The Terror

“The men assured me,” said Fitzjames, “that they are only using the oil and coal thay have saved by not heating Erebus these past weeks!”

“Whose idea was that… maze?” asked Crozier. “The coloured compartments? The ebony room?”

Fitzjames blew smoke, removed his pipe, and chuckled. “All the idea of young Richard Aylmore.”

“Aylmore?” repeated Crozier. He remembered the name but hardly the man. “Your gunroom steward?”

“The same.”

Crozier recalled a small man, quiet, with sunken, brooding eyes, a pedant’s tone to his voice, and a wispy black mustache. “Where in the hell did he come up with this?”

“Aylmore lived in the United States for several years before returning home in 1844 and enlisting in the Discovery Service,” said Fitzjames. The stem of the pipe clattered slightly against his teeth. “He maintains that he read an absurd story five years ago, in 1842, describing a masqued ball just such as this with such coloured compartments, read it while he was living in Boston with his cousin. In a trashy little piece called Graham’s Magazine, if I recall correctly. Aylmore can’t remember the plot of the story exactly, but he remembers that it was about a strange masqued ball given by a certain Prince Prospero… and he says that he is quite certain of the sequence of the rooms, ending in that terrible ebony compartment. The men loved his idea.”

Crozier could only shake his head.

“Francis,” continued Fitzjames, “this was a teetotaling ship for two years and one month under Sir John. Despite that, I managed to smuggle aboard three bottles of fine whiskey my father gave me. I have one bottle left. I would be honoured if you would share it with me this evening. It will be another three hours until the men begin cooking up the two bears they shot. I authorized my Mr. Wall and your Mr. Diggle yesterday to set up two of the whaleboats’ stoves on the ice for heating incidentals such as canned vegetables and to build a huge grill in what they are calling the White Room for the actual cooking of the bear meat. If nothing else, it will be our first fresh meat in more than three months. Would you care to be my guest over that bottle of whiskey down in Sir John’s former cabin until it’s time for the feast?”

Crozier nodded and followed Fitzjames into the ship.

25 CROZIER

Lat. 70°-05? N., Long. 98°-23? W.

31 December, 1847-1 January, 1848

Crozier and Fitzjames emerged from Erebus some time before midnight. The Great Cabin had been ferociously cold, but the deeper cold out here in the night was an assault on their bodies and senses. The wind had come up slightly in the last couple of hours and everywhere the torches and tripod braziers – Fitzjames had suggested, and after the first hour of whiskey Crozier had agreed, sending out extra sacks of coal and coal oil to fuel open-flame braziers to keep the revelers from freezing – were rippling and crackling in the hundred-below freezing night.

The two captains had talked very little, each lost in his own melancholic reverie. They’d been interrupted a dozen times. Lieutenant Irving came to report that he was taking the replacement watch back to Terror; Lieutenant Hodgson came to report that his watch had arrived at the Carnivale; other officers in absurd costumes came to report that all was well with Carnivale itself; various Erebus watches and officers came to report coming off duty and going on duty; Mr. Gregory the engineer came to report that they might as well use the coal for the braziers since there wasn’t enough to fuel the steam engine for more than a few hours of steaming come the mythical thaw and then went off to make arrangements for several sacks to be hauled out to the increasingly wild ceremony on the ice; Mr. Murray, the old sailmaker – dressed as some sort of mortician with a skull under his high beaver hat, a skull not so different from his own wizened visage – begged their pardon and asked if he and his helpers could break out two spare jibs to rig a wind shield upwind of the new tripod braziers.

The captains had given their acknowledgments and permissions, passed along their commands and admonitions, never really rising out of their whiskey-induced thoughts.

Sometime between eleven and midnight, they bundled themselves back into their outer slops, came up on deck, and then went out onto the ice again after both Thomas Jopson and Edmund Hoar, Crozier’s and Fitzjames’s respective stewards, came down to the Great Cabin with Lieutenants Le Vesconte and Little – all four men in bizarre costumes squeezed over and under their many layers – to announce that the bear meat was being cooked up, that prime portions were being set aside for the captains, and could the captains please come to the feast now?

Crozier realized that he was very drunk. He was used to holding his liquor without letting it show, and the men were used to him smelling like whiskey while he was in complete command of situations, but he hadn’t slept for several nights and this midnight, coming out into the chest-slamming cold and walking toward the lighted canvas and glowing iceberg and movement of strange forms, Crozier felt the whiskey burning in his belly and brain.

They’d set up the main grilling area in the white room. The two captains traversed the series of compartments without comment either to each other or to any of the dozens upon dozens of wildly costumed figures flitting about. From the open-ended blue room, they walked through the purple and green rooms, then through the orange room and into the white.

