We cleared the table in the Sick Bay area, shielded our Actions further by moving some crates between the milling Men and ourselves, drew the curtain around our Labours as best we could, and I fetched my instruments. Stanley, although Chief Surgeon, suggested that I should do the work since I had studied as an anatomist. I made the initial Incision and began.
Immediately I realized that in my Haste I had used the inverted-Y incision that I had used in training on cadavers when I was in a rush. Rather than the more common Y, with the two arms of the incision reaching down from the shoulders and meeting at the base of the sternum, my upside-down Y incision had the arms of the Y starting near each hip and meeting near Hartnell’s umbilicus. Stanley commented upon it and I was embarrassed.
“Whatever is faster,” I said softly to my fellow surgeon. “We must do this quickly — the men hate knowing that bodies of their crewmates are being opened.”
Surgeon Stanley nodded and I continued. As if to Confirm my statement, Hartnell’s younger brother, Thomas, began shouting and crying from just the other side of the curtain. Unlike Torrington’s slow decline on Terror, giving his crewmates time to come to terms with his death, time to parcel out his belongings and prepare letters for Torrington’s mother, John Hartnell’s sudden collapse and death had shocked the men here. None of them could abide the idea that the ship’s surgeons were cutting into the body. Now only the bulk, rank, and demeanor of Commander Fitzjames stood between the angry brother, confused seamen, and our Sick Bay. I could hear that the younger Hartnell’s messmates and Fitzjames’s presence were holding him back, but even as my scalpel cut through tissue and my knife and rib spreader opened the corpse for examination, I could hear the Muttering and Anger just a few yards beyond the curtain.
First I removed Hartnell’s heart, cutting away part of the trachea with it. I held it up to the lantern light, and Stanley took it and washed away blood with a dirty rag. We both inspected it. It looked normal enough — not visibly diseased. With Stanley still holding the Organ close to the light, I made one cut in the right ventricle, then one in the left. Peeling the tough muscle back, both Stanley and I reviewed the valves there. They seemed healthy.
Dropping Hartnell’s heart back into his abdominal cavity, I dissected the lower part of the able seaman’s lungs with quick strokes of my scalpel.
“There,” said Surgeon Stanley.
I nodded. There were obvious signs of scarring and other indications of Consumption, as well as signs that the seaman recently had been suffering from pneumonia. John Hartnell, like John Torrington, had been tubercular, but this older, stronger — and according to Stanley — harsher and louder sailor had concealed the Symptoms, perhaps even from himself. Until today, when he keeled over and died just minutes before getting his salt pork.
Pulling and cutting the Liver free, I held it under the light, and both Stanley and I believed that we noticed adequate confirmation of the consumption as well as indications that Hartnell had been too heavy a Drinker for too long a time.
Just yards away on the other side of the curtain, Hartnell’s brother, Thomas, was shouting, furious, being held in check only by Commander Fitzjames’s stern bark. I could tell from the voices that several of the other officers — Lieutenant Gore, Lieutenant Le Vesconte and Fairholme, even Des Voeux, the mate — had joined in calming and intimidating the Mob of sailors.
“Have we seen enough?” whispered Stanley.
I nodded again. There had been no sign of Scurvy on the body, on the face or in the mouth, or in the organs. While it remained a Mystery how the consumption or pneumonia or a combination of the two had been able to kill the able-bodied seaman so quickly, it was at least obvious that we had nothing to fear from some Plaguelike Disease.
The noise from the crew’s Berthing Space was growing Louder, so I quickly thrust the lung samples, liver, and other organs back in the abdominal cavity with the heart, taking no care to set them in proper place, more or less squeezing them into a Mass, and then I returned Hartnell’s chest plate roughly back in place. (Later I was to Realize that I had set it in upside down.) Chief Surgeon Stanley then closed up the inverted-Y incision, using a large needle and heavy sail thread with a quick, confident motion that would have done credit to any sailmaker.
Within another minute we had Hartnell’s clothes back on — rigor mortis was beginning to be a problem — and we thrust the curtain aside. Stanley — whose voice is deeper and more resonant than mine — assured Hartnell’s brother and the other men that all we had remaining was to wash their crewmate’s body so that they could prepare it for burial.
