and bent to see who lay there, but the light had moved away as the captain and mate continued to run forward with the lanterns. Goodsir was left in the absolute darkness with what was almost certainly another corpse. He stood and ran to catch up.
More crashes. Shouts now from the deck above. A musket or pistol shot. Another shot. Screams. Several men screaming.
Goodsir, outside the bobbing circles of lantern light, came out of the narrow corridor into an open, dark area and ran headfirst into a thick oak post. He fell on his back into eight inches of ice and sludgy meltwater. He couldn’t focus his eyes – the lanterns above him were only swinging orange blurs as he struggled to stay conscious – and everything at that moment stank and tasted of sewage and coal dust and blood.
“The ladder’s gone!” cried Des Voeux.
Sitting arse-deep in vile slush, Goodsir could see better as the lanterns steadied. The forward ladderway, made of thick oak and easily able to support several large men hauling hundred-pound sacks of coal up and down, had been smashed into splinters. Fragments hung from the open scuttle frame above.
The screaming was coming from up on the orlop deck.
“Boost me up,” cried Fitzjames, who had tucked his pistol into his belt and set down the lantern and was now reaching up, trying to get a handhold on the splintered frame of the scuttle. He started pulling himself up. Des Voeux bent to boost him.
Flames suddenly exploded above and through the square opening.
Fitzjames cursed and fell onto his back in the icy water only a few yards from Goodsir. It looked as if the entire forward scuttle and everything above it on the orlop deck was on fire.
“The main ladderway,” said Fitzjames and got to his feet, found the lantern, and began running aft. Des Voeux followed.
Goodsir crawled on all fours through the ice and water, got to his feet, fell again, crawled, then ran after the receding lanterns.
Something on the orlop deck roared. There came a rattle of muskets and the distinct blast of shotguns.
Goodsir wanted to stop in the coal bunker to see if the man belonging to the arm was dead or alive – or even attached to the outflung arm – but there was no light when he got there. He ran on in the dark, ricocheting off the iron, coal, and water bunker bulkheads.
The lanterns were already disappearing up the ladderway to the orlop deck. Smoke billowed down.
Goodsir clambered upward, was kicked in the face by a boot belonging to the captain or mate, and then he was on the orlop deck.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. Lanterns bobbed around him but the air was so thick with smoke that there was no illumination.
Goodsir’s impulse was to find the ladderway up to the lower deck and keep climbing, then keep climbing again until he was outside into the clean air, but there were men shouting to his right – toward the bow – so he dropped to all fours. The air was breathable here. Just. Toward the bow was a bright orange glow, far too bright to be lanterns.
Goodsir crawled forward, found the port companionway to the left of the Bread Room, crawled farther. Ahead of him somewhere in the smoke, men were beating at flames with blankets. The blankets were catching fire.
“Get a bucket brigade,” shouted Fitzjames from somewhere ahead of him in the smoke. “Get water down here!”
“There’s no water, Captain,” shouted a voice so agitated that Goodsir could not recognize it.
“Use the piss buckets.” The captain’s voice cut like a blade through the smoke and shouting.
“They’re frozen!” shouted a voice that Goodsir did recognize. John Sullivan, captain of the maintop.
“Use them anyway,” shouted Fitzjames. “And snow. Sullivan, Sinclair, Reddington, Seeley, Pocock, Greater – get the men to form a bucket line from the deck down here to the orlop deck. Scoop up as much snow as you can. Throw it on the flames.” Fitzjames had to stop to cough violently.
Goodsir stood. Smoke swirled around him as if someone had opened a door or window. One second he could see fifteen or twenty feet forward toward the carpenter’s and bosun’s storerooms, clearly see the flames licking the walls and timbers, and the next second he could not see two feet in front of him. Everyone was coughing and Goodsir joined them.
Men shoved against him in their rush to get up the ladderway and Goodsir pressed himself to the bulkhead, wondering if he should go up to the lower deck. He was no use here.
He remembered the bare arm flung out of the coal bunker below in the hold deck. The thought of going down there again made him want to vomit.
As if to confirm that thought, four or five muskets not ten feet in front of the surgeon fired at once. The explosions were deafening. Goodsir flung his palms over his ears and fell to his knees, remembering how he had told the crew of
“Belay that firing!” shouted Fitzjames. “Hold off! There are men up there.”
“But, Captain…” came the voice of Corporal Alexander Pearson, the highest ranking of the four surviving
“Hold off, I tell you!”
