Later in the day an anxious Izzy Garber hurried to Newgate and arranged to meet with two of the turnkeys at the George. The chaplain of Newgate, the Reverend Brownlow Ford, was already in place, soused, lolling on the sofa with the hangman Thomas Cheshire. Old Cheese, recognizing Izzy, raised his glass to him, his eyes charged with rancour:
Ignoring him, Izzy fed the turnkeys ribald stories and stuffed their pockets with guineas. As a consequence, Ephraim was tossed a straw mattress that evening and discovered he now had a line of credit in the prison taproom. He promptly loosened the old boatman’s tongue with gin and tobacco for his pipe.
The Orkney boatman, his voice hoarse, complained to Ephraim about the ruinous addiction of the Cree to spirituous liquors, and how they had become debased by their undying thirst for the noxious beverage, cursed to live out their days without any of the consolations which the Christian religion never fails to afford. A vain, fickle, and indolent race, he said, given to seducing each other’s wives.
The boatman, given to fits of shivering, obviously feverish, would doze fitfully from time to time, coming abruptly awake to demand more gin and to resume his tale as if he had never let off. “I have seen reindeer too numerous to count, the herd extending as far as the horizon, and learned to eat its flesh raw.” The staple food for the voyage, he said, was pemmican, buffalo meat, dried and pounded with melted fat. But there were times, the boatman allowed, when fish and fowl were plentiful. River salmon, jack fish, the singular and beautiful gold eye, which could be caught in nets in the spring at Cumberland House. There was also ptarmigan, Canada grouse, mallard and wild swan.
Ephraim, who had never heard of such things, hungered for more details, but dared not interrupt the cantankerous boatman’s flow.
If the boatman disapproved of savages, he also pitied them, his unbridled contempt reserved for the Canadian voyageurs, a riotous lot, lazy and complaining, who thought nothing of wintering in the fur forts with Indian wives of twelve years of age, whom they often bartered for a season to one or another of their rude companions. “When the cold abates, which you—in your ignorance—might consider a mercy, and the sun prevails day and night on the barrens, then do the mosquitoes begin to swarm everywhere, flying into your ears and mouth, a hellish torment, and the only thing for it is to light a fire, dampen it, and fill your tent with stinging smoke. Without a doubt, it is the land God gave to Cain.”
“Then why did you undertake such an arduous voyage in the first place?”
“I had no way of knowing.”
“True.”
“For my sins, of all the men assembled in Mr. Geddes’s house on June 14, 1819, I was one of the four who agreed to join the expedition, tempted by the promise of adventure and a wage of forty pounds annually as well as free passage back to the Orkney Islands. I was most impressed with the Christian character of Mr. Franklin. He bore with him a translation of the Gospel of St. John in the Esquimaux lingo printed by the Moravian Society in London. He also carried with him gifts to conciliate any savages we might encounter. Looking-glasses, beads, nails, tea kettles and so forth.”
In that stifling cell that crawled with lice, cockroaches, and sewer rats, that stank of excrement and urine and reverberated with the hacking of men already taken with typhus, Ephraim dreamt of a cool white land where the summer sun never set and herds of reindeer extended as far as the horizon. He was jolted awake when one of the boatman’s tormentors crept close to him, pretending to be the Bellman on his eve of execution visit. Ephraim lunged at him, grabbing his hand. Then, even as the man cried out, Ephraim gave his hand an even sharper twist, seemingly determined on uprooting his arm from its socket. “Tell me the name of your companion in the far corner.”
“Larkin.”
“Well now, he was with me in the Steel and he can tell you about me.”
In the morning, after another discouraging stroll through the exercise yard, Ephraim wakened the old boatman with gin and filled his pipe with tobacco.
“I want the sodomites’ sausages when they come,” the old man said.
“And you shall have them. Now tell me more.”
“I would also find a straw mattress most beneficial.”
“Take mine.”
Coughing, clearing his faltering lungs of phlegm, the old man told him that they had espied their first icebergs some ninety miles off the coast of Labrador. A day later the brilliant coruscations of the aurora borealis appeared to them. “We did not encounter any difficulties until we quit York Factory in a small boat, bound for the interior. Then we couldn’t make progress on that damned Steel River by sail. The current was running too fast for using oars so we were bloody well bound to commence tracking.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then you are blessed. What I’m saying is that we had to drag the boat by a line to which we were harnessed like beasts of the field. This is not easy at the best of times, but these were the worst for anybody but a mountain goat, considering the steep declivity of the high banks and the soft slippery footing. Aye, we were fortunate indeed to advance at the rate of two miles an hour. Are you for the dance upon nothing?”
“I’m too young. And then?”
“And then the water in the Hill River was so low we were obliged to jump into it, though it was freezing, and this we did several times a day to lift the boat over our shoulders. And next came the sprouts, and we were leaping in and out of the boat all day, working in wet clothes in freezing temperatures. I take it you’re a Four by Two.”
“Yes.”
The old man began to chortle. “Gin. Tobacco. Steak-and-kidney pie. The turnkeys dancing attendance. I thought as much.”
“Did you now?”
He held out his tumbler for more gin.
“You’ve had enough.”
“I want more, lad.”
“Then tell me more.”
It was the long trek back from the interior that really exorcised the boatman; a time when they had to contend with fearful famine and cold, the thieving of rations by the Canadian voyageurs and the unspeakable treachery of Michel Teroahauté. “We ate the skin and bones of deer and the storms raged without and within. Don’t you see? Mr. Franklin had to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Separate them. Hood and Back. Sending Back on his long trek.”
“Why?”
“How can you be such an idiot?”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Hood had already got a savage with child at Fort Enterprise and now he lusted after the little Copper Indian harlot—after Green Stockings—who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. But Back, an even worse whoremonger, was also smitten. That brazen girl would bathe in cold streams, displaying her cunny to the officers on the bank, inflaming them. She lay with both of them in turn. They took her from behind, like a bitch in heat.”
“And how would you know that?”
“Why, if not for me those two midshipmen would have fought a duel. I consulted with Dr. Richardson and then I removed the charges from their pistols. Then it was that Mr. Franklin sent Back away for the winter.”
“You were spying on the girl.”
“I did no such thing. Mind, I did stumble on them fornicating in the bush once. Aye, and it was a disgusting sight. Not to you or your kind, perhaps, who have denied Christ. But you must understand that my Christian upbringing stood me no matter how far from civilization.”
“Though not necessarily when you came back to it.”