The Terror

Stanley leaned close and shouted into my mufflered ear: It would be a blessing if they missed the cairns and got lost on the way back. Or if the Thing on the ice got them tonight.

I could only turn and stare in horror at the chief surgeon.

Death by starvation is a terrible thing, Goodsir, continued Stanley . Trust me. I’ve seen it in London and I’ve seen it with shipwreck. Death by scurvy is worse. It would be better if the Thing took us all tonight.

And with that we went below to the flame-flickering Darkness of the lower deck and to a cold almost the equal of the Dante-esque Ninth Circle Arctic Night without.

19 CROZIER

Lat. 70°-05? N., Long. 98°-23? W.

5 December, 1847

On a Tuesday dogwatch in the third week of November, the thing from the ice came aboard Erebus and took the well-liked bosun, Mr. Thomas Terry, snatching him from his post near the stern, leaving only the man’s head on the railing. There had been no blood at Terry’s stern watch post: no blood on the ice-covered deck or on the hull. The conclusion was that the thing had taken Terry, carried him hundreds of yards out into the darkness where the seracs rose like trees of ice in a thick white forest, murdered and dismembered him – perhaps eaten him, although the men were growing increasingly doubtful that the white thing killing their crewmates and officers was actually doing so for food – and then it returned Mr. Terry’s head before the starboard or port watchmen noticed that the bosun had gone missing.

The men who found the bosun’s head at the end of that watch spent the week telling and retelling the others about poor Mr. Terry’s visage – jaws open wide as if frozen in the middle of a scream, lips pulled back from his teeth, eyes protruding. There was not a tooth wound or claw mark on his face or head, only the ragged tearing at the neck, the thin pipe of his esophagus protruding like a rat’s grey tail, and the stump of white spinal cord showing.

Suddenly the more than one hundred surviving seamen found religion. Most of the men aboard Erebus had grumbled for two years about Sir John Franklin’s endless Divine Services, but now even the men who wouldn’t have recognized a Bible if they’d wakened next to one after a three-day drunk found a deep need for some sort of spiritual reassurance. As word of Thomas Terry’s beheading spread – Captain Fitzjames had put the sail-wrapped bundle in Erebus’s own sealed Dead Room down on the hold deck – the men began requesting a single Sunday service for both crews. It was ferret-faced Cornelius Hickey who came to Crozier late on Friday night with the request. Hickey had been on a torchlight work party repairing ice cairns between the ships and had spoken to the men from Erebus.

“It’s unanimous, sir,” said the caulker’s mate as he stood in the doorway of Captain Crozier’s tiny cabin. “All the men would like a combined Divine Service. Both ships, Captain.”

“You speak for every man on both ships?” Crozier asked.

“Aye, sir, I do,” said Hickey, flashing a once-winning smile that now showed only four of his remaining six teeth. The little caulker’s mate was nothing if not confident.

“I doubt it,” said Crozier. “But I’ll talk to Captain Fitzjames and let you know about the service. Whatever we decide, you can be our appointed courier to tell all the men.” Crozier had been drinking when Hickey rapped on his door. And he’d never liked the officious little man. Every ship had sea lawyers – like rats, they were a fact of Naval life – and Hickey, despite his bad grammar and total lack of formal education, struck Crozier as the kind of sea lawyer that, on a difficult voyage, soon began fomenting actual mutiny.

“One of the reasons we’d all of us like a service such as that what Sir John – God bless and rest his soul, Captain – used to provide is that all of us…”

“That will be all, Mr. Hickey.”

Crozier drank heavily that week. The melancholia that usually hovered over him like a fog now lay on him like a heavy blanket. He’d known Terry and thought him a more-than-capable boatswain, and it was certainly a horrible enough way to die, but the Arctic – at either pole – offered a myriad of horrible enough ways to die. So did the Royal Navy during peacetime or war. Crozier had witnessed more than a few of these horrible ways to die during his long career, so while Mr. Terry’s death was among the more uncanny he’d personally known and the recent plague of violent deaths more frightening than any real plague he’d seen aboard ships, what brought on Crozier’s deeper melancholy was more the reaction of the surviving members of the expedition.

James Fitzjames, the hero of the Euphrates, seemed to be losing heart. He was made a hero by the press even before his first ship had left Liverpool when young Fitzjames had plunged overboard to rescue a drowning customs agent even though the handsome young officer was, as the Times said, “embarrassed by a greatcoat, hat, and very valuable watch.” The merchants of Liverpool, knowing the value – as Crozier well knew – of a customs officer who was already bought and paid for, had rewarded young Fitzjames with an engraved silver plate. The Admiralty had taken notice first of the silver plate, then of Fitzjames’s heroism – although in Crozier’s experience, an officer rescuing a drowning man was an almost weekly occurrence since few sailors knew how to swim – and finally of the fact that Fitzjames was “the handsomest man in the Navy” as well as a well-bred young gentleman.

