What Crozier most wanted to do was to kill the thing itself. Unlike the majority of his men, he believed it was mortal – an animal, nothing more. Smarter, perhaps, than even the frighteningly intelligent white bear, but still a beast.
If he could kill the thing, Crozier knew, the mere fact of its death – the pleasure of revenge for so many deaths, even if the rest of the expedition still were to die later from starvation and scurvy – would temporarily lift the morale of the survivors more than discovering twenty gallons of untapped rum.
The beast had not bothered them – not killed any of them – since the ice-enclosed lake where Lieutenant Little and his men had died. Each of the hunting parties the captain sent out had standing orders to return immediately should they find the thing’s tracks in the snow; Crozier intended to take every man who could walk and every weapon that could fire out to stalk the beast. If he had to, he would use men banging pots and pans and shouting to flush the thing out, as if it were a tiger in the high grass of India being brought to bay by beaters.
But Crozier knew this would work no better than the late Sir John’s bear blind. What they really needed to bring the thing closer was bait. Crozier had no doubt whatsoever that it was still keeping pace with them, moving in closer during the increasing hours of darkness, hiding wherever it hid, perhaps under the ice, during the day, and that it would come even closer if they could bait it in. But they had no fresh meat, and if they had even a pound of fresh kill, the men would devour it, not use it as bait to catch the thing.
Still, Crozier thought, while remembering the impossible great size and mass of the monstrous thing on the ice, there was more than a ton of meat and muscle there, perhaps several tons, since the larger male white bears weighed up to 1,500 pounds and the thing made its white bear cousins look like hunting dogs next to a large man in comparison. So they would eat well for many weeks if they
If it would work, Francis Crozier knew he would set himself out onto the ice as bait.
With the thought of the Marines came, unbidden, the memory of Private Henry Wilkes’s body left behind in one of the abandoned boats a week earlier. There had been no gathering of the men for Wilkes’s nonburial, only Crozier, Des Voeux, and a few of the Marine’s closer friends saying a few words over the body before dawn.
Then he realized – and not for the first time – that they had fresher bait with them. David Leys had been nothing but a burden for eight months, ever since the night in December of last year when the thing had given chase to the late Ice Master Blanky. Leys staring at nothing since that night, unresponsive, useless, hauled in the boat like a hundred and thirty pounds of soiled laundry for almost four months now, nonetheless managed to slurp down his salt-pork broth and rum ration every afternoon and to swallow his spoonful of tea and sugar each morning.
It was to the men’s credit that none of them – not even the whispering Hickey or Aylmore – had suggested leaving Leys behind, or any of the other sick men who currently could not walk. But everyone must have had the same thought…
Francis Crozier was so hungry that he could imagine eating human flesh. He would not kill a man in order to devour him – not yet – but once dead, why should all that meat be left behind to rot in the arctic summer sun? Or worse yet, left behind to be eaten by the thing that was after them?
As a new lieutenant in his twenties, Crozier had heard – as all sailing men now heard sooner or later, usually as ship’s boys before the mast – the true story of Captain Pollard in the U.S. brig
Then they steered the whaleboats for South America.
First, of course, they killed and ate the large turtles, drinking the blood when the meat was gone. Then they managed to capture some hapless flying fish who leapt into the boat by accident; while the men had contrived to cook the turtle meat, after a fashion, the fish they ate raw. Then they dived into the sea, scraped the barnacles from the hulls of their three open boats, and ate those.
Miraculously, the boats encountered Henderson Island – one of those few specks on the endless blue that is the Pacific Ocean. For four days the twenty men captured crabs and stalked gulls and their eggs. But Captain Pollard knew that there were not enough crabs, gulls, or gull eggs on the island to sustain twenty men for more than another few weeks, so seventeen of the twenty voted to take to the boats again. They launched the boats and waved good-bye to their three remaining companions on 27 December, 1820.
By 28 January, the three boats had been separated from one another by storm, and Captain Pollard’s whaleboat sailed eastward alone under the endless sky. Their rations now consisted of one and a half ounces of ship’s biscuit per man a day for the five men in the whaleboat. By not so great a coincidence, this was precisely the reduced ration that Crozier had just secretly discussed with Dr. Goodsir and First Mate Des Voeux for when the last of the salt pork ran out in a few days.
