The mute boatman was waiting for them, and they pulled away into the darkness until the few lights astern looked like scattered fires on the shore, one by one extinguished as some other low and invisible land blocked their view.
Four days before they were due to leave, news reached the
Erebus
of a whaler that had grounded several miles to the north of them, having reputedly just accomplished a six-day ice-free journey across
the area of the Middle Pack. Upon hearing this, Reid was determined to visit the vessel and hear a first-hand account of the state of the water, but the news came late in the day and could not be acted upon immediately.
The waist boat was lowered at four the next morning. The sea remained calm, deadened by the cold of the melting ice to the north, and the dip and rise of their oars did little to disturb it.
Gore sat in the prow of the boat, a cape over his shoulders, and warned them of obstacles ahead. On several occasions they were forced to divert from their course to avoid mooring chains and ropes gone slack with the ebb.
“A pity her captain couldn’t bring her to an anchorage here,” Fitzjames said to Reid.
“If she’s holed he’ll have good enough reason to stay away from the scavengers of this place.”
“Do you know him?”
“If it’s the same man, I haven’t seen or spoken to him for almost ten years.”
“And will he be able to make his repairs where he is?”
Reid sniffed the air deeply, making it appear as though his answer somehow depended upon whatever this brought to him. “I should think so, Mr. Fitz.”
Fitzjames had not been in his bunk until after midnight, spending three hours the previous evening completing a long letter to his sister, and he was aware now that if he sat back and leaned his head upon his shoulder, then he might easily fall asleep. Gore, too, looked tired and disheveled, a thick scarf wound round his neck beneath the cape, and wearing tweed leggings to his calves. His hair was unbrushed and he yawned frequently.
“You should have brought along our camera, Mr. Gore,” Fitzjames said to him, avoiding the use of Christian names in front of the two marines who rowed them.
At the mention of the camera, Gore frowned.
Upon hearing of Franklin’s expedition, the photographer Robert Adamson had traveled to the Admiralty from Edinburgh and presented
them with one of his cameras with which to make a record of their exploits. It was an opportunity not to be missed, he had insisted, convincing them of the merits of the device, of the irrefutable evidence and record it would take back to them. He had explained the operation of the camera to men who would not be using it, and had then, as requested, written all those instructions down. Unable to refuse, Graham Gore had been appointed the expedition photographer. He had inspected the machinery and read and reread Adamson’s notes regarding its use, but as yet he understood little of the true nature of its operation, and doubted its value. In Adamson’s absence it had been pointed out to him by various members of the Arctic Council that no one would be genuinely disappointed if the device could not be made to work under the conditions in which it was to be used. Gore believed he had been chosen for the task solely on the grounds that he had once built an accordion to his own design, and that the two instruments were not totally dissimilar in appearance. His passion now was for the flute, several of which he had brought with him on the expedition.
“The camera,” he said to Fitzjames, “is considerably more obscura than illuminata.” He was not genuinely angry that he and not someone else had been chosen as their photographer—although the title itself was too strange—but he was frustrated by his own inability to master the techniques involved. He prided himself upon his versatility and his willingness to explore all aspects of artistic and scientific development, but here was something which professed to be both, yet which might turn out to be neither.
“Tell me honestly, James, are our journals and dispatches not equal to the task? They are, after all, no more or less than an accurate and honest portrayal of all we might achieve. I feel my heart sink every time I look over Adamson’s illegible scrawl. Perhaps the man would have been better advised on how to write grammatically and legibly before being encouraged into the realms of the fantastic.”
Fitzjames laughed at this, as did Reid and the marines.
They cleared the crowded bay and arrived at a headland, beyond which lay the beached whaler.
Sighting it a mile ahead of them, Reid instructed the marines to pull closer to the shore, where the shoal current might be avoided and their work made easier.
“A little suspicious, don’t you think, Mr. Reid?” Gore said. She supposedly has an ice-free passage and is then run ashore holed.”
“If she is holed, Mr. Gore. And if it was ice that did the damage.”
“What else could have done it?”
“A wounded fish, perhaps.”
“I don’t believe it.”
This skepticism did not concern Reid, and he rose to study the outline of the distant vessel.
“She shows no lights,” he said, causing Fitzjames and Gore also to examine her through their telescopes. He then told the marines to ship their oars.
“What are we doing?” Gore asked him.
“Holding off until they see us approach.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?”
“So they don’t mistake us for wreckers or looters and take a shot at us in the poor light. She’s in the shade of the cliff, see.”
Gore looked back, but still did not understand Reid’s reluctance to approach the vessel once they were in a position to hail her and identify themselves.
“Best do as he advises,” Fitzjames said to Gore. “You are, after all, the closest and largest of our targets.”
They sat drifting in the shallows. Nothing of the buildings or the vessels to the south of them was any longer visible, and all five men were awed and silenced by the emptiness of the place into which they had come.
“He’s run her up on to a good bed of soft shingle,” Reid said eventually. “He knows that the tides are all falling behind a cut moon, but that there’ll be enough water along here in a week for him to refloat himself.”
“Won’t she keel over?” Fitzjames asked.
“I doubt it. He’s taken down her top arms, run her up at the turn of the tide and then got his men overboard shovelling the stone and sand to hold her up. See along her hull.” He pointed. “He’s lowered
his boats and driven them in alongside her to act as props. If she’s carrying a full load she’ll settle upright fast enough.”
