CHAPTER FOUR
“Darling Edward,” Frances had pleaded, “either Sir John will find a way through the ice or he’ll turn around and sail home. Why must you go?”
Adams had sat with her in the parlour and patted her hand. He was grateful to her father for encouraging his daughter’s studies of the sciences. Her acuity of mind had drawn him to her, but she was now so familiar with the perils of discovery service that he struggled to allay her fears for his safety. He had written her but once of his fascination with the Passage before she had devoured the works of the most prominent writers on the subject. Parry, Lyon, Franklin, Scoresby—she could quote them all.
He smiled into her eyes. “Sometimes, God asks much of us. He is showing me a path to salvation.”
She frowned. “By rescuing Franklin?”
“Do you not hear the word of God?”
She gave a mock pout and shook her auburn curls. “Do not tease me. You know I do.”
“But you have not turned your entire mind to Him.”
“Have I not? I rather think I have.” She squeezed his hand. “But surely the Arctic is a wilderness. There are no paths there. None that wind back to England, at least.”
Adams regarded her with gentle reproach. “It is there, as yet undiscovered. What is any path but bare earth before the first boots tread upon it?” He lifted his teacup and drank, then returned it to the table. “Courage and trust in God are indivisible. Franklin is a worthy man. My father taught me that.”
“Worthy of what? I would not disparage Sir John, but Father says the only people who care a whit about him are the Admiralty and a few newspaper editors in London.”
“No,” said Adams. “Her Majesty’s benevolent hand will span the north if there are brave men of Christian virtue to find the Passage. Sir John ate his boots to survive but returned to the Arctic a second time, then a third. He will not be denied.”
“One hundred and thirty men will have eaten their boots by now,” she said. “What else is there for them to eat?”
Adams frowned. “Franklin is a warrior of our faith. He took it upon himself to carry the English Church to new lands. As the empire expands, so do our obligations.”
“So what is it? You wish to be a hero? A warrior?”
“Neither.”
“God’s instrument, then?”
Adams considered this. “If He deems me worthy.”
“If there is a North-West Passage, ice blocks it much of the time, does it not?”
Adams leaned forward, his face earnest. “Great prizes are not easily achieved. Franklin knew it. The North-West Passage is the quickest way to China. What if the Russians find it first?”
She sighed and gazed out the window at the oaks in the rectory garden. “Then I shall be sure to send them my commiserations.” She whispered, even though they were alone. “Your father is gone. It won’t matter to him now. You cannot change it.”
“I do it in his name. So that he might be absolved.” He looked away.
“It was not your fault, Edward.”
The couple sat in silence for a long time. The clock ticked in the hallway.
“Dear Edward,” she said at last, “I do not question your motives, for I know them to be noble. I speak only out of concern for you. If you are determined to look for Franklin, I wish only that you return safely to me.”
Adams smiled. “Do not ennoble me too soon, my dear. Have you never thought the choices we make are not our own? That the Almighty plots a path for each of us? I am drawn onward like a slave shackled at the wrists.” He leaned closer to her, his elbows on the table. He clasped his hands together, interlocking his fingers. “For the first time in my life, I know what my purpose is. I am meant to find Franklin. I know this is my calling.”
“Because he has something I want.”
As soon as he had spoken, Robinson wished he had not. Irritated at his garrulity, he thrust his hands into his pockets and turned his back on Adams to watch the men drag the sledges out of earshot.
Adams walked around and stood before him, staring into his face. “What could Sir John possibly have that should be yours?”
Robinson sighed. He studied Adams with an air of resignation. He had let his guard down, and he knew Adams would not let the matter drop. “Do you know what I did before I joined Investigator ?”
“I do not.” Adams shivered in the wind.
“I was on surveying service. Off the coast of Ireland, then on Bonetta in the Mediterranean. Five years of it.” His face wore a look of disgust. “I met an old fellow a few months before we sailed, a retired commander. Sixty years old if he was a day. He’d been a lieutenant on half pay for twenty years. The Admiralty agreed to promote him to commander if he retired.”
“Your point escapes me,” said Adams, frowning. “I am cold. I wish you would speak plainly.”
