witness the complete series of Floggings, even should Aylmore bleed to death due to my absence.
Magnus Manson was next. The huge man dwarfed the second mates tying him to the Grate. If the Giant had decided to Resist at that moment, I have Little Doubt that the ensuing Chaos and Carnage would have resembled New Year’s Eve’s mayhem in the Seven Coloured Compartments.
He did not resist. As far as I could tell, Boatswain’s Mate Johnson administered the endless Flogging with the same force and Severity as he had for Aylmore – no more, no less. Blood flew from the first Impact. Manson did not scream. He did something Infinitely Worse. From the first touch of the Lash, he wept like a child. He sobbed. But afterward he was able to walk between the two Seamen escorting him back to the Sick Bay, although – as always – Manson had to hunch over so that his head did not strike the Beams overhead. As he passed me, I noticed Strips of Flesh hanging loose on his back between the crisscrossed Scourging wounds of the Cat.
Hickey, the smallest of the three men being punished, barely made a sound during the long Administration of the Lashes. His narrow Back tore open more freely than had the flesh of the other two, but he did not cry out. Nor did he pass out. The diminutive Caulker’s Mate seemed to remove his mind to something beyond the Grate and Overhead Deck upon which his obviously angry glare was firmly fixed and his only reaction to the Terrible Flogging was a gasp for breath between each of the fifty lashes of the Cat.
He walked aft to the provisional Sick Bay without accepting help from the seamen on either side of him.
Captain Crozier announced that punishment had been duly meted out according to the Ship’s Articles and Dismissed the Company. Before going aft, I ran up on deck very briefly to watch the departure of the men from Terror. They went down the ice ramp from the ship and began their long walk back to the other ship in the dark – passing the scorched and partially melted area where the Carnivale Conflagration had taken place. Crozier and his primary officer, Lieutenant Little, brought up the rear. None of the more than forty men had said a word by the time they had disappeared beyond the small circle of light radiating from Erebus’s deck lanterns. Eight men remained as a sort of companion Guard to walk with Hickey and Manson when they were ready to be returned to Terror.
I hurried down and aft to the new Sick Bay to take care of my new charges. Beyond Washing and Bandaging their wounds – the Cat had left a Sickening array of welts and gouges on each man and some Permanent Scars, I would think – there was little else I could do. Manson had ceased his Weeping, and when Hickey abruptly ordered him to stop his Snuffling, the giant did so at once. Hickey suffered my Ministrations in silence and gruffly ordered Manson to get fully dressed and to follow him out of the Sick Bay.
Aylmore, the gunroom steward, had been unmanned by the punishment. From the minute he had regained consciousness, according to young Henry Lloyd, my current Surgeon’s Assistant, Aylmore had moaned and cried aloud. He continued doing so as I Washed and Bandaged him. He was still moaning piteously and seemed unable to walk by himself when some of the other warrant officers – the elderly John Bridgens, the Subordinate Officer’s Steward, Mr. Hoar, the Captain’s Steward, Mr. Bell the Quartermaster, and Samuel Brown, the Boatswain’s Mate – arrived to help him back to his quarters.
I could hear Aylmore moaning and crying out all the way down the Companionway and around the Main Ladderway as the other men half-carried him to the gunroom steward’s cubicle on the starboard side between William Fowler’s empty berth and my own, and I knew that I would probably be listening to Aylmore’s cries through the thin wall all through the night.
Mr. Aylmore reads a lot, said William Fowler from his place on his cot in the Sick Bay. The Purser’s Steward had received serious burns and a Terrible Mauling during the night of the Carnivale Conflagration, but never once during the last four days of stitchings or skin removals had Fowler cried out. With wounds and burns on both his Back and Stomach, Fowler attempted to sleep on his side, but not once had he complained to Lloyd or me.
Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. And if the poor bloke hadn’t read that stupid story by that American, he wouldn’t have suggested the different-coloured compartments for Carnivale – an idea we all thought was Wonderful at the time – and none of this would have happened.
I did not know what to say to this.
Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it’s better for a man to stay inside his own mind.
Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.
As I write this, I am in Dr. Peddie’s former surgeon’s berth on HMS Terror since Captain Crozier has instructed me to spend each Tuesday through Thursday aboard his ship and the Remaining Days of the Week aboard Erebus. Lloyd is watching my six recovering charges in the Erebus sick bay and I was Distressed to discover almost as many seriously ill men here aboard Terror.
