Dan Simmons - The Terror

They clamber over a final pressure ridge, and Crozier can see that Erebus is more brightly lit than he’s seen before. A dozen or more lanterns hang from spars just on this visible port side of the icebound, absurdly lifted, and steeply canting vessel. It’s a prodigious waste of lamp oil.

The Erebus , Crozier knows, has suffered more than his Terror . Besides bending the long propeller shaft last summer – the shaft that had been built to be retracted but hadn’t done so in time to avoid damage from the underwater ice during their ice-breaking in July – and losing the screw itself, the flagship had been mauled more than her sister ship during the past two winters. The ice in the comparative shelter of the Beechey Island harbour had warped, splintered, and loosened hull timbers to a greater degree on Erebus than on Terror; the flagship’s rudder was damaged in their past summer’s mad dash for the Passage; the cold has popped more bolts, rivets, and metal brackets in Sir John’s ship; much more of the iron icebreaker cladding on Erebus has been torn free or buckled. And while Terror has also been raised and squeezed by the ice, the last two months of this third winter have seen HMS Erebus lifted on a virtual pedestal of ice even while the pressure from the sea pack splintered a long section of the starboard bow, port stern, and bottom hull amidships.

Sir John Franklin’s flagship, Crozier knows – and its current captain, James Fitzjames, and his crew also know – will never sail again.

Before stepping into the area lit by the ship’s hanging lanterns, Crozier steps behind a ten-foot-tall serac and pulls Silence in behind him.

“Ahoy the ship!” he bellows in his loudest dockyard-commanding voice.

A shotgun roars and a serac five feet from Crozier splinters into a shower of ice chips catching the lantern’s dim glow.

“Avast that, God-damn your blind eyes, you fucking lubbing idle-brained shit-for-wits idiot!” roars Crozier.

There is a commotion on Erebus ’s deck as some officer wrestles the shotgun away from the shit-for-wits idiot sentinel.

“All right,” Crozier says to the cowering Esquimaux girl. “We can go now.”

He stops, and not just because Lady Silence is not following him out into the light. He can see her face by the reflected glow, and she is smiling. Those full lips that never move are curling up ever so slightly. Smiling. As if she had understood and enjoyed his outburst.

But before Crozier can confirm that the smile is real, Silence backs into the shadows of the ice jumble and is gone.

Crozier shakes his head. If the crazy woman wants to freeze out here, let her. He has business with Captain Fitzjames and then a long walk home in the dark before he can sleep.

Tiredly, realizing that he’s not felt his feet for the past half hour at least, Crozier stumps his way up the ramp of dirty ice and snow toward the deck of the dead Sir John’s broken flagship.

Captain Sir John Franklin may have been the only man aboard either ship who remained outwardly serene when spring and summer simply did not arrive in April, May, and June of 1847.

At first, Sir John had not formally announced that they were stuck for at least another year; he didn’t have to. The previous spring, up at Beechey Island, the crew and officers had watched with eager anticipation not only as the sun returned but as the close pack broke up into discrete floes and slushy brash ice, open leads appeared, and the ice gave up its grip. By late May of 1846 they had been sailing again. Not so this year.

The previous spring crew and officers had observed the return of the many birds, whales, fish, foxes, seals, walruses, and other animals, not to mention the greening of the lichen and low heather on the islands they were sailing toward by early June. Not this year. No open water meant no whales, no walruses, almost no seals – the few ring seals they spied were as hard to catch or shoot now as they had been in early winter – and nothing but dirty snow and grey ice as far as the eye could see.

The temperature stayed cold despite the longer hours of sun each day. Although Franklin had the masts fully stepped, the spars reset, the rigging redone, and fresh canvas on both ships brought up by mid-April, there was no purpose to it. The steam boilers remained unfired except to move warm water through the heating pipes. Lookouts reported a solid table of white extending in all directions. Icebergs stayed in place where they had been frozen in place the previous September. Fitzjames and Lieutenant Gore, working with Captain Crozier from Terror , had confirmed from their star sightings that the current was pushing the ice flow south at a pitiful one and a half miles per month , but this mass of ice on which they were pinned had rotated counterclockwise all winter, returning them to where they had begun. Pressure ridges continued to pop up like white gopher burrows. The ice was thinning – fire-hole teams could saw through it now – but it was still more than ten feet thick.

Captain Sir John Franklin remained serene through all of this because of two things: his faith and his wife. Sir John’s devout Christianity buoyed him up even when the press of responsibility and frustration collaborated to press him down. Everything that happened was, he knew and fervently believed, God’s will. What seemed inevitable to the others need not be in a universe administered by an interested and merciful God. The ice might suddenly break up in midsummer, now less than six weeks away, and even a few weeks of sailing and steaming time would bring them triumphantly to the North-West Passage. They would steam west along the coast as long as they had coal, then sail the rest of the way to the Pacific, escaping the far northern latitudes sometime in mid-September just before the pack ice solidified again. Franklin had experienced greater miracles in his lifetime. Just being appointed commander of this expedition – at age sixty, after the humiliation of Van Diemen’s Land – had been a greater miracle.

As deep and sincere as Sir John’s faith in God was, his faith in his wife was even deeper and sometimes more frightening. Lady Jane Franklin was an indomitable woman… indomitable was the only word for her. Her will knew no bounds and in almost every instance, Lady Jane Franklin would bend the errant and arbitrary ways of the world to the iron command of her will. Already, he imagined, after being out of touch for two full winters, his wife had mobilized her very impressive private fortune, public contacts, and apparently limitless force of will to cajole the Admiralty, the Parliament, and God alone knew what other agencies into searching for him.

This last fact bothered Sir John somewhat. Above all else, he did not want to be “rescued” – approached either overland or by sea during the brief summer thaw by hastily assembled expeditions under the command of whiskey-breath Sir John Ross or the young Sir James Ross (who would be forced out of his arctic retirement, Sir John was sure, by Lady Jane’s demands). That way lay shame and ignominy.

But Sir John remained serene because he knew that the Admiralty was not moved quickly on any matter, not even by such a forceful fulcrum and lever as his wife Jane. Sir John Barrow and the other members of the mythical Arctic Council, not to mention Sir John’s official superiors in the Royal Navy Discovery Service, knew quite well that HMS Erebus and HMS Terror had provisions for three years, longer if severe rations were imposed, not to mention the capability of fishing and hunting game should they ever come in sight of any. Sir John knew that his wife – his indomitable wife – would force a rescue should it come to that, but the terrible and wonderful inertia of the Royal Navy would almost certainly ensure that such a rescue attempt would not be outfitted until the spring and summer of 1848, if not later.