Waiting until the surrounding ice was carried clear of them, they resumed rowing.
An hour later they were beyond the influence of the channel, and the ships came into view ahead of them. A fire had been lit at the outer edge of the ice to guide them and its dense black smoke rose in a curve like a trick rainbow. A second boat rowed out to meet them and help them back ashore.
Around the fire the outermost bay ice was already beginning to break. It cracked but remained in position, rocking as the deeper currents began to probe underneath it. It was sea ice, not fresh, and because of the manner in which it had formed, it remained flexible, bulging and rippling without breaking, and where men walked upon it they felt it give beneath them like saturated turf.
During the previous week the
Erebus
and
Terror
had both been re-rigged, and their wooden props had been sawn away and dragged
clear. Now all they waited for were the fissures in the ice to reach in and release them. Night watches were doubled and rigging parties remained on full-day alert for the first indication that they were about to float free.
On the 20th of July a giant berg appeared on their western horizon and drove in upon them, crashing through the shallow ice of the bay and grounding itself less than two hundred yards from the ships. They shook as it gouged along the bottom, leaving a broad open channel in its wake.
Parties of men went out to inspect the berg. Warmed by the high sun, water ran in small streams and cascades from every exposed surface, and upon their approach, the first men to arrive discovered that it contained a small arch through which they might easily pass. Such features were known as the Eyes of God, after the remark supposedly made by St. Brendan upon encountering something similar during his own voyage in northern waters. These Eyes were considered a good omen, and men passed through them shouting out the names of their wives and sweethearts to ensure that they would return to see them again.
Having visited this new arrival himself, Franklin called a conference and he and his officers discussed what they might do next.
“We’ll need three days at the very least if we’re to collect all the supplies ashore,” Gore said, conscious that even this was an optimistic assessment.
“I don’t think we have it,” Reid said, his calmness only adding to the sense of urgency which had come so suddenly upon them, and which some of the others were only then beginning to feel.
“Then every man available must be put ashore,” Franklin said.
“There’s a possibility that if we can break up the firmer ice surrounding our moorings then we might be able to nose our way out using our engines,” Reid said.
“They’re ready to be stoked up,” Fitzjames added enthusiastically.
It was Fitzjames who had petitioned the Admiralty for the engines to be fitted to the ships in the first place, and he had arrived at Greenhithe a month before their departure to supervise their installation and then to test them on the river. Few others shared his
enthusiasm, but masking his disappointment at the size of the engines, and at the locomotive wheels and gearing still attached to them on delivery, he declared himself satisfied with them, convinced that the future of all close-work Arctic exploration lay with steam and sail rather than sail alone. Even the Rosses’ near useless paddles, he pointed out, had taken the
Victory
farther into the heart of the frozen sea than anyone before them.
“Explosives,” Goodsir said unexpectedly, his fingers moving in calculation. “A line of small explosions along our intended course. Weaken the ice before we even begin to push it clear.”
This idea appealed to many, but when Franklin asked Reid what he thought, Reid said that the ice surrounding them was already too unstable and variable in thickness and that to disturb it any further before they were floating free and ready to move out of the bay would bring them more problems than it solved.
“I agree,” said Thomas Blanky, and Goodsir withdrew the suggestion.
Two days later the argument was taken out of their hands. Men working on the
Terror’s
rigging felt her shudder and then begin to rock beneath them. Others out on the surrounding ice saw this and ran toward her. Watching from the fore-deck, Crozier saw the ice directly alongside his bow rise and then sink, causing water to rush up against the hull. He called down for the men on the ice to stay clear, and if possible to return to the safety of the shore. He watched in alarm as a dozen other cracks appeared simultaneously, many of them running toward the
Terror
as though she were the hub of a buckled wheel, and all around her the ice began to tilt and sway, and men abandoned what they were doing and raced for the land. Less than twenty yards from the port bow of the
Erebus
a mound of coal ten feet high was shaken loose and then tipped into the basin of water which suddenly appeared beneath it. A fire upon the ice was equally suddenly extinguished in a spout of steam.
Franklin watched all this from the rail of the
Erebus
, and felt his own vessel begin to shake beneath him. A man was knocked from his perch on the fore-stay and fell heavily to the deck below, where others ran to help him.
