The morning of Friday, 31 December, 1847, dawned cold but still – although of course there was no real dawn. Terror’s morning watch under Mr. Irving registered the temperature as −73 degrees. There was no measurable wind. Clouds had moved in during the night and now concealed the sky from horizon to horizon. It was very dark.
Most of the men seemed eager to head off to Carnivale as soon as breakfast was finished – a faster meal on the new rations, consisting of a single ship’s biscuit with jam and a reduced scoop of Scotch barley mush with a dollop of sugar – but all ship’s duties had to be attended to and Crozier had agreed to liberty for general attendance at the gala only after the day’s work and supper were finished. Still, he’d agreed that those men without specific duties that day – holystoning the lower deck, the usual watches, deicing the rigging, deck shoveling, ship repair, cairn repair, tutoring – could go work on final preparations for the masque, and about a dozen men headed off into the darkness after breakfast, two Marines with muskets accompanying them.
By noon and the issuing of the further-diluted grog, the excitement of the remaining ship’s company was a palpable thing. Crozier released six more men who’d finished their day’s duties and sent Second Lieutenant Hodgson along with them.
That afternoon, while pacing the stern deck in the dark, Crozier could already see the bright glow of torches just beyond the largest iceberg rising between the two ships. There still was no wind or starlight.
By supper time, the remaining men were as fidgety as young children on Christmas Eve. They finished their meal in record time, although with the reduced rations – since this Friday was not a “flour day” with baking, they were eating little more than Poor John, some Goldner canned vegetables, and two fingers of Burton’s ale – and Crozier didn’t have the heart to hold them in the ship while the officers finished their more leisurely mess. Besides, the remaining officers on board were as eager as the seamen to go to Carnivale. Even the engineer, James Thompson, who rarely showed interest in anything outside the machinery in the hold and who had lost so much weight he resembled an ambulatory skeleton, was on the lower deck and dressed and ready to go.
So by 7:00 p.m., Captain Crozier found himself bundled in every layer he could add on, making the final inspection of the eight men left to watch the ship – First Mate Hornby had the duty but would be relieved before midnight by young Irving, who would return with three seamen so that Hornby and his watch could attend the gala – and then they were descending the ice ramp to the frozen sea and walking briskly through −80-degree air toward Erebus. The crowd of thirty-some men soon strung out into a long line in the dark, and Crozier found himself walking with Lieutenant Irving, Ice Master Blanky, and a few petty officers.
Blanky was moving slowly, using a well-padded crutch under his right arm since he’d lost the heel on his right foot and still hadn’t quite mastered walking on its wood-and-leather replacement, but seemed in a fine mood.
“Good evenin’ to you, Captain,” said the ice master. “Don’t let me slow you down, sir. My mates here – Fat Wilson and Kenley and Billy Gibson – will see me there.”
“You seem to be moving as fast as we are, Mr. Blanky,” said Crozier. As they passed the torches lit on every fifth cairn, he noticed that there still was no breath of wind; the flames flickered vertically. The path had been well trod out, the pressure ridge gaps shoveled and hacked out to provide an easy passage. The large iceberg still half a mile ahead of them seemed to be lit from within by all the torches burning on the other side of it and now resembled some phantasmagorical siege tower glowing in the night. Crozier recalled going to regional Irish fairs when he was a boy. The air tonight, while a good bit colder than an Irish summer night’s, was filled with a similar excitement. He glanced behind them to make sure that Private Hammond, Private Daly, and Sergeant Tozer were bringing up the rear with their weapons at port arms and their outer mittens off.
“Strange how excited the men are about this Carnivale, ain’t it, Captain?” said Mr. Blanky.
Crozier could only grunt at that. This afternoon he had drunk the last of his self-rationed whiskey. He dreaded the coming days and nights.
Blanky and his mates were moving so quickly – crutch or no – that Crozier let them get ahead. He touched Irving’s arm, and the gangly lieutenant dropped back from where he was walking with Lieutenant Little, surgeons Peddie and McDonald, the carpenter, Honey, and others.
“John,” Crozier said when they were out of earshot of the officers but still far enough ahead of the Marines so as not to be heard, “any news of Lady Silence?”
“No, Captain. I checked the forward locker myself less than an hour ago, but she’d already gone out her little back door.”
When Irving had reported to Crozier on their Esquimaux guest’s extracurricular excursions earlier in December, the captain’s first instinct had been to collapse the narrow ice tunnel, seal and reinforce the ship’s bows, and evict the wench onto the ice once and for all.
But he hadn’t done that. Instead, Crozier had ordered Lieutenant Irving to assign three crewmen to watch Lady Silence whenever that was feasible and for him to follow her out onto the ice again if possible. So far, they’d not seen her go out her back door again, although Irving had spent hours hiding in the ice jumble beyond the ship’s bow, waiting. It was as if the woman had seen the lieutenant during her witchly meeting with the creature on the ice, as if she had wanted him to see and hear her out there, and that had been enough. She appeared to be subsisting on ship’s rations these days and using the forward cable locker only for sleeping.
Crozier’s reason for not immediately evicting the native woman was simple: his men were beginning the slow process of starving to death, and they would not have adequate stores to get through the spring, much less the next year. If Lady Silence was getting fresh food from the ice in the middle of winter – trapping seals perhaps, walrus hopefully – it was a skill that Crozier knew his crews would have to learn in order to survive. There was not a serious hunter or ice fisherman among the hundred-some survivors.
Crozier had discounted Lieutenant Irving’s embarrassed, heavily self-critical account of seeing something that seemed like the creature on the ice making some sort of music with the woman and bringing food offerings to her. The captain simply would never believe that Silence had trained a huge white bear – if such the thing was – to hunt and bring her fish or seal or walrus like a proper English bird dog fetching pheasant for its master. As for the music… well, that was absurd.
But she had chosen this day to go missing again.
“Well,” said Crozier, his lungs aching from the cold air, even filtered as it was through his thick wool comforter, “when you return with the relief watch at eight bells, check her locker again, and if she’s not there… what in the name of Christ Almighty?”
They had passed through the last line of pressure ridges and come out onto the flat sea ice on the last quarter mile to Erebus. The scene that met Crozier’s eyes made his jaw sag under the wool scarf and high-pulled jacket collars.
The captain had assumed that the men would be having the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale on the flat sea ice immediately below Erebus, the way Hoppner and Parry had set their masque on the short stretch of ice between the frozen-in Hecla and Fury in 1824, but while Erebus sat bow up, dark and desolate-looking on its dirty pedestal of ice, all the light, torches, motion, and commotion came from an area a quarter of a mile away, immediately in front of the largest iceberg.