Des Voeux and his men were sighted on the northern horizon, still headed due west and oblivious of Terror three miles south of them, on the morning of their twenty-first day on the ice. An Erebus lookout had spotted them, but the ship itself was gone by then – crushed and splintered and sunk. It was Des Voeux’s and his men’s good fortune that the lookout, Ice Master James Reid, had climbed the huge iceberg that had been part of the Grand Venetian Carnivale before dawn that day and spotted the men through his glass just at first light.
Reid, Lieutenant Le Vesconte, Surgeon Goodsir, and Harry Peglar led the party that went out to fetch the Des Voeux team, bringing them back past the crushed timbers, tumbled masts, and tangled rigging that was all that remained of the sunken ship. Five of the Des Voeux champion team were not able to walk the last mile to Terror but had to be sledged there by their mates. The six Erebuses among the superteam of sledgers, including Des Voeux, wept at the sight of their destroyed home as they were led past it.
So… the short way northeast to Boothia was no longer an option. After debriefing Des Voeux and the other shattered men, both Fitzjames and Crozier agreed that a few of the 105 survivors might make it to Boothia, but the vast majority were certain to perish on the ice under such conditions, even with the longer days, slightly rising temperatures, and added sunlight. The possibility of open leads would only add to the hazard.
The choices now were either stay on the ships or set up a camp on King William Land with the option of making a run south to Back’s River.
Crozier began the planning for the evacuation the next day.
Just before sunset and their dinner stop, the procession of sledges came across a hole in the ice. They stopped, the five sledges and harnessed men making a ring around the pit. The black circle far below them was the first open water the men had seen in twenty months.
“This weren’t here last week when we brung the pinnaces to Terror Camp, Captain,” said Seaman Thomas Tadman. “You can see how close them runner tracks come to it. We would’ve seen it, sure like. There was nothing here.”
Crozier nodded. This was no ordinary polynya – the Russian word for one of those rare holes in pack ice that remained open all year long. The ice was more than ten feet thick here – less thick than the congealed pack ice around Terror but still solid enough to erect a London building on – but there was no sign of pressure slabs or cracking around this hole. It was as if someone or something had taken a gigantic ice saw of the sort both ships packed and cut a perfectly round hole through the ice.
But the ships’ ice saws would not cut so cleanly through ten feet of ice.
“We could take our dinner here,” said Thomas Blanky. “Enjoy our victuals by the seaside, as it were.”
The men shook their heads. Crozier agreed – he wondered if the others felt the same unease he did about the uncannily perfect circle, deep pit, and black water. “We’ll keep moving for another hour or so,” he said. “Lieutenant Little, have your sledge take the lead, please.”
It was perhaps twenty minutes later, the sun had set with an almost tropical suddenness and stars were shaking and twitching in the cold sky, when Privates Hopcraft and Pilkington, who had been serving as rear guard, crunched up to Crozier where he was walking beside the rearmost sledge. Hopcraft whispered, “Captain, there’s something following us.”
Crozier pulled his brass telescope from the top-lashed box on the sled and stood stationary on the ice with the two men for a minute while the sledges rasped their way past them into the gathering gloom.
“There, sir,” said Pilkington, pointing with his good arm. “Maybe it come up out of that hole in the ice, Captain. Do you think it did? Bobby and I think it probably did. Maybe it was just down there in the black water under the ice waiting for us to pass and then come up for us. Or hoping for us to tarry there. Do you think, sir?”
Crozier did not answer. He could see it through the glass, just visible in the failing light. It looked white but only because it was briefly silhouetted against storm clouds building in the night-black sky to the northwest. As the thing passed seracs and ice boulders the sledge procession had grunted its way past only twenty minutes earlier, it was easier to get a sense of its enormous size. At the shoulder, even when it was moving on all fours as it was now, it was taller than Magnus Manson. It moved lithely for something so massive – the movement looked to be more foxlike than bear-heavy. As Crozier struggled to steady the glass in the rising wind, he saw the thing rise up and begin walking on two legs. It moved a little less rapidly that way, but still more quickly than men attached to 2,000-lb. sledges. It now towered over seracs whose tops Crozier could not have reached with his fully raised arm and extended telescope.
Then it was dark and he could no longer make it out against the background of pressure ridges and seracs. He led the Marines back to the sledge procession and set his glass into the storage box as the men ahead leaned steeply into their harnesses and grunted and panted and pulled.
“Stay close to the sledges but keep looking rearward and keep your weapons primed,” he said softly to Pilkington and Hopcraft. “No lanterns. You’ll need whatever vision you have in the dark.” The bulky shapes of the Marines nodded and moved rearward. Crozier noted that the guards ahead of the first sledge had lit their lanterns. He could no longer see the men, just the ice-crystal-haloed circles of light.
The captain called Thomas Blanky over. The man’s peg leg and wooden foot exempted him from man-hauling even though the foot had been thoughtfully studded with nails and cleats for the ice. The half-leg simply didn’t give Blanky the leverage and pulling power he needed. But the men knew that the ice master might soon figuratively, if not literally, pull his weight and more; knowledge of ice conditions would be crucial if they encountered leads and had to launch their boats from Terror Camp in the coming weeks or months.
Now Crozier used Blanky as a messenger. “Mr. Blanky, would you be so good as to go forward and pass the word to the men not hauling that we will not be stopping for supper? They should retrieve the cold beef and biscuits from the appropriate sledge boxes and pass them out to the Marines and men in harness along with the word that everyone should eat on the march and drink from the water bottles they carry under their outer clothing. And also please ask our guards to make sure that their weapons are ready. They might wish to remove their outer mittens.”
“Yes, Captain,” said Blanky and disappeared ahead into the gloom. Crozier could hear the crunch of his hobnailed wooden foot.
The captain knew that within ten minutes, every man on the march would understand that the thing on the ice was following them and closing the gap.
35 IRVING
Except for the fact that John Irving was sick and half-starving and his gums were bleeding and he feared that two of his side teeth were loose and he was so tired that he was afraid he would collapse in his tracks at any moment, this was one of the happiest days of his life.
All this day and the previous day, he and George Henry Hodgson, old friends from the gunnery training ship Excellent before this expedition, had been in charge of teams of men doing some hunting and honest-to-God exploring. For the first time in this accursed expedition’s three years of sitting around and freezing, Third Lieutenant John Irving was a true explorer.