weakness he’d been holding back for weeks through sheer force of will welled up through him like concentric circles of nausea.
The figures below – they still did not appear to have seen him, probably because he had crossed over the rise and would not be very visible here with his dark coat blending into the dark rock – could be hunters out from some unknown farther-north Esquimaux village that was not far away. If so, the 105 survivors of
Or there was a chance that the Esquimaux were a war party and that the crude spears Irving had caught a glimpse of in the glass were meant for the white men they’d somehow heard had invaded their lands.
Either way, Third Lieutenant John Irving knew that it was his job to go down, encounter them, and find out.
He closed the telescope, set it carefully amid extra sweaters in his shoulder bag, and – throwing one arm high in what he hoped the savages would see as a gesture of greeting and peace – started down the long hill toward the ten humans who had suddenly stopped in their tracks.
36 CROZIER
The third and last day on the ice was by far the hardest.
Crozier had made this crossing at least twice before in the last six weeks with some of the earliest and larger sledge parties, but even with the trail less established, it had been much easier then. He’d been healthier. And he’d been infinitely less tired.
Francis Crozier was not truly aware of it, but since his recovery from his near-fatal withdrawal illness in January, his severe melancholia had made him an insomniac. As a sailor and then a captain, Crozier had always prided himself – as most captains did – on needing very little sleep and waking from the deepest sleep at any change in the ship’s condition: a slight change in the ship’s direction, the rising of wind in the sails, the sound of too many feet running on deck above him during any specific watch, any alteration in the sound of the water moving against the ship’s hull… anything.
But in recent weeks, Crozier slept less and less each night, until he’d fallen into the habit of only half dozing for an hour or two in the middle of the night, perhaps catching a nap of thirty minutes or less during the day. He told himself it was just the result of so many details to watch over and commands to give in the last days and weeks before taking to the ice, but in truth it was melancholia trying to destroy him again.
His mind was sodden much of the time. He was a smart man whose mind was stupid with the chemical by-products of constant fatigue.
Sleeping at Sea Camps One and Two had been damned near impossible for any of the men the past two nights, no matter how tired they were. There had been no need to erect tents at either camp since eight Holland tents there had been left up permanently over the past weeks, any wind or snow damage being repaired by the next party that came through.
The three-person reindeer-skin sleeping bags were many times warmer than the sewn-together Hudson’s Bay blanket bags, and these good bags had been drawn by lottery. Crozier had not even taken part in the lottery, but when, the first time he’d been on the ice, he’d come into the tent he shared with two other officers, he found that his steward, Jopson, had laid out a reindeer-skin bag tailored for him. Neither the ailing Jopson nor the men thought it right that their captain would have to share a bag with two other snoring, farting, shoving men – even other officers – and Crozier had been too tired and grateful to argue.
Nor had he told Jopson or the others that sleeping in a bag by one’s self was much chillier than his experience sleeping in three-man bags. The other men’s body heat was the only thing that kept them warm enough to sleep through the night.
But Crozier hadn’t tried to sleep through the night at either sea camp.
Every two hours he was up and walking the perimeter to make sure that the watch had changed on time. The wind came up during the night, and the men on watch huddled behind hastily erected low snow walls. Because the biting wind and blowing snow kept the men curled low behind their snow-block barriers, the thing on the ice would have been visible to them only if it actually stepped on one of the men.
It did not make its appearance that night.
During the fitful minutes of sleep he did find, Crozier was revisited by the nightmares he’d had during his January illness. Some of the dreams returned so many times – and startled the captain out of sleep so many times – that he remembered fragments of them. Teenaged girls carrying out a seance. M’Clintock and another man staring down into an open boat at two skeletons, one sitting up and fully clothed in peacoat and slops, the other just a mass of tumbled and gnawed bones.
Crozier walked through his days wondering if he was one of those skeletons.
But the worst dream, by far, was the Communion dream in which he was a boy or a sicker, older version of himself and was kneeling naked at the altar rail in Memo Moira’s forbidden church while the huge, inhuman priest – dripping water in shredded white vestments through which showed the raw, red flesh of a badly burned man – loomed over him and leaned closer, breathing carrion breath into Crozier’s uplifted face.
The men all rose in the dark a little after 5:00 a.m. on the morning of 23 April. The sun would not rise until almost 10:00 a.m. The wind continued to blow, flapping the brown canvas of the Holland tents and stinging their eyes as they huddled to eat breakfast.
