CHAPTER TEN
Adams scoured the campsite, but there was nothing. He wondered how there could be no messages, no documents. A handful of men had camped here. They hunted, cooked a meal. They slept. And now they were gone.
Robinson pointed to the north. “Perhaps they were caught in the ice near here but got free and sailed north again.”
“And left that poor mad fellow?”
Robinson shook his head slowly. “There may have been a mutiny.”
Adams was unconvinced. “But we have seen the ice north of here. How could any vessel sail through that?”
“Perhaps the opposite is true. If the men who camped here were returning to the ships, perhaps the ice cleared sufficiently to allow them to sail to the southwest, to Point Turnagain.” He stared at Adams. “They may have already completed the Passage.”
Adams pointed out at the ice pack. “That ice does not appear to have broken up anytime recently. If they are beset out there, I wager they have not moved.”
Both men stared to the southwest.
Robinson gritted his teeth. “They vanish, they leave us clues, but none that make any sense.” He spread his arms. “There is nowhere to hide, yet they are nowhere to be found.”
“What is that?” Adams pointed at some pieces of red fabric lying in the gravel. He picked them up and turned them over in his hands. He noticed the familiar naval markings.
“It is part of an ensign, I think,” said Robinson.
He took the fragments of cloth from him and studied them. “I can think of only one reason for an ensign out here.”
Adams nodded. “To place on a coffin.”
“They must have had a sledge to move the stones for the cairn, so they could have moved a coffin.”
Adams looked around again at the deserted campsite. “Perhaps a burial party camped here.”
They went looking for graves, walking in ever-widening circles around the campsite. They scanned the rocky ground for anything resembling a tombstone or grave marker but saw nothing.
Robinson sighed. “Could they have buried them in the ice, then?”
Adams gazed out at the pack. A white haze had descended, blurring the almost indistinguishable line between the ice and the sky. He thought of how far they had walked from Fury Beach. None of their shipmates knew their location. If they met with misadventure, nobody would ever find them.
“I’m hungry,” said Billings.
Adams sighed. “I miss a hot cup of tea,” he said. “A freshly baked loaf of bread. Tell me something you miss, Jimmy.”
“No, do not.” Robinson wore a strained expression, as if struggling to keep in check something coiled within him. “Do not. Please.” He shook his head. “It does me no good to be reminded of what I cannot have.”
Twenty miles on, they arrived at Victory Point. A large cairn stood amid the remains of a vast campsite on a wide gravel beach. They stood in the cold air, transfixed. Adams forgot the pain in his legs, the hollow in his stomach. The land rose gradually from the sea, a low, flat beach of crushed stone. Four tents stood around the cairn in a semicircle. Secured to rocks, their guys trembled in the breeze. Two collapsed tents lay in rumpled piles on the ground. The sun melted the ocean to gold. The floes to the west were blotchy with shadows, lined up one hundred yards from the shore like misshapen beasts eager to crawl upon the land.
Heavy winter clothing was heaped in untidy mounds four feet high on the gravel. Tiny icicles hung from the edges of folded overcoats and box cloth trousers. Debris was scattered over a wide area: pieces of rope and canvas, lengths of copper, broken pickaxes, splintered chunks of oar. Adams stumbled to the cairn, limbs stiff and tremulous. A small metal message cylinder was lodged in the stones clustered at the top. He seized the cylinder in a gloved hand, toppling several stones to the ground in his haste. He removed the cap from the cylinder and pulled the glove from his trembling right hand with his teeth and withdrew a sheet of rolled paper. Robinson’s footsteps approached from behind.
“Give it to me,” he demanded.
Robinson took the paper and unrolled it. Adams recognised the standard Royal Navy tide paper, crisp and nearly new. The upper half of the page displayed a series of lines for a commander to note the name of his vessel, the date, and his coordinates. The lower half of the document comprised a preprinted message written in six languages, requesting the discoverer of the note to forward it to the Admiralty.
Occupying most of the upper half of the page was a message written in an unhurried, confident hand.
28 of May, 1847 H.M. Ships Erebus and Terror Wintered in the Ice in Lat. 70°5’N Long. 98°23’W Having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in Lat. 74°43’28”N Long. 91°39’.15”W after having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat. 77° and returning by the west side of Cornwallis Island.
Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All well.
At the bottom of the page, in the same large bold lettering, was an addendum:
Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the ships on Monday 24th May 1847.
Gm. Core, Lieut.
Chas. F. DesVoeux, Mate
Robinson frowned. “It says they wintered at Beechey Island in 1846–7. That cannot be more than sixty miles across Barrow Strait from Port Leopold. It would not have taken them two years to get there from the Thames. The date must be wrong. Do they mean 1845–6?”
Adams pointed at the paper. “There is more.”
Another message was written in the margin. The writing was a cramped scrawl, the lettering small and hastily scribbled. Robinson read it aloud, squinting at some indistinct letters.
“April 25th, 1848. H.M.’s ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September 1846. The Officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F.R.M. Crozier, landed here in Lat. 69-37’-42”N., long. 98-41’ W.
