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The Voyage of the Narwhal
Andrea Barrett


`A great, shivery, seductive read.’ ElleIntelligent, accessible literary fiction of the highest order. Superbly dramatic and beautifully readable.A terrific tale of high endeavour and polar peril, this is the story of a scientific expedition to the Arctic in 1855 and the women the explorers left behind.A brilliant portrait of Victorian society obsessed with mapping and classifying everything under the sun – including the icy Arctic – where theemancipation of women and the evolution of species are the next great revolutions just stirring into life.












The Voyage of the Narwhal

Andrea Barrett












For Carol Houck Smith




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#u4c7a3f59-a569-52cb-baf7-00200a660ce0)

Title Page (#u4b3b33b1-b46a-51ef-b96d-ea04f4a04e1a)

Prologue (#u44b47d63-e253-56af-a102-4662a9cc055c)

PART I (#uc42eccfc-034d-5584-96ad-610801bc7ffa)

1 HIS LISTS (#ueaa69076-f84f-51d3-a7e9-66af7daafe36)

2 PAST THE CAVE WHERE THE COLD ARISES (#u7343bc53-2a02-50d2-8f31-d4ff59c4c525)

3 A RIOT OF OBJECTS (#udf3809b4-434f-5317-a6f5-f9cde195b378)

4 A LITTLE DETOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

PART II (#litres_trial_promo)

5 THE ICE IN ITS GREAT ABUNDANCE (#litres_trial_promo)

6 WHO HEARS THE FISHES WHEN THEY CRY? (#litres_trial_promo)

7 THE GOBLINS KNOWN AS INNERSUIT (#litres_trial_promo)

PART III (#litres_trial_promo)

8 TOODLAMIK, SKIN AND BONES (#litres_trial_promo)

9 A BIG STONE SLIPPED FROM HIS GRASP (#litres_trial_promo)

10 SPECIMENS OF THE NATIVE TRIBES (#litres_trial_promo)

11 THE NIGHTMARE SKELETON (#litres_trial_promo)

Author's Note and Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Andrea Barrett (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Prologue (#ulink_819ceaab-709b-533a-a40f-3fb38a1fd39c)


I hate travelling and explorers…Amazonia, Tibet and Africa fill the bookshops in the form of travelogues, accounts of expeditions and collections of photographs, in all of which the desire to impress is so dominant as to make it impossible for the reader to assess the value of the evidence put before him. Instead of having his critical faculties stimulated, he asks for more such pabulum and swallows prodigious quantities of it. Nowadays, being an explorer is a trade, which consists not, as one might think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts after years of study, but in covering a great many miles and assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in color, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succession. For this audience, platitudes and commonplaces seem to have been miraculously transmuted into revelations by the sole fact that their author, instead of doing his plagiarizing at home, has supposedly sanctified it by covering some twenty thousand miles…Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories…So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable.

—CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS, Tristes Tropiques (1955)



PART I (#ulink_4cd2805f-9888-55c6-9fe4-e8ed2cca195f)




1 HIS LISTS (#ulink_9ffab3e3-7b30-5ea1-bd00-cda6e239e70d)


(MAY 1855)



I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There…the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendor. There…snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe…What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?

—MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein (1818)





He was standing on the wharf, peering down at the Delaware River while the sun beat on his shoulders. A mild breeze, the smells of tar and copper. A few yards away the Narwhal loomed, but he was looking instead at the partial reflection trapped between hull and pilings. The way the planks wavered, the railing bent, the boom appeared then disappeared; the way the image filled the surface without concealing the complicated life below. He saw, beneath the transparent shadow, what his father had taught him to see: the schools of minnows, the eels and algae, the mussels burrowing into the silt; the diatoms and desmids and insect larvae sweeping past hydrazoans and infant snails. The oyster, his father once said, is impregnated by the dew; the pregnant shells give birth to pearls conceived from the sky. If the dew is pure, the pearls are brilliant; if cloudy, the pearls are dull. Far above him, but mirrored as well, long strands of cloud moved one way and gliding gulls another.

In the water the Narwhal sat solid and dark among the surrounding fleet. Everyone headed somewhere, Erasmus thought. England, Africa, California; stony islands alive with seals; the coast of Florida. Yet no one, among all those travelers, who might offer him advice. He turned back to his work. Where was this mound of supplies to go? An untidy package yielded, beneath its waterproof wrappings, a dozen plum puddings that brought him near to tears. Each time he arranged part of the hold more of these parcels appeared: a crate of damson plums in syrup from an old woman in Conshohocken who’d read about their voyage in the newspaper and wanted to contribute her bit. A case of brandy from a Wilmington banker, volumes of Thackeray from a schoolmaster in Doylestown, heaps of hand-knitted socks. His hands bristled with lists, each only partly checked-off: never mind those puddings, he thought. Where were the last two hundred pounds of pemmican? How had half the meat biscuit been stowed with the candles and the lamp oil? And where were the last members of the crew? In his pocket he had another list, the final roster:




FREDERICK SCHUESSELE, Cook

THOMAS FORBES, Carpenter

Seamen:

ISAAC BOND, NILS JENSEN, ROBERT CAREY,

BARTON DESOUZA, IVAN HRUSKA,

FLETCHER LAMB, SEAN HAMILTON



Fifteen of them, all hands counted. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, and Mr. Francis, who together would have charge of the ship’s daily operations, were experienced whaling men. Dr. Boerhaave had a medical degree from Edinburgh; Schuessele had been cook for a New York packet line; Forbes was an Ohio farm boy who’d never been to sea, but who could fashion anything from a few odd scraps of wood. Of the seven unevenly trained seamen, Bond had reported for duty drunk, and Hruska and Hamilton were still missing.

Their companions, invisible in the hold, waited for directions—waited, Erasmus feared, for him to fail. He was forty years old and had a history of failure; he’d sailed, when hardly more than a boy, on a voyage so thwarted it became a national joke. Since then his life’s work had come to almost nothing. No wife, no children, no truly close friends; a sister in a difficult situation. What he had now was this pile of goods, and a second chance.

Still pondering the puddings, he heard laughter and looked up to see Zeke hanging from the rigging like a flag. His long arms were stretched above a thatch of golden hair; as he laughed his teeth were gleaming in his mouth; he was twenty-six and made Erasmus feel like a fossil. Everything about this moment was tied to Zeke. The hermaphrodite brig about to become their home had once been part of Zeke’s family’s packet line; with his father’s money, Zeke had ordered oak sheathing spiked to her sides as protection against the ice, iron plates wrapped around her bows, tarred felt layered between the double-planked decks. In charge of the expedition—and hence, Erasmus reminded himself, of him—Zeke had chosen Erasmus to gather the equipment and stores surrounding him now in such bewildering heaps.

Where was all this to go? Salt beef and pork and barrels of malt, knives and needles for barter with the Esquimaux, guns and ammunition, coal and wood, tents and cooking lamps and woolen clothing, buffalo skins, a library, enough wooden boards to house over the deck in an emergency. And what about the spirit thermometers, or the four chronometers, the microscope, and all the stores for his specimens: spirits of wine, loose gauze, prenumbered labels and glass jars, arsenical soap for preserving bird skins, camphor and pillboxes for preserving insects, dissecting scissors, watch glasses, pins, string, glass tubes and sealing wax, bungs and soaked bladders, brain hooks and blowpipes and egg drills, a sweeping net…too many things.

