The Terror

51 CROZIER

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, “Present!” 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.”

“Amen,” croaked the sixty-two men still able to stand at muster stations.

“Amen,” came a few voices from the other twelve lying in tents.

Crozier did not dismiss the assembled men.

“Men of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, members of the John Franklin Discovery Service Expedition, shipmates,” he rasped loudly. “Today we have to decide which way our paths shall carry us. You all remain – under both the Ship’s Articles and the Articles of the Royal Discovery Service which you signed with your oaths of honour – under my command and will continue to be so until you are released by me. You’ve followed Sir John, Captain Fitzjames, and me this far, and you have done well. Many of our friends and shipmates have gone home to Christ, but seventy-four of us have persevered. I am resolved in my heart that every man of you here at Rescue Camp today should survive to see England, home, and your families again, and God shall be my witness that I have done my best to make sure that this shall be the outcome of our efforts. But today I release you to decide your own path by which to reach that goal.”

The men murmured to one another. Crozier let that go on for a few seconds and then continued. “You’ve heard what we are doing – Dr. Goodsir to remain here with those too ill to travel, the healthier men to continue toward Back’s River. Are there any among you who still wish to attempt to find some other way to rescue?”

There was a silence as men looked down and scuffled their booted feet on the gravel, but then George Hodgson hobbled forward.

“Sir, some of us do, sir. Want to head back that is, Captain Crozier.”

The captain just looked at the young officer for a long moment. He knew that Hodgson was a stalking horse for Hickey, Aylmore, and a few of the more rebellious sea lawyers who had been stirring up the men with resentment for so many months, but he wondered if young Hodgson knew it.

“Back to where, Lieutenant?” Crozier asked at last.

“To the ship, sir.”

“Do you think Terror is still there, Lieutenant?” As if to punctuate his query, the sea ice south of them exploded in a series of shotgun blasts and earthquake rumbles. An iceberg hundreds of yards from shore crumbled and fell.

Hodgson shrugged like a boy. “Terror Camp will be, Captain, whether the ship still is or not. We left food and coal and boats at Terror Camp.”

“Aye,” said Crozier, “so we did. And we’d all welcome some of that food now – even some of the tinned food that killed some of us so terribly. But, Lieutenant, that was some eighty or ninety miles and almost one hundred days ago when we left Terror Camp. Do you and the others really think you can walk or haul your way back there into the teeth of winter? It would be late November by the time you made your way even to the camp. Total darkness. And you remember the temperatures and storms of last November.”

Hodgson nodded and said nothing.

“We ain’t going to walk ’til no late November,” said Cornelius Hickey, stepping out of the ranks to stand next to the slumped young lieutenant. “We think the ice is open along the shore back the way we come. We’ll sail and row around that fuckin’ cape we hauled five boats over like ’Gyptian slaves and be home in Terror Camp in a month.”

The assembled men mumured furtively among themselves.

Crozier nodded. “It may indeed open for you, Mr. Hickey. Or it may not. But even if it does, it’s more than a hundred miles back to a ship that may well be crushed and most certainly will be frozen fast by the time you get there. It’s at least thirty miles closer to the mouth of Back River from here and the odds of the inlet being free of ice south of here, near the river, are much greater.”

“You ain’t talking us out of this, Captain,” Hickey said firmly. “We talked it over ’mongst ourselves, and we’re going.”

Crozier stared at the caulker’s mate. The captain’s usual instinct to put down any insubordination immediately and with great strength and decisiveness rose in him, but he reminded himself that this was what he wanted. It was past time to get rid of the malcontents and to save those others who trusted his judgement. Besides, this late in the summer and in their escape attempt, Hickey’s plan might even be workable. It all depended upon where the ice broke up – if it broke up anywhere before the winter set in. The men deserved to choose their own last, best chance.

“How many are going with you, Lieutenant?” asked Crozier, speaking to Hodgson as if he would actually be the commander of the group.

“Well…,” began the young man.

“Magnus is going,” said Hickey, gesturing the giant forward. “And Mr. Aylmore.”

The sullen gunroom steward swaggered forward, his face filled with defiance and visible contempt toward Crozier.

“And George Thompson…,” continued the caulker’s mate.

Crozier was not surprised that Thompson would be part of Hickey’s cabal. The seaman had always been insolent and lazy and – as long as the rum lasted – drunk whenever possible.

“I’m going along, too,… sir,” said John Morfin, stepping up with the others.

William Orren, just turned 26, stepped forward without a word and stood with Hickey’s group.

Then James Brown and Francis Dunn – Erebus’s caulker and caulker’s mate – joined the group. “We think it’s our best chance, Captain,” said Dunn and looked down.

