“Thank you, Captain,” says the young engineer between heaves of the shovel. Seaman Manson has just dropped off a second sack of coal and gone back for a third.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Thompson.” Crozier glances at Stoker Johnson. The man is four years younger than the captain but looks thirty years older. Every seam and wrinkle on his age-molded face is outlined in coal black and grime. Even his toothless gums are soot grey. Crozier doesn’t want to reprimand his engineer – and thus an officer, although civilian – in front of the stoker, but he says, “I presume we’ll dispense with using Marines as messengers, should there be another such instance in the future, which I very much doubt.”
Thompson nods, uses the shovel to clang shut the iron grate on the boiler, leans on the tool, and tells Johnson to go above to get him some coffee from Mr. Diggle. Crozier’s glad the stoker is gone but even happier that the grate is closed; the heat in here makes him slightly nauseated after the cold everywhere else.
The captain has to wonder at the fate of his engineer. Warrant Officer James Thompson, Engineer First Class, graduate of the Navy’s steam factory at Woolwich – the world’s best training grounds for the new breed of steam-propulsion engineers – is here stripped to his filthy undershirt, shoveling coal like a common stoker in an ice-locked ship that hasn’t moved an inch under its own power now for more than a year.
“Mr. Thompson,” says Crozier, “I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to talk to you today since you walked over to Erebus. Did you have a chance to confer with Mr. Gregory?”
John Gregory is the engineer aboard the flagship.
“I did, Captain. Mr. Gregory’s convinced that with the onset of real winter, they’ll never be able to get at the damaged driveshaft. Even if they were able to tunnel down through the ice to replace the last propeller with the one they’ve jury-rigged, with the replacement driveshaft bent as badly as it is, Erebus is going nowhere under steam.”
Crozier nods. Erebus bent its second driveshaft while the ship was throwing itself desperately on the ice more than a year ago. The flagship – heavier, with a more powerful engine – led the way through the pack ice that summer, opening leads for both ships. But the last ice they’d encountered before being frozen in for the last thirteen months was harder than the iron in the experimental propeller screw and driveshaft. Divers that summer – all of who suffered frostbite and came close to dying – had confirmed not only that the screw had been shattered but that the driveshaft itself was bent and broken.
“Coal?” says the captain.
“Erebus has enough for… perhaps… four months of heating in the ice, at only one hour of hot-water circulation through the lower deck per day, Captain. None at all for steaming next summer.”
If we get free next summer, thinks Crozier. After this last summer, when the ice never relented for a day, he’s a pessimist. Franklin had used up Erebus’s coal supply at a prodigious rate during those last weeks of freedom in the summer of 1846, sure that if he could smash through those last few miles of pack ice, the expedition would reach the open waters of the North-West Passage along the northern coast of Canada and they’d be drinking tea in China by late autumn.
“What about our coal use?” asks Crozier.
“Perhaps enough left for six months of heating,” says Thompson. “But only if we cut back from two hours a day to one. And I recommend we do that soon – no later than the first of November.”
That is less than two weeks away.
“And steaming?” says Crozier.
If the ice relents at all next summer, Crozier plans to cram all the surviving men from Erebus aboard Terror and make an all-out effort to retreat the way they’d come – up the unnamed strait between Boothia Peninsula and Prince of Wales Island, down which they rushed two summers ago, past Walker Point and Barrow Strait, out through Lancaster Sound like a cork from a bottle, then rushing south into Baffin Bay with all sail set and the last coal being burned, going like smoke and oakum, burning extra spars and furniture if need be to get the last bit of steam, anything to get them into open water off Greenland where whalers could find them.
But he’ll also need steam to fight his way north through the south-flowing ice to Lancaster Sound, even if a miracle occurs and they are released from the ice here. Crozier and James Ross once sailed Terror and Erebus out of the south polar ice, but they’d been traveling with the currents and bergs. Here in the damned arctic, the ships have to sail for weeks against the flow of ice coming down from the pole just to reach the straits where they can escape.
Thompson shrugs. The man looks exhausted. “If we cut off the heat on New Year’s Day and somehow survive until next summer, we might get… six days steaming without ice? Five?”
Crozier merely nods again. This is almost certainly a death sentence for his ship, but not necessarily for the men of both ships.
There is a sound out in the darkened corridor.
“Thank you, Mr. Thompson.” The captain lifts his lantern off an iron hook, leaves the glow of the boiler room, and heads forward in the slush and darkness.
Thomas Honey is waiting in the corridor, his candle lantern sputtering in the bad air. He is holding the iron pry bar in front of him like a musket, clutched in thick gloves, and hasn’t opened the bolted door of the Dead Room.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Honey,” Crozier says to his carpenter.
Without explanation, the captain throws back the bolts and enters the freezing-cold storage room.
Crozier can not resist lifting his lantern toward the aft bulkhead where the six men’s bodies have been stacked in their common canvas shroud.
The heap is writhing. Crozier expected that – expected to see the movement of rats under the tarp – but he realizes that he’s looking at a solid mass of rats above the shroud-canvas as well. There is a solid cube of rats, extending more than four feet above the deck, as hundreds of them jostle for position to get at the frozen dead men. The squealing is very loud in here. More rats are underfoot, scuttling between his and the carpenter’s legs. Rushing to the banquet, thinks Crozier. And showing no fear of the lantern light.
Crozier turns the lantern back to the hull, walks up the slight incline caused by the ship’s cant to port and begins pacing along the curved, tilted wall.
There.
He holds the lantern closer.
“Well, I’ll be God-damned to hell and hanged for a heathen,” says Honey. “Pardon me, Captain, but I didn’t think the ice would do this so soon.”
Crozier doesn’t answer. He crouches to investigate the bent and extended wood of the hull more closely.
Hull planks have been bent inward here, bulging almost a foot from the graceful curve elsewhere along the hull’s side. The innermost layers of wood have splintered and at least two planks are hanging free.
“Jesus God Christ Almighty,” says the carpenter, who has crouched next to the captain. “That ice is a fucking monster, begging the Captain’s pardon, sir.”
“Mr. Honey,” says Crozier, his breath adding crystals to the ice already on the planks and reflecting the lantern light, “could anything but the ice have done this damage?”
The carpenter barks a laugh but stops abruptly as he realizes his captain is not making a joke. Honey’s eyes widen, then squint. “Begging your pardon again, Captain, but if you mean… that’s impossible.”