The Terror

20 BLANKY

Half an hour after the captain and the other men returning from the Divine Service party on Erebus went below, Tom Blanky couldn’t see the watch lanterns or the mainmast for all the blowing snow. The Ice Master was glad the blow had come up when it had; an hour earlier and their group trek back from Erebus would have been a buggering bitch.

On port watch under Mr. Blanky’s command this black evening were thirty-five-year-old Alexander Berry – not an especially intelligent man, Blanky knew, but dependable and good in the rigging – as well as John Handford and David Leys. This last man, Leys, now on bow watch, had just turned forty in late November and the men had thrown quite a fo’c’sle party for him. But Leys wasn’t the same man who had signed up for the Discovery Service two and a half years ago. Back in early November, just a few days before Marine Private Heather had his brains dashed out while on starboard watch and young Bill Strong and Tom Evans had disappeared, Davey Leys had simply gone to his hammock and quit talking. For almost three weeks Leys had simply left – his eyes stayed open, staring at nothing, but he hadn’t responded to voice, flame, shaking, shouts, or pinching. For most of that time he was in the sick bay, lying next to poor Private Heather, who somehow drew breaths even with his skull scooped open and some of his brains missing. While Heather lay there gasping, Davey continued to lie there in silence, staring unblinkingly at the overhead as if already dead himself.

Then, as soon as the fit had come on, it was over, and Davey was his old self again. Or almost his old self again. His appetite had come back – he’d lost almost twenty pounds during his time away from his own body – but the old Davey Leys’s sense of humour was gone, as was his easy, boyish smile and his willingness to enter into fo’c’sle conversations during make-and-mend or supper. Also, Davey’s hair, which had been a rich reddish brown the first week in November, was pure white when he came out of his funk. Some of the men said that Lady Silence had put a hex on Leys.

Thomas Blanky, Ice Master for more than thirty years, did not believe in hexes. He was ashamed of the men who were wearing polar bear claws, paws, teeth, and tails as some sort of anti-hex amulets. He knew that some of the less-educated men – centered around the caulker’s mate, Cornelius Hickey, whom Blanky had never liked nor respected – were spreading the word that the Thing on the Ice was some sort of demon or devil – or Daemon or Divell as their captain had later said the spelling ran in his odd Book of Leviathan – and some around Hickey were already making sacrifices to the monster, setting them outside the forward cable locker in the hold where everyone now knew Lady Silence, obviously an Esquimaux witch, was hiding. Hickey and his giant idiot friend, Magnus Manson, seemed to be the high priests of this cult – or rather, Hickey was the priest and Manson the acolyte who did whatever Hickey said – and they appeared to be the only ones allowed to bring the various offerings down to the hold. Blanky had gone down there into the sulfurous dark and stench and cold recently and was disgusted to see little pewter plates of food, burned-down candles, tiny tots of rum.

Thomas Blanky was no natural philosopher, but he had been a creature of the arctic as both man and boy, working as able-bodied seaman or ice master for American whalers when the Royal Navy had no use for him, and he knew these polar regions as few others on the expedition did. While this area was strange to him – as far as Blanky knew, no ship had ever sailed this far south of Lancaster Sound and so near to King William Land before, nor sailed so far west of Boothia Peninsula – most of the terrible arctic conditions were as familiar to him as a summer in Kent where he was born.

More familiar, actually, Blanky realized. He’d not seen a Kent summer in almost twenty-eight years.

The howling snow this night was familiar, as was the solid surface of ice and seracs and grumbling pressure ridges which were pushing poor Terror higher on its capstan of rising ice even while squeezing the life out of her. Blanky’s ice-master counterpart on Erebus, James Reid, a man Blanky highly respected, had informed him just today after the odd Divine Service that the old flagship hadn’t much longer to last. Besides its coal scuttles being drawn down even farther than the failing Terror’s, the ice had seized Sir John’s ship in a fiercer and less-forgiving grip more than a year ago when they’d first been locked fast into their current positions.

Reid had whispered that since Erebus was stern-down in the encroaching ice – the opposite of Terror’s bow-down position – the unrelenting pressure was squeezing Sir John’s ship more tightly and growing more terrible as it pushed the creaking, groaning ship higher above the surface of the frozen sea. Already the rudder had been splintered and the keel damaged beyond repair outside of a dry dock. Already the stern plates were sprung – there were three feet of frozen water in the stern, which was down by ten degrees, and only sandbags and coffer dams kept the slushy sea out of the boiler room – and the mighty oak beams that had survived decades of war and service were splintering. Worse, the spiderwebs of iron bracings set in place in 1845 to make Erebus impervious to the ice moaned constantly now from the terrible pressure. From time to time, smaller stanchions gave way at the join with the sound of a small cannon being fired. This often happened late at night and the men would snap upright in the hammocks, identify the source of the explosion, and go back to sleep with soft curses. Captain Fitzjames usually went below with some of his officers to investigate. The heavier braces would hold, Reid said, but only by tearing through the contracting oak-and-iron-layered hulls. When that happened, the ship would sink, ice or no ice.

Erebus’s ice master said that their ship’s carpenter, John Weekes, spent every day and half of most nights with a work party of no fewer than ten men down in the hold and orlop deck, shoring everything with every stout plank the ship had brought along – and many quietly borrowed from Terror – but the resulting web of internal wooden structure was a temporary fix, at best. Unless Erebus escaped the ice by April or May, Reid quoted Weekes as saying, it would be crushed like an egg.

