Goodsir had absentmindedly worn his spectacles when he’d come out from the surgical tent and now he removed them and unhurriedly wiped moisture from them, using the bloody end of his woolen waistcoat as a rag. A small man with a boy’s full lips and a receding chin only partially concealed under the hedge of curly beard that had grown down from his earlier unsuccessful side whiskers, Goodsir seemed completely at ease. He put his spectacles back on and looked at Hickey and the men behind him.
“Mr. Hickey,” he said softly, “as grateful as I am for your boundless generosity in offering to save my life, you need to know that you do not need me along to do what you are planning to do with regards to dissecting the bodies of your shipmates in order to provide yourself with a larder of meat.”
“I ain’t…,” began Hickey.
“Even an amateur can learn dissective anatomy quite quickly,” interrupted Goodsir, his voice strong enough to override the caulker’s mate’s. “When one of these other gentlemen you’re bringing along as your private food stock dies – or when you help him die – all you have to do is sharpen a ship’s knife to a scalpel’s edge and begin cutting.”
“We ain’t going to…,” shouted Hickey.
“But I do strongly recommend that you bring a saw,” overrode Goodsir. “One of Mr. Honey’s carpenter saws will do nicely. While you can slice off your shipmates’ calves and fingers and thighs and belly flesh with a knife, you shall almost certainly require a good saw to get the legs and arms off.”
“God-damn you!” screamed Hickey. He started forward with Manson but stopped when the mates and Marines raised their shotguns and muskets again.
Unperturbed, not even looking at Hickey, the surgeon pointed toward the huge form of Magnus Manson as if the man were an anatomist’s chart hanging on a wall. “It’s not so different than carving a Christmas goose when one gets right down to it.” He slashed vertical marks in the air toward Manson’s upper torso and a horizontal one just below his waist. “Saw the arms off at the shoulder joints, of course, but you shall have to saw through each man’s pelvic bones to cut off his legs.”
Hickey’s neck cords strained and his pale face grew red, but he did not speak again while Goodsir continued.
“I would use my smaller metacarpal saw to cut through the legs at the knees and, of course, the arms at the elbow, and then proceed with a good scalpel to slice away the choice parts – thighs, buttocks, biceps, triceps, deltoids, the meaty part behind the shins. Only then do you start the real butchering of the pectorals – chest muscles – and to get at any fat you gentlemen may have retained near your shoulder blades or along your sides and lower back. There shan’t be much fat there, of course, nor muscle, but I’m sure Mr. Hickey wants no parts of you to go to waste.”
One of the seamen in the back of the group behind Crozier dropped to his knees and began to dry retch into the gravel.
“I have an instrument called a tenaculum to crack the sternum and to remove the ribs,” Goodsir said softly, “but I’m afraid I can’t let you borrow it. A good ship’s hammer and chisel – there’s one in every boat kit, you’ve noticed – should serve that purpose almost as well.
“I do recommend you attend to rending the flesh first and set aside your friends’ heads, hands, feet, intestines – all of the contents of the soft abdominal sac – for later.
“I warn you – it’s more difficult than you think to crack open the long bones for their marrow. You’ll need some sort of scraping tool, rather like Mr. Honey’s wood-carving gouge. And do note that the marrow will be lumpy and red when it’s forced from the center of the bones… and mixed with bone chips and fragments, so not terribly healthy to eat raw. I recommend you put each other’s bone marrow into a pot for cooking straightaway and let yourselves simmer before trying to digest your friends.”
“Fuck you,” snarled Cornelius Hickey.
Dr. Goodsir nodded.
“Oh,” the surgeon added softly, “when you get around to eating one another’s brains, it will be simplicity itself. Simply saw off the lower jaw, throw it away with the lower teeth, and use any knife or spoon to gouge and hack your way up through the soft palate into the cranial vault. If you wish, you may invert the skull and sit around it, scooping out each other’s brains like so much Christmas pudding.”
For a minute there were no voices raised, only the wind and the groan, crack, and snapping of the ice.
“Is there anyone else who wants to leave tomorrow?” called Captain Crozier.
Reuben Male, Robert Sinclair, and Samuel Honey – Terror’s fo’c’sle captain, Erebus’s foretop captain, and Terror’s blacksmith, respectively – stepped forward.
“You’re going with Hickey and Hodgson?” asked Crozier. He did not allow himself to show the shock he felt.
“Nay, sir,” said Reuben Male, shaking his head. “We ain’t with them. But we want to try walking back to Terror.”
“No boat needed, sir,” said Sinclair. “We’re going to try hiking cross-country as it were. Straight across the island. Maybe we’ll find some foxes and such inland, away from the coast.”
“Navigation will be difficult,” said Crozier. “Compasses aren’t worth a damn here and I can’t give you one of my sextants.”
Male shook his head. “No worries, Captain. We’ll just use dead reckoning. Most of the time, if the fuckin’ wind is in our face – pardon my language, sir – then we’re headed the right way.”
“I was a seaman before I was a ’smith, sir,” said Samuel Honey. “We’re all sailors. If we can’t die at sea, at least this way perhaps we can die aboard our ship.”
“All right,” said Crozier, speaking to all the men still standing there and making sure that his voice would reach to the tents. “We’re going to assemble at six bells and divide up all the remaining ship’s biscuits, spirits, tobacco, and any other victuals we still have. Every man. Even those who had their surgeries last night and today will be brought to the dividing-up. Everyone will see what we have, and every man will get an equal share. From this point on, each man – except those being fed and cared for by Dr. Goodsir – will be in charge of his own rationing.”
Crozier looked coldly at Hickey, Hodgson, and their group. “You men will – under Mr. Des Voeux’s oversight – go ready your pinnace for your departure. You’ll leave at dawn tomorrow, and except for the divvying up of goods and food at six bells, I don’t want to see your faces before then.”
52 GOODSIR
For the two days after the amputations and Mr. Diggle’s death and the muster of the men and the hearing of Mr. Hickey’s plans and the pathetic dividing up of the food, the surgeon had no stomach for keeping his diary. He tossed the stained leather book into his traveling medical kit and left it there.
The Great Dividing Up, as Goodsir already thought of it, had been a sad and seemingly endless affair, extending into the shortening August arctic evening. It soon became obvious that – at least when it came to food – no one trusted anyone. Everyone seemed to harbour some bone-deep anxiety that someone else was hiding food, hoarding food, secreting away food, denying everyone else food. It had taken hours to unpack all boats, empty all stores, search all tents, go through Mr. Diggle’s and Mr. Wall’s stores, with representatives of each class of man on the ship – officers, warrant officers, petty officers, able seamen – sharing the search and distribution chores while the other men looked on with avid eyes.