The Terror

49 CROZIER

When Crozier slept – even for a few minutes – the dreams returned. The two skeletons in the open boat. The intolerable American girls snapping toe joints to simulate a spirit rapping at a table in a darkened room. The American doctor posturing as a polar explorer, a pudgy man dressed in an Esquimaux parka and wearing heavy makeup on an overbright gaslit stage. Then the two skeletons in an open boat again. The night always ending with the dream that disturbed Crozier the most.

He is a boy and is with his Memo Moira in a vast Catholic cathedral. Francis is naked. Memo pushes him toward the altar rail, but he is afraid to go forward. The cathedral is cold; the marble floor under young Francis’s bare feet is cold; there is ice on the white wooden pews.

Kneeling at the altar rail, young Francis Crozier can feel Memo Moira watching approvingly from somewhere behind him, but he is too frightened to turn his head. Something is coming.

The priest seems to rise up from some trapdoor set into the marble floor on the opposite side of the altar railing. The man is too large – far too large – and his vestments are white and dripping water. Smelling of blood and sweat and something ranker, he towers over little Francis Crozier.

Francis closes his eyes and, as Memo taught him while he knelt on the thin rug of her parlour, extends his tongue to receive the Eucharist. As important as this Sacrament is, as necessary as he knows it must be, Francis is terrifed to receive the Host. He knows that his life will never be the same after receiving the Papist Eucharist. And he also knows that his life will end if he does not receive it.

The priest looms closer and leans toward him…

Crozier awoke in the belly of the whaleboat. As always when he came up out of these dreams, even if he had caught only a few minutes’ sleep, his heart was pounding and his mouth was dry from fear. And he was shaking hard, but from cold more than from fear or the memory of fear.

The ice had broken up in the part of the strait or gulf they were in on the 17th and 18th of July, and for four days after that, Crozier had kept the men together on the large ice floe where they had stopped – the cutters and pinnace removed from their sledges, all five of the boats fully loaded except for their tents and sleeping bags, and rigged for open water.

Each night the rocking of their large floe and the cracking and fracturing of ice sent them scurrying from their tents, half awake, sure that the sea was opening up beneath them and ready to swallow them as it had Sergeant Tozer and his men. Each night the gunshot explosions of the ice cracking eventually abated, the wild rocking fell into a more regular rhythm of swells, and they crawled back into their tents.

It was warmer, some days rising almost to the freezing point – these few weeks of late July would almost certainly be the only hint of summer this second frozen-in arctic year would see – but the men were colder and more miserable than ever. Some days it actually rained. When it was too cold to rain, ice crystals in the foggy air soaked their wool clothing since it was too warm now to wear waterproof winter slops over their peacoats and greatcoats. Sweat from their man-hauling soaked their filthy underwear, filthy shirts and socks, and their ragged, ice-crusted trousers; despite their almost-depleted stores, the five remaining boats were heavier than the ten boats they’d hauled before ever had been, for in addition to the eating, breathing, but still comatosely staring Davey Leys, more sick men had to be hauled along every day. Dr. Goodsir reported to Crozier each day that more feet – always soaked and in wet socks in spite of all the extra boots Crozier had thought to bring along – turned rotten, more toes and heels turned black, and more feet had grown gangrenous and were now in need of amputation.

The Holland tents were soaked and never dried. The sleeping bags they cracked open in the late evening and crawled into as darkness fell were soaked and frozen inside and out and never dried. When the men awoke in the morning after a few stolen minutes of fitful sleep – no amount of shivering could make one warmer – the inside of the circular and pyramid tents were lined with thirty pounds of hoarfrost that fell and dripped on the men’s heads, shoulders, and faces as they tried to drink the tiny bit of lukewarm tea that was brought around to the tents each morning by Captain Crozier, Mr. Des Voeux, and Mr. Couch – a strange reversal of commanders as morning stewards that Crozier had instigated during their first week on the ice and which the men now took for granted.

