The Terror

56 JOPSON

They were treating him like an old man and leaving him behind because they thought he was an old man, used up, dying even, but that was ridiculous. Thomas Jopson was only thirty-one years old. Today, the twentieth of August, he turned thirty-one years old. It was his birthday, and none of them except Captain Crozier, who had quit coming to see him in his sick tent for some unknown reason, even knew it was his birthday. They were treating him like an old man because almost all of his teeth had fallen out from the scurvy and most of his hair had fallen out for some reason he did not understand and he was bleeding from his gums and eyes and hairline and anus, but he was not an old man. He was thirty-one years old today and they were leaving him behind to die on his birthday.

Jopson heard the revelries the afternoon and evening before – impressions and memories of the shouting and laughter and smell of roasting food were not connected since he had been shifting in and out of fevered consciousness all that previous day – but he had wakened in the twilight to find that someone had brought a plate holding a slab of oily sealskin, strips of dripping white blubber, and a fish-smelling stripe of almost-raw red seal meat. Jopson vomited – nothing had come up because he had not eaten for a day or days – and shoved the offending plate of offal out the open tent door.

He’d understood that they were leaving him when crewmate after crewmate came by his tent later in the evening, saying nothing, not even showing their faces, but each shoving in one or two rock-hard and half-green ship’s biscuits, stacking them by his side like so many white rocks in preparation for his burial. He was too weak to protest then – and too preoccupied with his dreams – but he had known that these few lousy lumps of half-baked and fully stale flour were all he was to receive for his years of faithful service to the Navy, to the Discovery Service, and to Captain Crozier.

They were leaving him behind.

This Sunday morning he awoke more clearheaded than he had been in some days – perhaps in weeks – only to hear his shipmates’ preparations to leave Rescue Camp forever.

There was shouting down by the boats as the two whaleboats were righted and as the two cutters were readied on their sledges and as all four boats were loaded.

How could they leave me behind? Jopson had trouble believing they could or would. Hadn’t he stayed by Captain Crozier’s side a hundred times during the captain’s illnesses and moody low points and outright bouts of drunkenness? Hadn’t he quietly, uncomplainingly, like the good steward he was, hauled pails of vomit from the captain’s cabin in the middle of the night and wiped the Irish drunkard’s arse when he shat himself in his fever deliriums?

Perhaps that’s why the bastard is leaving me to die.

Jopson forced his eyes open and tried to roll over in his sodden sleeping bag. It was very difficult. The weakness radiating out from his center consumed him. His head threatened to burst with pain every time he opened his eyes. The earth pitched against him as fiercely as any ship he’d ever ridden around the Horn in high seas. His bones ached.

Wait for me! he shouted. He thought he had shouted it, but it had been only a silent thought. He would have to do better than that… catch up to them before they shoved the boats out onto the ice… show them that he could man-haul with the best of them. He might even fool them by being able to force down some of their reeking, rotten seal meat.

Jopson could not believe that they were treating him like a dead man. He was a living human being with a good Naval record and excellent experience as a personal steward and with as solid a private history as a loyal citizen of Her Majesty’s as any other man on the expedition, not to mention a family and a home in Portsmouth (if Elisabeth and his son, Avery, were still alive and if they’d not been evicted from the home they’d rented with Thomas Jopson’s Discovery Service river-pay advance of 28 pounds against his first year’s expedition salary of 65 pounds).

Rescue Camp now seemed empty except for a few low moans that could be coming from nearby tents or could be merely the incessant wind. The usual crunch of boots on gravel, soft cursing, rare laughter, the small talk of men going to and from watch, shouts between tents, echoes of hammer or saw, the smell of pipe tobacco – all were absent except for faint and receding noises from the direction of the boats. The men were really leaving.

Thomas Jopson was not going to stay here and die in this cold arse-end-of-the-world temporary camp.

Using all of the strength he had and some he knew he did not have, Jopson pulled his Hudson ’s Bay blanket sleeping bag down past his shoulders and began creeping his way out of it. The operation was made no simpler by the fact that strands of frozen sweat, blood, and other bodily fluids had to be ripped free of flesh and wool before he could crawl out of the blanket and toward the tent opening.

Moving what seemed like miles on his elbows, Jopson collapsed forward through the tent flap and gasped at how cold the air outside was. He had grown so used to the canvas-filtered dim light and stuffy air of his tent-womb that this openness and glare made his lungs labour and filled his squinted-shut eyes with tears.

Jopson soon realized that the sun’s glare was illusory; indeed, the morning was dark and thickly fogged, with tendrils of icy vapour moving between the tents like the spirits of all those dead men they’d left behind. It reminded the captain’s steward of the thick fog on the day they’d sent Lieutenant Little, Ice Master Reid, Harry Peglar, and the others forward down the first open lead in the ice.

