Bitter Passage

CHAPTER ONE

The sun had not set for three weeks, but snow still covered much of the land. Seven men walked south along a barren coastline.

The wind was a bayonet at Adams’ throat. He adjusted his goggles and pulled his cap lower. Licks of pain curled up his legs, the flesh ropy and sore on his bones. The search party had left the ships at Port Leopold only a day before, but nine months’ confinement aboard ship by the winter snows—and four months at sea before that—had left his muscles spongy from inactivity. His pulse flickered in his throat. Under his thick hose and stockings, his toes were a dull ache in his boots. His scarf reeked of stale tobacco. He eased it down from over his nose to hawk and spit on the snow. The wind carried the taste of salt off the bergs in the inlet to the east.

Adams glanced back at the five men marching over the hard-packed snow behind him. Three seamen dragged the heavier four-hundred-pound sledge—the pock-scarred baker Porter; Worthington of the piratical red beard; and the wiry, terrier-like Payne. Two others—the tall, hulking Billings and Humphreys, a corporal in Investigator ’s marine detachment—hauled the other. Grunting and puffing, they bent into the cold wind, leaning into their harnesses with scarves tight across their noses and gloved hands thrust into coat pockets. Their beards were flecked with ice, their eyes rimmed with red. Humphreys was limping.

Adams thought of his sore feet and knew that the men, forced to pull such weight across the frozen ground like yoked beasts, would be in a worse state than he. In weeks of training on the frozen surface of the bay at Port Leopold, the skin of their hands and feet had torn like tissue, scabbing over and tearing again with little time to callus. They had come to him in the sick bay, peeling bloody stockings from stinking feet like so much dead skin.

Lieutenant Robinson strode thirty yards ahead, straight-backed, his shotgun strapped across his shoulders. He gripped a telescope in his gloved hand. Robinson had picked the men for their endurance and would demand that they march without complaint. He would look to Adams to treat them. Adams had added extra linen bandages to his medical bag before departure but now feared his supplies would not last.

Adams wondered if Investigator ’s other sledge teams were faring any better. His friend, Lieutenant John Barnard, had led a party north across Barrow Strait while Lieutenant Willy Browne had gone east across Prince Regent Inlet. Mission commander Captain Sir James Clark Ross had taken his own team from Enterprise west across the northern coastline of North Somerset. Captain Bird had ordered Adams to join Robinson’s party for a trek eighty miles southward, to the twenty-five-year-old wreck site at Fury Beach.

“Sir John knew Parry off-loaded provisions there in ’25, when Fury sank,” Bird said. “It’s a place he might go if his ships were frozen in.”

Snow fell in tiny flakes, spinning in the wind. Adams scanned the treeless landscape as he walked, blinking in the grey light. The sledge runners hissed over the snow. The brown outline of thousand-foot hills rose in the west. He watched for a plume of smoke or a waving arm as they picked their way over patches of bare gravel. To the east, ice floes jostled in Prince Regent Inlet, buffeted by the currents like slow-moving boats on the surface of a pond. Great broken chunks of ice scraped on the shallow floor of the inlet, snapping with loud reports like gunfire.

The snow stopped, and the sun emerged. Adams thought the air was so clear it might shatter like glass if only he extended a finger. The cold left a smooth, stony sensation on his tongue. Far above, the first ivory gull of the season paused at the apex of a steep ascent, its wings spread and its head pointed to the heavens, a tiny angel in rapture. Adams bowed his head, put his hand on his coat pocket, and moved his gloved fingertips over his Bible.

He again counted the days until Sunday. It was Thursday, an eternity since the ship’s company had last gathered for divine service on Investigator ’s upper deck. Sunday services had anchored him in the year since their departure from the Thames, drawing him back to God after endless mundane days treating blisters and sprained wrists. Even after the ship was frozen in the ice at Port Leopold and the black hand of winter closed around them, Adams bowed his head daily to pray with men crushed by melancholy. Now, out on the empty, snow-covered expanse, without the opportunity to commune with the men in worship, he felt unmoored. Robinson had rejected his request to stop for even a brief prayer after six hours of walking.

“There can be no stopping,” the lieutenant had said. “You wanted them kept warm. Walking keeps them warm.”

Lieutenant Robinson paused to wait for Adams and the sledge team to close the two-hundred-yard gap that had opened between them. He bent to fill his canteen from a thin stream that trickled out of the bare hills to the west. The clouds dissolved, and the sky was bright and hollow.

