Dan Simmons - The Terror

Francis Crozier was eager only to see Sophia Cracroft again.

He took another drink of whiskey. Above him, barely audible through the deck and snow, the ship’s bell rang six bells. Three a.m.

The men were sorry when Sir John had been killed five months ago – most of them because they knew that the promise of ten sovereigns per man and a second advance-pay bonus had died with the paunchy, bald old man – but little actually changed after Franklin’s death. Commander Fitzjames was now acknowledged as the captain of Erebus that he’d always been in reality. Lieutenant Le Vesconte, gold tooth flashing when he smiled, his arm in a sling, took Graham Gore’s place in the hierarchy of command with no visible ripple of disruption. Captain Francis Crozier now assumed the rank of expedition commander, but with the expedition frozen in the ice, there was little he could do differently now from what Franklin would have done.

One thing Crozier did almost immediately was ship more than five tons of supplies across the ice to a point not far from the Ross cairn on King William Land. They were now fairly certain it was an island because Crozier had sent out sledge parties – monster bear be damned – to scout the area. Crozier himself went along on half a dozen of these early sledge parties, helping to smash easier, or at least less impossible, paths through the pressure ridges and iceberg barrier along the shore. They brought extra winter slops, tents, lumber for future cabins, casks of dried foods and hundreds of cans of the tinned foods, as well as lightning rods – even brass bed rods from Sir John’s appropriated cabin to be fashioned into lightning rods – and the essentials of what both crews would need if the ships had to be abandoned suddenly in the midst of the next winter.

Four men had been lost to the creature on the ice before winter returned, two from one tent during one of Crozier’s trips, but what stopped the transfer sledge trips in mid-August was a return of the severe lightning and thick fog. For more than three weeks both ships sat in the midst of the fog, suffered the lightning to strike them, and only the briefest ice outings – hunting parties mostly, a few fire-hole teams – were allowed. By the time the freakish fog and lightning had passed, it was early September, and the cold and snow had begun again.

Crozier then resumed sending cache-supply sledge parties to King William Land despite the terrible weather, but when Second Master Giles MacBean and a seaman were killed just a few yards ahead of the three sledges – the deaths unseen because of the blowing snow but their last screams all too audible to the other men and to their officer, Second Lieutenant Hodgson – Crozier “temporarily” suspended the supply trips. The suspension had now lasted two months, and by the first of November no sane crewman wanted to volunteer for an eight- to ten-day sledge trip in the dark.

The captain knew that he should have cached at least ten tons of supplies on the shore rather than the five tons he’d hauled there. The problem was – as he and a sledge party had learned the night the creature had ripped through a tent near the captain’s and would have carried off seaman George Kinnaird and John Bates if they had not run for their lives – any campsite on that low, windswept gravel-and-ice spit of land was not defensible. Aboard the ships, as long as they lasted, the hulls and raised deck acted as a wall of sorts, turning each ship into a kind of fort. Out on the gravel and in tents, no matter how tightly clustered, it would take at least twenty armed men watching day and night to guard the perimeter, and even then the thing could be among them before guards could react. Everyone who had sledged to King William Land and camped out there on the ice knew this. And as the nights grew longer, the fear of those unprotected hours in the tents – like the arctic cold itself – seeped deeper into the men.

Crozier drank some more whiskey.

It had been April of 1843 – early autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, although the days were still long and warm – when Erebus and Terror returned to Van Diemen’s Land.

Ross and Crozier were once again guests at the governor’s house – officially called Government House by the old-time inhabitants of Hobart Town – but this time it was obvious that a shadow lay over both Franklins. Crozier was willing to be oblivious to this, his joy at being near Sophia Cracroft was so great, but even the irrepressible Sophia had been subdued by the mood, events, conspiracies, betrayals, revelations, and crises that had been brooding in Hobart during the two years Erebus and Terror had been in the southern ice, so in the course of his first two days in Government House, he’d heard enough to piece together the reasons for the Franklins’ depression.

It seemed that local and venial landed interests, personified in one undercutting, backstabbing Judas of a colonial secretary named Captain John Montagu, had decided early on in Sir John’s six years as governor that he simply would not do, nor would his wife, the outspoken and unorthodox Lady Jane. All Crozier heard from Sir John himself – overheard, actually, as the despondent Sir John spoke to Captain Ross while the three men took brandy and cigars in the booklined study in the mansion – was that the locals had “a certain lack of neighbourly feelings and a deplorable deficiency in public spirit.”

From Sophia, Crozier learned that Sir John had gone, in the public eye at least, from being “the man who ate his shoes” to his self-styled description of “a man who wouldn’t hurt a fly” then quickly to a description widespread on the Tasmanian Peninsula of “a man in petticoats.” This last calumny, Sophia assured him, came from the colony’s dislike of Lady Jane as much as it had from Sir John’s and his wife’s attempts to improve things for the natives and prisoners who laboured there in inhuman conditions.

“You understand that the previous governors simply loaned out prisoners for the local plantation owners’ and city business tycoons’ insane projects, took their cut of the profits, and kept their mouths shut,” explained Sophia Cracroft as they walked in the shadows of the Government House gardens. “Uncle John has not played that game.”

“Insane projects?” said Crozier. He was very aware of Sophia’s hand on his arm as they walked and spoke in hushed whispers, alone, in the warm near-dark.

“If a plantation manager wants a new road on his land,” said Sophia, “the governor is expected to loan him six hundred starving prisoners – or a thousand – who work from dawn until after dark, chains on their legs and manacles on their wrists, through this tropical heat, without water or food, being flogged if they fall or falter.”

“Good Lord,” said Crozier.

Sophia nodded. Her eyes remained fixed on the white stones of the garden path. “The colonial secretary, Montagu, decided that the prisoners should excavate a pit mine – although no gold has been found on the island – and the prisoners were set to digging it. It was more than four hundred feet deep before the project was abandoned – it flooded constantly, the water table here is very shallow, of course – and it was said that two to three prisoners died for every foot excavated of that abhorred mine.”

Crozier restrained himself before he could say Good Lord again, but in truth that was all that came to his mind.

“A year after you left,” continued Sophia, “Montagu – that weasel, that viper – persuaded Uncle John to dismiss a local surgeon, a man very popular with the decent people here, on trumped-up charges of dereliction of duty. It divided the colony. Uncle John and Aunt Jane became the lightning rod for all criticism, even though Aunt Jane had disapproved of the surgeon’s dismissal. Uncle John – you know, Francis, how very much he hates controversy, much less to administer pain of any sort, why he’s often said he would not hurt a fly…”