Erasmus stroked the wolf skins his youngest brother had sent from the Utah mountains. Just then he would have given anything for an hour’s conversation with Copernicus, who understood what it meant to leave a life. But Copernicus was gone, still, again, and the wolf skins were handsome, but where would they fit? The sledges, specially constructed after Zeke’s own design, had arrived two weeks late and wouldn’t fit into the space Erasmus had planned for them; and he couldn’t arrange the scientific equipment in any reasonable way. Every inch of the cabin was full, and they were not yet in it.

On the Narwhal Zeke slipped his feet from the stay, hung by one hand for a second, and then dropped lightly to the deck. Soon he joined Erasmus among the wharfs clutter, moving the theodolite and uncovering a crate of onions. “These look nice,” he said. “Do we have enough?”

While they went over the provision lists yet again, Mr. Tagliabeau walked up with the news that their cook had deserted. He’d last been seen two days earlier, Mr. Tagliabeau reported. In the company of a red-headed woman who’d been haunting the docks.

Zeke, his hands deep in onions, only laughed. “I saw that hussy,” he said. “What a flashing eye she had! But that it should be Schuessele who got her, with that monstrous beard of his…”

The wind tore one of Erasmus’s lists away and sent it spinning through the masts. “We’re leaving in three days!” he shouted. Later he’d remember this display with embarrassment. “Three days. Where are we going to find another cook?”

“There’s no need to get excited,” Zeke said. “The world is full of cooks. Mr. Tagliabeau, if you’d be so kind as to take a small recruiting tour among the taverns…”

“Wonderful,” Erasmus said. “Do find us some criminal, some drunken sot.”

They might have quarreled had not a group of young men dressed in Lincoln-green frock coats, white pantaloons, and straw hats trailing black ostrich feathers come dancing up the wharf. The United Toxophilites, Erasmus saw, making a surprise farewell to Zeke. The sight made him groan. Once he’d been part of this group of archers; once this had all seemed charming. Resurrecting the old sport of archery, flourishing the arrows retrieved from those first, magical trips to the Plains—as a boy, he’d participated in a meet that drew two thousand guests. But he’d lost his taste for such diversions after the Exploring Expedition, and he’d let his association with the Toxies lapse. Zeke, though, was part of the new young crowd that had taken over the club.

“Voorhees!” the Toxies cried. All around them, crews from other ships stared. “Voorhees! Voorhees!”

They gave Zeke three great cheers, hauled him down the length of the wharf, and formed a circle around him. Erasmus received courteous nods but no recognition. He listened to the mocking, high-spirited speeches, which likened Zeke to a great Indian chief setting off on a buffalo hunt. One youngster with a shock of red hair presented Zeke with a chalice; an elflike boy offered a patent-leather belt from which dangled a grease box and a tassel. Zeke accepted his gifts with a smile and a handshake, thanking each man by name and showing the poise that had made Erasmus’s sister call him a natural leader.

Yet what had Zeke done? So very little, Erasmus thought as he eyed the grease box. A few years of sailing from Philadelphia to Dublin and Hull on the ships of his father’s packet line, investigating currents and ocean creatures, although often, as he’d admitted to Erasmus, he’d been too seasick to work. Other than that all his learning came from books. As a boy he’d insinuated his way into Erasmus’s family, through their fathers’ friendship and an interest in natural history. Now they were further bound by Lavinia. But that Erasmus should be standing in Zeke’s shadow, setting off for the arctic under the command of this untried youth—again he was amazed by his decision.

Zeke, as if he heard what Erasmus was thinking, broke through the circle of green-coated men, seized Erasmus’s arm, and drew him into the center. “I couldn’t do this without Erasmus Darwin Wells,” he cried. “Three cheers for our chief naturalist, my right hand!”

Erasmus blushed. Was this what he wanted? A kind of worship, mixed with disdain; as if Zeke wanted to emulate him, but without his flaws. But exactly this grudging caution had stranded him alone in midlife, and he pushed the thought aside. When the Toxies presented their green-and-gold pennant, he grasped the end marked with a merry archer and smiled at Zeke. Zeke made a speech of thanks; Erasmus made a shorter one, not mentioning that he’d known the club’s founders or that he’d learned to shoot a bow when some of these men were still children. As he spoke he saw Captain Tyler hanging over the Narwhal’s rail, gazing curiously at them. His face, Erasmus thought, was the size and color of a ham.

The Toxies departed, Zeke climbed back on the Narwhal, and Erasmus was once more alone. He folded the pennant and tucked it into the wolf skins. Then he reconsidered the stowing of the sledges: back to front in a line down the center of the hold? or piled in a tight tower near the bow? He worked quietly for an hour, pushing down his worries by the repeated checking of items against his lists. Mr. Tagliabeau interrupted him, returning to the wharf in the company of a fresh-faced, dark-haired, blue-eyed boy.

“Ned Kynd,” Mr. Tagliabeau said. “Twenty years of age.” Zeke hopped down to investigate. After making introductions all around, Mr. Tagliabeau added, “Ned would like to join our expedition.”

Zeke, hovering once more near the mound of supplies, looked Ned over. “You’ve had experience cooking?”

“In three places,” the boy said shyly. As he listed them, all in the rough area by the wharves, Erasmus noted his heavy Irish accent.

“And have you been to sea?” Zeke asked.

Ned blushed. “Just once, sir. When I made my crossing.”

“But the sea suits you?”

“My…circumstances then were not such that anyone could have enjoyed them. But I believe I would have, if I’d had work and meals and a place to sleep. I enjoyed being on deck very much. I like to watch the birds and fish.”

“You’d be cooking for fifteen men,” Erasmus said. “You’re capable of that?”

“I wouldn’t like to boast, but many a night I’ve cooked for three or four times that number. I was at a logging camp in the Adirondacks for some time, before I made my way to this city. Loggers are hungry men.”

Zeke laid a hand on Erasmus’s shoulder. “If he can feed loggers, he can surely feed us.”

“You’d be bunking in the forecastle,” Erasmus said. “With the seamen. They can be a bit rough.”

“Not rougher than loggers, I wouldn’t guess.”

“Done, then,” Zeke said. “And welcome. Gather your things and say your good-byes, we leave in three days.” Off he went, bounding down the wharf like an antelope.

And so it was that Ned, hastily engaged to fill Schuessele’s shoes, came to join the expedition. Later Erasmus would think many times how little might have steered Ned away. Mr. Tagliabeau might not have bumped into him beneath the chandler’s awning; the Toxies’ ostrich-feathered hats might have spooked him had he arrived but a few minutes earlier; Zeke might not have been there to interview him had he arrived but a little later. Any small coincidence might have done.





THAT NIGHT ERASMUS was sleepless again. In the Repository, his family’s little natural history museum, he rose and paced the floors and tried to understand what he’d been doing. For twelve years he’d been camped out here, his world contracted to display cabinets stuffed with dead animals, boxes of seeds and trays of fossils, the occasional stray beam of light shining through the windows like a message from another planet. Framed engravings of eminent naturalists leaned down from the bookshelves, watching benignly as he bent to work that wasn’t work, and went nowhere. Who could understand that life? Or how he’d decided, finally, to leave it?

Across the garden loomed the house he hadn’t slept in for more than a decade. Everything showed his father’s hand, from the carved ferns on the moldings to his own name. He was Erasmus Darwin for the British naturalist, grandfather to the young man who’d set off on the Beagle; his brothers were named after Copernicus, Linnaeus, and Alexander von Humboldt. Four boys gaping up at their father like nestlings waiting for worms. An engraver and printer by trade, Frank Wells’s passion had been natural history and his truest friends the Peales and the Bartrams, Thomas Nuttall and Thomas Say, Audubon of the beautiful birds and poor peculiar Rafinesque, who’d died in a garret downtown.

