Neither of these things happened; instead the monumental block began to sink, silently at first, and then with a grinding noise louder than any they had heard so far, and as it sank geysers of spray were forced up all around it and these too ignited in the last of the sun.
The dying moments of the sinking block were as spectacular as its beginnings: it appeared to slow for a moment, as though it had encountered some buried obstacle, after which it shook vigorously for a few seconds and then dropped with a sudden roar and rush of spume, slamming into the ice at its base. By that time the sun was almost gone, and as always when this final crescent of light sank beneath the horizon, complete darkness descended in minutes.
The three men walked toward where all this had taken place. They attracted the attention of a small group of men who followed them at a distance, several of them armed with rifles.
“Watch the ground,” Gore warned suddenly, stepping back from a piece of ice which had unexpectedly rocked beneath him.
“Recent fissures,” Fitzjames pointed out, noting the cracks and barely visible ridges, little more than inches high in most places, which now criss-crossed the ice-field all around them.
“Where was it?” Vesconte asked them both, searching for signs of the previous evening’s upheaval.
Gore believed it was to their left, indicating a higher ridge and a series of crevasses which extended from the plain into the lower slopes beyond.
Fitzjames confirmed this by pointing out a mound of ice whose edges were clean and sharp. Gore went ahead alone, moving from side to side on the sound ice and testing the uncertain ground before he committed himself to it. He stopped suddenly, crouched down and then called for them to join him.
The raised slab had been part of the surface layer, and where it had been tilted and raised there was now a depression in the ice so geometrical and sharply defined that it might have been cut out by men using saws. More interesting than this was what lay at the level base of this depression, for there, entombed in ice as clear as glass, were the corpses of at least three hundred narwhals, most fully submerged in their tomb, but some with their tusks and tails and backs breaking the surface, all of them giving the appearance of having died instantaneously as they were long ago coralled together and then trapped by the encircling ice.
The three men stood and looked down in silence. They had all seen small whales frozen in blocked leads before, but never in such great numbers or in such packed confusion, and they could only wonder at the frenzied panic of the creatures as they realized that every route of escape into open water had been cut off to them, and as they were forced to circle closer and closer, crammed side by side and one above the other as the water all around them began to solidify.
The bodies stretched from side to side and end to end of the great depression, suggesting that even more might lie buried beyond those they could already see.
“A fortune in ivory for the man stupid enough to sling over a ladder and take down a saw,” Gore said, his words interrupted by a creaking beneath them which caused them to back away from the edge. At the far end of the depression a slab of ice several feet thick came loose and fell in on the whales, shattering as it struck their frozen bodies and then skittering over them.
Gore and Vesconte helped Fitzjames away from the lip of the excavation, pointing out where cracks in the ice which had been closed on their outward journey were now several inches apart.
Turning back, they encountered the men who had earlier followed them, and who had stopped short at the first distant rumble of the ice.
Fitzjames recognized several of them as marines under Tozer’s command. He greeted them and they said they were pleased to see him so well recovered. One of them pulled a recently killed hare from his jacket and offered it to him.
“Fresh meat,” he said simply. The gift was not made grudgingly, but the man’s manner suggested to Fitzjames that he wished he could have given it without the others looking on.
Fitzjames took the hare and pressed its still-warm body to his face for a moment. He thanked the man and then warned them all against proceeding any farther in that direction. He made no mention of the whales for fear of encouraging the dangerous plunder of their horns.
“Are you with Tozer?” he asked, trying to appear more concerned with tying the hare to his belt than with their answer.
The marines exchanged glances before admitting that they were.
“We thought of paying him a visit and looking over your new quarters,” Fitzjames said, again attempting to make light of the matter, but noting the alarm on the men’s faces at the suggestion.
He felt Gore’s hand on his arm and turned to him.
“I don’t think you’re ready for this,” Gore said quietly.
Already exhausted by their morning’s walk, Fitzjames agreed with him, to the obvious relief of the watching marines.
