The Terror

ice below looked up at them with eyes almost made invisible under low-pulled Welsh wigs and above wool comforters, all squinting in the cold morning light.

“Go ahead, Edward,” Crozier said softly. “Over the side with you.”

The lieutenant saluted, lifted his heavy pack of personal possessions, and went down first the ladder and then the ice ramp to join the men below.

Crozier looked around. The thin April sunlight illuminated a world of tortured ice, looming pressure ridges, countless seracs, and blowing snow. Tugging the bill of his cap lower and squinting toward the east, he tried to record his feelings at the moment.

Abandoning ship was the lowest point in any captain’s life. It was an admission of total failure. It was, in most cases, the end of a long Naval career. To most captains, many of Francis Crozier’s personal acquaintance, it was a blow from which they would never recover.

Crozier felt none of that despair. Not yet. More important to him at the moment was the blue flame of determination that still burned small but hot in his breast – I will live.

He wanted his men to survive – or at least as many as possibly could. If there was the slightest hope of any man from HMS Erebus or HMS Terror surviving and going home to England, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to follow that hope and not look back.

He had to get the men off the ship. And then off the ice.

Realizing that almost fifty sets of eyes were looking up at him, Crozier patted the gunwale a final time, scrambled down the ladder they’d set on the starboard side as the ship had begun to cant more steeply to port in recent weeks, and then walked down the well-worn ice ramp to the waiting men.

Hoisting his own pack and stepping into line near the men in harness at the rearmost sledge, he looked up a final time at the ship and said, “She looks fine, doesn’t she, Harry?”

“She does that, Captain,” said Captain of the Foretop Harry Peglar. As good as his word, he and the topmen had managed to steep all of the stored masts and restore the yards and rigging in the past two weeks, despite blizzards, low temperatures, lightning storms, surging ice pressures, and high winds. Ice gleamed everywhere on the now top-heavy ship’s restored topmasts, spars, and rigging. She looked to Crozier as if she were bedecked in jewels.

After the sinking of HMS Erebus on the last day of March, Crozier and Fitzjames had decided that even though Terror had to be abandoned soon if they were to have any chance of walking or taking the boats to safety before winter, the ship should be restored to sailing shape. Should they be stuck at Terror Camp on King William Land for months into summer and the ice miraculously open, they could, theoretically, take the boats back to Terror and try sailing to freedom.

Theoretically.

“Mr. Thomas,” he called to Robert Thomas, the Second Mate and lead hauler on the first of the five sledges, “lead off when you’re ready.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” called back Thomas and leaned into the harness. Even with seven men straining in harness, the sledge did not budge. The runners had frozen to the ice.

“Hearty does it, Bob!” said Edwin Lawrence, laughing, one of the seamen in harness with him. The sledge groaned, men groaned, leather creaked, ice tore, and the high-packed sledge moved forward.

Lieutenant Little gave the order for the second sledge, headed up by Magnus Manson, to start off. With the giant in the lead of the men, the second sledge – although more heavily laden than Thomas’s – immediately started off with only the slightest rasp of ice under the wooden runners.

And so it went for the forty-six men, thirty-five of them man-hauling for the first stretch, five walking in reserve with shotguns or muskets, waiting to pull, four of the mates from both ships and the two officers – Lieutenant Little and Captain Crozier – walking alongside and occasionally pushing and less frequently slipping into harness themselves.

The captain remembered that several days earlier, when Second Lieutenant Hodgson and Third Lieutenant Irving were preparing to leave for yet another boat-sledge trip to Camp Terror – both officers then ordered to take men from that camp to hunt and reconnoiter over the next few days – Irving had surprised his captain by requesting that one or the other of two men assigned to his team be left back at Terror. Crozier had been initially surprised because his estimate of young John Irving had been that the junior lieutenant was capable of dealing with seamen and carrying out and enforcing any orders given to him, but then Crozier heard the names involved and understood. Lieutenant Little had put the names of both Magnus Manson and Cornelius Hickey on Irving’s sledge and scouting team rosters, and Irving was respectfully requesting, without giving any reasons, that one or the other man be assigned to another team. Crozier had acceded to the request immediately, reassigning Manson to the last day’s sledge pulls and allowing the small caulker’s mate to go ahead with Lieutenant Irving’s sledge team. Crozier did not trust Hickey either, especially after the near mutiny weeks ago, and he knew that the little man was much more treacherous with the huge idiot Manson by his side.

Now, walking away from the ship, seeing Manson pulling fifty feet ahead of him, Crozier deliberately kept his face directed forward. He had resolved that he would not look back at Terror for at least the first two hours of the pulling.

Looking at the men leaning and straining ahead of him, the captain was very aware of those who were absent.

Fitzjames was absent this day, serving as commanding officer at Camp Terror on King William Land, but the real reason for his absence was tact. No captain wanted to abandon his ship in full view of another captain if at all possible, and all captains were sensitive to this. Crozier, who had visited Erebus almost every day from the beginning of its breakup from ice pressure two days after the fire and invasion of the thing from the ice in early March, had made a point of not being there midday on 31 March when Fitzjames had to abandon ship. Fitzjames had returned the favour this week by volunteering for command duties far from Terror.

Most of the other men’s absences were for a far more tragic and depressing reason. Crozier brought up their faces as he marched alongside the last sledge.