He watched Adams approach across the gravel. Would this be another request for a prayer? He was suspicious of the man’s righteousness, mistrustful of anyone so convinced that his achievements hinged on some heavenly edict. A man’s ingenuity and courage determined his fate, of that Robinson was certain. Absolute faith unsettled him. He thought it lazy for a man to submit so utterly to an invisible power, especially one so capricious. It was too easy to blame one’s failures on the Almighty. Too easy to make excuses. He decided he would permit Adams a brief prayer only on Sundays. They had no time to waste.

Robinson led the searchers down from the cliffs and onto the shingle. Sheets of frost-shattered limestone disintegrated under their boots and sliced chunks from their soles. At times the beach disappeared, catching them between cliffs and floes thrust up from the sea by wind and tide. They passed the sledges over their heads and clambered over twenty-foot hummocks of ice. The wind cut through Robinson’s sweater and heavy coat. Sweat ran down his face and froze in his beard. Snow fell again, specks of powder twirling around them in clouds. The men brushed the particles from their coats and caps and trudged through the drift to the summit of a small hill. To the west was a deserted landscape pitted with ravines.

Robinson called a halt as a commotion erupted in the water near the shore. Amid a great blowing and splashing, half a dozen long narwhal tusks emerged like javelins from among the chunks of ice floating in the inlet. They clattered against each other before the round, speckled heads of the whales appeared, chasing baitfish through the rippling water. The seven men stood and watched as the narwhals butted each other, jostling and urgent in their hunt. A moment later, the small fish dispersed, and the whales vanished beneath the surface as suddenly as they had appeared. As the search party walked on along the shore, the only sound was the crunch of boots on the stones.

At five o’clock in the morning, Robinson ordered a halt on a narrow beach. The wind died, and the air was still. Without the ceaseless, numbing wind in his face, his cheeks glowed with warmth. The men dropped their harnesses and sank to their haunches. They drank from their canteens and urinated in the snow with long sighs. Steam rose from scalps matted with sweat as they removed their sealskin caps. Men coughed and spat. Five-hundred-foot cliffs towered above their heads. Wisps of clouds shrouded the broken cliff-tops, stoles around the shoulders of giants. As Adams approached him, Robinson craned his neck to gaze up at the parapets.

“God creates such beauty,” said Adams. “Does He not?”

Robinson grunted. “I see little but ice and rock, and rather too much of both.”

“The sunsets. The shape of the clouds. Unearthly.”

“You will see sunsets and clouds daily in England, too, if you look.”

“Look at the colours in the ice. Green, like emeralds mounted in glass.”

Robinson tipped up his canteen and drank. He wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. Ripples rose on the surface of the inlet.

“Look at that,” Adams said. “The wind over the water is like the breath of God. Do you know your Psalms? Oh, to ‘dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord.’”

Robinson eyed him. There was something almost laudable in the man’s tenacious cheer. “That wind will cut you in two when it picks up.”

The ripples on the water disappeared. Silence fell. The sun was a bronze lamp above a mirrored sea, reflecting off puddles of molten copper in the ice.

“I have never seen a sun like that,” said Adams.

“It will only last a minute.” Robinson hitched his knapsack higher on his shoulder. “I am sure God made this land with a purpose in mind, but I cannot imagine what it is.”

The big seaman, Billings, stopped, his head thrust forward like a foxhound’s. He raised a hand and pointed. “There! I see something in the water!”

The faces of the other six men turned as one to peer through slitted eyes into the white haze to the south. Robinson’s heart knocked in his chest. He removed his goggles and shielded his face with a gloved hand, but he saw nothing.

“Where, Billings?”

“In the water!” Billings began to jump up and down. “I saw it moving.”

“Is it men?” Robinson scanned the landscape in vain. “Is it men, Billings?” He unslung his telescope and raised it. The rest of the party stood in silence, awaiting his verdict.

“Something moves there, near the shore.” He spoke with the telescope still held to his eye. “Perhaps an upturned boat, but I cannot make it out.”

He and Adams hurried along the shingle, leaving the men to drag the sledges in their wake. A mile down the beach, they halted. Fifty yards from them in the inlet, a flock of petrels attacked a whale carcass rolling in the shallows. The screeching birds fell like harpies from the air to rip and tear at the carcass, tossing their heads back to swallow bits of blubber. Spreading their wings for balance, they climbed atop each other, their beaks snapping and stabbing and slashing at the quivering flesh.

Robinson sighed. He chewed his lip and kicked at the stones. Of course it would have been too convenient to find Franklin and his men so soon. Adams will say God has decided to make us work for it, he thought. That great rewards are not so easily won. On this at least, I would agree.