Thomas Blanky knew ice. In the early summer of 1846, all the time he was guiding Sir John and his captain south through the long sound and newly discovered strait south of the Barrow Strait – the new strait remained nameless in their logs but some were already calling it “Franklin Strait,” as if naming the channel that had trapped the dead old fool would make his ghost feel better about being carried away by a monster – Blanky had been at his station atop the mainmast, shouting down advice to the helmsman as Terror and Erebus gingerly picked their way through more than 250 miles of changing ice and narrowing leads and dead-end channels.

Thomas Blanky was good at his job. He knew that he was one of the best ice masters and pilots in the world. From his precarious post high atop the mainmast – these old bombardment ships had no crow’s nests like a mere whaler – Blanky could tell the difference of drift ice from brash ice at eight miles’ distance. Asleep in his cubicle, he knew at once when the ship had moved from the glug-glug-glug passage through sludge ice into the metal-file rasp of pancake ice. He knew at a glance which bergy bits were a threat to the ship and which could be taken head-on. Somehow his aging eyes could make out the blue-white submerged growlers in a blue-white sea alive with sun sparkles and even tell which of the growlers would merely grind and groan as they slid along the ship’s hull and which – like an actual berg – would put the ship at risk.

So Blanky was proud of the job he and Reid had done leading both ships more than 250 miles south and then west of their first wintering spot at Beechey and Devon Islands. But Thomas Blanky also cursed himself for a fool and a villain for helping lead the two ships and their 126 souls 250 miles south and then west of their wintering spot at Beechey and Devon.

The ships could have retreated from Devon Island, back through Lancaster Sound and then down Baffin Bay, even if they’d had to wait two cold summers, or even three, to escape the ice. The little bay there at Beechey would have protected the ships from this open-sea ice abuse. And sooner or later the ice along Lancaster Sound would have relented. Thomas Blanky knew that ice. It behaved the way arctic ice was meant to behave – treacherous, deadly, ready to destroy you after a single wrong decision or moment’s lapse, but predictable.

But this ice, thought Blanky as he stomped about the dark stern to keep his feet from freezing, seeing the lanterns glowing port and starboard where Berry and Handford paced with their shotguns, this ice was like no ice in his experience.

He and Reid had warned Sir John and the two captains fifteen months ago, right before the ships became frozen in place. Go for broke, Blanky had advised, agreeing with Captain Crozier that they needed to turn tail while there were still the slightest open leads, needed to seek out open water as close to the Boothia Peninsula as fast as they could steam that long-ago September. The water there close to a known coast – at least the east side of it was known to old Discovery Service and whaler veterans such as Blanky – almost certainly would have stayed liquid for another week, perhaps two, into that lost-opportunity September. Even if they hadn’t been able to steam north along the coast again because of hummocky floes and old pack ice – Reid called it screw pack ice – they would have been infinitely safer behind the shelter of what they now were certain, after the dead Lieutenant Gore’s sledge expedition last summer, was James Ross’s King William Land. That landmass, as low, frozen, windswept, and lightning-ravaged as they now knew it to be, would have sheltered the ships from this Devil-sent constant northwest blast of arctic wind, blizzards, cold, and endless assaulting sea ice.

Blanky had never seen ice like this. One of the few advantages of pack ice, even when your ship was frozen in like a musket ball blasted into an iceberg, was that the pack ice drifted. The ships, while seemingly motionless, moved. When Blanky had been ice master on the American whaler Pluribus in ’36, winter had roared in on the twenty-seventh of August, taking everyone including the experienced one-eyed American captain by surprise and freezing them into Baffin Bay hundreds of miles north of Disko Bay.

The next arctic summer had been bad – almost as cold as this last summer, 1847, during which there had been no summer ice melt, air warmth, or return of birds or other wildlife here – but the whaler Pluribus was in more predictable pack ice and drifted more than seven hundred miles south until, late that next summer, they’d reached the ice line and been able to sail their way south through sludge-ice seas and narrow leads and what the Russians called polynyas, cracks in the ice that opened up as you watched, until the American whaler reached open water and could sail southeast to a Greenland port for refitting.

But not here, Blanky knew. Not in this truly godforsaken white hell. This pack ice was, as he’d described to the captains a year and three months ago, more like an endless glacier being pushed down from the north pole. And with the mostly uncharted bulk of arctic Canada to their south, King William Land to their southwest, and Boothia Peninsula beyond their reach to the east and nor’east, there was no real ice drift here – as Crozier’s and Fitzjames’s and Reid’s and Blanky’s repeated sun and star sextant readings kept telling them – just a sickening pivot around a fifteen-mile circumference. It was as if they were flies pinned to one of the metal music disks no longer used by the men in the Great Room below. Going nowhere. Always returning to the same spot again and again.

And this open pack ice was more like the coastal fast ice of Blanky’s experience, only here at sea the ice was twenty to twenty-five feet thick around the ships rather than the three-foot depth of regular fast ice. So thick that the captains couldn’t keep open the usual fire holes that all ships locked in the ice kept free all winter.

This ice didn’t even allow them to bury their dead.

Thomas Blanky wondered if he had been an instrument of evil – or perhaps just of folly – when he had used his more than three decades of ice-master skills to get 126 men the impossible 250 miles through ice to this place where all they could do was die.

Suddenly there came a shout. Then a shotgun blast. Another shout.