The Terror

When Wilson has squeezed his bulk up through the upper hatch, Captain Crozier lifts the lower hatch and descends to the hold deck.

Because the entire deck-space lies beneath the level of outside ice, the hold deck is almost as cold as the alien world beyond the hull. And darker, with no aurora, stars, or moon to relieve the ever-present blackness. The air is thick with coal dust and coal smoke – Crozier watches the black particles curl around his hissing lantern like a banshee’s claw – and it stinks of sewage and bilge. A scraping, sliding, scuttling noise comes from the darkness aft, but Crozier knows it’s just the coal being shoveled in the boiler room. Only the residual heat from that boiler keeps the three inches of filthy water sloshing at the foot of the ladder from turning to ice. Forward, where the bow dips deeper into the ice, there is almost a foot of icy water, despite men working the pumps six hours and more a day. The Terror, like any living thing, breathes out moisture through a score of vital functions, including Mr. Diggle’s ever-working stove, and while the lower deck is always damp and rimed with ice and the orlop deck frozen, the hold is a dungeon with ice hanging from every beam and meltwater sloshing above one’s ankles. The flat black sides of the twenty-one iron water tanks lining the hull on either side add to the chill. Filled with thirty-eight tons of fresh water when the expedition sailed, the tanks are now armored icebergs and to touch the iron is to lose skin.

Magnus Manson is waiting at the bottom of the ladder as Private Wilkes had said, but the huge able-bodied seaman is standing, not sitting arse-on-ladder. The big man’s head and shoulders are hunched beneath the low beams. His pale, lumpy face and stubbled jowls remind Crozier of a rotten white peeled potato stuffed under a Welsh wig. He will not meet his captain’s stare in the harsh lantern glow.

“What is this, Manson?” Crozier’s voice does not hold the bark he unleashed on his lookout and lieutenant. His tone is flat, calm, certain, with the power of flogging and hanging behind every syllable.

“It’s them ghosts, Cap’n.” For a huge man, Magnus Manson has the high, soft voice of a child. When Terror and Erebus had paused at Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland in July of 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin had seen fit to dismiss two men from the expedition -a Marine private and a sailmaker from Terror. Crozier had made the recommendation that seaman John Brown and Private Aitken from his ship also be released – they were little better than invalids and never should have been signed on for such a voyage – but on occasion since, he wished he’d sent Manson home with those four. If the big man was not feebleminded, he was so close to it that it was impossible to tell the difference.

“You know there are no ghosts on Terror, Manson.”

“Yes, Cap’n.”

“Look at me.”

Manson raises his face but does not meet Crozier’s gaze. The captain marvels at how tiny the man’s pale eyes are in that white lump of a face.

“Did you disobey Mr. Thompson’s orders to carry sacks of coal to the boiler room, Seaman Manson?”

“No, sir. Yes, sir.”

“Do you know the consequences of disobeying any order on this ship?” Crozier feels like he’s talking to a boy, although Manson must be at least thirty years old.

The big sailor’s face brightens as he is presented with a question he can answer correctly. “Oh, yes, Cap’n. Flogging, sir. Twenty lashes. A ’undred lashes if I disobeys more than once. ’Anging if I disobey a real officer rather’n jus’ Mr. Thompson.”

“That’s correct,” says Crozier, “but did you know that the captain can also inflict any punishment he finds appropriate to the transgression?”

Manson peers down at him, his pale eyes confused. He has not understood the question.

“I’m saying I can punish you any way I see fit, Seaman Manson,” says the captain.

A flood of relief flows over the lumpy face. “Oh, yes, right, Cap’n.”

“Instead of twenty lashes,” says Francis Crozier, “I could have you locked up in the Dead Room for twenty hours with no light.”

Manson’s already pale, frozen features lose so much blood that Crozier prepares to get out of the way if the big man faints.

“You… wouldn’t…” The child-man’s voice quavers toward a vibrato.

Crozier says nothing for a long, cold, lantern-hissing moment. He lets the sailor read his expression. Finally he says, “What do you think you hear, Manson? Has someone been telling you ghost stories?”

Manson opens his mouth but seems to have trouble deciding which question to answer first. Ice forms on his fat lower lip. “ Walker,” he says at last.

“You’re afraid of Walker?”

James Walker, a friend of Manson’s who had been about the same age as the idiot and not much brighter, was the last man to die on the ice, just a week earlier. Ship’s rules required that the crew keep small holes drilled in the ice near the ship, even when the ice was ten or fifteen feet thick as it was now, so that they could get at water to fight a fire should one break out aboard. Walker and two of his mates were on just such a drilling party in the dark, reopening an old hole that would freeze in less than an hour unless rammed with metal spikes. The white terror had come out from behind a pressure ridge, torn off the seaman’s arm, and smashed his ribs to splinters in an instant, disappearing before the armed guards on deck could raise their shotguns.

“ Walker told you ghost stories?” says Crozier.

