CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Robinson climbed the ladder to the upper deck and stood in the cold breeze. Adams followed him, and together they watched the ice pack turn from white to grey in sunlight leaking through fissures in the ashen clouds. A bank of fog approached from the north.
“We should tell Captain Fitzjames his men are dead,” Adams said. “That he has a madman ministering to his dead fellows belowdecks.”
Robinson huddled into his coat. “It would serve no purpose to tell him. He may not even understand.”
He thought of Fitzjames with a mixture of envy and admiration. The man had what Robinson desired most: the rank of captain. Fitzjames had left the Thames a commander, but Crozier would have promoted him in the field upon Franklin’s death. Robinson felt a welling of pride in the man. Even when starving, hallucinating, half out of his head, Fitzjames could correctly state his rank. He knew he was a captain. And he would more than likely die a captain.
“Those empty preserved-meat canisters in the galley—” Robinson checked himself, then continued. “The vendor’s name on the label was Goldner—the same vendor who supplied the preserved meats to our ships.”
Adams looked puzzled. “What of it?”
“There is something you should know. Last summer, when we were still in Davis Strait, the cook brought a canister of boiled beef to Captain Bird.” Robinson turned to face Adams. “The contents were utterly rancid.”
Adams frowned. “Rancid? How could that be?”
“Captain Bird summoned the senior officers to witness it. The contents of the can were green, revolting. I will not soon forget the stench.”
Adams pressed him. “Are you sure it was not damaged earlier, during the gale off Cape Farewell? Perhaps it sustained a blow and was perforated.”
Robinson shook his head. “The cook opened it with his bayonet only ten minutes before. He swore to it.”
“So it was rotten when first placed in the can?”
“It would seem so.” Robinson shrugged. “Sometimes they do not force out all the air before they solder them shut. Or they do not cook them long enough. The cook later found two other putrid boiled-beef canisters, but the mutton and veal were perfectly edible. The preserved soups were tolerable too.”
“Why was I not informed?”
“Captain Bird’s orders. He did not wish it to get about, did not want the crew to know. There were also at least two cans of beef containing nothing but offal. Intestines, a bit of liver. One was filled largely with tallow. And quite a few unopened cans were unnaturally light in the hand, well short of the stated weight. The contents of one eight-pound can I examined could not have weighed more than four pounds.”
Adams digested this. “Sir John’s men would have been issued preserved meats every other day, twelve ounces per man. So when he thought he was provisioned for three years—”
“—he would have assumed his preserved meats were unspoiled,” said Robinson. The bank of fog was much closer now, draining the world of colour. “If some of his meats were also putrid or underweight, they would have run out of food. Probably quite some time ago, I should think.”
Adams and Robinson went looking for the steward, Aylmore.
Billings shied like a nervous pony from the black maw of the hatchway leading from the lower deck down to the hold. The whites of his eyes glistened in the gloom. His breath came in short gasps. Adams had wrapped the decaying corpse from the cabin in a blanket and had Billings carry it up the companion ladder to the deck and down to the ice, but the stench still hung in the air, coating their throats, adhering to their cheeks and fingers.
Robinson snapped at him. “Move, Billings! You’ve been in Investigator ’s hold a hundred times, have you not?”
Billings looked on the verge of tears. He glanced toward the corpses in the hammocks.
“It weren’t like this. Smells like death.”
“You have smelled worse, I’m sure,” said Robinson. “The streets of Manchester are hardly any more sweet-smelling.”
Adams put a hand on the seaman’s shoulder. “Go up top, will you, Jimmy?” he said softly. “We need a man to keep watch.”
The big man looked relieved to have a task for which he could use his talents. “I can see real good.”
“Shout if you see a bear. There’s a good man,” said Adams. “We shall want some meat from him.”
Adams and Robinson descended the ladder to Terror ’s hold. With only a stub of tallow candle from his pocket to light the way, Adams felt he was exploring a cave. The hold was bare, the coal once stored there consumed years before. Two feet of bilge water had frozen solid. The smell of sewage and rotten bacon rose around them. A dead rat hung suspended in the frozen muck beneath his boots, its claws extended and mouth open in a silent scream.