Billings and Humphreys arrived and shrugged off their harnesses. Billings stood at Adams’ shoulder, staring wide-eyed at the dead whale. Robinson studied the big man. When the other men tired after hours of walking, Billings showed no sign of fatigue. He patted Billings once on the shoulder.

“Well done, Billings. Speak up if you see anything else.”

The four other seamen arrived, gawping at the carcass trembling in the cold grey water. They slapped Billings on the back and tousled the big man’s hair.

“How did you see this from so far, Jimmy?” Payne asked.

Humphreys clapped Billings on the shoulder. “Jimmy, you’ll never want for work once you’re paid off. Every picklock in London will want you on the street corner, watching for the sheriff while he goes to work.”

Billings drew himself up, grinning. “I can see real good.”

They made camp in the lee of an enormous block of ice thrust onto the shore by the tide. Adams instructed Worthington to fetch fuel from the sledge and warm their salt pork on the little stove. The smell of tobacco and unwashed bodies was sour in the tent. The stove hissed as the sailcloth shuddered and flapped. Robinson sent two seamen to scour the shoreline for driftwood, but they returned empty-handed.

The men smoked in silence, their expressions distant, faces like masonry. The fatty smell of the pork rose from the pot, the heavy odour slick in Adams’ nostrils and thick at the back of his throat. He leant over the stove and sniffed. The pork had not gone bad.

Thank you, Lord, he thought. We have so little and need so much.

Worthington distributed each man’s biscuit ration. The hungry men plucked their pork from the water before it heated through. Billings wolfed his portion down in three bites and sat looking around, forlorn. The others ignored him, staring straight ahead and chewing without comment. Their exhalations and the stove’s heat rose and condensed on the canvas ceiling. Within minutes, freezing water droplets fell, prompting curses as they burst on noses and trickled down necks.

Adams ate mechanically, working his jaws carefully before tearing off another strip of the hard flesh. He paused to pick scraps of fat from between his teeth with the tip of his knife. His biscuit had frozen solid under the sledge cover and had yet to thaw. He cupped his ration in his hands and breathed on it, tapping it on his knees until it was soft enough to gnaw. The broken fragments were like sand in his mouth. He sipped from his canteen between bites to force the biscuit down.

Stiff with cold, the men unrolled the waterproof floorcloth, laid out the buffalo robes, and took out their blanket bags. Facing away from the men, Robinson sat in silence, writing in his journal. Before letting them sleep, Adams examined the men’s blisters and wind-swollen faces. He rubbed and blew on half-frozen fingers more marble than flesh. Billings’ huge shoulders bore angry red welts from the track rope.

“You’re a good fellow, Jimmy,” said Adams, “but you do too much alone. Share the load.”

Billings bobbed his head like a puppy and looked at the ground. “Yes, sir.”

Payne and Worthington complained of sore feet. The eyes of the fourth man, Porter, were bloodred from the glare off the snow.

“Use the green crape I gave you,” said Adams. “And wear your goggles. Or you won’t see what pies you’re making when you get home.”

Porter pressed his palms to his eyes and sucked air through his teeth. “I think there might be an easier way than this to earn the money for my shop. I’ll have to sell them at tuppence each to make it worth the effort.”

Payne grunted. “Tuppence for a bloody meat pie? Would you pay that, Jimmy?”

Billings swung his shaggy head around, a vacant grin on his face. He nodded. “I like pies.”

“You silly bugger, you gave all your wages to your ma.”

Billings touched an index finger to his lip, then nodded again, smiling. “But I promised I’d buy a pie at his shop.”

“Get him to make you one when we reach Fury Beach,” said Payne. “Should be flour and sugar there.”

Billings looked baffled. “Why?”

“I told you, Jimmy,” Porter said. “Captain Parry left barrels of stuff there when Fury was wrecked: flour, peas, sugar.”

“Bloody Esquimaux would’ve eaten the lot by now,” said Payne. “Or the bears.”

“It ain’t what they eat. Why d’you think we’re goin’ there? To see if Sir John’s there.”

Worthington sighed. “When I get home, there’s only one thing I want to do, and it don’t involve eating a pie.”

“Your wife will charge you for it,” Payne shot back.

The men spluttered with laughter. Billings’ cheeks reddened. He smiled and turned his face into his shoulder like an abashed child. Robinson lay down in his blanket bag and rolled onto his side, facing the tent wall.