“We are expected back aboard,” he told them, and the men turned and walked away from him without speaking.
Halfway back to the
Erebus,
just as they had once again entered the stained and trampled ice surrounding their stores, Fitzjames felt faint, dropped one of his sticks and then fell. Neither Gore nor Vesconte was fast enough to catch him, able only to pull him up and brush the moisture from his face.
S
ailing north in his search for tin and amber, the Greek navigator Pytheas imagined that a sea unicorn had pointed the way for him upon leaving the cold island of Thule, and that another had emerged from an impenetrable barrier of ice and fog and pointed in the direction he had come, warning him to turn back into those warmer waters with which he was already familiar. None of his masters or oarsmen had argued with these interpretations.
Twenty years later Pytheas suggested that the original home of these strange creatures might once have been the moon, and that they had possessed the wings which enabled them to make the journey from there to their new home in the icy northern sea. Speculating further on this, he was led to the conclusion that the surface of the moon was also composed of ice, which had once been liquid, but which had gradually hardened, forcing the unicorns to seek out their new home.
Goodsir recounted all this with obvious relish, his common-book open on the sheets beside him. Fitzjames took down his intermittent dictation for him.
“And write this, James. Write that on his second voyage into the Arctic, Frobisher himself came upon a narwhal frozen into the ice at the mouth of the strait afterward to bear his name, and that he too identified this strange creature as a unicorn, dug it from its tomb, sawed off its horn, and took it home with him as a gift for Elizabeth, who—” here Goodsir took the book from Fitzjames and
searched back through its pages. “Who received it ‘graciously and full of awe, as though it were the most precious of jewels.’ Her own words, James. The most precious of jewels. Afterward to be kept guarded, admired and untouched in her wardrobe of robes until her death.” He handed the book back to Fitzjames so that he might finish taking his notes. “And forever afterward regarded as ‘a creature of mythical proportions, born in unfathomable depths or otherwise escaped from some strange bestiary’.”
As Goodsir spoke he frequently wiped the sweat from his brow. On occasion, he spoke quickly, hardly separating his words, and at other times he became distracted, behaving as though he were alone and unobserved, as though he had forgotten what he wanted to say and was having to make a great and silent effort to retrieve some elusive word or lost meaning.
All this Fitzjames attributed to his fever. He finished writing and waited.
“Of course, it is unlikely that Frobisher’s specimen was anything like as well preserved as any of your own fish,” Goodsir said suddenly, staring at his bandaged hand. “More likely that he came upon a beached and rotting corpse, from which he pulled out the horn with no more effort than he might pull a carrot from its bed of sand.”
He laughed at this and then drew up his sheets to wipe his face. There remained a mark on his bandaged hand where old blood and the darker stain of cauterization still showed through. When he lowered the sheets, he had stopped laughing, and was staring directly ahead of him, trembling slightly.
“You felt us rocking in our cradle earlier?” he said.
“Distant tremors. We may yet be released.”
“Ah, yes, release.” This time he spoke almost mockingly, making a flourish with his good hand.
“Whatever,” Fitzjames said, reluctant to continue.
“You used the word corpses,” Goodsir said, stopping him.
“They were all surely dead, even those deeper down.”
“No—‘corpse’—that is where they are supposed to take their name. Old Norse. ‘Nar’ and ‘Hvalr’. Corpse and whale. It was later
believed that their flesh was poisonous, and that this was also how they had come to be named.” Goodsir was now speaking loudly and quickly, as though he were addressing a larger audience. “Scoresby refutes this, of course, and I trust his rigor. According to him, the cooked flesh is a powerful antiscorbutic, better than any of our ordinary meats, that it is greasy and pungent, but that it tastes of chestnuts. Imagine that—chestnuts—as though it were a wild pig rooting for mast all day in a submerged forest.”
“Have you eaten it yourself?” Fitzjames asked.