Shadows thrown by Adams’ candle shuddered on the reinforced oak beams. The two men stepped carefully across the slippery surface in search of hull breaches but could see little in the darkness. Adams imagined himself walking through the empty rib cage of some enormous dead creature. The huge locomotive engine was silent, slung sideways across the hold like a fossilised heart. An ice axe stood propped against the wall of the hull. Adams hefted it in one hand.
“Mister Aylmore!” he called. “Come out! We will not hurt you!” The darkness swallowed his voice. He and Robinson stopped and listened. A slow drip plinked somewhere in the dark.
They climbed one level to the orlop deck. Once crammed with provisions, it, too, had been stripped. Flour spilled on the floor of the Bread Room by careless hands had frozen into a filthy rock-hard residue. Finger tracks were visible in the grey muck. Adams opened two tin cases of ship’s biscuit but found them both empty. The Slop Room was empty, every coat and boot gone. The lock that had once secured the Spirit Room lay in rusty pieces on the floor. Not a cask or barrel or bottle remained. Several rusty nails and a saw with a broken handle lay on the floor. All the spare canvas was missing from the Sail Room. Half a dozen empty food canisters lay scattered on the floor.
Adams looked in the Carpenter’s Store. A long shape stretched from the ceiling almost to the floor. Richard Aylmore hung from a rope looped around an overhead beam. An upturned seaman’s chest lay near his dangling heels.
“Here!” Adams shouted.
He ran forward and lifted the young man around the waist. Robinson rushed in behind him and reached up to cut the rope with his knife. Aylmore’s body slumped over Adams’ shoulder, but the muscles were already stiff. He laid the thin body on the floor. Adams felt for a pulse, then put his ear to Aylmore’s mouth. He gazed down at the man’s face, the eyes half-open, the skin grey and slack. Adams had seen dead men. If he had known them, he mourned. He felt regret and frustration for sick men he had failed to treat, sympathy for the mortally maimed. Now he knew only bewilderment. He looked up at Robinson, uncomprehending.
“But we were going to take him with us.”
“We buried him in the ice,” said Fitzjames.
He lay stretched out on the gun room couch. The tiny flame of Adams’ candle stood motionless in the still air from a saucer on the floor. Shadows flitted on the walls. Adams thought the creases in Fitzjames’ skin deeper even than a few hours earlier. More of the man had leaked away. A cluster of purple bruises nestled in the notch of his throat. Adams feared his head might topple from his neck if it trembled much more. He knelt beside Fitzjames with a bowl of soup and a spoon, feeding him tiny sips.
“The surgeon said it was apoplexy,” Fitzjames said. His expression was doleful. “Sir John lingered for a day, but it was not ... a good death.”
Adams’ throat tightened, and his eyelids grew hot. He could see how it must have been, Fitzjames and Crozier standing over their dying commander, waiting for the final breath of the man they had expected to lead them through the Passage. He imagined the carpenter hammering the coffin, the men taking turns at the long saw to cut a hole in the ice, then standing with caps in hand as Franklin was lowered into the black water.
“I saw you.” Fitzjames stared at him. “You were here before. With me.”
“Yes,” said Adams gently. He lifted the spoon to Fitzjames’ lips and waited for him to swallow.
“My mind is foggy,” Fitzjames whispered, “like I am ... groping around in a sack. But my head is a little clearer today. The soup is very good.” His hands quivered in his lap. He turned them over, first examining the palms, then curling the fingers of one hand around the thin, corded wrist of the other.
“Captain,” said Adams, “why did you not bury Sir John on King William Land?”
“I would have.” Fitzjames shrugged. “But he insisted, before he was ever ill. When we were still in the Thames, he said if it ever came to it, he would want to be buried at sea. He laughed about it. None of us thought ...” He stopped. “We thought the ice would melt within weeks and we would sail on. By the time we sought a safe harbour for the winter, we were trapped. Only later did we realise we would never get out.” Fitzjames gazed down at the candle flame quivering on the floor. “We blasted holes in the ice with gunpowder,” he said, “but they froze over in minutes. We hoped the ice might break up this summer. Terror is lost, I think, but Erebus may yet be seaworthy.” He sighed. “But we are not strong enough to man the ship now. I had the topmast sent up in the spring to survey the state of the ice, but none of us can climb it.”
“Where is Sir John’s journal?” asked Robinson. “The ship’s log?”
