“Tell him that yourself, man,” said Goodsir. “Or at least tell him that you’re leaving. You owe him that.”
Bridgens smiled. “I would, Doctor, but you and I both know that the captain would not let me go. He is stoic, I think, but no Stoic. He might put me in chains to keep me … going on.”
“Yes,” agreed Goodsir. “But you’ll be doing me a favour if you stay, Bridgens. I have some amputations coming up that will require your steady hand.”
“There are other young men who can help you, sir, and who have hands far steadier — and stronger — than mine.”
“But no one as intelligent,” said Goodsir. “No one I can talk to as I have with you. I value your advice.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” said Bridgens. He smiled again. “I didn’t want to tell you, sir, but I’ve always been queasy around pain and blood. Since I was a boy. I’ve very much appreciated the opportunity to work with you these past weeks, but it’s gone against my basically squeamish nature. I’ve always agreed with St. Augustine when he said that the only real sin is human pain. If there are amputations coming, it’s best I’m going.” He extended his hand. “Good-bye, Dr. Goodsir.”
“Good-bye, Bridgens.” The doctor used both of his hands to shake the older man’s.
Bridgens walked northeast out of camp, climbed up out of the shallow river valley — as with everywhere else on King William Island, no hill or ridgeline was much higher than fifteen or twenty feet above sea level — found a rocky ridgeline free of snow, and followed it away from camp.
Sunset now came sometime around 10:00 p.m., but John Bridgens had decided that he would not walk until dark. About three miles from River Camp, he found a dry spot on the ridge, sat, and took a ship’s biscuit — his day’s ration — from his peacoat pocket and slowly ate it. Completely stale, it was one of the most delicious things he’d ever tasted. He had neglected to bring water with him, but now he scooped up a bit of snow and let it melt in his mouth.
The sunset to the southwest was beautiful. For an instant the sun actually emerged in the gap between low grey cloud and high grey gravel, hung there as an orange ball for a moment — the kind of sunset that Odysseus, not Lear, would have seen and enjoyed — and then disappeared.
The day and air grew grey and mellow, although the temperature, that had held in the twenties all day, was dropping very quickly now. A wind would come up soon. Bridgens would like to be asleep before the nightly wind howled out of the northwest or the nightly lightning storms rolled across the land and ice strait.
He reached into his pocket and removed the last three items there.
First was the clothes brush that John Bridgens had used as steward for more than thirty years. He touched the bits of lint on it, smiled at some irony understood only by himself, and set it in his other pocket.
Next was Harry Peglar’s horn comb. A few light brown hairs still clung to the teeth of it. Bridgens held the comb tightly in his cold, bare fist for a moment and then set it in his coat pocket with the clothes brush.
Last was Peglar’s notebook. He flipped it open at random.
Oh Death whare is thy sting, the grave at Comfort Cove for who has any doubt now … the dyer sad.
Bridgens shook his head. He knew that the last word should be “said,” whatever else the water-stained and illegible part of the message should have read. He had taught Peglar to read but had never succeeded in teaching Harry how to spell. Bridgens suspected — since Harry Peglar was one of the most intelligent human beings he’d ever known — that there had been some problem with the constitution of the man’s brain, some lobe or lump or grey area unknown to medical learning, that controlled the spelling of words. Even in the years after he’d learned to decode the alphabet and read the most challenging of books with a scholar’s insight and understanding, Harry had been unable to pen the shortest letter to Bridgens without reversing letters and misspelling the simplest words.
Oh Death whare is thy sting …
Bridgens smiled a final time, set the journal in his front jacket pocket where it would be safe from small scavengers because he would be lying on it, and stretched out on his side on the gravel, laying his cheek on the backs of his bare hands.
He stirred only once, to tug his collar up and his hat down. The wind was coming up and it was very cold. Then he resumed his napping position.
John Bridgens was asleep before the last of the grey twilight died in the south.
