12 GOODSIR
Lieutenant Gore’s cache party arrived at Sir James Ross’s cairn on King William Land late on the evening of 28 May, after five hard days of travel across the ice.
The good news as they approached the island – invisible to them until the last minutes – was that there were pools of salt-free drinking water as they neared the shore. The bad news was that most of these pools had been leached from the base of an almost unbroken series of icebergs – some of them a hundred feet tall and more – that had been swept up against the shallows and shore and now stretched like a parapeted white castle wall as far as the eye could see around the curve of land. It took the men a full day to cross this barrier and even then they had to leave some of the robes, fuel, and provisions cached on the sea ice to lighten the sledge load. To add to their difficulties and discomfort, several of the cans of soup and pork they had opened on the ice had gone putrid and had to be thrown away, leaving them less than five days’ rations for the return – assuming that more of the cans were not bad. On top of all that, they found that even here, at what must be the sea’s edge, the ice was still seven feet thick.
Worst of all – for Goodsir, at least – King William Land, or King William Island as they later learned, was the greatest disappointment of his life.
Devon Island and Beechey Island to the north had been windswept, inhospitable to life at the best of times, and barren except for lichen and low plants, but that was a veritable Garden of Eden compared to what the men now found on King William Land. Beechey had boasted bare ground, some sand and soil, imposing cliffs, and a sort of beach. None of that was to be found on King William Land.
For half an hour after crossing the iceberg barrier, Goodsir did not know if he was on solid ground or not. He had been prepared to celebrate with the others since this would be the first time any of them had set foot on terra firma in more than a year, but the sea ice gave way beyond the bergs to great tumbles of shore ice and it had been impossible to tell where the shore ice left off and the shore began. Everything was ice, dirty snow, more ice, more snow.
Finally they reached a windswept area free of snow and Goodsir and several of the seamen threw themselves forward onto the gravel, going to hands and knees on the solid ground as if in thanksgiving, but even here the small round stones were frozen solid, as firm as London cobblestones in winter and ten times as cold, and this chill traveled up through their trousers and other layers covering their knees, then into their bones and up through their mittens to their palms and fingers like a silent invitation to the frozen infernal circles of the dead far below.
It took them four more hours to find Ross’s cairn. A heap of rocks promised to be six feet high on or near Victory Point should be easy enough to find – Lieutenant Gore had said this to all of them earlier – but on this exposed point the heaps of ice were often at least six feet high and high winds had long since blown off the smaller top stones of the cairn. The late-May sky never darkened into night, but the dim, constant glow made it exceedingly difficult to see anything in three dimensions or to judge distances. The only things that stood out were the bears, and only because of their movement. Half a dozen of the hungry, curious things had been following them off and on all day. Beyond that occasional awkward waddle of movement, everything was lost in a grey-white glow. A serac that looked to be half a mile away and fifty feet high was really only twenty yards away and two feet tall. A bare patch of gravel and stone that seemed a hundred feet away turned out to be a mile away far out on the featureless wind-scoured point.
But they found the cairn finally, at almost 10:00 p.m. by Goodsir’s still-ticking watch, all of the men so exhausted that their arms were hanging like those in sailors’ tales of apes, all speech abandoned in their tiredness, the sledge left half a mile north of where they had first come ashore.
Gore retrieved the first of two messages – he had made a copy of this first one to cache somewhere farther south along the coast as per Sir John’s instructions – filled in the date, and scribbled his name. So did Second Mate Charles des Voeux. They rolled the note, slid it into one of the two airtight brass cylinders they’d hauled with them, and, after dropping the cylinder into the centre of the empty cairn, replaced the rocks they’d removed to gain access.
“Well,” said Gore. “That’s that then, isn’t it?”
The lightning storm began not long after they had trudged back to the sledge for a midnight supper.
To save weight during the iceberg crossing, they had left their heavy wolfskin blanket-robes, ground tarps, and most of the tinned food cached out on the ice. They assumed that since the food was in sealed and soldered tins, it would not attract the white bears that were always sniffing around and that even if it did the bears wouldn’t be able to get into the tins. The plan was to get along on two days’ reduced rations here on land – plus any game they might see and shoot, of course, but that dream was fading with the dismal reality of the place – and to have everyone sleep in the Holland tent.
Des Voeux supervised the preparation of dinner, removing the patented cook kit from its series of cleverly nested wicker baskets. But three of the four cans they had chosen for their first evening’s meal on land were spoiled. That left only their Wednesday half-ration portion of salt pork – always the men’s favorite since it was so rich with fat, but not nearly enough to assuage their hunger after such a day of heavy work – and the last good can, which was labeled “Superior Clear Turtle Soup,” which the men hated, knowing from experience that it was neither superior nor clear and most likely not turtle at all.
Dr. McDonald on
The men filled the freezing air with obscenities upon learning that the cans were filled with rotten stuff.