“Captain Crozier has them. He went hunting. With some men who were still strong enough. He said they would return with meat for us.”
“The note at Victory Point said you went south to Back’s Fish River,” said Adams.
Fitzjames shook his head sadly. “Too many were sick. I returned to Erebus with the invalids.”
“Did they leave you with nothing?”
Fitzjames’ head fell back on the cushions. He stared up at the ceiling and watched the shadows of the three men. “Crozier left us what he could—some canned provisions, mostly. But I think there was a sickness in them. We threw many of the cans overboard. Our hunters shot the odd bird or fox, but there is so little game. I ordered the hunters to bring back all meat to share with the others. But they ate whatever they shot before they returned to the ship. I saw them licking the blood off their mittens.”
Adams lifted the spoon again, but Fitzjames turned his face away. The ship’s hull creaked under the pressure of the pack. The candle sputtered, the wick nearly consumed. A slender coil of soot spiralled upward. The room darkened. When Fitzjames spoke again, his voice was faint.
“We made soup from scraps of leather and hide and sealskin. I let the men stay in their hammocks now. It is all I can do to keep them warm. We all feel the cold terribly.”
Adams took his hand. “We shall lead you back to Fury Beach. From there we can bring provisions from Port Leopold on the steam launch.”
Fitzjames shook his head. “Too far. The men are ill. Scurvy. Dysentery. The dreadful melancholy is the worst.” He stopped, his chest heaving. Tears shone on his cheeks. He closed his eyes, and his chin fell to his chest. Adams thought he had fallen asleep when Fitzjames sighed and opened his eyes.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I am very tired.”
“Return with us,” Adams said. “There is nothing more you can do here.”
“You are mistaken.” Fitzjames looked at Adams with a kind expression. “I can stay with my men. We have been together four years, and our mission is at an end. I will see it through. I made that decision some time ago and will not retreat from it. The Lord will keep me.”
“We may yet find some of your men on King William Land,” said Robinson.
“They are not my men anymore.” Fitzjames would not meet Adams’ gaze. “You shall leave me here. I do not think I can stand any longer. My heart bothers me. There is nothing to be done. I have made my peace with it.”
Adams bowed his head and took Fitzjames’ hand. “I am sorry,” he said, his voice cracking. “I had the finest words rehearsed. For Sir John, for you.”
Fitzjames patted Adams’ hand. “I am grateful for my good fortune. I am glad to be going out with the staunchest of fellows. Such are the curious merits of a slow death. A musket ball through the heart and it would all be over in an instant, before one even knew it. Before one had a chance to reflect. Instead, I have been able to remember people who were kind to me.”
Robinson stood. “Would you have us carry any letters?”
Fitzjames took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He gestured at a letter lying on the table. “I wrote this sometime ago. It is for my parents.”
“Is there nothing for the Admiralty? Your journal?”
“Someone stole it. Burned it, I expect.” Fitzjames turned his head away. “But you can tell them.”
“We know so little,” said Adams.
“Tell them we became stuck in the ice and could not escape.”
“They will want to know more.”
“Tell them we went out bravely, like Royal Navy men. Tell them the conduct of the men was exemplary when Providence was unkind. That they accepted their fate with dignity and did nothing to bring shame upon their families.” He relaxed against the cushions. “Give some thought to the story. Knead it and bake it into something palatable. Thus, heroes are born of men.”
Fitzjames’ gaze was fixed on Adams’ face, his voice barely audible. Adams leaned in and put his ear near Fitzjames’ lips. The candle flame flared once and died, and the room was black. Robinson fished a nub of candle from his pocket and struck his flint and steel but could not ignite the denuded wick.
“You know,” Fitzjames whispered in the darkness, “you would think a man is most likely to freeze to death here. I think it more accurate to say he erodes . The cold hardens a man’s spirit; then it becomes brittle and is burned off by the glare and ground down by the wind and whittled away by hunger until his will to live is snuffed out. Some of the men laid down on their bunks and hoped never again to wake. They just close their eyes and die. But do you know”—he stopped, then spoke in wonder, as if relating a great discovery—“the more one desires it, the more difficult it becomes.”
The wick of Robinson’s candle finally ignited. A yellow light bloomed. He held it close to the stricken man’s face. Fitzjames’ lips trembled. Adams leaned in until he could feel his breath on his ear.
