Unlashing the carefully secured top foods, boxes of fuel bottles, robes, sleeping bags, and heavy tent, they lightened the load, ending up with fifty- to hundred-pound bundles and boxes that they had to pull up the steep, tumbled, jagged ridge before even attempting to move the sledge.
Goodsir realized quickly that if the pressure ridges had been discrete things – that is, mere ridges rising out of relatively smooth sea ice – climbing them would not have been the soul-destroying exertion that it proved to be. None of the frozen sea was smooth, but for fifty to a hundred yards around each pressure ridge the sea ice became a truly insane maze of rough snow, tumbled seracs, and giant ice blocks – a maze that had to be solved and traversed before the real climbing could begin.
The climbing itself was never linear but always a tortuous back-and-forth, a constant search for footholds on treacherous ice or handholds on a block that might break away at any moment. The eight men zigzagged upward in ridiculous diagonals as they climbed, handed heavy loads up to one another, hacked away at clumps of ice with their pickaxes to create steps and shelves, and generally tried not to fall or be fallen upon. Parcels slipped out of icy mittens and crashed below, bringing up short but impressive clouds of curses from the five seamen below before Gore or Des Voeux shouted them into silence. Everything had to be unpacked and repacked ten times.
Finally the heavy sledge itself, with perhaps half its load still lashed to it, had to be pulled, shoved, lifted, braced, dislodged from entrapping seracs, angled, lifted again, and tugged to the summit of each uneven pressure ridge. There was no rest for the men even atop these ridges since to relax for a minute meant that eight layers of sweat-sodden outer clothing and underlayers would begin to freeze.
After tying new lines to the vertical posts and cross braces at the rear of the sledge, some of the men would get ahead of it to brace its descent – usually the large Marine, Pilkington, and Morfin and Ferrier had this duty – while others dug in their cleats and lowered it to a syncopated chorus of gasps, calls, warnings, and more curses.
Then they would carefully reload the sledge, double-check the lashings, boil snow to pour on the frozen-in runners, and be off again, forcing their way through the tumble-labyrinth on this side of the pressure ridge.
Thirty minutes later they would come to the next ridge.
Their first night out on the ice was terrifyingly memorable for Harry D. S. Goodsir.
The surgeon had never done any camping in his life, but he knew that Graham Gore was telling the truth when the lieutenant said, laughingly, that everything took five times longer on the ice: unpacking the materials, firing up the spirit lamps and stoves, laying out the brown Holland tent and securing screws as anchor stakes in the ice, unrolling the many blanket rolls and sleeping bags, and especially heating up the tinned soup and pork they’d brought along.
And all the while, one had to keep moving – waving arms and shaking legs and stamping feet – or extremities would freeze.
On a normal arctic summer, Mr. Des Voeux reminded Goodsir, citing their previous summer of ice-breaking southward from Beechey Island as an example, temperatures at this latitude on a sunny June day with no wind might rise as high as 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Not this summer. Lieutenant Gore had taken measurements of the air temperature at 10:00 p.m. – the time they stopped to make camp with the sun still on the southern horizon and the sky quite bright – and the thermometer read only ?2 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature at their midday tea and biscuit break had been +6 degrees.
The Holland tent was small. In a storm it would save their lives but this first night out on the ice was clear with almost no wind, so Des Voeux and the five sailors decided to sleep outside on their wolfskins and tarps with only their Hudson’s Bay Company blanket sleeping bags for shelter – they would retreat to a very crowded tent if bad weather blew in – and after debating with himself for a moment, Goodsir decided to sleep outside with the men rather than inside with just Lieutenant Gore, as capable and affable a fellow as Gore was.
The daylight was maddening. It grew dim around midnight, but the sky was as light as an 8:00 p.m. London evening in midsummer, and Goodsir was damned if he could fall asleep. Here he was more physically tired than ever before in his life and he couldn’t sleep. The aches and pains from the day’s exertions also impeded sleep, he realized. He wished he’d brought some laudanum with him. A small draught of that would moderate the discomfort and allow him to sleep. Unlike some surgeons with a doctor’s certificate to administer drugs, Goodsir was not an addict – he used the various opiates only to allow himself to sleep or to concentrate when he had to. No more than once or twice a week.
And it was
But not deep enough to get warm. Des Voeux had explained to him that he had to remove his boots and slide them down into the bag with him so that the leather would not freeze solid – at one point Goodsir had pricked the bottom of his foot on the nails hammered through the sole of one of the boots – but all the men left on all their other clothes. The wool – all the wool, Goodsir realized not for the first time that day – was soaked through with his sweat and exhalations from the long day. The endless day.
For a while around midnight, the light deepened toward twilight enough that a few stars – planets, Goodsir now knew from a private lecture at the ad hoc observatory atop the iceberg two years ago – became visible. But the light never disappeared.
