I shrugged. I find that fieldwork is not my forte, Captain.
Yet you’ve dissected some of the white bears we’ve shot here and at Beechey Island, persisted Sir John. Studied their skeletons and musculature. Observed them on the ice as we all have.
Yes, Sir John.
Do you find Lieutenant Gore’s wounds consistent with the damage such an animal would produce?
I hesitated only a second. I had examined poor Graham Gore’s corpse before we had loaded it onto the sledge for the nightmare journey back across the pack ice.
Yes, Sir John, I said. The white polar bear of this region is — as far as we know — the largest single predator on Earth. It can weigh half again as much and stand three feet taller on its hind legs than the Grizzly Bear, the largest and most ferocious bear in North America. It is a very powerful predator, fully capable of crushing a man’s chest and severing his spine, as was the case with poor Lieutenant Gore. More than that, the white arctic bear is the only predator that commonly stalks human beings as its prey.
Commander Fitzjames cleared his throat. I say, Dr. Goodsir, he said softly, I did see a rather ferocious tiger in India once which — according to the villagers — had eaten twelve people.
I nodded, realizing at that second how terribly weary I was. The exhaustion worked on me like Powerful Drink. Sir … Commander … Gentlemen … , you have all seen more of the world than have I. However, from my rather extensive reading on the subject, it would seem that all other land carnivores — wolves, lions, tigers, other bears — may kill human beings if provoked, and some of them, such as your tiger, Commander Fitzjames, will become man-eaters if forced to due to disease or injury which precludes them from seeking out their natural prey, but only the white arctic bear — Ursus maritimus — actively stalks human beings as prey on a common basis.
Crozier was nodding. Where have you learned that, Doctor Goodsir? Your books?
To some extent, sir. But I spent most of our time at Disko Bay speaking to the locals there about the behaviour of the bears and also inquired of Captain Martin on his Enterprise and Captain Dannert on his Prince of Wales when we were anchored near them in Baffin Bay. Those two gentlemen answered my questions about the white bears and put me in touch with several of their crewmen — including two elderly American whalers who had spent more than a dozen years apiece in the ice. They had many anecdotes about the white bears stalking the Esquimaux natives of the region and even taking men from their own ships when they were trapped in the ice. One old man — I believe his name was Connors — said that their ship in ’28 had lost not one but two cooks to bears … one of them snatched from the lower deck where he was working near the stove while the men slept.
Captain Crozier smiled at that. Perhaps we should not believe every tale an old sailor has to tell, Doctor Goodsir.
No, sir. Of course not, sir.
That will be all, Mr. Goodsir, said Sir John. We shall call you back if we have more questions.
Yes, sir, I said and turned tiredly to return forward to the sick bay.
Oh, Dr. Goodsir, called Commander Fitzjames before I stepped out the door of Sir John’s cabin. I have a question, although I am deucedly ashamed to admit that I do not know the answer. Why is the white bear called Ursus maritimus? Not out of its fondness for eating sailors, I trust.
No, sir, I said. I believe the name was bestowed on the arctic bear because it is more a sea mammal than land animal. I’ve read reports of the white arctic bear being sighted hundreds of miles at sea, and Captain Martin of the Enterprise told me himself that while the bear is fast on the attack on land or ice — coming at one at speeds of more than twenty-five miles per hour — that at sea it is one of the most powerful swimmers in the ocean, capable of swimming sixty or seventy miles without rest. Captain Dannert said that once his ship was doing eight knots with a fair wind, far out of sight of land, and that two white bears kept pace with the ship for ten nautical miles or so and then simply left it behind, swimming toward distant ice floes with the speed and ease of a beluga whale. Thus the nomenclature … Ursus maritimus … a mammal, yes, but mostly a creature of the sea.
Thank you, Mr. Goodsir, said Sir John.
You are most welcome, sir, I said and left.
4 June, 1847, continued …
The Esquimaux man died just a few minutes after midnight. But he spoke first.
I was asleep at the time, sitting up with my back against the Sick Bay bulkhead, but Stanley woke me.