On summer evenings, down by the creek, Mr. Wells had read Pliny’s Natural History to his sons. Pliny the Elder had died of his scientific curiosity, he’d said; the fumes of Vesuvius had choked him when he’d lingered to watch the smoke and lava. But before that he’d compiled a remarkable collection of what he’d believed to be facts. Some true, some false—but even the false still useful for the beauty with which they were expressed, and for what they said about the ways men conceived of each other, and of the world. Sometimes pacing, sometimes sitting on a tuft of grass, Erasmus’s father had passed down Pliny’s descriptions of extraordinary peoples living beyond the edge of the known. A race of nomads with legs like snakes; a race of forest dwellers running swiftly on feet pointed backward; a single-legged race who move by hopping and then rest by lying on their backs and raising their singular feet above their heads, like small umbrellas. Stories, not science—but useful as a way of thinking about the great variety and mutability of human nature. How easily, he’d said, might we not exist at all. How easily might we be transformed into something wholly different.

In those old stories, he’d said, were lessons about gossip and the imagination and the perils of not observing the world directly. Yet although he was a great collector of explorers’ tales he’d traveled very little himself; Erasmus had never known what his father would most like to have seen. As a counterpoint to Pliny he’d offered his sons the living, breathing science of his friends. They’d helped design the Repository and delighted Erasmus and his brothers with accounts of their travels. When Lavinia was born, they’d named her after her dying mother and tried to distract their friend from his grief with bones and feathers.

Now Erasmus followed the tracks of those men across the polished floor. He stopped at a wooden case holding trays of fossil teeth. Beneath the third tray was a false bottom, which only he knew about; in the secret space below the molars was a woman’s black calf walking boot. His mother’s; once he’d had a pair. Before the servants took her clothes away, to be given piece by piece to the poor, he’d stolen the boots she’d worn most often. For years he’d hidden them in his room, sometimes running his hands up the buttons as another boy might have fingered a rosary. Later, about to leave on his ill-fated first trip, he’d given Lavinia the left boot after swearing her to secrecy. This other he’d buried. Had it always been so small? The sole was hardly longer than his hand, the leather was cracking, the buttons loose. Where Lavinia’s was he had no idea.

Four years ago, when his father died, he’d received the house, the Repository, a small income, and the care of Lavinia until she married. Which meant, he thought, that he’d inherited all the responsibility and none of the freedom or even the solid work. Was it his fault he hadn’t known what to do? The family firm had gone to his middle brothers, who’d settled side by side downtown, within walking distance of their work: two moons, circling a planet that didn’t interest him. Meanwhile Copernicus had headed west as soon as he received his share of the estate. Out there, among the Indians, he painted buffalo hunts and vast landscapes while Erasmus and Lavinia, left behind, leaned against each other in his absence.

Copernicus sent paintings back, some of which had already been shown at the Academy of Fine Arts. And sometimes—when he remembered, when he could be bothered—he sent packets of seeds, shaken from random plants that had caught his eye. His afterthoughts, which had become Erasmus’s chief occupation. Erasmus had examined, classified, labeled, cataloged, added them to his lists. He filed them in tall wooden towers of tiny drawers, alongside the seeds his father’s friends had brought back from China and the Yucatan and the Malay Archipelago, and those he’d salvaged—stolen, really—from the collections of the Exploring Expedition. When his eyes grew strained and his skin felt moldy, he retreated out back, between the house and the river and behind the Repository, planting samples in oblong plots and noting every characteristic of the seedlings.

But all that was over now. He put the boot away and returned to bed. In Africa, his father had said, are a tribe of people who have no heads, but have mouths and eyes attached to their chests. Sleep eluded him yet again and his lists bobbed behind his lids. In Germantown and along the Wissahickon, people sent him socks and marmalade and then dreamed of this expedition. Vicarious travelers, sleeping while he could not and conjuring up a generic exotic land. Lavinia had friends like this, for whom Darwin’s Tierra del Fuego and Cook’s Tahiti had merged with Parry’s Igloolik and d’Urville’s Antarctica until a place arose in which ice cliffs coexisted with acres of pampas, through which Tongan savages chased ostriches chasing camels. Those people sent six candles encased in brown paper but couldn’t keep north and south straight in their minds, placing penguins and Esquimaux in the same confused ice and pleating a continent into a frozen sea.

None of them grasped the drudgery of such a voyage. Not just the planning and buying and stowing but the months sitting idly on the decks of a ship, the long stretches when nothing happened except that one’s ties to home were imperceptibly dissolved and one became a stranger to one’s life. No one knew how frightened he was, or the mental lists he made of all he dreaded. Ridiculous things, ignoble things. His bunk would be too short or too narrow or damp or drafty; his comrades would snore or twitch or moan; he’d be overcome by longing for women; he’d never sleep. Sleepless, he would grow short-tempered; short-tempered, he’d say something wrong to Zeke and make an enemy. The coarse food would upset his stomach and dyspepsia would upset his brain; what if he forgot how to think? His hands would be cold, they were always cold; he’d slice a specimen or stab himself. His joints would ache, his back would hurt, they’d run out of coffee, on which he relied; a storm would snap the masts in half, a whale would ram the ship. They’d get lost, they’d find nothing, they’d fail.

Giving up on sleep, he lit a candle and reached for his journal. On his earlier voyage this had been his constant, sometimes sole, companion, but tonight it let him down. Pen, inkpot, words on white paper; an inkstain on his thumb. He couldn’t convey clearly the scene at the wharf. He gazed at his first messy attempt and then added:



Why is it so difficult simply to capture what was there? That old problem of trying to show things both sequentially, and simultaneously. If I drew that scene I’d show everything happening all at once, everyone present and every place visible, from the bottom of the river to the clouds. But when I describe it in words one thing follows another and everything’s shaped by my single pair of eyes, my single voice. I wish I couldshow it as if through a fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture might appear and not just my version of it. As if I weren’t there. The river as the fish saw it, the ship as it looked to the men, Zeke as he looked to young Ned Kynd, the Toxies as they appeared to Captain Tyler: all those things, at once. So someone else might experience those hours for himself.

Irritated, he put down his pen. Even here, he thought, even in these pages meant only for his own eyes, he wasn’t honest. He’d left out the first mate’s self-important strut; the appalling sight of his own hands, which amid the onions had suddenly looked just like his father’s; and the sense that they were all posturing in front of each other, perhaps for the benefit of the green-coated boys. He rubbed at the stain on his thumb. Nor was it true, or not wholly true, that he wanted to paint the scene as if he weren’t in it. He did want his own point of view to count, even as he also wanted to be invisible. Such a liar, he thought. Although chiefly he lied to himself. He’d wrapped himself in a cloud. Beyond it the world pulsed and streamed but he was cut off; people loved and sorrowed without him. When had that cloud arrived?

STILL THEY WEREN’T ready to leave. Captain Tyler banished Zeke and Erasmus the next afternoon, while the men tore out and then rebuilt the bulkheads in the hold. The sledges hadn’t fit after all, in any configuration; the wood took more space than planned and the measurements on Zeke’s sketch had turned out to be wrong. A clock ticked in Erasmus’s chest: two days, two days, two days. They could leave no later, they were already late, the season for arctic navigation was short and the newspaper reporters and expedition’s donors were ready to send them off on Thursday. Did he have enough socks? The right charts, enough pencils?