“Once.”
“And?”
“Scoresby was right.”
It occurred to Fitzjames that a party of men might be sent to excavate a number of the frozen bodies and add these to their stores, but in view of what Goodsir had just told him, and the sinister connection made, he did not suggest this.
Goodsir went on, his excitement growing. “Buffon believed that the whale would attack without warning, that it reveled in carnage and would eat human flesh wherever it could find it. There is a marsh on the coast of Iceland, Pytheas’ Thule, known as the Pool of Corpses. In the twelfth century, Anhald, the first bishop of that island, was shipwrecked there, and among the washed-up bodies of his sailors and the flotsam of his ship he discovered a large number of horns, upon each of which was carved runic symbols colored in red.”
“Signifying?” Fitzjames said, believing he had missed Goodsir’s point.
“Who knows? Signifying perhaps that each man had been given some warning of his own inescapable and terrifying end.”
“Ridiculous,” Fitzjames said, unhappy at the morbid turn their conversation had taken, at the divide they had crossed.
“Perhaps. But such associations take hold in men’s minds. And as both you and I are well aware, there is no mind more open to such prophetic suggestion than the mind of a sailor.” Goodsir laughed at this, and seeing that the laughter was genuine, and that he was being made fun of, Fitzjames laughed with him.
Goodsir retrieved his journal, read closely what Fitzjames had written and then slapped it shut.
Prior to embarking on his own expedition six weeks earlier, Graham Gore had arranged for John Irving to make a photographic record of his preparations and of the members of his party.
Gore himself set up the equipment, explaining to the reluctant Irving how to expose the sensitive plates and how long to keep them uncovered, afterward going to great lengths to arrange his men and their stores in a variety of compositions, running back and forth to examine them through the eyepiece before handing over to Irving. Of the nine plates exposed, only three were successfully developed.
The first showed a broad sweep of ice with broken ground and peaks in the distance, the foreground composed of various piles of stores and four unrecognizable men looking directly at the photographer. One of the dogs was also present, but only as a blur, the animal refusing to sit still for the necessary length of time.
The second plate was more successful, showing the entire party standing side by side with their arms folded across their chests. They had been arranged by Gore in order of height, declining from left to right, a slope reversed on the finished plate.
The final exposure showed only Gore and Des Voeux standing against the
Erebus
, their elongated shadows stretched across the ice and then curved against the hull. Both men held their right arms rigidly upright as though waving to the photographer, this being Gore’s first attempt to include any suggestion of action into the otherwise artificial immobility of the plates.
On his journey south, he took with him mates Des Voeux and Edward Couch, and five others, including James Rigden, captain’s cox, and a single marine private, Robert Hopcraft.
They left on Monday the 24th of May, Gore’s orders being to march until he reached King William Land and establish the true distance and the nature of the terrain between their present position and that part of the known coastline. Current estimates of this varied between twenty and a hundred miles.
They took with them a single sledge on which to haul their tents,
and each man carried his own marching rations in his pack.
During the first day’s march they covered seven miles, delayed by a field of pressure ridges intersected by narrow fissures.
The following day they were held up when Edward Couch fell and injured his ankle. Having strapped his foot, Couch felt able to continue, but rather than add to the four miles they had already covered, Gore chose to make camp.
At sunset, James Rigden, who had gone ahead of the main party, returned with the news that there was land to the southeast of them, and encouraged by this, and convinced that what Rigden had seen was not the distant shore of Boothia, Gore agreed that they would turn in that direction at first light the following day.
They reached this exposed shore an hour before noon, having come a distance of only sixteen miles, and dividing into two parties, they searched in both directions along the low, ice-filled shore.
By Des Voeux’s calculations they were on King William Land at the base of the Boothia Peninsula, but were still to the north and east of James Ross’ Point Victory, reached seventeen years earlier and unvisited ever since. It was difficult to make precise calculations, being so close to the Magnetic Pole, but Des Voeux estimated that they were still fifty miles from Ross’ Farthest West.
