CHAPTER NINE
Adams was warm. He lay on his side beneath a blanket. Something large and hot pressed against his naked back. The ice pack moaned and creaked somewhere far away as the black ocean moved beneath him. He imagined the pressure ridges rising, great alabaster slabs forced against each other by the currents and wind with a sound like the breaking of bones. He tried to remember, to understand how he came to be here. The memory danced out of reach, hovering in the shadows of his mind like an apparition just outside the pool of light thrown by a lamp in a dark room. The wind whined across the ice outside the tent. He remembered dropping through a trapdoor into a dark cellar. He could not recall being wet or cold. His body felt light, and he thought he might float into the air, if only he wished.
O Lord, have I done Thy bidding?
He summoned his strength and opened one eye, squinting in the dim light. Robinson sat a few feet away, writing in his journal. It was Billings, then, lying against him beneath the blanket. The young seaman’s bare chest pressed against Adams’ back, his breathing a soft, steady cadence. His arm curled around the assistant surgeon’s chest. His knee was nestled against the back of Adams’ own. Adams tried to move his fingers but had no sensation in his hands.
I wish only to stay here, just like this, he thought, never to move again. If he wakes and pulls away, I shall burst into tears.
“We needed to warm you quickly,” Robinson said. “You were quite senseless. Wet and freezing. We had to get your clothes off. The heat of his body was all we had.”
Adams tried to speak. All that emerged was a dry, strangled sound in his throat.
Robinson studied him. “It is nine o’clock in the morning. Rest for the remainder of the day. We shall resume our march in the evening, if you can.”
Adams swallowed, cleared his throat. A hoarse whisper rose from somewhere outside his head, the sound of his own voice unrecognisable. “Where are we?”
Robinson rubbed his eyes and yawned. “About ten miles south of Cape Felix. I would make you a fire, but we have no fuel.”
Adams closed his eyes. Billings slept on.
“He nearly went under himself, you know,” said Robinson. “He was drenched to the waist, upside down in the hole in the ice. You were sinking just as he reached you. Another moment and he would not have grasped your collar.”
“He is a good man,” Adams whispered.
Robinson lit his pipe and sat, smoking quietly. Finally, he nodded. “Yes. He is a good man.”
“I dreamed of him. Of Sir John.”
“Tell me.”
“I saw the ships,” said Adams. “I was floating like a gull, aloft on the freezing air. Erebus and Terror were in the ice, housed over with awnings.”
The dream returned so clearly. He had seen their topmasts down, the sails wrapped and stored away. The ships’ boats had been buried in the snow, for the sun had been gone a month, and no amount of prayer would coax it back before February. He looked away to the sky’s edge, but the sun was cloaked, a mere glow below the southern horizon for an hour on either side of noon, a torch burned down to a smouldering nub.
“Then I was inside one of them. Erebus , I think. Sir John stood at the window of his cabin. He was staring out into a winter gloom that rose like a prison wall.”
Adams fell silent, spent by the effort of speech. Later, he thought, I shall write it down for Frances. He would tell her he saw Franklin clasp his hands behind his back to hide the tremors from his men. The captain had stood just outside the small puddles of light spilled by two candles on the table behind him, watching his reflection fracture on the grimy pane. He listened to the deck timbers creaking and popping as the ice that trapped them shifted against the hull. Franklin’s face was lined and his hair untrimmed. Grey stubble roughened his cheeks, and dark stains spotted his rumpled uniform. He wore his scuffed old grey shoes, not his best boots. His steward had not polished those for many weeks. Franklin had forgotten to remind him, and the man had grown too ill to fulfil his duties. The winter sky was a thick blue-grey veil that he went to push on with his shaky white hand before withdrawing it, cowed, lest his fingertips be seared on the freezing glass.
“And what of Crozier?” Robinson asked intently. “Did you see him also?” He seemed absorbed in Adams’ tale, as if pressing for details from the witness to a crime.
“He was there. Beside Franklin at the window.” Even in his dream, Adams could smell the brandy on Crozier. His eyes were sunk in his skull. He reported twelve sick this morning on Erebus , fourteen on Terror . “It is melancholy and boredom that does it,” Crozier advised Franklin, “for when confined belowdecks, they have nothing to do but darn socks and wipe down the walls. It is too dark for hunting or skating on the ice, and too cold. If we let them out, we shall not see half of them again.”
“Make sure the men get extra rations over Christmas,” Franklin told him.
“I shall order an extra gill of rum for each man and a gallon of beer for each mess.” Franklin looked pained, but Crozier added, “You know it will go better for them if they are drunk.”
Franklin sighed and gazed out into the murk. “Four winters. I pray this shall be the last.” Then he whispered so that no one, not even Crozier, could hear.
