The Terror

message to Terror – Crozier remembered the date well since he had walked to Erebus from Terror in the dark himself that first full day of winter darkness – the beast had reduced Fitzjames’s Marine guard to only four: Corporal Alexander Pearson in command, Private Hopcraft with his ruined shoulder, Private Pilkington with his bullet wound, and Private Joseph Healey.

Crozier’s own Marine detachment had lost only Private William Heather to the thing on the ice, on the night the previous November when the creature had come aboard and bashed the man’s brains out while the private was on watch. But amazingly, shockingly, Heather had refused to die. After lying comatose in the sick bay for weeks, obscenely hovering between life and death, Private Heather had been carried by his Marine mates to his hammock forward in the crew berthing area and they had fed him and cleaned him and carried him to the seat of ease and dressed him every day since. It was as if the staring, drooling man was their pet. He’d been evacuated to Terror Camp just last week, bundled up warmly by the other Marines and set carefully, almost royally, into a special one-man toboggan made for him by Alex “Fat” Wilson, the carpenter’s mate. The seamen had not objected to the extra load and had volunteered to take turns pulling the living corpse’s little sled across the ice and over the pressure ridges to Terror Camp.

That left Crozier five Marines – Daly, Hammond, Wilkes, Hedges, and thirty-seven-year-old Sergeant Soloman Tozer, an unschooled fool but now commanding officer among the total of nine functional surviving Royal Marines on the Sir John Franklin Expedition.

After the first hour in harness, the sledge seemed to slide more easily and Crozier had fallen into the rhythm of panting that passed for breathing while hauling such dead weight across such nonslippery ice.

That was all the categories of men lost that Crozier could think of. Except for the boys, of course, those young volunteers who had signed on to the expedition at the last minute and had been listed on the roster as “Boys” even though three of the four were a full-grown eighteen years old. Robert Golding was nineteen when they sailed.

Three of the four “boys” survived, although Crozier himself had been forced to carry the unconscious George Chambers from the burning Carnivale compartments on the night of the fire. The only fatality among the boys had been Tom Evans, the youngest in demeanor as well as in age; the thing on the ice had plucked the lad literally from beneath Captain Crozier’s nose as they were out on the ice in the dark hunting for the missing William Strong.

George Chambers, although recovering consciousness two days after Carnivale, had never been the same. A bright lad before his violent encounter with the thing, the concussion he received reduced him to a level of intelligence even below that of Magnus Manson. George was no living corpse like Private Heather – he could obey simple orders according to Erebus’s bosun’s mate – but he hardly ever spoke after that terrible New Year’s Eve.

Davey Leys, one of the more experienced men on the expedition, was another man who had physically survived two encounters with the white thing on the ice but who was as useless as the literally brainless Private Heather these days. After the night the white thing encountered Leys and John Handford on watch and then chased Ice Master Thomas Blanky into the darkness, Leys had slipped back into his earlier state of unresponsive staring and had never returned from it. He had been transported to Terror Camp – along with the seriously injured or those too ill to walk, such as Fitzjames’s steward, Hoar – bundled in coats and tucked into one of the boats being dragged atop a sledge. There were too many men now sick with scurvy, wounds, or low morale who were of little use to Crozier or Fitzjames. More mouths to feed and bodies to haul with them when the men were hungry and sick and barely able to walk.

Weary, realizing that he had not really slept the past two nights, Crozier tried counting the dead.

Six officers from Erebus. Four dead from Terror.

All three warrant officers from Erebus. Zero from Terror.

One petty officer from Erebus. One from Terror.

Just one seaman from Erebus. Four from Terror.

That was twenty dead, not counting the three Marines and the boy Evans. Twenty-four men lost on the expedition already. A frightful loss – greater than Crozier could remember from any arctic expedition in Naval history.

But there was a more important number, and one that Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier tried to focus on: 105 living souls remaining under his care.

One hundred and five men alive, including himself, on this day he had been forced to abandon HMS Terror and cross the ice.

Crozier put his head down and leaned more into the harness. The wind had come up and was blowing snow around them, obscuring the sledge ahead, hiding the walking Marines from sight.

Was he sure in the count? Twenty dead not counting the three Marines and one boy? Yes, he was certain that he and Lieutenant Little had checked the muster that morning and confirmed 105 men spread out between the sledging parties, Terror Camp, and HMS Terror that morning… but was he certain? Had he forgotten anyone? Was his addition and subtraction correct? Crozier was very, very tired.

Francis Crozier might get muddled in the count for a short while – he had not slept at all in two, no, three nights – but he had not forgotten a single man’s face or name. Nor would he ever.

“Captain!”

