Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Thank you again for allowing me to accompany Lieutenant Gore’s party, Sir John,” said the little medico. “The outing could be of inestimable importance in our medical evaluation of the antiscorbutic properties of a wide variety of flora and fauna, including the lichens invariably present on the terra firma of King William Land.”

Sir John involuntarily made a face. The surgeon could not have known that his commander had once survived on thin soup made from such lichen for several months. “You’re very welcome, Mr. Goodsir,” he said coolly.

Sir John knew that the slouching young popinjay preferred the title of “Doctor” to “Mister,” a dubious distinction since, although from a good family, Goodsir had trained as a mere anatomist. Technically on par with the warrant officers on board both ships, the civilian assistant surgeon was entitled, in Sir John’s eyes, only to be called Mr . Goodsir.

The young surgeon blushed at his commander’s coolness after the easy banter with the crewmen, tugged at his cap, and took three awkward steps backward on the ice.

“Oh, Mr. Goodsir,” added Franklin.

“Yes, Sir John?” The young upstart was actually red-faced, almost stammering with embarrassment.

“You must accept my apologies that in our formal communiqué to be cached at Sir James Ross’s cairn on King William Land, we referred only to two officers and six men in Lieutenant Gore’s party,” said Sir John. “I had dictated the message prior to your request to accompany the party. I would have written an officer, a warrant officer, an assistant surgeon, and five men had I but known you would be included.”

Goodsir looked confused for a moment, not quite sure of what Sir John was trying to tell him, but then he bowed, tugged at his cap again, mumbled, “Very good, there is no problem, I understand, thank you, Sir John,” and backed away again.

A few minutes later, as he watched Lieutenant Gore, Des Voeux, Goodsir, Morfin, Ferrier, Best, Hartnell, and Private Pilkington diminish across the ice to the southeast, Sir John, under his beaming countenance and outward serenity, actually contemplated failure.

Another winter – another full year – in the ice could undo them. The expedition would be out of food, coal, oil, pyroligneous ether for lamp fuel, and rum. This last item’s disappearance might well mean mutiny.

More than that, if the summer of 1848 were as cold and unyielding as this summer of 1847 fully promised to be, another full winter or year in the ice would destroy one or both of their ships. Like so many failed expeditions before them, Sir John and his men would be fleeing for their lives, dragging longboats and whalers and hastily clabbered-together sledges across the rotten ice, praying for open leads and then cursing them when the sledges fell through the ice and the contrary winds blew the heavy boats back on the pack ice, leads that meant days and nights of rowing for the starving men. Then, Sir John knew, there would be the overland part of any escape attempt – eight hundred miles and more of featureless rock and ice, rivers of constant rapids strewn with boulders each capable of smashing their smaller boats (the larger boats could not get down northern Canada’s rivers, he knew from experience), and native Esquimaux who were hostile more often than not and thieving liars even when they seemed to be friendly.

Sir John continued watching as Gore, Des Voeux, Goodsir, and the five crewmen and single sledge disappeared in the ice glare to the southeast and wondered idly if he should have brought dogs on this trip.

Sir John had never liked the idea of dogs on arctic expeditions. The animals were sometimes good for the men’s morale – at least right up to the point when the animals had to be shot and eaten – but they were, in the final analysis, dirty, loud, and aggressive creatures. The deck of a ship carrying enough dogs to do any good, that is to harness to sledges the way the Greenland Esquimaux liked to do, was a deck filled with incessant barking, crowded kennels, and the constant stench of excrement.

He shook his head and smiled. They’d only brought one dog along on this expedition – the mutt named Neptune – not to mention a small monkey named Jocko – and that, Sir John was sure, was quite enough of a menagerie for this particular ark.

The week after Gore’s departure seemed to crawl for Sir John. One by one the other sledge parties reported in, their men exhausted and frozen and their woolen layers soaked with sweat from the exertion of hauling their sledge across or around countless ridges. Their reports were the same.

From the east toward the Boothia Peninsula – no open water. Not even the smallest lead.

From the northeast toward Prince of Wales Island and the path of their approach to this frozen desert – no open water. Not even the hint of dark sky beyond the horizon which sometimes suggested open water. In eight days of hard sledging the men had not been able to reach Prince of Wales Island, nor even catch a glimpse of it. The ice was more tortured with ridges and icebergs than the men had ever seen.

From the northwest toward the unnamed strait that led the ice stream south toward them around the west coast and southern tip of Prince of Wales Island – nothing seen except white bears and frozen sea.

From the southwest toward the presumed landmass of Victoria Land and the theoretical passage between the islands and the mainland – no open water, no animals except the confounded white bears, hundreds of pressure ridges, so many frozen-in-place icebergs that Lieutenant Little – the officer from HMS Terror whom Franklin had put in command of this particular sledging party, made up of Terrors – reported that it was like trying to struggle west through a mountain range of ice where the ocean should be. The weather had been so bad on the last part of the trip that three of the eight men had seriously frostbitten toes and all eight of them were snow-blind to some extent, Lieutenant Little himself completely blind for the last five days and sick with terrible headaches. Little, an old arctic hand, Sir John understood, a man who had gone south with Crozier and James Ross eight years earlier, had to be loaded onto the sledge and hauled back by the few men who could still see well enough to pull.

No open water anywhere in the twenty-five straight-line miles or so they had explored – twenty-five straight-line miles gained in perhaps a hundred miles of marching around and over obstacles. No arctic foxes or hares or caribou or walruses or seals. Obviously no whales. The men had been prepared to haul their sledge around cracks and small leads in search of real open water, but the surface of the sea, Little reported, his sunburned skin peeling away from his nose and temples below and above the white bandages over his eyes, was a white solid. At the outermost point on their western odyssey, perhaps twenty-eight miles from the ships, Little had ordered the man with the best remaining eyesight, a bosun’s mate named Johnson, to climb the tallest iceberg in their vicinity. Johnson had taken hours to do so, hacking out narrow steps for his feet with his pickaxe and then digging in the cleats the purser had driven through the soles of his leather boots. Once on the top, the seaman had used Lieutenant Little’s telescope to look northwest, west, southwest, and south.

The report was dismal. No open water. No land. Jangles of seracs, ridges, and bergs to the distant white horizon. A few white bears, two of which they later shot for fresh meat – but the livers and heart were unhealthy to humans they’d discovered. The men’s strength was already depleted from hauling the heavy sledge over so many ridges, and in the end they cut out less than a hundred pounds of the gamy, muscular meat to fold in tarps and haul back to the ship. Then they skinned the larger bear for its white fur, leaving the rest of the bears to rot on the ice.