“My point is this: The navy has many lieutenants but no wars to fight. I have no patron to recommend me, no relative in the Admiralty. If I am to move up, I must distinguish myself. I cannot do so in battle. Discovery service is my last hope, or I will be on half pay and darning my socks when my teeth fall out.”
“Surely finding Sir John will bring us all to Whitehall’s attention.”
Robinson shook his head, his jaw set. A vein pulsed in his temple. Now that he had begun to speak, he needed to make Adams understand. The man must be in no doubt of his convictions.
“If I am one of many, they will not see me. I must be the only one they see. The only one they hear from. If I find Franklin, they will make me a captain before we even dock in England. I will be forgotten if I am merely one of a dozen officers who found nothing.”
Adams drew his jacket tighter around him. “Then Sir John is merely a body to be stepped over.”
Robinson attempted an earnest expression. “Truly, I bear the man no malice. I hope he lives.” He paused and looked sad. “But is history not a procession of the living over the bodies of the fallen? I merely hope not to trip over Sir John as I go.”
At midnight, Robinson led the sledge team along the sweeping brown shingle toward Fury Beach. Thick chunks of broken ice drifted in Prince Regent Inlet to the east. Smaller pieces littered the wide beach, which ended abruptly at the sheer walls of brown cliffs scarred by aeons of ice and wind. Below the cliffs were huge mounds of moraine clumped like piles of debris from endless detonations.
“Look,” Billings said, “there’s something built there.” He gestured at the cliffs. “It’s not like the rest of this. There’s straight lines, like timbers.”
Robinson stared into the distance, seeing nothing but curtains of brown rock and carpets of grey shale in the haze. He swept the site ahead with his telescope. The second team of men arrived and stopped beside them, shivering and exhausted, heads hanging like penitent sinners under the overcast sky. As they continued along the stony shore, the remains of a simple rectangular wooden structure appeared in the low foothills above the water. A cold blue light bathed the frame of the ancient shelter, its smooth geometric shapes as incongruous in the emptiness as a cathedral on the moon.
Porter, the snow-blind seaman, pulled at his blindfold.
“Leave it, man,” said Robinson. “There is nothing to see.”
“I want to see,” said Porter. Adams untied the blindfold from around his head. The man grunted in pain at the sudden light, squeezing his eyes shut and covering them with his hands. Worthington unhitched the rope tethering him to the sledge. Porter dropped his hands and took a few steps unaided, squinting through eyes like glowing brick-red holes.
Robinson approached to inspect the ruin. Adams and the men followed. The wind murmured over the shingle, and a lone distant seabird cried out from the cliffs above. The structure was a bleached skeleton thirty-one feet long by sixteen feet wide. Ragged scraps of canvas once used for walls and roof remained fixed by thick iron nails to weathered beams fashioned years ago from spars.
Billings touched one of the upright spars with his fingertips. “What is it, sir?”
“It was called Somerset House,” said Robinson. “Sir John Ross’ men built it in ’32. They spent the winter here after their ship got stuck in the ice.”
Billings nodded, comprehending none of it. “Sir John didn’t build it, then?”
Robinson rubbed his beard and sighed. “No. Not Franklin.”
Robinson joined Adams and the seamen in a search of the vicinity. They found ancient casks of dried peas and preserved carrots behind a collection of boulders. Barrels of flour and bags of sugar were concealed under sheets of canvas streaked with grime. Robinson broached a cask and brought out a pickle. He sniffed it cautiously, then held the tip between his teeth before crushing it slowly. It was soft, like a piece of old fruit. He savoured the briny taste on his tongue, then ate the rest of the pickle in two bites.
Rusted iron barrel hoops lay scattered on the ground like the ribs of some long-dead metallic creature. A box of nails lay in a snow-filled depression. The men returned and stood before him, steam rising from their collars. Robinson had them dig up the floor of the ruined structure and look for message cylinders deposited in the earth, then left to explore the beach below the campsite. As the men’s shovels rang on the hard earth, he wandered among lumps of hard-packed snow scattered like cannonballs on the limestone, perhaps once part of the snow walls erected by John Ross’ men to insulate their tiny house against the cold. He imagined Ross’ men huddled by their tiny stove, plastering the cracks in the walls with wet snow as the winter crushed them in its grip.