6 January, 1846 —
For some reason this Burial Service was Harder on me than the first. Again we had the solemn Procession from the ship — with only Erebus and its crew involved this time, although Dr. McDonald, Surgeon Peddie, and Captain Crozier joined us from Terror.
Again the flag-covered coffin — the men had dressed Hartnell’s upper body in three layers, including his brother Thomas’s best shirt, but had wrapped his naked lower body in only a shroud, leaving the top half of the coffin open for several hours in the black-creped Sick Bay on the lower deck before the nails were hammered in for the burial service. Again the slow sledge procession from the Frozen Sea to the Frozen Shore, lanterns bobbing in the black night, although the stars were out this Midday and no snow fell. The Marines had work to do, since three of the Great White Bears came sniffing closer, looming like white wraiths out of the ice blocks, and the men had to fire muskets at them to drive them away — visibly wounding one bear in the side.
Again the Eulogy from Sir John — although shorter this time, since Hartnell was not as well liked as young Torrington had been — and again we walked back across the creaking, squeaking, moaning ice alone, under the stars dancing in the Cold this time, the only sound behind us the dwindling scrape of spades and pickaxes filling in the frozen soil in the new hole next to Torrington’s nicely tended grave.
Perhaps it was the black cliff face Looming over All that murdered my Spirits this second burial. Although I deliberately stood where my back was to the Cliff this time, closer to Sir John so that I could hear the Words of Hope and Solace, I was always aware of that cold, black, vertical, lifeless and lightless slab of insensate Stone behind me — a portal, it seemed, to that Country from Which No Man Has Ever Returned. Compared to the Cold Reality of that black, featureless stone, even Sir John’s compassionate and inspired words had little effect.
The morale on both ships is very low. We are not yet a Full Week into the new year, and already two of our Company have died. Tomorrow the four of us surgeons have agreed to Meet in a Private Place — the carpenter’s room belowdecks on Terror — to discuss what should be done to avoid more Mortality in what seems to be a Cursed Expedition.
The headstone on this second grave read
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
JOHN HARTNELL, A.B. OF H.M.S.
EREBUS
DIED JANUARY 4TH, 1846
AGED 25 YEARS
‘THUS SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS, CONSIDER YOUR WAYS’
HAGGAI, I., 7.
The wind has come up in the last hour, it is almost Midnight and most of the lamps are out here on the lower deck of Erebus. I listen to the wind howl and think of those two cold Low Heaps of Loose Stone out on that black, windy isthmus, and I think of the dead men in those two cold Holes, and I think of the Featureless Black Face of Rock, and I can imagine the fusillade of snow pellets already working to eradicate the letters on the wooden headstones.
7
FRANKLIN
Lat. 70°-03′-29″ N., Long. 98°- 20′ W.
Approximately 28 miles NNW of King William Land, 3 September, 1846
Captain Sir John Franklin had rarely been so pleased with himself.
The previous winter frozen in at Beechey Island, hundreds of miles northeast of his present position, had been uncomfortable in many ways — he would be the first to admit that to himself or to a peer, althoug
h he had no peers on this expedition. The death of three members of the expedition, first Torrington and Hartnell so early in January, then Private William Braine of the Royal Marines on 3 April, all of consumption and pneumonia, had been a shock. Franklin was not aware of any other Navy expedition losing three men of natural causes so early in their endeavor.
It was Franklin himself who had chosen the inscription on the thirty-two-year-old Private Braine’s headstone — “Choose this day whom ye shall serve,” Joshua, ch. xxiv, 15 — and for a short while the words had seemed as much a challenge to the unhappy crews of Erebus and Terror, not yet near mutiny but neither so far away from it, as it was a message to the nonexistent passersby of Braine’s, Hartnell’s, and Torrington’s lonely graves on that terrible spit of gravel and ice.