51
CROZIER
Rescue Camp
13 August, 1848
They’d hauled for two weeks to the southeastern-most tip of the island — the point where the King William Island shoreline abruptly began curving north and east — and then they’d stopped to set up tents, send out hunting parties, and catch their breath while waiting and watching for openings in the sea-strait ice to the south. Dr. Goodsir had told Crozier that he needed time to deal with the sick and injured they’d been hauling in their five boats. They named the campsite Land’s End.
When Crozier was informed by Goodsir that at least five men needed to have feet amputated during the stop there — which meant, he knew, that those men would never go farther than this place, since even the ambulatory seamen no longer had the strength to haul the extra weight of men in boats — the captain renamed the wind-whipped point Rescue Camp.
The idea, so far discussed only between Goodsir and himself although suggested by Goodsir, was for the surgeon to stay behind with the men recovering from the amputations. Four had been operated on already and so far none had died — the last man, Mr. Diggle, was to have his amputation this morning. Other seamen too sick or weary to continue on could opt to stay with Goodsir and the amputees, while Crozier, Des Voeux, Couch, Crozier’s trusted second mate, Johnson, and any others with strength left would sail south down the inlet when — if — the ice relented again. Then this smaller group, traveling lightly, would head up Back River, returning with a rescue party from Great Slave Lake in the spring — or, with the help of a miracle, in the next month or two before winter arrived, providing that they ran into a rescue party moving north along the river.
Crozier knew that the chances of that particular miracle were so low as to be almost nil and that the chances of any of the sick men surviving at Rescue Camp until the following spring without help were not even worth discussing. There had been almost no easily hunted game all this summer of 1848, and August was proving to be no different. The ice had been too thick to fish through everywhere except in the few small leads and rare year-round polynyas, and they’d caught no fish even while in the boats. How could Goodsir and a few other attendants to the dying survive the coming winter here? Crozier knew that the surgeon had voluntarily signed his death warrant by volunteering to stay behind with the doomed men and Goodsir knew his captain knew it. Neither man spoke of it.
Yet that remained the current plan, unless Goodsir changed his mind this morning or a true miracle occurred and the ice opened up almost all the way to the shore this second week of August, allowing them all to set sail in two battered whaleboats, two battered cutters, and a single splintery pinnace, bringing the amputees, the injured, the starved, the too weak to walk, and the most advanced scurvy cases with them in the boats.
As potential food? thought Crozier.
This was the next issue that had to be dealt with.
The captain carried two pistols in his greatcoat whenever he went out of his tent now — his large percussion-cap revolver in his right pocket, as always, and the two-shot, twin-barreled little percussion pistol (what the American sea captain who’d sold it to him years ago had called “a riverboat gambler’s belly gun”) in his left pocket. He had not repeated his mistake of sending his best men — Couch, Des Voeux, Johnson, some others — out of camp at the same time while leaving such malcontents as Hickey, Aylmore, and the idiot giant Manson behind. Nor had Francis Crozier trusted Lieutenant George Henry Hodgson, his captain of the fo’c’sle, Reuben Male, or Erebus captain of
the foretop Robert Sinclair since that day of near mutiny back at Hospital Camp more than a month earlier.
The view from Rescue Camp was depressing. The sky had been an unrelieved mass of low clouds for two weeks and Crozier hadn’t been able to use his sextant. The wind had begun blowing hard from the northwest again and the air was colder than it had been for two months. The strait to the south remained a solid mass of ice, but not the flat ice interrupted by occasional pressure ridges such as they’d crossed on the trek from Terror to Terror Camp so very, very, very long ago. The ice in this strait south of King William Island was a total jumble of full-sized and shattered icebergs, crisscrossing pressure ridges, the occasional year-round polynya showing black water ten feet below the ice level but leading nowhere, and countless razor-edged seracs and ice boulders. Crozier didn’t believe that any man in Rescue Camp — including the giant Manson — was up to man-hauling a single boat through that ice-forest and over those mountain ranges of ice.