It was obvious to Crozier that most of the men were also drunk. How had they done that? Had they been hoarding their allotments of grog? Hiding away the ale usually served with their suppers? He knew that they hadn’t broken into the Spirit Room aboard Terror because he’d had Lieutenant Little check to make sure the locks were secure both this morning and this afternoon. And Erebus’s Spirit Room was empty thanks to Sir John Franklin, and had been since they’d sailed.

But the men had gotten into hard spirits somehow. As a seaman of more than forty years who had served his time before the mast as a boy, Crozier knew that – at least in terms of fermenting, hoarding, or finding alcohol – a British sailor’s ingenuity knew no bounds.

Huge haunches and racks of bear meat were being grilled over an open fire by Mr. Diggle and Mr. Wall, pewter plates of the steaming victuals being handed out to the queues of men by a grinning Lieutenant Le Vesconte, his gold tooth gleaming, and by other officers and stewards of both ships. The smell of grilling meat was incredible and Crozier found himself salivating despite all his private vows not to enjoy this Carnivale feast.

The queue gave way to the two captains. Ragmen, popish priests, French courtiers, faerie sprites, motley beggars, a shrouded corpse, and two Roman legionnaires in red capes, black masks, and gold chest armour gestured Fitzjames and Crozier to the front of the queue and bowed as the officers passed.

Mr. Diggle himself, his fat-Chinese-lady’s pendulous bosoms now down around his waist and wobbling as he moved, cut a prime piece for Crozier and then another for Captain Fitzjames. Le Vesconte gave them proper officers’ mess cutlery and white linen napkins. Lieutenant Fairholme poured ale into two cups for them.

“The trick out here, Captains,” said Fairholme, “is to drink quickly, dipping like a bird, so that your lips don’t freeze to the cup.”

Fitzjames and Crozier found a place at the head of a white-shrouded table, sitting on white-shrouded chairs, pulled back for them on the protesting ice by Mr. Farr, the captain of the maintop whom Crozier had braced earlier in the evening. Mr. Blanky was sitting there with his ice-master counterpart, Mr. Reid, as were Edward Little and a half dozen of the Erebus officers. The surgeons clustered at the other end of the white table.

Crozier took his mittens off, flexed cold fingers under wool gloves, and tried the meat gingerly, careful not to let the metal fork touch his lips. The bear cutlet burned his tongue. He had the urge to laugh then – a hundred below zero out here in the New Year’s night, his breath hanging in front of him in a cloud of ice crystals, his face hidden down the tunnel of his comforters, caps, and Welsh wig, and he’d just burned his tongue. He tried again, chewing and swallowing this time.

It was the most delicious steak he’d ever eaten. This surprised the captain. Many months ago, the last time they’d tried fresh bear meat, the cooked flesh seemed gamy and rancid. The liver and possibly some of the other commonly prized organs made the men actively ill. It had been decided that the meat of the white arctic bear would be eaten only if survival demanded it.

And now this feast… this sumptuous feast. All around him in the white room, and obviously at canvas-covered casks, chests, and tables in the adjoining orange and violet rooms, crewmen were wolfing down the steaks. The noise and chatter of happy men easily rose over the roar of the grill flames or the flapping of canvas as the wind came up again. A few of the men here in the white room were using knives and forks – many just spearing the steaming bear steaks and chewing on them that way – but most were using their mittened hands. It was as if more than a hundred predators were reveling in their kill.

The more Crozier ate, the more ravenous he became. Fitzjames, Reid, Blanky, Farr, Little, Hodgson, and the others around him – even Jopson, his steward, at a nearby table with the other stewards – appeared to be wolfing down the meat with equal gusto. One of Mr. Diggle’s helpers, dressed as a baby Chinaman, came around the tables, dishing out steaming vegetables from a pan heated on one of the whaleboat’s iron stoves, but the canned vegetables, however wonderfully hot, simply had no taste next to the delicious fresh bear meat. Only Crozier’s position as expedition commander stopped him from muscling his way to the front of the queue and demanding another helping when he finished his heavy slab of bear steak. Fitzjames’s expression was anything but distracted now; the younger commander looked as if he was about to weep from happiness.

Suddenly, just as most of the men had finished the steaks and were drinking down their ale before the alcohol-rich liquid froze solid, a Persian king near the entrance to the violet room began cranking the musical disk player.

The applause – thick mittens pounding thunderously – began almost as soon as the first notes tinkled and thunked out of the crude machine. Many of the musical men aboard both ships had complained about the mechanical music player – its range of sounds emanating from the turning metal disks was almost precisely that of a corner organ grinder’s instrument – but these notes were unmistakable. Dozens of men rose to their feet. Others began singing at once, the vapour from their breaths rising in the torchlight shining through the white canvas walls. Even Crozier had to grin like an idiot as the familiar words of the first stanza echoed off the iceberg towering above them in the freezing night.

When Britain first at Heav’n’s command, Arose from out the azure main;

This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sang this strain;

Captains Crozier and Fitzjames rose to their feet and joined in the first bellowing chorus.

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never shall be slaves!