“This paper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831, 4 miles to the northward, where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in June 1847. Sir James Ross’ pillar has not however been found and the paper has been transferred to this position which is that in which Sir J. Ross’ pillar was erected.”
“What does that last paragraph mean?” Adams asked. “It sounds as if whoever wrote it was drunk.”
Robinson shook his head. “I do not understand it.” He pointed out at the ice. “They were frozen in five leagues in that direction. And they came ashore a year ago.”
He returned his attention to the message. As Adams watched, the profile of Robinson’s face changed, the jaw slackening, the flesh turning pale.
“What is it?” Adams asked.
“Look here.” Robinson pointed a trembling finger at the document.
Adams peered at the message. The final sentence began in the right-hand margin of the page, tracing up the page before turning left, the words upside down across the top.
Robinson read it aloud: “‘Sir John Franklin died on 11th June 1847; the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date nine officers and fifteen men.’”
Adams took the paper in shaking hands. He tried to read the line again, but his eyes blurred with tears. He did not feel the strength in his legs go until his knees struck the gravel. Nausea churned beneath his ribs. He crumpled in on himself, his mind scrabbling for a support suddenly withdrawn. The moment stretched out until his chest hurt, and he drew a long, desperate breath that raked his throat. He would never grasp Franklin’s hand or stand beside him. He would not pray with him.
“He was dead a year before we even left the Thames,” Adams whispered. He could not comprehend it. Why had the Lord led him here if not to bring Franklin home?
Billings approached, concerned. “What is it, Mister Adams? Will we find Sir John today?”
A gust of wind ruffled the dark water near the shore. Shadows flickered on the gravel as a thin band of cloud passed before the sun. Adams shook his head and wiped his tears with his hand.
“No. We will not find him today, Jimmy.”
Billings smiled. “Bear up, sir.” He appeared to sense Adams’ anguish and was anxious to console him. “Perhaps we will find him tomorrow, then.”
The broken ice out at sea, the torn clouds above, and the desolate earth were all unchanged from a moment before, yet nothing was the same. The new moon hovered above the horizon, a distant grey crack in the sky through which one might escape, if only it were possible.
Robinson left Adams hunched and shuddering on the stones, Billings stooping over him with a hand on his shoulder.
He strode off a dozen steps and stood looking at the sky. Lightheaded, he thought how pleasant it would be to lay flat on the earth, but he was not certain he could stand again. The wind dropped, and the air was still. A bird fluttered somewhere, but he did not think to reach for his gun.
Sir John Franklin was dead. And the mortality: nine officers and fifteen men. More than a year had passed since then. The weight of his failure was like iron shackles on his body, threatening to take his breath, stop his heart. Anger at Franklin began to boil in him. The damn fool had not only gotten lost; he’d had the temerity to die.
The irony was not lost on Robinson. Of all Investigator ’s officers, only he had taken the right trail while all other sledge teams had gone in the wrong direction. It had led only to the lip of a precipice, with nothing but a cryptic note telling of dead men. He imagined his father standing on the Thames dock, arms folded, glaring at Investigator as she tied up, a sneer curling his lip: Well? Did you find him?
What would Elizabeth say? He pushed away all thought of his father, groping instead for a memory of his wife like a drowning man flailing for a piece of flotsam in a heavy sea. The one that came to him was from years ago, when they had ridden out across his father’s estate soon after their marriage, and barely a year since Franklin’s expedition had departed the Thames.
They made their way past the orchard and the dairy and walked the horses along the canal, where their hooves kicked up puffs of dust on the narrow lane. Elizabeth was still hearty then, the illness within her darkly coiled and unseen. As he helped her from the saddle, her eyes were bright, her gloved fingertips soft against his chest. As the horses nickered, he spread a blanket on the grass beside an old oak’s thick, knotted trunk. Sunlight flecked the leaves, scattering golden fragments.
It was her habit to read to him. She withdrew a book from the basket he had set down and sat close to him, giggling. Her breath was sweet against his cheek.
“Do not tell Father I am reading Frankenstein .” Her tone was conspiratorial. “He would hardly think it appropriate reading for a young lady.”
Unlike himself, she was adored by her parents but bored of their suffocating attentions. In the earliest days of their correspondence, he had suspected her interest in him was merely to cause her father chagrin, but he had decided he did not care if it was.
He laughed. “On that point alone, I might agree with him.”
She widened her eyes in mock gravity. “But you are my Victor. And I am your Elizabeth.”
“I should hope not! Frankenstein’s Elizabeth was killed by his Creature, was she not? I would not see you suffer such a fate.”
“It is too late, you shall not stop me. I am already near the end.” She held the book up and read aloud: “‘Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.’”
“Frankenstein’s last words to Walton, I believe?” He smiled. “Then I cannot be Victor, as I shall not promise to eschew ambition. And discovery may be the only field where I might achieve mine, unless we soon find ourselves a war.”
At once demure, Elizabeth had taken his hand and held it. “I am glad of it. I would not have you go off to battle and leave me. It would please me if you devote yourself to discoveries rather than war.”
He sighed. “I’m afraid Sir John Franklin will make the last great discovery when he finds the North-West Passage. There will be little left for me.”