The seamen found nothing in the earth. They leaned on their shovels, lit their pipes, and watched the smoke rise into the air. Adams sat on a boulder and rubbed his stiff limbs. Robinson came up from the shore and looked up at the cliffs. He took out his pipe and shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said. “No footprints. No detritus.”
Adams spoke. “Perhaps they might have—”
“No.” Robinson cut him off. “They were not here.” He had known it even as they approached Somerset House along the beach. Why pretend they had missed a boot print preserved in the frozen mud, or an abandoned glove or tool? Franklin and his men would hardly have hidden their presence. They would have swarmed the sledge team before Robinson’s men even saw them. There would have been tent rings on the beach, broken barrels. Robinson turned his back on Adams and strode off, his unlit pipe in his hand. A great weariness fell upon him, a heavy weight he thought might press him down into the frozen earth and pin him there forever. Franklin’s saviour was to be another man. He thought of Lieutenants Barnard and Browne leading their teams east and north, hoping with all his heart they would find nothing. Would Captain Ross’ team find Franklin in the west? He imagined Elizabeth sitting in her wicker chair on a warm afternoon, waiting for the carriage to arrive with news of his return. He squatted and put his head in his hands.
Adams watched Robinson walk away. Was their search to stretch into a second year? If none of the other sledge teams found Franklin by summer’s end, he knew Sir James Clark Ross would try to sail farther west into Barrow Strait, to overwinter before launching new sledge teams the following year. The thought of caring for the men through another dark winter made his stomach churn. The last one had cost the lives of two men on Investigator , two more on Enterprise . The dying had begun early, only a week after Trafalgar Day, when Investigator ’s carpenter, William Coombe, babbled like a lunatic and breathed his last as Adams held his hand, helpless. Numbed by boredom, the men’s faces had grown wan. Their eyes sank into their heads as the ice shifted against the hull timbers, and the mercury froze, and a blizzard blew for weeks. The snow had been three feet thick on top of the main hatch, hard enough to cut into bricks with a sword. As the officers counted the remaining sacks of coal, the men counted the days until their next grog. Adams counted the sick. Investigator ’s captain of the hold, Cundy, died only two weeks before Adams and Robinson departed Port Leopold. Adams had told the captain it was scurvy and nostalgia, but he didn’t really know what made a man collapse into himself and die.
Captain Bird had just shrugged and nodded. “I have seen it before,” he said.
To last another winter required faith. Adams knew that few of the men had it. I have it, Lord, he thought. I do. But can we not finish the job now?
Robinson ordered the men to pitch the tent inside the four empty walls of the abandoned shelter. They lay in their blankets, each man huddled against the next for warmth. His hips and knees ached. He could not feel his feet. His tea was cold the moment it left the stove. He chewed his pork and biscuit, then checked his shotgun and lifted the tent flap. The desolate shore outside was a tapestry of white and grey. The sun was rising in the sky. Nothing moved, land and sea frozen alike.
Robinson curled up in his blanket and cursed himself for a fool. Since before their departure from Port Leopold, he had known Franklin might not be here, but he had allowed himself to hope, and now disappointment was a heavy stone on his heart. The missing captain had not passed this way.
“Poor bastards.”
It was a whisper from one of the men, but in the tent’s gloom, Robinson could not tell who had spoken. He found himself thinking that how a man dies can determine how he is remembered, far more than how he lived. He had seen it himself, another lesson of his father’s. A man had died on the railway when he was twelve. Robinson’s father had taken him to Parkside to see Stephenson’s Rocket pass on its inaugural journey from Liverpool to Manchester. The atmosphere was that of a carnival. His father and brothers strolled like lords in their top hats, tailcoats, and silk cravats among the shoeblacks and fruit sellers. His father, rarely one to display emotion, had been excited.
“It is remarkable, Frederick,” he said, his eyes shining. “It will bring the cotton from Liverpool and take the cloth back there from Manchester, far quicker than on the canal. And it will carry people. All without horses.”