To their deaths, thought Jopson.

Crawling over the ship’s biscuits and seal meat – brought to him as if he were some damned pagan idol or sacrificial offering to the gods – Jopson pulled his unfeeling and unresponsive legs out through the circular tent opening.

He saw two or three tents standing nearby and for a second he was filled with the hope that the absence of ambulatory men here was temporary, that they were all busy doing something near the boats and would soon be back. But then Jopson saw that most of the Holland tents were missing.

No, not missing. He could see now, as his eyes adapted to the diffuse light leaking through the fog, that the majority of tents here on the south end of the camp – nearest to the boats and shoreline – had been collapsed, with rocks tossed atop them to keep them from blowing away. Jopson was confused. If they were actually leaving, wouldn’t they be bringing the tents along? It was as if they planned to go out on the ice but then return soon. To where? And why? None of it made any sense to the sick and recently hallucinatory steward.

Then the fog shifted and lifted and he could see fifty yards or so to where the men were pulling, pushing, and tugging from the sides on the boats, hauling them out onto the ice. Jopson estimated that there were at least ten men per boat, which meant that all or almost all of the survivors here at camp were leaving him and the other really sick men behind.

How can Dr. Goodsir leave me behind? wondered Jopson. He tried to remember the last time it had been the surgeon who had lifted his head and shoulders to feed him broth or to clean him. It was young Hartnell yesterday, wasn’t it? Or had that been several days ago? He could not recall the last time the surgeon had looked in on him or brought him medicine.

“Wait!” he called.

Only it had not been a call. It had hardly been a croak. Jopson realized that he had not spoken aloud for days – perhaps weeks – and the noise he’d just made sounded muted and muffled even to his own ringing ears.

“Wait!” That had been no better. He realized that he had to wave his arm in the air, make them see him, make them turn back for him.

Thomas Jopson could not raise either arm. Even trying to do so caused him to fall forward, his face striking the gravel.

There was nothing for it – he would just have to crawl toward them until they saw him and turned back. They wouldn’t leave behind a fellow crewmate healthy enough to crawl a hundred yards after them onto the ice.

Jopson wriggled forward on his torn elbows another three feet and collapsed facedown onto the icy gravel again. The fog roiled around him, obscuring even his own tent a few paces behind him. The wind moaned – or perhaps it was more abandoned sick souls moaning in the few tents still standing – and the chill of the cold day cut right through his filthy wool shirt and soiled trousers. He realized that if he kept crawling away from his tent, he might not have the strength to crawl back and would die of the cold and damp out here.

“Wait!” he called. His voice was as weak and mewling as a newborn kitten’s.

He crawled and wriggled and writhed another three feet… four… and lay gasping like a harpooned seal. His weakened, dragging arms and hands were of no more use than flippers would be… of less use.

Jopson tried digging his chin into the frozen earth to propel himself forward another foot or two. He immediately chipped one of his last remaining teeth in two but dug his chin in again for another try. His body was simply too heavy. It seemed attached to the earth by great weights.

I am only thirty-one years old, he thought fiercely, angrily. Today is my birthday.

“Wait… wait… wait… wait.” Each syllable was weaker than the last.

Panting, gasping, his remaining strands of hair dabbing crimson streaks onto the rounded stones, Jopson lay on his belly, his dead arms at his sides, painfully cocked his neck, and settled his cheek against the cold earth so that he could see straight ahead.

“Wait…”

The fog swirled and then lifted.

He could see a hundred yards, past the odd vacuity where the boats had been lined up, past the shingle of shore gravel and the tumble of shore ice, out onto the ice itself where forty-some men and four boats – where is the fifth? – struggled southward deeper onto the ice, the men’s own weakness evident even at this distance, their own progress not that much more efficient or elegant than Jopson’s five-yard struggle had been.

“Wait!” This last shout had taken the penultimate ounce of draining energy – Jopson could feel his core’s warmth flowing away into the icy ground beneath him – but it had come out as loud as any spoken word he had ever uttered.

“Wait!!” he finally shouted. It was a man’s voice now, not a kitten’s mewl or dying seal’s squeak.

But it was too late. The men and boats were a hundred yards out now and disappearing fast – mere black, staggering silhouettes against an eternal background of grey and grey – and the cracking and groaning of ice and wind would have covered the sound of a rifle shot, much less a solitary voice of one man left behind.

For an instant the fog lifted more and a benevolent light fell on everything – as if the sun were coming out to melt the ice everywhere and to bring green tendrils and living things and hope back where none existed here before – but then the fog closed in and swirled around Jopson, blinding him and binding him with its clammy, cold grey fingers.

And then the men and the boats were gone.

It was as if they had never existed.