The grey-haired man was struggling as he lay on the Surgical Bench, his arms moving almost as if he were trying to swim up into the air. His punctured lung was hemorrhaging and blood was pouring down his chin and onto his bandaged chest.
As I raised the light of the lantern, the Esquimaux girl rose up from the corner where she had been sleeping and all three of us leaned in toward the dying man.
The old Esquimaux hooked a powerful finger and poked at his chest, very near the bullet hole. Each gasp of his pumped out more bright red arterial blood, but he coughed out what could only be words. I used a piece of chalk to scribble them on the slate Stanley and I used to communicate when patients were sleeping nearby.
“Angatkut tuquruq! Quarubvitchuq … angatkut turquq… . Paniga … tuunbaq! Tanik … naluabmiu tuqutauyasiruq … umiaqpak tuqutauyasiruq … nanuq tuqutkaa! Paniga … tunbaq nanuq … angatkut ququruq!”
And then the hemorrhaging grew so extreme he could talk no more. The blood geysered and fountained out of him, choking him until — even with Stanley and me propping him up, trying to help clear his breathing passages — he was inhaling only blood. After a terrible final moment of this his chest quit heaving, he fell back into our arms, and his stare became fixed and glassy. Stanley and I lowered him to the table.
Look out! cried Stanley.
For a second I did not understand the other surgeon’s warning — the old man was dead and still, I could find no pulse or breath as I hovered over him — but then I turned and saw the Esquimaux woman.
She had seized one of the bloody scalpels from our worktable and was stepping closer, lifting the weapon. It was obvious to me at once that she was paying no attention to me — her fixed gaze was on the Dead Face and chest of the man who might have been her husband or father or brother. In those few seconds, not knowing anything of the customs of her Heathen tribe, a Myriad of wild images came to my mind — the girl cutting out the man’s heart, perhaps devouring it in some terrible ritual, or removing the dead man’s eyes or slicing off one of his fingers or perhaps adding to the webwork of old scars that covered his body like a sailor’s tattoos.
She did none of that. Before Stanley could seize her and while I could think of nothing but to cower protectively over the dead man, the Esquimaux girl flicked the scalpel forward with a surgeon’s dexterity — she obviously had used razor-sharp knives for most of her life — and she severed the rawhide cord that held the old man’s amulet in place.
Catching up the flat, white, blood-spattered bear-shaped stone and its severed cord, she secreted it somewhere on her person under her parka and returned the scalpel to its table.
Stanley and I stared at each other. Then Erebus’s chief surgeon went to wake the young sailor who served as the Sick Bay mate, sending him to inform the officer on watch and thence the Captain that the old Esquimaux was dead.
4 June, continued …
We buried the Esquimaux man sometime around one-thirty in the morning — three bells — shoving his canvas-wrapped body down the narrow fire hole in the ice only twenty yards from the ship. This single fire hole giving access to open water fifteen feet below the ice was the only one the men have managed to keep open this cold summer — as I have mentioned before, sailors are afraid of nothing so much as fire — and Sir John’s instructions were to dispose of the body there. Even as Stanley and I struggled to press the body down the narrow funnel, using boat pikes, we could hear the chopping and occasional swearing from several hundred yards east on the ice where a party of twenty men
was working through the night to hack out a more decorous hole for Lieutenant Gore’s burial service the next day — or later the same day, actually.
Here, in the middle of the night, it was still light enough to read a Bible verse by — if anyone had brought a Bible out here on the ice to read a verse from, which no one had — and the dim light aided us, the two surgeons and two crewmen ordered to help us, as we poked, prodded, shoved, slid, and finally slammed the Esquimaux man’s body deeper and deeper into the blue ice and thence into the Black Water beneath.
The Esquimaux woman stood silently, watching, still showing no expression. There was a wind from the west-northwest and her black hair lifted from her stained parka hood and moved across her face like a ruffle of raven feathers.
