The Terror

11 CROZIER

You’re frozen through, Francis,” says Commander Fitzjames. “Come aft to the Common Room for brandy.”

Crozier would prefer whiskey, but brandy will have to serve. He precedes Erebus’s captain down the long, narrow companionway toward what had been Captain Sir John Franklin’s personal cabin and which is now the equivalent of Terror’s Great Room – a library and off-duty gathering place for officers and a meeting room when necessary. Crozier thinks that it says good things about Fitzjames that the commander kept his own tiny cubicle after Sir John’s death, refitting the spacious aft chamber into a common area and sometimes sick bay for surgery.

The companionway is totally dark except for the glow from the Common Room and the deck is canted more steeply in the opposite direction from Terror, listing to port rather than starboard, down by the stern rather than bow. And although the ships are almost identical in design, Crozier always notices other differences as well. HMS Erebus smells different somehow – beyond the identical stench of lamp oil, dirty men, filthy clothes, months of cooking, coal dust, pails of urine, and the men’s breath hanging in the cold, dank air, there is something else. For some reason, Erebus stinks more of fear and hopelessness.

There are two officers smoking their pipes in the Common Room, Lieutenant Le Vesconte and Lieutenant Fairholme, but both stand, nod toward the two captains, and withdraw, pulling the sliding door shut behind them.

Fitzjames unlocks a heavy cabinet and pulls out a bottle of brandy, pouring a large measure into one of Sir John’s crystal water glasses for Crozier, a smaller amount for himself. For all of the fine china and crystal their late expedition leader loaded aboard for his and his officers’ own use, there are no brandy snifters. Franklin was a devout teetotaler.

Crozier does no snifting. He drinks the brandy down in three gulps and allows Fitzjames to replenish it.

“Thank you for responding so quickly,” says Fitzjames. “I expected a message in response, not for you to come in person.”

Crozier frowns. “Message? I haven’t received a message from you in over a week, James.”

Fitzjames stares a moment. “You didn’t receive a message this evening? I sent Private Reed to your ship with one about five hours ago. I presumed he was spending the night there.”

Crozier shakes his head slowly.

“Oh… damn,” says Fitzjames.

Crozier pulls the woolen stocking from his pocket and sets it on the table. In the brighter light from the bulkhead lamp here there are still no signs of violence. “I found it during my walk over. Closer to your ship than mine.”

Fitzjames takes the stocking and studies it sadly. “I’ll ask the men if they recognize it,” he says.

“It could belong to one of mine,” Crozier says softly. He succinctly tells Fitzjames about the attack, the mortal wounding of Private Heather, and the disappearance of William Strong and young Tom Evans.

“Four in one day,” says Fitzjames. He pours more brandy for both of them.

“Yes. What is it you were sending me a message about?”

Fitzjames explains there had been sightings of something large moving through the ice jumbles, just beyond the lanterns’ glow, all that day. The men had fired repeatedly but parties going onto the ice had found no blood nor other sign. “So I apologize, Francis, for that idiot Bobby Johns firing at you a few minutes ago. The men’s nerves are stretched very tightly.”

“Not so tightly that they think that thing on the ice has learned how to shout at them in English, I hope,” Crozier says sardonically. He takes another sip of the brandy.

“No, no. Of course not. It was pure idiocy. Johns will be off his rum ration for two weeks. I apologize again.”

Crozier sighs. “Don’t do that. Rip him a new arsehole if you like, but don’t take his rum away. This ship feels surly enough already. Lady Silence was with me and wearing her God-damned hairy parka. Johns may have got a glimpse of that. It would have served me right if he’d blown my head off.”

“Silence was with you?” Fitzjames allowed his eyebrows to ask the questions.

“I don’t know what in hell she was doing out on the ice,” rasps Crozier. His throat is very sore from the day’s cold and his shouting. “I almost shot her myself a quarter mile from your ship when she crept up on me. Young Irving is probably turning Terror upside down as we speak. I made a huge mistake when I put that boy in charge of looking out for that Esquimaux bitch.”

“The men think she is a Jonah.” Fitzjames’s voice is very, very soft. Sounds travel easily through the partitions in such a crowded lower deck.

“Well why the hell shouldn’t they?” Crozier feels the alcohol now. He hasn’t had a drink since last night. It feels good in his belly and tired brain. “The woman shows up on the day this horror begins with that witch doctor father or husband of hers. Something has chewed her tongue out at the roots. Why the hell shouldn’t the men think she’s the cause of all this trouble?”

“But you’ve kept her aboard Terror for more than five months,” says Fitzjames. There is no reproach in the younger captain’s voice, only curiosity.

