The Terror

the ships?”

“Can we, Doctor?” asked Crozier.

“I do not believe so,” said the surgeon. “More of the canned food is contaminated or putrefied than we had thought. We’re running low on all other stores. The men’s diet is already below what they need for the work they’re doing every day on the ship or out on the ice. Everyone is losing weight and energy. Add to that the sudden rise in scurvy cases and… well, gentlemen, I simply do not believe that many of us on Erebus or Terror – if the ships themselves last that long – will have the energy or concentration abilities to make any sledge trip if we wait until June or July to see if the ice breaks up.”

The room was silent again.

Into the silence, Goodsir added, “Or rather, a few men may well have the energy to haul sledges and boats in a bid for rescue or to reach civilization, but they will have to leave the vast majority of others behind to starve.”

“The strong could go for help to bring rescue parties back to the ships,” said Lieutenant Le Vesconte.

It was Ice Master Thomas Blanky who spoke up. “Anyone heading south – say by hauling our boats south to the mouth of the Great Fish River and then upstream 850 miles farther south to Great Slave Lake where there’s an outpost – wouldn’t get there until late autumn or winter at the best and couldn’t return with an overland rescue party until late summer of 1849. Everyone left behind on the ships would be dead of scurvy and starvation by then.”

“We could load sledges and all head east to Baffin Bay,” said First Mate Des Voeux. “There might be whalers there. Or even rescue ships and sledge parties already searching for us.”

“Aye,” said Blanky. “That’s a possibility. But we’d have to man-haul sledges across hundreds of miles of open ice, what with all its pressure ridges and maybe open leads. Or follow the coast – and that would be more than twelve hundred miles. And then we’d have to cross the whole Boothia Peninsula with all its mountains and obstacles to get to the east coast where the whalers might be. We could haul the boats with us to cross leads, but that would triple our effort. One thing is sure – if the ice ain’t opening here, it won’t be open if we head northeast toward Baffin Bay.”

“There would be far less weight if we only take sledges with provisions and tents to the northeast across Boothia,” said Lieutenant Hodgson from the Terror side of the table. “One of the pinnaces must weigh at least six hundred pounds.”

“More like eight hundred pounds,” Captain Crozier said softly. “Without stores in it.”

“Add to that more than six hundred pounds for a sledge that could carry a boat,” said Thomas Blanky, “and we’d be man-hauling between fourteen and fifteen hundred pounds for each party – just the weight of the boat and sledge – not counting food, tents, weapons, clothes, and other things we’d have to haul with us. No one has ever man-hauled that much weight for more than a thousand miles – and much of it would be across open sea ice if we head for Baffin Bay.”

“But a sledge with runners on the ice and possibly a sail – especially if we leave in March or April before the ice gets runny and sticky – would be easier going than man-hauling gear overland or through summer slush,” said Lieutenant Le Vesconte.

“I say we leave the boats behind and travel light to Baffin Bay with just sledges and survival stores,” said Charles Des Voeux. “If we arrive on the east coast of Somerset Island to the north before the whaling season ends, we’re bound to be picked up by a ship. And I would wager that there will be Navy rescue ships and sledge parties there looking for us.”

“If we leave the boats behind,” said Ice Master Blanky, “one open stretch of water will stop us for good. We die out there on the ice.”

“Why would rescuers be on the east side of Somerset Island and the Boothia Peninsula in the first place?” asked Lieutenant Little. “If they’re searching for us, won’t they follow our path through Lancaster Sound to Devon and Beechey and Cornwallis Islands? They know Sir John’s sailing orders. They will presume we made it through Lancaster Sound since it’s open most summers. There’s no chance at all of any of us making it that far north.”

“Perhaps the ice is as bad up at Lancaster Sound this year as it is down here,” said Ice Master Reid. “That would keep the search parties farther south, out on the east side of Somerset Island and the Boothia.”

“Maybe they’ll find the messages what we left in the cairns way up at Beechey if they do get through,” said Sergeant Tozer. “And send sledges or ships south the way we come.”

Silence descended like a shroud.

“There were no messages left at Beechey,” Captain Fitzjames said into that silence.

In the embarrassed vacuum that followed this statement, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier found a strange, hot, pure flame burning in his chest. It was a sensation rather like a first sip of whiskey after days without it, but also nothing at all like that.

Crozier wanted to live. It was that simple. He was determined to live. He was going to survive this bad patch in the face of all odds and gods dictating that he would not and could not. This fire in his chest had been there even in the shaky, sick hours and painful days after he had emerged from the pit of his malaria-and-withdrawal brush with death in early January. The flame grew stronger every day.

Perhaps more than any other man around the long table in the Great Cabin this day, Francis Crozier understood the near impossibility of the courses of action being discussed. It was folly to head south across the ice toward Great Fish River. Folly to head for Somerset Island across twelve hundred miles of coastal ice, pressure ridges, open leads, and an unknown peninsula. Folly to think that the ice would open up this summer and allow Terror – overcrowded with two crews and almost empty of provisions – to sail out of the hopeless trap that Sir John had led them into.