Nonetheless, the four surgeons met and conferred after Hartnell’s death and decided that incipient scurvy might be weakening the men’s constitutions, allowing pneumonia and such congenital defects as consumption to rise to lethal proportions. Surgeons Stanley, Goodsir, Peddie, and McDonald recommended to Sir John that the men’s diet be changed — fresh food when possible (although there was almost none except polar bear possible in the dark of winter, and they had discovered that eating the liver of that great, ponderous beast could be fatal for some unknown reason) and, failing finding fresh meat and vegetables, cutting back on the men’s preferred salted pork and beef, or salted birds, and relying more on the tinned foods — vegetable soups and the like.
Sir John had gone along with the recommendation, ordering the diet on both ships changed so that no less than half the meals were prepared with tinned foods from stores. It seemed to have turned the trick. No more men died, or were even seriously sick, between Private Braine’s death in early April and the day both ships were freed from their icy imprisonment within the harbor of Beechey Island in late May of 1846.
After that, the ice broke up quickly and Franklin, following the paths through the leads chosen by his two fine ice masters, steamed and sailed south and west, going, as the captains of Sir John’s generation liked to say, like smoke and oakum.
Along with the sunlight and open water, animals, birds, and aquatic life returned in plenitude. During those long, slow, arctic summer days, where the sun remained above the horizon until almost midnight and the temperature sometimes rose above freezing, the skies were filled with migrating birds. Franklin himself could identify the petrels from the teals, eider ducks from the little auks, and the sprightly little puffins from all others. The ever-widening leads around Erebus and Terror were alive with right whales that would have been the envy of any Yankee whaler, and there was a profusion of cod, herring, and other small fish, as well as the large beluga and bowhead whales. The men put out the whaling boats and fished, often shooting some of the small whales just for sport.
Every hunting party came back with fresh game for the tables each night — birds, of course, but also those confounded ringed and harp seals, so impossible to shoot or catch in their holes in the winter, now brazen on the open ice and easy targets. The men did not enjoy the taste of the seals — too oily and astringent — but something about the blubber in the slimy beasts appealed to all their winter-starved appetites. They also shot the large bellowing walruses visible through telescopes tusking away for oysters along the shores, and some hunting parties returned with the pelts and flesh of the white arctic fox. The men ignored the lumbering polar bears unless the waddling beasts seemed ready to attack or contest the kill of the human hunters. No one really liked the taste of the white bears and certainly not when there was so much tastier game to be found.
Franklin’s orders included an option: if he “found his way toward the Southern Approach to the North-West Passage blocked by Ice or other Obstacles,” to turn north and to follow the Wellington Passage into “the Open Polar Sea” — in essence, to sail to the north pole. But Franklin did what he had done without question his entire life: he followed his primary orders. This second summer in the arctic, his two ships had sailed south from Devon Island, Franklin leading HMS Erebus and HMS Terror past Cape Walker into the unknown waters of an icy archipelago.
The previous summer, it had seemed as if he would have to settle for sailing to the north pole rather than finding the North-West Passage. Captain Sir John Franklin had reason to be proud of his speed and efficiency so far. During his shortened summer voyage time that year before, 1845 — they had departed England late and Greenland even later than planned — he had nonetheless crossed Baffin Bay in record time, passed through Lancaster Sound south of Devon Island, then through Barrow Strait, and found his way south past Walker Point blocked by ice so late in August. But his Ice Masters reported open water to the north, past the western reaches of Devon Island into the Wellington Channel, so Franklin obeyed his secondary orders and turned north toward what could be an ice-free passage into the Open Polar Sea and the north pole.
There had been no opening to the fabled Open Polar Sea. The Grinnell Peninsula, which might have been part of an unknown Arctic Continent for all the men of the Franklin Expedition knew, had blocked their way and forced them to follow open water north by west, then almost due west, until they reached the western tip of that peninsula, turned north again, and encountered a solid mass of ice that extended north from the Wellington Channel apparently to infinity. Five days of sailing along that high wall of ice convinced Franklin, Fitzjames, Crozier, and the ice masters that there was no Open Polar Sea north of the Wellington Channel. At least not that summer.
