CHAPTER ELEVEN
Adams sat up in the dim light. Robinson lay motionless under the blanket. Billings whimpered in his sleep like a puppy. The canvas tent wall muttered in the wind.
Adams looked out through the tent flap at the dead land. He did not recall laying out the blankets. His boots sat by his head. He found his ink bottle frozen beside him and his quill lost in the folds of his blanket. His journal lay open, but there was nothing written on the page. He thought again of the handwriting on the note from the cairn, how the atmosphere at the moment of its creation was revealed on the paper. The lettering of the first message was large and bold, perhaps penned while Franklin was in casual conversation with Fitzjames, sharing a brandy, discussing which route to take when the summer thaw freed them. He could imagine Franklin smiling, speaking the words aloud and signing off in fat black strokes with a happy flourish:
Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All well.
But the second part of the message was entirely alien. It seemed to Adams that two disparate people—the first calm, the second agitated and desperate—were confined together and given only a single piece of paper to write on. The lettering was thin and panicked, scratched quickly on the document. Something had gone awry. Men were dead. The tale had to be told, but there was no time. The first message was a casual salutation, the second a cry of anguish.
And start on tomorrow 26th for Back’s Fish River.
They sat outside the tent in a yellow light, surveying the remains of Franklin’s last campsite. An easterly wind carried the faint earthy smell of new lichen over the gravel. Adams rummaged in the bag of provisions.
“The cocoa is all gone,” he said. “And the tea is long finished. It shall have to be water with breakfast.” He handed two strips of reindeer meat to Billings.
“We cannot go after them,” Robinson said. “The note says they left a year ago. Back’s River is five hundred miles from Port Leopold. Even if we got that far and found Crozier, we could not get back to Port Leopold before the ice melts and Captain Ross sails off. I do not fancy being left here until a search vessel arrives next year.”
The wind dropped, and it was almost warm.
“It is over, then.” Adams’ head throbbed. His shoulders were raw from the track rope. He knew he should mourn Franklin and his men but instead felt cheated of a prize. Shame weighed upon him like chain mail. “I thought God had chosen me.”
Robinson’s response was terse. “If you must pity anyone, pity them, not yourself.”
“But we shall never find them now.” Adams’ chin dropped to his chest. He imagined the flat, empty land around them as the surface of a vast ocean, gently undulating and featureless. He floated upon it now, adrift and aimless, wishing the current to take him and cast him up on some distant shore far from this place.
Billings chewed his meat noisily. “Are we going home now?”
Robinson puffed on his pipe. He took a small bite from a strip of meat. “Do you think it likely there are records aboard Erebus and Terror ?”
Adams raised his head, frowning. “What records?”
“Journals, diaries. Messages like the one we found here. Surely there is more. What if Crozier abandoned the ships not because they were about to sink but only because they were stuck fast? He would have left a log or journal in case the ships were found before he was. If they were frozen in for two years, I have no doubt he would have written a full account.”
Adams stared at him. So Robinson had not abandoned the pursuit.
“But we do not know where the ships are.”
“We know where they were a year ago. They were five leagues north-northwest of this very spot. Crozier said so, right here.” Robinson brandished the message from the cairn.
“They would have drifted with the ice, or sunk,” said Adams. “Or perhaps Crozier got the coordinates wrong. Other parts of his message are little more than babble. Why trust that part?”
He sucked on a strip of reindeer flesh, afraid he would soon be spitting teeth into his palm if he did not soften the dried meat first. He tested an unsteady molar with his tongue, then guided the strip of meat to the opposite side of his mouth, where the teeth felt sturdier.
Robinson leaned forward, bringing his pallid face close to Adams’. The red mist of broken blood vessels behind pale-blue irises lent his gaze a hypnotic allure.
“The ships were stuck fast for two years, and Crozier thought they would not move. That is precisely why he abandoned them.” Robinson pointed to the northwest. “That pack ice is being driven south by the currents and winds.” He slapped the map with his hand. “The coast of King William Land trends southwest from here. If the pack has carried the ships south, they might still be sitting in the ice near the western edge of King William Land. We may be able to see them.”
Adams felt an unexpected admiration for the man. Robinson seemed to know no self-reproach, felt no contrition for his failures. He was no sooner thwarted than mulling his next gambit. If he could replicate a single aspect of Robinson’s character, it would be this.
