Other men suffered the torments of Hell from sunburn. Everyone was blistered red on their hands and faces and necks, but some men who would tug off their shirts for even the shortest periods during the intolerable heat of the midday, when temperatures were above freezing, would that same evening watch their skins, bleached white after three years of darkness and enclosure, burn red and quickly turn to suppurating blisters.
Dr. Goodsir popped the blisters with his lancet and treated the open sores with a salve that smelled to Blanky like axle grease.
By the time the ninety-five survivors were trudging east along the southern coast of the cape in mid-June, almost every man was on the edge of breakdown. As long as some men could man-haul the terribly heavy sledges with boats atop them and the full-packed whaleboats without sledges, others suffering could ride briefly, recover slightly, and rejoin the man-hauling within hours or days. But when there were too many sick and injured to pull, Blanky knew, their escape march would be at an end.
As it was now, the men were always so thirsty that every stream or trickle of water was a reason to stop and throw themselves on all fours to lap at the water like dogs. If it hadn’t been for the sudden thaw, Blanky knew, they would have all died of thirst three weeks earlier. The spirit stoves were almost out of fuel. At first, melting snow in one’s mouth seemed to assuage the thirst, but it actually drained more energy from the body and made one thirstier. Each time they dragged the boats and themselves across a stream – and there were more streams and rivulets running liquid now – everyone would stop to fill water bottles that no longer needed to be carried next to the skin to keep them from freezing.
But while thirst would not kill them soon, Blanky saw that the men were failing in a hundred other ways. Starvation was taking its toll. Hunger kept the exhausted men from sleeping through the four hours of twilight – if they did not have watch duty – which Crozier allowed for their sleeping time.
Setting up and taking down the Holland tents, simple acts that had been performed in twenty minutes two months ago at Terror Camp, now took two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. Each day it took a little longer as fingers became more swollen and frostbitten and clumsy.
Few of the men’s minds, not even Blanky’s at times, were really clear. Crozier seemed the most alert of all of them most of the time, but sometimes when he thought that no one was looking, the captain’s face became a death mask of fatigue and stupor.
Sailors who had tied off complicated rigging and shroud knots in the roaring darkness fifty feet out on a pitching spar two hundred feet above the deck on a stormy night off the Strait of Magellan during a hurricane blow could no longer tie their shoes in the daylight. Because there was no wood within three hundred miles – other than Blanky’s leg and the boats and masts and sledges they’d hauled along with them and the remains of Erebus and Terror almost a hundred miles to their north – and because the ground was still hard-frozen an inch below the surface, the men had to gather heaps of stones at each stop to weigh down the edges of the tents and to anchor tent ropes against the inevitable nightly winds.
This chore also took forever. Men frequently fell asleep standing in the dimmed sunlight at midnight with a rock in each hand. Sometimes their mates did not even shake them awake.
So it came to pass that late in the afternoon of the eighteenth day of June, 1848, as the men were making their second haul of boats that day, when Blanky’s third leg snapped off just below his bleeding knee stump, he took it as a sign.
Dr. Goodsir had little work for him that afternoon, so Blanky had turned back to peg his way alongside the last boats on the second haul of the endless day, when the foot and peg had caught between two immovable rocks and snapped the peg off high. He took the high break and his unusual presence near the end of the march as a sign from the gods as well.
He found a nearby boulder, made himself as comfortable as he could, dug out his pipe, and tapped in the last bit of tobacco he had been saving for weeks.
When a few of the seamen stopped in their hauling to ask what he was doing, Blanky said, “Just going to sit a spell, I reckon. Give my stump a rest.”
When Sergeant Tozer, who was in charge of the Marine rear guard detail this sunny day stopped to ask tiredly what Blanky was doing allowing the procession to pass him by, Blanky said, “Never you mind, Soloman.” He had always enjoyed irritating the stupid sergeant by using his first name. “You just toddle off now with your remaining lobsterbacks and let me be.”
Half an hour later, when the last boats were hundreds of yards to the south of him, Captain Crozier had come back with Mr. Honey, the carpenter.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Mr. Blanky?” snapped Crozier.
“Just giving it a rest, Captain. I thought I might spend the night here.”
“Don’t be an ass,” said Crozier. He looked at the snapped-off peg leg and turned to the carpenter. “Can you fix this, Mr. Honey? Make a new one by tomorrow afternoon if Mr. Blanky rides in one of the boats until then?”
“Oh, aye, sir,” said Honey, squinting at the broken peg with an artisan’s scowl at the failure – or mistreatment – of one of his creations. “We ain’t got much spare wood left, but there’s one extra jolly boat rudder we brought along as a spare for the pinnaces that I can turn into a new leg as easy as you like.”
“D’you hear that, Blanky?” asked Crozier. “Now get off your ass and let Mr. Honey help you hobble to catch up to Mr. Hodgson’s last boat there. Quickly now. We’ll have you fixed up by tomorrow noon.”
Blanky smiled. “Can Mr. Honey fix this, Captain?” He tugged off the wooden cup of the leg and detached the clumsy leather-and-brass harness.
“Oh, Christ damn it,” said Crozier. He started to look more closely at the bleeding raw stump with the black flesh surrounding the white nub of bone but quickly pulled back his face from the smell.
“Aye, sir,” said Blanky. “I’m surprised Dr. Goodsir ain’t sniffed it out before this. I try to stay downwind of him when I’m helpin’ him out in the sick bay. The boys in my tent know what’s up, sir. There’s nothing to be done for it.”
“Nonsense,” said Crozier. “Goodsir will…” He stopped.
Blanky smiled. It was not a sarcastic or sad smile but an easy one, filled with some real humour. “Will what, Captain? Take my leg off at the hip? The black bits and red lines run all the way up to my ass and private parts, sir, with apologies for being so picturesque about it. And if he did operate, how many days would I be lyin’ in the boat like old Private Heather – God rest the poor bugger’s soul – being hauled along by men who are as tired as I am?”
Crozier said nothing.
“No,” continued Blanky, puffing contentedly on his pipe, “I think it’d be best if I rested here awhile on my own and just relaxed and thought some thoughts about this and that. My life has been a good one. I’d like to think about it some before the pain and stink get so bad I’m distracted.”
Crozier sighed, looked at his carpenter and then at his ice master, and sighed again. He took a water bottle from the pocket of his greatcoat. “Take this.”
“Thank you, sir. I will. With gratitude,” said Blanky.
Crozier felt in his other pockets. “I have no food with me. Mr. Honey?”
The carpenter came up with a moldy biscuit and a sliver of something more green than tan that might have been beef.
“No, thank you, John,” said Blanky. “I am truthfully not hungry. But, Captain, would you do me a huge favor?”
“What is that, Mr. Blanky?”
“My people are in Kent, sir. Near Ightham Mote north of Tonbridge Wells. Or at least my Betty and Michael and old mum were when I set sail, sir. I was wondering, Captain, I mean if you have luck on your side and have the time later…”