Mr. Wall, Erebus’s cook, was sick with something like consumption and lay curled into the bottom of one of the cutters most of the time, but Mr. Diggle remained the same energetic, obscene, efficient, bellowing, and somehow reassuring figure he had been for three years at his post near the huge Frazer’s Patent Stove aboard HMS Terror. Now, with the ether fuel depleted and the spirit stoves and heavy whaleboat coal stoves abandoned, Mr. Diggle’s job was to portion out twice a day the small bit of cold salt pork and other victuals remaining, always under Mr. Osmer’s and another officer’s watchful supervision. But always the optimist, Diggle had cobbled together a crude seal-oil stove and cooking pot which he was ready to light if and when they shot more seals.

Every day, Crozier sent out hunting parties to find those seals for Mr. Diggle’s pot, but there were almost none to be seen and those few sighted slipped back into their open leads or tiny holes before the hunters succeeded in shooting them. Several times, so the men on the hunting parties reported, the slippery black ring seals had been hit by buckshot or even a musket ball or rifle bullet but managed to slide back into the black water and dive out of reach before they died, leaving only a trail of blood on the ice. Sometimes the hunters knelt on the ice to lap at the blood.

Crozier had been in summer arctic waters many times before and knew that by mid-July the water and opening floes should be teeming with life: huge walruses sunning themselves on ice floes and flopping ponderously along the water’s edge, their barks more a series of belches than barks; a proliferation of seals catapulting in and out of the water like children playing and bellying their way comically across the ice; beluga whales and narwhals spouting and rolling and submerging in the open leads, filling the air with their fishy breaths; female white bears swimming in the black water with their ungainly cubs and stalking seals on floes, shaking the water out of their strange fur as they pulled themselves from the ocean to the ice, avoiding the larger and more dangerous males, which would eat the cubs and the sow as well if their bellies were empty; finally, seabirds flying overhead in such profusion as to almost darken the blue arctic summer sky, birds on shore, on floes, and lining the irregular tops of icebergs like musical notes on a score, while more terns and gulls and gyrfalcons skimmed the water everywhere.

This summer, for the second year in a row, almost nothing living moved across the ice – only Crozier’s diminished and diminishing men gasping in their man-hauling halters and their relentless pursuer, always briefly and partially glimpsed, always out of rifle or shotgun range. A few times in the evening, the men heard the yip of arctic foxes and frequently found their dainty tracks in the snow, but none ever seemed to make itself visible to the hunters. When the men did see or hear whales, they were always many floes and small leads over, too far to reach even by frenzied, careless running – men throwing themselves from rocking floe to rocking floe before the sea mammals casually breached and dove and disappeared again.

Crozier had no idea if they could kill a narwhal or beluga with the few small arms they carried, but he thought they could – a few rifle bullets to the brain should kill anything short of the Beast that stalked them (which the seamen had long since decided was no beast at all, but a wrathful God out of the captain’s Book of Leviathan) – and if they somehow had the strength to drag a whale onto the ice and render it down, the oil would power Mr. Diggle’s stove for weeks or months and they would eat blubber and fresh meat until they all burst.

What Crozier most wanted to do was to kill the thing itself. Unlike the majority of his men, he believed it was mortal – an animal, nothing more. Smarter, perhaps, than even the frighteningly intelligent white bear, but still a beast.

If he could kill the thing, Crozier knew, the mere fact of its death – the pleasure of revenge for so many deaths, even if the rest of the expedition still were to die later from starvation and scurvy – would temporarily lift the morale of the survivors more than discovering twenty gallons of untapped rum.

The beast had not bothered them – not killed any of them – since the ice-enclosed lake where Lieutenant Little and his men had died. Each of the hunting parties the captain sent out had standing orders to return immediately should they find the thing’s tracks in the snow; Crozier intended to take every man who could walk and every weapon that could fire out to stalk the beast. If he had to, he would use men banging pots and pans and shouting to flush the thing out, as if it were a tiger in the high grass of India being brought to bay by beaters.