Her lips were at his ear. She whispered, as if imparting a great secret, “There will always be more to find. More to know.”
Robinson considered his options. If he could not retrieve Franklin alive, he would have the next best thing. Prove to the Admiralty that Franklin was dead, and he may yet be hailed as the man who learned the lost captain’s fate. Perhaps he and Adams could find Sir John’s grave. That might be enough for promotion.
There will always be more to know.
Robinson spat a gob of phlegm on the ground. He walked back to join Adams, looking around at the scattered debris of the campsite.
“Graves.” His voice quivered. He coughed to steady it. “With that many casualties, there should be graves here.”
Adams stood and scraped a muddy boot on a stone. He nodded wearily.
“An outbreak of disease?” Robinson folded his hands into his armpits and walked in a slow circle.
“Or an explosion. An accident with gunpowder, perhaps, or a fire aboard ship?”
Robinson grimaced. “Nine officers dead in a year?”
“Crozier may not have been drunk when he wrote this,” said Adams. “Perhaps he was ill.”
“What is that last little bit there, under Crozier’s signature?”
The new commander of the expedition had left them a final line: And start on tomorrow 26th for Back’s Fish River.
Adams shook his head. “Crozier knew there were provisions at Fury Beach. Why would he go to Back’s River?”
“It is closer than Fury Beach, I suppose, but not by much.”
“But there is nothing there,” said Adams. “At least from Fury Beach he might reach a whaler in Lancaster Sound.”
“I can only think he took them south to find game.” Robinson began to see it now. “He needed fresh meat to hold off the scurvy. Twenty-five-year-old biscuit and pickles would not do the job.”
“So he went to shoot a few reindeer. Then what? Seek help from the Esquimaux at Repulse Bay? That must be a further two hundred and fifty miles.”
Robinson shrugged. He looked out across the flat, stony landscape to the south. He imagined a hundred sick and weary men limping across the shingle, leaning into their harnesses. He could hear the sledge runners scraping on the gravel and the groans of the sick, malnourished men hauling on the track ropes, their tattered boots slipping on the stones. The terrain stretched out into the distance, pocked and scarred.
Nothing made sense.
How on earth, he thought, could you march a hundred men across two hundred miles of that?
The three men explored the abandoned campsite, stooping and straightening like cranes. Adams retrieved pannikins and canteens, examining them for messages scratched into the metal. He collected a gimlet and a clothes brush. A pair of snow goggles protruded from the gravel near a sextant and a surgeon’s tourniquet.
A shovel stood upright, its blade embedded in the earth. Billings grasped the handle with all his strength and pulled it like a knight tugging on Excalibur, but the shovel would not budge from the frozen ground. Adams joined him and ran his hand over the handle, imagining he might somehow commune with the man who had last used it. There was so much detritus strewn across the ground, he thought surely there must be men here. At any moment he expected Franklin’s crew to come running across the shingle, shouting and laughing at their prank, but there was only the wind. Perhaps Franklin and his men had stumbled across some hidden pit, concealed by the spirits inhabiting this place, and simply dropped into the earth.
Adams inspected a small wooden box. He opened it with trembling hands to find a dip circle, complete with magnets and needles. A medicine chest sat abandoned on the gravel. He opened it and lifted out several vials and bottles: a two-ounce bottle of olive oil, others of ipecac and peppermint oil. He examined bottles containing tinctures and pulvered roots of jalap and bindweed and ginger, most less than one-quarter full. Bandages and sticking plaster and test tubes. A pair of woollen gloves lay on a flat rock a few feet away, as if placed there to dry only minutes earlier. He looked around, but the area was deserted.
Frances was right. They had both known it. She told him Franklin had too many men, and she was right. He imagined her now, wandering with her father through the gardens of the ruined monastery in Bury St Edmunds, where the two of them had walked before his departure. He pictured her among the crumbled thousand-year-old walls and tombstones shrouded in long grass, worrying for him as her father attempted to calm her fears.
“So many men,” she would say, shaking her head. “Such big ships. Thirty years ago, Mister Scoresby recommended ships no larger than 150 tons. Larger vessels are susceptible to damage from impact with ice or rock. Why must the Admiralty send a vessel more than twice that size?”
How might her father answer? Perhaps he would attempt to disarm her with nonchalance. “The Admiralty is disinclined to lend weight to the opinions of a whaler.”
She would not be mollified. “Scoresby is no ordinary whaler. He is a scientist, a fellow of the Royal Society. He has been at sea for forty years. Why will Their Lordships not listen to such a learned man?”
“I agree, my dear. But they are disinclined to heed a man without a cocked hat and epaulets.”
“And they give them rum, Father. Mister Scoresby thinks it most injurious. He says men should drink only warm tea in the Arctic.”
“No doubt, my dear, but a sailor and his rum are not easily separated. Even at double pay, I think the Admiralty would find few volunteers for discovery service if there were no rum.”
Adams imagined her becoming agitated, her face reddening. “And most important of all, he said the only way from east to west is likely to be overland across the northern coast of America, not via a sea passage!”
He pictured her in tears.
“Why, Father? Why must they do everything wrong?”