Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Open water!” It was Lieutenant Little’s party coming in from the pack ice – Ice Master Reid, Bosun John Lane, Harry Peglar, and half a dozen others, all carrying shotguns or muskets.

“Open water!” screamed Little again. He was waving both arms as he came across the rocks and ice of the shoreline and was obviously unaware of the drama going on in front of his captain’s tent. “Not more than two miles south! Leads opening up large enough for the boats. Going on to the east for miles! Open water!”

Hickey and Manson stepped back into the ranks of cheering men where a mob had stood thirty seconds earlier. Some of the men started hugging one another. Reuben Male looked as if he was going to throw up at the thought of what he’d been about to do, and Robert Sinclair sat down on a low rock as if all the strength had gone out of his legs. The once-powerful foretop captain began to weep into his filthy hands.

“Get back to your tents and your duties,” said Crozier. “We’ll start loading the boats and checking the masts and riggings within the hour.”

The men waiting in Hospital Camp had been eager to depart ten minutes after Lieutenant Little’s party brought in the word of the open water, but it was another day before they broke camp and another two days until the boats’ hulls were actually slipped from the ice into the black water south of King William Land.

First they had to wait for all the other hunting and reconnaissance parties to return, and some came back after midnight, staggering into camp in the dim-yellow arctic twilight and collapsing into their sleeping bags without even hearing the good news. Very little game had been bagged, but Robert Thomas’s group had killed an arctic fox and several white rabbits and Sergeant Tozer’s team brought back a brace of ptarmigan.

On the morning of 5 July, a Wednesday, the Sick Bay tent all but emptied out as everyone who could stand or stagger wanted to lend a hand in preparations for putting to sea.

John Bridgens had taken the place of the dead Henry Lloyd and Tom Blanky as Dr. Goodsir’s assistant in recent weeks, and the steward had watched the previous afternoon’s near mutiny while standing next to the surgeon in the door of the Sick Bay tent. It was Bridgens who described the whole scene to Harry Peglar, who felt sicker than he already was by learning that his Erebus foretop counterpart, Robert Sinclair, had joined in the near uprising. Reuben Male, he knew, had always been a dependable man, but strong-willed. Very strong-willed.

Peglar had nothing but contempt for Aylmore, Hickey, and their sycophants. In Harry Peglar’s eyes they were all men with busy little minds and – except for Manson – an abundance of words, but no sense of loyalty.

That Thursday, the sixth of July, found them out on pack ice for the first time in more than two months. Most of them had forgotten how terrible the man-hauling was on the open ice, even here in the lee of King William Land and the bulbous cape they’d just come around. There were still pressure ridges to haul the ten boats up and over. The sea ice was far less slippery under runners than the snow and shore ice were. There were no vales in which to shelter, no low ridgelines – not even the occasional boulder – in which to hide from the wind. Out here there were no trickling streams to drink from. The snowstorm continued and the wind grew stronger out of the southeast, blowing directly in their faces as they hauled the boats the two miles Lieutenant Little’s hunting group had covered before coming across the open lead.

The first night out they were so exhausted that they did not even erect the Holland tents but pitched a few tent floors as tarps extending from the leeward side of the boats and boats on sledges and huddled together on the ice through the few hours of arctic summer dimness in their three-man sleeping bags.

Even with the storm, wind, and pack-ice difficulties, energized by their excitement, they covered the two miles by midmorning Friday, 7 July.

The lead was gone. Closed up. Little pointed out the thinner ice – none more than three to eight inches thick – where it had been.

With Ice Master James Reid in the lead, they followed the zigzag path of the recently frozen-over lead southeast then due east for much of that day.

Now, added to their disappointment and ever-present misery exacerbated by the snow in their faces and their thoroughly soaked clothing, came the tension – for the first time in years – of walking on thin ice.

A little after noon that day, Marine Private James Daly, who was one of six men sent ahead to test the ice by poking at it with long pikes, fell through. His comrades pulled him out, but not before he quite literally turned blue. Dr. Goodsir had Daly stripped naked on the ice, wrapped in Hudson ’s Bay blankets, and bundled under more blankets beneath the canvas cover of one of the cutters. Two other men had to stay with him, lying on either side of him in the canvas-yellow dimness beneath the boat cover so that their body warmth could keep him alive. Even then Private Daly’s body shook and his teeth chattered uncontrollably and he ventured into delirium for much of the rest of the day.

The ice, as stable as a continent underfoot for two years, now rose and fell in low swells in a way that made everyone dizzy and caused some men to vomit. Pressure made even the thicker ice crack and groan with sudden explosions from far ahead, close ahead, to either side, behind, or directly underfoot. Dr. Goodsir had explained to them months before that one of the symptoms of advanced scurvy was a man’s heightened sensitivity to sound – the blast of a gunshot could actually kill a man, he had said – and now the majority of the 89 men pulling the boats across the ice recognized those symptoms in themselves.

Even a near idiot like Magnus Manson realized that if any or all of the boats fell through the ice – ice that had failed to support a single skinny, starved scarecrow of a man like James Daly – there would be no hope for any of the men in harness. They would drown even before they froze to death.

Used to their tight procession across the ice, the men felt strange about their new man-hauling method of keeping the boats far apart and staggered. At times in the snowstorm each group would be out of sight of all the other groups and the sense of isolation was terrible. When they went back to haul the last three cutters and two pinnaces forward, they did not follow their old tracks and had to worry that the new ice they were on would not hold them.

Some of the men grumbled that they might have already missed the inlet leading south to the mouth of Back’s River. Peglar had seen the charts and Crozier’s occasional theodolite reading and knew that they were still a good distance to the west – thirty miles to the inlet, at the very least. Another sixty or sixty-five miles south then to the mouth. At the rate of their travel on land, even if food appeared and everyone’s health miraculously improved, they would not reach the inlet until August and the mouth of the river until late September at the earliest.

The promise of open water made Harry Peglar’s heart pound. Of course, his heart was pounding erratically much of the time these days anyway. Harry’s mother had always worried about his heart – as a boy he had suffered scarlet fever and frequent pains in his chest – but he’d always told her such concerns were nonsense, that he was foretop captain in some of the world’s greatest ships and that no man with a bad heart could hold such a position. Somehow he convinced her he was fine, but over the years Peglar felt occasional flutters in his chest, followed by days of pain and a sense of constriction and an ache down his left arm so bad that some days he had to climb to the foretop and upper spars with only one hand. The other foretopmen thought he was showing off.