“Yes, Cap’n. No, Cap’n. What Jimmy did was, ’e tells me the night before the thing killed ’im, ’e says, ‘Magnus, should that ’ellspawn out on the ice get me someday,’ ’e says, ‘I’ll come back in me white shroud to whisper in your ear how cold ’ell is.’ So help me God, Cap’n, that’s what Jimmy said to me. Now I ’ear ’im tryin’ to get out.”

As if on cue, the hull groans, the frigid deck moans under their feet, metal brackets on the beams groan back in sympathy, and there is a scraping, clawing noise in the dark around them that seems to run the length of the ship. The ice is restless.

“Is that the sound you hear, Manson?”

“Yes, Cap’n. No, sir.”

The Dead Room is thirty feet aft on the starboard side, just beyond the last metal-moaning iron water tank, but when the outside ice stops its noise, Crozier can hear only the muffled scrape and push of the shovels in the boiler room farther aft.

Crozier’s had enough of this nonsense. “You know your friend’s not coming back, Magnus. He’s there in the extra sail storage room securely sewn into his own hammock with the other dead men, frozen solid, with three layers of our heaviest sail canvas tied around them. If you hear anything from in there, it’s the damned rats trying to get at them. You know this, Magnus Manson.”

“Yes, Cap’n.”

“There will be no disobeying orders on this ship, Seaman Manson. You have to make up your mind now. Carry the coal when Mr. Thompson tells you to. Fetch the food stores when Mr. Diggle sends you down here. Obey all orders promptly and politely. Or face the court… face me… and the possibility that you’ll spend a cold, lanternless night in the Dead Room yourself.”

Without another word, Manson knuckles his forehead in salute, lifts a huge sack of coal from where he’s stowed it on the ladder, and hauls it aft into the darkness.

The engineer himself is stripped to his long-sleeved undershirt and corduroy trousers, shoveling coal alongside the ancient 47-year-old stoker named Bill Johnson. The other stoker, Luke Smith, is on the lower deck sleeping between his shoveling hours. Terror’s lead stoker, young John Torrington, was the first man of the expedition to die, on New Year’s Day 1846. But that had been from natural causes. It seems Torrington ’s doctor had urged the 19-year-old to go to sea to cure his consumption, and he’d succumbed after two months of being an invalid while the ships were frozen in the harbour at Beechey Island that first winter. Doctors Peddie and McDonald had told Crozier that the boy’s lungs were as solidly packed with coal dust as a chimney sweep’s pockets.

“Thank you, Captain,” says the young engineer between heaves of the shovel. Seaman Manson has just dropped off a second sack of coal and gone back for a third.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Thompson.” Crozier glances at Stoker Johnson. The man is four years younger than the captain but looks thirty years older. Every seam and wrinkle on his age-molded face is outlined in coal black and grime. Even his toothless gums are soot grey. Crozier doesn’t want to reprimand his engineer – and thus an officer, although civilian – in front of the stoker, but he says, “I presume we’ll dispense with using Marines as messengers, should there be another such instance in the future, which I very much doubt.”

Thompson nods, uses the shovel to clang shut the iron grate on the boiler, leans on the tool, and tells Johnson to go above to get him some coffee from Mr. Diggle. Crozier’s glad the stoker is gone but even happier that the grate is closed; the heat in here makes him slightly nauseated after the cold everywhere else.

The captain has to wonder at the fate of his engineer. Warrant Officer James Thompson, Engineer First Class, graduate of the Navy’s steam factory at Woolwich – the world’s best training grounds for the new breed of steam-propulsion engineers – is here stripped to his filthy undershirt, shoveling coal like a common stoker in an ice- locked ship that hasn’t moved an inch under its own power now for more than a year.

“Mr. Thompson,” says Crozier, “I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to talk to you today since you walked over to Erebus. Did you have a chance to confer with Mr. Gregory?”

John Gregory is the engineer aboard the flagship.

“I did, Captain. Mr. Gregory’s convinced that with the onset of real winter, they’ll never be able to get at the damaged driveshaft. Even if they were able to tunnel down through the ice to replace the last propeller with the one they’ve jury-rigged, with the replacement driveshaft bent as badly as it is, Erebus is going nowhere under steam.”

Crozier nods. Erebus bent its second driveshaft while the ship was throwing itself desperately on the ice more than a year ago. The flagship – heavier, with a more powerful engine – led the way through the pack ice that summer, opening leads for both ships. But the last ice they’d encountered before being frozen in for the last thirteen months was harder than the iron in the experimental propeller screw and driveshaft. Divers that summer – all of who suffered frostbite and came close to dying – had confirmed not only that the screw had been shattered but that the driveshaft itself was bent and broken.

“Coal?” says the captain.

“Erebus has enough for… perhaps… four months of heating in the ice, at only one hour of hot-water circulation through the lower deck per day, Captain. None at all for steaming next summer.”

If we get free next summer, thinks Crozier. After this last summer, when the ice never relented for a day, he’s a pessimist. Franklin had used up Erebus’s coal supply at a prodigious rate during those last weeks of freedom in the summer of 1846, sure that if he could smash through those last few miles of pack ice, the expedition would reach the open waters of the North-West Passage along the northern coast of Canada and they’d be drinking tea in China by late autumn.

“What about our coal use?” asks Crozier.