Terror had been much luckier than Erebus when it came to loss of its officers and leaders. Of his primary officers, Crozier had lost his first mate, Fred Hornby, to the beast during the Carnivale debacle, Second Master Giles MacBean to the thing during a sledge trip the previous September, and both his surgeons, Peddie and McDonald, also during the New Year’s Eve Carnivale. But his first, second, and third lieutenants were alive and reasonably well, as was his second mate, Thomas; Blanky, his ice master; and the indispensable Mr. Helpman, his primary clerk.

Fitzjames had lost his commanding officer – Sir John – and his first lieutenant, Graham Gore, as well as Lieutenant James Walter Fairholme and First Mate Robert Orme Sergeant, all killed by the creature. He’d also lost his primary surgeon, Mr. Stanley, and Henry Foster Collins, his second master. That left only Lieutenant H. T. D. Le Vesconte, Second Mate Charles Des Voeux, Ice Master Reid, Surgeon Goodsir, and his purser, Charles Hamilton Osmer, as his remaining complement of officers. Instead of the crowded officers’ mess of the first two years – Sir John, Fitzjames, Gore, Le Vesconte, Fairholme, Stanley, Goodsir, and clerk Osmer all dining together – the final weeks had seen only the captain and his sole surviving lieutenant, the surgeon, and clerk dining in the cold of the officers’ wardrooom. And even that in the last days, Crozier knew, had been an absurd sight once the ice had tilted Erebus almost thirty degrees to starboard. The four men had been forced to sit on the deck, their plates on their knees and their feet braced hard against a batten.

Hoar, Fitzjames’s steward, was still sick with scurvy, so poor old Bridgens had been the steward scurrying like a crab to serve the officers braced on the wildly tilted deck.

Terror had also been luckier in keeping her warrant officers intact. Crozier’s engineer, chief boatswain, and carpenter were still alive and functioning. Erebus had seen her engineer, John Gregory, and her carpenter, John Weekes, both eviscerated in March when the thing on the ice had come aboard in the night. The ship’s other warrant officer, Boatswain Thomas Terry, had been beheaded by the creature the previous November. Fitzjames had no warrant officers left alive.

Of Terror’s twenty-one petty officers – mates, quartermasters, fo’c’sle, hold, maintop, and foretop captains, coxswains, stewards, caulkers, and stokers – Crozier had lost only one man: Stoker John Torrington, the first man on the expedition to die, so long ago on 1 January 1846, way back at Beechey Island. And that, Crozier remembered, had been from consumption that young Torrington had brought aboard with him in England.

Fitzjames had lost another of his petty officers, Stoker Tommy Plater, on the day in March when the thing had gone on its murderous rampage on the lower decks. Only Thomas Watson, the carpenter’s mate, had survived the thing’s attack down on the hold deck that night, and he had lost his left hand.

Since Thomas Burt, the armourer, had been sent back to England from Greenland even before they’d encountered real ice, that left Erebus with twenty surviving petty officers. Some of these men, such as the ancient sailmaker, John Murray, and Fitzjames’s own steward, Edmund Hoar, were too sick with scurvy to be useful, while others, such as Thomas Watson, were too mauled to be of help, while still others, such as the flogged gunroom steward Richard Aylmore, were too sullen to be of much use.

Crozier told one of the men who was obviously fagged out to take a break and to walk with the armed guard while he, the captain, took a turn in the harness. Even with six other men pulling, the terrible exertion of hauling more than fifteen hundred pounds of canned food, weapons, and tents was a strain on his weakened system. Even after Crozier fell into the rhythm – he’d joined sledging parties since March, when he first began dispatching boats and gear to King William Land, and well knew the drill of man-hauling – the pain of the straps across his aching chest, the weight of the mass being pulled, and the discomfort from sweat that froze, thawed, and refroze in his clothes were all a shock.

Crozier wished they had more able-bodied seamen and Marines.

Terror had lost two of its rated sailors – Billy Strong, torn in half by the creature, and James Walker, the idiot Magnus Manson’s good friend before the giant fell completely under the sway of the little rat-faced caulker’s mate. It had been fear of Jimmy Walker’s ghost in the hold, Crozier remembered, that had brought the hulking Manson to his first point of mutiny so many months ago.

For once HMS Erebus had been luckier than its counterpart. The only able seaman Fitzjames had lost during this expedition had been John Hartnell, also dead of consumption and buried in the winter of ’46 on Beechey Island.

Crozier leaned into the straps and thought about the faces and names – so many officers dead, so few regular sailors – and grunted as he pulled, thinking that the thing on the ice seemed to be deliberately coming after the leaders of this expedition.

Don’t think that way, Crozier ordered himself. You’re giving the beast powers of reasoning it doesn’t have.

Doesn’t it? asked another, more fearful part of Crozier’s mind.

One of the Royal Marines walked by, carrying a musket rather than shotgun in the crook of his arm. The man’s face was completely hidden by caps and wraps, but from the slouched way the man walked, Crozier knew that it was Robert Hopcraft. The Marine private had been seriously injured by the creature on the day a year ago in June when Sir John was killed, but while Hopcraft’s other injuries had healed, his shattered collarbone left him always slouching to his left as if he had trouble maintaining a straight line. Another Marine walking with them was William Pilkington, the private who had been shot through his shoulder in the blind that same day. Crozier noticed that Pilkington didn’t seem to be favouring that shoulder or arm today.

Sergeant David Bryant, Erebus’s ranking Marine, was decapitated just seconds before Sir John had been carried off under the ice by the beast. With Private William Braine dead on Beechey Island in 1846 and Private William Reed disappeared on the ice on 9 November of last fall while sent to deliver a