When the trains stopped to take on water, Robinson had craned his neck to glimpse the Duke of Wellington in his carriage. The great black barrel of the locomotive rolled on, the chimney steaming. He did not see the man, Huskisson, fall onto the tracks, but screams cut through the babble of the crowd when the locomotive went over the man’s leg. The faces of the men who carried him up were sprayed with blood. He saw the man’s torn trousers, soaked red to the ankle. Later that evening, he heard the man had died. His eldest brother told him Huskisson had been a member of Parliament. His father seemed oddly unconcerned.
“Old Huskisson has made himself a martyr. Unfortunate, of course, but people shall know of the railway now. They shall think of him more for this than for anything he said in the Commons.”
Robinson gave up trying to sleep and walked into the hills above Fury Beach. The tent stood within the ruins of Somerset House far below him. Something hard cracked beneath his heel. At his feet were fragments of a shattered wine bottle, crimson against the snow. At once he was reminded of the blood on Elizabeth’s white handkerchief when she removed it from her lips.
“You are unhappy with your posting?” his wife had asked him.
Frail since the miscarriage, she lay in bed in a white nightdress. He leaned over her to pull the coverlet up. Her illness was advancing. The subtle jasmine scent she wore failed to mask the sickly odour of her breath, like stale beer. He sat on the edge of her bed, gazing out the window. The pond at the bottom of the garden glittered in the late-afternoon sun.
He sighed and caressed the back of her hand, gently rotating the wedding ring on her finger. So snug when he had first slipped it on her hand that he considered having it enlarged, it seemed enormous now, threatening to slip over her thin, bony knuckle and disappear in the bedclothes. He folded her fingers into her palm and closed his hand over hers.
“No, I am not unhappy with the posting.”
“Just unhappy with how you got it?”
He pressed his lips together. “Something like that. Father insists I go on discovery service. He says it is for the best.”
“Is he right?”
“He usually is.”
He smiled down at her, remembering the early months of their courtship. Her father, a mercer, had permitted him to write to her only because the man was solicitous of Robinson’s father. He had assumed his daughter would entertain no interest in a junior naval officer stationed aboard an old paddle steamer surveying the Irish coast. Both risking and expecting naught, he assumed Robinson was but a harmless distraction for his daughter until more satisfactory suitors appeared.
Written in the hours alone in his cabin at the end of his watch, Robinson’s letters to Elizabeth were candid and guileless. At first, they were an amusement for him, a way to relieve his boredom and solitude. He corresponded with some phantasm, someone not quite real. Had she terminated their exchanges, he would have persuaded himself he had dreamed her missives, that it had been merely a game. That she had never been there at all.
But reply she did. He wrote of his fondness for Walter Scott. She professed her regard for Ivanhoe . Expressing his admiration for Wordsworth, she sent him pages of “Tintern Abbey” copied in her own hand. Their correspondence continued. He was a different man with pen in hand, someone no one aboard his ship would have recognised. Imagining the brown of her eyes and the curl of her locks, he wrote words he would never have had the courage to speak to her face. She came to know a person he barely knew himself, one without rank or uniform, stripped of affectation and doubt. An honest man. When he returned to England on leave, she had given him a lock of her hair. On his fourth visit, he had asked to marry her. She had not hesitated.
Bemused at his success in attracting a woman, Robinson’s father would not easily permit him his triumph. “Her family is far from enthused about the match,” he had said, his tone dry. “You are but a lieutenant, and Britain is not at war. Her father fails to see how you will move up. Frankly, so do I.” He paused to sigh theatrically. “But the dowry is satisfactory, so I have resolved the matter with him.” He tugged down on his lapels and sniffed. Turning away, he said, “I wouldn’t have fancied your chances with her if it were not for me.”
He tried to push thoughts of his father’s acerbity from his mind as Elizabeth smiled up at him from her pillow. “Your father wants the best for you.”
“He wants what is best for him.”
She put her other hand over his. It seemed to require all her strength.
“You think he secured your position for you?”
He shrugged. “I could hardly have secured it for myself, as he does not fail to remind me. I have never met Sir John Franklin. Nor Sir James Clark Ross.”