Robinson appeared to take Adams’ silence as reticence. He pressed him further, as if pushing on a door he felt was sure to swing open.
“It would take but a day or two to walk out four or five leagues. If we see nothing, we shall turn back to Cape Felix and return to Fury Beach. Would you agree to that?”
The sky overhead was low and falling, like the ceiling of a vast cavern.
Adams gripped his Bible and held it to his forehead. “Is it brave to go further? Or foolish?”
Robinson sat back. He swigged from his canteen. “I consider myself neither.”
“I would follow this path, see it through, but ...”
“God is testing your resolve? I have always understood one should expect that of Him.”
Adams once thought of his faith as heavy and immovable, like a ship’s anchor. Today he imagined it more as the trunk of a sapling bent over in a screaming gale. Stripped of leaves, groaning and creaking, roots ready to tear from the soil at one more gust.
“Captain Bird told me not all men are suited to Arctic service,” said Adams.
“No man is suited to this.”
“Jimmy.” Adams looked at Billings. The young seaman stared back with a frightened expression. “Can you go a little further?”
Billings bit his lip. “I miss my ma. She said I had to come home. The cholera took my brothers, see?”
Adams whispered to Robinson. “We pay out more and more rope but are yet to hang ourselves. We are like mice following a chunk of cheese on a string. At some point, a bootheel will crash down upon our heads.”
“Is it so odd to imagine your fate was never to rescue Sir John at all, but to carry the news of his fate back to the Admiralty?”
“Ma said I had to come home,” said Billings, “or else she’d be in the workhouse.”
Adams’ mouth was dry. He regarded Robinson with something approaching awe. “How is it you have no doubts?”
Robinson shrugged. “If we run out of food and cannot find more, we will die. There is no ambiguity in it.”
“The bear ...,” said Adams. “The one I shot.”
The memory of it, never far from his mind, was in his head again now: the massive white head with its small black eyes, the huge teeth, the broad taloned paws.
“What of it?”
“I shot nothing larger than a grouse before that.”
The sky took on the colour of slate, and the clouds knotted and heaved like creatures in a sack. The ice pack rumbled in the west. The clouds burst open, and a screaming wind reigned unimpeded across the flatland. The tentpole blew down, and they wore every piece of clothing they had, huddled together and freezing. The collapsed tent cocooned them as the gale roared for two days. The deafening wind circled the planet, thunder a ceaseless cannonade in the heavens. The earth shook as if likely to split apart. Adams stuffed cotton into his ears but could hear pieces of ice rolling along the beach in the wind. He lay curled up, his entire body clenched, his fingers gripping his arms, his eyes staring at the sailcloth inches from his nose.
Adams woke to find his blanket bag sodden; water had seeped through the floorcloth. He could not hear the wind, and there was no sound from the sea ice. He pulled on his boots and stood to insert the tentpole. Robinson and Billings lay asleep in their blankets.
Adams ate a small piece of biscuit. He could dry the wet bedding if he could find enough driftwood to make a fire. He checked his gun, collected his ammunition bag and telescope, and stepped out of the tent. The sky was overcast and the day warm. He removed the thick sweater beneath his coat, then took his blanket bag from the tent and laid it over some stones to dry.
All along the shore, the gale had tossed chunks of ice up out of the sea. Pieces of driftwood lay strewn across the shingle like the corpses of drowned sailors. The water to the west between the shore and the pack gleamed in the post-storm stillness. He scanned the beach for bears and looked skyward for birds. A white haze obscured the horizon. He took out his pipe, then turned. He felt the blood drain from his face, an itchy sensation like ants running down his neck. His hand went to his mouth.
An enormous cross, twice the height of a man and the colour of bone, stood at the water’s edge one hundred yards down the beach. It loomed over the shore, erupting from the earth, its long shadow stretched across the stones. Shorter than the left, the right crossbar pointed at the ocean so that the object appeared to face in his direction.
Unable to tear his gaze from the cross, Adams stumbled toward it, tripping over whale bones and pieces of ice and driftwood. The tree trunk was perhaps two feet in diameter, bleached by years riding the floes. The crossbars were truncated branches, misshapen and scarred. The tree’s base was embedded in the shingle, driven deep into the earth by the gale like a giant spear. A large chunk of ice buttressed the base of the trunk on the ocean side, holding it upright.
