Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

On sunlit nights, when sleep seemed such a waste of time, Erasmus thumbed through his battered copy of Hooker’s Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of the Erebus and the Terror in the Years 1839–1843, not only because those same ships had later carried Franklin, but also because it reminded him of what he might have done on his own first voyage, had Wilkes not blocked him. Now he believed he might put together an arctic volume that would stand as a companion to Hooker’s. Next to him Dr. Boerhaave re-read Parry’s journals, assessing the descriptions of the Esquimaux. Collating his own notes, he talked about writing an account of the Netsilik similar to Parry’s famed Appendix.

“All the arctic peoples build a culture around the available food sources,” he mused. “And those cultures may be very different. Yet the tribes share racial characteristics. Just as the plants and animals recur across the arctic zone so do the people, uniquely adapted to this environment. More and more it seems to me they must have been created here…”

“Why must they have been?” Erasmus said affectionately. He’d grown very fond of the way his friend talked: one cerebral, slightly stilted sentence linked to the next, whole paragraphs unfurling. He’d never asked, he realized, if Dr. Boerhaave still thought in Swedish, translating mentally before he talked; or if he now thought in English. And where did his French and German fit in, and when had he learned all those languages? His grandparents, he’d once mentioned, had been Dutch. “That doesn’t follow.”

“You’re so old-fashioned,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “All the leading naturalists, and all the most progressive philosophers, lean toward this idea of separate, successive creations — why do you resist it so? Why does it seem so improbable to you that man, like the other animals, might have been created multiply in separate zoological provinces?”

“I just don’t believe it,” Erasmus said. And held up his hands in surrender, and laughed. Whenever they discussed the geographical distribution of plants and animals, they always parted company at the final step of the hypothesis — that just as the arctic supported a white bear rather than black or grizzly bears, murres and dovekies rather than penguins, so too might the Esquimaux differ at a species level from the men in other places.

The idea seemed wrong to Erasmus — not just theologically unorthodox, but scientifically unsound. One practical definition of a species was the ability to interbreed; everyone knew matings of all the races of men produced fertile offspring. Canadian voyageurs and Coppermine Indians, Parry’s crews and Esquimaux, plantation owners and their slaves: that no one wanted to discuss these conjunctions didn’t make them less true. Erasmus thought of the botanist Asa Gray, whose work he admired. That idea of varieties moving toward species over time — if man was part of nature as a whole, subject to the same physical laws that governed other organisms…

“Separate,” Dr. Boerhaave said, “does not mean inferior.”

“Differentiation always implies ranking,” Erasmus said. They smiled and left the subject, returning to the books before them.

Ned listened in on these conversations, occasionally asking questions of his own and practicing what the two older men taught him about the preparation of specimens. At first he worked on birds. In his lined copybook he wrote:

Remember to measure everything before beginning to remove the skin: record color of eyes and other soft parts; if possible make an outline of the entire bird on a large sheet of paper before spinning, otherwise sketch overall shape and stance. Break the wings as close to the body as possible, then cut the skin down the center of the breast to the vent. For the head, stretch the skin gradually until the ears are reached; cut through the skin there close to the bone; then cut carefully around the eye, making sure not to cut the eyelids. Sever the head from the neck and pull out the brain with the hookj remove eyes from sockets, cut out the tongue, and remove all flesh from the skull. Poison the skin with powdered arsenic and alum or arsenical soap.

If prepared carefully, Mr. Wells says, the skins will stay in perfect shape until we return home and will be of much use to scientists. Or they may be softened and mounted in a lifelike shape, so others will have a chance to examine what we’ve seen. Ever since I pulled Mr. Wells from the water at the base of the cliff he has treated me very kindly; who could imagine I’d find another man willing to help me like this? I have a gift for this work he says. I might make a living from it someday, if I wanted — in museums, he claims, are assistants with no more formal education than me, who do the initial work on all the specimens. My father would have laughed and thought this no better than undertaker’s work- But that was there, and this is another country.

* * *

PART OF ERASMUS’S well-being came from the sense that he was teaching Ned something useful. As Ned’s hands moved among skins and bones, Erasmus was reminded of his own boyish efforts — a squirrel, he thought, had been his first preparation — and he watched happily. On his other side Dr. Boerhaave, busy himself with an ivory gull, asked Ned, “How is it you read and write so well?”

“I was lucky,” Ned said, comparing the spinal column in his palm to the sketch before him. “A man who took me in one winter taught me.”

They were interrupted by the lookout calling, “Drift ice ahead!” As they leapt to their feet and stared, the ice turned into a herd of beluga whales, glimmering white in the water. After gaping at them, Ned told Erasmus and Dr. Boerhaave how he’d gotten his education.

He had left Ireland in ‘47, he said, at the height of the potato famine. All his family had died but his brother Denis and his older sister, Nora; the three of them had taken passage on one of the overcrowded emigrant ships bound for Quebec. But Nora had sickened on the ship, and at the quarantine station of Grosse Isle, downriver from Quebec city, Nora had been taken from them.

“We were starving,” Ned said, gazing out at the water. “And Denis and I were sick ourselves, though we didn’t know it yet. Nora was almost dead. These men carried her off the ship and said she had to go into the hospital on the island. Me and Denis were forced onto another, smaller ship, crammed full of Irish like us, and they sent us upriver to Montreal. We never saw Nora again.”

In Montreal, he said, there were already so many sick with the fever that the residents had forced them along to Kingston. In Kingston, Denis had died.

“How old were you then?” Dr. Boerhaave asked.

“Twelve,” Ned said. “I turned thirteen there.”

He touched only briefly on the terrible years when, after being left for dead in a pauper’s hospital, and then wandering the streets, homeless and thieving, he’d been taken in by some farmers who worked him hard. Soon after turning sixteen, he’d run away.

“All I wanted,” he said, “was to be out of that cruel country. I thought that if I could just get to America, my whole life would be different.”

He’d crossed the St. Lawrence into New York State and drifted from Cape Vincent to Chaumont to Watertown; then, hearing tales of logging work to be had in the Brown’s Tract wilderness, he’d made the hazardous journey through the north woods. Deep in the forests near Saranac Lake he’d found work in a logging camp, though not as a logger. The men, immigrants like himself, had laughed at his slight physique but had been willing to hire him as cook’s helper.

Midway through his second season, the cook had left and Ned had taken on the duties of feeding the entire camp. That year, while picking up groceries on Lower Saranac Lake, he’d met a pale Boston lawyer who planned to winter there in the hope of curing his consumption. The lawyer was building a cabin in the woods and hiring a staff. He’d engaged Ned as his cook.