Dan Simmons - The Terror

Crozier took another drink.

He understood the arctic’s motivation better than his own. The ancient Greeks had been right, thought Crozier, when they stated that there were five bands of climate on this disk of an earth, four of them equal, opposite, and symmetrical like so many things Greek, wrapped around the world like bands on a snake. Two were temperate and made for human beings. The central band, the equatorial region, was not meant for intelligent life – although the Greeks had been wrong in assuming that no humans could live there. Just no civilized humans, thought Crozier, who’d had his glimpse of Africa and the other equatorial areas and was sure nothing of value would ever come from any of them. The two polar regions, the Greeks had reasoned long before the arctic and antarctic wastes were reached by explorers, were inhuman in every sense – unfit even to travel through, much less to reside in for any length of time.

So why, wondered Crozier, did a nation like England, blessed to be placed by God in one of the most gentle and verdant of the two temperate bands where mankind was meant to live, keep throwing its ships and its men into the ice of the northern and southern polar extremes where even fur-wearing savages refuse to go?

And more pertinent to the central question, why did one Francis Crozier keep returning to these terrible places time after time, serving a nation and its officers that have never recognized his abilities and worth as a man, even while he knew in his heart that someday he would die in the arctic cold and dark?

The captain remembered that even when he was a small boy – before he went to sea at age thirteen – he had carried his deep mood of melancholy within him like a cold secret. This melancholic nature had manifested itself in his pleasure at standing outside the village on a winter night watching the lamplights fade, by finding small places in which to hide – claustrophobia had never been a problem for Francis Crozier – and by being so afraid of the dark, seeing it as the avatar of the death that had claimed his mother and grandmother in such a stealthy way, that he had perversely sought it out, hiding in the root cellar while other boys played in the sunlight. Crozier remembered that cellar – the grave chill of it, the smell of cold and mold, the darkness and inward-pressing which left one alone with dark thoughts.

He filled his small glass and took another drink. Suddenly the ice groaned louder, and the ship groaned back in response – trying to shift its place in the frozen sea but having no place to go. In recompense it squeezed itself tighter and moaned. Metal brackets in the hold deck contracted, the sudden cracks sounding like pistol shots. The seamen forward and the officers aft snored on, used to the night noises of the ice trying to crush them. On deck above, the officer on watch in the seventy-below night stomped his feet to renew circulation, the four sharp stamps sounding to the captain like a weary parent telling the ship to hush its protestations.

It was hard for Crozier to believe that Sophia Cracroft had visited this ship, stood in this very cabin, exclaimed how neat it was, how tidy, how cozy, how very learned with its row of books, and how pleasant the austral light pouring down from the Illuminator.

It had been seven years ago almost to the week, the Southern-Hemispheric spring month of November of 1840, when Crozier had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land south of Australia in these very ships – Erebus and Terror – on the way to Antarctica. The expedition had been under the command of Crozier’s friend, although always his social superior, Captain James Ross. They had stopped at Hobart Town to finish their provisioning before heading into antarctic waters, and the governor of that penal island, Sir John Franklin, insisted that the two younger officers – Captain Ross and Commander Crozier – stay at Government House during their visit.

It had been an enchanting time and – to Crozier – a romantically fatal one.

The inspection of the expedition’s ships had occurred on the second day of the visit – the ships were clean, refitted, almost fully provisioned, their young crews not yet bearded or made haggard by the two winters in the antarctic ice to come – and while Captain Ross personally hosted Governor Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, Crozier had found himself escorting the governor’s niece, the dark-haired and bright-eyed young Sophia Cracroft. He had fallen in love on that day and had carried that blossoming love into the darkness of the next two southern winters, where it had bloomed into an obsession.

The long dinners under the servant-turned fans of the governor’s house were filled with lively conversation. Governor Franklin was a worn-out man in his midfifties, dispirited by the lack of recognition of his accomplishments and dispirited further by the opposition of the local press, wealthy landowners, and bureaucrats during his third year in Van Diemen’s Land, but both he and his wife, Lady Jane, had come alive during this visit by their Discovery Service countrymen and, as Sir John liked to address them, his “fellow explorers.”

Sophia Cracroft, on the other hand, showed no signs of unhappiness. She was witty, alive, vivacious, sometimes shocking in her comments and boldness – even more so than her controversial aunt, the Lady Jane – and young and beautiful and seemingly interested in every aspect of the forty-four-year-old bachelor Commander Francis Crozier’s opinions, life, and sundry thoughts. She laughed at all of Crozier’s initially hesitant jokes – he was not used to this level of society and strived to be on his best behaviour, drinking less than he had in years and that only wine – and she always answered his tentative bon mots with increasingly higher levels of wit. To Crozier, it was like learning tennis from a far better player. By the eighth and final day of their extended visit, Crozier felt the equal of any proper Englishman – a gentleman born in Ireland, yes, but one who had made his own way and had also lived an interesting and exciting life, the equal of any man – and the superior of most men in Miss Cracroft’s amazing blue eyes.

When HMSs Erebus and Terror left the Hobart Town harbour, Crozier was still calling Sophia “Miss Cracroft,” but there was no denying the secret connections they had made: the secret glances, the companionable silences, the shared jokes and private moments alone. Crozier knew that he was in love for the first time in a life whose “romance” had consisted of dockyard doxies’ cribs, back-alley knee-wobblers, some native girls doing the deed for trinkets, and a few overpriced nights out in gentlemen’s whorehouses in London. All that was behind him now.

Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor’s house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit.

Then followed almost two years of pack ice, glimpsing Antarctica, the stink of penguin rookeries, naming two distant, smoking volcanoes after their tired ships, darkness, spring, the threat of being frozen in, finding and fighting their way out by sail only through a sea now named after James Ross, and finally the rough Southern Sea passage and the return to Hobart Town on the island of eighteen thousand prisoners and one very unhappy governor. This time there was no inspection of Erebus and Terror; they stank too much of grease and cooking and sweat and fatigue. The boys who had sailed south were now mostly hollow-eyed and bearded men who would not sign up for future Discovery Service expeditions. Everyone except HMS Terror ’s commander was eager to return to England.