He was wild with anxiety and stuck here at home, with Zeke and Lavinia and her friend Alexandra Copeland. They were in the front parlor, all four of them working. Maps and charts and drawings spread everywhere. Without explanation he rose and ran to the Repository, which he ransacked in search of Scoresby’s work on the polar ice.

He rolled the ladder along the shelves; the book was gone, yet he couldn’t remember packing it. And couldn’t bear the thought of explaining why it had suddenly seemed so crucial. The wry face Alexandra had made as he bolted embarrassed him. Yet her presence had been his idea—Lavinia couldn’t stay alone, with only the servants for company, and she hadn’t wanted to join Linnaeus or Humboldt. “A companion,” he’d proposed. “Who’d like to share our home, in return for room and board and a modest payment.”

Lavinia had chosen Alexandra, who’d accepted a pair of rooms on the second floor. When Linnaeus and Humboldt, unexpectedly generous, offered work hand-coloring the engravings they were printing for an entomology book, Alexandra had accepted that as well and made herself at home. Now there was no escaping her; sometimes she even followed him into the Repository. But she was good for Lavinia, he reminded himself. The way she pulled Lavinia into her work was wonderful. He took a breath and headed back.

At the parlor doorway he paused to watch his sister, who was frowning with concentration and shifting her gaze from the original painting pinned above her desk to the engraved copy she was coloring with Alexandra’s help. Caught up, he thought, as she’d never been helping him with his seeds. The plates showed four tropical beetles. The sun lit the brushes, the water jars, and the ruffled pinafores so dabbed with gold and rust and blue that the beetles seemed to have leapt from the plates to the women’s legs. “Has anyone seen my copy of Scoresby?” he asked.

“I’ve been reading it upstairs,” Alexandra said. She touched her brush to the paper, leaving three tiny golden dots. “I didn’t know you needed it.”

Erasmus, admitting his foolishness, said, “It’s not as if I have room for one more thing.”

“I’ll get it.” As Alexandra put down her brush and moved away, Lavinia called for tea and leaned over the table on which Erasmus and Zeke had spread their papers: rather too close to Zeke’s shoulder, Erasmus thought. As if she were pulled by the fragrance of Zeke’s skin; as if she did not have the sense to resist the almost farcical beauty that made women stare at Zeke on the street and men hum with envy. It pained him to watch her betrayed by her body’s yearnings. To him she was lovely, with her wide hazel eyes and rounded chin, now charmingly smudged with blue. Yet he suspected that to the gaze of others—perhaps even Zeke—she was merely pleasant-looking. She seemed to know that herself, as she knew that among her monthly meetings of earnest young women, gathered to discuss Goethe and Swedenborg and Fourier, she was valued more for her sensibility than for her brilliance. One by one those women had married and disappeared from the meetings, leaving behind only Alexandra and her. Once, when he’d been voicing his concerns about Zeke, she’d said, “I know I love him more than he loves me. It doesn’t bother me.” Then had flushed so darkly he’d wanted to pick her up and pace her around the floor, as he’d done when she was an infant and needed comforting.

As Lavinia traced their planned route with her index finger, past Devon and Cornwallis and Beechey Island, where Franklin’s winter camp had been found, then south along Boothia Peninsula and King William Land, Erasmus thought how maps showed only two things, land and water. To someone who hadn’t traveled, their journey over that arctic map might seem a simple thing. Turn left, turn right, go north or south, steer by this headland or that bay. He and Zeke, who’d pored over their predecessors’ accounts, knew otherwise. Ice, both fluid and solid, appeared and disappeared with consistent inconsistency; one year an inlet might be open, the next walled shut. Lavinia, unaware of this, traced the route backward and said with satisfaction, “It’s not so very far. You’ll be home before October.”

“I hope,” Zeke said. “But you mustn’t worry if we’re not—many expeditions have to winter over. We’ve provisioned for a full eighteen months, in case we’re frozen in.”

While Lavinia gazed at the deceitful map, Alexandra returned with Erasmus’s book and then asked the question Lavinia might have been framing in her mind. “I haven’t understood this all spring,” she said. “If you take this route, which you say concentrates most efficiently on the areas in which you have some evidence of Franklin’s presence, how can you also search for signs of an open polar sea? De Haven and Penny reported Jones Sound clogged with ice when they were there.” She smoothed her paintstained garment. “Ross found most of Barrow Strait frozen, and Peel Sound as well. Even if you manage to approach the region of Rae’s discoveries, which lies south of all those areas, surely you can’t also simultaneously head north?”

Erasmus lifted his head in surprise. The same question had worried him for months, but he’d pushed it aside; Zeke hadn’t mentioned his desire to find an open polar sea since the evening that had launched them all on this path. Lavinia’s twenty-sixth birthday party, back in November; Alexandra had been present that night as well, although Erasmus had hardly noticed her. He’d been full of hope that Lavinia was about to get what she most desired.

He’d spared no expense, dressing the Repository’s windows with greenery and lining the sills with candles, scrubbing the dissecting table and shrouding it with crisp linen, on which he’d spread biscuits, a roasted ham, a turkey and a salmon in aspic. Lavinia had rejected her first three suitors—too dull, she’d said. Too weak, not smart enough. While her friends married and produced their first children she’d held out for Zeke and somehow won him. Erasmus had been terrified for her during her long campaign, then relieved, then worried again: his own fault. Zeke had asked for her hand but been vague about the details, and Erasmus had failed to press him. His father would have known better, he thought. His father wouldn’t have permitted Lavinia to bind herself for an uncertain length of time. The damage was done, but secretly Erasmus had hoped Zeke might choose the party to announce a wedding date.

In the kind light of the candles Lavinia might have been a candle herself, radiant in white silk trimmed with blue ribbons. She stood perfectly still when Zeke, just as Erasmus had hoped, silenced the room and said, “I have an announcement!”

Erasmus had sighed with relief, not noticing that Lavinia looked confused. Zeke rested his elbow on a case that held a bird-of-paradise. “You’ve all heard the news announced by John Rae earlier this month,” he said. He stood with his chin up, his chest out, one hand dancing in the air. “No doubt you share both my sorrow at what appears to have been the fate of Franklin’s expedition, and my relief that some news—however fragmentary, and possibly incorrect—has been obtained.”

He went on about the tragic disappearance of Franklin and his men, the many rescue attempts, the details of what Rae had discovered—old news to Erasmus, who’d followed every newspaper article. His guests listened, glasses in hands, among them women who would have listened with equal interest had Zeke been reciting the agricultural products of China; anything, Erasmus imagined them thinking, for this chance to gaze at Zeke blamelessly. Yet his own sister was the woman Zeke had chosen. “Perhaps you also feel, as I do,” Zeke added, “that now that the area has been defined, someone has to search further for any possible survivors.”

A guest stepped sideways then, so that Erasmus caught sight of Lavinia’s face. She looked as puzzled as he felt.

“To that end,” Zeke continued, “I’ve been able to obtain the backing of a number of our leading merchants for another expedition. Our valiant Dr. Kane has been searching for Franklin in the wrong area, and although we’re all worried about him—and although I’d be the first to go in search of him if a relief expedition wasn’t already being organized—something more is needed. I propose to set forth this spring, to search more thoroughly for Franklin in the areas below Lancaster Sound. While I’m there, I also propose to study the region, and to further investigate the possibility of an open polar sea.”