It hadn’t hurt the rising young officer’s reputation that he had twice volunteered to lead raiding parties against Bedouin bandits. Crozier noticed in the official reports that Fitzjames had broken his leg in one such foray and been captured by the bandits in the second adventure, but the handsomest man in the Navy had managed to escape, which made Fitzjames all the more the hero to the London press and the Admiralty.

Then came the Opium Wars and in 1841 Fitzjames showed himself to be a real hero, being commended by his captain and by the Admiralty no fewer than five times. The dashing lad – twenty-nine at the time – had used rockets to drive the Chinese off the hilltops of Tzekee and Segoan, used rockets again to drive them out of Chapoo, fought ashore at the Battle of Woosung, and returned to his expertise with rockets during the capture of Ching-Kiang-Fu. Seriously wounded, Lieutenant Fitzjames had managed, on crutches and in bandages, to attend the Chinese surrender at the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. Promoted to commander at the tender age of thirty, the handsomest man in the Navy had been given command of the sloop of war HMS Clio, and his bright future seemed assured.

But then in 1844 the Opium Wars ended, and – as always happened to rising prospects in the Royal Navy when treacherous peace suddenly broke out – Fitzjames found himself without a command, on shore, and on half pay. Francis Crozier knew that if the Discovery Service offer of command to Sir John Franklin had been a godsend to the largely discredited old man, the offer of effective command of HMS Erebus had been a shining second chance to Fitzjames.

But now “the handsomest man in the Navy” had lost his pink cheeks and usual ebullient humor. While most of the officers and men were maintaining their weight even on two-thirds rations – for members of the Discovery Service received a richer diet than 99 percent of Englishmen ashore – Commander, now Captain, James Fitzjames had lost more than two stone. His uniform hung loosely on him. His boyish curls now fell limp from under his cap or Welsh wig. Fitzjames’s face, always a bit too chubby, now appeared drawn, wan, and hollow-cheeked in the light from the oil lamps or hanging lanterns.

The commander’s public demeanor, which was always an easy mix of self-effacing humor and firm command, remained the same, but in private with only Crozier in attendance, Fitzjames spoke less, smiled less frequently, and too often looked distracted and miserable. For a melancholy man like Crozier, the signs were obvious. At times it was like staring into a looking glass, except for the fact that the melancholy countenance staring back was a proper lisping English gentleman rather than an Irish nobody.

On Friday the third of December, Crozier loaded a shotgun and made the long solo walk through the cold darkness between Terror and Erebus. If the thing on the ice wanted to take him, Crozier thought, a few more men with guns would make little difference in the outcome. It hadn’t for Sir John.

Crozier arrived safely. He and Fitzjames discussed the situation – the men’s morale, the requests for a religious service, the situation with the food tins, and the need to enforce strict rationing soon after Christmas – and they agreed that a combined Divine Service on the following Sunday might be a good idea. Since there were no chaplains or self-appointed ministers aboard – Sir John had filled both those roles until the previous June – both captains would give a sermon. Crozier hated this task more than dockside dentistry but realized that it had to be done.

The men’s moods were in a dangerous state. Lieutenant Edward Little, Crozier’s executive officer, reported that men on Terror had begun to fashion necklaces and other fetishes from the claws and teeth of some of the white bears they had shot during the summer season. Lieutenant Irving reported weeks ago that Lady Silence had gone into hiding in the forward cable locker and the men had started leaving portions of their rum and food rations down there in the hold as if making offerings to a witch or saint in hopes of intercession.

“I’ve been thinking about your ball,” said Fitzjames as Crozier began bundling up to leave.

“My ball?”

“The Grand Venetian Carnivale that Hoppner set up when you wintered over with Parry,” continued Fitzjames. “When you went as a black footman.”

“What about it?” asked Crozier as he bound his comforter around his neck and face.

“Sir John had three large trunks of masks, clothing, and costumes,” said Fitzjames. “I found them among his personal stores.”

“He did?” Crozier was surprised. The aging windbag who would have held Divine Service six times a week if he had been allowed and who, despite his frequent laughter, never seemed to understand anyone else’s jokes, seemed like the last sort of expedition commander to load trunks of frivolous costumes the way the stagestruck Parry had.

“They’re old,” confirmed Fitzjames. “Some of them may have belonged to Parry and Hoppner – may have been the same costumes you chose from while frozen in Baffin Bay twenty-four years ago – but there are over a hundred tattered rags in there.”

Crozier stood bundled in the doorway of Sir John’s former cabin where the two captains had held their sotto voce meeting. He wished Fitzjames would get to the point.

“I thought we might hold a masque for the men soon,” said Fitzjames. “Nothing as fancy as your Grand Venetian Carnivale, of course, not with the… unpleasantness… out on the ice, but a diversion nonetheless.”

“Perhaps,” said Crozier, allowing his tone to convey his lack of enthusiasm at the idea. “We shall discuss it after this accursed Divine Service on Sunday.”