“Surely there is no shame in acquiescing this time,” she said. “It is a wonderful opportunity.”
The sun sank. The shadows on the lawn lengthened, and the bedroom light took on a coppery hue. Paler even than the pillow upon which she rested, Elizabeth’s white face glowed brighter. She was the only person to whom he could ever reveal himself, and yet so many truths remained unspoken between them. The pair of them were like swordsmen dancing around in a mock bout, each anxious not to injure the other with their sharp blades. Determined not to dissuade him from embarking on his voyage, she refused to speak of her infirmity. To decline his mission and remain at her bedside would wound her more deeply than any sabre thrust. And so they spoke instead of his duty, casting it like a cloak over their fear and guilt.
“What if we do not find Franklin?” Robinson whispered. “I may go all that way and Father will say, “I gave you the perfect opportunity, and you did nothing with it.” It will be my fault.”
“You should not doubt yourself so.”
I should not, he thought . But I do. He smiled and squeezed her hand. “I shall make you proud of me.”
“Promise me you will control your temper. You do yourself no favours when you are overly impassioned.”
He glanced down at her. She had closed her eyes. She murmured something, her voice inaudible, the effort of speaking too great. As she fell asleep, he whispered, so as not to wake her.
“You shall be proud. I care not what Father thinks.”
He sat by her bed for a long time, her hand in his. Pretending to ignore the lies you tell yourself, he thought, is like trying to pick cobwebs from your jacket. No matter what you do, they stick to your fingers, your hair, your stockings. There is simply no getting rid of them.
Adams and Robinson stood atop the cliffs at Creswell Bay and turned up their collars against a pitiless wind. Belugas swam in the shallows seven hundred feet below. The floes breaking up in the bay spun like enormous chunks of meringue in the water.
They had left Humphreys at Fury Beach with Porter. Worthington, Payne, and Billings had carried driftwood up from the beach and made a fire on the cliff top. Now they roasted a fox Adams had shot an hour earlier. The three seamen capered like children around the flames, turning the meat as its rich odour rose on the air.
Adams followed Robinson along the cliff top, away from the men. Robinson’s manner was conspiratorial, his cap pulled down and his shoulders hunched. He glanced back at the men, then turned to face Adams. “You and I will push on to the southwest,” he said.
“What?” Adams stopped, frowning. “Humphreys must go no further. If his condition deteriorates, the others will need to carry him. It will be hard for them. And Porter’s eyes are still bad.”
Robinson’s face was impassive, his tone flat. “Not them. Just the two of us. We will send the men back to Port Leopold.”
Adams gaped at him, sure he had misunderstood. “But ... we are expected at Port Leopold.”
Robinson shook his head. “Captain Bird ordered us to proceed as far south as practicable. We would be following orders, not disobeying them.”
“How can you know—”
Robinson spoke over him. “Two of us can move more quickly than seven. We can shoot enough game to feed two, but not seven. We could cover fifteen miles a day, perhaps twenty if the thaw is late and we walk along the shore ice.”
“But—”
Robinson scowled. He grasped Adams’ shoulder and shook it. “Be silent, and listen to me. We risk more if we go back now. Wherever Franklin is, we are closer to him than at any point thus far. I wager Captain Bird would gladly sanction an extended foray. To him, it would hardly be a risk.”
Adams held his gaze for a long moment. This was not an order. Robinson was requesting his assent, not demanding it. “We do not have enough provisions for us and the men.”
“We can do it,” said Robinson.
Adams realised he had rehearsed his proposal.
The lieutenant counted on his fingers. “We have just over half the provisions with which we left Port Leopold. If we send the men back on two-thirds rations, we keep the rest. We cache half here and take two weeks’ worth of food—mostly meat, bread, and cocoa. We’ll leave the rum, tea, and sugar. We shall take the smaller tent and floorcloth, and one sledge. We can share one buffalo robe. We will have the spirit lamp and fuel. Give Humphreys the axe and the seine net; we shall take the shovel. With our spare clothing, guns, and bedding, we can reduce the sledge’s weight to under three hundred pounds. Two of us together can haul it. We can abandon certain items along the way or return for them later.”