But Crozier knew this would work no better than the late Sir John’s bear blind. What they really needed to bring the thing closer was bait. Crozier had no doubt whatsoever that it was still keeping pace with them, moving in closer during the increasing hours of darkness, hiding wherever it hid, perhaps under the ice, during the day, and that it would come even closer if they could bait it in. But they had no fresh meat, and if they had even a pound of fresh kill, the men would devour it, not use it as bait to catch the thing.

Still, Crozier thought, while remembering the impossible great size and mass of the monstrous thing on the ice, there was more than a ton of meat and muscle there, perhaps several tons, since the larger male white bears weighed up to 1,500 pounds and the thing made its white bear cousins look like hunting dogs next to a large man in comparison. So they would eat well for many weeks if they did manage to murder their murderer. And with every bite, Crozier knew, even eating the thing-flesh as they were the salt pork while on the march, there would be the pleasure of revenge, even if it had to be a dish best served cold.

If it would work, Francis Crozier knew he would set himself out onto the ice as bait. If it would work. If it would save and feed even a few of his men, Crozier would offer himself to the beast as bait and hope that his men, who had proved themselves atrocious shots even before the last of Terror’s Marines died in the cold water, would be able to shoot the monster often enough, if not accurately enough, to bring it down, whether the Crozier bait survived or not.

With the thought of the Marines came, unbidden, the memory of Private Henry Wilkes’s body left behind in one of the abandoned boats a week earlier. There had been no gathering of the men for Wilkes’s nonburial, only Crozier, Des Voeux, and a few of the Marine’s closer friends saying a few words over the body before dawn.

We should have used Wilkes’s body for bait, thought Crozier as he lay in the bottom of the rocking whaleboat while the other men slept in heaped piles around him.

Then he realized – and not for the first time – that they had fresher bait with them. David Leys had been nothing but a burden for eight months, ever since the night in December of last year when the thing had given chase to the late Ice Master Blanky. Leys staring at nothing since that night, unresponsive, useless, hauled in the boat like a hundred and thirty pounds of soiled laundry for almost four months now, nonetheless managed to slurp down his salt-pork broth and rum ration every afternoon and to swallow his spoonful of tea and sugar each morning.

It was to the men’s credit that none of them – not even the whispering Hickey or Aylmore – had suggested leaving Leys behind, or any of the other sick men who currently could not walk. But everyone must have had the same thought…

Eat them.

Eat Leys first, then the others when they die.

Francis Crozier was so hungry that he could imagine eating human flesh. He would not kill a man in order to devour him – not yet – but once dead, why should all that meat be left behind to rot in the arctic summer sun? Or worse yet, left behind to be eaten by the thing that was after them?

As a new lieutenant in his twenties, Crozier had heard – as all sailing men now heard sooner or later, usually as ship’s boys before the mast – the true story of Captain Pollard in the U.S. brig Essex back in 1820.

Essex had been stove in and sunk, so the few survivors later reported, by an 85-foot sperm whale. The brig went down in one of the emptiest parts of the Pacific and the entire 20-man crew had been out in their boats hunting whales at the time and returned to find their ship sinking fast. Retrieving a few tools, some navigation instruments, and one pistol from the ship, the survivors set off in three whaleboats. Their only provisions were two live turtles they’d captured in the Galapagos, two casks of ship’s biscuits, and six casks of fresh water.

Then they steered the whaleboats for South America.

First, of course, they killed and ate the large turtles, drinking the blood when the meat was gone. Then they managed to capture some hapless flying fish who leapt into the boat by accident; while the men had contrived to cook the turtle meat, after a fashion, the fish they ate raw. Then they dived into the sea, scraped the barnacles from the hulls of their three open boats, and ate those.

Miraculously, the boats encountered Henderson Island – one of those few specks on the endless blue that is the Pacific Ocean. For four days the twenty men captured crabs and stalked gulls and their eggs. But Captain Pollard knew that there were not enough crabs, gulls, or gull eggs on the island to sustain twenty men for more than another few weeks, so seventeen of the twenty voted to take to the boats again. They launched the boats and waved good-bye to their three remaining companions on 27 December, 1820.

