On the
Erebus,
Fitzjames, Gore and Reid examined the whaler and the activity on the berg. Reid was the first to spot the fish, his attention drawn to it by the flock of birds which hovered above.
Fitzjames gave the order to take in part of their sail.
“Shall we wait for Sir John?” Gore asked. He had just eaten a large breakfast and the thought of seeing the whaler at work repulsed him.
“She’s only a small fish,” Reid observed.
Franklin, Fitzjames knew, would want to make contact with the vessel to determine the state of the ice further west. They were fifteen degrees east of the entrance to Lancaster Sound, their course west-southwest, and the ice was certain to be thicker and faster-moving the further they now sailed.
The
Erebus
and
Terror
had been fourteen days in the bay and this was their first sighting of another vessel close enough to make contact. They too had spent the night moored in the lee of a small berg in the fog, and throughout the night the hulls of both ships had rubbed and ground along the ice, causing those who were new to the experience to wake in panic with fears of being holed in the darkness.
The
Erebus
drew closer to the whaler and came alongside. A boat was lowered and Fitzjames, Gore, Reid and Des Voeux rowed across to her. Dannet greeted them and helped them aboard. On the far side of his ship the men on the ice hauled the head of the small whale up on to the level surface, and when this was done, Dannet untied the tail and let it fall back into the water with a loud slap. A minute later the whole carcass was lifted free and the claver of the birds was matched only by the sound of knives being sharpened.
“Don’t let us delay you in your work,” Fitzjames told Dannet.
“We’ll carve her up on the ice and save ourselves the trouble of swilling clean afterward. What’s left we’ll leave for the birds.”
“Like a feast set out on a tablecloth,” Gore said. He had never before seen a whaler at work, and, having overcome his initial repugnance, was now fascinated by the process and stood looking across at the men about to start stripping the carcass.
A large cauldron was rolled on to its base-plate on the deck behind Dannet and a fire lit in the iron well beneath it. Dannet considered this for a moment before turning to Reid. “What about you, ice-master, does our fish look dry to you?”
Reid studied the body and said that the skin was badly creased, confirming with a shrug what Dannet already knew.
“They’ve opened her up,” Gore called from the rail.
They turned to watch one of the men on the ice plunge his long blade into the flesh of the whale and then run the length of the
carcass, his knife still embedded, slicing as he ran and only one step ahead of the flesh which peeled behind him like a breaking wave. The blubber lay flat in a twelve-foot strip, and a second man, this time using the ice as a chopping board, detached this flap from the bulk of the whale. A third followed behind him chopping it into manageable pieces. Blood and juices stained the ice and formed a pool around the wound. The noise of the frenzied birds doubled in volume and intensity. Other men hooked and dragged these smaller pieces of blubber toward the ship and threw them aboard with practiced, confident motions. By then the cauldron was heated and the first of the blubber burned with a foul stink.
“Too hot,” Dannet called to the man tending the fire. The man wore a leather apron from his chest to his feet and used the blade of an oar to scrape and prod at the liquefying mass.
“Not so good,” Reid said to him.
Dannet shrugged. “We only went after her because we’d had an idle day.” The two men understood each other perfectly. “Collect her white bone,” Dannet called across to the men on the ice. “No part barrels. And the second rendering waits for my inspection before anything goes in the manifest.”
Reid found himself nodding at everything the man said.
They went below and Dannet handed Fitzjames his log so that he might assess for himself the nature of the ice the whaler had already encountered. It was a mark of trust and respect to be given the log so freely, and Fitzjames acknowledged this by complimenting Dannet on the thoroughness of his entries.
“Too far north,” Dannet said.
“Lured by the prospect of the breaking pack?” Reid asked him.
Dannet nodded. “Sixteen years I’ve been coming and I’ve never seen it so broken or so scattered at this latitude.”
“Do you have a sister ship?”
“The
Orion.
Probably full and sailing for our transports by now. She’s under contract to the Spanish off the Azores at the end of the month.”
“Small fish, hot work,” Reid said, and the two men smiled.
“And you?” Dannet asked.
“Forty-eight hours for observations and then west into Lancaster.”
“You expect to find an opening?”
Fitzjames looked up, first at Dannet and then at Reid.
“We expect to find Chinamen dancing on the shore in welcome,” Reid said.
“I wondered why they were gathering.”
Fitzjames handed back the log, and because none of them wished to enter any further into their useless speculations, the three men returned above deck.
“Come aboard this evening and dine with us,” Fitzjames said as they climbed the ladder.
Dannet accepted. “Barring a favorable wind or a blow close enough to wet our brows.”
They emerged into the bright sunlight and looked across to where the flensers were still at work. By now the blubber and meat had been stripped from the skeleton, and the men were cutting out the ribcage. The skull, its eyes still intact, lay like a boulder a short distance from them. The stain on the ice was now wider and other internal organs lay scattered all around. The liver had been retrieved, and the stomach had been dragged with its thick rope of intestine to the far side of the berg. A man swung at the jawbone with a mallet, and another probed inside the mouth with a knife to secure the tongue.
