O
n their third day of drifting and warping amid the thickening ice a school of belugas swam alongside them moving north, vividly white, and visible to a considerable depth in the clear water.
“Not a dry skin among them,” Reid said, as he and Fitzjames watched them pass. “As full of oil as they’ll ever be.”
Amused by this, Fitzjames suggested fetching Reid a harpoon so that he might practice his old skill.
“They were always our sickly fish,” Reid said.
“Sickly?”
The sheen of the creatures’ skins and the sunlight gilding the sea gave them the appearance of being almost translucent, as though, like jellyfish, they existed without any obvious skeleton, muscle or meat.
“See them pass under you during a moonlit night and you’d be as hard pressed as many before you not to believe that they weren’t the ghosts or the souls of drowned men,” Reid said.
Fitzjames acknowledged the comparison. He asked why there were so many young and Reid explained that what they were seeing was known among whalers as a nursery troop, this being only the second he himself had ever seen.
“They give birth in secret places well beyond our reach and then when the young are grown enough to travel they begin their migrations. The last time I saw anything like this was on the north shore of Davis. We were ready to turn for home when a big school of
Greenland fish came straight out across our bows on a course for the pack.”
“And did you give chase?”
“We were too full. We’d had a good year, already paid for the ship and the crew three times over.” He paused for a moment to retrieve and savor the memory.
The whales continued to cruise past them, a group of the younger fish congregating close to their hull.
“We sold the baleen cheap for sheep pens,” Reid said. “One year we’d glut the market, the next we’d leave it empty and begging for every foot of bone it could get.” He was distracted from his reverie by the sound of distant gunfire, and both of them looked across to the
Terror,
where a number of men, immediately identified by their blue jackets as marines, were hanging from the rigging and firing down into the water.
Fitzjames was more outraged at this than Reid, and he searched the surface of the sea for any sign that the marksmen had found their targets. At first he saw nothing, but then his attention was drawn to a flock of gulls gathering astern of the
Terror
, and to the stain he was then able to make out on the water.
“What in God’s name is Crozier thinking of?” he said aloud.
Attracted by the noise, others came to the rail and some cheered at the sight of this first kill.
A man with a pistol climbed their own rigging and fired into the water at the nearest of the small whales. Fitzjames ordered him to stop and a chorus of aggrieved disapproval rose around him.
The whales, apparently unconcerned, or perhaps oblivious to what was happening, made no attempt to leave the ships or dive out of range.
Franklin and Gore arrived to look. The others dispersed, and Franklin asked Fitzjames if he knew why the men on the
Terror
were still shooting at the fish. As he spoke, the whales passing them by decreased in number until they were gone completely. The shooting ceased and the
Terror
sailed on in silence, leaving only her stains and echoes and small dabs of gunsmoke astern.
Fitzjames reported their day’s progress and the distance they had
made during the previous four hours of drifting and sailing.
Franklin appeared distracted, his eyes still on the distant ice beneath which the whales had finally disappeared.
“What do they tell us, Mr. Reid?” he asked, silencing Fitzjames, who did not immediately understand what was meant by the remark.
Reid considered his answer for a moment before giving it. “I’d be a happier man if they’d passed us going south, Sir John.”
“My thoughts precisely. And yet the current still draws us on.”
All around them the build-up of grounded and floating ice was narrowing both their choice of channels and the channels themselves. They were, in effect, sailing into a funnel, their course now determined by the most promising-looking of the leads still available ahead of them.
The horizon they referred to as their “western shore” was not in fact land, but old dark ice ruptured and mounded in the semblance of land, stretching from north to south as far as they could see. It offered them a possible refuge, and everyone took comfort in its presence in a seascape whose more immediate features changed from one hour to the next.
Vesconte had taken readings as best he could from their moving platform, estimating that the uppermost peak of this western ridge approached a height of 500 feet. From this he concluded that it was ancient and undisturbed ice, remarking that if they were caught too close among it then they themselves might grow ancient and remain undisturbed for just as long.
The Boothia Peninsula still lay invisible to the east, and they had detected no current to suggest that any inlet or navigable passage lay between themselves and Prince Regent’s Inlet on its distant shore.
Franklin left them and returned to his cabin.
The men remaining on deck considered the channel ahead of them. It had narrowed considerably during the past two days, its banks of ice growing ever more solid, and soon the two ships would be forced to sail close together if they were to avoid being separated. When sailing abreast became impossible, they would line up astern and follow a single course.
Vesconte said that his magnetic instruments had become unreliable and that his azimuth compasses and dipping needles were now useless, so close had they come to the shifting Magnetic Pole. They took some consolation from the fact that they were the first men to approach this since James Ross had marched to it from the trapped
Victory
fifteen years earlier.
Their conversation was cut short by Gore, who pointed out to them a new and prominent peak which had just then come into view above their southern horizon, and which they immediately all examined through their glasses.
Realizing that their unhindered drift might be about to come to an end sooner than he had imagined, Fitzjames ordered their winch ropes to be coiled, and then signaled for the
Terror
to take note of what lay ahead. At best the distant peak might be the ice-capped summit of an island; at worst it might represent the highest point of a land mass blocking their way forward.