“Perhaps I shall manage it today.”
Robinson had found the Passage. He could prove it now.
He rolled up his map and leaned on the captain’s table with both hands. He had hoped to bring Franklin home, but the location of the Passage was worth far more. He could show Franklin’s ships had sailed down the uncharted waterway west of Boothia before becoming icebound. Franklin was heading to Point Turnagain and, from there, west to Behrings Strait. The Admiralty would mourn Franklin and his men, yes, but they would soon see them as martyrs in the acquisition of the greater prize. He was eager to be on his way.
He and Adams wrapped Fitzjames in blankets taken from the corpses on the lower deck and laid him in his bunk. Fitzjames watched them, saying nothing, then closed his eyes. Adams and Robinson returned to the captain’s cabin.
“How long, do you think?” Robinson asked him.
“Not long. Hours.”
“But it could be longer?”
Adams sighed and rubbed his matted hair. “Perhaps as long as a day or two. I cannot be certain.”
“We must leave now,” said Robinson. “We have so little food left. There is no time.”
“No.” Adams’ tone was flat. “We stay. It is our duty.”
“He is beyond help. If we cannot get back, it will all have been for nothing.”
Adams turned and stared into Robinson’s eyes. “He deserves a burial. It is the decent thing.”
The decent thing. Robinson found the notion amusing. What was the decent thing when confronted with demented and starving men, dwindling provisions, and an advancing summer? In England, the meaning of the term would have been clear to him, but here it was indeterminate, something never quite within reach, like a fluttering moth you grasp at over and over but cannot seize.
It seemed to him that he and Adams orbited each other, separated by their polarities yet captured and held by the gravity of their mission. Each unable to break free of the other but destined never to intersect.
“You have no more detours to propose?” Adams meant it as a quip but was suddenly seized with a fear Robinson would change his mind and declare they must march a farther two hundred miles to Back’s River in search of Crozier.
Robinson grunted, tried to smile, and failed. He shook his head. “No more. We have but pieces of a story, many chapters missing. It will have to do. Only Crozier knows the rest, but we have missed him now.”
Adams called Billings down from the upper deck, gave him and Robinson two strips of dried meat and a piece of biscuit each, and took the same for himself. He sat on the table in the captain’s cabin and stitched a hole in his stocking. Robinson sharpened his knife on a leather strap he had found on the orlop deck. Billings played soldiers with the chess pieces they had discovered in the captain’s private quarters. The two officers cleaned their shotguns and went hunting out on the ice. Half a day later they returned, having seen no sign of life. Fitzjames lay lifeless in his bunk. Adams looked down at his waxen features: eyes half-open but dull and empty, long greasy hair, cracked and pale lips parted just enough to see the yellow teeth beneath.
“Another prayer, then?” Robinson asked.
Adams shook his head. He felt something heavy slipping from his heart and thought it might be the notion that he ever had any power to help these men. He pulled the blanket over the dead man’s face.
“He was more prepared to meet the Lord than any man I have known.”
Robinson turned on his heel and made for the door of the cabin. “Then it is time to leave.”
Robinson climbed the ladder to the upper deck and looked out at the snow dissolving into freezing mush. Rivulets of water ran down Erebus ’ hull. Above his head, drops of water rained from stalactites in the rigging. Tiny pockets of turquoise gleamed where the sunlight struck the icy outcrops. Adams and Billings followed him up the ladder. Together they stepped over the gunwale and carefully climbed down the snow ramp to the ice below. When they planted their boots on the surface of the snow, they sank to their ankles.
They walked away through the hummocks of ice toward King William Land. The wind came at them out of the sun and ran them through with freezing blades. It lifted clouds of drift off the snow and bore them forward like malevolent spirits. Dark clouds descended and smothered the sun. In the half-light, the ice took on a metallic sheen.
Robinson turned for a last glimpse of the two ships, Erebus ’ masts a trio of dead trees in a desert of white. When the end came for the ships, it would be swift. When they finally lost their battle against the floes, they would be crushed and sucked into the black water below. The masts would shudder as they dropped into the swirling ice, the thick doubled-planked timbers popping and snapping like twigs, the frozen bodies of Fitzjames’ men squashed flat in their bunks and hammocks. The ice would close over the holes in the floe within minutes. Nothing would remain, nothing to say Franklin’s men were ever here.