Most of those working on the ice made it safely to the shore, where they congregated and stood waving and calling.
All along its outer rim, the bay ice began to break free. Caught off guard by the speed with which the breakup had finally come, Franklin ordered all their boats to be lowered, including their inflatable dinghies, and for these to move among the pieces of floating ice and rescue the men still trapped there. Several men, he saw, had fallen into the water, but were close enough to the shore to be dragged clear. They were in little danger of suffering from exposure in the warming sea, only of being caught and injured by the grinding ice.
Fitzjames and Gore went ashore to supervise the retrieval of the last of their stores, determined that as little as possible should be lost or abandoned by this unexpected turn in their fortunes.
An hour after the breakup had started, both ships were able to cast off and move into open water. There was still no navigable channel leading out of the bay, but they were now in a position, their sails unfurled and their rudders fixed, to make the dash into the wider reaches when the opportunity arose.
By the following morning they were ready to leave. Their boats and sledges had been retrieved, and everywhere around them, on the shore and floating on the ice and in the water, lay the scattered debris of their long stay.
And above all this, clearly visible on the lower slopes of Beechey, were the wooden markers of the three men who had died there.
On the morning of Sunday the 23rd of July, Franklin held a service during which he read aloud the first chapter of Genesis in its entirety, and afterward, shortly before noon, the
Erebus
led the way out through the crumbling ice into the open sea beyond.
“H
ow does she look?” Franklin asked, standing close behind Fitzjames, his own lantern held high to examine the walls, one of them a bulkhead separating the hold from the forward quarters.
“She’s no longer shipping,” Fitzjames called back, his voice amplified and distorted by the confined space in which he was wedged.
On the first day of sailing into Barrow Strait, the
Erebus
shipped two tons of water into her forward coal store through a sprung plank. Her stokers worked for nine hours to carry the damp coal astern and then a caulking party sealed the leak and pumped the bulk of the water clear. A length of planking on the outer hull had been crushed, previously held in place by both the buttress to which it was attached and by the pressure of the outside ice. Once in open water, and without the support of the ice, the buttress had been jarred, rupturing the inner hull and bunker wall.
Wading knee-deep through the black sludge, Fitzjames shone his lantern into the gap between the two hulls, searching for further trapped water which might need to be pumped away.
Franklin passed him a hammer to test the surrounding spars, and both men fell silent to listen to the dull wooden knocks which reassured them that the remaining timbers were sound. New wood had already been taken to the store and now lined the walls, held clear of the dirty floodwater in rope slings.
“How far below her waterline, do you think?” Franklin asked as
Fitzjames twisted his chest and arms to extricate himself from the tight space.
“A foot or two.” Fitzjames examined the warm caulking to the left and right of the damage. There was still some seepage, but no more than might be expected after so long out of the water.
It was nightfall by the time the examination was completed, and Franklin ordered any remaining repairs to wait until the following morning. Leaving, they passed the exhausted stokers, and Franklin thanked them for having acted so promptly. The men were coated black from head to foot, only their hands and eyes and mouths washed clean. Water still lapped around them in the narrow passage, and they were forced to back out of it to allow Franklin and Fitzjames to pass by.
The two men parted, and Franklin went on deck, surprised by the darkness of the brief summer night. The
Terror’
s lights were visible a mile off their port bow, momentarily extinguished as a large berg passed silently and unseen between them. There was no moon and he could pick out only the closest of the drifting ice.
The repair work resumed at dawn. Regardless of the progress of this, they would sail at noon, taking advantage of a broad lead which had appeared ahead of them during the night, and which ran due south, taking them only a few degrees from their projected course.
When Fitzjames joined Reid on the fore-top platform, Reid inquired about the progress of the repair and the likelihood of their hull having been weakened. He himself had survived two ships which had been crushed and sunk by the ice. He indicated ahead of them, pointing along the lead to their southern horizon. Ice still moved across their path from west to east.
“Is it heavy?” Fitzjames asked him.