The growls, explosions, crackings, blasts, and roars that now filled their days and nights were their only hope. The ice was agitated and torturing itself. Now and then, far out, it opened into tiny leads that sometimes lasted for hours. Then they closed with a thunderclap. Pressure ridges leapt to a height of thirty feet in a matter of seconds. Hours later, they collapsed just as quickly as new ridges thrust themselves up. Icebergs exploded from the pressure of the tightening ice around them.
It is only 13 August, Crozier told himself. The problem with that thinking, of course, was that instead of “only” 13 August, the season was now far enough along that it was time to be thinking, It is already 13 August. Winter was fast approaching. Erebus and Terror had been first frozen in place off King William Land in September 1846, and there had been no respite after that.
It is only 13 August, Crozier repeated to himself. Time enough, if only a small miracle was granted them, to sail and row across the strait — probably man-hauling some short ice portages — the seventy-five miles he estimated to the mouth of Back’s River, there to rerig the battered boats for travel upriver. With a bit more luck, the inlet itself beyond this visible ice jam would be free of ice — because of Back’s Great Fish River’s inevitable high summer flow northward and its warmer water — for as much as sixty miles of the way. After that, on the river itself, they would be racing the oncoming winter south each day while fighting their way upstream, but the voyage was still possible. In theory.
In theory.
This morning — a Sunday if the weary Crozier had not lost track — Goodsir was performing the last of the amputations with the help of his new assistant, Thomas Hartnell, and then Crozier planned to call the men together for a sort of Divine Service.
There he would announce that Goodsir would be staying with the crippled men and scurvy cases and he would bring into the open his plans to take a few of the healthiest men and at least two boats south within the coming week, whether the ice opened or not.
If Reuben Male, Hodgson, Sinclair, or the Hickey conspirators wanted to offer their alternate plans without challenging his authority, Crozier was ready not only to discuss them but to agree to them. The fewer men left at Rescue Camp the better, especially if it meant getting rid of the rotten apples.
The screaming started from the surgical tent as Dr. Goodsir began his operation on Mr. Diggle’s gangrenous left foot and ankle.
A pistol in each pocket, Crozier went to find Thomas Johnson to tell him to assemble the men.
Mr. Diggle, the most universally liked man on the expedition and the excellent cook Francis Crozier had known and worked with for years on expeditions to both poles, died of blood loss and complications immediately after the amputation of his foot and just minutes before muster was called.
Each time the survivors spent more than two days at a camp, the bosuns dragged a stick through the gravel and snow in some relatively open, flat spot to create the rough outline of the Erebus’s and Terror’s top and lower decks. This allowed the men to know where to stand during muster and gave them a sense of familiarity. During the first days at Terror Camp and beyond, the muster positions had been crowded to the point of confusion, with more than a hundred men from two ships crowding into the footprint of a single ship’s top deck, but now the attrition had reached the point where the gathering was appropriate for a single ship’s mustering.
In the silence after the roll was called and before Crozier’s brief reading of Scripture — and in the deeper silence in the aftermath of Mr. Diggle’s screams — the captain looked out at the clusters of ragged, bearded, pale, filthy, hollow-eyed men leaning forward toward him in a sort of tired-ape slump that was meant to be a brisk standing at attention.
Of the thirteen original officers on HMS Erebus, nine were dead: Sir John, Commander Fitzjames, Lt. Graham Gore, Lt. H. T. D. Le Vesconte, Lt. Fairholme, First Mate Sergeant, Second Master Collins, Ice Master Reid, and Chief Surgeon Stanley. The surviving officers consisted of the first and second mates, Des Voeux and Couch; the assistant surgeon, Goodsir (who now joined the muster ranks late, his posture even more slumped than the other men’s, his eyes downcast with exhaustion and defeat); and the purser, Charles Hamilton Osmer, who had survived a serious bout of pneumonia only to be prostrated in his tent now by scurvy.
It did not escape Captain Crozier’s attention that all of Erebus’s commissioned Navy officers were dead and that the survivors were mere mates or civilians granted the honorary title of officer for wardroom purposes.
Erebus’s three warrant officers — Engineer John Gregory, Bosun Thomas Terry, and Carpenter John Weekes — were all dead.