Everyone had cheered. Erasmus had stretched his lips in something like a smile, hoping no one would notice his surprise. What merchants, when, how…did everyone know about this but him? Lavinia, even, who might have hidden her knowledge—but she wore a smile as forced as his own. Zeke must have made these arrangements in secret, taking pleasure in presenting his plan only when it was complete.

After the flurry of congratulations, after the first buzz of questions about where Zeke might go, and how he might get there, and what sort of ship and crew he envisioned, Zeke took Lavinia’s hands. She beamed as if his announcement were the ideal birthday present, and when a guest sat down at the piano and began to play, she and Zeke led the crowd to the floor.

Erasmus went outside to have a cigar and calm the storm in his chest. He was watching the smoke rise through the still night air when Zeke appeared with two glasses and a bottle. He had to ask questions, Erasmus thought. Fatherly questions, although that role still felt odd: what this meant in terms of the engagement, whether Zeke wanted to marry Lavinia before he left—or release her, perhaps, until he returned.

Leaning against one of the fluted porch columns, Zeke filled the glasses and lit a cigar for himself. Erasmus opened his mouth to speak, and Zeke said, “Erasmus—you must come with me. When are you going to get another chance like this?”

Erasmus choked, coughing so hard he bent double. All the expeditions he’d already missed—was this what he’d been waiting for? Even Elisha Kent Kane had spurned him, sailing off with a crew of Philadelphians younger but no smarter than himself. Perhaps Zeke sensed his discouragement, and the extent of his wounded vanity.

“You’re ideal for this,” he said. “Where could I find anyone else as knowledgeable about the natural history of the polar regions? Or as familiar with the hardships of such a journey?”

The idea of serving under a man so much younger than himself was preposterous, but it seemed to him that Zeke was looking for a partner, not a subordinate. Surely Zeke wouldn’t ask for his help if he didn’t regard him as an equal, even—naturally—a superior? Erasmus said, “You’re kind to think of me. But you might have asked me earlier—I have responsibilities here, and of course my own work…”

Zeke bounded from the porch to the grass below. “Of course!” he said, pacing before the columns. “It’s a huge imposition—I wouldn’t think of asking you if your work weren’t so invaluable…but that’s why you’re the right person. I didn’t want to bother you until I was sure I had backing for the expedition. Think of what we’ll see!”

Somewhere in those icy waters, Franklin and his men might still be trapped in the Erebus and the Terror. Even if they couldn’t be found, many new species, even new lands, were there to be discovered. Erasmus thought of being free, this time, to investigate everything without the noxious Navy discipline. He thought of northern sights to parallel, even exceed, his brief experience in the Antarctic; of discoveries in natural history that might prove extraordinarily important. Then he thought of his sister, who appeared on the porch with her white dress foaming like a spray of catalpa blossom.

“You should go in,” she said to Zeke. “All the guests are longing to talk with you.”

He leapt up the steps and she steered him inside. With a swirl of skirts she turned to Erasmus.

“Will you go?” she said.

Eavesdropping, he thought. Again. She’d done this since she was a little girl, as if this were the only way she could keep track of her brothers.

“Please? You have to go with him.”

He had his own reasons, Erasmus thought. For going, or staying. “Did he keep this secret from you?”

“He had to, he said he needed…”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“As if you ever tell me anything,” she said. “And who are you to criticize him? Especially since Father died: all you do is mope around, sorting your seeds—do you think I haven’t seen you at eleven in the morning still in bed? So Linnaeus and Humboldt can run the business without you. So you haven’t found anyone to fall in love with since Sarah Louise.”

Sarah Louise, he thought. Still the simple sound of her name made him feel like he’d swallowed a stone. A dull ache, which never quite left him. As Lavinia knew.

“Copernicus isn’t married either,” she continued, “but you don’t see Copernicus moping around, you don’t see Copernicus wasting his life…I need you.”

A snarl of guilt and tenderness caught at him. As children, he and his brothers used to bolt for the woods and return hours later, to find Lavinia waiting by a window with an unread book in her lap. He’d been the one she looked up to, the one who tied her shoes and taught her to read. Sometimes, when the other boys weren’t around and he’d remembered not just that her birth had cost him his mother, but that she’d never had a mother, they’d drawn very close. Then his brothers would tumble in and he’d abandon her again. Back and forth, oldest and youngest. He had failed her often enough.

She drew him inside, to a corner behind a case of stuffed finches. “This is who I love,” she said fiercely. “Do you understand? Do you remember what that feels like? What if something happens to him? You have to take care of him for me.”

“Lavinia,” he said. Her hands, squeezing his left arm, were very hot. Once, after Zeke had been describing the shipwreck that made him a local hero, Erasmus had found her weeping in the garden. Not with delayed fear over what might have happened to Zeke, not with hysteria—but with longing, she’d managed to make him understand. A boundless desire for Zeke. When he’d tried to remind her that Zeke had flaws as well as virtues, she’d said, “I know, I know. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the way I feel when he touches my hand, or when we dance and I smell the skin on his neck.” The strength of her feelings had embarrassed him.

“You know this means waiting even longer,” he said. “Has he mentioned a date?” His fault, he thought again. Why hadn’t he asked Zeke himself?

“Not exactly. But when he gets home, I know he’ll want to settle down.”

Of course he wanted her to marry Zeke, not just to ease his own responsibilities but because he wanted her happy. Didn’t he? She’d cared first for their father and then him. “You’re sure…” he said. “You feel sure of his feelings for you?”

“He loves me,” she said passionately. “In his own way—I know he does.”

A blinding headache had seized him then, blurring the rest of the party. And through a process he still didn’t understand, he’d been led to this table and Alexandra’s pointed questions; to the fact that, in two days, he’d be sailing north in the company of a young man he’d known for ages yet couldn’t imagine accepting orders from.

One of the maids came in with the tea tray: Agnes? Ellen? The servants were Lavinia’s province; as long as meals appeared on time Erasmus didn’t notice who did the work. He thought they didn’t know this, although Lavinia sometimes reproached him. And although once he’d overheard the staff in the kitchen referring to “the seedy-man” and then laughing furiously. Now he avoided the eyes of the girl with the tray and drew a breath, waiting to hear what Zeke would say about the open polar sea.

“You read a lot,” Zeke said to Alexandra. If he was startled that she’d remembered his comment at the party, it didn’t show. “I’ve noticed that. So you must have learned about the stretches of open water persisting all winter and recurring in the same places every year. What the Russians call polynyas. Inglefield found open water in Smith Sound. Birds have been seen migrating northward from Canada. A warm current flows northward beneath the surface, several people have observed it—suppose it leads to a temperate ocean, free from ice, surrounding the North Pole beyond a frozen barrier?”

“Suppose,” Alexandra said. Her right hand sketched an arc in the air, as if she were still holding her paintbrush.

“When Dr. Kane left,” Zeke continued, “he said he was going to look for signs of this phenomenon if he could. So there’s nothing so strange in my wanting to look as well.”

Many times in the months since the party Erasmus had sat in the offices of wealthy men, while Zeke proposed their search for Franklin. A portrait of Franklin in full-dress uniform hung in the Narwhal’s cabin—Franklin, Franklin, Zeke had said, as he asked the men for money. It made sense that he concentrated on this aspect of the voyage—how proud the merchants were, contributing to such a good cause! In Zeke, Erasmus thought, they saw a young man who could succeed at anything. The man they’d dreamed of being, the man they hoped their sons might be. Other expeditions might have failed, but Zeke’s would not.