Reid answered him with a nod, his eyes fixed on the colliding ice ahead of them. “It’ll turn us and flush us straight back out into Baffin if we don’t find some way through it before the end of August. A winter in it would cripple us for good, and come next spring we’d be struggling to keep the pieces of ourselves together.”
“Sir John is hopeful of a twenty-day passage,” Fitzjames said, probing for Reid’s own estimation.
“So I hear,” Reid said. “I wish us luck.” He climbed down from their narrow perch.
Fitzjames remained where he was until the noon bell was sounded and he felt the
Erebus
move beneath him as her mooring lines were released.
Moving swiftly along the open channel, there was an air of excitement and expectation among both crews. This did not last long: after only four hours of unobstructed sailing they came up against an impenetrable rush of ice across their bows, a mass so dense and fast-moving that it would have been madness to try and enter it. Nothing they had so far encountered had prepared them for what they now saw: islands of ice immeasurable in the glare sailing past them at three times the speed they themselves might achieve even with a favorable wind; bergs twice their own height, caught, crushed and scattered, and all around them the water flowing and eddying in foaming torrents, which every now and then rose in spouts and fountains where submerged ice collided and forced it up.
The
Terror
was the first to reach the edge of this maelstrom, and at the first indication that she was being drawn into its peripheral currents, Crozier gave the order to turn about and retrace their course back into calmer water.
The first those on the
Erebus
knew of the problem ahead was when they saw the
Terror
coming toward them with a warning flag rising on her foremast. Seeing that Crozier was headed for the safety of a grounded berg, Franklin set a course to join him, and the two ships drew alongside each other.
A boat was lowered and Crozier and John Irving came aboard the
Erebus.
“Too powerful, and filled with far more ice than you can see from here,” Irving told Franklin and Fitzjames. “We were barely able to draw back.”
“Mr. Irving exaggerates,” Crozier said. “Vessels as stout as ours might enter it with care.”
“And the reason for your withdrawal?” Fitzjames asked.
“To await your arrival. And to bring you the news that the
Terror
at least is ready to forge a crossing.”
“With an invitation to follow in your wake?”
Crozier breathed deeply and turned to Franklin. “Sir John?”
“I agree with James and Mr. Irving, Francis. Even if we were able to negotiate a passage, we would undoubtedly become separated and then waste time in searching for each other once we were clear at the other side.”
“As usual, Mr. Irving has overstated the case for doing nothing. Delay, delay, delay.”
“Look at it,” Fitzjames said in Irving’s defense, pointing to where the swiftly moving ice ran in a constant stream, heliographing its dangerous presence to them each time a piece spun or overturned and caught the sun.
“I still say that to delay is the wrong decision. We all know how calm and stable by comparison the southbound straits beyond are likely to be.”
“Oh?” Fitzjames said.
“History, Mr. Fitzjames, history. For the want of only a few days’ sailing we might just as well never have crossed Baffin for all we’ve achieved so far.”
“We wait,” Franklin said firmly, aware of the men gathering around them to listen.
Crozier, too, saw them. “Back to the
Terror
,” he said to Irving, almost pushing him to the rail.
Fitzjames was about to speak, but Franklin stopped him.
The delay frustrated everyone, and was further exacerbated by the warm sun and pale blue skies beneath which they waited.
“We are being mocked,” Gore remarked to Fitzjames, Goodsir and Vesconte as the four men exercised upon deck during the fifth morning of their enforced idleness.
The following day was the 1st of August, and they were all aware of the turning point this represented, of how the loosening grip of the previous winter would shortly become the stiffening, probing fingers of the next.
Later that day, the lookout on the
Terror
called down that the distant ice flow appeared to be decreasing. A boat was lowered, and Fitzjames, Irving, Reid and Blanky rowed to the limit of the open
water to investigate. There they saw that the islands of ice moving past them had diminished in size, and that there were now free-moving bergs in the water, through which a passage might be navigated with luck and caution. The current too appeared to be flowing less vigorously now that it was no longer forced into narrow channels amid the ice.
“The time might have come to take our chances,” Irving said uncertainly.
“The chance of collision weighed against an early arrival in the south?” Fitzjames said.
“Captain Crozier believes—”
“That we might earn ourselves some charmed protection by pitting our wits and strength against it all,” Blanky said.