Waiting for Reuben Male and Robert Sinclair to declare their intentions – realizing that if the majority of men standing at muster joined this group that all of his own plans for flight south were gone for good – Crozier was surprised when William Gibson, Terror’s subordinate officers’ steward, and Stoker Luke Smith walked slowly forward. They’d been good men aboard ship and stalwart haulers.

Charles Best – a reliable Erebus seaman who had always been loyal to Lt. Gore – stepped forward with four other seamen in tow: William Jerry, Thomas Work, who had been sorely injured at Carnivale, young John Strickland, and Abraham Seeley.

The sixteen men stood there.

“Is that it then?” asked Crozier, feeling a hollow sense of relief that gnawed at his belly like the hunger that was always with him now. Sixteen men were standing there; they would need one boat, but they were leaving behind enough loyal men to head for Back River with him while also leaving enough to take care of the ill here at Rescue Camp. “I’ll give you the pinnace,” he said to Hodgson.

The lieutenant nodded gratefully.

“The pinnace is all busted up and rigged for river work and the sledge is a pain in the arse to drag,” said Hickey. “We’ll take a whaleboat.”

“You’ll get the pinnace,” said Crozier.

“We want George Chambers and Davey Leys, too,” said the caulker’s mate, folding his arms and standing legs-apart in front of his men like a Cockney Napoleon.

“The hell you say,” said Crozier. “Why would you want to bring two men who can’t take care of themselves?”

“George can haul,” said Hickey. “And we been takin’ care of Davey and want to keep doin’ so.”

“No,” said Dr. Goodsir, stepping forward into the tense space between Crozier and Hickey’s men, “you haven’t been taking care of Mr. Leys and you don’t want George Chambers and him as fellow travelers. You want them as food.”

Lieutenant Hodgson blinked in disbelief, but Hickey balled up his fists and gestured to Magnus Manson. The little man and huge man took a step forward.

“Stop exactly where you are,” bellowed Crozier. Behind him, the three surviving Marines – Corporal Pearson, Private Hopcraft, and Private Healey – while visibly ill and shaky on their feet, had lifted and aimed their long muskets.

More to the point, First Mate Des Voeux, Mate Edward Couch, Bosun John Lane, and Bosun’s Mate Tom Johnson were aiming shotguns.

Cornelius Hickey actually snarled. “We got guns, too.”

“No,” said Captain Crozier, “you do not. While you were at muster, First Mate Des Voeux rounded up all weapons. If you leave peaceably tomorrow, you’ll get one shotgun and some cartridges. If you take another step right now, you’ll all get bird shot in your faces.”

“You are all going to die,” said Cornelius Hickey, pointing his bony finger at the men standing silently in muster formations while swinging his arm in a half circle like a scrawny weather vane. “You’re going to follow Crozier and these other fools and you’re going to die.”

The caulker’s mate wheeled toward the surgeon. “Dr. Goodsir, we forgive you for what you said about why we want to save George Chambers and Davey Leys. Come with us. You can’t save these men here.”

Hickey gestured contemptuously toward the sagging wet tents where the sick men lay.

“They’re dead already, just don’t know it,” continued Hickey, his voice very large and loud coming from such a small frame. “We’re going to live. Come with us and see your family again, Dr. Goodsir. If you stay here – or even follow Crozier – you’re a dead man. Come with us.”

Goodsir had absentmindedly worn his spectacles when he’d come out from the surgical tent and now he removed them and unhurriedly wiped moisture from them, using the bloody end of his woolen waistcoat as a rag. A small man with a boy’s full lips and a receding chin only partially concealed under the hedge of curly beard that had grown down from his earlier unsuccessful side whiskers, Goodsir seemed completely at ease. He put his spectacles back on and looked at Hickey and the men behind him.

“Mr. Hickey,” he said softly, “as grateful as I am for your boundless generosity in offering to save my life, you need to know that you do not need me along to do what you are planning to do with regards to dissecting the bodies of your shipmates in order to provide yourself with a larder of meat.”

“I ain’t…,” began Hickey.

“Even an amateur can learn dissective anatomy quite quickly,” interrupted Goodsir, his voice strong enough to override the caulker’s mate’s. “When one of these other gentlemen you’re bringing along as your private food stock dies – or when you help him die – all you have to do is sharpen a ship’s knife to a scalpel’s edge and begin cutting.”

“We ain’t going to…,” shouted Hickey.

“But I do strongly recommend that you bring a saw,” overrode Goodsir. “One of Mr. Honey’s carpenter saws will do nicely. While you can slice off your shipmates’ calves and fingers and thighs and belly flesh with a knife, you shall almost certainly require a good saw to get the legs and arms off.”

