Whom would they send to save Erebus and Terror? Whom had they already sent?
Crozier knew that Sir John Ross would be champing at the bit to lead any rescue parties into the ice, but he also sees that Lady Jane Franklin will ignore the old man – she thinks him vulgar – and will choose his nephew, James Clark Ross, with whom Crozier had explored the seas around Antarctica.
The younger Ross had promised his young bride that he would never go on a sea exploration again, but Crozier sees that he could not refuse this request from Lady Franklin. Ross would choose to go with two ships. Crozier saw them sailing this coming summer of 1848. Crozier saw the two ships sailing north of Baffin Island, west through Lancaster Sound, where Sir John had sailed Terror and Erebus three years ago – he could almost make out the names on the bows of Ross’s ships – but Sir James would encounter the same relentless pack ice beyond Prince Regent Inlet, perhaps beyond Devon Island, that holds Crozier’s ships in thrall now. Next summer there will be no full thaw of the sounds and inlets Ice Masters Reid and Blanky had sailed them south through. Sir James Clark Ross will never get within three hundred miles of Terror and Erebus.
Crozier saw them turning back to England in the freezing early autumn of 1848.
He weeps as he moans and bites down hard on his leather strap. His bones are freezing. His flesh is on fire. Ants crawl everywhere on and under his skin.
His Second Sight sees there would be other ships sent, other rescue expeditions this year of our Lord 1848, some most likely launched at the same time or earlier than Ross’s search party. The Royal Navy was slow to act – a maritime sloth – but once in motion, Crozier knows, it tended to overdo everything it undertook. Wretched excess after interminable stalling was standard procedure for the Navy Francis Crozier has known for four decades.
In his aching mind, Crozier saw at least one other Naval expedition setting sail for Baffin Bay in search of the lost Franklins this coming summer and most probably even a third Naval squadron sent all the way around Cape Horn to rendezvous, theoretically, with the other search-party ships near the Bering Strait, searching for them in the western arctic, to which Erebus and Terror had never come within a thousand miles. Such ponderous operations would stretch into 1849 and beyond.
And this is only the beginning of the second week of 1848. Crozier doubts if his men will live to see the summer.
Would there be an overland party sent up from Canada to follow the Mackenzie River to the arctic coastline, then east to Wollaston Land and Victoria Land in search of their ships stranded somewhere along the elusive North-West Passage? Crozier is sure there will be. The chances of such an overland expedition finding them twenty-five miles out at sea to the northwest of King William Island are nil. Such a party would not even know that King William Island was an island.
Would the First Lord of the Admiralty announce in the House of Commons a reward for the rescue of Sir John and his men? Crozier thinks he will. But how much? A thousand pounds? Five thousand pounds? Ten thousand? Crozier closes tight his eyes and sees, as if on parchment hanging before him, the sum of twenty thousand pounds offered for anyone who “might render efficient assistance in saving the lives of Sir John Franklin and his squadron.”
Crozier laughs again, which brings on the vomiting again. He is shaking with cold and pain and the clear absurdity of the images in his head. All around him the ship groans as the ice crushes it. The captain can no longer tell the groaning of the ship from his own moans.
He sees an image of eight ships – six British, two American – clustered within a few miles of one another in mostly frozen anchorages that look to Crozier like Devon Island, near Beechey, or perhaps Cornwallis Island. It is obviously a late arctic-summer day, perhaps late August, mere days before the sudden freeze that may capture all of them. Crozier has the sense that this image is two or three years in the future of his terrible reality this moment in 1848. Why eight ships sent out for rescue would end up clumped together like this in one location rather than fanning out throughout thousands of square miles of the arctic to hunt for signs of Franklin’s passing makes no sense to Crozier whatsoever. It is the delusion of toxic madness.
The craft range in size from a small schooner and a yacht-sized craft far too flimsy for such serious ice work to 144-ton and 81-ton American ships strange to Crozier’s eye to an odd little 90-ton English pilot boat crudely fitted out for arctic sailing. There are also several proper British Naval vessels and steam cruisers. In his aching mind’s eye he can see the names of the ships – Advance and Rescue, these under the American flag, and Prince Albert for the former pilot boat, as well as the Lady Franklin at the head of the anchored British squadron. There are also two ships Crozier associates with old John Ross – the undersized schooner Felix and the totally inappropriate little yacht Mary. Finally there are two true Royal Navy vessels, Assistance and Intrepid.
As if viewing them through the eyes of a high-soaring arctic tern, Crozier can see that all eight of these ships are clustered within forty miles of one another – four of the smaller British craft at Griffith Island above the Barrow Strait, four of the remaining English ships at Assistance Bay on the south tip of Cornwallis, and the two American ships farther north, just around the eastern curve of Cornwallis Island, just across Wellington Channel from Sir John’s first winter anchorage at Beechey Island. None are within two hundred and fifty miles of the spot far to the southwest where Erebus and Terror lie trapped.
A minute later, a mist or cloud clears, and Crozier sees six of these vessels anchored within a quarter of a mile of one another just off the curve of a small island’s shoreline.
Crozier sees men running across frozen gravel under a vertical black cliff wall. The men are excited. He can almost hear their voices in the freezing air.
It is Beechey Island, he is sure. They have found the weathered wooden headboards and graves of Stoker John Torrington, Seaman John Hartnell, and Marine Private William Braine.
However far in the future this fever-dream discovery is, Crozier knows, it will do him and the other men of Erebus and Terror no good whatsoever. Sir John had left Beechey Island in a mindless hurry, sailing and steaming the first day the ice relented enough to allow the ships to leave their anchorage. After nine months frozen there, the Franklin Expedition had left not so much as a note saying which direction they were sailing.
Crozier had understood at the time that Sir John did not feel it necessary to inform the Admiralty that he was obeying their orders by sailing south. Sir John Franklin always obeyed orders. Sir John assumed that the Admiralty would trust that he had done so again. But after nine months on the island – and after building the proper cairn and even leaving a cairn of pebble-filled Goldner food cans behind as a sort of joke – the fact remained that the message cairn at Beechey Island was left empty contrary to Franklin’s orders.
The Admiralty and Discovery Service had outfitted the Franklin Expedition with two hundred airtight brass cylinders for the express purpose of leaving behind messages of their whereabouts and destination along the entire course of their search for the North-West Passage, and Sir John had used… one: the useless one sent to King William Land twenty-five miles to the southeast of their present position, cached a few days before Sir John was killed in 1847.