Dan Simmons - The Terror

He sees an image of eight ships – six British, two American – clustered within a few miles of one another in mostly frozen anchorages that look to Crozier like Devon Island, near Beechey, or perhaps Cornwallis Island. It is obviously a late arctic-summer day, perhaps late August, mere days before the sudden freeze that may capture all of them. Crozier has the sense that this image is two or three years in the future of his terrible reality this moment in 1848. Why eight ships sent out for rescue would end up clumped together like this in one location rather than fanning out throughout thousands of square miles of the arctic to hunt for signs of Franklin’s passing makes no sense to Crozier whatsoever. It is the delusion of toxic madness.

The craft range in size from a small schooner and a yacht-sized craft far too flimsy for such serious ice work to 144-ton and 81-ton American ships strange to Crozier’s eye to an odd little 90-ton English pilot boat crudely fitted out for arctic sailing. There are also several proper British Naval vessels and steam cruisers. In his aching mind’s eye he can see the names of the ships – Advance and Rescue , these under the American flag, and Prince Albert for the former pilot boat, as well as the Lady Franklin at the head of the anchored British squadron. There are also two ships Crozier associates with old John Ross – the undersized schooner Felix and the totally inappropriate little yacht Mary . Finally there are two true Royal Navy vessels, Assistance and Intrepid .

As if viewing them through the eyes of a high-soaring arctic tern, Crozier can see that all eight of these ships are clustered within forty miles of one another – four of the smaller British craft at Griffith Island above the Barrow Strait, four of the remaining English ships at Assistance Bay on the south tip of Cornwallis, and the two American ships farther north, just around the eastern curve of Cornwallis Island, just across Wellington Channel from Sir John’s first winter anchorage at Beechey Island. None are within two hundred and fifty miles of the spot far to the southwest where Erebus and Terror lie trapped.

A minute later, a mist or cloud clears, and Crozier sees six of these vessels anchored within a quarter of a mile of one another just off the curve of a small island’s shoreline.

Crozier sees men running across frozen gravel under a vertical black cliff wall. The men are excited. He can almost hear their voices in the freezing air.

It is Beechey Island, he is sure. They have found the weathered wooden headboards and graves of Stoker John Torrington, Seaman John Hartnell, and Marine Private William Braine.

However far in the future this fever-dream discovery is, Crozier knows, it will do him and the other men of Erebus and Terror no good whatsoever. Sir John had left Beechey Island in a mindless hurry, sailing and steaming the first day the ice relented enough to allow the ships to leave their anchorage. After nine months frozen there, the Franklin Expedition had left not so much as a note saying which direction they were sailing.

Crozier had understood at the time that Sir John did not feel it necessary to inform the Admiralty that he was obeying their orders by sailing south. Sir John Franklin always obeyed orders. Sir John assumed that the Admiralty would trust that he had done so again. But after nine months on the island – and after building the proper cairn and even leaving a cairn of pebble-filled Goldner food cans behind as a sort of joke – the fact remained that the message cairn at Beechey Island was left empty contrary to Franklin’s orders.

The Admiralty and Discovery Service had outfitted the Franklin Expedition with two hundred airtight brass cylinders for the express purpose of leaving behind messages of their whereabouts and destination along the entire course of their search for the North-West Passage, and Sir John had used… one: the useless one sent to King William Land twenty-five miles to the southeast of their present position, cached a few days before Sir John was killed in 1847.

On Beechey Island, nothing.

On Devon Island, which they had passed and explored, nothing.

On Griffith Island, where they had searched for harbours, nothing.

On Cornwallis Island, which they had circumnavigated, nothing.

Down the entire length of Somerset Island and Prince of Wales Island and Victoria Island along which they had sailed south for the entire summer of 1846, nothing.

And now, in his dream, the rescuers in the six ships – now all on the verge of being frozen in themselves – were looking north to what open sea remained up the Wellington Channel toward the North Pole. Beechey Island revealed no clues whatsoever. And Crozier could see from his magical arctic tern’s high viewpoint that Peel Sound to the south – down which Erebus and Terror had found their way a year and a half ago during that brief summer thaw – was now, in this future summer, a solid sheet of white as far as the men on Beechey Island and sailing Barrow Strait could see.

They never even consider that Franklin could have gone that way… that he could have obeyed orders. Their attention – for the coming years, since Crozier sees that they are frozen in solid now in Lancaster Sound – is to search to the north. Sir John’s secondary orders had been that if he could not continue his way south to force the Passage, he should turn north to sail through the theoretical rim of ice into the even more theoretical Open Polar Sea.

Crozier knows in his sinking heart that the captains and men of these eight rescue ships have all come to the conclusion that Franklin had gone north – precisely the opposite direction he had in fact sailed.

He wakes in the night. His own moaning has awakened him. There is light, but his eyes cannot stand the light so he tries to understand what is happening just through the burning of touch and the crash of sound. Two men – his steward, Jopson, and the surgeon, Goodsir – are stripping him of his filthy and sweat-soaked nightshirt, bathing him with miraculously warm water, and carefully dressing him in a clean nightshirt and socks. One of them tries to feed him soup with a spoon. Crozier vomits up the thin gruel, but the contents of his full-to-the-brim vomit pail are frozen solid and he is vaguely aware of the two men cleaning the deck. They make him drink some water and he falls back into his cold sheets. One of them spreads a warm blanket over him – a warm, dry, unfrozen blanket – and he wants to weep with gratitude. He also wants to speak but is slipping back into the maelstrom of his visions and cannot find or frame the words before all words are lost to him again.

He sees a boy with black hair and greenish skin curled in a fetal position against a brick-tile wall the colour of urine. Crozier knows that the boy is an epileptic in an asylum, in some bedlam somewhere. The boy shows no movement except for his dark eyes, which constantly flicker back and forth like a reptile’s. That shape am I .

As soon as he thinks this, Crozier knows that this is not his fear. It is some other man’s nightmare. He was briefly in some other mind.

Sophia Cracroft enters him. Crozier moans around the biting strap.

He sees her naked and straining against him at the Platypus Pond. He sees her distant and dismissive on the stone bench at Government House. He sees her standing and waving – not at him – in her blue silk dress on the dock at Greenhithe on the May day that Erebus and Terror sailed. Now he sees her as he has never seen her before – a future-present Sophia Cracroft, proud, grieving, secretly happy to be grieving, renewed and reborn as her aunt Lady Jane Franklin’s full-time assistant and companion and amanuensis. She travels everywhere with Lady Jane – two indomitable women, the press will call them – Sophia, almost as much as her aunt, always visibly earnest and hopeful and strident and feminine and eccentric and bent to the task of cajoling the world to rescue Sir John Franklin. She will never mention Francis Crozier, not even in private. It is, he sees at once, a perfect role for Sophia: brave, imperious, entitled, able to play the coquette for decades with the perfect excuse for avoiding commitment or real love. She will never marry. She will travel the world with Lady Jane, Crozier sees, never publicly giving up hope that the missing Sir John will be found, but – long after real hope is surrendered – still enjoying the entitlement, sympathy, power, and position that this once-removed widowhood affords her.