Worsening ice conditions made them turn south, around the landmass previously known as only Cornwallis Land but now understood to be Cornwallis Island. If nothing else, Captain Sir John Franklin knew, his expedition had solved that puzzle.
With pack ice quickly freezing in place that late summer of 1845, Franklin had finished circumnavigating the huge, barren Cornwallis Island, reentered the Barrow Strait north of Cape Walker, confirmed that the way south past Cape Walker was still blocked — now solid with ice — and sought out their winter anchorage at little Beechey Island, entering a little harbour they had reconnoitered two weeks earlier. They’d arrived just in time, Franklin knew, for the day after they anchored in the shallow water of that harbour, the last open leads in Lancaster Sound beyond closed up and the moving pack ice would have made any more sailing impossible. It was doubtful if even such masterpieces of reinforced iron-and-oak technology as Erebus and Terror would have survived the winter out in the channel ice.
But now it was summer and they had been sailing south and west for weeks, restoring their provisions when they could, following every lead, seeking out any glint of open water they could spy from the lookout’s position high on the main mast, and every day smashing and forcing their way through the ice when they had to.
HMS Erebus continued to lead the way in the ice-breaking, as was her right as the flagship and her logical responsibility as the heavier ship with a more powerful — five horsepower more powerful — steam engine, but — confound it! — the long shaft to the screw had been bent by underwater ice; it would neither retract nor work properly, and Terror had moved into the lead position.
And with the icy shores of King William Land visible no more than fifty miles ahead of them to the south, the ships had moved out from under the protection of the huge island to their north — the one which had blocked their way directly to the southwest past Cape Walker, where his orders had directed him to sail, and instead had forced him south through Peel Sound and previously unexplored straits. Now the ice to the south and west had become active and almost continuous once again. Their pace had slowed to a crawl. The ice was thicker, the icebergs more frequent, the leads thinner and farther apart.
This morning of 3 September, Sir John had called a conference of his captains, top officers, engineers, and ice masters. The crowd fit comfortably into Sir John’s personal cabin; where this space on HMS Terror served as a Great Cabin for the officers, complete with libraries and music, the width o
f the stern of HMS Erebus was Sir John Franklin’s private quarters — twelve feet wide by an amazing twenty feet long, with a private commode “seat of ease” in a room to itself on the starboard side. Franklin’s private privy was almost exactly the size of Captain Crozier’s and all the other officers’ entire cabins.
Edmund Hoar, Sir John’s steward, had lengthened the dining table until it could accommodate all the officers present — Commander Fitzjames, Lieutenants Gore, Le Vesconte, and Fairholme from Erebus, Captain Crozier and Lieutenants Little, Hodgson, and Irving from Terror. Besides those eight officers seated on either side of the table — Sir John sat at its head near the starboard bulkhead and entrance to his private head — also present, standing at the foot of the table, were the two ice masters, Mr. Blanky from Terror and Mr. Reid from Erebus, as well as the two engineers, Mr. Thompson from Crozier’s ship and Mr. Gregory from the flagship. Sir John had also asked one of the surgeons, Stanley from Erebus, to be in attendance. Franklin’s steward had set out grape juice, cheeses, and ship’s biscuits, and there was a short period of chatting and relaxing before Sir John called the conference to order.
“Gentlemen,” said Sir John, “I am sure you all know why we are gathered here. Our expedition’s advance the last two months, thanks to the graciousness of God, has been wonderfully successful. We have left Beechey Island almost three hundred and fifty miles behind us. Lookouts and our sledge scouts still report glimpses of open water far to our south and west. It still may be in our power — God willing — to reach this open water and to navigate the North-West Passage this very autumn.
“But the ice to our west is increasing, I understand, in both thickness and frequency. Mr. Gregory reports that Erebus’s main shaft has been damaged by ice and that although we can make headway under steam, the flagship’s effectiveness has been compromised. Our coal supplies are dwindling. Another winter will soon be upon us. In other words, gentlemen, we must decide today what our course of action and direction shall be. I think it is not unfair to say that the success or failure of our expedition shall be determined by what we decide here.”