Nonetheless, Francis Crozier was determined to live. The flame burned in him like strong Irish whiskey.

“Have we given up on the idea of sailing out?” Robert Sinclair was saying.

James Reid, Erebus’s Ice Master, answered. “We would have to sail almost three hundred miles north up the unnamed strait and sound that Sir John discovered, then through Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound, then get south through Baffin Bay before the ice closed on us again. We had the steam engine and armour plating to help us bash through the ice heading south. Even if the ice relents to levels it was two summers ago, we would have great difficulty traversing that distance just with sail. And with our weakened wooden hull.”

“The ice may be considerably less than in 1846,” said Sinclair.

“Angels may fly out my arse,” said Thomas Blanky.

Because of his missing leg, none of the officers at the table reprimanded the ice master. A few smiled.

“There might be another option… for sailing, I mean,” said Lieutenant Edward Little.

Eyes turned in his direction. Enough men had saved some rations of tobacco – stretched out by adding unspeakable things to it – that half a dozen were now smoking pipes around the table. The smoke haze made the gloom even thicker in the dim flicker of the whale-oil lamps.

“Lieutenant Gore last summer thought that he spied land to the south of King William Land,” continued Little. “If he did, that has to be the Adelaide Peninsula – known territory – which quite often has a channel of open water between the coast ice and the pack ice. If enough leads open to allow Terror to sail south – just a little over one hundred miles, perhaps, rather than the three hundred miles back through Lancaster Sound – we could follow open channels along the coast west until we reach the Bering Strait. Everything beyond here would be known territory.”

“The North-West Passage,” said Third Lieutenant John Irving. The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

“But would we have enough able-bodied men to crew the ship by late summer?” asked Dr. Goodsir, his voice very soft. “By May, the scurvy may have all of us in its grip. And what would we do for food during the weeks or months of our passage west?”

“Hunting might be good farther west,” said Marine Sergeant Tozer. “Musk oxen. Them big deer. Walruses. White foxes. Maybe we’d be eating like pashas before we got to Alaska.”

Crozier half-expected Ice Master Thomas Blanky to say, “And musk oxen might fly out my arse,” but the sometimes-giddy ice master seemed to be lost in his own reveries.

Lieutenant Little answered instead. “Sergeant, our problem is that even if the game were to miraculously return after two summers’ absence, none of us aboard seems able to hit anything with muskets… your men excluded, of course. We’d need more than your few surviving Marines to hunt. And it appears that none of us has any experience hunting anything much larger than birds. Will the shotguns bring down the game you’re talking about?”

“If you gets close enough,” Tozer said sullenly.

Crozier interrupted this line of discussion. “Dr. Goodsir made an excellent point earlier… if we wait until midsummer, or perhaps even until June to see if the pack ice breaks up, we may be too ill and hungry to crew the ship. We’d certainly be too low on provisions to start a sledge trip. And we have to assume three or four months of travel across the ice or up Fish River, so if we’re going to abandon the ships and take to the ice with the hopes of arriving at either Great Slave Lake or the east coast of Somerset Island or Boothia before winter sets in again, our departure obivously has to be before June. But how early?”

There was another thick bout of silence.

“I would suggest no later than the first of May,” Lieutenant Little said at last.

“Earlier, I would think,” said Dr. Goodsir, “unless we find sources of fresh meat soon and if the illness continues to spread as quickly as it currently is.”

“How much earlier?” asked Captain Fitzjames.

“No later than mid-April?” Goodsir said hesitantly.

The men looked at one another through the tobacco smoke and cold air. That was less than two months away.

“Perhaps,” said the surgeon, his voice sounding both firm and tentative to Crozier, “if conditions continue to worsen.”

“How could they get worse?” asked Second Lieutenant Hodgson.

The young man obviously had meant it as a joke to lessen the tension but was rewarded with baleful and angry stares.

Crozier did not want the council of war to end on that note. The officers, warrant officers, petty officers, and civilian at the table had looked at their choices and seen that they were as bleak as Crozier had known they would be, but he did not want his ships’ leaders’ morale to get any lower than it already was.

“By the way,” Crozier said in a conversational tone, “Captain Fitzjames has decided to conduct Divine Service next Sunday on Erebus – he’ll be giving a special sermon that I’m interested in hearing, although I have it on good authority that it will not be a reading from the Book of Leviathan – and I thought that since the ships’ companies will be assembled anyway, we should have full rations of grog and dinner that one day.”

The men smiled and bantered. None of them had expected to bring back good news to their specialized portions of the crews from this meeting.

Fitzjames raised one eyebrow very slightly. His “special sermon” and this Divine Service five days away, Crozier knew, were news to him, but Crozier thought it would probably do the thinning captain good to be preoccupied with something and to be the center of attention for a change. Fitzjames nodded ever so slightly.