CHAPTER FIVE
Dearest Frances, Adams wrote, I had a dream in which I wandered across the ice but was not cold. The wind whipped my hair into my eyes. In the distance I saw a man dressed in a Royal Navy captain’s uniform. As I approached, the man faced away from me, his features concealed by the brim of his cocked hat. But I knew it was Franklin from the curve of his paunch and the curl of his black muttonchops. I reached out to touch the man’s shoulder, and in that moment he grew taller and slimmer. As he turned to look at me, his features were those of my father when I last saw him twenty years ago. He had not aged a day. And Father said to me, “The story is unfinished, my lad. Write the ending.”
Robinson thought it a good evening for walking. The sun ebbed in a pearly evening sky strewn with distant pink clouds.
“You,” he told Humphreys, “are to be in command. Do not delay. Get them back to Port Leopold, and the surgeon will look at your feet. You should be there in four days.”
“Yes, sir.” Humphreys nodded. “And how long should I say you will be, sir?”
Robinson exchanged a glance with Adams. “Ask Captain Bird to send the steam launch if we have not returned by mid-July.”
“Yes, sir.” Humphreys hesitated, then leaned in to whisper to the two officers, “Pardon me for askin’, sir, but how will Jimmy fare? Sometimes he needs a bit of help, if you take my meaning.”
“Mister Adams will look after him,” said Robinson. “You just see to your own men.”
Doubt clouded Humphreys’ features. “Very good, sir.” He knuckled his forehead, stepped back, and addressed the men in a loud voice. “Come on, then, lads—three cheers for the lieutenant and Mister Adams. They’re going on with Jimmy for a bit. Let’s give ’em a lively send-off!”
The men assembled and stood in a line. Billings grinned at the others. “I get to pull the sledge.” Humphreys led the men in a subdued cheer.
“Lieutenant,” said Adams, “if I may, a prayer?”
Robinson squinted up at the sky, then cast him a sour glance. “They should be on their way.” He sighed, then threw up a hand. “Very well. Quickly, then.”
The five members of the sledge party pulled off their caps and Welsh wigs and shuffled forward to stand around Adams in a circle. Adams took his Bible from his pocket, clasped it in front of his chest, then bowed his head. The men surrounding him did the same. Robinson stood ten feet away with his back turned and arms folded.
“O Lord,” said Adams, “bless our journey so we might find our lost companions safe and well. Protect and deliver us from peril, and guide us home again with your light. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Redeemer. Amen.”
Before the men had finished muttering their amens, Robinson turned on his heel and marched back to where they stood with Adams.
“There is no time to waste,” he said. “Get your harnesses on.”
He watched with hands on hips as they picked up the track ropes and looped them over their shoulders. Humphreys looked from Robinson to Adams, then glanced at the officers’ sledge. He cleared his throat.
“Will you be taking the rum, sir?”
“The rum stays here,” said Robinson.
Humphreys nodded, his expression stony. “Very good, sir.”
Robinson watched the men until they vanished from sight over a distant rise. The snow on the low hills to the west glinted like wet silver. Flecks of drift fell out of an empty grey sky. Already harnessed, Billings stood by the sledge in silence, framed in the cold evening light.
Robinson went to the sledge, picked up the two flasks of rum, and poured the thick brown fluid onto the earth. He caught Adams’ eye as the dark liquid pooled in the gravel.
“You think me churlish? Denying them their rum?” Robinson asked.
Adams looked away. “It could help keep them warm on their return. I thought you might let them have it.”
Robinson’s temper again flared at the man’s naivete. “Are you really so unfamiliar with the seaman’s fondness for liquor? They would guzzle it all at once as soon as we were gone. Then they would be drunk and dead in a snowdrift.” He threw the empty flask on the ground. When he glanced up, Adams was holding out his Bible, an expression of calm on his face.
“You are welcome to borrow my Bible.” Adams’ voice was quiet. “If you choose not to pray with me, perhaps you would like to select your own prayer.”
Robinson had refused many proffered Bibles in his life, but this time, for no reason he could comprehend, he found his hand extending to accept the small leather-bound volume. His rancour dissipated, and he stood weighing it in his palm. Its magic had never worked on him. He coveted the comfort the pious found in their prayers, but heard no voice in his head, felt no sense of awe. He gave the Bible back to Adams, then turned away so the other man would not see the colour in his cheeks. He picked up his knapsack, put his arm through the loop of the sledge harness, and studied the sky.
“We must make a start. In a few days, the weather will warm up. The sledge will be more difficult to haul when the snow turns to slush.”
