The letter in hand, Ephraim hurried back to Whitechapel, where a desperate Izzy was hiding out. “We’re for the Orkneys,” he said.
“I dare not leave here. They’re looking for us everywhere.”
“They will be watching the ports, expecting us to make a dash for Ireland or the Continent.”
“Even if we got there safely how could we expect to get ourselves included in the ship’s company?”
Ephraim was already steaming open Lady Jane’s letter. The ink, he established at once, would be easy enough to duplicate. He had the nib she had used in his jacket pocket. He practised her spidery script for more than an hour before he risked adding the post scriptum, imploring Sir John to accept Ephraim, their Van Diemen’s Land foundling, and Mr. Isaac Grant, admirable as he was devout, among his ship’s company.
The rap on the door startled Izzy.
“Not to worry,” Ephraim said. “That will be the Sullivan sisters. Dorothy and Kate are coming with us.”
Once in Stromness Harbour, the gloomy dockside public house where the crews gathered was easily found. Many of them were fearful they would never see home again. Dangling the Sullivan sisters like bait, spending lavishly, it did not take Ephraim long to ingratiate himself with the sailors. He settled instinctively on those he took to be the most jittery, regaling them with tales of his late father’s overland journey to the shores of the Polar Sea with Franklin in 1819. “Why, there came a time,” he said, “during their third year on the barrens, when they were driven to eating the putrid powdered marrow bones of a deer that had already been picked over by ferocious white wolves and black ravens. Mind you, my father was one of the few fortunate enough to survive, though my poor mother hardly recognized him on his return. His teeth lost to scurvy and all of his toes amputated. Not much use to her, which probably accounts for her running off with Mr. Feeney.”
The night before they were to sail, Captain Crozier of the Terror wisely refused his crew shore leave, worried that some of the men would jump ship. But Captain Fitzjames of the Erebus allowed his lot the usual liberty. All of them reported back at the required hour, but then the randy assistant surgeon appropriated a small boat and had a sailor, a lad fortunate enough to be fancied by Kate, row him back to land. There the two of them joined the Sullivan sisters, the assignation having been hastily arranged while Ephraim was ostensibly busy elsewhere.
According to the official records, the miscreants rowed back to the Erebus at three A.M. The third lieutenant, whose watch it was, hardly recognized them, but then it was a dark night, the moon and stars obscured by clouds, and he was somewhat the worse for drink himself. The sailor, sporting a silk top hat, was jabbering in some unknown guttural tongue with the assistant surgeon, the two of them lugging sacks of personal provisions on board. Certainly against the rules, that, but they had been sufficiently thoughtful to bring the third lieutenant a bottle of rum.
Franklin had no luck. Unknowingly, he set sail for the Arctic in what would subsequently prove to have been one of the most relentlessly cold cycles of the last 1,000 years. He went to sea with some eight thousand cans of preserved meat, supplied by one Stephen Goldner, the lowest bidder, and canned according to his new-fangled process called “Goldner’s Patent”. The meat was vile. Cans found on Beechey Island by a perspicacious anthropologist more than 125 years later had imperfectly sealed seams and bulging ends, evidence of putrefaction, supporting his theory that expedition members had suffered from lead poisoning, which can lead to debilitating fatigue, anorexia and paranoia. But Ephraim and Izzy, given their secret hoard of Jewish soul food, were not as infected as the rest of the company. True, the bulk of their supplies gave out during the first year, but the schmaltz herring, an indulgence Izzy limited to the sabbath, lasted them well into the second. And even then, the ever resourceful Izzy, by now an intimate of the cook, was able to leaven their intake of poisonous meat with delicacies that he had shrewdly held back. So one Friday night they might gorge themselves on kasha fried in chicken fat and the next on rice prepared in a similar fashion.
Trying to reconstruct Ephraim’s interminable winters in the high Arctic, the sun sinking below the horizon for four months, Moses had to rely on conjecture and the accounts of other nineteenth-century explorers. Then there were the fragments from Solomon’s journals, those tales told by Ephraim on the shores of a glacial lake, man and boy warming themselves by their camp-fire under the shifting arch of the aurora.
Navigation in the Arctic Archipelago was limited to eight weeks. Then, confronted with the melancholy prospect of yet another winter, the men would either blast or saw their ship’s path into a safe harbour, where they would be held hostage in the pack ice for ten months. They would set to cutting the ice for fresh water and constructing an ice wall around the ship, piling snow against the hull for insulation, and erecting canvas housing on the decks. The officers, intent on maintaining morale, diverted the crews with foot races on the ice, cricket matches, schools, and theatrical performances, the temperature on stage below zero for the Christmas pantomime. “No joke,” the saucy Lieutenant Norton complained, “when you are wearing petticoats.” Cabin boys and the more comely of the able sailors and marines took to demanding exorbitant fees for their favours from smitten officers.
Solomon noted in his journal that Ephraim attended classes in astronomy, becoming proficient in reading the stars, and never missed a lecture by Mr. Stanley, the surgeon on the Erebus.
“The science of medicine has now arrived at such perfection in England,” Mr. Stanley said, “that we have almost forgotten the crude beginnings out of which our present knowledge was evolved. But from our pinnacle of learning, it is interesting to observe the darkness in which the wild Esquimaux still tolerates a class of medicine man whose pretensions to perform all kinds of miracles are of the extravagant character. These shamans say they can and do make themselves larger and smaller at will, or change themselves into some other animal, or enter into a piece of wood or stone; that they can walk on water and fly through the air; but there is one indispensible condition—no one must see them.”
The officers laughed appreciatively.
“Alas,” Mr. Stanley continued, “the matter is serious. The shamans, to take one example, have absolutely no understanding of the nature of delirium. When a patient becomes delirious, as in severe fevers, they take him to be mad, possessed of an irresistible desire for cannibalism.”
Franklin, his death foretold, was buried on June 11, 1847 in the British ensign Lady Jane had embroidered for him. And when the longed-for summer dawned at last, its feeble sun was insufficient to free the ships from the ice floes.
The men, their teeth swimming in their bloodied mouths, were put on even shorter rations, Ephraim told Solomon. Scurvy, Solomon noted in his journal, claimed twenty of them in the winter of 1848. And then the Erebus became the place of darkness between Earth and Hades. Men tore at each other’s faces over a chunk of tainted meat and performed acts abhorrent to them for the sake of a ration of tea or tobacco. Officers wept as they wrote letters of farewell. The captain of the forecastle sat at the organ for hours, playing hymns, praying for deliverance from the sunless frozen sea. A demented, feverish Philip Norton, wearing a wig, his cheeks rouged, his lips painted, paraded below decks in a ball gown, attended by admirers, pausing to pinch Izzy Garber’s cheeks or caress Ephraim’s buttocks, speculating aloud on which one would taste most tender in the pot, warning everybody that it would come to that soon enough. One morning he had Ephraim led forcibly into his tiny cabin where, in spite of the intense cold, he lay on his bunk wearing nothing but a black suspender belt and stockings, singing softly as he combed his pubic hairs with a toothbrush. “The time has come, my dear, to reveal where you and Grant have your secret store of food.”