Certain that the thing had circled behind him in the confusion, perhaps crashing up through the impenetrable ice, he swung to confront it with only his one mittened fist free.
The entire iceberg was steaming and popping from the heat. Huge chunks and heavy overhangs were breaking off and crashing down to the ice, hissing like snakes as they fell into the cauldron of flame that had been the tent maze. The sight held Crozier in motionless rapture for a minute – the berg’s countless facets reflecting the flames made him think of a hundred-storey fairy-tale castle tower ablaze with light. He knew at that instant that as long as he lived he would never again see anything like this.
“Francis,” lisped Captain James Fitzjames. “We have to go.”
The green room’s walls were falling away but there were only more flames on the ice beyond. The rapidly advancing fissures and tendrils and fingers of fire had spread to the final two compartments.
Shielding his face with his free hand, Crozier charged forward through the flames, herding the last of the fleeing revelers on ahead of him.
Out through the burning purple room staggered the survivors as Crozier led them into the blazing blue room. The wind from the northwest was howling now, joining with screams and roars and hisses that might have been only in Francis Crozier’s head for all he knew at that moment, and the flames were blowing across the blue compartment’s wide opening, creating a barrier of fire.
A cluster of about a dozen men, some still wearing shreds of their costume finery, had slid to a stop before those flames.
“MOVE!” roared Crozier, bellowing in his most commanding typhoon voice. A lookout in the crosstrees at the top of a mainmast two hundred feet above the deck could have heard the command clearly in an eighty-knot wind with forty-foot waves crashing around them. And he would have obeyed. These men also obeyed, jumping, screaming, and running through the flames with Crozier right behind them, still carrying Chambers along on his right shoulder and tugging Fitzjames along with his left hand.
Once outside, his slops steaming, Crozier continued running, catching and passing some of the dozens of men who were spreading out in every direction in the night. The captain did not immediately see the white creature among the men, but everything was very confused out here – even with the flames throwing light and shadows five hundred feet in every direction – and then he was busy shouting for his officers and trying to find an ice boulder on which to lay the still-unconscious George Chambers.
Suddenly there came the pop-pop-pop of musket fire.
Incredibly, unbelievably, obscenely, a line of four Marines just outside the circle of light from the flames had taken their knees on the ice and were firing into the clumps and mobs of running men. Here and there a figure – still sadly and absurdly in costume – fell to the ice.
Releasing Fitzjames, Crozier ran forward, stepping into the line of volley fire and waving his arms. Musket balls whizzed past his ears.
“CEASE FIRE! GOD-DAMN YOUR EYES, SERGEANT TOZER, I’LL BREAK YOU TO A PRIVATE FOR THIS AND HAVE YOU HANGED IF YOU DON’T CEASE THAT FUCKING FIRE IMMEDIATELY!”
The firing popped and stopped.
The Marines snapped to a standing salute, Sergeant Tozer shouting that the white thing was out there among the men. They’d seen it backlit by the flames. It was carrying a man in its jaws.
Crozier ignored him. Shouting and shoving both Terrors and Erebuses into clumps around him on the ice, sending obviously mauled or burned men back to Fitzjames’s nearby ship, the captain was hunting for his officers – or Erebus officers – or anyone he could give an order to and have it relayed to the clusters of terrified men still running out through seracs and across pressure ridges into the howling arctic darkness.
If those men didn’t come back, they’d freeze to death out there. Or the thing would find them. Crozier decided that no one was going the mile back to Terror until they had warmed up on the lower deck of Erebus.
But first Crozier had to get his men calmed, organized, and busy pulling the wounded and the bodies of the dead from what was left of the burning Carnivale compartments.
In the first moments he found only the Erebus mate Couch and Second Lieutenant Hodgson, but then Lieutenant Little came up through the smoke and steam – the top few inches of ice were melting in an irregular radius around the flames and sending a thick fog out across the sea ice and into the serac forest – saluted clumsily, his right arm was burned, and reported for duty.
With Little at his side, Crozier found it easier to gain control of the men, get them back toward Erebus, and start taking roll. He ordered the Marines to reload and set them in a defensive skirmish line between the accumulating mass of staggering men near Erebus’s ice ramp and the still roaring inferno.
“My God,” said Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir, who had just come out of Erebus and was standing nearby, tugging off his slops and greatcoat. “It’s actually warm out here with the flames.”
“So it is,” said Crozier, feeling the sweat on his face and body. The fire had brought the temperature up a hundred degrees or more. He wondered idly if the ice would melt and they’d all drown. To Goodsir he barked, “Go over there to Lieutenant Hodgson and tell him to begin to assess the numbers of dead and wounded and to get them to you. Find the other surgeons and get Erebus’s sick bay fitted out in Sir John’s Great Room – set it up as they trained you surgeons to do for a combat engagement at sea. I don’t want the dead laid out on the ice – that thing is still out here somewhere – so tell your seamen to carry them to the forepeak on the lower deck. I’ll check in on you in forty minutes – have a complete butcher’s bill ready for me.”
“Aye, Captain,” said Goodsir. Grabbing up his outer clothes, the surgeon rushed toward Lieutenant Hodgson and the ice ramp to Erebus.
The canvas and rigging and ice-set masts and costumes and tables and casks and other furniture in the inferno that had been the seven coloured compartments continued to burn all through that night and deep into the darkness of the next morning.
26 GOODSIR
From the private diary of Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir:
Tuesday, 4 January, 1848 -
I am the only one left.
Of the Expedition’s Surgeons, I am the only one left. All agree that we were incredibly Lucky to have lost only Five in Death to the Grand Venetian Carnivale’s Horror and Conflagration, but the fact that Three of those Five were my Fellow Surgeons is, at the very least, Extraordinary.
The two Chief Surgeons, Drs. Peddie and Stanley, died of Burns. My Assistant Surgeon counterpart on HMS Terror, Dr. McDonald, survived the flames and Raging Beast only to be Struck Down by a Marine’s Musket Ball upon fleeing the burning tents.
Both of the other two Fatal Casualties were also Officers. First Lieutenant James Walter Fairholme of Erebus had his chest crushed in the Ebony Room, presumably by the creature there. Although Lt. Fairholme’s Body was found Burned in the ice-melted wreckage of that Loathsome Tent Maze, my postmortem examination showed that he had Died Instantly when his collapsing Rib Cage had pulverized his Heart.
The final fatality of the New Year’s Eve Fire and Mayhem was Terror’s First Mate Frederick John Hornby, who had been Eviscerated in that Canvas Enclosure in what the men had called the White Room. The sad irony of Mr. Hornby’s death was that the gentleman had been on Watch Duty aboard Terror through most of the evening and had been relieved by Lieutenant Irving not an hour before the Violence broke out.