Crozier carefully stowed his sextant in his wooden case and set the case away in its oilskin waterproof bag, found a sodden blanket from the whaleboat, and threw it down on stones next to Des Voeux and three sleeping men. He was asleep within seconds.
He dreamt of Memo Moira shoving him forward toward an altar rail and of the waiting priest in dripping vestments.
In his sleep, as the men snored in the moonlight of this unknown shore, Crozier closed his eyes and extended his tongue to receive the Body of Christ.
50 BRIDGENS
John Bridgens had always – secretly – compared the different parts of his life to the various pieces of literature that had formed his life.
In his boyhood and student years, he had from time to time thought of himself as different characters from Boccaccio’s Decameron or from Chaucer’s ribald Canterbury Tales – and not all of his chosen characters were heroic by any means. (His attitude toward the world for some years was, kiss my arse.)
In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark – Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V – had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself. The young Bridgens had been a victim of such consciousness and, like Hamlet, had frequently considered that most essential of questions – to continue or not to continue? (Bridgens’s tutor at the time, an elegant don in exile from Oxford who was the first unabashed sodomite the young would-be scholar had ever encountered, had disdainfully taught him that the famous “to be, or not to be” soliloquy was not in any way a discussion of suicide, but Bridgens knew better. Thus doth conscience make cowards of us all had spoken directly to the boy-man soul of John Bridgens, miserable with the state of his existence and his unnatural desires, miserable when pretending to be something he was not, miserable when pretending and miserable when not pretending, and, most centrally, miserable that he could only think about ending his own life because the fear that thought itself might continue on the other side of this mortal veil, “perchance to dream,” kept him from acting even toward quick, decisive, cold-blooded self-murder.)
Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction – books and a sense of irony.
In his middle years, Bridgens most thought of himself as Odysseus. It was not the wandering the world alone that made the comparison apt for the would-be scholar turned secondary officers’ steward but rather Homer’s description of the world-weary traveler – the Greek word meaning “crafty” or “guileful” by which Odysseus’ contemporaries identified him (and by which some, such as Achilles, chose to insult him). Bridgens did not use his craft to manipulate others, or rarely did, but used it more like one of the round leather-and-wood or prouder metal shields behind which Homeric heroes sheltered while under violent attack by spear and lance.
He used his craft to become and to stay invisible.
Once, some years ago, during the five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle during which he had come to know Harry Peglar, Bridgens mentioned his Odysseus analogy – suggesting that all the men on such a trip were modern-day Ulysseses to some extent or another – to the natural philosopher aboard (the two played chess frequently in Mr. Darwin’s tiny cabin), and the young bird expert with the sad eyes and sharp mind had looked penetratingly at the steward and said, “But how is it that I doubt you have a Penelope waiting at home, Mr. Bridgens?”
The steward had been more circumspect after that. He had learned – as Odysseus had learned after a certain number of years of his wanderings – that his guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.
In these last days, John Bridgens felt that the literary character with whom he had most in common – in outlook, in feeling, in memory, in future, in sadness – was King Lear.
And it was time for the final act.
They had stayed two days at the mouth of the river that drained into the unnamed strait south of King William Land, now known to be King William Island. The river here, in late July, was running freely in places and allowed them to fill all their water casks, but no one had seen or caught a fish from it. No animals seemed interested in coming down to drink from it… not so much as a white arctic fox. The best one could say about this campsite was that the slight indentation of the river valley kept them out of the worst of the wind and afforded them some peace of mind during the lightning storms that raged every night.
Both mornings at this camp, the men – hopefully, prayerfully – laid their tents, sleeping bags, and whatever clothing they could spare out on rocks to dry in the sunlight. There came, of course, no more sunlight. Several times it drizzled. The only day with blue sky they had seen in the past month and a half had been their last day in the boats and after that day, most of the men had to see Dr. Goodsir for their sunburns.
Goodsir – as Bridgens knew well, being his assistant – had very few medicines left in the box he’d put together from the supplies of his three dead colleagues as well as his own. There were still some purgatives in the good doctor’s arsenal (mostly castor oil and tincture of jalap, made from morning-glory seeds) and some stimulants for the scurvy cases, camphor and Hartshorn being the last after the tincture of lobelia had been used so liberally in the first months of scurvy symptoms, some opium as a sedative, a bit of Mandragora and Dover’s Powders left to dull pain, and only Sulphate of Copper and Lead remaining to disinfect wounds or deal with sunburn turned to blisters. Obeying Dr. Goodsir’s orders, Bridgens had administered almost all of the Sulphate of Copper and Lead to the moaning men who had stripped their shirts off while rowing and added severe sunburn to their nightly misery.
But there was no sunlight now to dry the tents or clothes or bags. The men stayed wet and at night they moaned as they shook with cold and burned with fever.
Reconnaissance by their healthiest, fastest-walking shipmates had shown that while out of sight of land on boats they had passed a deeply indented bay less than fifteen miles to the northwest of this river where they had finally put in to shore. Most shocking of all, the scouts reported that the entire island curved back to the northeast only ten miles ahead of them to the east. If this was true, they were very close to the southeast corner of King William Island, their closest possible approach on this landmass to the Back River inlet.
Back River, their destination, lay southeast across the strait, but Captain Crozier had let the men know that he planned to continue man-hauling east on King William Island to the point where the coast of the island ceased its current southeastern slant. There, at this final point of land, they would set up camp again on the highest place possible and watch the strait. If the ice broke in the next two weeks, they would take to the boats. If it did not, they would try to haul them south across the ice toward the Adelaide Peninsula and, upon hitting land there, head due east the fifteen miles or fewer that Crozier estimated remained before they would reach the inlet leading south to Back’s River.