“God-damn you!” screamed Hickey. He started forward with Manson but stopped when the mates and Marines raised their shotguns and muskets again.

Unperturbed, not even looking at Hickey, the surgeon pointed toward the huge form of Magnus Manson as if the man were an anatomist’s chart hanging on a wall. “It’s not so different than carving a Christmas goose when one gets right down to it.” He slashed vertical marks in the air toward Manson’s upper torso and a horizontal one just below his waist. “Saw the arms off at the shoulder joints, of course, but you shall have to saw through each man’s pelvic bones to cut off his legs.”

Hickey’s neck cords strained and his pale face grew red, but he did not speak again while Goodsir continued.

“I would use my smaller metacarpal saw to cut through the legs at the knees and, of course, the arms at the elbow, and then proceed with a good scalpel to slice away the choice parts – thighs, buttocks, biceps, triceps, deltoids, the meaty part behind the shins. Only then do you start the real butchering of the pectorals – chest muscles – and to get at any fat you gentlemen may have retained near your shoulder blades or along your sides and lower back. There shan’t be much fat there, of course, nor muscle, but I’m sure Mr. Hickey wants no parts of you to go to waste.”

One of the seamen in the back of the group behind Crozier dropped to his knees and began to dry retch into the gravel.

“I have an instrument called a tenaculum to crack the sternum and to remove the ribs,” Goodsir said softly, “but I’m afraid I can’t let you borrow it. A good ship’s hammer and chisel – there’s one in every boat kit, you’ve noticed – should serve that purpose almost as well.

“I do recommend you attend to rending the flesh first and set aside your friends’ heads, hands, feet, intestines – all of the contents of the soft abdominal sac – for later.

“I warn you – it’s more difficult than you think to crack open the long bones for their marrow. You’ll need some sort of scraping tool, rather like Mr. Honey’s wood-carving gouge. And do note that the marrow will be lumpy and red when it’s forced from the center of the bones… and mixed with bone chips and fragments, so not terribly healthy to eat raw. I recommend you put each other’s bone marrow into a pot for cooking straightaway and let yourselves simmer before trying to digest your friends.”

“Fuck you,” snarled Cornelius Hickey.

Dr. Goodsir nodded.

“Oh,” the surgeon added softly, “when you get around to eating one another’s brains, it will be simplicity itself. Simply saw off the lower jaw, throw it away with the lower teeth, and use any knife or spoon to gouge and hack your way up through the soft palate into the cranial vault. If you wish, you may invert the skull and sit around it, scooping out each other’s brains like so much Christmas pudding.”

For a minute there were no voices raised, only the wind and the groan, crack, and snapping of the ice.

“Is there anyone else who wants to leave tomorrow?” called Captain Crozier.

Reuben Male, Robert Sinclair, and Samuel Honey – Terror’s fo’c’sle captain, Erebus’s foretop captain, and Terror’s blacksmith, respectively – stepped forward.

“You’re going with Hickey and Hodgson?” asked Crozier. He did not allow himself to show the shock he felt.

“Nay, sir,” said Reuben Male, shaking his head. “We ain’t with them. But we want to try walking back to Terror.”

“No boat needed, sir,” said Sinclair. “We’re going to try hiking cross-country as it were. Straight across the island. Maybe we’ll find some foxes and such inland, away from the coast.”

“Navigation will be difficult,” said Crozier. “Compasses aren’t worth a damn here and I can’t give you one of my sextants.”

Male shook his head. “No worries, Captain. We’ll just use dead reckoning. Most of the time, if the fuckin’ wind is in our face – pardon my language, sir – then we’re headed the right way.”

“I was a seaman before I was a ’smith, sir,” said Samuel Honey. “We’re all sailors. If we can’t die at sea, at least this way perhaps we can die aboard our ship.”

“All right,” said Crozier, speaking to all the men still standing there and making sure that his voice would reach to the tents. “We’re going to assemble at six bells and divide up all the remaining ship’s biscuits, spirits, tobacco, and any other victuals we still have. Every man. Even those who had their surgeries last night and today will be brought to the dividing-up. Everyone will see what we have, and every man will get an equal share. From this point on, each man – except those being fed and cared for by Dr. Goodsir – will be in charge of his own rationing.”

Crozier looked coldly at Hickey, Hodgson, and their group. “You men will – under Mr. Des Voeux’s oversight – go ready your pinnace for your departure. You’ll leave at dawn tomorrow, and except for the divvying up of goods and food at six bells, I don’t want to see your faces before then.”