Erebus had left Greenland with twenty-one petty officers, and at today’s muster, fifteen of them were still alive, although some of them — such as Purser’s Steward William Fowler, who had never fully recovered from his burns at the Carnivale, were little more than mouths to be fed during the march.
A muster of Erebus’s able seamen on Christmas Day of 1845 would have heard nineteen sailors answering the call. Fifteen of them were still living.
Of seven Royal Marines who’d originally answered the muster call on Erebus, three had survived to this day in August of 1848 — Corporal Pearson and Privates Hopcraft and Healey — but all were too sick from scurvy even to stand guard or go hunting, much less haul boats. But this morning they stood leaning on their muskets among the other ragged, slumping forms.
Of the two ship’s boys on Erebus’s muster — both actually men of eighteen when the two ships had sailed — both David Young and George Chambers had survived, but Chambers had been so heavily concussed by the thing from the ice during the Carnivale that he had been little more than an idiot since that night of fire. Still, he was able to haul when instructed and to eat when told to and to keep breathing without prompting.
So, according to the muster just finished, thirty-nine of Erebus’s original complement of sixty-five souls were still alive as of 13 August 1848.
The officers of HMS Terror had fared a bit better than those of Erebus, at least in the sense that two Naval officers — Captain Crozier and Second Lieutenant Hodgson — had survived. Second Mate Robert Thomas and Mr. E. J. Helpman, Crozier’s clerk-in-charge and another civilian who served the expedition with officer’s rank, were the other remaining officers.
Not answering muster today were Crozier’s lieutenants Little and Irving, as well as First Mate Hornby, Ice Master Blanky, Second Master MacBean, and both his surgeons, Peddie and McDonald.
Four of Terror’s original eleven officers were still alive.
Crozier had started the expedition with three warrant officers — Engineer James Thompson, Bosun John Lane, and Master Carpenter Thomas Honey — and all three were still living, although the engineer had wasted away to a hollow-eyed skeleton too weak to stand, much less haul, and Mr. Honey not only showed advanced symptoms of scurvy but had had both feet amputated the night before. Incredibly, as of this assembly, the carpenter was still alive and even managed to shout, “Presen
t!” from his tent when his name was called at muster.
Terror had sailed with twenty-one petty officers three years earlier and sixteen were still alive on this cloudy August morning — Stoker John Torrington, Captain of the Foretop Harry Peglar, and quartermasters Kenley and Rhodes had been the only casualties in that group until just moments ago when Cook John Diggle had joined the ranks of the dead.
Where nineteen able seamen had once answered Terror’s muster, ten now did, although eleven had survived: David Leys still lay comatose and unresponsive in Dr. Goodsir’s tent.
Of HMS Terror’s contingent of six Royal Marines, none had survived. Private Heather, who had lingered for months with his shattered skull, finally died the day after they had left River Camp, and his body was left on the gravel without burial or comment.
The ship had recorded two “Boys” on its original muster, and now only one — Robert Golding, almost twenty-three years old and certainly no longer a boy, although gullible in a boy’s way — answered to the roll.
Out of an original muster of sixty-two souls on HMS Terror, thirty-five had survived to see this Divine Service at Rescue Camp on 13 August, 1848.
Thirty-nine Erebuses and thirty-five Terrors remained, for a total muster of seventy-four men out of the one hundred twenty-six who had sailed from Greenland in the summer of 1845.
But four of these had suffered one or both of their feet being amputated in the last twenty-four hours and at least another twenty were almost certainly too sick, too injured, too starved, or too bone- and soul-weary to go on. A third of the expedition had reached their limit.
It was time for a reckoning.
“Almighty God,” intoned Crozier in his exhausted rasp, “with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity: We give thee hearty thanks, for that it hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother John Diggle, age thirty-nine, out of the miseries of this sinful world; beseeching thee, that it it may please thee, of thy gracious goodness, shortly to accomplish the number of thine elect, all of us here if it pleases thee, and thus to hasten thy kingdom; that we, with all those that are departed in the true faith of thy holy Name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul, in thy eternal and everlasting glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”