Andrea Barrett: Voyage of the Narwhal

“Disappeared?” Ned said. His hands cut lard into flour for a pie crust.

“Vanished,” Erasmus replied. Everyone knew this part of the story, he thought: not just himself and Zeke, but Lavinia and all her acquaintances, even his cook and his groom. “How did you miss this?”

“There was starvation in Ireland,” Ned said sharply. “How did you miss that? I had other things on my mind.”

The chronology of these two events fell into line. Ned, Erasmus realized, must have been part of the great wave of Irish emigrants fleeing the famine. He was still just a boy, he could almost have been Erasmus’s son. “Forgive me,” he said. He knew nothing of Ned’s history, as he’d known nothing of his servants’ lives at home. “That was stupid of me.” Of course the events in Ireland had shaped Ned’s life more than the stories of noble Franklin, unaccountably lost; or noble Jane, his wife, who by the time Zeke proposed their voyage had organized more than a dozen expeditions in search of her husband.

Ned sliced apples so swiftly they seemed to leap away from his knife, and Erasmus, after an awkward pause, explained how ships had converged from the east and west on the areas in which Franklin was presumed to be lost, while other expeditions traveled overland. All had made important geographical discoveries, but despite the rockets fired, the kites and balloons sent adrift in the air, the foxes tagged with messages and released, no one had found Franklin. Erasmus’s fellow Philadelphian, Dr. Kane, had been with the fleet that reached Beechey Island during the summer of 1851, finding tantalizing traces of a winter camp.

Erasmus tried, without frightening Ned, to describe what that fleet had seen. Three of Franklin’s seamen lying beneath three mounds; and also sailcloth, paper fragments and blankets, and six hundred preserved-meat tins, emptied of their contents and refilled with pebbles. But no note, nor any indication of which direction the party had headed on departing. Subsequent expeditions hadn’t found a single clue as to Franklin’s whereabouts.

The Admiralty had given up the search a year ago, declaring Franklin and his men dead.

“Why would Commander Voorhees want to do this, then?” Ned asked. “If the men are dead?”

“There was news,” Erasmus said. “Surprising news.”

In the fall, just as Zeke had said at Lavinia’s party, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company had startled everyone. Exploring the arctic coastline west of Repulse Bay, not in search of Franklin at all but purely for geographical interest, he’d come across some Esquimaux. A group of thirty or forty white men had starved to death some years before, they said, at the mouth of a large river. They wouldn’t lead Rae to the bodies, and Rae had thought the season too far advanced to embark on a search himself. But the Esquimaux had relics: Rae purchased a gold watch, a surgeon’s knife, a bit of an undervest; silver forks and spoons marked with Franklin’s crest; a golden band from a cap.

“The part that set everyone talking, though,” Erasmus said, “was the last story the Esquimaux told Dr. Rae.”

Three pies were taking shape; he filched some apple slices. Was it wrong, he wondered, to bring up the subject of starvation with a boy who might have seen it directly? Was it wrong to talk so freely with a subordinate? But Ned, crimping the crusts together, said, “Well, tell me.”

Erasmus, leaving out the worst parts, described the Esquimaux tale of mutilated corpses and human parts found in cooking kettles. There could be no doubt, Rae had said, that his countrymen had been driven to cannibalism as a last resort.

“What an uproar Rae caused!” Erasmus said. He registered Ned’s pallor, but he was caught in his own momentum now. “You’d have thought he killed the men himself, from the public’s response. The Admiralty dismissed his findings and said Englishmen don’t eat Englishmen. But they declared the fate of Franklin’s expedition resolved, despite the fact that Rae’s story accounted for less than a third of the crew.”

“You look for the rest, then?” Ned asked.

“We look.”

He wound up with the facts that had set them off on their own quest. Although the Admiralty had given up, Lady Franklin persisted, bombarding the press with pleas for further, private expeditions.

“Until the ships are found,” Erasmus said, “there’s no proof that all the men are dead. Dr. Kane is still searching for them, but he headed for Smith Sound before Rae’s return. Franklin might have reached that area if he’d headed north through Wellington Channel, but now we know he went southwest and that Kane’s a thousand miles from the right place. We have all the facts Dr. Kane was missing, and our job is to search in the area Rae insufficiently explored.”

Ned finished the pies and then looked up. “Commander Voorhees made it sound as if we were going to rescue survivors” he said. “Yet it seems we’re only going after corpses.”

“Not exactly,” Erasmus said, flustered. “There may be some survivors, we hope there are. We go in search of them, and of news.

He left the galley feeling uneasy, a biscuit in his hand. He’d imagined that the ship’s crew shared his and Zeke’s thoughts: the story of Franklin clear in their minds, the goals of the voyage sharply defined and their own tasks understood. Now he wondered if they were like Ned, signed on for their own reasons, occupied with their own concerns, hardly aware of the facts. One was thinking, perhaps, about a belled cow walking high on a hill. Another about a pond and four locust trees, or about drinking whiskey or shoeing a horse, what he might buy when he was paid off, a young woman, an old quarrel, a sleigh’s runners slicing the snow.

* * *

THE LAST TIME Ned had sailed on a ship, he’d been sick and stunned and hadn’t known how to read or write. This time he’d do it differently; this time he’d keep a record. Before leaving Philadelphia he’d bought a lined copybook, of the sort boys used in school. That night he wrote:

The apple pies were very good. But Commander Voorhees still hasn’t eaten a mouthful, nothing I make tempts him. Today I saw a large school of bluefish. Mr. Wells came to visit while I made dinner and told me about the explorer we’re searching for. Except he is dead, also all his men I thinly Not only frozen but starved. When he told me about the men eating each other I thought about home, and all this evening I’ve been remembering Denis and Nora and our voyage over, and all the others dead at home, and Mr. Wicfyersham who taught me to read and write, and everyone. I get along well enough with the seamen I bunk with, but don’t yet have a special friend among them and wish I did. Although I’ve heard Mr. Wells asking the other seamen for details of their lives, he didn’t ask me one thing about the famine years nor how or when I arrived in this country. Nor how it was that I happened to be free, with less than a dollar in my pocket, on the very afternoon Mr. Tagliabeau came looking for a replacement cook. Only he seemed surprised that I hadn’t heard about the famous Englishman. If I hadn’t tried to stop the fight between the two Spaniards that afternoon, and been fired for my pains and denied my last week’s wages, I wouldn’t have leapt at the chance for this position. When we return to Philadelphia in October I wonder if he’d help me find work away from the docks, perhaps in one of the inns out Germantown way.

OFF ST. JOHN’S, the scattered icebergs — pure white, impossibly huge, entirely covered with snow — cured Zeke like a drug. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, and Mr. Francis viewed them calmly, after their many whaling voyages. Erasmus, who’d seen similar bergs off Antarctica, restrained his excitement for the sake of appearances. But the men who hadn’t been north before gaped openly, and Zeke was overcome.