The three men walked blind for two days but did not find the land. Adams craned his neck and sought the sun in vain. Clouds and banks of mist combined to form a whiteness that rose and dissolved the world. He stumbled through icy pools and slipped on patches of smooth ice. The sledge snagged on ice outcrops, recalcitrant like an exhausted child, forcing Billings to retrace his steps and ease it free. His boots filled with freezing water, and he lost all sensation in his fingers and toes.
Adams checked their provisions. He guessed their remaining food at twelve pounds of biscuit and fifteen pounds of meat. Enough for a week, perhaps, if they marched on reduced rations. A loose tooth wobbled at the touch of his tongue. His legs ached, his bones afire. Billings hobbled beside him, favouring his right hip. The toe of his boot dragged on the ice. Adams reached into his tobacco pouch and filled his pipe, and the smoke streamed out behind him.
Adams’ hands shook. His shotgun was a cannon across his shoulders. He looked skyward for ducks or geese but could see nothing in the mist. Clambering over the ridges of ice left them all doubled over, panting for breath. His mind began to wander. In their confused state, he worried they would walk in circles on the floes. Only a few feet above sea level, the low stony shore of King William Land concealed itself somewhere ahead, offering no mountains or glaciers by which to navigate. They chewed on frozen pieces of meat and filled their canteens from puddles in the ice.
Robinson’s blurry shape moved ahead of Adams in the wind. Occasionally, the lieutenant bent over his compass, shook it, and turned it in his hand, peering into the blank sky. They had already walked for half a day longer than on their journey out from King William Land to Erebus . Adams thought to ask Robinson if he was sure of their direction, but with no better idea of their position, he held his tongue and followed him through the fog. Were they heading south? King William Land was somewhere to the east, but its coastline south of Victory Point was uncharted. If the shoreline turned east, they might walk forever over the sea ice and not reach land.
The snow became heavier, whipped around them by the wind. Adams pulled his bandanna high on his nose. Every few minutes, he reached out with his gloved hands to scrape away the snow caked around Billings’ eyelids. They stopped to sleep in the morning. Adams lay shivering in his blanket and held his frozen fingers gingerly to his chest as if cupping a tiny bird. Any movement and the pain in his legs and bowels would wrap him in its coils and squeeze the breath from him. He thought of the men dead in their hammocks on Erebus and understood how they had done it. When he rolled himself in his blanket, he imagined himself crawling into a dark hole, his only respite from the light and wind.
Three days out from Erebus , Robinson saw the low coast of King William Land appear before them like the brown hump of a whale rising in a white sea. He walked ashore, stepping over banks of shattered limestone pushed onto the land by ancient glaciers and left to freeze and crack into flat shards. Robinson dropped the sledge rope. He fell to all fours and touched his forehead to the shingle. Adams put his hands on his knees. Billings stood dazed and blinking. A thin layer of fresh snow covered much of the ground above the tidemark. Small reddish-brown boulders were visible through the slush, like pustules bubbling to the surface.
Robinson produced his compass and sextant and knelt on the gravel, his map unrolled. “We have landed too far south,” he said. He gestured to the northeast, where fog shrouded the coastline. “Victory Point is that way.”
“How far?”
Robinson hesitated. “Forty miles, I think.” He paused. “Perhaps more.” He led the other two men to the higher ground above the beach. The land stretched into the grey distance as though a great force had swept across it, scraping away not only all animal life and vegetation but also every undulation and blemish in the earth until all was utterly flat and lifeless. The wind died away, and the only sound was the clack of the stones under their boots. The sun climbed in the sky to the northwest, painting a glittering orange stripe on the ice that led almost to their feet. The only shadows were their own, unfamiliar shapes rippling across the dead land.
Suddenly there was only the sound of two pairs of boots on the gravel. Robinson stopped and turned. Billings stood twenty yards behind them, gazing into the distance with vacant eyes.
“Billings,” said Robinson, “are you unwell? We must push on. Stopping here will delay us. We can rest this evening.”
Billings did not reply.
Adams went to him and placed a gloved hand on his shoulder. “Jimmy, can you go on?”
“‘Keep an eye out,’ you said.” Billings’ voice was quiet. He lifted a hand and pointed. “Something moves there.”