He searched the vicinity for debris from the missing vessels but saw nothing. He removed his glove. The surface of the wood was cool and smooth beneath his fingers. He recognised this tree. It was the storm-buffeted sapling of his imagination, stripped of leaves and riven now with fissures, but even after the previous day’s gale, the cross stood tall and straight. He had been heard. It was a message.
Adams dropped to his knees before the cross. Tears were hot on his cheeks. He put his shotgun on the ground beside him, then closed his eyes and clasped his hands together.
Merciful Lord and Saviour, I pray for Your guidance and Your love.
Robinson approached the kneeling Adams, his boots crunching on the stones. He stopped behind him and studied the trunk. My God, he thought, we are fortunate something this large did not land on our tent.
“Remarkable,” he said. “The storm must have thrown it up.” He approached the trunk and touched it. “It must have been in the pack for years.”
“It is a sign of His presence,” said Adams. “To appear here, now, while we are here.”
“It is spruce, I think.”
“It is affirmation.”
“Of what?”
“Of our sacred mission.”
Robinson regarded him with a mixture of amusement and contempt. Adams had recovered his courage by kneeling to a dead tree. So be it. He needed him strong. If his renewed fervour lent him vigour, Robinson was unconcerned whence it came.
“It is a blessing,” said Adams. “The Lord urges us on. He is telling us not to have doubts.”
“I would rather He blessed us with a fat duck or a reindeer.”
Adams reached up and gripped Robinson’s wrist, his eyes wide. “You are correct about the ships, I am sure of it. If we look in the ice, we will find them.” He pointed at the giant cross. “This is the proof we require.”
Robinson felt a prick of envy. He marvelled at the ability of the pious to discern the presence of the divine in the merely peculiar. Elizabeth’s illness would be easier to accept if he believed it to be simply the will of the Almighty. Nobody to blame, no retribution possible. It would make for a simpler world.
Adams knelt again and prayed silently. Robinson collected driftwood and made a fire near the tent. Smoke from the fire rose and twisted in the air, then was swept on the wind and whisked away across the lifeless expanse to the east. Billings emerged from the tent and wandered down the beach toward them. When he noticed the tree, he stopped and stared, slack-jawed.
Adams sat beside Robinson. “God has shown us the way. My faith was being tested. But I know now He will protect me. He will lift me.”
“It is quite the chalice he passes to you.” Robinson stoked the fire and laid some strips of meat out on the stones near the flames. Not for the first time he wondered if he should think better of the man. He was deluded by his fervour, perhaps, but that delusion lent him a resilience Robinson admired. Never extinguished, Adams’ devotion smouldered like a low fire, embers glowing on the coldest night. He needed only a prayer or hymn to fan his zeal into flame whenever misery or exhaustion threatened to snuff it out. It seemed so easy for him. But in my own weaker moments, he thought, my resolve leaves me. The coals of my own fire grow cold and black. Rekindling it sometimes requires more strength than I think I can summon. In those moments there is no one to help me. At least he has God.
“Very good,” he said. “We shall go and look for the ships. We shall find out what happened.”
Adams nodded. “Through great hardship does man know himself. Thus, he knows God. The Bible tells us this. We must share in the sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Robinson rocked forward and held his hands near the flames. “Then I suspect we could be in no better place.”
They walked west over the sea ice. King William Land sank into the whiteness behind them. A dark object on the ice raised its bullet head to look at them, then flicked its tail and disappeared into a hole. Robinson scanned the icy crags around them, his shotgun at the ready. He blew on his fingertips and ran them over the nipples and examined the barrel for moisture. Where there were seals, there would be bears.
The ice was corrugated with ridges and hummocks, great chunks rising like the broken columns and crumbling walls of an ancient city of white, long abandoned. Walking on numb feet, they bent into a relentless wind. The drift stung their faces. The three men crawled and slid over the hummocks and stepped around meltwater pools, pulling the sledge behind them. The runners hissed over the thin snow coating the ice. The murky sky was low overhead, but Robinson’s eyes smarted from the glare.