“It’s a theory,” Zeke told Alexandra now. “An interesting theory. In the arctic one can never predict where the ice will allow one to go, nor one’s speed, nor even always one’s direction. My plan is to follow this route and search for Franklin. But were conditions to be unexpectedly good—were one of the northern channels to be open, say—it’s possible we’d do some exploring.”

“Possible,” Alexandra said. “Hence you provision for eighteen months?”

“For safety’s sake,” Zeke said. He stroked his eyebrows, taming the springy golden tufts; perhaps aware that Lavinia followed the gesture intently. And perhaps, Erasmus thought, a bit annoyed that Alexandra didn’t. A sensible woman, she seemed immune to Zeke’s charms.

Lavinia, tearing her eyes from Zeke’s hand, said, “I don’t see here on the maps where you’d head north at all.”

“Only if he were driven to it,” Alexandra said. “Were he to raise this money to search for Franklin, and then purposefully head in another direction, that would be quite wrong.”

Zeke gazed steadily at her, and she gazed as steadily back. “The maps never tell us what we need,” he said, turning toward Lavinia. “That’s part of the reason we go.”

Later Erasmus would realize that for all his alertness to Zeke’s gestures and the women’s responses he hadn’t been paying sufficient attention. The lamps were lit, the sun was setting, they were munching delicious chocolate cake; the maps beckoned and he was dreaming of glory. His own glory, his own desires. They might find survivors of Franklin’s expedition; or if not, surely better evidence of what had happened than Rae’s dispiriting tale. With any luck they’d find other things as well. All sorts of specimens, not just plants but seaweeds, fishes, birds—he would write a book. He’d sketch his specimens and write their descriptions; his talent was for drawing from nature, capturing the salient features as only a trained observer could. Copernicus, so skilled with color and light, would turn the sketches into paintings; Linnaeus and Humboldt would prepare the plates. Together they’d make something beautiful. For years, in the light of his disappointments, he’d pretended to himself that he wasn’t ambitious—but he was, he was. And lucky beyond belief to be part of this voyage. A blaze of excitement blinded him.

“And you, Erasmus,” Alexandra said. “What do you think of all this?”

“In the polar regions,” he said, “it’s true that one must be flexible, and take what opportunities are offered.”

He looked down at the volume she’d relinquished. He would bring it, after all. Surely there was room for one small book. “Zeke and I will respond to what we find, and decide accordingly.”





THAT NIGHT, IN her diary, Alexandra wrote:



It’s not Lavinia’s fault her brothers underestimate her. I know she’ll be different once the men leave and we’re on our own; her mind dissolves in Zeke’s presence. I’ll be glad when we can be ourselves. This house is so beautiful, so spacious—what would my parents think, I wonder, if they were alive to see me in these two gorgeous rooms I now call my own? The window over my bed looks down on a planting of dwarf trees. My bed-linen is changed weekly, by someone other than me. And this painting is such a pleasure, so much more satisfying than needlework. So much better paid. Beneath the lining of my sewing box I’ve already tucked a surprising sum. Soon I’ll be able to purchase some books of my own, an extravagance when I have the Repository shelves to browse through, once the men leave…I’m impatient for them to go, I am. And wish that, like Erasmus, I might have the luxury of sleeping out there.

Does he know that he rocks the toe of his boot in the air whenever Zeke speaks? I wonder what Erasmus was like as a boy. Before he grew so frozen, before he sat with his chin tucked into his collar like that, and his right hand wringing his left so strongly one wonders he doesn’t break the bones. Lavinia says that when she was a girl he was fond of beetles and moths, and teased the succession of governesses who raised her. I can’t imagine him teasing anyone.

THE NARWHAL SET sail on May 28, in such a wild flurry that everything important seemed still undone and nothing Erasmus meant to say got said. He and Zeke stood on the deck in their new gray uniforms, waving their handkerchiefs. Above them the Toxophilites’ pennant streamed in the wind, snapping straight out then beginning to droop, snapping straight out again. Terns hung motionless in the high currents, and Erasmus felt as though he himself were hanging between two worlds.

The acquaintances of the Narwhal’s crew gathered in little knots close to shore, followed by the cheering Toxies in their green outfits. Dotting the wharf in separate clusters were Zeke’s and Erasmus’s relatives and friends, their clothing splayed into wide colored planes by the wind whipping across the river. Alexandra had brought her entire family—her sisters, Emily and Jane; her brother, Browning; and Browning’s wife and infant son—all of them huddled so tightly that it was as if even here, in the open air, they couldn’t expand beyond the confines of the tiny house they’d shared since their parents’ deaths. They were small, neat, and yet somehow fierce-looking; abolitionists, serious young people. They dressed in the colors of sparrows and doves but more closely resembled, Erasmus thought, a family of saw-whet owls. Browning had a Bible in his hands.

Later, Alexandra would write in her diary about the argument she and Browning had over the verses he read out loud. Later she’d sketch a portrait of Erasmus during these last minutes, which showed his hand clasped nervously around a stay, his graying hair curled beneath a cap that made him look oddly boyish, the tip of his long, thin nose sniffing at the wind. But for now she only stood silently, watching him watch everyone. In the oily water around the pilings wood shavings swirled and tossed.

To the left of Alexandra’s family stood a group of employees from the engraving firm and some representatives from the Voorhees packet line; beyond them were Linnaeus and Humboldt, as plump and glossy as beavers, and Lavinia, leaning on both of them, overdressed in swirls of blue and green and flashing in the sun like a trout. At the tip of the wharf, befitting their support of the expedition, came Zeke’s family. His father stood suave and proud, his still-thick thatch of ruddy hair moving in the wind and revealing his massive eyebrows and the lynxlike tufts on his ears. His mother, shrouded in black for the death of an aunt, was weeping. Not surprising, Erasmus thought; she was famous for the way she coddled her only son. Flanking her were Zeke’s sisters, Violet and Laurel, beautifully dressed and seemingly contemptuous of their merchant husbands, who weren’t sailing north.

They waved; the water opened between the wharf and the ship; the tune piped by the Toxies’ piccolo player shattered in the breeze until the separate and unrelated notes merged with the calls of the gulls. Behind the mountains and beyond the north wind, Erasmus’s father had once read to him, past the cave where the cold arises, live a race of people called Hyperboreans. Here are the hinges on which the world turns and the limits of the circuits of the stars. Here there is no disharmony and sorrow is unknown. The figures on the wharf began to shrink. Everyone, except the dead, whom Erasmus had ever loved; every person who might be proud of him or admire his courage or worry over his fate. The faces faded, and then disappeared.




2 PAST THE CAVE WHERE THE COLD ARISES (#ulink_bf23c131-ad33-5391-9d91-4d292a8597df)


(JUNE–JULY 1855)



Of the inanimate productions of Greenland, none perhaps excites so much interest and astonishment in a stranger, as the ice in its great abundance and variety. The stupendous masses, known by the name of Ice-Islands, Floating-Mountains, or Icebergs, common to Davis’ Straits and sometimes met with here, from their height, various forms, and the depth of water in which they ground, are calculated to strike the beholder with wonder; yet the fields of ice, more peculiar to Greenland, are not less astonishing. Their deficiency in elevation, is sufficiently compensated by their amazing extent of surface. Some of them have been observed near a hundred miles in length, and more than half that in breadth; each consisting of a single sheet of ice, having its surface raised in general four or six feet above the level of the water, and its base depressed to the depth of near twenty feet beneath.