Nor did the cold. No longer moving or exerting itself, Goodsir’s thin body was defenseless against the cold that came in through the sleeping bag’s too-wide opening and that crept up from the ice through the hair-out wolfskin pad beneath him, crawling through the thick Hudson’s Bay Company blankets like some cold-fingered predator. Goodsir began to shake. His teeth chattered.
Around him, the four sleeping men – there were two on guard duty – snored so loudly that the surgeon wondered if the men on both ships miles northwest of them on the ice, beyond the countless pressure ridges –
Goodsir was shaking. At this rate he was sure he would not survive until morning. They would try to roust him out of his blanket and bag and find only a frozen, curled corpse.
He crawled as far down into the sewn-blankets sleeping bag as he could, pulling the ice-ridged opening closed above him, inhaling his own sour-sweat smell and exhalations rather than be exposed to that freezing air again.
In addition to the insidious light and the even more insidious creeping cold, the cold of death, Goodsir realized, the cold of the grave and of the black cliff wall above the Beechey Island headstones, there was the noise; the surgeon had thought himself accustomed to the groan of ship’s timbers, occasional creakings and snappings of supercold ship’s metal in the dark of two winters, and the constant noise antics of the ice holding the ship in its vise, but out here, with nothing separating his body from the ice except a few layers of wool and wolfskin, the groaning and movement of the ice beneath him was terrible. It was like trying to sleep on the belly of a living beast. The sense of the ice moving beneath him, however exaggerated, was real enough to give him vertigo as he curled more tightly into a fetal position.
Sometime around 2:00 a.m. – he had actually checked his pocket watch by the light filtering in through the bag opening – Harry D. S. Goodsir had begun drifting off into a state of semiconsciousness vaguely resembling sleep when he was pounded awake by two deafening explosions.
Struggling with his sweat-frozen bag like a newborn trying to chew through its caul, Goodsir managed to free his head and shoulders. The freezing night air hit his face with enough cold force to make his heart stutter. The sky was already brighter with sunlight.
“What?” he cried. “What has happened?”
Second Mate Des Voeux and three of the seamen were standing on their sleeping bags, long knives they must have slept with in their gloved hands. Lieutenant Gore had burst from the Holland tent. He was fully dressed with a pistol in his bare –
“Report!” Gore snapped at one of the two sentries, Charlie Best.
“It was the bears, Lieutenant,” said Best. “Two of them. Big bastards. They’ve been snooping around all night – you remember we saw them about half a mile out before we stopped to make camp – but they kept coming closer and closer, circling like, until finally John and me had to shoot at them to drive them away.”
“John” was twenty-seven-year-old John Morfin, Goodsir knew, the other sentry this night.
“You both fired?” asked Gore. The lieutenant had climbed to the highest point of nearby heaped snow and ice and was searching the area with his brass telescope. Goodsir wondered why the man’s bare hands hadn’t already frozen to the metal.
“Aye, sir,” said Morfin. He was reloading his breech-loading shotgun, his wool gloves fumbling with the shells.
“Did you hit them?” asked Des Voeux.
“Aye,” said Best.
“Didn’t do no good,” said Morfin. “Just with shotguns over about thirty paces. Them bears have thick hides and thicker skulls. Hurt ’em enough though that they went away.”
“I don’t see them,” said Lieutenant Gore from ten feet up on his ice hill above the tent.
“We think they come out of those little open holes in the ice,” said Best. “The bigger one was running that way when John fired. We thought it went down, but we went out on the ice far enough to see there weren’t no carcass there. It’s gone.”
The sledge-hauling team had noticed those soft areas in the ice – not quite round, about four feet across, too large for the tiny breathing holes ring seals made, seemingly too small and too far separated for the white bears, and always crusted over with several inches of soft ice. At first, the holes had raised hopes for open water, but in the end they were so few and far between that they were only treacherous. Seaman Ferrier, walking ahead of the sledge late in the afternoon, had almost fallen through one, his left leg going in to above the knee, and they’d all had to stop long enough for the shivering sailor to change into different boots, woollies, socks, and trousers.
“It’s time for Ferrier and Pilkington to take the watch anyway,” said Lieutenant Gore. “Bobby, fetch the musket from my tent.”
“I’m better with shotgun, sir,” said Ferrier.
“I’m comfortable with the musket, Lieutenant,” said the big Marine.
“Get the musket then, Pilkington. Peppering those things with shotgun pellets is just going to get them angry.”
“Aye, sir.”
Best and Morfin, obviously shaking from their cold two hours on watch rather than from any tension, sleepily pulled off their boots and crawled into their waiting bags. Private Pilkington and Bobby Ferrier forced their swollen feet into boots retrieved from their bags and slouched off to the nearby ice ridges to keep watch.
Shaking worse than ever, his nose and cheeks now joining his fingers and toes in feeling numb, Goodsir curled up deep in his bag and prayed for sleep.
It did not come. A little more than two hours later, Second Mate Des Voeux began ordering everyone up and out of their bags.
“We have a long day ahead of us, boys,” cried the mate in jovial tones.
They were still more than twenty-two miles from the shore of King William Land.
