Dan Simmons - The Terror

The remaining ton or so of bundled food and gear in the bottom of the boat made seating difficult; those six seamen at the oars had to prop their feet on the duffels and would be rowing or paddling with their knees as high as their heads, and as the man at the oar-sweep tiller, Peglar found himself sitting on a rope-wrapped bundle rather than on the stern bench – but everyone fit and there was room for Lieutenant Little and Mr. Reid to perch in the bow with their long pikes.

The men were eager to launch the boat. There was a chorus of “one, two, three” and several heave-hos, and the heavy whaleboat slid across the ice, the bow tipped and fell two feet into the black water, the oarsmen fended off nearby ice as Mr. Reid and Lieutenant Little crouched and gripped the gunwales, the men on the ice heaved again, oars found water, and they were moving away in the fog – the first boat from Erebus or Terror to feel liquid water under its hull in almost two years and eleven months.

A spontaneous cheer went up, followed by the more traditional three hip-hip-hurrahs.

Peglar steered the boat to the center of the narrow lead – never more than twenty feet across here, sometimes barely room for the shortened oars to find water on both sides – and by the time he glanced back over his shoulder, all the men on the ice were lost in the fog astern.

The next two hours were dreamlike. Peglar had steered a small boat through floe ice before – it had taken more than a week of poking into berg-ridden harbours and inlets before they’d found the right anchorage for the two ships at Beechey Island two autumns ago, and Peglar had been in command of one of those small boats for days – but that had not felt like this. The lead stayed narrow – never more than thirty feet wide and sometimes so tight they propelled the whaleboat by poling on the ice that scraped the sides rather than by rowing – and the narrow channel of open water would bend left and then right, but never quite so tightly that the boat could not make the turns. Tumbles of pressure-raised ice hid the view to either side and the fog continued to close on them, then open a bit, then close even more tightly. Sounds seemed to be muffled and amplified at the same time and the effect was unsettling; men found themselves whispering when they had to communicate.

Twice they encountered stretches where floating ice blocked the way or the lead itself was frozen over to the point that most of the men had to clamber out to shove floating ice ahead with pikes or to hack away at the frozen surface with pickaxes. Some of the men stayed on the ice on either side then, pulling at ropes tied to the bow and thwarts or grabbing the gunwales and shoving and pulling the screeching whaleboat through the narrow crevice. Each time the lead then widened enough that the men could clamber back in and shove, paddle, and row their way forward.

They had been creeping forward this way for almost their full allotment of two hours when suddenly the meandering lead narrowed. Ice scraped both sides, but they used the oars to pole as Peglar stood in the bow, his steering sweep useless. Then suddenly they popped out into what was by far the widest stretch of open water they had seen. As if confirming that all their troubles were behind them, the fog lifted so that they could see hundreds of yards.

They had either reached true open water or a massive lake in the ice. Sunlight streamed down from a hole in the clouds above and turned the seawater blue. A few low, flat icebergs, one the size of a respectable cricket pitch, floated ahead of them in the azure sea. The icebergs prismed the light and the weary men shielded their eyes from the painful glory of sunlight shimmering on snow, ice, and water.

The six men at the oars gave a loud, spontaneous cheer.

“Not yet, men,” said Lieutenant Little. He was peering through his brass telescope, his foot up on the whaleboat’s bow. “We don’t know yet if this goes on… if there’s a way out of this ice lake other than the way we came in. Let’s make sure of that before we turn back.”

“Oh, it goes on,” shouted the seaman named Berry from his place at the oars. “I feel it in me bones. It’s open water and fair breezes between here and Back’s River, all right. We’ll get the others, open our sails, and be there before supper tomorrow.”

“I pray you’re right, Alex,” said Lieutenant Little. “But let’s spend some time and sweat to make certain. I want to bring nothing but good news back to the rest of the men.”

Mr. Reid, their ice master, pointed back at the lead from which they had emerged. “There are a dozen inlets here. We might have trouble finding the real lead when we come back unless we mark it now. Men, bring us back to the opening there. Mr. Peglar, why don’t you take that extra pike and drive it into the snow and ice there at the edge where we can’t miss it on our way back. It’ll give us something to row toward.”

“Aye,” said Peglar.

With their return avenue marked, they rowed out into the open water. The large, flat iceberg was only a hundred yards or so from the opening to their inlet, and they rowed close to it on their way toward open water.

“We could camp on ’aton and have plenty of room left over,” said Henry Sait, one of the Terror seamen at the oars.

“We don’t want to camp,” said Lieutenant Little from the bow. “We’ve had enough camping for a fucking lifetime. We want to go home .”

The men cheered and put their backs into it. Peglar at the sweep started a chantey and the men sang along, the first real singing they’d done in months.

It took them three hours – a full hour beyond the time they should have turned back – but they had to be sure.

The “open water” was an illusion: a lake in the ice a little more than a mile and a half long and a little more than two thirds of a mile wide. Dozens of apparent “leads” opened from the irregular southern, eastern, and northern ice edges of the lake, but they were all false starts, mere inlets.

At the southeastern terminus of the lake they tied up to the ice shelf, driving a pickaxe into the six-foot-thick ice and tying on to it, then cutting steps up the side as if it were a wharf; all the men clambered out and looked to the direction they’d hoped the open water continued.

Solid, flat white. Ice and snow and seracs. And the clouds were coming down again, swirling into a low fog. It was beginning to snow.

After Lieutenant Little looked in each direction, they boosted the smallest man, Berry, up onto the shoulders of the largest man there, thirty-six-year-old Billy Wentzall, and let Berry look through the glass. He boxed the compass with his search, telling Wentzall when to turn.

“Not so much as a fookin’ penguin,” he said. It was an old joke, referring to Captain Crozier’s trip to the other pole. No one laughed.

“Do you see dark sky anywhere?” asked Lieutenant Little. “As one sees over open water? Or the tip of a larger berg?”

“Nay, sir. And the clouds is comin’ closer.”

Little nodded. “Let’s head back, boys. Harry, you clamber down into the boat first and steady her, will you?”

No one said a word in their ninety-minute pull across the lake. The sunlight disappeared and fog blotted away the landscape again, but before long the cricket-pitch berg loomed out of the mist and showed them that they were going the correct direction.

“We’re almost back to the lead,” called Little from the bow. At times the fog was so thick that Peglar in the stern had trouble seeing the lieutenant. “Mr. Peglar, a little to port, please.”

“Aye, sir.”

The men at the oars did not even look up. To a man they seemed lost in the misery of their thoughts. Snow was pelting them again, but from the northwest now. At least the men at the oars had their backs to it.