Dan Simmons - The Terror

There was a weak cheer followed by some coughing.

If the boats and floes had been drifting south, weeks of man-hauling or sailing work might have been done for them. But the leads and areas of open water in which they floated continued to crack open only toward the north.

Life in the boats was as miserable as life on the floes in the tents had been. The men were crowded too close together. Even with boards on thwarts offering a second level for sleeping on those whaleboats and cutters with their sides built up by Mr. Honey (the disassembled sledges also served as a crossed-T deck amidships on the crowded cutters and pinnace), wet-wooled bodies were pressed against wet-wooled bodies both day and night. The men had to hang out over the gunwales to shit – an event that was becoming less and less necessary, even for the men with serious scurvy, as the food and water grew less – but while all the men had lost all vestiges of modesty, a sudden wave often soaked bare skin and lowered trousers, leading to curses, boils, and longer nights of shivering misery.

On the morning of Friday, 28 July, 1848, the lookout on Crozier’s boat – the smallest man on each boat was sent up the short raised mast with a spyglass – spied a maze of leads opening all the way to a point of land to the northwest, perhaps three miles away.

The able-bodied men in the five boats pulled – and when necessary, polled between narrowing ice ledges, the healthiest men at the bow hacking away with pickaxes and fending off with pikes – for eighteen hours.

They landed on a rocky shingle, in a darkness broken only by short periods of moonlight when the returning clouds parted, a little after eleven o’clock that night.

The men were far too exhausted to dismount the sledges and lift the cutters and pinnaces onto them. They were too tired to unpack their soaked Holland tents and sleeping bags.

They fell onto the rough stones where they had ceased their dragging of heavy boats across the shore ice and rocks made slippery by high tide. They slept in clumps, kept alive only by their crewmates’ failing body warmth.

Crozier did not even assign a watch. If the thing wanted them tonight, it could have them. But before he slept, he spent an hour trying to get a good sighting with his sextant and to work it out with the navigation tables and maps he still carried with him.

As best he could reckon, they had been on the ice for twenty-five days and man-hauled and drifted and rowed a total of forty-six miles to the east-southeast. They were back on King William Land somewhere north of the bulk of the Adelaide Peninsula and now even farther from the mouth of Back’s River than they had been two days earlier – about thirty-five miles northwest of the inlet across the unnamed strait they’d been unable to cross. If they even crossed this strait, they would be more than sixty miles up the inlet from the mouth of the river, a total of more than nine hundred miles from Great Slave Lake and their salvation.

Crozier carefully stowed his sextant in his wooden case and set the case away in its oilskin waterproof bag, found a sodden blanket from the whaleboat, and threw it down on stones next to Des Voeux and three sleeping men. He was asleep within seconds.

He dreamt of Memo Moira shoving him forward toward an altar rail and of the waiting priest in dripping vestments.

In his sleep, as the men snored in the moonlight of this unknown shore, Crozier closed his eyes and extended his tongue to receive the Body of Christ.

John Bridgens had always – secretly – compared the different parts of his life to the various pieces of literature that had formed his life.

In his boyhood and student years, he had from time to time thought of himself as different characters from Boccaccio’s Decameron or from Chaucer’s ribald Canterbury Tales – and not all of his chosen characters were heroic by any means. (His attitude toward the world for some years was, kiss my arse .)

In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark – Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V – had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself . The young Bridgens had been a victim of such consciousness and, like Hamlet, had frequently considered that most essential of questions – to continue or not to continue ? (Bridgens’s tutor at the time, an elegant don in exile from Oxford who was the first unabashed sodomite the young would-be scholar had ever encountered, had disdainfully taught him that the famous “to be, or not to be” soliloquy was not in any way a discussion of suicide, but Bridgens knew better. Thus doth conscience make cowards of us all had spoken directly to the boy-man soul of John Bridgens, miserable with the state of his existence and his unnatural desires, miserable when pretending to be something he was not, miserable when pretending and miserable when not pretending, and, most centrally, miserable that he could only think about ending his own life because the fear that thought itself might continue on the other side of this mortal veil, “perchance to dream,” kept him from acting even toward quick, decisive, cold-blooded self-murder.)

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction – books and a sense of irony.

In his middle years, Bridgens most thought of himself as Odysseus. It was not the wandering the world alone that made the comparison apt for the would-be scholar turned secondary officers’ steward but rather Homer’s description of the world-weary traveler – the Greek word meaning “crafty” or “guileful” by which Odysseus’ contemporaries identified him (and by which some, such as Achilles, chose to insult him). Bridgens did not use his craft to manipulate others, or rarely did, but used it more like one of the round leather-and-wood or prouder metal shields behind which Homeric heroes sheltered while under violent attack by spear and lance.

He used his craft to become and to stay invisible.

Once, some years ago, during the five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle during which he had come to know Harry Peglar, Bridgens mentioned his Odysseus analogy – suggesting that all the men on such a trip were modern-day Ulysseses to some extent or another – to the natural philosopher aboard (the two played chess frequently in Mr. Darwin’s tiny cabin), and the young bird expert with the sad eyes and sharp mind had looked penetratingly at the steward and said, “But how is it that I doubt you have a Penelope waiting at home, Mr. Bridgens?”

The steward had been more circumspect after that. He had learned – as Odysseus had learned after a certain number of years of his wanderings – that his guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.

In these last days, John Bridgens felt that the literary character with whom he had most in common – in outlook, in feeling, in memory, in future, in sadness – was King Lear.

And it was time for the final act.

They had stayed two days at the mouth of the river that drained into the unnamed strait south of King William Land, now known to be King William Island. The river here, in late July, was running freely in places and allowed them to fill all their water casks, but no one had seen or caught a fish from it. No animals seemed interested in coming down to drink from it… not so much as a white arctic fox. The best one could say about this campsite was that the slight indentation of the river valley kept them out of the worst of the wind and afforded them some peace of mind during the lightning storms that raged every night.