The Terror

As the sledge party approached the burial crater, the line of twelve Royal Marines parted, opening to form a lane. The Marines turned inward and stood at reverse arms as the procession of sledge-pullers, funeral sledge, honor guard, and other mourners passed between their ranks.

As the hundred and ten men shuffled to their places amid the mass of officers’ uniforms around the crater – some seamen standing on pressure ridges to get a better look – Sir John led the captains to their place on a temporary scaffolding at the east end of the crater in the ice. Slowly, carefully, the thirty-two sledge-pullers worked together to unlash the heavy coffin and lower it down precisely angled boards to its temporary resting place on the wooden superstructure just above the rectangle of black water. When the coffin was in place, it rested not only on the final planks but on three sturdy hawsers now manned on either side by the same men who had been chosen to pull the sledge.

When the muffled drums quit beating, all hats came off. The cold wind ruffled the men’s long hair, all washed, parted, and tied back with ribbons for this service. The day was chilly – no more than five degrees at the last measuring at six bells – but the arctic sky, filled with ice crystals, was a solid dome of golden light. As if in honour of Lieutenant Gore, the single circle of the ice-occluded sun had been joined by three more suns – sun dogs floating above and to either side of the south-hanging true sun – all connected by a halo-band of rainbow-prismed light. Many men present bowed their heads at the aptness of the sight.

Sir John conducted the Service for the Dead, his strong voice easily audible to the hundred and ten men gathered round. The ritual was familiar to all there. The words were reassuring. The responses were known. By the end, the cold wind was ignored by most as the familiar phrases echoed across the ice.

“We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the Sea shall give up her dead, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”

“Amen,” said the assembled men.

The twelve men of the Royal Marine firing party raised their muskets and fired three volleys, the last one having only three shots rather than the four in the two volleys that had preceded it.

At the sound of the first volley, Lieutenant Le Vesconte nodded and Samuel Brown, John Weekes, and James Rigden slid the planks out from under the heavy casket, which now hung suspended only by the three hawsers. At the sound of the second volley, the coffin was lowered until it touched the black water. At the sound of the final volley, the hawsers were slowly let slip until the heavy casket with its copper plaque – Lieutenant Gore’s medals and sword also now perched atop the mahogany – disappeared beneath the water’s surface.

There was a slight roiling of icy water, the hawsers were pulled up and tossed aside, and the rectangle of black water was empty. To the south, the sun dogs and halo had disappeared and only a sullen red sun glowed under the dome of sky.

The men dispersed silently to their ships. It was only two bells into the first dogwatch. For most of the men it was time for their evening meal and their second portion of grog.

The next day, Saturday the fifth of June, saw both crews huddling in the lower decks of their ships as another arctic summer lightning storm exploded above them. Lookouts were called down from the topmains and those few who kept watch on deck kept away from all metal and masts as lightning crashed through fog, thunder rolled, great bolts of electricity struck and then restruck the lightning rods set on the masts and cabin roofs, and blue fingers of Saint Elmo’s fire crept along the spars and slithered through the rigging. Haggard lookouts coming below after their watch told their wide-eyed mates of spheres of ball-lightning rolling and leaping across the ice. Later in the day – with the lightning and airborne electrical displays growing even more violent – the dogwatch lookouts reported something large, much too large to be a mere white bear, prowling and pacing along the ridges in the fog, now concealed, now made visible by lightning flash for only a second or two. Sometimes, they said, the shape walked on four legs like a bear. Other times, they swore, it walked easily on two legs, like a man. The thing, they said, was circling the ship.

Although the mercury was falling, Sunday dawned clear and thirty degrees colder – the temperature at noon was nine below zero – and Sir John sent out word that Divine Service would be compulsory that day on Erebus.

Divine Service was compulsory each week for the men and officers of Sir John’s ship – he held it on the lower deck all during the dark winter months – but only the most devout Terrors made the ice crossing to join in the service. Since it was mandatory in the Royal Navy, by tradition as much as by regulation, Captain Crozier also held Divine Service on Sunday, but with no chaplain aboard it was an abbreviated effort – sometimes amounting to little more than reading the Ship’s Articles – and ran twenty minutes of a morning rather than Sir John’s enthusiastic ninety minutes or two hours.

This Sunday there was no option.

Captain Crozier led his officers, mates, and men across the ice for the second time in three days, this time with their greatcoats and mufflers over any dress uniforms, and they were surprised upon their arrival at Erebus to see that the service was to take place on deck, with Sir John preaching from the quarterdeck. Despite the pale blue sky above – no gold dome of ice crystals or symbolic sun dogs this day – the wind was very cold, and the mass of seamen huddled together for at least the illusion of warmth in the area below the quarterdeck, while the officers from both ships stood behind Sir John on the weather side of the deck like a solid mass of greatcoated acolytes. Once again, the twelve Marines were drawn up in rank, this time on the lee side of the main deck with Sergeant Bryant in front, while the petty officers massed before the mainmast.