At first he believed they had once again come within sight of land and that they might make for this through the thickening floe and establish their winter quarters there. But as the afternoon progressed and the sun fell lower in the sky, he saw the way in which this new landmark reflected the light, and knew that like the “land” off their starboard bow, this too was mounded, mountainous ice.
As anticipated, the ice-packed channel continued to narrow during the following days, and on the 4th of October the
Terror
came astern. All around them the smaller pieces of ice began to crash against both ships with increasing frequency and force.
On the 7th of October, after twenty-four hours during which they had sailed less than two miles, they spent their first full day warping themselves into a secure position within the ice field ahead.
They could not allow themselves to be caught on the thickening fringes of the floe where fractures and collisions were more frequent, and where the probability of damage among the large and unstable ice masses was correspondingly greater. Bulk attracted bulk, and the bergs now gathering around them varied from the size of their own boats to islands the size of cathedrals, and all of them shifting and
grinding together in a bed of shattering and reforming surface ice already several feet thick.
At noon Fitzjames gave the order for what little remained of their sail to be taken in, and for Reid and his party to go out on the ice. A second party led by Thomas Blanky climbed down from the
Terror
. The two groups congregated for a moment and then dispersed.
Reid and a dozen men returned to within hailing distance of the
Erebus
and the slack of her two hawsers was pulled tight across the fixed ice. A few minutes later their first anchorage point was gouged out and the anchors secured. Winching parties then rewound the ropes, and hauled the
Erebus
into the ice shelf, crushing it beneath her as she went.
The solid-looking ice gave easily beneath the ship’s weight, and the men ashore ran ahead of the splintering deltas which spread around them.
After an hour, her winching crews exhausted, the
Erebus
had been warped seventy yards and had reached her anchors.
Aboard the
Terror
, the work was again made easier by following the path already cleared through the ice, and she was pulled by her boats into the gap behind the leading ship.
The ice closed quickly around them, and they moored that night having warped themselves 150 yards into the field. When the temperature fell the displaced water froze all around them and a watch was posted to warn them of any further movement in the ice which might threaten their planned route the following day.
For the first time since leaving Beechey, they felt as well as heard the movement of the ice, felt as it squeezed their timbers, and as it knocked against them with a drumming sound where fresh ice, unable to rise to the covered surface, rolled along their hulls in its attempt to float clear.
That night a powerful collision woke everyone and they gathered on deck to see that a slab of ice twelve feet thick and rising to a height equal to their own had been suddenly and violently pushed up fifty feet off their port bow. Their lanterns were reflected in the lustrous surface of this slab, and in the darkness its upper edge could not be discerned. They heard and felt the more distant collisions
where the larger masses ran together or broke up, and heard too the unsettling groan of trapped air skimming beneath the thickening surface. Those who watched were deafened by the noise of all this, and shaken by the vibrations which gripped both ships and spilled the mounds of stores on their decks.
The upended slab continued to rise as though it were being squeezed up from some vast underwater machinery. Though some returned to their bunks and the warmth of the stoves, most remained on deck to watch what might happen next, ready to take to the boats until the danger had passed.
With the first light of day they saw that the risen slab was wedged and held fast by a series of lesser blocks which had appeared around its base, and which now supported it upright where it stood. To some it rose in silhouette like the prow of a sinking ship.
The sun was fully risen by ten, and at eleven Reid and Blanky met on the ice to plan their route past this disturbance.
The warping crews were on the ice at noon, and by three the jagged eruption had been reduced to a small mount three hundred yards astern.
For a further hour they forced their way across a broad and level plain using only their engines. Their progress by this means was comparatively effortless, but they were frequently forced to reverse where the ice would not give to their gentle shoving. There was no longer any possibility of turning back into the rapidly freezing channels they left behind them.
They steamed until darkness, driving themselves into the ice until it became impossible to go any farther.
They were further hindered by a storm which lasted for two days, and when this finally abated on the morning of the 14th, they emerged to find themselves sitting on a vast plain barely distinguishable, or so Franklin remarked, from the snow-covered Lincolnshire landscape of his home. In support of this comparison, he pointed out to them the low rounded mounds of the Wolds, the level horizon of the frozen North Sea, and here and there the jagged spire of an otherwise concealed village church.
It being Sunday, a service was held and hymns sung, and afterward
their bells were tolled, pealing hour after hour to celebrate their arrival, and as though in determined summons of some other, more stubborn congregation in that so-far Godless place.
Following a stocktake of their provisions, Fitzjames reported to Franklin that they still possessed enough fuel to keep their stoves burning for the next thirty-six months. Alternatively, he suggested, they had sufficient for twelve months’ heat and 200 miles’ steady steaming at six knots. Franklin told him to overhaul their boiler and engine in readiness for further use. He still anticipated a drift to the south in the coming winter and was determined to be ready to move with it when it came.
They finally abandoned all hope of winching themselves any farther on the 21st of October, after six hours during which they were able to make no progress whatsoever.
That evening both ice-masters reported that they were now deeply embedded in a field of ice which extended for at least ten miles behind them and possibly ten times that distance ahead.
Over the previous days, parties had explored in all directions, returning with the news that there were no major fissures or recent upheavals for at least five miles on either side of them. They brought back samples, from which Goodsir deduced the age and density of the ice, and this too reassured them, convincing Franklin that they had reached a secure position on the plain, and one from which they might continue south with the breakup the following summer.