It had been only mildly ironic then that Harry Peglar had been illiterate until he was a twenty-five-year-old midshipman. Reading was now his secret pleasure, and he had already devoured more than half of the 1,000 volumes in Terror’s Great Cabin on this voyage. It had been a mere officers’ steward on the survey bark HMS Beagle who had transformed Peglar into a literate man, and it was the same steward who had made Harry Peglar ponder what it meant to be a man.
John Bridgens was that steward. He was now the oldest man on the expedition, by far. When they had sailed from England, the joke in both Erebus’s and Terror’s fo’c’sles had been that John Bridgens, lowly subordinate officers’ steward, was the same age as the elderly Sir John Franklin but twenty times as wise. Harry Peglar, for one, knew that this was true.
Old men below the rank of captain or admiral rarely were allowed on Discovery Service expeditions, so it was with some good humour that both crews learned that John Bridgens’s age on the official ship’s muster had been reversed – either by accident or by a purser with a sense of irony – and listed as “ 26.” There had been many jokes made to the grey-haired Bridgens about his youth and callowness and presumed sexual prowess. The quiet steward had smiled and said nothing.
It had been Harry Peglar who had sought out a younger steward Bridgens on the HMS Beagle during their five-year round-the-world scientific survey voyage under Captain FitzRoy from December of 1831 to October of 1836. Peglar had followed an officer he’d served under on HMS Prince Regent, a lieutenant named John Lort Stokes, from the first-rate 120-gun ship of the line to the lowly Beagle. The Beagle was only a Cherokee class 10-gun brig adapted as a survey bark – hardly the kind of ship that an ambitious topman like young Peglar would normally pick – but even then Harry had been interested in scientific survey work and exploration, and the voyage of the little Beagle under FitzRoy had been an education for him in more ways than one.
Steward Bridgens had been about eight years older then than Peglar was now – in his late forties – but already known as the wisest and most widely read warrant officer in the fleet. He was also known as a sodomite, a fact that hadn’t bothered twenty-five-year-old Peglar much at the time. There were two types of sodomites in the Royal Navy: those who sought their satisfaction only on shore and never brought their activities to sea, and those who continued their habits at sea, often by seducing the young boys almost always present on Royal Navy ships. Bridgens, everyone in the Beagle fo’c’sle and in the Navy knew, was the former – a man who liked men when ashore but who never bragged of it nor brought his inclinations to sea. And, unlike the caulker’s mate on Peglar’s current ship, Bridgens was no pederast. Most of his crewmates thought that a boy at sea was safer with subordinate officers’ steward John Bridgens than he would have been with his village vicar at home.
Besides that, Harry Peglar was living with Rose Murray when he sailed in 1831. Although never formally married – she was a Catholic and would not marry Harry unless he converted, which he could not bring himself to do – they were a happy couple when Peglar was ashore, although Rose’s own illiteracy and lack of curiosity about the world reflected the younger Peglar’s life and not the man he would later become. Perhaps they would have married if Rose could have had children, but she could not – a condition she referred to as “God’s punishment.” Rose died while Peglar was at sea on the long Beagle voyage. He had loved her, in his way.
But he had also loved John Bridgens.
Before the five-year mission of the survey ship HMS Beagle had ended, Bridgens – at first accepting his role of mentor with reluctance but finally bending under the young topsail midshipman’s eager insistence – had taught Harry to read and write not only in English but also in Greek and Latin and German. He had taught him philosophy and history and natural history. More than that, Bridgens had taught the intelligent young man to think.
It had been two years after that voyage that Peglar had looked up the older man in London – Bridgens had been on extended shore leave with most of the rest of the fleet in 1838 – and requested more tutoring. By then, Peglar was already captain of the foretop on the HMS Wanderer.
It was during those months of shorebound discussion and further tutoring that the close friendship between the two men had moved into something more resembling lovers’ interactions. The revelation that he was capable of doing such a thing astounded Peglar – dismaying him at first but then causing him to reconsider every aspect of his life, morals, faith, and sense of self. What he discovered confused him but, to his astonishment, did not change his basic sense of who Harry Peglar was. What was even more astounding to him was that he had been the one to instigate intimate physical contact – not the older man.
The intimate aspect of their friendship lasted only a few months and ended by mutual choice as much as by Peglar’s long absences at sea on Wanderer until 1844. Their friendship survived intact. Peglar began writing long philosophical letters to the former steward and would spell all words backward, the last letter of the last word in each sentence now first and capitalized. Mostly because the formerly illiterate foretop captain’s spelling was so atrocious, Bridgens suggested in one responding letter that “your childlike idea of Leonardo’s backward-writing encryption, Harry, is almost unbreakable.” Peglar now kept his journals in the same crude code.
Neither man had told the other that he was applying for Discovery Service duty on Sir John Franklin’s North-West Passage expedition. Both were astonished a few weeks before sailing time when they saw the other’s name on the official roster. Peglar, who had not been in communication with Bridgens for more than a year, traveled from the Woolwich barracks up to the steward’s North London rooms to ask if he should drop out of the expedition. Bridgens insisted that he should be the one to remove his name from the list. In the end, they agreed that neither of them should lose the opportunity for such adventure – certainly Bridgens’ last opportunity because of his advanced age (Erebus’s purser, Charles Hamilton Osmer, had been a longtime friend of Bridgens and had smoothed his enlistment with Sir John and the officers, even going so far as to hide the subordinate officers’ steward’s real age by being the one to write it as “ 26” on the official rolls). Neither Peglar nor Bridgens said it aloud, but both knew that the older man’s long-standing vow never to bring his sexual desires to sea would be honoured by both of them. That part of their history, they both knew, was closed.
As it turned out, Peglar had seen almost nothing of his old friend during the voyage, and in three and a half years, they rarely had a minute alone.
It was still dark, of course, when Peglar arrived at Erebus sometime around eleven on this Saturday morning two days before the end of January, but there was a glow in the south that promised to be, for the first time in more than eighty days, a predawn glow. The slight glow did not dispel the bite from the −65-degree temperatures, so he did not dawdle as the lanterns of the ship came into sight.
The view of Erebus’s truncated masts would have dismayed any topman, but it hurt Harry Peglar more than most since he had, with his Erebus captain of the foretop counterpart, Robert Sinclair, helped supervise the dismantling and storage of both ships’ upper masts for the endless winters. It was an ugly sight at any time and was made no prettier by Erebus’s bizarre stern-down, bow-up posture in the encroaching ice.