The bit of biscuit and few sips of water had kept Pollard’s men – his nephew Owen Coffin, a freed black man named Barzillai Ray, and two seamen – alive for nine weeks.
They were still more than 1,600 miles from land when the last of the biscuits ran out at the same time as the last of the water was drunk. Crozier had figured that if the biscuits lasted his men another month, they would still be more than 800 miles from human habitation in winter even if they reached the mouth of Back’s River.
Pollard had no conveniently recently deceased men aboard his boat, so they drew straws. Pollard’s young nephew Owen Coffin drew the short straw. Then they drew straws again to see who would do the deed. Charles Ramsdell drew the short straw this time.
The boy wished the other men a tremulous good-bye (Crozier always remembered his scrotum-tightening sense of horror the first time he heard this part of the story while on watch with an older man high in the mizzen of a warship far off Argentina, the old seaman terrifying Lieutenant Crozier by saying good-bye in a trembling boy’s voice), and then young Coffin had laid his head on the gunwale and closed his eyes.
Captain Pollard, as he later testified in his own words, had given Ramsdell his pistol and turned his face away.
Ramsdell shot the boy in the back of the head.
The five others, including Captain Pollard, the boy’s uncle, first drank the blood while it was warm. Although salty, it was – unlike the endless sea around them – drinkable.
Then they sliced the boy’s flesh from his bones and ate it raw.
Then they broke open Owen Coffin’s bones and sucked out the marrow to the last shred.
The cabin boy’s corpse had sustained them for thirteen days, and just when they were considering drawing lots again, the black man – Barzillai Ray – died of thirst and exhaustion. Again the draining, drinking, slicing, cracking, and sucking of marrow sustained them until they were rescued by the whaler
Francis Crozier never met Captain Pollard but he had followed his career. The unlucky American had retained his rank and gone to sea only once more – and once more was shipwrecked. After being rescued the second time, he was never again entrusted with command of a ship. The last Crozier heard, only a few months before Sir John’s expedition sailed three years earlier in 1845, Captain Pollard was living as a town watchman in Nantucket and was universally shunned by both townspeople and whalers there. It was said that Pollard had aged prematurely, spoke aloud to himself and his long-dead nephew, and hid biscuits and salt pork in the rafters of his home.
Crozier knew that his people would have to make a decision about eating their own dead within the next few weeks, if not the next few days.
The men were approaching the point where they were too few and those few too weak to man-haul boats, but the four-day rest on the ice floe from the 18th to the 22nd of July had not renewed their energy. Crozier, Des Voeux, and Couch – young Lieutenant Hodgson, while technically the second in command, was given no authority by the captain these days – rousted men and ordered them out hunting or repairing sledge runners or caulking and rerepairing the boats rather than let them lie in their frozen sleeping bags in their dripping tents all day – but essentially all they could do was sit on their connected floes for days since too many tiny leads, fissures, small areas of open water, and patches of thin and rotten ice surrounded them to allow any progress south or east or north.
Crozier refused to turn back west and northwest.
But the floes were not drifting in the direction they wanted to go – southeast toward the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River. They merely milled and circled upon themselves as the pack holding
Finally, on the afternoon of Saturday, 22 July, their own floe began cracking up enough that Crozier ordered everyone into the boats.
For six days now they had floated, tethered together by lines, in patches and leads too short or small to row or sail in. Crozier had the one sextant left to them (he had left the heavier theodolite behind), and while others slept he took the best readings he could during the occasional short break in cloud cover. He reckoned their position to be about eighty-five miles northwest of the mouth of Back’s River.
Expecting to see a narrow isthmus ahead of them any day now – the presumed peninsula connecting the bulb of King William Land to the previously mapped Adelaide Peninsula – Crozier had awakened in the boat at sunrise on the morning of Wednesday the 26th of July to find the air colder, the sky blue and cloudless, and glimpses of land darkening the sky more than fifteen miles away to both the north and south.
Calling the five boats together later, Crozier stood in the bow of his lead whaleboat and shouted, “Men, King William Land is
There was a weak cheer followed by some coughing.
If the boats and floes had been drifting south, weeks of man-hauling or sailing work might have been done for them. But the leads and areas of open water in which