Seeing Fitzjames and the others back out on the deck, Gore called for them to join him. The edge of the berg was held fast against the hull and Fitzjames alone stepped across on to the level surface. He joined Gore and they watched together as the vertebrae were chiseled one by one from the curved spine. These were inspected by the man in charge of the operation and then kicked off the ice into the water, where they slowly sank.
“No use to us,” he said to Fitzjames, that being the full extent of his explanation. He cursed the birds which had become braver in their desperation to reach the congealed mess to which the carcass had been reduced, and which now flew among the men, narrowly avoiding their heads and flailing arms.
The last of the blubber was thrown to the deck and the flensers
cleaned their knives. A small group gathered around the shining bulging stomach and called Fitzjames and Gore over to watch as they slit it open to see what it contained. One man stood ready with a rack of bottles to collect specimens. They made this final act of disembowelment seem like an honor, and there was a murmur of concurrence when the man in charge held out his knife to Graham Gore and asked him if he would like to do it. Gore readily accepted, and only Fitzjames saw the shared glances and smiles as the knife was handed to him.
Gore approached the bloated sac and prodded it with his finger. It was flattened on the ice, but still the size of a resting pony, longer than he was tall and mounded almost to his waist. He prodded it again, this time more forcefully, and set it quivering. Around him, the others took several paces back, and seeing this, Fitzjames did the same.
“Now slit her long and clean,” the man called to Gore, making a slashing motion with his hand.
Gore selected his starting point, flexed his arm, took a deep breath and drove in the knife. And as he did so, the men around him turned and ran, racing each other through the clamoring birds back to the ship.
Gore had no opportunity to cut the full length of the stomach, for the instant his knife entered it there was an explosion of liquid and gas and the bag collapsed, spilling its contents in a gush against his legs and knocking him off his feet. All around him the birds turned into insatiable demons.
Later that day, Dannet’s favorable wind arose. He detached himself from the berg and shouted his apologies to the
Erebus
that he would not after all be dining with them. Franklin called back that he understood and asked him to report their encounter to the Admiralty upon his return home.
As they pulled away, the crew of the
Prince of Wales
stood in a line at her rail, raised their caps and cheered.
T
hey entered Lancaster Sound on the 31st of August, the two vessels sailing line astern through the dispersing ice there.
At midday a broader channel of open water appeared ahead of them and their progress for the rest of the day was good. There was a sense of relief aboard both ships—not only at having found their entrance open, but also at now having moved beyond the sphere of others in the region. They passed into a stillness and an emptiness that even the flocks of following birds seemed to acknowledge in their silence. Baffin Bay, long since probed and charted in frustrating detail since the days of Davis, Frobisher and Cabot, had presented them with no real challenge, and to have been forced to turn back there would have embarrassed and shamed them all. But with the northern shore of the island slipping out of sight astern they had entered an unknown wilderness which bore few signs of those who had gone there before them, and who had been lost there, or returned home beaten and incredulous at the stubbornness, complexity and confusing impermanence of the place. They all knew who these men were, and many paid silent homage to them.
“We pass through Ross’ mountains,” Vesconte remarked to Fitzjames and Gore, causing them to turn and look at the open channel still unwinding ahead of them.
Twenty-five years earlier, John Ross, sailing with Parry, had entered the Sound, then unconfirmed as the only true entrance to the Passage, but had turned back at what he believed to be a range of
mountains blocking his way ahead. These turned out to be nothing more than a solid bank of cloud, through which Parry himself sailed a few years later, eclipsing his former captain and taking up the baton of exploration, until he too withdrew a decade later, old and defeated and privately convinced that where he had failed no one would succeed after him.
The
Terror
moved closer astern and sounded her bell. Turning to study her through his glass, Fitzjames saw that the man upon her prow was signaling to landward. He looked where he pointed, and amid the ice there he saw a darker form.
Reid too had been alerted and he was the first to speak. “She’s a country ship come out in this year’s rush,” he said solemnly. “No rigging, no deck. She’s floundered and been carried in the pack, left high in the crush.”
“Are you certain of this, Mr. Reid?” Franklin asked him, relieved that they would not again be obliged to delay or alter their course.
“No need to turn, Sir John,” Gore said, expressing the thoughts of them all.
A few moments later the abandoned hulk was lost to sight.
These ice-locked wrecks were common enough on the edges of the Arctic, usually whalers too late or too careless in the forming pack, sucked into the drift, savaged and then spat out again, sometimes many years later and hundreds of miles from where they had been trapped and abandoned.