It was Gore’s intention to visit neither the Pole nor Point Victory, but to remain for several days longer and explore inland and to the south of where they had come ashore, this being the most valuable area of exploration should a later evacuation to the south become necessary.
They searched for the cairns Ross had built during his journey west, but found only the stakes of an abandoned Eskimo dwelling and the nearby scattered bones of a large animal, whether butchered and stripped or dead of natural causes they could not tell.
Gore set the men to work constructing their own cairns, six in all, at half-mile intervals both north and south of their landing-point, and tall and solid enough for one to be seen from any other. Using a chisel, he numbered these, so that anyone coming after them might know immediately where on the coast they had come ashore, and in each he placed a canister containing the details of the route of
their expedition to date. He also wrote that Sir John Franklin was still in command and that all was well, choosing not to mention the deaths they had already suffered.
He buried the last of these canisters on the 28th of May and then recalled his men to their base, from which they set out back across the ice to the ships.
The sea was still frozen for as far as they could see, but ashore the confused stacks of broken ice suggested to Gore that some recent movement had taken place. Inland, large areas of rock and shingle were exposed, and a succession of low smooth ridges tempted them to the east.
On a short hunting trip immediately prior to their departure, Robert Hopcraft found a discarded cartridge case, and upon inspecting this, Gore was convinced that their path had at last crossed with James Ross.’ He organized a further search along the line taken by Hopcraft, but nothing more was found, with the exception of a large patch of sorrel, which they collected and boiled.
They turned back across the frozen sea on the 31st of May, and following their own tracks they reached the ships two days later.
Franklin congratulated them on their discoveries, pleased that their current position had been so swiftly and easily fixed. Privately, however, he expressed his regret that Gore had not pushed farther south until he came upon more positive proof of Ross’ presence, or perhaps east, crossing the full width of King William Land to determine once and for all whether it truly was a part of the Boothia Peninsula, or if it was in fact a separate island linked only by an ice-bound sea to that larger land mass.
Following his first excursion away from the
Erebus
, Fitzjames did not visit Tozer and the others until ten days later. Since that first trip he had not exerted himself and had continued to recover his health. His one true disappointment during this time was the loss of four of his back teeth, which had come loose from his injured gums, and detached themselves completely during dinner one evening. He had gained half a stone in weight since his return, but his face still bore the signs of his illness. His hair continued to fall out,
and despite Goodsir’s assurances that it would grow again, he regretted the change in his appearance. That he should feel genuinely saddened by this loss surprised him. He knew he was not a vain man, but since his return he frequently found himself comparing what he saw in the mirror with a photograph of himself taken a month before their departure from home. Only a little over two years separated the faces, but the one he now considered daily in the mirror looked at least ten years older. He knew that a man’s years between his mid-thirties and mid-forties represented a dangerous passage, and one for which he now realized he had not yet properly prepared himself.
Also of continuing concern to him was the worsening condition of James Fairholme who, following his rapid recovery, had since suffered some form of relapse and was again feverish and delirious. On one occasion he had left his sick-bed and pulled out all the drawers of the chests around him, spilling their contents and then sitting among these and tearing to shreds any books or papers which came within his reach. Afterward he shouted and screamed until he was discovered by Stanley, who immediately sedated him.
He slept for the next thirty-six hours, and when he woke he had no recollection of anything that had happened. When he saw the results of his destructive rage, he collapsed and wept. He continued to sweat heavily and at the same time to complain of a bone-chilling cold; he cried out in his shallow sleep and became incoherent and distracted when anyone tried to hold a conversation with him. He demanded to see Franklin long after he had been told of Franklin’s death, and on the few occasions when Fitzjames was called upon to help subdue and reassure him, Fairholme did not recognize him, cursing and lashing out with his feeble arms without warning. He was fed regularly, but was seldom able to keep down even the lightest of foods.