Walking abreast, they continued over the cracked and scarred land. Robinson yawned and felt the skin of his face growing tight and leathery in the glare off the snow. Now that his decision was made and their search had recommenced, his spirits were high. The temperature dropped as the sun rolled lower in the sky. The sledge runners hissed through snow that had melted during the day and refrozen, then scraped over patches of icy gravel. The sky was empty of birds. He looked across at Billings. The weight of the sledge pulled the harness straps tight against the seaman’s coat as the track ropes stretched taut behind him. His energy unbounded, the young giant marched in long strides, his breath coming in deep gusts, his face a mask of concentration.
“Slacken your pace, man,” Robinson told him. “The days will be long.”
He observed Billings with a mixture of relief and disquiet. True, the man was compliant, but as with a powerful wild beast, Robinson sensed an intransigence beneath his docile exterior, a latent implacability he feared might surface if the young man were pushed beyond his limits. Robinson had heard tales from India of elephants obediently hauling great burdens one moment and trampling their handlers in a rage the next. What would he do if Billings decided he no longer wanted to haul the sledge, if he wanted to go home? Adams, he knew, could obey an order. He was less sure about Billings. But he knew Adams was right: having Billings haul the sledge would extend their search range, and for now he was glad to have the big fellow dragging it in his place.
Robinson pictured Captain Bird’s expression when Humphreys and the men arrived at Port Leopold without him and Adams. Robinson suspected the captain, a practical man not given to fits of temper, would shrug and retreat to his cabin to await their return, aware he could do nothing to retrieve them from such a distance. If he and Adams were successful, the Admiralty would hardly court-martial the man who rescued Sir John. And if they failed, well ... it would merely hasten the end of an otherwise inconsequential naval career. He had increased the stakes of his wager and was content with it.
In the morning, they stopped in a steel-grey light. Adams and Billings prepared to pitch the tent.
As Adams took his knapsack from his shoulder, his journal fell to the ground. The pages parted, and a piece of paper folded between them was blown across the snow-covered stones, flapping and tumbling like a small bird before catching on Robinson’s boot. Robinson stooped to retrieve it.
Adams felt a brief stab of alarm. “I would thank you not to—”
But Robinson had already opened the paper. It was Adams’ sketch of Franklin looking out over the ice pack. Robinson held the drawing in both hands, carefully studying each line. Adams felt his face grow hot. He waved a gloved hand casually.
“It is only something I did to pass the time. Just throw it away,” he said, hoping Robinson would not. He had not intended Robinson to see the sketch but was annoyed now to find himself anxious for the man’s approval. He turned away and joined Billings in lifting the tentpoles from the sledge. Robinson silently examined the picture while Billings unrolled the tent on the ground. Adams stood waiting, with a tentpole held in one hand like a spear.
“Your technique is sound,” said Robinson, tracing the image on the page with his fingertip, “but you flatter him with this strong chin and overly confident gaze. It is exaggerated, a caricature. The kind of picture one finds in a child’s storybook.” He held the paper out to Adams.
Adams took the sketch, hoping the nonchalance in his tone did not appear feigned. He shrugged. “It is precisely that. I have drawn him this way since I was a boy.” He folded the piece of paper and replaced it in the pages of his journal. He spoke quietly, as though to himself: “It is how I imagine him. All of them.”
“Them?”
“All those who went north to seek the Passage. I was five years old when my father began reading to me and my brother about Henry Hudson and William Baffin. When he put the lamps out at night, I read by candlelight: Samuel Hearne’s journey down the Coppermine, Mackenzie’s canoe voyage from Fort Chipewyan to the ocean. Then Franklin and Parry.” He cast a sideways glance at Robinson, gauging his reaction. Robinson inserted a tentpole, then pulled down on the guy to hoist the tent. He seemed absorbed in the task, barely listening.
The man’s indifference chafed Adams. Robinson seemed empty of all passion. Adams failed to resist an urge to explain himself further. “Even then, I could see their bearded faces and hear their voices,” he said. “The sound of the ship’s bell. The thump of the pack ice against the hull. I could even smell the galley stove. I built models of their ships, just deck and masts, and made my own little fleet of discovery ships. I put them on a shelf over my bed.”
“You have a vivid imagination,” Robinson grunted as he stooped to tie off the last of the guys. He turned to Billings: “Get the floorcloth.”
“My father instilled in me both a love of God and an admiration for those who do His work,” said Adams.
“Mine fostered no such emotions in me.” Robinson pointed into the tent as Billings returned from the sledge with the floorcloth over his shoulder. “Unroll it.”
“God requires only devotion,” said Adams. “My father once told me there is a path to righteousness for each of us, but we must strive for it, search for it, demonstrate our virtue.”
“Pretty words.”
“No. Guidance, like arrows on a map. Directions to Paradise, if only you will follow them.”
At this, Robinson straightened and frowned. Adams had his full attention now. “Is that how it works, then? Follow instructions to win a prize? It seems less a demonstration of piety than a transaction.”
“I will see the Passage found for my father,” said Adams. “To atone not only for my sins but for his.”