Goodsir could now see Lieutenant Le Vesconte and the Marines there silhouetted against the flames, Le Vesconte standing and the Marines each on one knee, reloading their muskets as if they were in the midst of a battle. The surgeon thought that the walls, timbers, and loose casks and cartons toward the bow were all on fire. Sailors batted at the flames with blankets and rolls of canvas. Sparks flew everywhere.
The burning silhouette of a man staggered out of the flames toward the Marines and clustered seamen.
“Hold your fire!” shouted Fitzjames.
“Hold your fire!” repeated Le Vesconte.
The burning man collapsed into Fitzjames’s arms. “Mr. Goodsir!” called the captain. John Downing, the quartermaster, ceased beating a blanket against the fire in the corridor and stamped out the flames emanating from the wounded man’s smoldering clothes.
Goodsir ran forward and took the weight of the collapsing man from Fitzjames. The right side of the man’s face was almost gone – not burned but clawed away, the skin and eye hanging loose – and parallel marks ran down the right side of his chest, the claw marks cutting deep through eight layers of fabric and flesh. Blood soaked his waistcoat. The man’s right arm was missing.
Goodsir realized that he was holding Henry Foster Collins, the second master whom Fitzjames earlier had ordered to go toward the bow with Brown and Dunn, the caulker and his mate, to secure the forward hatch.
“I need help getting him up to the surgery,” gasped Goodsir. Collins was a big man, even without his arm, and his legs had finally given way. The surgeon was able to hold him upright only because he was braced against the Bread Room bulkhead.
“Downing!” Fitzjames called to the silhouette of the tall quartermaster who had returned to fighting flames with his burning blanket.
Downing tossed the blanket away and ran back through the smoke. Without asking a question, the quartermaster hooked Collins’s remaining arm over his own shoulder and said, “After you, Mr. Goodsir.”
Goodsir started up the ladderway but a dozen men with buckets were trying to come down through the smoke.
“Make way!” bellowed Goodsir. “Wounded man coming up.”
The boots and knees pressed back.
As Downing carried the now unconscious Collins up the almost vertical ladder, Goodsir came up onto the lower deck where they all lived. Seamen gathered around and stared back at him. The surgeon realized that he must look like a casualty himself – his hands and clothes and face were bloody from crashing into the post, and he knew that they were also black with soot.
“Aft to the sick bay,” ordered Goodsir as Downing lifted the burned and mauled man in his arms. The quartermaster had to twist sideways to carry Collins down the narrow companionway. Behind Goodsir, two dozen men were handing buckets down the ladder from the deck while others poured snow onto the steaming, hissing deck boards in the seamen’s berthing area around the stove and forward scuttle. If the deck there caught fire, Goodsir knew, the ship was lost.
Henry Lloyd came out of the sick bay, his face pale and eyes wide.
“Are my instruments laid out?” demanded Goodsir.
“Yes, sir.”
“Bone saw?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Downing laid the unconscious Collins on the bare surgical table in the middle of the sick bay.
“Thank you, Mr. Downing,” said Goodsir. “Would you be so kind as to get a seaman or two and help these other sick men to a bed in a cubicle somewhere? Any empty berth will do.”
“Aye, Doctor.”
“Lloyd, get forward to Mr. Wall and tell the cook and his mates that we need as much hot water from the Frazer’s stove as he can give us. But first, turn up those oil lamps. Then get back here. I’ll need your hands and a lantern.”
For the next hour, Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir was so busy that the sick bay could have caught fire and he would not have noticed except to be glad for the extra light.
He stripped Collins’s upper body naked – the open wounds steamed in the freezing air – threw the first pan of hot water over them to cleanse them as best he could, not for hygiene but to briefly clear away the blood in order to see how deep they were, decided that the claw wounds themselves were not immediately life threatening, and went to work on the second master’s shoulder, neck, and face.
The arm had come off cleanly. It was as if a huge guillotine had severed Collins’s arm with one drop. Used to industrial and shipboard accidents that mauled and twisted and tore flesh to shreds, Goodsir studied the wound with something like admiration, if not awe.
Collins was bleeding to death, but the flames he’d been caught in had cauterized the gaping shoulder wound to some extent. It had saved his life. So far.
Goodsir could see the shoulder bone – a glistening white knob – but there was no remaining arm bone that he had to cut away. With Lloyd shakily holding a lantern close and sometimes putting his finger where Goodsir ordered – often on a spurting artery – Goodsir deftly tied off the severed veins and arteries. He had always been