Crozier shrugs. “I don’t believe in witches, James. Nor Jonahs much, for that matter. But I do believe that if we put her out on the ice, the thing will be eating her guts the way it’s devouring Evans’s and Strong’s right now. And maybe your Private Reed’s as well. Wasn’t that Billy Reed, the redheaded Marine who always wanted to talk about that writer – Dickens?”

“William Reed, yes,” says Fitzjames. “He was very fast when the men did footraces back on Disko Island two years ago. I thought that perhaps one man, with speed…” He stops and chews his lip. “I should have waited for morning.”

“Why?” says Crozier. “It’s no lighter then. Or not much lighter at noon, for that matter. Day or night doesn’t mean anything anymore, and it won’t for another four months. And it’s not as if that damned thing out there only hunts at night… or even just in the dark, as far as that goes. Maybe your Reed will show up. Our messengers have gotten lost before out there in the ice and come in after five or six hours, shaking and cursing.”

“Perhaps.” Fitzjames’s tone echoes his doubt. “I’ll send out search parties in the morning.”

“That’s just what that thing wants us to do.” Crozier’s voice is very weary.

“Perhaps,” Fitzjames says again, “but you just told me that you’ve had men out on the ice last night and all day today looking for Strong and Evans.”

“If I hadn’t brought Evans with me when I was looking for Strong, the boy would still be alive.”

“Thomas Evans,” says Fitzjames. “I remember him. Big chap. He was not really a boy, was he, Francis? He must be… have been… what? Twenty-two or twenty-three years old?”

“Tommy turned twenty this May,” says Crozier. “His first birthday aboard was on the day after our departure. The men were in good spirits and celebrated his eighteenth birthday by shaving his head. He didn’t seem to mind. Those who knew him say he was always big for his age. He served on HMS Lynx and before that on an East Indian merchantman. He went to sea when he was thirteen.”

“As you did, I believe.”

Crozier laughs a little ruefully. “As I did. For all the good it did me.”

Fitzjames locks the brandy away in the cabinet and returns to the long table. “Tell me, Francis, did you actually dress up as a black footman to old Hoppner’s lady of rank when you were frozen in up here in… what was it, ’24?”

Crozier laughs again but more easily this time. “I did. I was a midshipman on the Hecla with Parry when he sailed north with Hoppner’s Fury in ’24, trying to find this same God-damned Passage. Parry’s plan was to sail the two ships through Lancaster Sound and down the Prince Regent Inlet – we didn’t know then, not until John and James Ross in ’33, that the Boothia was a peninsula. Parry thought he could sail south around Boothia and go hell-bent for leather until he reached the coastline that Franklin had explored from land six, seven years earlier. But Parry left too late – why do these God-damned expedition commanders always start off too late? – and we were lucky to get to Lancaster Sound on ten September, a month late. But the ice was on us by thirteen September, and there was no chance of getting through the Sound, so Parry in our Hecla and Lieutenant Hoppner in Fury ran south, our tails between our legs.

“A gale blew us back into Baffin Bay and we were lucky sods to find an anchorage in a tiny, pretty little bay off Prince Regent Inlet. We were there ten months. Froze our tits off.”

“But,” says Fitzjames, smiling slightly, “you as a little black boy?”

Crozier nods and sips his drink. “Both Parry and Hoppner were fanatics for fancy dress-up galas during winters in the ice. It was Hoppner who planned this masque he called the Grand Venetian Carnivale, set for the first day in November, right when morale dips as the sun disappears for months. Parry came down Hecla’s side in this huge cloak that he didn’t throw off even when all the men were assembled – most in costume, we had this huge trunk of costumes on each ship – and when he did throw down the cloak, we saw Parry as that old Marine – you remember the one with the peg leg what played the fiddle for ha’pennies near Chatham? No, you wouldn’t, you’re too young.

“But Parry – I think the old bastard always wanted to be an actor more than a ship’s captain – he does the whole thing up right, scratching away at his fiddle, hopping on that fake peg leg, and shouting out, ‘Give a copper to the poor Joe, your honour, who’s lost his timbers in defence of his King and country!’

“Well, the men laughed their arses off. But Hoppner, who loved that make-believe rubbish even more than Parry, I think, he comes into the ball dressed as a noble lady, wearing the latest Parisian fashions from that year – low bustline, big crinoline dress bunched up over his ass, everything – and since I was full of piss and vinegar in those days, not to mention too stupid to know better, in other words still in my twenties, I was dressed as Hoppner’s black footman – wearing this real footman’s livery that old Henry Parkyns Hoppner had bought in some dandy’s London livery store and brought along just for me.”

“Did the men laugh?” asks Fitzjames.