For many of them, it is the disease we Arctic Doctors first called Nostalgia and then Debility. The early severe stages of this disease – besides bleeding gums, Confusion of Thought, weakness in the Extremities, bruises everywhere, and bleeding from the Colon – often include a tremendous Sentimental Wish to go home. From Nostalgia the weakness, confusion, Impaired Judgement, bleeding from Anus and Gums, open Sores, and other symptoms worsen until the patient is unable to stand or work.
Another name for Nostalgia and Debility – one which all Surgeons hesitate to say aloud and which I have not yet done – is Scurvy.
Meanwhile, Captain Crozier took to his Private Cabin yesterday and is terribly sick. I can hear his stifled moans since the late Peddie’s compartment borders the captain’s here on the starboard stern side of the ship. I think Captain Crozier is biting down on something hard – perhaps a Strip of Leather – to keep those moans from being heard. But I have always been Blessed (or Cursed) with good hearing.
The Captain turned over the handling of the Ship’s and Expedition’s affairs to Lieutenant Little yesterday – thus quietly but Firmly giving Command to Little rather than to Captain Fitzjames – and explained to me that he, Captain Crozier, was battling a recurrence of Malaria.
This is a lie.
It is not just the symptoms of Malaria which I hear Captain Crozier suffering – and almost certainly will continue to hear through the walls until I head back to Erebus on Friday morning.
Because of my uncle’s and my father’s weaknesses, I know the Demons the Captain is battling tonight.
Captain Crozier is a man addicted to Hard Spirits, and either those Spirits on board have been used up or he has decided to go off them of his own Volition during this Crisis. Either way, he is suffering the Torments of Hell and shall continue to do so for many days more. His sanity may not survive. In the meantime, this ship and this Expedition are without their True Leader. His stifled moans, in a ship descending into Sickness and Despair, are Pitiable to the extreme.
I wish I could help him. I wish I could help the dozens of other Sufferers – all the victims of wounds, maulings, burns, diseases, incipient malnutrition, and melancholic despair – aboard this entrapped ship and her sister ship. I wish I could help myself, for already I am showing the early signs of Nostalgia and Debility.
But there is little that I – or any surgeon in this Year of Our Lord 1848 – can do.
God help us all.
Lat. 70°-05? N., Long. 98°-23? W. 11 January, 1848 It will not end.
The pain will not end. The nausea will not end. The chills will not end. The terror will not end.
Crozier writhes in the frozen blankets of his bunk and wants to die.
During his lucid moments this week, which are few, Crozier laments the most sane act he had performed before retreating to his demons; he had given his pistol to Lieutenant Little with no explanation other than to tell Edward not to return it unless and until he, the captain, asks for it while on deck and in full uniform again.
Crozier would pay anything now for that charged and loaded weapon. This level of pain is unsupportable. These thoughts are unsupportable.
His grandmother on his late, unlamented father’s side, Memo Moira, had been the outcast, the unmentioned and unmentionable Crozier. In her eighties, when Crozier was not yet a teenager, Memo lived two villages away – an immense, inestimable, and unbridgeable distance for a boy – and his mother’s family neither included her in family events nor mentioned her existence.
She was a Papist. She was a witch.
Crozier began sneaking over to her village, cadging rides on pony carts, when he was ten. Within a year he was going with the old woman to that strange village’s Papist church. His mother and aunt and maternal grandmother would have died if they had known. He would have been renounced and exiled and held in as much scorn by that proper Irish-English Presbyterian side of his family as the Naval Board and Arctic Council had held him in for all these years just for being an Irishman. And a commoner.
Memo Moira had thought him special. She told him that he had the Second Sight.
The thought did not frighten young Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service – the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting. Once, when he was twelve, shortly before he ran away to sea, he told Memo that he wanted to become a priest, and the old woman laughed that wild, husky laugh of hers and told him to put such nonsense out of his mind. “Being a priest is as common and useless as being an Irish drunkard. Use your Gift instead, Young Francis,” she’d said. “Use the Second Sight that has been in my family for a score of generations. It will help you go places and see things that no person on this sad earth has ever seen.”
Young Francis did not believe in Second Sight. It was about that same time that he realized that he also did not believe in God. He went to sea. He believed in everything he learned and saw there, and some of these sights and lessons were strange indeed.
Crozier rides on crests of pain rolling in on waves of nausea. He awakens only to vomit into the bucket that Jopson, his steward, has left there and replaces each hour.
