Gore, upon hearing Goodsir declare that he would begin his study
of the creatures that same evening, had offered a reward of a guinea to the first man to spear and bring aboard a healthy specimen, and he presented Goodsir with two less than an hour later.
“They communicate, James, did you know that? I’m not the first to remark on it. They know fear and they know pleasure—the two essential constancies in any life, wouldn’t you agree?”
Fitzjames nodded, knowing that it would be pointless to argue now that Goodsir himself was convinced of this fact.
Goodsir then searched among the clutter of his desk and picked up a jar. He unscrewed its cap, took out a piece of whatever was inside, and ate it. He passed the bottle to Fitzjames, inviting him to do the same. “Pickled mango,” he said, licking his fingers. “Mango in oil and mustard seed. I picked the fruit myself three years ago.” Fitzjames sniffed the contents and declined. Goodsir stood the jar on a shelf beside another in which a small white snake lay coiled in its preserving fluid like a slender root.
“There were some narwhal horns in Whalefish,” Fitzjames remarked.
“So I saw. A great pity that they had been carved by such incompetent craftsmen. I would have bought a dozen specimens for the Museum but for the crude and ugly figures and acts that had been scratched upon them in the hope of enhancing their appeal.”
A year earlier, determined to understand the effectiveness of the various acknowledged antiscorbutics, Goodsir had lived for a week at a time upon a diet of each, keeping an hourly record of how he felt, of how well his hair and nails grew, of changes in the texture and color of his skin, of his appetite and eyesight, his bladder and bowel movements. His methods and conclusions were criticized, but nothing that was said to him convinced him that he had been wrong to conduct the experiments. It was why he now ate mango pickled in oil and mustard seed, and why he insisted upon eating his own raw pickled offals in preference to the boiled meat and vegetables supplied by the Admiralty.
“I shall work until we sail,” he said, removing his reading glasses and rubbing his eyes. Looking up at Fitzjames, he said, “I’m boring you.”
Fitzjames denied this.
“Nevertheless, one man’s passions are another’s—what?”
Fitzjames, too, could think of no immediate comparison.
“A long day,” Goodsir said. “Blunt wits. Our passions can save.” He pulled open a drawer in his desk. “Except this one.”
From the drawer he took out a chess board upon which the pieces were already positioned, held in place by pegs. The game was already well advanced, having so far lasted six days. When time was short or they were too tired to play they set a limit of six moves apiece. Tonight they decided on a dozen.
Fitzjames picked up his surviving knight, and knew immediately from his friend’s pursed lips that he had made his first mistake of the evening.
T
he first of the encroaching ice entered the bay three weeks later. It was a small piece, no larger than one of their boats, but its unobstructed arrival in their sheltered harbor convinced them all that more was soon to follow.
“See how it hesitates,” Vesconte said to Fitzjames as the two men watched it approach the shore close to where they were moored. “Almost as though it had entered by mistake and is now uncertain of what to do. A drawing-room, perhaps, a dozen hushed voices at its unannounced and unwelcome appearance.”
“Row out and make it welcome,” Fitzjames suggested.
“Why exert ourselves? Soon it will run aground, either to thaw in the sun or to lock on to the land and sit out the winter in precisely the same manner as ourselves.”
It occasionally occurred to Fitzjames that Vesconte might only have been repeating the words of some character he had encountered in one of the endless novels he read. They had with them a combined library of over eight thousand volumes, dozens of which might at any time be found in the surveyor’s cabin. He professed to prefer reading a single page of twenty books at a sitting rather than twenty pages of any one title, and would frequently pull a book from one of his pockets during an idle moment, however short.
At his reference to the sun, Fitzjames turned to see where it hung in the sky above them. Each morning and afternoon he marked the position of its rising and setting. It had long since been losing its
light and warmth and would soon be lost to them entirely as the Arctic night announced itself with its first full span of darkness, when the only natural light available to them would be the cold hard glare of the moon. Even in the short time since their arrival the sun was circling considerably lower in the sky, and would soon barely clear the outline of Beechey, rolling across the horizon in a cooling ball, ready to plunge into and be extinguished by the frozen sea.
The small floe-piece ran aground only a few yards from the
Erebus’
bow, and upon being joined by Goodsir, who was keen to collect samples from this advance guard, Fitzjames and Vesconte rowed ashore to inspect it.
Others arrived ahead of them. The ice was new and easily broken, and several men climbed upon it, and the clean white block was quickly reduced to a broken dirty mass.
All the stores that were to be taken ashore had already been delivered there, and following a delay caused by the collapse of one of the shelters, the last of the cases were now being transported beyond the reach of any ice that might ground itself more forcibly.
