The march had taken a toll on everyone, but Blanky was in constant agony: not from scurvy, which seemed to be affecting him less than most, but from the pain in the stump of the leg that the thing had taken. Walking on the ice and rock of the shore was so difficult for him that by midmorning of each day’s sixteen- or eighteen-hour march, his stump would be streaming blood down over the wooden cup and leather harness that held it in place. The blood soaked through his thick canvas trousers and ran down his wooden peg, leaving a trail of blood behind. It soaked upward through his long underwear, trousers, and shirt.
During the first weeks of the march, while it was still cold, it was a blessing that the blood had frozen. But now, with the tropical warmth of days above zero, some above freezing, Blanky was bleeding like a stuck pig.
The long slops and greatcoats also had been a blessing – they hid the worst evidence of Blanky’s bleeding from the captain and others – but by mid-June, it was too warm to wear the greatcoats while hauling, so tons of sweat-soaked slops and wool layers were piled in the boats they were hauling. The men often hauled in shirtsleeves through the warmest parts of the day, pulling on more layers as the afternoons cooled toward zero degrees. Blanky had joked with them when they asked him why he continued to wear his long coats. I’m cold-blooded, boys, he’d said with a laugh. My wooden leg brings the chill of the ground up into me. I don’t want you to see me shiver.
But eventually he had to take off the greatcoat. Because Blanky was working so hard hobbling just to keep up, and because the pain of his tortured stump caused him to sweat even when he was standing still, he could no longer stand the freeze-and-thaw, freeze-and-thaw of all his layers of clothes.
When the men saw the blood pouring, they said nothing. They had their own problems. Most of them were bleeding from scurvy.
Crozier and Little often would pull Blanky and James Reid aside, asking the two ice masters their professional opinion about the ice just beyond the berg barrier of the shoreline. Once they’d come around to the east again, along the southern coast of this cape that had bulged out miles to the west and south of Comfort Cove – probably adding twenty miles to their haul south – Reid was of the opinion that the ice between this part of King William Land and the mainland, whether King William Land was connected to the mainland or not, would be slower breaking up than the pack ice to the northwest, where conditions were more dynamic come the summer thaw.
Blanky was more optimistic. He pointed out that the bergs piled here along this southern coast were becoming smaller and smaller. Once a serious barrier separating the shore from the sea ice, this wall of bergs was no more a hindrance now than a cluster of low seracs. The reason, Blanky told Crozier, and Reid had agreed, was that this cape of King William Land was sheltering this stretch of sea and coast, or perhaps of gulf and coast, from the glacierlike river of ice that had poured down so relentlessly from the northwest onto Erebus and Terror and even upon the coast near Terror Camp. That endless press of ice, Blanky pointed out, had been flowing down from the North Pole itself. Things were more sheltered here south of the King William Land southwestern cape. Perhaps the ice would break up sooner here.
Reid had looked at him strangely when Blanky delivered that opinion. Blanky knew what the other ice master was thinking. Whether this is a gulf or a strait leading to Chantrey Inlet and the mouth of Back’s River, ice usually breaks up last in a confined space.
Reid would have been correct if he’d stated that opinion aloud to Captain Crozier – he hadn’t, obviously not wanting to contradict his friend and fellow ice master – but Blanky was still optimistic. In truth, Thomas Blanky had been optimistic in his heart and soul every day since that dark night of 5 December of the previous winter when he’d considered himself a dead man as the Thing on the Ice chased him from Terror and into the forest of seracs.
Twice the creature had tried to kill him. And twice all that Thomas Blanky had lost had been parts of one leg.
He hobbled on, bringing cheer and jokes and the occasional shred of extra tobacco or sliver of frozen beef to exhausted, drained men. His tent mates, he knew, valued his presence. He took his turn at watch in the ever-shorter nights and carried a shotgun while painfully stumping alongside the morning boat procession as a guard, although Thomas Blanky knew better than any living man that no mere shotgun would stop the Terror Beast when it finally came in close to claim its next victims.
The tortures of the Long March were increasing. Not only were men slowly dying of starvation and scurvy and exposure, but there had been two other incidences of the terrible poisoning death that had claimed Captain Fitzjames – John Cowie, the stoker who had survived the thing’s invasion of Erebus on 9 March, died screaming in cramps and pain and then silent paralysis on 10 June. On 12 June, Daniel Arthur, Erebus’s thirty-eight-year-old quartermaster, collapsed with abdominal pains and died from paralyzed lungs a mere eight hours later. Their bodies were not truly buried; the procession had paused only long enough to sew both bodies into the little remaining spare canvas and to pile rocks on them.
Richard Aylmore, the object of much speculation since Captain Fitzjames’s death, showed almost no signs of illness. The scuttlebutt was that while everyone else had been banned from eating warm meals from the canned goods and suffered the scurvy worse for it, Aylmore had been ordered to share portions of his tinned meals with Cowie and Arthur. Other than the obvious answer of active and deliberate poisoning, no one could figure why the Goldner tins would horribly kill three men but leave Aylmore untouched. But while everyone knew that Aylmore hated Captain Fitzjames and Captain Crozier, no one could see a reason for the gunroom steward to poison his mates.
Unless he wanted their shares of food after they were dead.
Henry Lloyd, Dr. Goodsir’s assistant in the sick bay, was one of the men dragged along in the boats these days – sick from scurvy that had him vomiting blood and his own loose teeth – so since Blanky was one of the few men other than Diggle and Wall who stayed with the boats after the morning haul, he tried to help the good doctor.
Oddly enough, now that it was getting tropically warm, there were more cases of frostbite. Sweating men who’d doffed their jackets and gloves would continue man-hauling into the chill of the endless evening – the sun hung in the south until midnight now – and be surprised to find that the air temperature had fallen to fifteen below during their exertions. Goodsir was constantly treating fingers and patches of skin turned white by frostbite or dead black from rot.
Sun blindness or screaming headaches caused by the sun’s glare afflicted half the men. Crozier and Goodsir would move up and down the ranks of man-hauling men during the morning, cajoling them to put on their goggles, but the men hated the wire-mesh monstrosities. Joe Andrews, captain of the hold for Erebus and an old friend of Tom Blanky’s, said that wearing the God-damned wire goggles was as difficult as trying to see through a pair of lady’s black silk drawers but much less fun.
The snow blindness and headaches were becoming serious problems on the march. Some of the men begged Dr. Goodsir for laudanum after the headaches struck, but the surgeon told them that he had none left. Blanky, who was often sent to fetch medicines from the doctor’s locked chest, knew that Goodsir was lying. There was a small vial of laudanum left there, unmarked. The ice master knew that the surgeon was keeping it for some terrible occasion – to ease Captain Crozier’s last hours? Or the surgeon’s own?