“Do you suppose they are coming?”
Adams closed his eyes. He would not tell Robinson the end of his dream. The ships were gone. Franklin’s men shuffled across the dead land like ghosts, their gums blackening, teeth dropping onto their boots from gaping mouths. Purple scars ran with blood. Yellow skin stretched over rib cages and concave bellies. Eyeless sockets stared at the barren shingle, and fingers turned to bone inside their gloves. As they walked, the lichen-encrusted stones and bare ice became ugly, stunted forests where they encountered Esquimaux hunters, who lowered their weapons, stared at the apparitions, and asked, “Where did you come from?” Crozier waved at the north. “From there,” he said, and then turned to his remaining men. “Perhaps they will think we descend from the sky. We may yet know what it is like to be gods.”
Robinson puffed on his pipe. When he finally spoke, his voice was so soft, Adams thought he was talking only to himself.
“I think I have begun to envy Franklin.”
Adams opened his eyes. “You?”
Robinson spoke slowly, groping for the words. “I can issue an order or follow one. I can have a man’s obedience. But to earn his devotion ... I do not know how to do that. Franklin endears himself to people who have never met him. They worry for him and pray for his safe return. They write poems and songs for him.” He stopped and puffed once more on his pipe. “I find that extraordinary. How on earth does he get them to do that?”
Adams was unsure whether he was asleep or awake. The words were in his mind, on his tongue. Perhaps he said them aloud. It might have been only a whisper, or merely a thought.
“He is doing God’s work.”
Robinson led them ashore ten miles southeast of the northernmost tip of King William Land. The sea ice vanished from beneath his boots, and he stepped onto an empty beach of gravelly brown shingle stretching away to the west. Adams limped up behind him, still weak from his dunking in the sea. He bent over and coughed for an entire minute. Billings knelt and put his arm across his shoulders. Adams took Billings’ arm, and the pair followed Robinson along the shore.
They walked north until the shoreline turned abruptly to the southwest. Robinson stopped and stared at the ice rearing up along the western side of the cape.
My God, he thought.
Thirty feet high in places, the pack extended for miles like a glacier peeled from a valley and unrolled across the surface of the sea, blocking the ocean passage from the north. It formed a huge barrier, ruptured and torn and built up into jagged clumps. Robinson imagined crazed demons gone berserk beneath the ice, trying to burst forth from some undersea prison. The mottled ice was ancient, with none of the translucence or trapped colour he had seen in the young bergs in Baffin Bay. Robinson stood in silence for a long time, gazing at the pack. Eventually, Adams spoke in a whisper.
“Have you ... have you ever seen it like this?”
“Never.” Robinson shook his head. “Not like this.”
None of it made sense. No sooner was he convinced he had solved the riddle of the Passage than new evidence appeared to prove him wrong. The lost crewman they encountered could only have come from here, but how could any ship have sailed through ice like this? I was so sure, Robinson thought.
Robinson squatted on his haunches and hung his head. He picked up a stone and bounced it on the palm of his gloved hand, then tossed it back to the earth. Adams drank from his canteen and tightened the straps of his knapsack. He pulled Robinson to his feet, and they walked on.
Cape Felix was a low, stony beach shrouded in a heavy fog restricting visibility to fifty yards. Fox tracks speckled a patch of snow above the tidemark. The ice pack cracked and groaned out at sea, the sound like a distant battle underway somewhere in the fog. The land was utterly flat. No cliffs rose into the mist, no glaciers slunk through valleys. The shore was bare of driftwood.
Robinson’s nose and throat were raw in the cold air. He wished for blue lights to burn, or a signal cannon. He shouted into the emptiness, but the mist snuffed out his voice.
“If the wreck of Erebus lay here,” he said, “I might set the thing afire just to warm my hands.”
Blind in the fog, they walked slowly. After midnight, the wind shifted to the northwest, and the fog disappeared, blown away like a cloak whisked back by a magician. Billings cried out in fear. Fifty yards to their left, a large shape seemed to step forward out of the dissipating mist. It was an enormous cairn of stones. The marker was immense in the flat, treeless landscape, a giant awaiting them on the barren shore. Thick chunks of stone had been carefully piled atop each other, arranged in layers between broader, thinner pieces. Longer segments jutted out beyond the column of the cairn with the appearance of truncated arms. Clumps of saxifrage hugged the earth around the base, their tiny white petals shuddering in the cold air. The cairn stood eight feet high and at least as wide. Robinson touched one of the stones.
“There is no old lichen or moss on these, and they do not look weathered.” He knelt to examine the largest stones at the base of the cairn. “These are too heavy for a single man to lift.” He looked around. “I see none this size in this vicinity.”
