Stanley looked at each man and then poured spirit over that part of the leg about to be cut. The blade went in quickly as far as the bone and he slid it deftly both left and right of the line he had chosen. There was little immediate blood, but this began to flow more heavily as he drew back the two lengths of severed skin. He picked up his saw, and positioning it on the exposed bone, he drew it back a few inches to feel the teeth bite and then pushed it quickly forward.
Geater screamed and Macdonald lost his grip on his shoulder,
fumbling and grabbing at it as Geater tried to struggle free. Peddie pushed the cloth he held into Geater’s mouth. He leaned close to his ear and spoke to him. Stanley continued sawing. Blood flowed from the cut on to the cloths mounded beneath. Goodsir pulled tighter on the straps holding Geater’s thigh, releasing the one around his calf as he felt the bone finally give and as the saw passed through into the softer flesh behind. Stanley immediately took up a knife, and supporting that part of the leg he had already almost severed, he cut through the remaining tendons and skin with a succession of short slashes. The foot and shin came away completely and he let it fall to the floor. Goodsir released another of the straps, and with only a single tourniquet remaining at Geater’s groin, the flow of blood suddenly increased, spurting over his own and Stanley’s apron.
At Geater’s head, Alexander Macdonald began to retch.
Stanley took a bowl of diluted spirit and threw it over Geater’s exposed stump. Geater screamed again and then passed out. Taking advantage of this respite, Stanley stood back from the patient. Relieved of his part in the proceedings, Goodsir went to the door and called for Philip Reddington, who had been waiting outside.
Reddington came in with a small bowl of molten pitch intended as a temporary seal for the wound in its antiseptic state and to stem the flow of blood. There had been no improvement on this crude and simple remedy for as long as Stanley had been practicing, and it fell to the ship’s caulker to assist in this final, and often fatal, part of the operation.
Stanley poured the pitch, adding more spirit as this congealed and then set firm over the exposed flesh. Later he would peel it off using paraffin. He built up the thickening liquid in layers until Geater’s leg came to resemble the ball of a pollarded willow, and the scent of burning was added to the already overpowering smell of the spirit and pitch. Pungent smoke marbled the cabin.
Instructing Peddie and Macdonald to release their grip on Geater, Stanley looked more closely at the unconscious man. He opened his eyelids and felt his pulse. He pressed his palm to Geater’s soaked and burning forehead and then lifted the thigh of the sawn leg,
peeling hardened splashes of pitch from the table before laying it back down.
Alexander Macdonald asked to leave and then ran from the room with both hands over his mouth.
Retrieving the amputated foot from where it had fallen, Goodsir examined it.
At a signal from Stanley, Reddington called for four men to carry Geater from the surgery to the bed which had been prepared for him in the forward hold.
When the patient was gone, Peddie apologized to Stanley for the behavior of his assistant. Stanley said nothing; instead he collected the cloths from the table and the floor and stuffed them into a sack for burning. He washed his bloody instruments, scraped the last of the pitch from the table and doused the bloodstains with cold water. Then John Weekes the carpenter was sent for and shown the severed leg to help him judge the length of the peg to be fitted to Geater’s stump.
T
he ice came slowly, a few small floe-pieces as hesitant as the first, drifting into the double bay from both the east and the west and then grounding in the shallows or running ashore on the beach or the spit of land. But gradually, the size and number of these pieces increased, and new watches were stationed at both points of entry.
James Reid had led the first party to their most distant outlook on the west Devon coast, following in the footprints of Vesconte and his surveying party, and then meeting the men as they made their way back down to the ships.
On their second day ashore Edward Little had fallen and slid eighty feet down a scree slope. He protested that he was uninjured, but had afterward walked with a painful limp. He was helped down the hillside now by Gore and Irving.
The climb to the peak overlooking Wellington Channel took three hours. With Reid went Des Voeux and John Bridgens, steward. They left Vesconte’s path and turned west, reaching a point at which the broad expanse of water beyond Devon was finally revealed to them in its entirety.
It surprised Reid to see how much of this was already filled with ice; equally surprising to him was the extent to which this had closed all around them in their sheltered backwater, surrounding them entirely and ready now to move in on them. Bergs larger than the ships drifted along the edges of the pack, collided with it and were either shattered or pushed forward by it. Watching this, it became clear to
Reid that their own harbor would freeze over sooner than they had anticipated, and he became concerned that the pressure of the ice arriving from the west did not push a wall of bergs in upon them from which they would later be unable to extricate themselves. He kept these thoughts to himself.
Bridgens called out that he thought he could see a vessel in Wellington Channel, but this turned out to be only a dark cap upon a large berg already run aground.
It was mid-afternoon and the light was fading as they began their descent to the
Erebus
across the isthmus, where they saw that in addition to the smaller bergs drifting in upon them, the water of the bay was freezing around its edges for the first time.