Two men had been injured when the shelter had collapsed: seaman William Closson had been cut and bruised by a stack of falling crates, and Josephus Geater, slower than Closson in running from the falling wreckage, had had his foot crushed by a forty-gallon barrel of vinegar. He had screamed out at the sudden and unexpected pain of this and then fallen unconscious. Those working nearby rushed to help the two men and pull them clear of the debris. Stanley was sent for, and by the time he arrived Geater had come round, his screams gagged by a cloth forced into his mouth by one of the men now helping him to try and stand. A quick inspection of the shattered foot told Stanley that it would need to be amputated. Surgeon Peddie arrived from the
Terror,
and after his own inspection, he nodded once to let Stanley know that he agreed with him. He had with him his case and administered morphine to ease Geater’s pain. A makeshift stretcher was constructed and he was taken back to the
Erebus.
Peddie stayed with William Closson, attending to his cuts with surgical spirit.
The scattered stores were retrieved and stacked in the open until the pieces of the shelter could be dragged from among them and rebuilt a short distance away from the site of the accident.
Passing Stanley and the injured man on their way ashore, Fairholme and Des Voeux arrived to inspect and report on the damage to Franklin. Two of the
Erebus
’ quartermasters, Daniel Arthur and John Downing, had already arrived. Arthur made an inventory and Downing, with the help of others, passed each can and case out of the wreckage and inspected it for damage. Most were discovered to be intact, but several 12-pound cans of fruit had been punctured and their leaking syrup stuck to the hands of the men handling them.
Arthur reported to Franklin. Very little had been lost, and those cans which had been damaged might be used immediately. He appeared reluctant to say anymore, but when urged by Franklin he took a can of peas from his satchel, green liquid seeping from where the container had been holed. The smell of putrefaction was unmistakeable and both men turned away from it. Franklin sent for Des Voeux, who tasted this liquid and then immediately spat it out.
“Just the peas?” he asked Arthur.
Arthur, aware of what was being suggested, called for Downing, and together they studied the inventory. In total there were two thousand cans of peas, half in 12-pound cannisters, half in six.
“And no way of knowing if they were all sealed and cooked in the one batch,” Franklin said.
“The damaged fruit tastes fine,” Downing said reassuringly.
Not wishing to appear prematurely alarmist, Franklin told Arthur to store the peas separately, away from the other stores. Those which they could prove had turned rotten he ordered destroyed.
Later, he and Des Voeux went to see Stanley and the injured Geater. Sedated but unconscious, Geater insisted that his injuries would not prevent him from continuing his work ashore, but Franklin told him that he was relieved of his duties there. The seaman saluted him from where he lay gasping on Stanley’s table.
A flock of several thousand geese and the same number of smaller birds alighted on the island during the night, and the following
morning parties went ashore to trap and kill as many as they could before, having rested, the birds continued south.
Gore and Vesconte persuaded Fitzjames to accompany them, and the three men climbed the slope through the birds, few of which made any attempt to escape from them.
“They must be exhausted,” Vesconte said, surprised by the birds’ apparent lack of fear.
All around them men fired and netted, and back on the beach others were already gutting and plucking the carcasss and hanging them to dry.
“No sport,” Gore said, drawing a bead with his pistol on a passing tern without firing.
“And no one ashore from the
Terror,
” Vesconte remarked, shielding his eyes and scanning the scene around them.
“Confined to duties aboard,” Gore said. “I dined last night with John Irving.”
“And?”
“Crozier isn’t happy about the way some things are being done.”
“Oh?” said Fitzjames, as aware as any of them of Crozier’s recent black moods, but unwilling to give any further voice to his own thoughts on the matter.
“Common enough grumbles of confined men,” Vesconte said.
“Which won’t improve with being confined even further.”
“What did John Irving think was the cause?” Fitzjames asked.
“He didn’t say. But the consensus of opinion is that you should have been given—”
“Don’t,” Fitzjames said.
“There’s many would agree with that,” Vesconte said.
Fitzjames walked ahead of them and they let him go.
It was common knowledge that upon the expedition being proposed and organized, Fitzjames had been considered the man most likely to lead it. Sir John had been thought too old, was too recently retired from the Governership of Van Diemen’s Land, and had been too long away from the ice. And Crozier, following his defeats at the South Pole with James Ross, had expressed little interest. Then Franklin, largely at the insistence of his wife, had put himself forward,
and Crozier had applied too. Both were senior to Fitzjames, and he had been offered, and accepted, a position subordinate to them both. It angered him that this “usurpation”—although this was not how he himself saw it—was still being discussed among the crews.