“That must be a great deal of sin.”
“We are all sinners.” An image came to him of his schoolmates hissing at him: Son of a suicide! He pushed it away.
Together they brought the stove, provisions, and bedding from the sledge into the tent.
“You are enamoured of stories.” Robinson jabbed the stem of his pipe at Adams. “So I shall tell you one.” Robinson ignited a quantity of spirits of wine in the lamp, threw a handful of snow into the kettle, and began warming their salt pork. The thick fatty smell filled the tent. Billings sat over the pot, staring into its depths, his eyelids drooping. He opened his mouth to try to catch the rising steam on his tongue.
“Once, when I was a midshipman,” Robinson said, “I witnessed a fight on the lower deck. One man stood on the toes of another; then there was a shout and the swing of a fist, and in a moment the rest of the men circled the two pugilists and were placing bets on the outcome. Then the lieutenant appeared. He was ... imposing. Almost regal, I should say. I remember how loudly his boots rang on the floor timbers. The men fell silent and stepped back and dropped their heads, and the two brawlers looked up from the floor.” Robinson paused to check the meat, then took his chronometer from his pocket and began winding it.
Adams broke a slab of biscuit into three pieces and handed a piece each to Robinson and Billings.
Robinson went on. “I waited for him to bellow a reprimand, but he stepped in between them without saying a word. He held a belaying pin in his hand but did not raise it, carrying it down by his knee instead. His voice was so soft when he spoke that I could barely hear it. ‘I would happily break your legs with this and dump you at the nearest port,’ he said, ‘and will do so if this happens again. You will each cook meals for the other’s mess for a month.’ In a second, the men dispersed. None said a word.” He looked up at Adams. “And he would have done it. They all knew it. It was the threat the men respected, you see? In that moment, God held no authority over those men—a man held it all.”
“God’s is the last judgment,” said Adams.
“Perhaps. But while we live, we answer to other men. I concern myself with only one judgment at a time.”
They walked west at a steady pace over the snowy cliffs north of the ice-choked waters of Creswell Bay. A few miles on, they arrived at a large ice-encrusted lake and walked fifteen miles around its southern shore before striking out across an empty plain. Wiry yellow grass poked up through the snow. The icy wind stung their cheeks. Shallow rocky pools gleamed red in the late-evening sun. They waded across freezing streams, their knapsacks and spare socks brandished above their heads. At midnight, the sky was a deep blue overhead but a buttery yellow along the horizon. Their bodies cast long shadows on the snow. The sun lurked among tousled grey clouds tugged at the edges by far-off winds.
They pitched the tent at five in the morning and laid out the floorcloth. To conserve fuel, they ate their meat cold. They pulled on their fur sleeping boots and crawled into their blanket bags, their shotguns loaded and primed by their sides.
Billings lay on his back, staring up. “Will we find Sir John tomorrow, Mister Adams?”
“We might, Jimmy, we might. Watch for smoke.”
He and Robinson lit their pipes and wrote in their journals, then slept as the sun rose higher.
Robinson woke in the early evening. As Adams and Billings slept, he left the tent and stood looking out at a moon twinned in the mirrored surface of a meltwater lake.
Elizabeth had been with him while he slept. He wondered how Franklin had done it, leaving his dying wife, Eleanor, to go on discovery service in ’25. If I find him, he thought, it will be my first question. He imagined Franklin sitting by his wife’s bedside before leaving on his second expedition to the Arctic. Eleanor, cursed with consumption just like Elizabeth, was dead a week after he left for the Mackenzie Delta. When he finally received word, did Franklin feel relief that her ordeal was over? Or was it guilt that he had not waited?
Robinson felt no affinity for the man, save for this one shared sorrow. Can it be I am like him? Elizabeth’s illness was like the onset of the long Arctic night—a gradual fading of the light, followed by an interminable darkness. And he with no means of stopping it. He wondered if Franklin’s thoughts had mirrored his own: I will be nothing if I do not go. She will soon be nothing if I do. Elizabeth had sensed his hesitation and spurned his remorse. It was a burden she refused to carry.
“You have a chance to achieve something great,” she said. “To be someone great. Whether you go or not, my fate will be the same.”
What had Eleanor said to Sir John? Had she asked him to stay? Did he hold her hand?
Robinson wished now that he had not signed on to Investigator . He thought there was too much time to reflect in the Arctic and not enough distraction from one’s darker thoughts, which fattened into malignant obsessions one had no hope of overcoming. Cold and darkness feed repentance in a man, as wood feeds a fire.
Adams walked at an even, mechanical pace, inured now to ten hours of daily trekking. Tempered by the endless repetition of movement, his legs were stronger, the sinews supple and muscles pliant. His feet were rough and unfeeling, the skin of his face and hands coarse. Billings hauled the sledge each evening without complaint, head thrust forward into the wind. But by the early-morning hours, Adams noticed the young seaman begin to tire and joined him in the harness.
