Thomas Honey died during the night after the Dividing Up. Goodsir had Thomas Hartnell inform the captain and then he helped sew the carpenter’s body into his sleeping bag. Two sailors carried it to a snowdrift about one hundred yards from the camp where Mr. Diggle’s body already lay in cold state. The troop had begun forgoing burials and burial services, not because of an edict from the captain or some vote, but simply through silent consensus.
Are we preserving the bodies in the snowdrift so they won’t spoil as future food? wondered the surgeon.
He could not answer his own question. All he knew was that while he was giving Hickey – and all the other assembled men (quite deliberately since he had spoken to Captain Crozier about the tactic before the muster assembly) – the anatomical details of carving up the human body to serve as sustenance, Harry D. S. Goodsir had been horrified to find himself salivating.
And he knew that he could not have been alone in that reaction to the thought of fresh meat… from whatever source.
Only a handful of men had turned out at dawn the next morning, Monday 14 August, to watch Hickey and his fifteen companions leave camp with their pinnace lashed onto its battered sledge. Goodsir had come back to see them off after making sure that Mr. Honey had been secretly buried in the drift.
Earlier, he had missed seeing the three walking men off. Mr. Male, Mr. Sinclair, and Samuel Honey – no relation to the recently deceased carpenter – had left before dawn on their proposed trek across the island to Terror Camp, carrying with them only their rucksacks, blanket sleeping bags, some ship’s biscuits, water, and one shotgun with cartridges. They had not so much as a single Holland tent for shelter and planned to build caves in the snow if serious winter weather reached them before they reached Terror Camp. Goodsir thought that they must have said their good-byes to friends the night before, since the three men were out of camp before the first grey light touched the southern horizon. Mr. Couch later told Dr. Goodsir that the party headed north, inland and directly away from the coast, and planned to turn toward the northwest on their second or third day.
In contrast, the surgeon was amazed by how heavily Hickey’s departing men had loaded their boat. Men all over camp, including Male, Sinclair, and Samuel Honey, had been abandoning useless items – hairbrushes, books, towels, writing desks, combs – bits of civilization they’d hauled for a hundred days and now refused to haul any farther, and, for some inexplicable reason, Hickey and his men had loaded many of these rejected pieces of junk into their pinnace along with tents, sleeping gear, and necessary food. One bag held 105 individually wrapped chunks of dark chocolate that was the shared accumulation of these sixteen men’s allotment of a secret store hauled all this way as a surprise by Mr. Diggle and Mr. Wall – six and a half pieces of chocolate per man.
Lieutenant Hodgson had shaken hands with Crozier, and a few of the other men had said clumsy farewells to old shipmates, but Hickey, Manson, Aylmore, and the most resentful of the group said nothing. Then Bosun’s Mate Johnson gave Hodgson the unloaded shotgun and a bag of cartridges and watched while the young lieutenant stowed them in the heavily loaded boat. With Manson in the lead and at least a dozen of the sixteen men lashed to the sledge and longboat by harnesses, they left the camp in silence broken only by the scrape of runners on gravel, then on snow, then on rock again, then again across ice and snow. Within twenty minutes they were out of sight over the slight rise to the west of Rescue Camp.
“Are you thinking about whether they’ll make it, Dr. Goodsir?” asked Mate Edward Couch, who had been standing next to the surgeon and observing his silence.
“No,” said Goodsir. He was so weary that he could only answer honestly. “I was thinking about Private Heather.”
“Private Heather?” said Couch. “Why, we left his body…” He stopped.
“Yes,” said Goodsir. “The Marine’s corpse is lying under a shred of canvas by the side of our sledge tracks this side of River Camp, not twelve days’ pull west of here – much less time than that at the rate Hickey’s large team is pulling the single pinnace.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” hissed Couch.
Goodsir nodded. “I just hope they do not find the subordinate officers’ steward’s body. I liked John Bridgens. He was a dignified man and deserves better than to be devoured by the likes of Cornelius Hickey.”
That afternoon, Goodsir was directed to come to a meeting near the four boats along the shore – the two whaleboats were inverted as always, the cutters still upright on their sledges but unloaded – out of the hearing of the men at their duties or drowsing in their tents. Captain Crozier was there, as were First Mate Des Voeux, First Mate Robert Thomas, Acting Mate Couch, Bosun’s Mate Johnson, Bosun John Lane, and Marine Corporal Pearson, who was too weak to stand and had to half recline against the splintered hull of an overturned whaleboat.
“Thank you for coming so promptly, Doctor,” said Crozier. “We’re here to discuss ways to guard against the return of Cornelius Hickey’s group and to look at our own options over the coming weeks.”
“Surely, Captain,” said the surgeon, “you don’t expect Hickey, Hodgson, and the others to come back here?”
Crozier held up his gloved hands and shrugged. Light snow whipped around and between the men. “He still might want David Leys. Or the corpses of Mr. Diggle and Mr. Honey. Or even you, Doctor.”
Goodsir shook his head and shared his thoughts about the bodies – starting with Private Heather – that lay along the return way to Terror Camp like frozen food caches.
“Aye,” said Charles Des Voeux, “we’ve thought of that. It’s probably the main reason that Hickey thought he could get back to Terror. But we’re still going to mount a round-the-clock watch here at Rescue Camp for a few days and send Bosun’s Mate Johnson here out with a man or two to follow Hickey’s group for three or four days – just to be sure.”
“As for our future here, Dr. Goodsir,” rasped Crozier, “what do you see?”
It was the surgeon’s turn to shrug. “Mr. Jopson, Mr. Helpman, and Engineer Thompson will not live more than a few days,” he said softly. “Of my other fifteen or so scurvy patients, I simply do not know. A few might survive… the scurvy, I mean. Especially if we find fresh meat for them. But of the eighteen men who may stay here at Rescue Camp with me – Thomas Hartnell has volunteered to stay on as my assistant, by the way – only three, perhaps four, will be capable of going out to hunt seals on the ice or foxes inland. And they not for long. I would presume that the rest of those who remain here will have died of starvation no later than fifteen September. Most of us sooner than that.”
He left unstated that some might survive awhile longer here by eating the bodies of the dead. He also did not mention that he, Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir, had decided that he would not turn cannibal to survive, nor help those who found need to. His dissection instructions at the previous day’s muster assembly were his last words on the subject. Yet he would also never cast judgement on the men here at Rescue Camp or on the expedition south who did end up eating human flesh to last a short while longer. If any man on the Franklin Expedition understood that the human body was a mere animal vessel for the soul – and only so much meat once that soul had departed – it was their surviving surgeon and anatomist, Dr. Harry Goodsir. Not extending his own life a few weeks or even months longer by partaking of such dead flesh was his own decision, for his own moral and philosophical reasons. He had never been an especially good Christian, but he preferred to die as one nonetheless.
“We may have an alternative,” Crozier said softly, almost as if reading Goodsir’s thoughts. “I’ve decided this morning that the Back’s River party can stay here at Rescue Camp another week – perhaps ten days, depending upon the weather – in hopes that the ice will break up and that we can all depart here on boats… even the dying.”