On the ice, the men were supposed to heat their food thoroughly in small tins labeled “Cooking Apparatus (1),” using their small spirit stoves fueled by pints of ether carried in bottles. Even without wind, it was often difficult or nearly impossible to get the spirit stoves primed and started; in a wind like that morning’s, it was simply not possible, even when taking the risk of firing up the spirit stoves inside the tents. So – reassuring themselves that Goldner’s canned meats and vegetables and soups had already been cooked – the men just spooned the frozen or near-frozen masses of congealed glop straight out of the cans. They were starving and had an endless day of man-hauling ahead of them.
Goodsir – and the three dead surgeons before Goodsir – had talked to Crozier and Fitzjames about the importance of heating Goldner’s tinned foodstuffs, especially the soup. The vegetables and meats, Goodsir had pointed out, had indeed been precooked, but the soups – mostly cheap parsnips and carrots and other root vegetables – were “concentrated,” meant to be diluted with water and brought to a boil.
The surgeon could not name the poisons that could be lurking in unboiled Goldner soups – and perhaps even in the meats and vegetables – but he kept reiterating the need for full heating of the tinned foods, even while on the march on the ice. These warnings were one of the main reasons Crozier and Fitzjames had ordered the heavy iron whaleboat stoves transported to Terror Camp over the ice and pressure ridges.
But there were no stoves here at Sea Camp One or at Sea Camp Two the next night. The men ate all the tinned foods cold from the can when the spirit stoves failed – and even when the ether of the little stoves lighted, there was just enough fuel to
That would have to suffice, thought Crozier.
As soon as breakfast was finished, the captain’s belly began rumbling with hunger again.
The plan had been to fold up the eight Holland tents at both sea camps and haul them to Terror Camp on the sledges, to serve as backup should the groups have to go out on the ice again soon. But the wind was too high and the men were too weary even after just one day and night on the ice this trip. Crozier conferred with Lieutenant Little and they decided that three tents would be enough to bring along from this camp. Perhaps they would do better the next morning after Sea Camp Two.
Three men in harness broke down that second day on the ice on 23 April 1848. One began vomiting blood onto the ice. The other two simply fell in their tracks and were unable to pull for the rest of that day. One of those two had to be set onto a sledge and hauled.
Not wanting to reduce the number of armed pickets walking behind, ahead, and to the sides of the procession of sledges, Crozier and Little tied on harnesses and man-hauled for most of that endless day.
The pressure ridges weren’t as high during this middle day of the crossing and the previous sledge tracks had left a virtual highway on this stretch of open sea ice, but the wind and blowing snow eliminated almost all of these advantages. Men pulling a sledge could not see the next sledge fifteen feet in front of them. The Marines or sailors carrying weapons and walking along as guards could see no one else when they were twenty feet or more from the sledges and had to walk within a yard or two of the sledge parties so as not to get lost. Their usefulness as lookouts was nil.
Several times during the day, the lead sledge – usually Crozier’s or Lieutenant Little’s – would lose the worn sledge track, and everyone would then have to stop for up to half an hour while some men unharnessed themselves, tied on a rope so as not to get lost in the howling snow, and walked left and right of the false route, seeking out the faint depressions of the actual track on a surface quickly being covered by inches of blowing snow.
To lose the route midway like this would cost not only time, it might well cost all of them their lives.
Some of the sledge teams hauling heavier loads this spring had done this nine miles of flat sea ice in under twelve hours, arriving at Sea Camp Two only hours after the sun had set. Crozier’s group arrived long after midnight and almost missed the camp completely. If Magnus Manson – whose keen hearing seemed as unusual as his size and low intelligence – had not heard the flapping of tents in the wind far to their port side, they would have marched past their shelter and food cache.
As it was, Sea Camp Two had been largely destroyed by the day’s incessant and rising winds. Five of the eight tents had been blown away into the darkness – even though they had been secured by deep ice screws – or simply torn to tatters. The exhausted and starving men managed to pitch two of the three tents they’d man-hauled from Sea Camp One, and forty-six men who would have been comfortable but crowded in eight tents squeezed into five.
For the men taking turns on watch that night – sixteen of the forty-six – the wind, snow, and cold were a living hell. Crozier stood one of the 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. watches. He preferred being able to move since his one-man sleeping bag would not allow him to get warm enough to sleep anyway, even with men stacked like cordwood around him in the flapping tent.
The final day on the ice was the worst.
The wind had stopped shortly before the men roused themselves at 5:00 a.m., but as in evil compensation for the gift of the blue skies to come, the temperature dropped at least thirty degrees. Lieutenant Little took the measurements that morning: the temperature at 6:00 a.m. was ?64 degrees.