They continued due west until the sun began its late descent ahead of them, barely darkening the sky until it touched and then burned into the horizon. They moved closer to the ice-littered shore and dropped anchor. Watches were posted and their plans for the following days’ sailing were discussed over dinner. It had been decided that there should be no exchange of men between the two ships until the full 200-mile length of the Sound had been navigated. It was unlikely that they would become separated for long, but it was now important for the ships to begin to function independently of each other as soon as possible.
The following morning they sailed at first light. The wind for once was not with them, and until midday their progress was slow. They
remained within sight of the southern shore, only diverting from it when the ice there extended seaward.
In the early afternoon, Reid warned that the floe ahead of them was thickening and that if it showed any further signs of consolidating then they would be forced to abandon their coasting and seek out a safer channel farther north. Franklin flagged this message to Crozier, who concurred in the decision.
Less than an hour later the cry went up from the
Terror
that she had struck ice. She was 300 yards astern of the
Erebus,
following in her wake, and it seemed impossible to those on the leading ship that she could have struck some obstacle over which they themselves had passed. As they watched, several men, led by Thomas Blanky, made their way along the
Terror’s
bowsprit lines to inspect whatever damage she might have suffered.
“She’s run over a submerged berg,” Goodsir guessed.
“She’s still coming,” Vesconte said.
The
Terror
appeared to have incurred no damage, but they could neither see nor hear if she was still in contact with the ice, and several minutes passed before Blanky returned to the head, raised both his hands to the
Erebus
and then swung them slowly apart.
“Passed right over,” Reid said, raising his own arms in answer.
Vesconte called for their own depth and was answered with a cry of six fathoms. This surprised him, conflicting as it did with the few scattered soundings of his chart, and he recommended to Franklin that they should steer a course into deeper water.
They turned to starboard and the
Terror
moved closer to them, holding her course until she was alongside.
“I believe we sliced a grounded berg by the full length of our keel,” Crozier shouted to them, his voice amplified in the still air.
“And your rudder?” Fitzjames called back.
“Lifted the second we touched,” Crozier shouted. “First blood to
Terror,
I believe, gentlemen. Let the ice lick its wounds and tremble before us.”
Elated, he raised three cheers for the
Terror,
and the shouts and applause of the men around him crossed the water to the
Erebus
like the sound of fighting punctuated by gunfire.
An hour after darkness during their second night the
Erebus
herself was struck by a piece of floating ice, which caught her amidships on her port side and then slid slowly to her stern. Deep in her hull, men listened without speaking, the newcomers almost without breathing, as the knock of the collision became a drawn-out scraping, rising and then fading as the ice eventually drifted free of them.
Fitzjames was with Goodsir and Reid in the narrow corridor between his own and Goodsir’s cabin when the ice struck, and all three waited in silence until it moved off.
“An icy finger sent out of the darkness to prod us as we sleep,” Goodsir announced with a flourish.
“To prod the atrocious poet in your soul,” Fitzjames said, releasing the tension now that the danger had passed.
One of the
Erebus’
boys appeared, stopping when he saw them in the narrow passage. He had been woken and frightened by the collision. Goodsir told him to return to his bunk and he left them without speaking. They watched him go, each of them momentarily lost in his own thoughts.
There were no further collisions during the night, and the following morning they rose to find that the field in which they had anchored the previous evening was no longer in sight, having been drawn away from them during the brief spell of darkness.
They continued along their previous course in full sail. News of the
Erebus’
encounter with the ice was communicated to the
Terror,
and John Irving shouted back to ask if they were sure it was ice that had struck them and not a fish that had come too close in search of scraps from their galley.
The
Erebus
led the way that day, maintaining a course which kept them out of sight of land to both north and south.
In the falling dusk they sailed several degrees to port and moored for the night to a massive grounded berg. This rose as high as a small hill above them and was larger than anything they had so far encountered. In a precisely calculated maneuver, both ships sailed alongside the edge of the ice until they were pressed close upon it, whereupon claws were thrown to secure them.
At first light Vesconte took his surveying equipment ashore and
made a series of measurements. He was accompanied by Goodsir, who hammered at the ice in a dozen places and collected samples. He also netted the water along the edge of the berg and took the bottled results of this back aboard with him too.
Later, when they were ready to sail and both ships had drawn clear of their moorings, Goodsir conducted another experiment involving packages of explosive set along a line in the ice. Those watching from the ships were disappointed by the small size of the explosions when they finally came, and with the undramatic and short-lived plumes of powder-smoke and steam they threw up. The noise broke the morning silence for many miles around, but apart from this nothing else appeared to have been achieved, and as he climbed back aboard, Fitzjames asked Goodsir what he had expected. Goodsir looked back to the ice without speaking, and then a moment later pointed and said, “That.”
Fitzjames looked, and as the last of the smoke and powdered ice slowly cleared, he saw a long deep fissure appear, which then cleaved the berg in half as he watched.