We were the only members of the Burial Party — Surgeon Stanley, the two panting, softly cursing crewmen, the native woman, and me — until Captain Crozier and a tall, lanky lieutenant appeared in the blowing snow and watched the final moment or two of struggle. Finally the Esquimaux man’s body slid the last five feet and disappeared into the black currents fifteen feet below the ice.
Sir John ordered that the woman not spend the night aboard Erebus, Captain Crozier said softly. We’ve come to take her back to Terror. To the tall lieutenant whose name I now remembered as Irving, Crozier said, John, she will be in your charge. Find a place for her out of sight of the men — probably forward of the sick bay in the stacks — and make sure no harm comes to her.
Aye, sir.
Excuse me, Captain, I said. But why not let her go back to her people?
Crozier smiled at this. Normally I would agree with that course of action, Doctor. But there are no known Esquimaux settlements — not the smallest village — within three hundred miles of here. They are a nomadic people — especially those we call the Northern Highlanders — but what brought this old man and young girl out onto the pack ice so far north in a summer where there are no whales, no walruses, no seals, no caribou, no animals of any sort abroad except our white bears and the murderous things on the ice?
I had no answer to this, but it hardly seemed pertinent to my question.
It may come to the point, continued Crozier, where our lives might depend upon finding and befriending these native Esquimaux. Shall we let her go then before we’ve befriended her?
We shot her husband or father, said Surgeon Stanley, glancing at the mute young woman who still stared at the now empty fire hole. Our Lady Silence here might not have the most charitable of feelings toward us.
Precisely, said Captain Crozier. And we have enough problems right now without this lass leading a war party of angry Esquimaux back to our ships to murder us as we sleep. No, I think Captain Sir John is right … she should stay with us until we decide what to do … not only with her, but with ourselves. Crozier smiled at Stanley. In two years, this was the first time that I could remember seeing Captain Crozier smile. Lady Silence. That is good, Stanley. Very good. Come, John. Come, m’lady.
They walked west through the blowing snow toward the first pressure ridge. I went back up the ramp of snow to Erebus, to my tiny little cabin which seemed like pure heaven to me now, and to the first solid night’s sleep I had had since Lieutenant Gore led us south-southeast onto the ice more than ten days earlier.
15
FRANKLIN
Lat. 70°- 05′ N., Long. 98°- 23′ W.
11 June, 1847
By the day that he was to die, Sir John had almost recovered from the shock of seeing the Esquimaux wench naked.
It was the same young woman, the same teenaged harlot Copper squaw whom the Devil had sent to tempt him during his first ill-fated expedition in 1819, the wanton Robert Hood’s fifteen-year-old bedmate named Greenstockings. Sir John was sure of that. This temptress had the same coffee-brown skin that seemed to glow even in the dark, the same high, round girl’s breasts, the same brown areolae, and the same raven-feather slash of dark escutcheon above her sex.
It was the same succubus.
The shock to Captain Sir John Franklin of seeing her naked on surgeon McDonald’s table in the sick bay — on his ship — had been profound, but Sir John was sure that he had been able to hide his reaction from the surgeons and from the other captains during the rest of that endless, disconcerting day.
Lieutenant Gore’s burial service took place late on Friday, the fourth of June. It had taken a large work party more than twenty-four hours to get through the ice to allow for the burial at sea, and before they were done they had to use black powder to blow away the top ten feet of rock-hard ice, then use picks and shovels to excavate a broad crater to open the last five feet or so. When they were finished around midday, Mr. Weekes, the carpenter from Erebus, and Mr. Honey, the carpenter from Terror, had constructed a clever and elegant wooden scaffolding over the ten-foot-long and five-foot-wide opening into the dark sea. Work parties with long pikes were stationed at the crater to keep the ice from congealing beneath the platform.
Lieutenant Gore’s body had begun to decay quickly in the relative heat of the ship, so the carpenters first constructed a most solid coffin of mahogany lined with an inner box of sweet-smelling cedar. Between the two enclosures of wood was set a layer of lead in lieu of the traditional two rounds of shot set in the usual canvas burial bag to ensure that the body would sink. Mr. Smith, the blacksmith, had forged, hammered, and engraved a beautiful memorial plate in copper, which was affixed to the top of the mahogany coffin by screws. Because the burial service was a mixture of shoreside burial and the more common burial at sea, Sir John had specified that the coffin be made heavy enough to sink at once.