Four days later it had frozen outward from the shore to a distance of a hundred yards, thickening as it spread, until three days after that it was found to be solid to a depth of two feet and capable of supporting the weight of a man and his loaded sledge.
It also began to form outward from the two ships, until a precarious pathway existed between them. Props were sunk into this thickening ice to keep the vessels level as they rose and then froze into position. The
Erebus
remained at an even keel, but the
Terror,
standing in water a fathom deeper, began to list to starboard as the ice gathered beneath her. Crozier ordered her to be winched closer to the shore, using boat parties to break the ice ahead of her. She was anchored when her keel touched the soft bottom again, and her own boats and those of the
Erebus
waited alongside her all day and into the night as the ice re-formed beneath her hull. In this way they settled her level, and instead of rising beneath her, the adjacent ice was cut loose and allowed to mound into ridges a few feet from her sides.
Two men were taken ill during this time—John Torrington, stoker on the
Terror,
and John Hartnell, a seaman on the
Erebus.
Alerted by the appearance and the persistent symptoms shown by Hartnell, Stanley could only conclude that he was suffering from the onset of scurvy. At first he refused to believe this: no one else was suffering, and Hartnell had been eating fresh food and taking his lemon juice, of which twice the usual ration had so far been administered in an
effort to build up a greater degree of protection against the disease when it eventually did appear among them.
Hartnell lost weight. His joints ached and he bruised easily; he became listless and enervated. Reporting all this to Franklin, Stanley conferred with Peddie, who told him of the identical symptoms in Torrington. Both surgeons knew that the disease seldom struck isolated individuals, but afflicted whole crews to varying degrees, and it was Peddie who made the alarming suggestion that if the cause of the men’s suffering
was
scurvy, then their lemon juice or other antiscorbutics were considerably less potent than they had been led to believe. Franklin ordered a cask of the juice to be brought to his cabin, and in the company of Crozier, Fitzjames and the two surgeons, he opened it and ladled out its contents for them to sample. They all declared it to be fresh and strong. It had not frozen or diluted itself, and nor had it been contaminated in any way. After a year or two in the cask it would begin to congeal into a glutinous ball at its center, but as yet it showed no signs of doing so.
Reassured, Franklin resealed the cask.
Stanley suggested that the two men might be suffering from some kind of food poisoning, and this, in view of the spoiled food which had already been brought to light and destroyed, seemed a more likely explanation. Franklin asked his surgeons if anyone else had reported sick to them, and was told that three or four men on each vessel had reported stomach cramps, vomiting and loss of appetite.
The sun finally dipped below the horizon on the 21st of November. Some were unsettled by the change from light to dark, and all, regardless of their previous internments, were made cautious by it. To some, the full moon seemed to be as bright as the waning sun.
The ice, which had earlier been so noisy as it moved into place along its channels around them, was now almost completely silent. Occasionally it cracked in the darkness with the sound of a pistol being fired, and with the same wooden echo of a gunshot; and sometimes it fell in sheets from the cliff faces, collapsing into powder before it hit the ground below. Sometimes it murmured in the distance with the noise of an approaching crowd, and those who heard
this for the first time swore they could detect the voices of others in it calling out to them. More than one man on watch made a fool of himself by calling back in answer to these voices, convinced he had established contact with someone when all he had done was pick up the returning echo of one of his own companions.
A fortnight later Christmas wreaths and decorations were hung on the covered decks of both ships. The path between the vessels was marked with stakes and macadamized with coal ash from their boilers and ovens.
Their tenting was doubled and reinforced, and by the time the first of the bad weather arrived both ships were ready to withstand it. Ice formed quickly in the rigging and on the exposed areas of deck, sealing canvas and rope to wood and preventing all draughts from penetrating below. A thick, insulating layer was allowed to build up, to thaw and refreeze into an impregnable protective coating, and this too was strengthened with scattered ash.
It gathered a foot deep on their vaulted roof and then in twelve-foot drifts against their hulls, through which corridors were cut for the men to take their daily exercise on the land and frozen sea. On the coldest days this amounted to no more than running the short distance from one vessel to the other and back again, but whenever the weather was kinder to them they spent several hours outside, collecting supplies by the light of the moon or exploring the changed contours of the world around them.
On Christmas Eve a service was held on the ice and the enclosed bay was filled with their singing voices.
Two sides of frozen ox were roasted, and forty of their geese slaughtered. The cook Richard Wall made a pudding in the shape of the island and in the vanilla sauce at its base he floated two small cinnamon ships. Toasts were drunk to the Queen and to those left at home.
