A Discovery of Strangers (14 page)

My Lords, I am not bitter against the Expedition’s officers, junior or senior. I beg you not to consider me a witness too biased to be believed concerning the sad events that took place at Fort Enterprise, October, 1820, or our even more desperate attempt to return there a year later. My life has been ordinary enough for a peasant: as a 16-year-old youth from a stony farm in Northumberland, I refused to descend into the black hell of the Tyneside mines, and so was seized and impressed into the Royal Navy by the King’s Men one summer evening while on my way home from the market. My mother never knew what was become of me until I was five months at sea (though she feared little else) fighting Napoleon. But our ship was captured by an American privateer and I, with four other lads (all poor
like myself — the officers were held for ransom, the war making excellent business for the Americans trading men with both sides — but where would my mother have found so much as a pound to ransom me?), we five without ransom were given over to a French trading vessal. The French captain, even more convinced of the stupidity of war than we, gave us free run of his ship. One week during a storm we helped save it from foundering by working before the mast beside his men, and so a few nights later, as he tacked close to Cornwall while sailing for St. Malo, he looked steadily starboard towards France while we lowered his smallest boat larboard into the running sea off Lizard Point. What became of the others I never knew; we rowed all night trying to fight through the surf, but were forced back by the terrible seas and after two or three days I was found by a fisherman, alone, washed up like kelp on the shingle of the outermost Scilly Island, not ten feet from the open Atlantic.

That poor fisherman’s family nursed me, I returned to my mother on her lonely farm and was again apprehended by the press-gang (I had never been discharged and Napoleon was apparently more of a devil than ever). But I survived that too. Why? Why did I survive our trek from the Arctic Ocean to Fort Enterprise? I do not know, but I trust in God. And also the truth of my mother’s teaching:

“Once they make you say, ‘a’, you’ll have to say ‘b’ as well.”

Thank God she could not imagine the Royal Navy’s ‘c’ — or ‘d’, though on a clear day you can see the sea from the uplands surrounding her village. But it was that first polar Expedition with Lieutenant (now Sir) John Franklin and Doctor Richardson and Midshipman (now Commander) George Back and poor, saintly Hood (lost for ever), which took me to the
end of the alphabet. In 1819 I committed myself to that Expedition, and stayed though others left and thereby saved themselves much suffering and probably their lives. By the grace of God I have a steady eye and strong body; I could find and shoot even the smallest ptarmigan on the tundra when the caribou or musk oxen that might have saved us were no longer there. I could still carry the heavy hide blankets when the voyageurs (who by reason of their great packs often broke through ice into frigid water and laboured and endured even more than I) were no longer able to walk, leave alone lift their normal burdens. Only once did I despair, while hunting, but that was not on the last trek, so there is no need for your Lordships to hear of it, after all these years.

This must be said: when, by the grace of God and St. Germain’s incomprehensible skill in making a cockleshell no bigger than a hat out of willow twigs and the officers’ oilskins, we were able finally to cross between the raging Obstruction Rapids one by one on a line, I was able to carry Hood for a short distance through snow across the tundra. I can still feel his weight, though weak as I was he weighed nothing then. No, it seemed not so much as an empty pack.

What else we did there, or had to do, it is not my place to report. But permit my age to tell you this: I prefer to collapse carrying a good man across snow than to firing massive guns at lads who, like myself, have been stolen from our birthplace and are as ignorant as I about the grand Empire purpose of our miserable deaths; or our mutilations, body and soul. Having suffered both, I prefer starvation to war.

True, the first days of starvation bring suffering hard to describe. A woman once told me of her pain at childbirth, but
that has no similarity since the intensity of it is always filled with the great hope of a sudden, happy ending. The poor in Great Britain hunger continually, but the first days of
starvation
are, I remember, not so much a matter of body pain alone as of relentless pain being pushed beyond itself into a knowledge of
hollow
, of body eating itself from inside, a beast within ravaging beast, and your knowledge of existence grows thin to the point of shell. But after the first three days, as Doctor Richardson has explained so often in his lectures, the physical pain strangely ceases. You observe another person visibly dying with you, and are at peace. The decrees of the Almighty are what they are, your anxieties are gone. The biggest problem is slowness: you are ready for death so long before it finally arrives.

Then the grand purpose of our coming to this place, this Ultimate North, no longer matters. Unlike the smash of war, in the Arctic you have always been surrendered to quiet. And gradually you recognize approaching death as a stranger whose coming grows steadily darker out of the whiteness that drifts and moans around you, and you begin to feel cold. It is a cold so dreadful you know that the winters of the Arctic have taught you nothing until now, this shell laid in ice, and you reach for anything, a frozen shrub, a useless blanket, your own leg, a frost-broken axe, pull the bones of your friend against you, anything for a prickle of passing warmth. And you see his snow-burned, flaking skin against the skin of your own face, the brown blotches of scurvy, feel his shudders reach into a space beyond bone, his eyes search the distance beyond sky or skull — and you feel a great peace. You lie thoughtless at last like a heather sheep. You have been given the greatest mercy of all, that of the gentle beasts in their dying.

I remember such a time very well, when Robert Hood looked at his right hand, the hand of his drawing. Under a clump of willows in a hollow on the tundra somewhere between Obstruction Rapids and Winter Lake. I have seen death in war, but never that way. My Lords, the heroic picture of General Wolfe dying on the Plains of Abraham is a great lie. You know this, in battle men swing from triumphant ecstasy to weeping terror, they die curled around their ripped guts and splattered with their own shit or — after the guns have stopped — from torn limbs rotting slowly towards their hearts. All those nights that I tried to warm Mr. Hood, rolled in all our clothes in our two buffalo robes — of course he was also warming me, I was starving too, though my peasant body was failing more slowly than his, tough but delicate son of a clergyman — and he whispered exalted words to me. That too is possible, sometimes, when you are starving.