“My apologies, James,” Vesconte held out his hand.
“Accepted. But it cannot be ignored.”
“The man broods, it’s in his nature. You and I are fleet of mind and foot, like hunted gazelles. Francis Crozier is a … a rhinoceros, happy to bludgeon and curse and moan because he has an impenetrable hide. And happy to unsettle everyone around him just by being there.”
“And me?” Gore asked, joining them, and out of breath as the slope grew steeper.
“I think a bear,” Vesconte said.
Gore was happy to accept this. “Seriously though, James, Crozier lacks a certain, shall we say, flexibility in some situations. This is not Spithead or the Channel.”
“Nor the Mediterranean, more’s the pity,” Vesconte added in an attempt to help the situation.
“Did John Irving mention anything specific?”
“He thinks Crozier suffers from severe headaches, and that these—”
“He would never allow them to influence his judgment,” Fitzjames said. “The Admiralty chose him. We must abide by, and respect their decision.” His loyalty and support for the man surprised them both.
A fusillade of shots from close by sent a nervous ripple through the terns and fulmars at their feet, as though the small birds had been physically dislodged and then thrown up by the noise. Fitzjames reached down, picked up a tern and wrung its neck, held it out by its wingtips and then severed its wings to take back for Goodsir. He carefully folded these, fastened them into scrolls with pieces of ribbon, and slid them into the pouch at his side. “He wants a dozen perfect sets,” he said.
“Then a dozen he shall have.” Gore aimed and fired and brought
down a bird which skimmed above them like a paper dart.
Later, when the samples were collected, and as the slaughter went on all around them, increasing in intensity as some of the larger birds struggled to get airborne and leave, the three men sat together on a rise overlooking the bay. Behind them was the shooting range that had been set up, using cans from the dump as targets, and melting down their lead solder for shot.
“You can’t ignore it, James,” Vesconte said.
“I don’t. But nor do I regret the fact that we have Sir John at our head with Crozier his second.”
“The man expects too much,” Gore said. “I’m sorry, James, but he does. This is very likely going to be his last time in this place and it shows in everything he says and does. He was always John Barrow’s favorite. Glory, James, that’s what he’s here for now. Why do you think he was given this one last opportunity to find it? And it isn’t just me saying that. Every one of his officers knows it.”
“Which makes him no less of a captain and no less able to do the job entrusted to him.”
“Agreed,” Vesconte said.
Gore aimed his empty pistol at the distant ships and fired it.
Much later, upon returning to the
Erebus
and delivering the wings to Goodsir, Fitzjames spent the evening alone writing letters. He regretted that the old dispute concerning Crozier’s appointment had been brought back into the open, but knew that there was nothing he could now say to the man which would not make matters worse.
He wrote until two in the morning and then fell asleep at his desk. At three he was woken by a steward wrapping a blanket around his shoulders.
Assisted by Goodsir, Stanley amputated Josephus Geater’s foot. John Peddie and his own assistant, Alexander Macdonald, arrived from the
Terror
as the preparations for the operation were being made.
“A straightforward enough task,” Stanley told them, acknowledging their offer of help. It annoyed him to have so many others crowded into the small room watching him as he worked.
He unwrapped his bag of instruments and tested their sharpness,
pulling down his strop and improving the edges of the saw and those knives which did not satisfy him.
Geater’s foot was swollen and badly bruised, and despite being heavily sedated he called out at each of Stanley’s exploratory prods, and at the smoothing motion of his thumb as Stanley felt beneath the swelling to determine where to make his first cut. He had taken the decision to amputate so soon after the injury because if gangrene was given the chance to take hold then he might be forced to delay by several weeks until the full extent of the contamination had revealed itself. This would greatly reduce his supply of laudanum, and he was convinced that as far as Geater was concerned the end result would be the same.
“Is there no hope of the bones being reset?” Macdonald asked, immediately regretting the remark when he saw the look on Peddie’s face.
“A garter cut?” Peddie said to Stanley, as though in apology for his assistant’s insensitive blunder.
“I think so. Ankle, shin and the mass of undetermined fractures in the foot itself.” He called for Goodsir to fasten his apron around him, and picking up the smallest of his scalpels he bowed his head and said a short prayer for the man on the table.
He began work without speaking to any of them. It was important to cut quickly, to trim away the skin and then to saw through the clean bone and out through the muscle behind before the pain became too great and Geater began thrashing around. Peddie and Macdonald held Geater’s shoulders, Peddie also clasping a wet cloth to his face.