Adams shook his head. “Seventy pounds of food cached here may keep the two of us alive, but it will not last long if we have survivors in tow.”
At this, Robinson stepped back and nodded. He put his pipe in his mouth and tasted the stem. “True, we cannot plan for survivors. We are but scouts, but the other sledge parties are no different. I will ask Captain Bird to send the steam launch with emergency provisions.”
“Over seventy miles?”
“Why not? By the time we return, it will be midsummer. The ice in Prince Regent Inlet will have melted enough for lanes of open water to be passable—perhaps not for the ships, but probably for the launch.”
Adams turned his back and walked away, thinking. He stared at the ground, his hands in his pockets. His disappointment faded. Was this the way, then? Hope swelled in his chest. God was offering him a different path when he had expected naught. He felt like a pauper fruitlessly ploughing barren ground at the end of a long day, only to stumble upon a gold coin glinting in the mud. If he and Robinson were successful, it would spare the men of Investigator and Enterprise a second winter that not all would survive. They would save not only the lives of Franklin and his men but also those of their shipmates.
Robinson approached from behind him. “All we need is a fox or a ptarmigan every day or two. We can shoot enough game to stretch this out.”
Adams drew the back of his hand across his mouth and touched his dry lips with his fingertips.
“You are a better shot than I,” Robinson went on. “After the bear, I have no doubts. I will lead, you will shoot, and we will find them together.”
Long serrated clouds scattered like bones across the heavens. The wind whispered over the ground. Adams looked down at pockets of snow accumulated in the cliff’s crevices.
“Are you certain Captain Bird would order this?”
“You can walk eighty miles back to Port Leopold and ask him, or you can join me and find your man.”
“The Lord has always been my guide.” Adams took his Bible from his pocket.
“What does He say now?”
Adams opened his Bible and silently read the verse on the page before him. He looked up. “And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” He replaced the Bible carefully in his coat pocket.
“We have little time,” said the lieutenant.
Adams stared at him. “They will be in poor condition.”
“They will be dying.”
“You have such little faith in Sir John.”
“And you should not place him atop such a high pedestal. He is just a man.” Robinson attempted a smile, but the effort twisted his face into a smirk. “Perhaps between us we shall strike the right balance.”
Adams looked across at the cliffs on the southwestern rim of the bay. At their base, the crumbling floes glowed blue around the edges. The wind dropped away abruptly, as if capped by a thumb over a pipe.
“Three hundred pounds on the sledge, you say?” Adams turned back to face Robinson, his voice suddenly loud in the stillness. “How far do you think two of us will get, dragging that much?”
For the first time, he saw uncertainty in Robinson’s eyes. The lieutenant squared his shoulders and looked down his nose. “You are not injured, are you?” he asked. “And are our legs not accustomed now to walking?”
“We would need another man.” Adams nodded toward the three men squatting by the fire, each gnawing on a piece of roasted meat. “We should bring Billings. He can haul the sledge.”
Robinson grimaced. “This is no task for a simpleton.”
“You know he is stronger than any two of the others. If we are to cover any meaningful distance, we need such a man.”
“He is an idiot.”
“He follows orders,” said Adams. “And he is the most keen-sighted of all of them. He sees what you or I require a telescope to detect, and he is curiously untroubled by the glare.”
Robinson glanced back again at the men. He removed a glove and rubbed his beard.
Adams pressed his advantage. “He will do as he is told. If I am to go, he must be part of it.”
Robinson gritted his teeth and sighed. “Very well. But you must be the one to look after him.” He jabbed a finger at Adams, scowling. “I tell you now, I shall not be wiping his backside.”
Adams huddled into his coat. “We are very different men, you and I.”
Robinson’s eyes narrowed. His gaze lingered longer than usual. Eventually Robinson nodded. “There are so many different kinds of men.”
Far below in the bay, tiny plumes of white erupted as hunting seabirds dropped into the water.
Robinson stared at him. “They are waiting for us.”
Adams held his gaze, making Robinson wait. He opened his Bible again, then closed it without glancing at the page. “Can we take at least some of the tea?”
It was the first time he had seen Robinson smile.