At eight bells at the beginning of the first dogwatch — 4:00 p.m. — the two ships’ companies assembled at the burial site a quarter of a mile across the ice from Erebus. Sir John had ordered everyone except the smallest possible ship’s watches to be present for the service and furthermore had ordered them to wear no layer over their dress uniforms, so at the appointed time more than one hundred shivering but formally dressed officers and men had gathered on the ice.
Lieutenant Gore’s coffin was lowered over the side of Erebus and lashed to an oversized sledge reinforced for this day’s sad purpose. Sir John’s own Union Jack was draped over the coffin. Then thirty-two seamen, twenty from Erebus and a dozen from Terror, slowly pulled the coffin-sledge the quarter mile to the burial site, while four of the youngest seamen, still on the roster as ship’s boys — George Chambers and David Young from Erebus, Robert Golding and Thomas Evans from Terror — beat a slow march on drums muffled in black cloth. The solemn procession was escorted by twenty men, including Captain Sir John Franklin, Commander Fitzjames, Captain Crozier, and the majority of all the other officers and mates in full dress, excluding only those left in command in each near-vacant ship.
At the burial site, a firing party of red-coated Royal Marines stood waiting at attention. Led by Erebus’s thirty-three-year-old sergeant, David Bryant, the party consisted of Corporal Pearson, Private Hopcraft, Private Pilkington, Private Healey, and Private Reed from Erebus — only Private Braine was missing from the flagship’s contingent of Marines, since the man had died last winter and been buried on Beechey Island — as well as Sergeant Tozer, Corporal Hedges, Private Wilkes, Private Hammond, Private Heather, and Private Daly from HMS Terror.
Lieutenant Gore’s cocked hat and sword were carried behind the burial sledge by Lieutenant H. T. D. Le Vesconte, who had assumed Gore’s command duties. Alongside Le Vesconte walked Lieutenant James W. Fairholme, carrying a blue velvet cushion on which were displayed the six medals young Gore had earned during his years in the Royal Navy.
As the sledge party approached the burial crater, the line of twelve Royal Marines parted, opening to form a lane. The Marines turned inward and stood at reverse arms as the procession of sledge-pullers, funeral sledge, honor guard, and other mourners passed between their ranks.
As the hundred and ten men shuffled to their places amid the mass of officers’ unifo
rms around the crater — some seamen standing on pressure ridges to get a better look — Sir John led the captains to their place on a temporary scaffolding at the east end of the crater in the ice. Slowly, carefully, the thirty-two sledge-pullers worked together to unlash the heavy coffin and lower it down precisely angled boards to its temporary resting place on the wooden superstructure just above the rectangle of black water. When the coffin was in place, it rested not only on the final planks but on three sturdy hawsers now manned on either side by the same men who had been chosen to pull the sledge.
When the muffled drums quit beating, all hats came off. The cold wind ruffled the men’s long hair, all washed, parted, and tied back with ribbons for this service. The day was chilly — no more than five degrees at the last measuring at six bells — but the arctic sky, filled with ice crystals, was a solid dome of golden light. As if in honour of Lieutenant Gore, the single circle of the ice-occluded sun had been joined by three more suns — sun dogs floating above and to either side of the south-hanging true sun — all connected by a halo-band of rainbow-prismed light. Many men present bowed their heads at the aptness of the sight.
Sir John conducted the Service for the Dead, his strong voice easily audible to the hundred and ten men gathered round. The ritual was familiar to all there. The words were reassuring. The responses were known. By the end, the cold wind was ignored by most as the familiar phrases echoed across the ice.
“We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the Sea shall give up her dead, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”
“Amen,” said the assembled men.
The twelve men of the Royal Marine firing party raised their muskets and fired three volleys, the last one having only three shots rather than the four in the two volleys that had preceded it.