Dan Simmons - The Terror

In the past two weeks they had just crossed the rugged ice of a huge bay that cut into the underside of the cape that seemed for weeks of hauling as if it would continue to bulge out to the southwest forever. But now they were headed southeast again, paralleling the coastline along the underside of that cape and then farther east – the correct direction if they were to get to Back’s River.

Crozier had brought his sextant and theodolite along, and Lieutenant Little also had his sextant, as well as the dead Fitzjames’s instrument as a spare, but neither officer had taken star sightings or sun sightings for weeks. It just wasn’t important. If King William Land was a peninsula, as most of the arctic explorers, including Crozier’s old commander James Clark Ross, had thought, then this coastline would lead them to the mouth of Back’s River. If it was an island – which had been Lieutenant Gore’s guess and Crozier’s hunch as well – then they would soon see the mainland to their south and cross what should be a narrow strait to the mouth of Back’s River.

Either way, Crozier – who had been content to follow the coastline since they had no other real choice and navigate by dead reckoning for the time being – estimated that they were now about ninety miles from the mouth of Back’s River.

On this march, they had been completing only a little better than a mile per day on average. Some days they did three or four miles, reminding Crozier of the fantastic rate of their crossing from the ships to Terror Camp on the ice highway they had laid down, but other days – when there was more rock than ice under the runners, when they had to ford sudden streams or in one case an actual river, when they were forced out onto the tortured sea ice when the coastline became too rocky, when the weather was foul, when more men than usual were too sick to pull and ended up riding in the boat themselves while their mates pulled the extra weight, first the sixteen hours of man-hauling the four whaleboats and a cutter, then back for the other three cutters and two pinnaces – saw them covering only a few hundred yards from their previous night’s camp.

On 1 July, after weeks of warming weather, the cold and snow returned in earnest. A blizzard blew out of the southeast, directly into the eyes of the men hauling their sledges. Slops were pulled out of baled heaps in the boats. Welsh wigs were dug out of valises and packs. The snow added hundreds of pounds to the weight of the sledges and the boats atop them. The men so sick that they were being carried in those boats, lying atop supplies and folded tents, burrowed under the canvas covers for shelter.

The men hauled forward through three days of continuous driving snow out of the east and southeast. At night, lightning crashed and the men cowered low against the canvas floors of their tents.

Today they had stopped because too many of the men were sick and Goodsir wanted to administer to them, and because Crozier wanted to send parties ahead to scout and larger armed parties north into the interior and south out onto the sea ice to hunt.

They needed food badly.

The good news and the bad news was that they had finally finished the last of the Goldner canned foods. When the steward Aylmore, who on captain’s orders had continued to eat and grow fat on the tinned foods, hadn’t died from the terrible symptoms that killed Captain Fitzjames – although two other men who were not supposed to be eating from the cans had – everyone went back on the tinned foods to supplement the little remaining salt pork and cod and biscuits.

The 28-year-old seaman Bill Closson died screaming silently and convulsing from gut pains and paralysis, but Dr. Goodsir had no clue what might have poisoned him until one of his mates, Tom McConvey, confessed that the dead man had stolen and eaten a Goldner can of peaches that no one else had shared.

In the very brief burial service for Closson – his body lying without even a canvas shroud under the loose pile of rocks because Old Murray, the sailmaker, had died of scurvy and there was no extra canvas left anyway – Captain Crozier had quoted not from the Bible the men knew but from his fabled Book of Leviathan .

“Life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’” the captain had intoned. “It seems it is shorter for those who steal from their mates.”

The eulogy, such as it was, was a hit with the men. Although the ten boats they had been dragging and hauling on sledges for more than two months all had old names assigned to them from when Erebus and Terror still sailed the seas, the man-hauling teams of seamen immediately renamed the three cutters and two pinnaces always hauled during the afternoon and evening stint of hauling – the part of the day they hated the most since it meant regaining ground already won through the sweat of the long morning. The five boats were now officially named Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short.

Crozier had grinned at this. It meant the men were not so far gone into hunger and despair that their English sailors’ black humour did not still hold a cutting edge.

The mutiny, when it came, was made vocal by the last man on earth that Francis Crozier would have imagined opposing his command.

It was the middle of the day and the captain was trying to get a few minutes’ sleep while most of the men were out of camp doing reconnaissance or hunting. He heard the slow shuffle of many screw-heeled boots in the snow outside his tent, and he knew immediately that there was trouble outside the usual range of daily emergencies. The furtive sound of the footsteps as he came up from his light sleep warned him of the defiance to come.

Crozier pulled on his greatcoat. He always carried a loaded pistol in the right pocket of this coat, but recently he had begun carrying a smaller two-shot pistol in his left pocket as well.

There were about twenty-five men assembled in the open area between Crozier’s tent and the large Sick Bay tent. The blowing snow, thick scarves, and filthy Welsh wigs made some of them hard to identify at first glance, but Crozier was not surprised to see Cornelius Hickey, Magnus Manson, Richard Aylmore, and a half dozen of the more vocal resenters in the second row.

It was the first row facing him that surprised him.

Most of the officers were off commanding the scattered hunting and scouting parties Crozier had sent out that morning – Crozier realized his mistake too late, sending away all of his most loyal officers, including Lieutenant Little and his second mate Robert Thomas, Tom Johnson, his faithful bosun’s mate, Harry Peglar and some others, all at once, leaving the weaker men congregated here at Hospital Camp – but standing in front of this group was young Lieutenant Hodgson. Crozier was also shocked to see Reuben Male, captain of the forecastle, and Erebus ’s captain of the foretop, Robert Sinclair, here. Male and Sinclair had always been good men.

Crozier strode toward the gathering so quickly that Hodgson actually took two steps back and collided with the giant idiot, Manson.

“What do you men want?” rasped Crozier. Wishing that his voice was not such a hoarse croak, he put as much volume and authority into it as he could. “What the hell is going on here?”

“We need to talk to you, Captain,” said Hodgson. The young man’s voice was trembling with tension.

“About what?” Crozier kept his right hand in his pocket. He saw Dr. Goodsir come to the opening of the Sick Bay tent and look out in surprise at the mob. Crozier counted twenty-three men in the group, and, despite the wigs pulled low and scarves pulled high, he noted who each man was. He would not forget.

“About going back,” said Hodgson. The men behind him began muttering assent with the crowd murmur that was always the hive-mind sound of mutineers.