“You must adopt a steadier pace, Jimmy. Do not use all your strength at once.”
The big man bobbed his head. “Yes, Mister Adams.”
Fury Beach was four days behind them when they halted, hunched against the cold atop low cliffs running north to south. A rocky shoreline was visible through the haze twenty miles distant, across a wide channel of water clogged with ice. Sun-splashed clouds teased licks of purple across the sky. Billings sat on the ground and stared into his lap, humming a tune to himself.
Adams knelt beside Robinson as the lieutenant unrolled his map on the ground and ran his finger over it, tracing their route down the eastern coast of North Somerset to Fury Beach. He moved his finger to a point across the map where neither the channel to their west nor the shoreline upon which they stood appeared.
“We are somewhere near here,” he said.
Adams examined the map. A vast blank space stretched for seven hundred miles from the east coast of North Somerset westward to Cape Bathurst on the American mainland. For a moment, the wind dropped, and Adams experienced an utter absence of sound, as though suddenly swept up and cupped in God’s hands. Below him, cliffs of myriad colours fell to the sea, their edges worn by wind and ice. Glaciers slashed through ravines and gorges like great knives.
So there it is, then, he thought. This is the edge of the world. This is where we fall off.
Adams lay down, but sleep eluded him. He listened to the wind buffeting the tent and the ice cracking and groaning in the pack. He thought of the winter they had all just spent aboard Investigator at Port Leopold. Boots squeaking, pots rattling in the galley, and backgammon pieces clicking in the gun room. Pipe smoke and the wet smell of salt pork. The walls and ceiling of the lower deck dripping with condensation. The men playing rounders on the ice or flying paper kites or whittling little boats from lumps of cork after supper. Others learning their letters at the clerk’s school on the lower deck while the officers cleaned their shotguns and used empty brandy bottles on the gunwale for target practice.
Franklin would have spent precisely such a winter four years earlier, after leaving the whalers in Davis Strait. Adams imagined Franklin in his cabin aboard Erebus , dressed in his finest uniform, stiff and brushed to a sheen, buttons and boots lustrous. Cocked hat lending him a regal air, telescope twirling in his hands. His face would have been round, his skin clear, bushy black muttonchops standing out from his cheeks, paunch pushing against his belt. Had he worried then that they would come to grief?
He looked across the tent. Robinson took out his pipe.
“They say some of the younger officers were hoping to spend at least one winter in the ice,” said Adams.
Robinson grunted. “And now they’ve had four. I suspect their enthusiasm has waned.”
“Sir John said his provisions could last seven years. Do you think that is possible?”
Robinson shook his head. “Hubris. But I suppose it depends how much game they could shoot.”
Adams remembered Frances’ scepticism at the suggestion the crews could subsist on caribou and fox and musk oxen. How could Franklin and his men believe it possible? “It seems odd to me now that he arranged no rendezvous points if he got frozen in, no supply depots in case of misadventure.”
“I suppose he thought he wouldn’t need them.”
Adams gasped at a burning sensation on his cheek. He sat up in the gloom, rubbing his face. A freezing drop of water had fallen from the tent ceiling and struck him, scoring his skin like the tip of a hot knife.
“And he left no message canisters,” he said. “Nothing at Parry’s cairn at Possession Bay. Nothing in Lancaster Sound.”
Robinson drew on his pipe and exhaled blue smoke. “I have also been troubled by that. I can only think he was in a hurry. When do circumstances allow you to hurry in the Arctic?”
Adams considered the question. “When there is no ice.”
“Precisely.” Robinson pointed his pipestem at Adams. “He thought there was no time to stop and build cairns. It occurs to me he may have found Lancaster Sound free of ice once he got across the North Water. Open water in the Arctic is tempting. If you encounter it, you want to keep going. You saw the ice in Baffin Bay. It moves like a living thing, like a giant hand that closes around a vessel. Once caught up in it, you could be stuck for months and carried a thousand miles. Then, if you are lucky, the ship will rise up and sit on the ice until it starts to break up. But if you hesitate and do not take your opportunities, if fortune deserts you and your ships are nipped in the ice?” He drew in his breath and shook his head, imagining it. “Have you ever crushed a boiled egg in your fist with all your strength? Imagine the eggshell is your ship’s hull.”
“I think he is taunting us,” said Adams. “Perhaps he is almost through to the west. He might be in Behrings Strait before we can rendezvous with him. Then we shall have to turn around and go back to England, or follow him through and sail round the Horn to get home.”
Robinson made no reply. He gathered his blanket around him and lay down.
“If Sir John could see us now,” asked Adams, “what do you think he would say? ‘Go back, we are already through the Passage’? Or ‘What the devil is taking you so long?’”