Adams knelt next to Humphreys, who sat with his head bowed, his eyes shut in pain.

“Your feet?” Adams asked.

Humphreys nodded.

“Show me.”

The marine’s hands went to his boots but then fell away. He shook his head, huffing through his beard. “Can’t get ’em off.”

“We must look after your feet. Your Alice will want you to go dancing.”

Humphreys grunted. “Aye, that she will. There’s a blind fiddler—Welsh fella—comes by the public house in Axbridge most weeks. They’ll let you dance for a penny.”

Adams grasped one of Humphreys’ boots and eased it off, then rolled the man’s stocking down and removed it. He recoiled, wincing at the acrid, vinegary odour. The corporal groaned and fell back on his elbows, grunting through clenched teeth. Adams pulled his scarf over his nose and inspected the man’s foot. A long blister ran along the ball of the foot, crowned with a sac of loose white skin. Adams pricked it gently with the tip of his knife. Pinkish fluid ran down the blade. He pressed a scrap of linen on the blister to absorb it. The flesh of the foot was bone white, but the toes appeared scalded, the colour of claret, and grotesquely swollen. Adams took each toe between his thumb and forefinger, inspecting it carefully. Detecting no sign of decay, he bound Humphreys’ toes with a strip of linen.

“Put your dry socks on,” he said. “I will have Payne make the cocoa.”

Adams remembered what Tatham, Investigator ’s ice master, had told him on their way north through Davis Strait the year before. A former whaling captain, Tatham made a living piloting merchantmen and supply ships through the ice to the Hudson Bay outposts and fishing stations on the Labrador coast.

“They don’t know what’s comin’,” the ice master had said as the men danced to the fiddle on the lower deck after supper. “They’re still on fresh rations. Wait till they’ve been on salt junk and biscuit for a whole winter and haven’t had a woman in a year. And haulin’ sledges is no easy toil. It can break a man.”

Adams and the sledge team followed Robinson along the shore to a small bay fed by a river that stole into the canyons to the west, then walked inland until they reached a point shallow enough to wade across. Adams and Robinson strode ahead up the opposite slope while the men followed a hundred yards behind. Robinson swept the hills to the west with his telescope, then scanned the inlet to the east. The two officers pulled their scarves over their noses as the men hauled the sledges up the gravel hillside.

Adams thrust his hands into his pockets. “Humphreys’ feet are bad,” he said. “He got them wet, and there is no chance to dry them.”

“Are the others afflicted?”

“They will be. One pound of salt pork per day, a pound of biscuit. A bit of sugar and tea and chocolate. It is not much, given what you ask of them.”

“It is all they will get.” Robinson’s tone was flat. “You should not be so familiar with them.”

Adams frowned. “Familiar?”

“You rub their sore feet, make them tea.”

“You require them to haul. Their welfare is my concern.”

“Do not imagine that these men are your friends.”

No, not friends, Adams thought, but after a year together in the belly of a ship, one cannot help but know a man. Billings, the heavily muscled man-child, who whittled toy boats and hoped to become a ship’s carpenter—strong, obedient, incapable of independent thought, and oddly untouched by the brutality of his Mancunian upbringing. Payne, whose ribald jokes and lurid tales were so popular on the lower deck that the illiterate seaman had once asked Adams to write them down so Payne might have them published upon his return to England. Porter, the would-be piemaker, who claimed he once broke a man’s leg with a shovel in a brawl. Worthington, who boasted that his wife was a housemaid in a large manor and cheerfully admitted, when challenged, that she was also occasionally a whore.

“I am only civil to them,” Adams told Robinson. “A dog that has known only ill treatment turns mean.”

Robinson regarded Adams with a sceptical eye. “For a man confined with them for a year, you understand nothing about them. Do not afford them ideas above their station.”

“We are all united in our purpose.”

Robinson grimaced and slapped his thigh. “You could not be more wrong. These men care nothing for Franklin. They are shoemakers and farmhands. Their allegiance is to whoever gives them a full belly. Were you in command, we would have a song before bedtime, or a story and a cup of tea when they tire and put down their track ropes. They must haul and lift and pull when ordered, and you must not let them forget it.”

Adams lay in his blanket. Robinson meant to drive the men like livestock, then. Adams knew better than to contradict him, but the lieutenant was wrong. He wanted to tell him that stories do not lead to weakness. They fire passion in a man, drive him to great discoveries.

“Unknown Parts,” he whispered.

“What’s that, Mister Adams?” Billings lay awake beside him. “What’s Unknown Parts?”

