Hallucinating crew members, fearful of being butchered, were never without a weapon to hand. Those who had spit out their teeth long ago and were now too weakened to move, ridden with skin ulcers, coughing phlegm and blood, slid in pools of diarrhoea in their hammocks. Those who were still mobile but with gums already livid, their mouths tasting of death, split into rival gangs, each suspecting the other of nourishing themselves on hidden caches of food. On the prowl, armed, they organized flash searches. Officers were openly jeered. An alarmed Crozier and Fitzjames met in the wardroom of the Erebus, two Royal Marines standing guard at the door.
Moses Berger, his annotated Franklin library all but definitive, found that more than a hundred years later scholars were still puzzled by why the expedition men, having decided to abandon their ships, sickly and inadequately equipped as they were, elected to strike out, by way of Back’s Fish River, for Fort Reliance, some eight hundred miles away. “Certainly only some grave factor or combination of circumstances,” wrote Hudson’s Bay Chief Trader William Gibson, FRGS, in The Beaver (June, 1937), “could have precipitated such a hazardous and daring decision.”
The grave circumstance, according to Ephraim, was Crozier’s conviction that mutiny was imminent.
Scholars were even more baffled by the amazing variety of articles strewn about the lifeboat found by Hobson near Victory Point. Silk handkerchiefs, scented soap, sponges, slippers, toothbrushes and hair-combs. That is to say, just about everything required for the toilette of the demented “Dolly” Norton and his entourage. Neither could scholars understand why the lifeboat was pointed in the direction of the abandoned ships.
Ephraim told Solomon: “Crozier and Fitzjames had departed with the men they ajudged to be loyal or at least sane. They induced Norton and his band to separate from the main body, bribing them with stores of tea and chocolate, and allowing them to take me and Izzy with them. Prisoners for the pot. But as God spared Isaac from the knife at the last moment, providing a ram in his place, so we were saved by that polar bear they shot on the ice. Norton and his bunch immediately set to gobbling the liver raw, sparing not a slice for us, and that was that.”
Hypervitaminosis, a toxic reaction to an overdose of Vitamin A, its severity heightened by the absence of Vitamins C and E, is acquired by eating the liver of a polar bear or bearded seal. The disease is so rare it is not even listed in Black’s Medical Dictionary. Its symptoms, Moses noted on one of his file cards, are as follows:
Headaches, vomiting, and diarrhoea, all of which appear promptly. And, within a week, scaling and stripping of skin, loss of hair, splitting of the skin round the mouth, nose, and eyes. This is followed by irritability, loss of appetite, drowsiness, vertigo, dizziness, skeletal pain, loss of weight, and internal disruption from swelling of liver and spleen, including violent dysentery. And, in severe cases, convulsions, delirium, and possible death from intercranial haemorrhage.
Ephraim told Solomon: “The Eskimos who had been with us for four days had gone, and we were still camped some seventy miles from the ships, unable to move on, the men vomiting and shitting themselves, blaming it all on the seal they had shared with the Eskimos. Izzy was feverish. And Norton, wearing his ball gown in the tent, warmed as it was by a feeble fire, swore he would have me for his catamite. When I began to curse, he ordered his followers to lower me to my knees, arms twisted behind my back. Thrusting himself at me, he raised his skirts and lowered his silk panties, and then it was he saw fragments of his own skin and hair fall into the snow. His privates were red and raw. Crazed now, he lowered his stockings, sobbing as strips of skin peeled off his legs. The other men, determined to examine themselves, let go of me. Oh, there rose such a wailing in that tent, and threats of murder for me and Izzy, who had not been affected. With the greatest of difficulty the quarrelsome, failing men managed to turn the lifeboat round on the sledge, intending to head back to the ship and rest there until they recovered, butchering me and Izzy for food. However, they were so weakened by dysentery by this time that it did not take much for me to leap at Norton from behind, topple him, slit his throat, and retreat from the others with Izzy in the direction the Eskimo band of hunters had gone, dragging our things with us on a makeshift sled.”
There was a gap in Solomon’s journal, and when he next took up Ephraim’s tale it was to recount the story of his grandfather’s contest with the shaman in the camp of the hunters. The hunters were Netsiliks. One of their number, Kukiaut, had served on an American whaler for two years and was able to both translate for Ephraim and teach him Inuktituk.
The contest was over a sickly child, keening women dancing around him in the igloo, crying, “Hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya.”
The boy had fallen through a scalp of ice into freezing water. His cheeks were burning hot, he was delirious, but Ephraim guessed he was suffering from nothing worse than a bad case of the grippe, and offered to treat him with medicines from Izzy’s sea chest. But Inaksak, the wily old shaman, denounced the usurper, a bloodthirsty interloper, who would bring storms and death into their camp. The old man, mocking Ephraim, pranced about him, snarling, flaunting the amulets hanging from his belt: rows of seal and bear teeth, the head of a tern carved in soapstone, the penis of a walrus. The child, he proclaimed, was possessed by an evil spirit, but the mighty Inaksak, with the help of the ghost of Kaormik, would draw it out of his body, curing him.
“Gottenyu,” Izzy said, “have they got dybbuks even here?”
Crouching, covering himself with a caribou skin, Inaksak went into a trance. Then he advanced on the boy, rolling his eyes, groaning, flashing his snow knife.
Izzy, recognizing another professional, nudged Ephraim. “Careful, old son. He’s bloody good he is.”
Sucking at the feverish boy’s stomach, Inaksak reeled backwards as the evil spirit struck him. Staggering about the igloo—thrashing—thrusting with his snow knife—he wrestled with the spirit. Finally, blood trickling down his chin, he spit out a stone at Ephraim’s feet, pronouncing the boy freed, and fell down in a swoon. But, within hours, the boy was worse, and a rueful Inaksak declared that he was possessed by too many tupiliqs for him to vanquish, the evil spirits having come with the kublanas. He ordained that the hunters must now build a small igloo and abandon the boy and the intruders there to freeze to death, lest the blight overwhelm everybody in the camp.
Once the sentence was translated, an outraged Izzy had to be restrained from leaping at the shaman. He appealed to Ephraim. “Explain to the silly buggers that the old fart drew the blood from his mouth by lancing his gums with the stone.”
Instead Ephraim said that he and Izzy would be pleased to accompany the boy to the igloo, providing they were allowed a stone lamp and fuel and food for a week, and in that time Ephraim would cure the boy, proving that he could perform greater magic than Inaksak.
Ephraim told Solomon: “Worse luck. The day I brought the boy back, shaky on his feet, but obviously on the mend, our return was followed hard by a blizzard. Inaksak, that cunning old bastard, danced up and down, saying my magic was bad. I had angered Narssuk, god of the wind, rain and snow.”