“And the mass of her hull will meanwhile be above water, enabling him to make his repairs,” Gore concluded. “Ingenious.”
“She’s the
Potomac,
” Reid told them. “And no doubt one of the first into the water if she thought the ice was clearing early.”
As he spoke, a light appeared on the shore alongside the ship. It was not a steady light, but the intermittent flicker of a fire being started. Smoke rising above the outline of the cliff into the gray sky above confirmed this.
“Can we approach her now?” Gore said.
Reid watched the glow for a further minute and then told the marines to resume rowing.
The whaler rested almost perfectly upright in a broad groove of piled shingle, her upended boats wedged against her hull. The fire on the shore had been lit inside a shallow pit, and was tended by a blacksmith; it was a coal fire and burned solidly and low, throwing up a cascade of sparks each time the man applied his bellows to it.
He was the first to see the approaching boat and called out for them to identify themselves. He also rang a bell, at the sound of which several others appeared carrying lanterns. These cast little light, but sent flashes across the beach and up into the rigging.
Reid rose in his seat and identified himself, and the clamor on deck subsided until only a single man stood amidships and leaned over the rail, his lantern held above his head.
“Taddeus Herrick,” Reid called up to him.
“Is that you, James Reid?” the man shouted back. He lowered his lantern until a ball of light floated across the shallows toward them.
“You had a brush with the ice. You surprise me. The price of oil must be rising fast to send an old hand like you too close to a breaking pack.”
Above them the man laughed. “Brush with the ice, you say! We were struck by a shooting star. In twenty fathoms. What would you say the chances were of that, James Reid?”
“Are you sure?” Reid called back, the grin of recognition falling from his face.
“A shooting star?” Gore said, but was prevented from inquiring further as their own keel touched bottom and he was jolted from his seat.
“Later,” Reid told him.
They climbed ashore, leaving the marines to secure the boat, and went toward the
Potomac.
Taddeus Herrick climbed down a rope ladder to greet them.
“Are you badly damaged?” Reid asked him, their introductions complete.
“Port mid and aft. I tell you, James Reid, I’d not want to go through that again, not even for a forty barrel blue. We were caught a hundred miles northwest of here. A full field of them, every one ungiving as a boulder and fast as a rocket. I’ve seen them individually before now, and heard tell of full fields of the devils, but it’s the first time I’ve been forced to sit helplessly among them and wait for one to do its worse. I’d take my chance against cannon any day.”
Gore, who was still confused about the cause of the damage to the ship, asked for an explanation.
“Last year’s ice, Mr. Gore,” Herrick told him. “A berg reduced in size, which for some reason known only to the Almighty and itself sinks to the bottom and sticks there in a cold current in mud or sand. Sticks there a full year and then something happens to release it, a warmer current perhaps, but instead of coming loose and finding another resting place on the bottom, it suddenly pushes straight back up to the surface.”
“And these you call ‘shooting stars’?”
“We call them a lot worse than that when they come up close. I had two fish in tow which we had yet to render. I was forced to cut them loose so that I might sail clear unhindered.”
Fitzjames, who had heard of such phenomena, but had never himself witnessed them, asked how many times the
Potomac
had been struck.
“Once was enough. My mate said he could feel it coming, but what could we do? Come with me, I’ll show you.”
They followed Herrick to the groove excavated by the
Potomac’
s
keel in the shingle. There were a dozen men already at work, and broken timbers lay all around them. A carpenter sawed off jagged edges and others clawed the damaged planking from its spars. Further along the beach stood a mound of barrels. This, Herrick explained, was their cargo.
“I shipped it ashore before we made our dash up the beach. A good landing, I think you’ll agree, Mr. Reid. I can recommend it in an emergency.”
“And you knew the depth of the shingle was sufficient to support you?”
“I had but the one way to find out. We were shipping faster than we were pumping for the full hundred miles.”
“You could have jettisoned your cargo then,” Reid said with a smile. “Has this ended your hopes of a second hunt?”
Herrick looked slowly along the full length of his vessel. “I hope not. The wound is clean now and we have only to fill and dress it before a week tonight when the high tide will suck us back out whether we’re ready for it or not.”
“And if you’re not, it will suck you grinding and cursing straight to the bottom.”
“As you say. Our cargo stays ashore until we’re safely afloat.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of the blacksmith, who carried a dozen heated rivets on a shovel. These were immediately seized by men with pliers and hammered into the edges of the torn hull, their glowing heads cooling and turning black against the timbers.
“Look at this,” Herrick said, dragging a hessian sack from the exposed bilge. He opened it and tipped out a lump of dirty ice. Reid kicked at this and then picked up a piece weighing several pounds. He licked it, spat, gnawed briefly at a corner of it and then spat again.
Herrick brought his lantern closer. The ice was opaque, and coated along one edge with yellow clay in which pebbles were embedded.
“You were lucky not to lose your rudder,” Reid said.
“At first I thought we had. The ice struck us and then lodged against us instead of floating free. I was forced to shake her fully rigged to clear it.”
“And all the while other pieces were coming up around you?”
“I counted forty. All of them in the space of half an hour.”
“They say the
Guinea Fool
was lost with all her crew last year when she was cut in half by a star,” Reid said.
“I heard. I gave it little credence at the time.”
There was a loud grinding sound, followed by the noise of spilling pebbles.