“They brought them here on sledges,” said Adams. “It is the work of at least half a dozen men.”
The remains of a campsite were visible through the partially melted snow: pieces of canvas, the fragments of a broken bottle. The site appeared to have been ground into the earth by a gigantic heel. The three men explored, walking in opposite directions around the edge of a circle sixty feet across. They made out the outlines of three collapsed tents beneath a covering of snow. All lacked their centre poles. Robinson lifted the sailcloth of one tent and peered beneath. Three pairs of box cloth jackets and trousers and a pair of old mittens. Dirt and stones were scattered across blankets and a bearskin. Robinson frowned.
“Odd,” he said. “They did not take their bedding.”
Torn pieces of blue fabric and three empty food cans lay on the ground near the jawbone of a fox and a few feathers. A pike head sat next to a small box of needles and a pair of dirty blue trousers. He noticed a crude fireplace: blackened stones and pieces of charcoal and burnt wood.
“They burned their tentpoles to cook their last meal here,” said Robinson. “Whoever it was had no intention of returning.”
“The fellow we met carried bedding on his sledge,” said Adams. “These blankets belong to other men.”
Robinson walked among the debris, nudging various items with his boot.
“Only three tents,” said Adams. “A handful of empty cans. A few bits of cloth. The entire company of two ships did not camp here.”
Robinson nodded his agreement. “It was a staging point for a sledging expedition.”
Adams gestured at the bones and feathers in the fireplace. “Or a hunting party’s campsite. Or an observatory.”
“I see no instruments,” said Robinson. “I cannot imagine they would have carried their dip circles with them if they were retreating for their lives.” He stepped over scattered knives, tin cups, and nails. Other objects—forks, spoons, bullet cartridges—poked out from pockets of ice and snow. A boot lay on its side on the open gravel. Ten feet beyond it, he noticed a bayonet scabbard and a comb. Something cracked like a bird’s bone beneath his heel. He raised it to find a shattered clay pipestem in the mud.
Robinson ordered Adams to rest while he and Billings began dismantling the cairn. They removed each stone and carried it away, depositing it in a fresh pile. The work was slow. Their breath billowed in the cold air. Each time he removed a stone, Robinson knelt on the ground until he felt strong enough to stand again. He grasped his wrist and felt his pulse gallop. Even Billings bent over after putting down each stone, his hands on his knees.
“I see something,” Robinson said. “There.” He pointed into the cairn. A small iron tube, nine inches in length, was wedged within the cairn. He drew his knife and reached in. Ice had formed around the tube, bonding it to the surrounding stones. He reversed his grip and stabbed downward, chipping at the ice until the tube was free.
He and Adams exchanged glances. Both recognised the Royal Navy message cylinder as standard Admiralty issue. Robinson removed the top of the cylinder. He pulled off a mitten and withdrew a piece of paper from the tube, gripping it in the calloused tips of fingers showing the first signs of frostbite. Adams peered over Robinson’s shoulder. Robinson squinted at the page for a long time before Adams could contain himself no longer. At first, his voice was trapped in his throat. When he spoke, it was a rasp.
“Can you read it? What does it say? Is it from Franklin?”
Robinson shook his head. He passed the paper to Adams and stood staring out over the campsite.
Adams held up the message. Scrawled in a shaky hand, the letters on the page swam in his vision. He read the words aloud.
My Deare Wyfe,
We shall not escape the ice now. We are weak and hungry and cannot hope for rescue only redemshun in the hearafter. Remember me kyndly to your sister may God bless you and priserve you for He has shurely abandoned us. I look forward to asking Him what I did to diserve this. I ask of you not Him please forgive me my sins.
Your husband, Phillip
“Phillip,” said Robinson, frowning. “Do you remember a Phillip on either ship?”
Adams heaved a sigh. He rubbed his temples. “I could once recite the names of all the officers. Now I can barely remember my own.”
“An officer did not write this.”
“And yet a seaman would likely be incapable of it.”
Robinson grunted. “I have known some who knew their letters.”
The sky was full of low grey clouds. Thunder rumbled in the cold air. Snow began to fall. Robinson massaged his sore legs. The picture in his head was shifting, breaking into fragments he could not reassemble into a recognisable image. He had once imagined Sir John and his men patiently awaiting rescue in a comfortable village of tents and snow huts, living off canned provisions or shooting game. But the evidence demanded a reappraisal. Franklin’s men, it seemed, wandered the landscape, scattering boots, combs, and pipestems. He read the message again, then rolled up the paper and began tapping it on the palm of his hand.
“This is a man who thinks he will die. And he is apologising.”