Crozier came out of the trance that he fell into when he was man-hauling sledges. He could not have told anyone at this moment whether he had been in harness an hour or six hours. The world had become the glare of the cold sun in the southeastern sky, the blowing ice crystals, the rack of his breath, the pain of his body, the shared weight behind him, the resistance of the sea ice and new snow, and most of all the oddly blue sky with wisps of white clouds curling around on all sides as if they were all walking in a blue-and-white-rimmed bowl.

“Captain!” It was Lieutenant Little shouting.

Crozier realized that his fellow pullers had come to a halt. All of the sledges were stopped on the ice.

Ahead of them to the southeast, perhaps a mile beyond the next heaped-ice pressure ridge, a three-masted ship was moving north to south. Its sails were furled and shrouded, its yards rigged for anchorage, but it moved anyway, as if on a strong current, gliding slowly and majestically on what must be a wide avenue of open water just beyond the next high ridge.

Rescue. Salvation.

The steady blue flame of hope in Crozier’s aching chest flared brighter for a few exhilarating seconds.

Ice Master Thomas Blanky, his peg leg set into something rather like a wooden boot that Carpenter Honey had devised, stepped up to Crozier and said, “A mirage.”

“Of course,” said the captain.

He’d recognized the distinctive bomb-ship masts and rigging of HMS Terror almost immediately, even through the shimmering, shifting air, and for a few seconds of confusion bordering on vertigo, Crozier had wondered if somehow they had managed to get lost, turned around, and were actually heading back to the northwest toward the ship they’d abandoned hours earlier.

No. There were the old sledge tracks, drifted over in spots but deeply worn into the ice by more than a month’s repeated passage back and forth, heading straight for the tall pressure ridge with its narrow passes hacked out with picks and shovels. And the sun was still ahead of them and to their right, deep in the south. Beyond the pressure ridge, the three masts shimmered, dissolved briefly, and then returned more solidly than ever, only upside down, with the hull of the ice-entombed Terror blending into a white-cirrus sky.

Crozier and Blanky and so many of the others had seen this phenomenon many times before – false things in the sky. Years ago, on a fine winter morning frozen in off the coast of the landmass they were calling Antarctica, Crozier had seen a smoking volcano – the very one named after this ship – rising upside down from solid sea to the north. Another time on this very expedition, in the spring of 1847, Crozier had come on deck to find black spheres floating in the southern sky. The spheres turned into solid figure eights, then divided again into what looked like a symmetrical progression of ebony balloons and then, within the course of a quarter hour, evaporated completely.

Two seamen on the third sledge had literally dropped in their traces and were on their knees in the rutted snow. One man was weeping loudly and the other had unleashed a string of the most imaginative sailor curses Crozier had ever heard – and the captain had heard his fill over the decades.

“God-damn it!” shouted Crozier. “You’ve seen arctic mirages before. Belay that sniveling and cursing or you’ll be man-hauling that God-damn sledge by yourselves and I’ll be sitting on it with one boot up each of your arses. Get on your feet, by God! You’re men, not weak sisters. Fucking act like it!”

The two seamen got to their feet and clumsily brushed off ice crystals and snow. Crozier couldn’t immediately identify them by their slops and Welsh wigs and he did not want to.

The line of sledges started up again with much grunting but no cursing. Everyone knew that the high pressure ridge ahead of them, carved out as it had been by countless previous trips in the past weeks, was still going to be a Christ-fucking cob. They would have to lift and wrestle the heavy sledges up at least fifteen feet of steep incline between the perilous sixty-foot ice cliffs on either side. The threat of tumbling ice boulders would be very real then.

“It’s as if there’s some dark God who wants to torment us,” Thomas Blanky said almost cheerily. The ice master had no pulling duties and was still stumping alongside Crozier.

The captain did not respond to this, and after a minute Blanky fell back to stump along beside one of the outriding Marines.

Crozier called for one of the extra men to take his place in harness – something they had rehearsed doing without stopping the forward motion of the sledges – and when the extra hand took over, he stepped aside out of the ruts and checked his watch. They had been pulling about five hours. Looking behind, Crozier saw that the real Terror had been out of sight for some time, at least five miles and several low pressure ridges behind them. The mirage image had been a final offering from some evil arctic god that seemed intent on tormenting them all.

Still leader of this ill-fated expedition, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier realized for the first time that he was no longer captain of a ship in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy Discovery Service. That part of his life – and being a seaman and Naval officer had been his life since he was a boy – was over forever. After being responsible for losing so many men and both his ships, he knew the Admiralty would never give him another command. In terms of his long Naval career, Crozier knew, he was now a dead man walking.

They were still two hard days of man-hauling away from Terror Camp. Crozier fixed his gaze on the tall pressure ridge ahead and trudged forward.

33 GOODSIR