Fitzjames wrote in his journal that he doubted if he had ever celebrated a more joyful or hopeful Christmas. He wrote an eighteen-page letter to his sister and opened the gift of books, knitted socks and waterproof cape she and her husband had sent with him. In addition to this she had given him a Fortnum and Mason’s
hamper, instructing him not to open it until Christmas Day, having chosen its contents so that none would spoil in the meantime. Some men unwrapped fruit cakes baked for them by their wives, and these they cut and ate with the greatest fondness of all.
The cabins and quarters remained decorated for the full twelve days of Christmas.
On New Year’s Eve a concert was given, in which some sang and others recited. A small drama titled “Arctic Light” was enacted, featuring both Neptune the dog and Jacko the monkey. Goodsir produced a shadow-play telling a tale of piracy, and Gore performed a magic show, producing fresh eggs from his ears and mouth until a dozen filled his cap.
John Torrington died on New Year’s Day. He had remained weak and barely conscious for a fortnight, eating nothing, drinking little, and continuing to lose weight and the will to live.
During the celebrations of the previous evening Peddie had sat with him, knowing he was close to death, every hour checking his heartbeat and weakening pulse. He died at four in the morning, and at nine the surgeon reported the death to Crozier, who refused permission for an autopsy to be carried out, insisting instead that the body be prepared for immediate burial, either later that same day or the one following. In this, however, he was thwarted by a snowstorm which began to blow around them at noon and which lasted for six days.
On board the
Erebus,
the condition of John Hartnell also continued to worsen. He was attended by Goodsir, and by his brother Thomas, another seaman, whom Franklin had excused his duties so that he might attend to his younger brother’s needs. There was no doubt in Goodsir’s mind that Hartnell was dying of whatever it was that had already killed John Torrington.
During the six claustrophobic days of the storm, of which he saw and heard nothing, Hartnell remained conscious. He had lost weight at an alarming rate during the past month and was now little more than a skeleton. Sores had erupted the full length of his back, and his knees and elbows were stiff and painful to bend. He had lost
many of his teeth, and each time he coughed or tried to speak those remaining rattled in their sockets. His gums had wasted, and were now almost transparent in places. He ate nothing, but was able to swallow half a cupful of thin broth twice a day, spoon-fed to him by his brother. The two men had served together for the past five years, and it was a painful ordeal for Thomas Hartnell to watch his brother decline and waste in this manner.
Following the death of Torrington, it was also obvious to Goodsir that only the will to live in the company of his brother kept John Hartnell alive. But eventually this was not enough, and he died during the afternoon of January the 4th.
Goodsir reported the death to Stanley, who immediately told Franklin. Like Crozier, Franklin ordered the body prepared for burial, but then changed his mind and acceded to Goodsir’s request to perform an autopsy.
Thomas Hartnell gave his permission. He undressed his dead brother and washed his body. He combed his hair and picked out the loose strands which came away in his comb. Defeated in his task of improving the appearance of the discolored and emaciated corpse, he knelt and prayed until Goodsir returned to start work upon it.
The procedure was swift and straightforward. An incision was made running vertically from the breastbone to the navel, and then two further cuts were made from this toward the thigh bones, creating an inverted Y. Goodsir then peeled back the skin and dry flesh beneath to examine the organs inside. The stomach had shrunk to a withered sac, and the intestines were desiccated and ruptured in several places. He was not convinced that either of these had caused Hartnell’s death, believing them to be the consequence of some other, greater debilitation. He himself was now certain that both Torrington and Hartnell had suffered some kind of poisoning, possibly as a result of sharing an illicit meal of contaminated food during their time ashore together. The liver and both kidneys were darker and harder than normal, the former enlarged to the point where it could be seen pressing up into Hartnell’s skin. Goodsir removed this and made an exploratory cut along its full length. Inside
it was darker still, and its consistency unlike any other he had seen.
He was joined by Stanley, curious as to his findings. The surgeon was not convinced of the need for the investigation, knowing that its results would remain inconclusive. No written report was to be made of the autopsy.
“Definitely not scurvy,” Stanley said, leaning closer to examine the opened liver, and to lift out both kidneys and prod them with his thumb in the palm of his hand. He opened Hartnell’s closed eyes and kneaded the flesh of his face, noting the marks this left. He was easily able to pull out another tooth, inspect it and then push it back into its socket.
Goodsir agreed with him, even though many of the symptoms corresponded with those of long-term scurvy sufferers.
“That, I think, is all we need to know,” Stanley said, dropping the kidneys back into the open flesh.
Goodsir was annoyed that Stanley, Franklin, Crozier and Peddie had all arrived at the same expedient and reassuring conclusion before he began his investigation. He had asked Crozier to reconsider and let him perform the same operation on John Torrington, but again Crozier had refused, and Franklin had been unwilling to pursue the matter on his behalf.