Dan Simmons - The Terror

When they finished, Crozier and Fitzjames walked away from the others. They would eat their dinners much later – for now they planned to walk the two miles up to Victory Point where Graham Gore had left his brass canister and optimistic message in James Ross’s old cairn almost a year ago.

Crozier planned to leave word there today on what the fate of their expedition had been in the past ten and a half months since Gore’s note had been written and on what they planned to do next.

Plodding tiredly through the fog, hearing one of the ship’s bells ringing for dinner somewhere in the roiling fog behind them – they had, of course, brought both Terror ’s and Erebus ’s bells along in the whaleboats dragged across the frozen sea to camp when the ships were abandoned – Francis Crozier hoped to Christ that he would decide on their course of action by the time that he and Fitzjames reached the cairn. If he could not, he thought, he was afraid he might start weeping.

There hadn’t been enough fish and seal on the sled to serve it as a main dish to ninety-five or a hundred men – a few were too ill to eat anything solid – and even Mr. Diggle’s and Mr. Wall’s record at routinely performing loaves-and-fishes miracles with the limited ships’ stores did not allow them to fully succeed at this one (especially since some of the food on the Esquimaux sledge had been particularly putrid), but every man managed to get a taste of the savory blubber or fish along with the prepared Goldner soups or stews or vegetables.

Harry Peglar enjoyed the meal even though he was shaking with cold as he ate it and knew that it would only provoke the diarrhea that was already ripping him apart every day.

After the meal and before beginning their scheduled duties, Peglar and Steward John Bridgens walked together with their tin mugs of tepid tea. The fog muffled their own voices even as it seemed to amplify sounds from far away. They could hear men arguing over a card game in one of the tents on the far side of Terror Camp. From the northwest – the direction the two captains had walked before dinner – came the artillery rumble of thunder out over the pack ice. That sound had been going on all day, but no storm had arrived.

The two paused at the long line of boats and boat-sledges drawn up above the tumble of ice that would be the inlet’s shoreline if there ever came a thaw to the sea.

“Tell me, Harry,” said Bridgens, “which of these boats will we be taking if or when we must go to the ice again?”

Peglar sipped his tea and pointed. “I’m not certain, but I think Captain Crozier has decided to take ten of the eighteen here. We don’t have men well enough to haul more these days.”

“Then why did we man-haul all eighteen to Terror Camp?”

“Captain Crozier considered the possibility that we’d stay at Terror Camp for another two or three months, perhaps letting the ice around this point melt. We would have been better off with more boats, keeping some in reserve should others be damaged. And we could have hauled much more in the way of food, tents, and supplies in eighteen boats. With more than ten men in each boat now, it’ll be damned crowded, and we’ll have to leave too much of the stores behind.”

“But you think we’ll leave for the south with only ten boats, Harry? And soon?”

“I hope to Christ we do,” said Peglar. He told Bridgens about what he had seen that morning, what Goodsir had said about the Esquimaux’s stomachs being as full of seal meat as Irving’s had been, and how the captain had treated those present, perhaps excepting the Marines, as a potential Board of Inquiry. He added that the captain had sworn them to secrecy.

“I think,” John Bridgens said softly, “that Captain Crozier is not convinced that the Esquimaux killed Lieutenant Irving.”

“What? Who else could…” Peglar stopped. The cold and nausea that were always with him now seemed to surge up and through him. He had to lean against a whaleboat to keep his knees from buckling. He had never considered for an instant that anyone other than the savages could have done what he’d seen done to John Irving. He thought of the frozen pile of grey entrails on the ridgeline.

“Richard Aylmore is saying that the officers have led us into this mess,” said Bridgens in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. “He’s telling everyone who won’t inform on him that we should kill the officers and parcel out the extra food rations amongst the men. Aylmore in our group and that caulker’s mate in yours say we should go back to Terror at once.”

“Back to Terror …” repeated Peglar. He knew that his mind was dull with illness and exhaustion these days, but the idea made no sense at all. The ship was locked in the ice far out there and would be for months more, even if summer did condescend to appear this year. “Why don’t I hear these things, John? I’ve heard none of this seditious whispering.”

Bridgens smiled. “They don’t trust you not to tell, my dear Harry.”

“But they trust you?”

“Of course not. But I hear everything sooner or later. Stewards are invisible, y’know, being neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat. Speaking of which, that was a delightful meal, wasn’t it? Perhaps the last relatively fresh food we shall ever eat.”

Peglar didn’t answer. His mind was racing. “What can we do to warn Fitzjames and Crozier?”

“Oh, they have this information about Aylmore and Hickey and the others,” the old steward said nonchalantly. “Our captains have their own sources before the mast and around the scuttlebutts.”

“The scuttlebutts have been frozen solid for months,” said Peglar.

Bridgens chuckled. “That seems to be a very good metaphor, Harry, and all the more ironic for its literalness. Or at least an amusing euphemism.”

Peglar shook his head. He still felt the nausea from the idea that amidst all this illness and terror, any man among them would turn on another.

“Tell me, Harry,” said Bridgens, patting the inverted hull of the first whaleboat with his worn mitten. “Which of these boats might we be hauling with us and which will be left behind?”

“The four whaleboats will go for sure,” Peglar said absently, still mulling over this talk of mutiny and what he had seen that morning. “The jolly boats are as long as the whaleboats, but damned heavy. If I were the captain, I might leave them behind and take the four cutters instead. They’re only twenty-five feet long, but much lighter than whaleboats. But their draft may be too much for the Great Fish River if we can get there. The ships’ smaller boats and dinghies are too light for the open sea and too flimsy for much hauling and river work.”

“So it’s the four whaleboats, four cutters, and two pinnaces, you think?” asked Bridgens.

“Yes,” said Peglar, and had to smile. For all his years at sea and all his thousands of volumes read, Subordinate Officers’ Steward John Bridgens still knew very little about some things nautical. “I think those ten, yes, John.”

“At best,” said Bridgens, “if most of the sick recover, that leaves only ten of us to man-haul each boat. Can we do that, Harry?”

Peglar shook his head again. “It won’t be like the sea ice crossing from Terror , John.”

“Well, thank the dear Lord for that small blessing.”

“No, I mean that we’ll almost certainly be man-hauling these boats over land rather than sea ice. It’ll be much harder than the crossing from Terror , where we man-hauled only two boats at a time and could put as many men on a team as we needed to get over the rough parts. And the boats now will be even more heavily laden with stores and our sick than before. I suspect that we’ll have twenty or more in harness for each boat hauled. Even then, we’ll have to haul the ten boats in relays.”