Sir John stood at the binnacle, which had been covered with the same Union Jack that had been draped over Gore’s casket “to answer the purpose of a pulpit,” as per regulation.

He preached for only about an hour and no toes or fingers were lost as a result.

Being an Old Testament man by nature and inclination, Sir John led the way through several of the prophets, focusing awhile on Isaiah’s judgement upon the earth – “Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof” – and slowly through the barrage of words, it became apparent to even the most dimwitted seaman in the mass of greatcoats, mufflers, and mittens on the main deck that their commander was really talking about their expedition to find the North-West Passage and their current condition frozen in the icy wastes at latitude 70°- 05' N., longitude 98°- 23' W.

“The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the LORD hath spoken this word,” continued Sir John. “Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth… And it shall come to pass that he who fleeth from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that cometh up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for the windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake… The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly. They shall reel to and fro like a drunkard…”

As if in proof of this dire prophecy, a great groaning came up from the ice all around HMS Erebus and the deck shifted under the standing men. The ice-rimmed masts and spars above them seemed to vibrate and then make small circles against the weak blue sky. No man broke formation or made a noise.

Sir John shifted from Isaiah to Revelation and gave them even more dire images of what awaited those who abandoned their Lord.

“But of what of he… of we… who do not break covenant with our Lord?” asked Sir John. “I commend you to JONAH.”

Some of the seamen sighed in relief. They were familiar with Jonah.

“Jonah was given a commission by God to go to Nineveh and to cry against it because of its wickedness,” cried Sir John, his often weak voice now rising in volume as strongly and well as any inspired Anglican preacher’s, “but Jonah – you all know this, shipmates – Jonah fled from his commission and from the presence of the Lord, going down to Joppa there to take a berth on the first ship leaving, which happened to be destined for Tarshish – a city beyond the edge of the world then. Jonah foolishly thought that he could sail beyond the limits of the Kingdom of the Lord.

“ ‘But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.’ And you know the rest… you know how the sailors cried out asking why this evil had fallen upon them, and they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. ‘And they said unto him, What shall we do unto thee, that the sea may be calm unto us? And he said unto them, Take me up and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.’

“But at first the sailors did not cast Jonah overboard, did they, shipmates? No – they were brave men and good sailors and professionals and rowed hard to bring their foundering ship to land. But finally they weakened, cried unto the Lord, and then did make a sacrifice of Jonah, casting him overboard.

“And the Bible says – ‘Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.’

“Notice, shipmates, that the Bible does not say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. No! This was no beluga nor right nor baleen nor sperm nor killer nor fin such as we would see in these high waters or in Baffin Bay on a normal arctic summer. No, Jonah was swallowed up by a ‘great fish’ which the Lord had prepared for him – which means a monster of the deep that Lord God Jehovah had made at the Creation for just this purpose, to swallow Jonah someday, and in the Bible this monster of a great fish is sometimes called Leviathan.

“And just so have we been sent on our mission beyond the farthest known edge of the world, shipmates, farther than the Tarshish – which was only in Spain, after all – we have been sent out to where the elements themselves seem to rebel, where lightning crashes from frozen skies, where the cold never relents, where white beasts walk the frozen surface of the sea, and where no man, civilized or otherwise, could ever call such a place home.

“But we are not beyond the Kingdom of God, shipmates! As Jonah did not protest his fate nor curse his punishment but rather prayed unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly for three days and three nights, so we must not protest, but accept God’s will of this exile of three long nights of winter in the belly of this ice, and like Jonah we must pray unto the Lord, saying, ‘I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains: the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God.’

“ ‘When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple. They that observe lying vanities foresake their own mercy. But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord.

“ ‘And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.’

“And, beloved shipmates, know in your hearts that we have given and must continue giving sacrifice unto the Lord with the voice of thanksgiving. We must pay that that we have vowed to pay. Our friend and brother in Christ, Lieutenant Graham Gore, may he sleep in the bosom of the Lord, saw that there would be no release from this belly of the Leviathan winter this summer. No escape from the cold belly of this ice this year. And this is the message he would have brought back had he survived.

“But we have our ships intact, shipmates. We have food for this winter and longer if need be… much longer. We have coal to burn for warmth and the deeper warmth of our companionship and the deepest warmth of knowing that our Lord has not abandoned us.

“One more summer and then winter here in the belly of this Leviathan, shipmates, and I swear to you that God’s divine mercy shall see us out of this terrible place. The North-West Passage is real; it is only miles over that horizon to the southwest – Lieutenant Gore could almost see it with his own eyes a mere week ago – and we