First he brought the heavy theodolite and several of his old manuals up, took a quick reading of the sun, and jotted his bearings in the margin of the salt-stained book. Then he carried theodolite and books below and tossed them aside, knowing that fixing this ship’s position one last time was perhaps the most useless thing he’d ever done in a long life of doing useless things. But he also knew he’d had to do it.
Just as he had to do what he did next.
In the dark Gunner’s Storeroom on the orlop deck he split open three successive kegs of gunpowder – pouring the contents of the first on the orlop deck and down the ladder into the hold deck (he would not go down there), the contents of the second keg everywhere on the lower deck (and especially inside the open door of his own cabin), and the contents of the third keg in black trails along the canted upper deck where Silence waited with his children. Asiajuk and the others on the ice had come around to the port side and now watched from thirty yards away. The dogs continued to howl and strain to get away, but Asiajuk or one of the hunters had staked them to the ice.
Crozier wanted to stay in the open air, even with the afternoon light waning, but he made himself go below to the orlop deck again.
Carrying the last keg of lamp oil left on the ship, he spilled a trail of it on all three decks, taking care to douse the door and bulkhead of his own cabin. His only hesitation was at the entrance to the Great Room where hundreds upon hundreds of spines of books stared back at him.
But they now carried the dark
When he was finished pouring the last of the fuel on the upper deck, he flung the empty cask far out over the ice.
The Lucifer matches were where he had left them in the drawer of his desk three years earlier.
For a second he was sure that he could hear the bunk creak and the nest of frozen blankets stir as the mummified thing behind him reached for him. He could hear the dry tendons in the dead arm stretching and snapping as the brown hand with its long brown fingers and too-long yellow nails slowly rose.
Crozier did not turn to look. He did not run. He did not look back. Carrying the matches, he left his cabin slowly, stepping over the lines of black gunpowder and deck boards stained by the whale oil.
He had to go down the main ladder to throw the first match. The air was so bad here that the match almost refused to light. Then the gunpowder lit with a
Knowing that the orlop deck fire alone would have been enough – these timbers were dried to tinder after six years in this arctic desert – he still took time to light the lines of powder on the lower deck and open upper deck.
Then he jumped the ten feet to the ramp of ice on the west side of the ship and cursed as his never fully recovered left leg announced its pain. He should have clambered down the rigged rope ladders here as Silence obviously had had the sense to do.
Limping like the old man he was sure he would soon be, Crozier walked out onto the ice to join the others.
The ship burned for almost an hour and a half before it sank.
It was an incredible conflagration. Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle.
He definitely wouldn’t have needed the gunpowder or lamp oil, he realized while watching. The timbers and canvas and boards were so leached of moisture that the entire ship went up like one of the incendiary mortar bombs it had been designed to launch so many decades ago.
But that is not why he burned it. If asked – which he never would be – he could not have explained why it had to be burned. He knew that he did not want “rescuers” from British ships poring over the abandoned ship, carrying tales of it home to frighten the ghoulish citizens of England and to spur Mr. Dickens or Mr. Tennyson on to new heights of maudlin eloquence. He also knew that it wouldn’t have been only tales these rescuers would have brought back to England with them. Whatever had taken possession of the ship was as virulent as the plague. He had seen that with the eyes of his soul and smelled it with all his human and
The Real People cheered when the burning masts collapsed.
They’d all been forced to move back a hundred yards.
The noise from the fire woke the children and the flames so heated the air out here on the ice that all of them – his wife, scowling Asiajuk, big-titted Nauja, the hunters, happily grinning Inupijuk, even Taliriktug – took off their outer parkas and piled them onto the
When the show was over and the ship was sunk and the sun was also sinking toward the south so that their shadows leapt long across the greying ice, still they stayed to point and enjoy the steam rising and celebrate the bits of burning debris still scattered here and there on the ice.
Then the band finally turned back toward the big island and then the smaller islands, planning to cross the ice to the mainland before they would make camp for the night. The sunlight shining until after midnight helped their march. All of them wanted to be off the ice and away from this place before the few hours of dimness and full darkness came. Even the dogs quit barking and snarling and seemed to pull harder when they passed the smaller island on their way back in to the land. Asiajuk was asleep and snoring under his robes on the sledge, but both the babies were wide awake and ready to play.
Taliriktug took the squirming Kanneyuk in his left arm and put his right arm around Silna-Silence. Raven, still being carried by his mother, was petulantly trying to slap her arms away and force her to put him down so he could try to walk on his own.
Taliriktug wondered, not for the first time, how a father and mother without tongues were going to discipline a headstrong boy. Then he remembered, not for the first time, that he now belonged to one of the few cultures in the world that did not bother to discipline their headstrong boys or girls. Raven already had an
The Francis Crozier
But perhaps it did not have to be solitary.
His arm around Silna, trying to ignore the raucous snores from the shaman and the fact that baby Kanneyuk had just pissed on her father’s best summer parka, while also ignoring the petulant swats and mewling noises from his squirming son, Taliriktug and Crozier continued walking east across the ice toward solid ground.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to acknowledge the following sources for providing information in my writing of
The idea to write about this era of Arctic exploration came from a short comment, almost a footnote, about the Franklin Expedition that I encountered in Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Three books that were especially important to me in the early stages of research were
These books led me to some of their invaluable sources, including
Other sources frequently consulted include
Other sources consulted include
