Dan Simmons - The Terror

Memo Moira had thought him special. She told him that he had the Second Sight.

The thought did not frighten young Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service – the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting. Once, when he was twelve, shortly before he ran away to sea, he told Memo that he wanted to become a priest, and the old woman laughed that wild, husky laugh of hers and told him to put such nonsense out of his mind. “Being a priest is as common and useless as being an Irish drunkard. Use your Gift instead, Young Francis,” she’d said. “Use the Second Sight that has been in my family for a score of generations. It will help you go places and see things that no person on this sad earth has ever seen.”

Young Francis did not believe in Second Sight. It was about that same time that he realized that he also did not believe in God. He went to sea. He believed in everything he learned and saw there, and some of these sights and lessons were strange indeed.

Crozier rides on crests of pain rolling in on waves of nausea. He awakens only to vomit into the bucket that Jopson, his steward, has left there and replaces each hour. Crozier hurts to the cavity in the center of his self where he is sure his soul had resided until it floated away on a sea of whiskey over the decades. All through these days and nights of cold sweat on frozen sheets, he knows he would give up his rank, his honours, his mother, his sisters, his father’s name, and the memory of Memo Moira herself for one more glass of whiskey.

The ship groans as it continues to be squeezed inexorably to fragments by the never-ceasing ice. Crozier groans as his demons continue to squeeze him inexorably to fragments through chills, fever, pain, nausea, and regret. He has cut a six-inch strap from an old belt, and to keep from moaning aloud he bites down on that in the darkness. He moans anyway.

He imagines it all. He sees it all.

Lady Jane Franklin is in her element. Now, with two and a half years of no word from her husband, she is in her element. Lady Franklin the Indomitable. Lady Franklin the Widow Who Refused to Be a Widow. Lady Franklin the Patroness and Saint of the Arctic that has killed her husband… Lady Franklin who will never accept such a fact.

Crozier can see her as clearly as if he does have Second Sight. Lady Franklin has never looked more beautiful than now in her resolve, in her refusal to grieve, in her determination that her husband is alive and that Sir John’s expedition must be found and rescued.

More than two and a half years have passed. The Navy knows that Sir John had provisioned Erebus and Terror for three years at normal rations but had expected to emerge beyond Alaska in the summer of 1846, certainly no later than August of 1847.

Lady Jane will have bullied the lethargic Navy and Parliament into action by now. Crozier can see her writing letters to the Admiralty, letters to the Arctic Council, letters to her friends and former suitors in Parliament, letters to the queen, and, of course, letters to her dead husband every day, writing in her perfect, no-nonsense script and telling the dead Sir John that she knows that her darling is still alive and that she looks forward to her inevitable reunion with him. He can see her telling the world that she does this. She will be sending sheaves and folios of letters to him off with the first rescue ships about now… Naval ships, to be sure, but also quite probably private ships hired with either the dwindling money of Lady Jane’s own fortune or by subscriptions from worried and rich friends.

Crozier, rising from his visions, tries to sit up in his bunk and smile. The chills make him shake like a topgallant in a gale. He vomits into the almost full pail. He falls back onto his sweat-soaked, bile-smelling pillow and closes his eyes to ride the waves of his seeing.

Whom would they send to save Erebus and Terror ? Whom had they already sent?

Crozier knew that Sir John Ross would be champing at the bit to lead any rescue parties into the ice, but he also sees that Lady Jane Franklin will ignore the old man – she thinks him vulgar – and will choose his nephew, James Clark Ross, with whom Crozier had explored the seas around Antarctica.

The younger Ross had promised his young bride that he would never go on a sea exploration again, but Crozier sees that he could not refuse this request from Lady Franklin. Ross would choose to go with two ships. Crozier saw them sailing this coming summer of 1848. Crozier saw the two ships sailing north of Baffin Island, west through Lancaster Sound, where Sir John had sailed Terror and Erebus three years ago – he could almost make out the names on the bows of Ross’s ships – but Sir James would encounter the same relentless pack ice beyond Prince Regent Inlet, perhaps beyond Devon Island, that holds Crozier’s ships in thrall now. Next summer there will be no full thaw of the sounds and inlets Ice Masters Reid and Blanky had sailed them south through. Sir James Clark Ross will never get within three hundred miles of Terror and Erebus .

Crozier saw them turning back to England in the freezing early autumn of 1848.

He weeps as he moans and bites down hard on his leather strap. His bones are freezing. His flesh is on fire. Ants crawl everywhere on and under his skin.

His Second Sight sees there would be other ships sent, other rescue expeditions this year of our Lord 1848, some most likely launched at the same time or earlier than Ross’s search party. The Royal Navy was slow to act – a maritime sloth – but once in motion, Crozier knows, it tended to overdo everything it undertook. Wretched excess after interminable stalling was standard procedure for the Navy Francis Crozier has known for four decades.

In his aching mind, Crozier saw at least one other Naval expedition setting sail for Baffin Bay in search of the lost Franklins this coming summer and most probably even a third Naval squadron sent all the way around Cape Horn to rendezvous, theoretically, with the other search-party ships near the Bering Strait, searching for them in the western arctic, to which Erebus and Terror had never come within a thousand miles. Such ponderous operations would stretch into 1849 and beyond.

And this is only the beginning of the second week of 1848. Crozier doubts if his men will live to see the summer.

Would there be an overland party sent up from Canada to follow the Mackenzie River to the arctic coastline, then east to Wollaston Land and Victoria Land in search of their ships stranded somewhere along the elusive North-West Passage? Crozier is sure there will be. The chances of such an overland expedition finding them twenty-five miles out at sea to the northwest of King William Island are nil. Such a party would not even know that King William Island was an island.

Would the First Lord of the Admiralty announce in the House of Commons a reward for the rescue of Sir John and his men? Crozier thinks he will. But how much? A thousand pounds? Five thousand pounds? Ten thousand? Crozier closes tight his eyes and sees, as if on parchment hanging before him, the sum of twenty thousand pounds offered for anyone who “might render efficient assistance in saving the lives of Sir John Franklin and his squadron.”

Crozier laughs again, which brings on the vomiting again. He is shaking with cold and pain and the clear absurdity of the images in his head. All around him the ship groans as the ice crushes it. The captain can no longer tell the groaning of the ship from his own moans.