Every hour he dropped his knapsack in the lee of a tall hummock and climbed an ice ridge to scan the horizon with the telescope. He bruised his knees on outcrops and stepped in puddles of freezing water collected in depressions in the ice. Adams and Billings walked in circles below, stamping their feet and slapping each other’s shoulders to stay warm. Early in the morning, they encountered a wall of ice twenty feet high and a hundred feet across. A row of hummocks had fused, rearing up like a long wave frozen the instant before crashing on a beach. Robinson propped his shotgun against the hummock.
“Wait for me. I will try again here.”
He approached the ice wall and began hacking footholds in the ice with his shovel. The sky above was empty of birds. When he reached the top, his heart galloped against the freezing wall of the hummock. He lifted the telescope like a sentry atop a rampart and swept the horizon. With the sun in his eyes, he could not gauge the distance. He raised a gloved hand to block the sun and held the telescope, trembling, in the other. Far away in the pack, a tiny black stick protruded above a craggy white mass.
He squeezed his eyes shut, took a deep breath, exhaled, and shook his head to clear it. He knew not to trust his eyes in the Arctic. Many a mirage had appeared on the voyage north through Davis Strait: inverted icebergs, ships sailing through the air, mountain ranges on the open sea—all witnessed by dozens of officers and seamen. The light could deceive tired, hungry, hopeless men.
Adams’ thin bearded face and Billings’ wide eyes looked up at him from below. He raised the telescope and looked again. The mast was still there, swimming in his vision. He leaned forward and touched his forehead to the ice wall. His breath came in sharp, uneven bursts, oddly unsynchronised with the ragged rhythm of his heart.
“A mast!” Robinson called down. “I see a mast!” His voice seemed far away. He climbed backward down the wall, sliding down the last slope of the hummock on his backside. He passed Adams the telescope. “Take this and tell me I am mistaken.” He doubled over, trying to catch his breath. “Over to the southwest. I could only see one of them. It has drifted south, just as we thought. But the topmast is up.”
Robinson threaded a path through the hummocks. Adams and Billings followed, pulling the sledge. Their view obscured by the icy hillocks, they twice lost their way and scaled ice ridges to confirm their position. Particles of drift sparkled and danced in the cold air, and the wind whined over the ice. Each time Robinson’s view of the distant mast was blocked as they picked their way through the pack, he expected it to have disappeared when they emerged into the open again. They rounded a hummock and halted on a flat area of ice. One ship sat half a mile from the other, unnatural black silhouettes against a curtain of white. They were like great shackled creatures, their heads hanging, spirits broken.
Terror listed heavily to starboard, its spars nearly touching the floe. Its one-hundred-foot keel lay exposed to the iron sky. Pieces of loose oakum protruded between weathered timbers streaked with dirt and sleet. Enormous banks of hard-packed snow were pushed against the hull. The topmasts were all missing, giving the ship an incomplete look. A huge awning had been pulled over a pair of spars lashed end to end between the amputated foremast and mizzenmasts twenty feet above the deck. One side of the awning had pulled loose from the gunwale and sagged against the masts like the wall of a collapsed tent. Three-foot icicles as thick as a man’s wrist hung from the scuppers on the portside. The bowsprit protruded twenty feet over the ice, as stiff as a dead limb.
It was Erebus whose mast they had seen; the ship sat upright. The trio approached and halted beside the vessel. Robinson removed his glove and touched the cold black timbers of the hull as if feeling for a pulse. Broken pieces of wood and glass were scattered around them. A coil of rope lay half-buried in the snow.
Billings’ face was ashen. “Where are the people, Mister Adams?”
It was close to midnight, and the sun was a bronze coin glowing on the horizon. All three of Erebus ’ masts were capped with their topmasts, each casting a long shadow across the ice. Articles of clothing hung out to dry on the ratlines were rigid from cold, banging against the rigging like empty suits of armour.
Adams pointed up at the ship. “The winter awning over the upper deck has been removed. There must have been someone here as recently as the spring.”
“They abandoned Terror . Evacuated her and retreated to Erebus .” Robinson gestured at the topmast. “They were surveying the ice, looking for the thaw.” He collected himself, then cupped his mittened hands around his mouth. “Hallo!” he called. “Hallo on deck!”
