“Have we given up on the idea of sailing out?” Robert Sinclair was saying.
James Reid, Erebus’s Ice Master, answered. “We would have to sail almost three hundred miles north up the unnamed strait and sound that Sir John discovered, then through Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound, then get south through Baffin Bay before the ice closed on us again. We had the steam engine and armour plating to help us bash through the ice heading south. Even if the ice relents to levels it was two summers ago, we would have great difficulty traversing that distance just with sail. And with our weakened wooden hull.”
“The ice may be considerably less than in 1846,” said Sinclair.
“Angels may fly out my arse,” said Thomas Blanky.
Because of his missing leg, none of the officers at the table reprimanded the ice master. A few smiled.
“There might be another option… for sailing, I mean,” said Lieutenant Edward Little.
Eyes turned in his direction. Enough men had saved some rations of tobacco – stretched out by adding unspeakable things to it – that half a dozen were now smoking pipes around the table. The smoke haze made the gloom even thicker in the dim flicker of the whale-oil lamps.
“Lieutenant Gore last summer thought that he spied land to the south of King William Land,” continued Little. “If he did, that has to be the Adelaide Peninsula – known territory – which quite often has a channel of open water between the coast ice and the pack ice. If enough leads open to allow Terror to sail south – just a little over one hundred miles, perhaps, rather than the three hundred miles back through Lancaster Sound – we could follow open channels along the coast west until we reach the Bering Strait. Everything beyond here would be known territory.”
“The North-West Passage,” said Third Lieutenant John Irving. The words sounded like a mournful incantation.
“But would we have enough able-bodied men to crew the ship by late summer?” asked Dr. Goodsir, his voice very soft. “By May, the scurvy may have all of us in its grip. And what would we do for food during the weeks or months of our passage west?”
“Hunting might be good farther west,” said Marine Sergeant Tozer. “Musk oxen. Them big deer. Walruses. White foxes. Maybe we’d be eating like pashas before we got to Alaska.”
Crozier half-expected Ice Master Thomas Blanky to say, “And musk oxen might fly out my arse,” but the sometimes-giddy ice master seemed to be lost in his own reveries.
Lieutenant Little answered instead. “Sergeant, our problem is that even if the game were to miraculously return after two summers’ absence, none of us aboard seems able to hit anything with muskets… your men excluded, of course. We’d need more than your few surviving Marines to hunt. And it appears that none of us has any experience hunting anything much larger than birds. Will the shotguns bring down the game you’re talking about?”
“If you gets close enough,” Tozer said sullenly.
Crozier interrupted this line of discussion. “Dr. Goodsir made an excellent point earlier… if we wait until midsummer, or perhaps even until June to see if the pack ice breaks up, we may be too ill and hungry to crew the ship. We’d certainly be too low on provisions to start a sledge trip. And we have to assume three or four months of travel across the ice or up Fish River, so if we’re going to abandon the ships and take to the ice with the hopes of arriving at either Great Slave Lake or the east coast of Somerset Island or Boothia before winter sets in again, our departure obivously has to be before June. But how early?”
There was another thick bout of silence.
“I would suggest no later than the first of May,” Lieutenant Little said at last.
“Earlier, I would think,” said Dr. Goodsir, “unless we find sources of fresh meat soon and if the illness continues to spread as quickly as it currently is.”
“How much earlier?” asked Captain Fitzjames.
“No later than mid-April?” Goodsir said hesitantly.
The men looked at one another through the tobacco smoke and cold air. That was less than two months away.
“Perhaps,” said the surgeon, his voice sounding both firm and tentative to Crozier, “if conditions continue to worsen.”
“How could they get worse?” asked Second Lieutenant Hodgson.
The young man obviously had meant it as a joke to lessen the tension but was rewarded with baleful and angry stares.
Crozier did not want the council of war to end on that note. The officers, warrant officers, petty officers, and civilian at the table had looked at their choices and seen that they were as bleak as Crozier had known they would be, but he did not want his ships’ leaders’ morale to get any lower than it already was.
“By the way,” Crozier said in a conversational tone, “Captain Fitzjames has decided to conduct Divine Service next Sunday on Erebus – he’ll be giving a special sermon that I’m interested in hearing, although I have it on good authority that it will not be a reading from the Book of Leviathan – and I thought that since the ships’ companies will be assembled anyway, we should have full rations of grog and dinner that one day.”
The men smiled and bantered. None of them had expected to bring back good news to their specialized portions of the crews from this meeting.
Fitzjames raised one eyebrow very slightly. His “special sermon” and this Divine Service five days away, Crozier knew, were news to him, but Crozier thought it would probably do the thinning captain good to be preoccupied with something and to be the center of attention for a change. Fitzjames nodded ever so slightly.
“Very well then, gentlemen,” Crozier said a bit more formally. “This exchange of thoughts and information has been very helpful. Captain Fitzjames and I will consult and perhaps talk to several of you again, one to one, before we make up our minds on a course of action. I will let you Erebuses get back to your ship before our midday sunset. Godspeed, gentlemen. I shall see you all on Sunday.”
The men filed out. Fitzjames came around, leaned close, and whispered, “I may want to borrow that Book of Leviathan from you, Francis,” and followed his men forward to where they were struggling into their frozen slops.
Terror’s officers went back to their duties. Captain Crozier sat for a few minutes in his chair at the head of the table, thinking about what had been discussed. The fire for survival burned hotter than ever in his aching chest.
“Captain?”
Crozier looked up. It was the old steward from Erebus, Bridgens, who had filled in on the serving because of both captains’ stewards’ illnesses. The man had been helping Gibson clean up the pewter plates and teacups.
“Oh, you can go, Bridgens,” said Crozier. “Go on with the others. Gibson will attend to all this. We don’t want you walking back to Erebus on your own.”
“Yes, sir,” said the old subordinate officers’ steward. “But I wonder if I might have a word with you, Captain.”
Crozier nodded. He did not invite the steward to sit down. He’d never felt comfortable around this old man – far too old for Discovery Service. If Crozier had been the one to make the decision three years earlier, Bridgens never would have been included on the roster – certainly not listed with an age of “ 26” to fool the Navy – but Sir John had been amused by having a steward aboard even older than himself and that had been that.
“I couldn’t help but hear the discussion, Captain Crozier – the three options of staying with the ships and hoping for a thaw, heading south to Fish River, or crossing the ice to Boothia. If the captain doesn’t mind, I’d like to suggest a fourth option.”
The captain did mind. Even an egalitarian Irishman like Francis Crozier bridled a bit at having a subordinate officers’ steward give advice on life-and-death command problems. But he said, “Go ahead.”