The ice in general, is designated by a variety of appellations, distinguishing it according to the size or number of pieces, their form of aggregation, thickness, transparency, &c. I perhaps cannot better explain the terms in common acceptation amongst the whale-fishers, than by marking the disruption of a field. The thickest and strongest field cannot resist the power of a heavy swell; indeed, such are much less capable of bending without being dissevered, than the thinner ice which is more pliable. When a field, by the set of the current, drives to the southward, and being deserted by the loose ice, becomes exposed to the effects of a grown swell, it presently breaks into a great many pieces, few of which will exceed forty or fifty yards in diameter. Now, such a number of the pieces collected together in close contact, so that they cannot, from the top of the ship’s mast, be seen over, are termed a pack.

When the collection of pieces can be seen across, if it assume a circular or polygonal form, the name of patch is applied, and it is called a stream when its shape is more of an oblong, how narrow soever it may be, provided the continuity of the pieces is preserved.

Pieces of very large dimensions, but smaller than fields, are called floes; thus, a field may be compared to a pack, and a floe to a patch, as regards their size and external form. Small pieces which break off, and are separated from the larger masses by the effect of attrition, are called brash-ice, and may be collected into streams or patches. Ice is said to be loose or open, when the pieces are so far separated as to allow a ship to sail freely amongst them; this has likewise been called drift ice. A hummock is a protuberance raised upon any plane of ice above the common level. It is frequently produced by pressure, where one piece is squeezed upon another, often set up on its edge, and in that position cemented by the frost. Hummocks are likewise formed, by pieces of ice mutually crushing each other, the wreck being coacervated upon one or both of them. To hummocks, the ice is indebted for the variety of fanciful shapes, and its picturesque appearance. They occur in great numbers in heavy packs, on the edges and occasionally in the middle of fields and floes. They often attain the height of thirty feet or upwards…

A bight signifies a bay or sinuosity, on the border of any large mass or body of ice. It is supposed to be called bight from the low word bite, to take in, or entrap; because, in this situation, ships are sometimes so caught by a change of wind, that the ice cannot be cleared on either tack; and in some cases, a total loss has been the consequence.

—WILLIAM SCORESBY, The Polar Ice (1815)





Zeke started heaving over the Narwhal’s rail before they cleared the bay. He had mentioned, Erasmus remembered, some seasickness on his father’s ships—but this was no spasm, a few hours’ illness and a night’s recovery. This was endless retching and a white-faced speechless headache. As they passed New York and surged ahead of the ship heading off to search for Dr. Kane, the elation Erasmus might have felt was squelched by worry over Zeke’s condition.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” he asked. Around him the crew hovered, disdainfully watching Zeke respond to the slightest swells.

“I thought it would be different this time,” Zeke whispered.

Erasmus, contemplating Zeke’s falsehood, remembered an image he’d long forgotten. A pale, frail, yellow-haired boy reading mounds of natural history books and explorers’ journals in a deep chair piled with pillows—that had been Zeke, aged thirteen or fourteen.

His own father, Erasmus remembered, had acted as a sort of uncle to Zeke during Mr. Voorhees’s business trips: an antidote to a houseful of women. He’d brought armfuls of books during the year Zeke spent in bed after a bout of typhus, and had later welcomed Zeke’s visits to the Repository. Erasmus, just back from the Exploring Expedition then, had been only vaguely aware that Zeke regarded him as some sort of hero. But after Zeke finished reading the journals of Franklin’s first voyage, Erasmus had heard him say to his father, “This is how I want to live, Mr. Wells—like Franklin and his men, like Erasmus. I want to explore. How can anyone bear to live and die without accomplishing something remarkable?”

Erasmus had dismissed those words as boyish fantasies, watching unsurprised as Zeke was funneled into his family’s business. He worked in the warehouse, he sat in the office, he traveled on the ships of the packet line; he complained he had no time for his own studies, yet acted like his father’s right hand. Then a lightning bolt struck a ship he was on, burning it to the waterline and killing some of the crew. Flames shooting into the night, shattered spars, the cries of the lost; Zeke had saved twenty-six passengers, herding them toward the floating debris and caring for them until their rescue. His descriptions of the incident, Erasmus believed, had made Lavinia fall in love with him. Afterward Mr. Voorhees, as a kind of reward, had allowed Zeke a certain amount of time for his scientific investigations on each voyage.

Erasmus, thinking those investigations were just a hobby, had expected Zeke to mature into a merchant captain. Yet Zeke kept reading and planning and making notes—dreaming, while no one paid attention, of a quest that would make his name. Until finally, at Lavinia’s birthday party, he’d surprised them all.

“In the water,” Zeke had once told Erasmus, “while I was floating there, knowing I might easily die, I understood I would not die. I was not sickly, I was very strong; I could keep my head in an emergency. I was destined—I am destined—to do something remarkable. Men have made themselves famous solely by mastering a subject which others have not yet seen to be important. And I have mastered the literature of arctic exploration.”

That mastery was of little use during the first ten days of the voyage, which Zeke spent flat on his back, flounder pale, his oddly large palms and short, blunt fingers dangling over the side of his berth. Erasmus cared for him as well as he could, remembering his promise to his sister and his own early misreadings of Zeke’s character. Unpleasant work: yet for all his worry, there was still the great pleasure of being at sea again. The wind tearing the clouds to shreds, tearing his old dull life to shreds. In his journal he wrote:



How could I have forgotten what this was like? Thirteen years since I was last on a ship, waking to the sounds of halyards cracking against the masts, water rushing past the hull; and each day the sense of time stretching out before me as rich and vast as the ocean. I think about things I’ve forgotten for years. Outwardly this is much like my last voyage: the watches changing, the ship’s bell ringing, the routine of meals and duties. Yet in other ways so different. No military men, no military discipline; just the small group of us, gathered for a common cause. And me with all the time in the world to stand on the deck at night and watch the stars whirling overhead.

RAIN, FOUR DAYS in a row. Erasmus stayed in the cabin for much of that time, besotted with his new home. Between the bulkhead separating the cabin from the forecastle, and the equipment shelves surrounding the stepladder leading to the deck, everything else was squeezed: hinged table and wooden stools; lockers, hanging lamp and stove; and, stacked in tiers of three along the sides, six berths. Mr. Tagliabeau, Captain Tyler, and Mr. Francis occupied the starboard berths. On the port side, Dr. Boerhaave had the bottom, Zeke the middle, and Erasmus the upper berth, which was lined and curtained off with India rubber cloth. The rats creeping up from the hold at night might have seen the officers arranged like cheeses along their shelves and, on the opposite side of the bulkhead, the seamen swaying in their netted hammocks.

Yet physical discomforts didn’t seem to matter. With his curtain drawn, Erasmus could almost pretend he was alone; almost forget that Zeke lay just a few inches below him, Mr. Tagliabeau a few feet across from him. Two wooden shelves held his books, his journal, a reading lamp, his pens and drawing supplies. Compass, pocket-sextant and watch hung from particular pegs; rifle, flask, and pouch from others. Order, sweet order. Everything under his control, in a space hardly bigger than a coffin yet warm and dry and lit. As the rain tapered off on the fourth day he read and wrote in there, happy until he heard Zeke vomiting.