“Oh, the men laughed their arses off again – Parry and his peg weren’t in it after old Henry appeared in drag with me lifting his silk train behind him. Why wouldn’t they laugh? All those chimney sweeps and ribbon girls, ragmen and hook-nosed Jews, bricklayers and Highland warriors, Turkish dancers and London match girls? Look! There’s young Crozier, aging midshipman not even lieutenant yet who thinks he’s going to be an admiral someday, forgetting that he’s just another black Irish nigger.”

Fitzjames says nothing for a minute. Crozier can hear the snores and farts from the creaking hammocks toward the bow of the dark ship. Somewhere on deck just above them, a lookout stamps his feet to keep them from freezing. Crozier is sorry he’s ended the story this way – he speaks to no one like this when he is sober – but he also wishes that Fitzjames would get the brandy out again. Or the whiskey.

“When did Fury and Hecla escape from the ice?” asks Fitzjames.

“Twenty July the next summer,” says Crozier. “But you probably know the rest of the story.”

“I know that Fury was lost.”

“Aye,” says Crozier. “Five days after the ice relents – we’d been creeping along the shore of Somerset Island, trying to stay out of the pack ice, trying to avoid that God-damned limestone always falling from the cliffs – another gale grounds Fury on a spit of gravel. We man-hauled her free – using ice screws and sweat – but then both ships get frozen in, and a God-damned iceberg almost as big as that bastard squatting between Erebus and Terror shoves Fury against the shore ice, tears her rudder away, smashes her timbers to splinters, springs her hull plates, and the crew worked the four pumps in shifts day and night just trying to keep her afloat.”

“And you did for a while,” prompts Fitzjames.

“A fortnight. We even tried cabling her to a berg, but the fucking cable snapped. Then Hoppner tried raising her to get at her keel – just as Sir John wanted to do with your Erebus – but the blizzard put an end to that idea and both ships were in danger of being forced onto the lee shore of the headland. Finally the men just fell over where they were pumping – they were too exhausted to understand our orders – and on the twenty-first of August, Parry ordered everyone aboard Hecla and cast her off to save her from being driven aground and poor Fury got shoved right up onto the beach by a bunch of bergs that slammed her hard ashore there and blocked her way out. There wasn’t even a chance of a tow. The ice was smashing her to bits as we watched. We barely got Hecla free, and that only with every man working the pumps day and night and the carpenter laboring round the clock to shore her up.

“So we never got close to the Passage – or even to sighting new land, really – and lost a ship, and Hoppner was court-martialed and Parry considered that his court-martial as well since Hoppner was under his command the whole time.”

“Everyone was acquitted,” says Fitzjames. “Even praised, as I recall.”

“Praised but not promoted,” says Crozier.

“But you all survived.”

“Yes.”

“I want to survive this expedition, Francis,” says Fitzjames. His tone is soft but very determined.

Crozier nods.

“We should have done what Parry did and put both crews aboard Terror a year ago and sailed east around King William Land,” says Fitzjames.

It is Crozier’s turn to raise his brows. Not at Fitzjames agreeing that it is an island – their later-summer sledge reconnaissance had all but settled that – but in agreeing that they should have made a run for it last autumn, abandoning Sir John’s ship. Crozier knows that there is no harder thing for a captain in anyone’s navy to do than to give up his ship, but especially so in the Royal Navy. And while Erebus had been under the overall command of Sir John Franklin, Commander James Fitzjames had been its true captain.

“It is too late now.” Crozier is in pain. Because the Common Room shares several outer bulkheads and has three overhead Preston Patent Illuminators, it is cold – the two men can see their breath in the air – but it’s still sixty or seventy degrees warmer than it had been out on the ice and Crozier’s feet, especially his toes, are thawing in a rush of jagged pin pokes and red-hot needle stabs.

“Yes,” agrees Fitzjames, “but you were wise to have the gear and provisions sledged to King William Land in August.”

“It wasn’t a fraction of what we’ll need to ferry there if that is to be our survival camp,” Crozier says brusquely. He had ordered about two tons of clothing, tents, survival gear, and tinned food to be removed from the ships and stored on the northwest shore of the island should they have to abandon ships quickly during the winter, but the ferrying had been absurdly slow and extremely dangerous. Weeks of laborious sledging had left only a ton or so of cache there – tents, extra slops, tools, and a few weeks of canned food. Nothing more.

“That thing wouldn’t let us stay there,” he adds softly. “We all could have moved to tents in September – I had the ground prepared for two dozen of the big tents, you remember – but the campsite would not have been as defensible as the ships are.”

“No,” says Fitzjames.

“If the ships last the winter.”

“Yes,” says Fitzjames. “Have you heard, Francis, that some of the men – on both ships – are calling that creature the Terror?”