“Propitiate the Gods.”
“The Gods are up there, we are down here,” Reid said. “What do they see that we can’t? There’s been no let up in the flow since we first arrived alongside it.”
They all nodded in agreement.
“Whatever Mr. Crozier or Sir John might pray for, we’d be fools to try and get across it as it now is. We’d be forced to sail almost directly against the flow of the ice.”
“And still need to maneuver when the need arose,” added Blanky.
“Which would be every few minutes,” Fitzjames said dejectedly.
“And trust to favorable winds for the entire passage.” Blanky licked his palm and held it up. “Which, regardless of whatever sacrifice we might care to make, we have yet to be blessed with.”
Fitzjames rose to his feet and took out his telescope. “There are some stationary islands, keel-ground amid the rush.”
“Impossible,” Reid said. “Too deep. If they’re stuck it’s because they’re grounded on the ice beneath them.” He too examined these larger bergs.
“Even so, might we not, given that favorable wind, move from piece to piece, mooring each night and selecting a new target for each day’s sailing?”
In the event, they were surrounded during the night by a dense
bank of fog, and their departure was delayed until the morning of the 3rd.
They sailed only with close-reefed topsails, allowing themselves to be drawn south in the drift. In support of his plan to move cautiously from berg to berg, Fitzjames also suggested that their boilers be fired so that they might be ready to use their engines if the wind turned against them, or if either vessel became uncontrollable by sail alone in the unpredictable currents ahead. Franklin agreed to this, and as they sailed smoke rose for the first time from both their stacks. Only Crozier voiced the opinion that he would sooner trust to providence than his stokers.
By dusk they had made three miles, and at ten in the evening they moored to an island of ice which had been constantly visible ahead of them from their starting point.
Despite their slow progress, everyone was encouraged that they had made this part of their passage safely. In the lee of the island the water was calm and the wind had dropped completely. A glossy white cliff rose 200 feet off their starboard side, and once secured their mooring ropes were let out so that they might come to rest away from this and any ice which might fall from its overhanging rim.
Collisions were heard throughout the night, and on several occasions the alarm was sounded when ice from the main flow drifted in upon them. None of this damaged them, and as the night progressed the alarms became fewer.
The repair to the
Erebus
’ bunker was completed the following morning and its cargo laboriously returned.
Franklin and Crozier breakfasted together and congratulated themselves on the previous day’s crossing.
Apart from their more obvious common concerns, their only other cause for alarm now lay with the men who remained in the sick bays of both ships. Genge continued to suffer from the symptoms which had killed Torrington, Hartnell and Braine, and Edward Little was still in considerable pain from his leg. It was Peddie’s belief, Crozier told Franklin, that Genge would shortly die, and upon
hearing this Franklin regretted having allowed him to be so severely punished.
The following day they made three miles, and the one after that seven.
And on the 6th of August they sailed free of the bulk of the ice, and for three days were able to cruise without mooring until they once again encountered ice too concentrated and fast-flowing to penetrate.
They tied up to a secure berg, and during the night of the 9th, Edward Genge died.
He was buried at sea the following morning, his corpse weighted with ballast and dropped into the water an hour before they sailed. The
Terror’
s marines fired into the air, and all around them flocks of hidden birds erupted from their roosts on the surrounding ice.
On one occasion, nineteen days into the strait, the
Terror
scraped her keel on the submerged tongue of a berg around which she was sailing. The
Erebus
lay half a mile ahead of her, oblivious to what had happened. The damage was not great, but part of the
Terror’
s rudder housing was lost, and until even a crude repair could be made she proved difficult to steer. The problem was made worse by the increasing number of smaller, free-moving pieces of ice among which they were once again sailing.
By the time Franklin realized something was wrong he was almost two miles ahead of the
Terror
. He finally saw her signal in the falling dusk, and ordering all their own sail to be taken in, he waited until she caught up with him. Because there was no substantial berg to which the
Terror
might moor while repairs were made, Franklin offered her a tow and Crozier accepted. The ships were still in open water as darkness fell, and it was not until two in the morning that they came upon a mass of ice large enough to provide them with the necessary shelter.