“Calm down, lads,” said Lieutenant Gore after allowing the barrage of best sailor obscenity for a minute or two. “What say you that we open tomorrow’s rations of cans until we find enough for a good meal and simply plan to get back to our ice cache by supper time tomorrow, even if that means midnight?”
There was a chorus of assent.
Two of the next four cans they opened were not spoiled – that included a strangely meatless “Irish Stew” that was only barely edible at the best of times and the deliciously advertised “Ox Cheeks and Vegetables.” The men had decided that the oxen parts had come from a tannery and the vegetables from an abandoned root cellar, but it was better than nothing.
No sooner was the tent up with the sleeping bags unrolled for a floor inside and the food heated on their spirit stove and the hot metal bowls and dishes distributed than the lightning began to strike.
The first blast of electricity struck less than fifty feet from them and led to every man spilling his ox cheeks and vegetables and stew. The second crash was closer.
They ran for the tent. Lightning crashed and struck around them like an artillery barrage. It wasn’t until they were quite literally piled inside the brown canvas tent – eight men in a shelter designed for four men and light gear – that Seaman Bobby Ferrier looked at the wood-and-metal poles holding the tent upright and said, “Well, fuck this,” and scrambled for the opening.
Outside, cricket-ball-sized hail was crashing down, sending splinters of ice chips thirty feet into the air. The midnight arctic twilight was being shattered by explosions of lightning so contiguous that they overlapped, setting the sky ablaze in flashes that left blinding retinal echoes.
“No, no!” cried Gore, shouting over the thunder and grabbing Ferrier back from the entrance and throwing him down into the crowded tent. “Anywhere we go on this island, we’re the tallest things around. Throw those metal-cored tent poles as far away as you can but stay under the canvas. Get in your bags and lie flat.”
The men scrambled to do so, their long hair writhing like snakes under the edges of their Welsh wigs or caps and above their many-wrapped comforters. The storm increased in ferocity and the noise was deafening. The hail pounding them in the backs through canvas and blankets felt like huge fists battering them black and blue. Goodsir actually moaned aloud during the pummeling, more from fear than from pain, although the constant blows constituted the most painful beating he had suffered since his public school days.
“Holy fucking Christ!” cried Thomas Hartnell as both hail and lightning grew worse. The men with any brains were under their Hudson ’s Bay Company blankets now rather than in them, trying to use them as a buffer against the hail. The tent canvas threatened to suffocate all of them, and the thin canvas beneath them did nothing to keep the cold from flowing up and into them, taking their collective breath away.
“How can there be a lightning storm when it is so
“It happens,” the lieutenant shouted back. “If we decide to move from the ships to land camp, we’ll have to bring one God-awful heap of lightning rods with us.”
This was the first time that Goodsir had heard any hint of abandoning the ships.
Lightning struck the boulder they’d been huddled near during their abbreviated supper not ten feet from the tent, ricocheted over their canvas-covered heads to a second boulder no more than three feet from them, and every man huddled lower, trying to claw through the canvas beneath himself in an attempt to burrow into the rock.
“Good God, Lieutenant Gore,” cried John Morfin, whose head was closest to the collapsed opening of the tent, “there’s something moving around out there in the middle of all this.”
All the men were accounted for. Gore shouted, “A bear? Walking around in this?”
“Too large to be a bear, Lieutenant,” shouted Morfin. “It’s…” Then the lightning struck the boulder again, another blast struck close enough to cause the tent fabric to leap in the air from the static discharge, and everyone cowered flatter, pressed their faces to cold canvas, and abandoned speech in favor of prayer.
The attack – Goodsir could only think of it as an attack, as if from Greek gods furious at their hubris for wintering in Boreas’s realm – went on for almost an hour, until the last of the thunder moved past and the flashes became intermittent and then moved on to the southeast.
Gore was the first to emerge, but even the lieutenant whom Goodsir knew to be almost without fear did not rise to his feet for a full minute or more after the barrage ceased. Others crawled out on their knees and stayed there, staring around as if in stupefaction or supplication. The sky to the east was a latticework of air-to-air and air- to-ground discharges, the thunder still rolled across the flat island with enough violence to exert a physical pressure on their skins and to make them cover their ears, but the hail had ceased. The smashed white spheres were piled two feet high all around them as far as they could see. After a minute Gore got to his feet and began looking around. The others then also rose, stiffly, moving slowly, testing their limbs, heavily bruised, Goodsir judged, if his own pain was any measure of their common abuse by the heavens. The midnight twilight was dimmed enough by the thick clouds to the south that it almost seemed as if real darkness was falling.
“Look at this,” called Charles Best.
Goodsir and the others gathered near the sledge. The tins of food and other materiel had been unpacked and stacked near the cooking area before their aborted supper, and somehow the lightning had contrived to strike the low pyramid of stacked cans while missing the sledge itself. All of Goldner’s canned food had been blasted
