Several times during the day, the lead sledge — usually Crozier’s or Lieutenant Little’s — would lose the worn sledge track, and everyone would then have to stop for up to half an hour while some men unharnessed themselves, tied on a rope so as not to get lost in the howling snow, and walked left and right of the false route, seeking out the faint depressions of the actual track on a surface quickly being covered by inches of blowing snow.
To lose the route midway like this would cost not only time, it might well cost all of them their lives.
Some of the sledge teams hauling heavier loads this spring had done this nine miles of flat sea ice in under twelve hours, arriving at Sea Camp Two only hours after the sun had set. Crozier’s group arrived long after midnight and almost missed the camp completely. If Magnus Manson — whose keen hearing seemed as unusual as his size and low intelligence — had not heard the flapping of tents in the wind far to their port side, they would have marched past their shelter and food cache.
As it was, Sea Camp Two had been largely destroyed by the day’s incessant and rising winds. Five of the eight tents had been blown away into the darkness — even though they had been secured by deep ice screws — or simply torn to tatters. The exhausted and starving men managed to pitch two of the three tents they’d manhauled from Sea Camp One, and forty-six men who would have been comfortable but crowded in eight tents squeezed into five.
For the men taking turns on watch that night — sixteen of the forty-six — the wind, snow, and cold were a living hell. Crozier stood one of the 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. watches. He preferred being able to move since his one-man sleeping bag would not allow him to get warm enough to sleep anyway, even with men stacked like cordwood around him in the flapping tent.
The final day on the ice was the worst.
The wind had stopped shortly before the men roused themselves at
5:00 a.m., but as in evil compensation for the gift of the blue skies to come, the temperature dropped at least thirty degrees. Lieutenant Little took the measurements that morning: the temperature at 6:00 a.m. was –64 degrees.
It’s only eight miles, Crozier kept telling himself that day as he pulled in harness. He knew that the other men were thinking the same thing. Only eight miles today, a full mile less than yesterday’s terrible haul. With more men dropping from sickness or exhaustion, Crozier ordered the accompanying guards to stow their rifles, muskets, and shotguns on the sledges and to tie on to the harnesses as soon as the sun rose. Every man who could walk would pull.
Lacking guards, they trusted in the clarity of the day. The brown blur of King William Land was visible as soon as the sun rose — the wall of high bergs and jostled coastal ice along its rim distressingly more visible, distantly gleaming in the thin, cold sunlight like a barrier of broken glass — but the clear light ensured they would not lose the old sledge tracks and that the thing on the ice could not sneak up on them.
But the thing was out there. They could see it — a small dot loping along to the southwest of them, moving much faster than they could haul. Or run, should it come to that.
Several times during the day, Crozier or Little would unstrap from harness, retrieve their telescopes from the sledges or their Male Bags, and look across the miles of ice at the creature.
It was at least two miles away and moving on all fours. From this distance, it might be just another white arctic bear of the kind they had shot and killed in such plentitude in the last three years. Until, that is, the thing took to its hind legs, rose up above the surrounding ice blocks and minibergs, and sniffed the air as it stared in their direction.
It knows we’ve abandoned the ships, thought Crozier, staring through his brass telescope that had become scuffed and scarred from so many years” use at both poles. It knows where we’re going. It’s planning to get there first.
They pulled on through the day, stopping only at the mid-afternoon sunset to eat frozen chunks out of cold cans. Their rations of salt pork and stale biscuits had been used up. The ice walls separating King William Land from the pack ice glowed like a city with ten thousand burning gas lamps in the minutes before darkness spread across the sky like spilled ink.
They still had four miles to go. Eight men were on sledges now, three of the seamen unconscious.
They crossed the Great Ice Barrier separating the pack ice from land sometime after 1:00 a.m. The wind stayed low but the temperature continued to drop. During one pause to rerig ropes for the lifting of the sledges over a thirty-foot wall of ice, made not at all easier by the passage of sledges in weeks past since the movement of the ice had tumbled a thousand new ice blocks into their path from the towering bergs on either side, Lieutenant Little took another temperature reading. It was –82 degrees.
Crozier had been working and giving commands from within a deep trench of exhaustion for many hours. At sunset, when he’d last looked to the south at the distant creature loping ahead of them now — it was already crossing the sea ice barrier in easy leaps — he had made the mistake of taking his mittens and gloves off for a moment so as to write some position notes in his log. He had forgotten to don the gloves before lifting the telescope again and his fingertips and one palm had instantly frozen to the metal. In pulling his hands away quickly, he had ripped a layer of skin and some flesh off his right thumb and three fingers on that hand, and lifted a swath off his left palm.
Such wounds did not heal up here in the arctic, especially not after the early symptoms of scurvy had set in. Crozier had turned away from the others and vomited from the pain. The sickening burning in his ravaged fingers and left palm only grew worse through the long night of hauling, tugging, lifting, and pushing. His arm and shoulder muscles bruised and bled internally under the pressure of the harness straps.
For a while on the last barrier, around one thirty in the morning, with the stars and planets shimmering and shifting in the endless clear but murderously cold sky overhead, Crozier stupidly considered leaving all the sledges behind and making a dash for Terror Camp, still a full mile away across the frozen gravel and drifted snow. Other men could come back with them tomorrow and help fetch these impossibly heavy burdens the last mile or so.
Enough of Francis Crozier’s mind and command instincts remained for him to reject this thought at once. He could do just that, of course, abandon the sledges — the first party in weeks to do so — and ensure their survival by staggering across the ice to the safety of Terror Camp without their burdens, but he would lose all leadership forever in the eyes of his 104 surviving men and officers.
Even though the pain from his torn hands caused him to vomit frequently and silently onto the ice wall as they pulled and pushed the sledges over — a distant part of Crozier’s mind noticed that the vomitus was liquid and red in the lantern light — he continued giving orders and lending a hand as the thirty-eight men well enough to continue the struggle managed to get the sledges and themselves over the Barrier and onto the ice and runner-scraping gravel of the shoreline.
If he hadn’t been sure that the cold would rip the skin of his lips off, Crozier might have fallen to his knees in the dark and kissed the solid ground as they heard that new sound of gravel and stone protesting under the sledge runners for the final mile.