By 28 January, the three boats had been separated from one another by storm, and Captain Pollard’s whaleboat sailed eastward alone under the endless sky. Their rations now consisted of one and a half ounces of ship’s biscuit per man a day for the five men in the whaleboat. By not so great a coincidence, this was precisely the reduced ration that Crozier had just secretly discussed with Dr. Goodsir and First Mate Des Voeux for when the last of the salt pork ran out in a few days.

The bit of biscuit and few sips of water had kept Pollard’s men – his nephew Owen Coffin, a freed black man named Barzillai Ray, and two seamen – alive for nine weeks.

They were still more than 1,600 miles from land when the last of the biscuits ran out at the same time as the last of the water was drunk. Crozier had figured that if the biscuits lasted his men another month, they would still be more than 800 miles from human habitation in winter even if they reached the mouth of Back’s River.

Pollard had no conveniently recently deceased men aboard his boat, so they drew straws. Pollard’s young nephew Owen Coffin drew the short straw. Then they drew straws again to see who would do the deed. Charles Ramsdell drew the short straw this time.

The boy wished the other men a tremulous good-bye (Crozier always remembered his scrotum-tightening sense of horror the first time he heard this part of the story while on watch with an older man high in the mizzen of a warship far off Argentina, the old seaman terrifying Lieutenant Crozier by saying good-bye in a trembling boy’s voice), and then young Coffin had laid his head on the gunwale and closed his eyes.

Captain Pollard, as he later testified in his own words, had given Ramsdell his pistol and turned his face away.

Ramsdell shot the boy in the back of the head.

The five others, including Captain Pollard, the boy’s uncle, first drank the blood while it was warm. Although salty, it was – unlike the endless sea around them – drinkable.

Then they sliced the boy’s flesh from his bones and ate it raw.

Then they broke open Owen Coffin’s bones and sucked out the marrow to the last shred.

The cabin boy’s corpse had sustained them for thirteen days, and just when they were considering drawing lots again, the black man – Barzillai Ray – died of thirst and exhaustion. Again the draining, drinking, slicing, cracking, and sucking of marrow sustained them until they were rescued by the whaler Dauphin on 23 February, 1821.

Francis Crozier never met Captain Pollard but he had followed his career. The unlucky American had retained his rank and gone to sea only once more – and once more was shipwrecked. After being rescued the second time, he was never again entrusted with command of a ship. The last Crozier heard, only a few months before Sir John’s expedition sailed three years earlier in 1845, Captain Pollard was living as a town watchman in Nantucket and was universally shunned by both townspeople and whalers there. It was said that Pollard had aged prematurely, spoke aloud to himself and his long-dead nephew, and hid biscuits and salt pork in the rafters of his home.

Crozier knew that his people would have to make a decision about eating their own dead within the next few weeks, if not the next few days.

The men were approaching the point where they were too few and those few too weak to man-haul boats, but the four-day rest on the ice floe from the 18th to the 22nd of July had not renewed their energy. Crozier, Des Voeux, and Couch – young Lieutenant Hodgson, while technically the second in command, was given no authority by the captain these days – rousted men and ordered them out hunting or repairing sledge runners or caulking and rerepairing the boats rather than let them lie in their frozen sleeping bags in their dripping tents all day – but essentially all they could do was sit on their connected floes for days since too many tiny leads, fissures, small areas of open water, and patches of thin and rotten ice surrounded them to allow any progress south or east or north.

Crozier refused to turn back west and northwest.

But the floes were not drifting in the direction they wanted to go – southeast toward the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River. They merely milled and circled upon themselves as the pack holding Erebus and Terror had for two long winters.

Finally, on the afternoon of Saturday, 22 July, their own floe began cracking up enough that Crozier ordered everyone into the boats.