Adams smiled. “Just something I remember from when I was a boy, Jimmy. When I was five, my father would unroll great maps on the table. I remember him tapping a place on the paper. ‘Look,’ he would say. ‘Look at Africa. What does it say there?’ I used to stand on a chair and stretch my neck to see. There was a large blank section between Abyssinia and Guinea.”

“And what did it say there?”

Humphreys spoke from across the tent. “I can guess. Unknown Parts.”

“Exactly,” said Adams. He remembered his father saying the words, uttering each syllable like a jewel to hold up and admire. “Then he would point to Greenland, just a lump near the top of the world. Then Baffin Bay to the west. Between Baffin Bay and Behrings Strait, the map was blank. ‘Somewhere in there is the North-West Passage,’ he would say. ‘The greatest prize of all. Imagine being the first to find it!’” Adams could still see his father, sitting back in his chair, a faraway look on his face. “‘What might we discover there?’ he’d say. ‘Mountain ranges? Great lakes?’” Adams made a face for Billings, his eyes wide and staring. “‘Mysterious creatures?’”

Billings giggled and hid his face in his blanket. Silence in the tent. All the men were listening now. Adams thought of his father pulling him close, placing him on his knee.

“He used to tell me there is no greater calling than discovering uncharted lands. Every Christian man must spread civilisation and the word of God to the poor, ignorant masses. And he said it takes a special man to venture into those blank spaces, the Unknown Parts. Dangerous work. One must face disease, dreadful storms, savage natives.”

Payne grunted. “And ice and snow enough to freeze yer arse.”

Adams smiled. “That too. Once upon a time, the empire needed fighting men like Nelson and Wellington. Now it needs men like Cook and Clapperton. Empires are made through exploration now, not conquest.” He propped himself on his elbow and looked Billings in the eye. “Make no mistake. It is God’s work.”

He lay back and stared at the tent’s ceiling, remembering how his hand had shaken one night as he held up a book and asked his father to read it. His father’s eyebrows had risen in mock surprise as the flames in the fireplace cast a glow across his whiskered face, tiny shadows deepening the wrinkles around his eyes.

“Read?” he had asked. “Read what? Let me see that.” He reached for the book and peered at the cover as if for the first time. He read aloud, his voice precise and stentorian: “ Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819–1822. Good heavens,” he said, looking gravely down his nose. “Who wrote this?”

It was part of their game. “Captain Franklin!”

“Ah, Captain John Franklin.” His father had smiled and nodded. Adams had held his breath as his father sipped from a pewter mug. In the fire’s light, tiny droplets of ale had sparkled on his beard. “A very fine man. He is brave. He is gallant.” He lifted the book and winked at his son. “Shall we find out just how brave he is?”

“Yes!”

“Well, then. Where were we?” His father had opened the book and flicked through the pages with his fingertip. “Ah, yes. When we last left the stalwart Captain Franklin, he and his men were retreating from Point Turnagain through the barren lands to Fort Enterprise, were they not? And what were they doing?”

“Starving!”

“Indeed. They were starving.” He raised the book to catch more of the reflected light of the fire, and read aloud. “‘The carcass of a deer was discovered in the cleft of a rock, into which it had fallen in the spring. It was putrid, but little less acceptable to us on that account in our present circumstances; and a fire being kindled, a large portion was devoured on the spot, affording us an unexpected breakfast, for in order to husband our small remaining portion of meat, we had agreed to make only one scanty meal a day.’”

The five-year-old Edward had stared into the flames, entranced, imagining he was at Franklin’s side, his telescope in one hand, Bible in the other. He could see the two of them summiting a mountain, silhouetted against the halo of a rising sun, the Passage stretching out before them in the distance. Franklin’s hand was on his shoulder.

Billings’ voice tugged Adams from his reverie. “Mister Adams, why does the Admiralty want to find the North-West Passage?”

“’Cos they’ve fuck all else to do,” Porter said, his voice muffled by his blanket.

Adams nodded. “Jimmy, it is thirty years since Napoleon was beaten. What is a navy to do when there is nobody left to fight? I shall tell you: it can find new territories, for England and for God. A passage through the ice across the top of America will make getting from England to China much quicker. Empires are built that way.”

He chuckled at Billings’ blank expression.

“You see, Jimmy,” he continued, “man covets that which he lacks. He seeks to learn that of which he is ignorant. Much of the ocean north of the Americas has never been explored. Nobody knows what is there. Once the unknown is known, it may lose its allure, but until then, it shines very, very brightly.”