Some of us suffer but are spared; I suppose, to suffer other things. I hear Mr. Hood’s voice still; it sounds dry as sheep sluffing again and again among the dry husks that will never fill their bellies. Because Mr. Hood did not die beautifully. Death did not carry him peacefully into eternity. No. Despite three years of faultless duty, courage, patience, finally starvation — no dignified death, no “proper” death, no.

You have that story in your reports from the officers. I corroborate what they say. Let them stand.

Our beloved Robert, or as he sometimes joked with me of his childhood name: “Little Robin” — Hood. Ever noble, never a robber of anything. Doctor Richardson and I laid his body out in the snow under small willows behind the tent on Sunday, October 20, 1821. Left it, as the Yellowknives do, for the animals.

Permit me: I think Mr. Hood understood better than anyone the magnetic declination of the compass, naval orders, the Book of Common Prayer (which he loved to read aloud), and how that beautiful land — so cruel no human being should ever live there, yet the Yellowknives do — could make a barbaric people so humane.

I did not know this on Sunday, October 15, 1820. Then I thought Mr. Hood was simply startled into silly chivalry by a pagan slut who, if he wanted to have her, he already owned the minute he looked up and saw she existed. Then I was disgusted, hearing him declare:

“Pistols!”

I did not think long about acting as second to both and also their referee: I agreed, and confidentially informed Doctor Richardson of the whole matter. After a start he merely murmured, “Ahh, yes … yes…” as if he had expected as much, and then directed me to load both pistols carefully with powder and wadding, but no ball.

So the next morning at dawn (nearly ten o’clock in that latitude) I gave them the signal and they both wheeled and fired. Mr. Back was quicker, though perhaps Mr. Hood hesitated when he saw the discharge and felt nothing strike him, nor even the whistle of a ball. But he stood his ground and fired at Mr. Back from the regulation ten strides away, who was rigid with astonishment at having missed. With of course the same results. I stepped forwards then and motioned them to approach. Mr. Back could barely walk, but Mr. Hood strode forwards, relieved and obviously satisfied. I took their smoking pistols from them; sweat beaded Mr. Back’s forehead in the grey morning, but he looked at me from under his bushy brows
with a certain comprehension. Fortunately, before I opened my mouth, Doctor Richardson declared behind me,

“Gentlemen, this charade will suffice. Or do you prefer I inform Lieutenant Franklin?”

I think Doctor Richardson did not then believe it was a matter of honour between them. I know I didn’t.

Later that day Lieutenant Franklin informed us a party was needed to walk back to Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake for the mail, and to bring forwards to Fort Enterprise the firearms and powder that were to have arrived there with the summer brigade after our leaving. If these supplies were brought forwards now on sleds, the Expedition in canoes could move on to the Polar Sea as soon as the ice broke in spring. Mr. Back immediately volunteered to lead the party.

Mr. Back walked not only to Fort Providence, but, not finding our supplies there (due to the usual disasters caused by trading company rivalry), he continued over the lake to Moose-Deer Island House and finally to Fort Chipewyan. He returned to Fort Enterprise with supplies in March 1821, having travelled through intense cold for more than a thousand miles, and that in the dark on snowshoes. A brilliant achievement, though strange for a sailor; a prefiguring of his superhuman effort that would save some of our lives a year later.

The lakes and rivers remained frozen around Fort Enterprise for nine months. By June 4, 1821, Lieutenant Franklin decided to wait no longer and we began what was the most hazardous stage of our Arctic journey: to reach the Coppermine and paddle down that unknown river to the Polar Sea, then coast and map its shores by Canadian voyageur canoe. In such a land, locked under ice to the end of June, though the sun shone
almost until midnight and rose again at two, where did we suppose we would find enough water for birchbark? Doctor Richardson left first with an advance party to carry supplies to the Coppermine River, over snow on sleds and snowshoes. We followed on June 14, each of our three canoes on a sled being dragged over ice by four men assisted by two dogs. The Yellowknives travelled with us in their light, easy fashion, and seemed satisfied. They had been destitute when winter came, but they said hunting had been good (though we had all been without meat several times, sometimes for over a fortnight), and throughout our stay at Winter Lake they had not lost a single life. Not even one of them, it seemed, had been sick.

The old mapmaker, Keskarrah, however, had not wintered well, nor his wife, who could barely walk under a small pack. The girl pulled their sled with a single dog, as Greenstockings did another. She was obviously with child. And though I never saw it, I have reason to believe Robert Hood was its father. He never saw the child either.

My Lords, this is the deposition you required. God save the King!

DOCTOR JOHN RICHARDSON

Wednesday October 18th 1820
Fort Enterprise

Mr. Back set out today for Fort Providence to make arrangements respecting supplies for next summer. We have at present upwards of
100
deer in store, and about
800
lbs of suet. Bigfoot and several men arrived at the house today and warned us that the reindeer have now retired farther south into the woods and that his people must follow them
.

Friday December 1st
1820
Fort Enterprise

Old Keskarrah has been nursing his wife here all winter, who is about to lose her nose by an ulcer; he and his family still remain our guests at the Fort, and intend to do so all winter. They and their visitors, who are frequent, have been a heavy drain upon our provisions. The fishery, failing, has been given up. Reindeer were not seen here October
26
to November
12;
they appeared again on November
16
but remained only a few days. Keskarrah made an offering today to the Water-spirit whose wrath he apprehends to be the cause of his wife’s malady. This offering consisted of an old knife, a small piece of tobacco and some trifling articles, made up into a packet and committed to the rapid (which remains open) with a long prayer
.