He unslung his shotgun and checked the priming. He hoisted it to his shoulder and fired into the air. The great boom of the gun reverberated off the ship’s hull and was plucked away by the breeze. Shivering, they waited. No heads appeared at the gunwale above them. No shouts rose from the ship. The wind picked up, whistling across the ice behind them. The sound of a floe cracking some distance to the north was like a pistol shot.
Robinson glanced at Adams and jerked his head at the ship. “Let us get inside.” He gestured at a snow ramp built beside the hull, leading from the ice up to the gunwale ten feet above. “At least we shall be out of the wind.”
They stepped over the gunwale onto the upper deck. The ship rang hollow beneath their boots. The boats were missing, the davits standing poised like unsheathed claws. The upper deck was bare but for three large wooden casks beside the mainmast. Robinson tugged off a mitten and rapped on the side of each one with his knuckles. All were empty. Unease stirred in him as he looked up at the masts. Not even the prison hulks at Plymouth were as lifeless and still as this. Erebus was now the corpse of something that had once been a ship, the masts and spars like the limbs of a dead man frozen in rigour.
Robinson heard a soft, rhythmic grunt and turned to see Billings with a knuckle thrust in his mouth. His eyes rolled in fear as he tried not to weep. For the first time, Robinson felt compassion for the man-child. He touched him on the shoulder.
“Fear not, Billings. Have courage, now.”
Aft and starboard of the mainmast, an iron chimney—an exhaust tube from the locomotive engine in the ship’s hold—jutted several feet above the deck. Adams held his bare hand close to the surface of the metal, then looked across at Robinson and shook his head.
The capstan was located on the deck between the mainmast and mizzenmast, the empty sockets of the drumhead like the gaps in a mouth lacking half its teeth. They looked down through the dirty windows of the skylight. No glimmer of light was visible in the gun room below. A belaying pin lay on the deck. Aft of the mizzenmast, the spokes of the double-wheeled helm protruded like skeletal fingers, the twelve-foot tiller a bone stripped of flesh.
They moved to the gunwales, Adams to port and Robinson to starboard, and walked forward to the bow. Shadowing Adams, Billings averted his eyes from the coats and trousers dangling from the hoary ratlines like the corpses of hanged criminals. Robinson knelt and wiped away dirt and ice from the small round windows in the deck timbers. The cabins below were dark.
Adams stopped and pointed. “Mister Robinson.”
The main hatchway was open.
The two men went to the hatchway and looked down. Nothing was visible in the blackness below. Robinson knelt by the hatchway and placed his face in the opening.
“Hallo!”
The murk below swallowed his voice. Both men cocked their heads and listened. Silence. The hairs on Robinson’s forearms rose. He swung his legs out over the hatchway and descended the companion ladder. The rungs were slippery in his hands, and he paused on each crosspiece so as not to fall. Adams climbed down the ladder after him. Billings knelt at the hatchway and looked down but made no move to follow them.
At the bottom of the ladder, the sound of the wind was far away above Robinson’s head. He and Adams stood listening, allowing their eyes to adjust to the gloom. Light fell in a shaft from the main hatch. No candles or lamps. The odour of mildew and woodsmoke. Behind them a timber creaked.
Robinson turned.
A tall figure stood before them at the edge of the shaft of light, a resurrected cadaver stepping from a tomb. Motes of dust swirled around him. His face was gaunt and drawn, the whites of his red-rimmed eyes bright against the grimy, wrinkled skin. His hair was ragged and filthy, his beard a tangled nest of brown and grey below sharp cheekbones. He wore a stained sweater beneath a long coat hanging loosely from his shoulders. Robinson winced at the stench of excrement.
The man’s mouth hung open. He stared with wide eyes, his lips trembling. He held out both his hands, groping like a blind man. Robinson was dazed, speechless, shivering with disgust as the man’s fingertips caressed his beard.
When the man’s voice came, it was something old and unused, a faint rasp like fingernails across sandpaper.
“Are you here?” he whispered. “Are you real?”
The man gripped Robinson’s hand and ran the other hand up to his shoulder, squeezing it. His touch was as light as a bird’s. A tear described his ravaged cheek.
Finally, Robinson could speak. “We are here,” he said. “Lieutenant Robinson and Assistant Surgeon Adams from HMS Investigator . Captain Bird is at Port Leopold.”
The man’s eyes rolled up, and his knees buckled. Robinson caught him before he fell. Despite the man’s height, his body was like a child’s.