Once, while he was still living with Lucy, Moses took her to Westminster Abbey to show her the memorial to the foolish but intrepid Franklin, the epitaph composed by the explorer’s nephew, Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
An afternoon in Sir Hyman Kaplansky’s library had been sufficient for Moses to determine that luxuries of a sort were not unknown on the Erebus and the Terror. Each of Franklin’s ships had a hand organ, capable of playing fifty tunes, ten of them psalms or hymns. There were school supplies for instructing illiterate sailors, mahogany desks for the officers. The Erebus boasted a library of 1,700 volumes and the Terror 1,200, including bound copies of Punch.
For the voyage through the Northwest Passage the officers packed all the finery appropriate for a ball. But, unlike the natives, they had no animal skins that could be worn in layers, providing ventilation to prevent sweat from freezing on a man’s back. Putting in at Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, they did not bother to acquire any teams of sled-dogs. Neither did they take on board a translator or a hunter, though none of their company knew how to take a seal or a caribou. So, in their last extremity, Franklin’s men were driven to boiling each other’s flesh. And seemingly not one of them, save for Ephraim, survived their northern ordeal.
A framed copy of the notice that appeared in the Toronto Globe on April 4, 1850, hung over Moses’s bed.
SIR JOHN FRANKLIN’S EXPEDITION
Copies of the following advertisement have been forwarded by the admiralty to the authorities in Canada:
£20,000
REWARD WILL BE GIVEN BY
Her Majesty’s Government
To any Party or Parties, of any country, who shall render efficient assistance to the crews of DISCOVERY SHIPS
Under the Command of
SIR JOHN FRANKLIN
1.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall discover and effectually relieve the crews of Her
Majesty’s Ships Erebus and Terror, the sum of
£20,000
OR
2.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall discover and effectually relieve any of the Crews of Her
Majesty’s Ships Erebus and Terror, or shall convey such intelligence as shall lead to the relief of such crews or any of them, the sum of
£ 10,000
OR
3.—To any Party or Parties who, in the judgement of the Board of Admiralty, shall by virtue of his or their efforts first succeed in ascertaining their fate,
£ 10,000
W.A.B. HAMILTON
Secretary of the Admiralty.
Admiralty, March 7th, 1850.
Why, Moses wondered, returning to the riddle again and again, hadn’t Ephraim told his tale, claiming the ten-thousand-pound reward? Why did he deny intelligence of either the Erebus or Terror to McNair, pretending to be a runaway off an American whaler?
There was another problem.
Neither Ephraim Gursky nor Izzy Garber were listed in the Muster Books of the Erebus or Terror (available at Admiralty Records, Public Records Office). But they had been there Moses knew, oh yes Ephraim Gursky had been there, and Izzy Garber as well.
Two
Following his arrest, after his ill-fated bug-hunting expedition with the Sullivan sisters, it was Newgate for Ephraim; and in that dark and fetid hole—as he told Solomon some seventy years on, a raven perched on his shoulder, the two of them warming themselves under the shifting arch of the aurora on the shores of Great Slave Lake—he met the man who met the man who would lead him and now Solomon to this place. Ephraim shrunken now, but still frisky, saying: “He was an old Orkney boatman with a bad milky eye and a spongy grey beard and he stirred me as never before with his tales of his journey to the shores of the Polar Sea with Lieutenant John Franklin, as he then was.”
It began innocently enough, Ephraim explained, when he cursed the jailer who once again had served them rancid sausages. This roused what at first glance appeared to be a sack of bones flung into a corner of the communal cell in the felons’ yard, causing it to splutter and sort itself out, assuming the shape of a tall emaciated man, his lips chalky, his hair matted and his beard a filthy tangle. “Young man,” the boatman said, “you are looking at somebody who was once grateful for the putrid powdered marrow bones and horns of a deer that had already been picked over by the white wolves and the black ravens of the barren land.”
“Tell the lad what brought you here, Enoch. Why it’s bound to be a leap into the dark for you.”
“A Jezebel of a daughter bore false witness against me.”
“I thought it was poaching on the Tweed,” another voice called out.
“Poaching,” somebody else put in, “but not on the Tweed.”
“His son-in-law’s slit it was.”
Ignoring their lascivious laughter, the boatman sucked sausage into his all but toothless maw. “Why, when there was no tripe de roche to be had we boiled scraps of leather from our boots and praised the Almighty for providing it. And such was the cold that when we still had it our rum froze in its cask. Aye, and all that time we had to keep watch on the Canadian voyageurs, a thieving lot, and that Iroquois heathen, the treacherous Michel Teroahauté. But the worst of it was we did not know whether poor Mr. Back, lusting after that Indian harlot, had perished on his trek or would return to us with supplies.”
Seizing Ephraim by the elbow, turning his own face aside the better to fix him with his good unclouded eye, he told him how the white wolves bring down a deer. “Those ferocious predators,” he said, “assemble in great numbers where the deer are grazing. They creep silently toward the herd, and only when they have cut off their retreat across the plain do they begin to race and howl, panicking their prey, tricking them into fleeing in the only possible direction—toward the precipice. The herd, at full speed now, is easily driven over the cliff. Then the wolves, their jaws dripping saliva, descend to feast on the mangled corpses.”
The boatman’s eyes flickered upward and in an instant he was asleep, his mouth agape. Ephraim shook him awake. “Tell me more,” he said.
“Have you any tobacco?”
“No.”
“Gin?”
“No.”
“To hell with you then.”
The next morning the boatman’s only response to Ephraim’s questions was a bilious glare. He was intent on the lice in his beard, flicking them into the flame of a candle.
Out for exercise in the men’s courtyard Ephraim, ignoring his cellmates, strolled up and down, surveying the rough granite walls of the enclosure. He sighed at the sight of the revolving iron spikes near the summit, possibly fifty feet from the ground. It would be impossible, he calculated, for him to squirm between the chevaux de frise and the masonry. And even if he could manage it, the cunning bastards had implanted yet another barrier above. A row of sharp, inward-projecting teeth rising from the top of the slimy wall. Hopeless, he thought.