Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

The second time he did this Erasmus left his outer mitts off for too long while he sketched: November 29, at eight P.M. He froze all but the little finger on his left hand, and the next day woke to find giant blood blisters extending from the tips past the second joints. The blisters ruptured a few days later, rendering his cracked and bloody hands useless for more than a week. But he was lucky, Dr. Boerhaave said; the flesh never blackened or died. Zeke held Erasmus’s hands up before the men, pointing out the oozing blood and enormous swelling.

“This is what you must guard against,” Zeke said. “This is what happens when you’re careless.”

Zeke lectured on the open polar sea. Erasmus thought the men would resent this, since the search for it was what had trapped them here. Yet they seemed interested. During their whaling days they’d all seen the open patches of water persisting strangely amid the ice and swarming with fish and sea creatures. Both Ivan Hruska and Captain Tyler had, on earlier trips, seen narwhals crowded into a small polynya, with their horns pointed straight up in the air as their bodies were crammed together.

“The theory of an open polar sea stems from ancient times,” Zeke told them. In the lamplight, with his beard shining and his cheekbones flushed, he looked like a young soldier. He made his own heat, he was often sweating. In the cabin he opened his shirt to the waist while others huddled in their jackets.

He held up a diagram of ocean currents. “Parry and others have shown that there are two sites of maximum cold on the globe, one for each hemisphere, both situated near the eightieth parallel. The isothermals projected around these points make it seem likely that, within an encircling barrier of ice, the sea remains perpetually open around the region of the pole.” Sabine barked, a tiny exclamation point. By then Erasmus had grown so used to her presence that he hardly registered her bounding over the shelves while Zeke talked, or standing on the table and sniffing at the cracks around the bull’s-eye, or sitting, tiny and bright-eyed and white, on Zeke’s shoulders as he paced the room.

The men’s spirits were good, he thought. Their days and nights were full, and their imaginations were fed by their studies, so that they seldom felt bored. Dr. Boerhaave brought out Agas-siz’s Poissons fossiles and toured the crew through the plates, translating key portions of the text for them as they gawked at the bony relics.

“Nature,” he said, “is not random but is the product of thought, planning, and intelligence. The entire history of creation has been wisely ordained.”

From extinct fishes he leapt to Thoreau; a great collector of turtles and trout, Dr. Boerhaave said. An avid reader of explorers’ accounts, and a good friend of Agassiz’s. Erasmus was the one who suggested he share with the men the contents of the books and essays he’d collected in Concord. On the night when Dr. Boerhaave lectured on Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, Erasmus saw attention on every face.

“There is a higher law than civil law,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “The law of conscience. When these laws are in conflict, Thoreau argues that it is our duty to obey the voice of God within rather than that of external authority.” He held a tattered magazine in his hand: Aesthetic Papers. The first and only issue. Robert Carey raised his hand. “What is ‘aesthetic’?” he said.

LATER, ERASMUS WOULD look back on those calm months and wonder what had brought an end to them. Just hardship, he would think. Enough hardship to disrupt the balance of any small community. As the solstice approached the weather bit at them. Routinely it was twenty-five degrees below zero, then thirty below, then colder, with a wind that licked through clothes and walls.

Pacing with Dr. Boerhaave on Zeke’s promenade, Erasmus would watch his friend’s beard, eyebrows, and lashes grow a crisp white frost, while icicles hung from his moustache and lower lip. They talked to keep their minds off the cold. Not of home, nor their friends and families, nor women — what would have been the point? Better to avoid any topic that would have drowned them in homesickness. They explored each other’s minds. In the light of the stars and the moon, the landscape glimmered indistinctly and edges disappeared, until they could imagine themselves at the moment of Creation. Could it be, Dr. Boerhaave asked, that the earth and stars and the planets and their moons had all condensed from swirling clouds of gas? And that these condensations developed constantly toward man?

The intricate joints of the hand, Erasmus said. The amazing complexities of the eye. From such everyday miracles one might infer a Creator. The hand and eye are but manifestations, Dr. Boerhaave replied. The Creator and the great design are the ultimate reality.

Their old difference rose again. A species, Erasmus said, was the collection of all individuals resembling each other more than they resemble others, and producing fertile offspring; presumably all descending from a single individual. A species, said Dr. Boerhaave as he whirled his arms in circles, was a thought in the mind of God. Everything on earth was just as God had created it, during the biblical six days and again in subsequent, successive creations after catastrophes similar to the biblical flood. Each new set of living beings was progressively more complex.

“Look at Cuvier,” he said.

“Look at Lyell,” Erasmus retorted.

Talking grew difficult; their beards froze to their neckerchiefs and saliva sealed their lips. The wind tore tears from their eyes and froze their lids together.

On December 21, all they saw of the sun was a red glow at noon. The cabin walls began to drip moisture; the men’s furs, dusted with snow and ice, drooped damply when they came inside and stiffened when they went out again. The weakest of the men — Robert Carey, who’d never completely recovered from the dunking that had killed Nils Jensen; Ivan Hruska, who’d always had the stunted look of an undernourished boy — grew reluctant to leave their bunks in the n orning and claimed an assortment of aches and congestions. The night school fell apart.

They were hungry, Erasmus thought. Or not so much hungry as filled with violent lusts for all they couldn’t have. The meat in the rigging was gone by then, and Joe could find nothing to shoot. Ned and Barton tried their hardest to make appetizing meals, but everything began to taste alike. Dr. Boerhaave took Erasmus aside and said, “You know, you’re remarkably pale. Are you feeling all right?”

Erasmus stared at his friend’s face, as white as a boiled potato, then looked around at the others. Each complexion was waxy and pale, except where the cold had bitten crusty sores. Four of the men complained of shortness of breath.

“Wich your permission,” Dr. Boerhaave said to Zeke, “I’d like to make a brief medical inspection of the crew each Sunday.”

“No one’s sick,” Zeke said, frowning. “We’re doing well.”

“No one’s sick,” Dr. Boerhaave agreed. “Yet. But as ship’s surgeon I’d like to take this extra precaution, so nothing gets hidden until it’s serious.”

“I don’t want to encourage malingering,” Zeke said. “We can’t coddle ourselves up here.”

Dr. Boerhaave pressed his lips together. “I simply think it’s wise to check them regularly.” Zeke shook his head.

Although Erasmus agreed with Dr. Boerhaave’s caution, he understood Zeke’s reluctance as well; any acknowledgment of sickness made the men nervous. So did the darkness, and the daily task of scraping from bunks and bulkheads the frost that formed from their breath while they slept. It was disturbing, Erasmus thought, to watch the air that had lived inside their lungs turn into buckets of dirty ice. Tossing the shavings over the side, he felt as if he were discarding parts of himself.