For six days now they had floated, tethered together by lines, in patches and leads too short or small to row or sail in. Crozier had the one sextant left to them (he had left the heavier theodolite behind), and while others slept he took the best readings he could during the occasional short break in cloud cover. He reckoned their position to be about eighty-five miles northwest of the mouth of Back’s River.

Expecting to see a narrow isthmus ahead of them any day now – the presumed peninsula connecting the bulb of King William Land to the previously mapped Adelaide Peninsula – Crozier had awakened in the boat at sunrise on the morning of Wednesday the 26th of July to find the air colder, the sky blue and cloudless, and glimpses of land darkening the sky more than fifteen miles away to both the north and south.

Calling the five boats together later, Crozier stood in the bow of his lead whaleboat and shouted, “Men, King William Land is King William Island. I’m certain now that there’s sea ahead all the way east and south to Back’s River, but I’ll bet my last quid that there’s no land connecting the cape you see far to the southwest there and the one you see far to the northeast. We’re in a strait. And since we have to be north of the Adelaide Peninsula, we’ve completed the goal of the Sir John Franklin Expedition. This is the North-West Passage. By God, you’ve done it.”

There was a weak cheer followed by some coughing.

If the boats and floes had been drifting south, weeks of man-hauling or sailing work might have been done for them. But the leads and areas of open water in which they floated continued to crack open only toward the north.

Life in the boats was as miserable as life on the floes in the tents had been. The men were crowded too close together. Even with boards on thwarts offering a second level for sleeping on those whaleboats and cutters with their sides built up by Mr. Honey (the disassembled sledges also served as a crossed-T deck amidships on the crowded cutters and pinnace), wet-wooled bodies were pressed against wet-wooled bodies both day and night. The men had to hang out over the gunwales to shit – an event that was becoming less and less necessary, even for the men with serious scurvy, as the food and water grew less – but while all the men had lost all vestiges of modesty, a sudden wave often soaked bare skin and lowered trousers, leading to curses, boils, and longer nights of shivering misery.

On the morning of Friday, 28 July, 1848, the lookout on Crozier’s boat – the smallest man on each boat was sent up the short raised mast with a spyglass – spied a maze of leads opening all the way to a point of land to the northwest, perhaps three miles away.

The able-bodied men in the five boats pulled – and when necessary, polled between narrowing ice ledges, the healthiest men at the bow hacking away with pickaxes and fending off with pikes – for eighteen hours.

They landed on a rocky shingle, in a darkness broken only by short periods of moonlight when the returning clouds parted, a little after eleven o’clock that night.

The men were far too exhausted to dismount the sledges and lift the cutters and pinnaces onto them. They were too tired to unpack their soaked Holland tents and sleeping bags.

They fell onto the rough stones where they had ceased their dragging of heavy boats across the shore ice and rocks made slippery by high tide. They slept in clumps, kept alive only by their crewmates’ failing body warmth.

Crozier did not even assign a watch. If the thing wanted them tonight, it could have them. But before he slept, he spent an hour trying to get a good sighting with his sextant and to work it out with the navigation tables and maps he still carried with him.

As best he could reckon, they had been on the ice for twenty-five days and man-hauled and drifted and rowed a total of forty-six miles to the east-southeast. They were back on King William Land somewhere north of the bulk of the Adelaide Peninsula and now even farther from the mouth of Back’s River than they had been two days earlier – about thirty-five miles northwest of the inlet across the unnamed strait they’d been unable to cross. If they even crossed this strait, they would be more than sixty miles up the inlet from the mouth of the river, a total of more than nine hundred miles from Great Slave Lake and their salvation.

Crozier carefully stowed his sextant in his wooden case and set the case away in its oilskin waterproof bag, found a sodden blanket from the whaleboat, and threw it down on stones next to Des Voeux and three sleeping men. He was asleep within seconds.

He dreamt of Memo Moira shoving him forward toward an altar rail and of the waiting priest in dripping vestments.

In his sleep, as the men snored in the moonlight of this unknown shore, Crozier closed his eyes and extended his tongue to receive the Body of Christ.