“No!” Crozier is offended. He does not want the name of his ship used to evil purposes such as that, even if the men are jesting. But he looks at Commander James Fitzjames’s hazel-green eyes and realizes that the other captain is serious and so must be the men. “The Terror,” says Crozier, and tastes bile.

“They think it is no animal,” says Fitzjames. “They believe its cunning is something else, is preternatural… supernatural… that there is a demon out there on the ice in the dark.”

Crozier almost spits he is so disgusted. “Demon,” he says in contempt. “These are the very seamen who believe in ghosts, faeries, Jonahs, mermaids, curses, and sea monsters.”

“I’ve seen you scratch the sail to summon wind,” Fitzjames says with a smile.

Crozier says nothing.

“You’ve lived long enough and traveled far enough to see things that no man knew existed,” Fitzjames adds, obviously trying to lighten the mood.

“Aye,” says Crozier with a bark of a laugh. “Penguins! I wish they were the largest beastie up here, as they seem to be down south.”

“There are no white bears there in the south arctic?”

“None that we saw. None that any south-sailing whaler or explorer has seen in seventy years of sailing toward and around that white, volcanic, frozen land.”

“And you and James Ross were the first men ever to see the continent. And the volcanoes.”

“Aye, we were. And it did Sir James much good. He’s married to a beautiful young thing, knighted, happy, retired from the cold. And me… I am… here.”

Fitzjames clears his throat as if to change the subject. “Do you know, Francis, until this voyage, I honestly believed in the Open Polar Sea. I was quite sure Parliament was correct when it listened to predictions from the so-called polar experts – in the winter before we sailed, do you remember? It was in the Times – all about the thermobaric barrier, about the Gulf Stream flowing up under this ice to warm the Open Polar Sea, and the invisible continent that must be up here. They were so convinced it existed that they were proposing and passing laws to send inmates of Southgate and other prisons up here to shovel the coal that must be in such plentitude just a few hundred miles from here on the North Polar Continent.”

Crozier laughs with real humour this time. “Yes, to shovel coal to heat the hotels and supply the refueling stations for the steamships that will be making regular trips across the Open Polar Sea by the 1860s at the latest. Oh, God, that I were one of those prisoners in Southgate. Their cells are, required by law and for humanity’s sake, twice the size of our cabins, James, and our future would be warm and secure if we only had to sit in such luxury and wait for word of that North Pole continent being discovered and colonized.”

Both men are laughing now.

There comes a thumping from the deck above – running footsteps rather than mere feet stamping – and then voices and a sliding of cold air around their feet as someone opens the main hatch above the far end of the companionway and the sound of several pairs of feet clattering down the steps.

Both captains are silent and waiting when the soft knock comes on the Common Room’s thin door.

“Enter,” says Commander Fitzjames.

An Erebus crewman leads in two Terrors – Third Lieutenant John Irving and a seaman named Shanks.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Commander Fitzjames, Captain Crozier,” says Irving through only slightly chattering teeth. His long nose is white from the cold. Shanks is still carrying a musket. “Lieutenant Little sent me to report to Captain Crozier as soon as I could.”

“Go ahead, John,” says Crozier. “You’re not still hunting for Lady Silence, are you?”

Irving looks blank for a second. Then, “We saw her out on the ice when the last search parties were coming in. No, sir, Lieutenant Little asked me to fetch you right away because…” The young lieutenant pauses as if forgetting the reason Little had sent him to report.

“Mr. Couch,” says Fitzjames to the Erebus mate on duty who had led the two Terrors to the Common Room, “be so kind as to step out into the companionway and to close the door please, thank you.”

Crozier has also heard the odd silence as the snoring and hammock creaking has all but ceased. Too many ears in the crew’s forward berthing space were awake and listening.

When the door is shut, Irving says, “It’s William Strong and Tommy Evans, sir. They’re back.”

Crozier blinks. “What the devil do you mean, back? Alive?” He feels the first surge of hope he’s had for months.

“Oh, no sir,” says Irving. “Just… one body… really. But it was propped against the stern rail when someone saw it as all the search parties were coming in for the day… about an hour ago. The guards on duty hadn’t seen anything. But it was there, sir. On Lieutenant Little’s orders, Shanks and I made the crossing as quickly as we could to inform you, Captain. Shanks Mare as it were.”

“It?” snaps Crozier. “One body? Back on the ship?” This makes no sense at all to the Terror’s captain. “I thought you said both Strong and Evans were back.”

Third Lieutenant Irving’s entire face is frostbite white now. “They are, Captain. Or at least half of them. When we went to look at the body propped there at the stern, it fell over and… well… came apart. As best we can tell, it’s Billy Strong from the waist up. Tommy Evans from the waist down.”

Crozier and Fitzjames can only look at each other.