The bit of biscuit and few sips of water had kept Pollard’s men – his nephew Owen Coffin, a freed black man named Barzillai Ray, and two seamen – alive for nine weeks.
They were still more than 1,600 miles from land when the last of the biscuits ran out at the same time as the last of the water was drunk. Crozier had figured that if the biscuits lasted his men another month, they would still be more than 800 miles from human habitation in winter even if they reached the mouth of Back’s River.
Pollard had no conveniently recently deceased men aboard his boat, so they drew straws. Pollard’s young nephew Owen Coffin drew the short straw. Then they drew straws again to see who would do the deed. Charles Ramsdell drew the short straw this time.
The boy wished the other men a tremulous good-bye (Crozier always remembered his scrotum-tightening sense of horror the first time he heard this part of the story while on watch with an older man high in the mizzen of a warship far off Argentina, the old seaman terrifying Lieutenant Crozier by saying good-bye in a trembling boy’s voice), and then young Coffin had laid his head on the gunwale and closed his eyes.
Captain Pollard, as he later testified in his own words, had given Ramsdell his pistol and turned his face away.
Ramsdell shot the boy in the back of the head.
The five others, including Captain Pollard, the boy’s uncle, first drank the blood while it was warm. Although salty, it was – unlike the endless sea around them – drinkable.
Then they sliced the boy’s flesh from his bones and ate it raw.
Then they broke open Owen Coffin’s bones and sucked out the marrow to the last shred.
The cabin boy’s corpse had sustained them for thirteen days, and just when they were considering drawing lots again, the black man – Barzillai Ray – died of thirst and exhaustion. Again the draining, drinking, slicing, cracking, and sucking of marrow sustained them until they were rescued by the whaler Dauphin on 23 February, 1821.
Francis Crozier never met Captain Pollard but he had followed his career. The unlucky American had retained his rank and gone to sea only once more – and once more was shipwrecked. After being rescued the second time, he was never again entrusted with command of a ship. The last Crozier heard, only a few months before Sir John’s expedition sailed three years earlier in 1845, Captain Pollard was living as a town watchman in Nantucket and was universally shunned by both townspeople and whalers there. It was said that Pollard had aged prematurely, spoke aloud to himself and his long-dead nephew, and hid biscuits and salt pork in the rafters of his home.
Crozier knew that his people would have to make a decision about eating their own dead within the next few weeks, if not the next few days.
The men were approaching the point where they were too few and those few too weak to man-haul boats, but the four-day rest on the ice floe from the 18th to the 22nd of July had not renewed their energy. Crozier, Des Voeux, and Couch – young Lieutenant Hodgson, while technically the second in command, was given no authority by the captain these days – rousted men and ordered them out hunting or repairing sledge runners or caulking and rerepairing the boats rather than let them lie in their frozen sleeping bags in their dripping tents all day – but essentially all they could do was sit on their connected floes for days since too many tiny leads, fissures, small areas of open water, and patches of thin and rotten ice surrounded them to allow any progress south or east or north.
Crozier refused to turn back west and northwest.
But the floes were not drifting in the direction they wanted to go – southeast toward the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River. They merely milled and circled upon themselves as the pack holding Erebus and Terror had for two long winters.
Finally, on the afternoon of Saturday, 22 July, their own floe began cracking up enough that Crozier ordered everyone into the boats.
For six days now they had floated, tethered together by lines, in patches and leads too short or small to row or sail in. Crozier had the one sextant left to them (he had left the heavier theodolite behind), and while others slept he took the best readings he could during the occasional short break in cloud cover. He reckoned their position to be about eighty-five miles northwest of the mouth of Back’s River.
Expecting to see a narrow isthmus ahead of them any day now – the presumed peninsula connecting the bulb of King William Land to the previously mapped Adelaide Peninsula – Crozier had awakened in the boat at sunrise on the morning of Wednesday the 26th of July to find the air colder, the sky blue and cloudless, and glimpses of land darkening the sky more than fifteen miles away to both the north and south.
Calling the five boats together later, Crozier stood in the bow of his lead whaleboat and shouted, “Men, King William Land is King William Island. I’m certain now that there’s sea ahead all the way east and south to Back’s River, but I’ll bet my last quid that there’s no land connecting the cape you see far to the southwest there and the one you see far to the northeast. We’re in a strait. And since we have to be north of the Adelaide Peninsula, we’ve completed the goal of the Sir John Franklin Expedition. This is the North-West Passage. By God, you’ve done it.”
There was a weak cheer followed by some coughing.
If the boats and floes had been drifting south, weeks of man-hauling or sailing work might have been done for them. But the leads and areas of open water in which they floated continued to crack open only toward the north.
Life in the boats was as miserable as life on the floes in the tents had been. The men were crowded too close together. Even with boards on thwarts offering a second level for sleeping on those whaleboats and cutters with their sides built up by Mr. Honey (the disassembled sledges also served as a crossed-T deck amidships on the crowded cutters and pinnace), wet-wooled bodies were pressed against wet-wooled bodies both day and night. The men had to hang out over the gunwales to shit – an event that was becoming less and less necessary, even for the men with serious scurvy, as the food and water grew less – but while all the men had lost all vestiges of modesty, a sudden wave often soaked bare skin and lowered trousers, leading to curses, boils, and longer nights of shivering misery.
On the morning of Friday, 28 July, 1848, the lookout on Crozier’s boat – the smallest man on each boat was sent up the short raised mast with a spyglass – spied a maze of leads opening all the way to a point of land to the northwest, perhaps three miles away.
The able-bodied men in the five boats pulled – and when necessary, polled between narrowing ice ledges, the healthiest men at the bow hacking away with pickaxes and fending off with pikes – for eighteen hours.
They landed on a rocky shingle, in a darkness broken only by short periods of moonlight when the returning clouds parted, a little after eleven o’clock that night.
The men were far too exhausted to dismount the sledges and lift the cutters and pinnaces onto them. They were too tired to unpack their soaked Holland tents and sleeping bags.
They fell onto the rough stones where they had ceased their dragging of heavy boats across the shore ice and rocks made slippery by high tide. They slept in clumps, kept alive only by their crewmates’ failing body warmth.
Crozier did not even assign a watch. If the thing wanted them tonight, it could have them. But before he slept, he spent an hour trying to get a good sighting with his sextant and to work it out with the navigation tables and maps he still carried with him.
As best he could reckon, they had been on the ice for twenty-five days and man-hauled and drifted and rowed a total of forty-six miles to the east-southeast. They were back on King William Land somewhere north of the bulk of the Adelaide Peninsula and now even farther from the mouth of Back’s River than they had been two days earlier – about thirty-five miles northwest of the inlet across the unnamed strait they’d been unable to cross. If they even crossed this strait, they would be more than sixty miles up the inlet from the mouth of the river, a total of more than nine hundred miles from Great Slave Lake and their salvation.