The view from Rescue Camp was depressing. The sky had been an unrelieved mass of low clouds for two weeks and Crozier hadn’t been able to use his sextant. The wind had begun blowing hard from the northwest again and the air was colder than it had been for two months. The strait to the south remained a solid mass of ice, but not the flat ice interrupted by occasional pressure ridges such as they’d crossed on the trek from Terror to Terror Camp so very, very, very long ago. The ice in this strait south of King William Island was a total jumble of full-sized and shattered icebergs, crisscrossing pressure ridges, the occasional year-round polynya showing black water ten feet below the ice level but leading nowhere, and countless razor-edged seracs and ice boulders. Crozier didn’t believe that any man in Rescue Camp — including the giant Manson — was up to man-hauling a single boat through that ice-forest and over those mountain ranges of ice.
The growls, explosions, crackings, blasts, and roars that now filled their days and nights were their only hope. The ice was agitated and torturing itself. Now and then, far out, it opened into tiny leads that sometimes lasted for hours. Then they closed with a thunderclap. Pressure ridges leapt to a height of thirty feet in a matter of seconds. Hours later, they collapsed just as quickly as new ridges thrust themselves up. Icebergs exploded from the pressure of the tightening ice around them.
It is only 13 August, Crozier told himself. The problem with that thinking, of course, was that instead of “only” 13 August, the season was now far enough along that it was time to be thinking, It is already 13 August. Winter was fast approaching. Erebus and Terror had been first frozen in place off King William Land in September 1846, and there had been no respite after that.
It is only 13 August, Crozier repeated to himself. Time enough, if only a small miracle was granted them, to sail and row across the strait — probably man-hauling some short ice portages — the seventy-five miles he estimated to the mouth of Back’s River, there to rerig the battered boats for travel upriver. With a bit more luck, the inlet itself beyond this visible ice jam would be free of ice — because of Back’s Great Fish River’s inevitable high summer flow northward and its warmer water — for as much as sixty miles of the way. After that, on the river itself, they would be racing the oncoming winter south each day while fighting their way upstream, but the voyage was still possible. In theory.
In theory.
This morning — a Sunday if the weary Crozier had not lost track — Goodsir was performing the last of the amputations with the help of his new assistant, Thomas Hartnell, and then Crozier planned to call the men together for a sort of Divine Service.
There he would announce that Goodsir would be staying with the crippled men and scurvy cases and he would bring into the open his plans to take a few of the healthiest men and at least two boats south within the coming week, whether the ice opened or not.
If Reuben Male, Hodgson, Sinclair, or the Hickey conspirators wanted to offer their alternate plans without challenging his authority, Crozier was ready not only to discuss them but to agree to them. The fewer men left at Rescue Camp the better, especially if it meant getting rid of the rotten apples.
The screaming started from the surgical tent as Dr. Goodsir began his operation on Mr. Diggle’s gangrenous left foot and ankle.
A pistol in each pocket, Crozier went to find Thomas Johnson to tell him to assemble the men.
Mr. Diggle, the most universally liked man on the expedition and the excellent cook Francis Crozier had known and worked with for years on expeditions to both poles, died of blood loss and complications immediately after the amputation of his foot and just minutes before muster was called.
Each time the survivors spent more than two days at a camp, the bosuns dragged a stick through the gravel and snow in some relatively open, flat spot to create the rough outline of the Erebus’s and Terror’s top and lower decks. This allowed the men to know where to stand during muster and gave them a sense of familiarity. During the first days at Terror Camp and beyond, the muster positions had been crowded to the point of confusion, with more than a hundred men from two ships crowding into the footprint of a single ship’s top deck, but now the attrition had reached the point where the gathering was appropriate for a single ship’s mustering.
In the silence after the roll was called and before Crozier’s brief reading of Scripture — and in the deeper silence in the aftermath of Mr. Diggle’s screams — the captain looked out at the clusters of ragged, bearded, pale, filthy, hollow-eyed men leaning forward toward him in a sort of tired-ape slump that was meant to be a brisk standing at attention.
Of the thirteen original officers on HMS Erebus, nine were dead: Sir John, Commander Fitzjames, Lt. Graham Gore, Lt. H. T. D. Le Vesconte, Lt. Fairholme, First Mate Sergeant, Second Master Collins, Ice Master Reid, and Chief Surgeon Stanley. The surviving officers consisted of the first and second mates, Des Voeux and Couch; the assistant surgeon, Goodsir (who now joined the muster ranks late, his posture even more slumped than the other men’s, his eyes downcast with exhaustion and defeat); and the purser, Charles Hamilton Osmer, who had survived a serious bout of pneumonia only to be prostrated in his tent now by scurvy.
It did not escape Captain Crozier’s attention that all of Erebus’s commissioned Navy officers were dead and that the survivors were mere mates or civilians granted the honorary title of officer for wardroom purposes.
Erebus’s three warrant officers — Engineer John Gregory, Bosun Thomas Terry, and Carpenter John Weekes — were all dead.
Erebus had left Greenland with twenty-one petty officers, and at today’s muster, fifteen of them were still alive, although some of them — such as Purser’s Steward William Fowler, who had never fully recovered from his burns at the Carnivale, were little more than mouths to be fed during the march.
A muster of Erebus’s able seamen on Christmas Day of 1845 would have heard nineteen sailors answering the call. Fifteen of them were still living.
Of seven Royal Marines who’d originally answered the muster call on Erebus, three had survived to this day in August of 1848 — Corporal Pearson and Privates Hopcraft and Healey — but all were too sick from scurvy even to stand guard or go hunting, much less haul boats. But this morning they stood leaning on their muskets among the other ragged, slumping forms.
Of the two ship’s boys on Erebus’s muster — both actually men of eighteen when the two ships had sailed — both David Young and George Chambers had survived, but Chambers had been so heavily concussed by the thing from the ice during the Carnivale that he had been little more than an idiot since that night of fire. Still, he was able to haul when instructed and to eat when told to and to keep breathing without prompting.
So, according to the muster just finished, thirty-nine of Erebus’s original complement of sixty-five souls were still alive as of 13 August 1848.