Delirious from lack of food, Zeke whimpered and called for his mother and sometimes for Lavinia. That boy in the invalid’s chair was still apparent in his eyes, although he’d already managed to make it clear that he resented whoever helped him. Erasmus opened his curtain, fetched a clean basin, soothed Zeke’s face with a damp cloth. Perhaps, he thought, Zeke wouldn’t remember this day or hold these acts against him. When Dr. Boerhaave, still a stranger, said, “Let me see what I can do,” and opened his medicine chest, Erasmus left Zeke in the doctor’s hands and went to get some fresh air. Low swells, a crisp breeze, the rain-washed sails still dripping and the clouds parting like tufts of carded wool. Beneath that sky the deck was dotted with men picking oakum. Which was Isaac, which was Ivan? Erasmus had made a resolution, after watching Alexandra’s ease with the same servants whose names he still forgot. On the Narwhal, he’d promised himself, he’d pay attention to everyone, not just the officers.

That was Robert, he thought. On that coil of rope. Sean, by the sturdy capstan. And in the galley, cooking as if he were dancing, Ned Kynd. A glance at the simmering carrots, a stir of the chicken fricassee, then a few quick kneads of the biscuit dough on a floured board.

Erasmus dipped a spoon in the stew pot and tasted the gravy. “Delicious,” he said, thinking with pleasure of the live chickens still penned on the deck. Fresh food for another several weeks; he knew, as Zeke and perhaps even Ned did not, how much this was to be relished. “You’re doing a fine job.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Ned said. “A pleasure to have such a tidy place to cook in. And then the sea—isn’t it lovely?”

“It is,” Erasmus agreed. They spoke briefly about menus and the state of their provisions; then about Ned’s quarters, which he claimed were fine. Never sick, always cheerful and prompt, Ned seemed to have made himself at home. Already he’d adopted the seamen’s bright neckerchiefs and was growing a spotty beard. After a few minutes’ chat about the weather and a spell of comfortable silence, Ned said, “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” Erasmus said, praying it wouldn’t be about Zeke.

“Could you tell me about this Franklin we’re looking for? Who he is?”

Erasmus stared at him, a piece of carrot still in his mouth. “Didn’t Commander Voorhees explain all this to you, when you signed on?”

Ned cut biscuits. “That Franklin was lost,” he said. “That we were to go and search for him…but not much more than that.”

Where had Ned been these last years? While Ned slipped the biscuits onto a tin, Erasmus leaned against the water barrel and tried to summarize the story that had riveted everyone else’s attention.

“Sir John Franklin was, is, English,” he said. “A famous explorer, who’d already been on three earlier arctic voyages.”

The chicken simmered as Erasmus explained how Franklin had set off with over a hundred of the British Navy’s finest men. For ships he had James Ross’s old Erebus and Terror, refitted with hot-water heating systems and experimental screw propellers. Black-hulled, white-masted, the ships had left England in the spring of 1845, provisioned for three years. Each had taken along a library of some twelve hundred books and a hand organ, which played fifty tunes. The weather was remarkably fine that summer, and hopes for a swift journey high. Toward the end of that July they were seen by a whaler, moored to an iceberg at the mouth of Lancaster Sound; after that they disappeared.

“Disappeared?” Ned said. His hands cut lard into flour for a pie crust.

“Vanished,” Erasmus replied. Everyone knew this part of the story, he thought: not just himself and Zeke, but Lavinia and all her acquaintances, even his cook and his groom. “How did you miss this?”

“There was starvation in Ireland,” Ned said sharply. “How did you miss that? I had other things on my mind.”

The chronology of these two events fell into line. Ned, Erasmus realized, must have been part of the great wave of Irish emigrants fleeing the famine. He was still just a boy, he could almost have been Erasmus’s son. “Forgive me,” he said. He knew nothing of Ned’s history, as he’d known nothing of his servants’ lives at home. “That was stupid of me.” Of course the events in Ireland had shaped Ned’s life more than the stories of noble Franklin, unaccountably lost; or noble Jane, his wife, who by the time Zeke proposed their voyage had organized more than a dozen expeditions in search of her husband.

Ned sliced apples so swiftly they seemed to leap away from his knife, and Erasmus, after an awkward pause, explained how ships had converged from the east and west on the areas in which Franklin was presumed to be lost, while other expeditions traveled overland. All had made important geographical discoveries, but despite the rockets fired, the kites and balloons sent adrift in the air, the foxes tagged with messages and released, no one had found Franklin. Erasmus’s fellow Philadelphian, Dr. Kane, had been with the fleet that reached Beechey Island during the summer of 1851, finding tantalizing traces of a winter camp.

Erasmus tried, without frightening Ned, to describe what that fleet had seen. Three of Franklin’s seamen lying beneath three mounds; and also sailcloth, paper fragments and blankets, and six hundred preserved-meat tins, emptied of their contents and refilled with pebbles. But no note, nor any indication of which direction the party had headed on departing. Subsequent expeditions hadn’t found a single clue as to Franklin’s whereabouts. The Admiralty had given up the search a year ago, declaring Franklin and his men dead.

“Why would Commander Voorhees want to do this, then?” Ned asked. “If the men are dead?”

“There was news,” Erasmus said. “Surprising news.”

In the fall, just as Zeke had said at Lavinia’s party, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company had startled everyone. Exploring the arctic coastline west of Repulse Bay, not in search of Franklin at all but purely for geographical interest, he’d come across some Esquimaux. A group of thirty or forty white men had starved to death some years before, they said, at the mouth of a large river. They wouldn’t lead Rae to the bodies, and Rae had thought the season too far advanced to embark on a search himself. But the Esquimaux had relics: Rae purchased a gold watch, a surgeon’s knife, a bit of an undervest; silver forks and spoons marked with Franklin’s crest; a golden band from a cap.

“The part that set everyone talking, though,” Erasmus said, “was the last story the Esquimaux told Dr. Rae.”

Three pies were taking shape; he filched some apple slices. Was it wrong, he wondered, to bring up the subject of starvation with a boy who might have seen it directly? Was it wrong to talk so freely with a subordinate? But Ned, crimping the crusts together, said, “Well, tell me.”

Erasmus, leaving out the worst parts, described the Esquimaux tale of mutilated corpses and human parts found in cooking kettles. There could be no doubt, Rae had said, that his countrymen had been driven to cannibalism as a last resort.

“What an uproar Rae caused!” Erasmus said. He registered Ned’s pallor, but he was caught in his own momentum now. “You’d have thought he killed the men himself, from the public’s response. The Admiralty dismissed his findings and said Englishmen don’t eat Englishmen. But they declared the fate of Franklin’s expedition resolved, despite the fact that Rae’s story accounted for less than a third of the crew.”

“You look for the rest, then?” Ned asked.

“We look.”

He wound up with the facts that had set them off on their own quest. Although the Admiralty had given up, Lady Franklin persisted, bombarding the press with pleas for further, private expeditions.

“Until the ships are found,” Erasmus said, “there’s no proof that all the men are dead. Dr. Kane is still searching for them, but he headed for Smith Sound before Rae’s return. Franklin might have reached that area if he’d headed north through Wellington Channel, but now we know he went southwest and that Kane’s a thousand miles from the right place. We have all the facts Dr. Kane was missing, and our job is to search in the area Rae insufficiently explored.”

Ned finished the pies and then looked up. “Commander Voorhees made it sound as if we were going to rescue survivors,” he said. “Yet it seems we’re only going after corpses.”

“Not exactly,” Erasmus said, flustered. “There may be some survivors, we hope there are. We go in search of them, and of news.”

He left the galley feeling uneasy, a biscuit in his hand. He’d imagined that the ship’s crew shared his and Zeke’s thoughts: the story of Franklin clear in their minds, the goals of the voyage sharply defined and their own tasks understood. Now he wondered if they were like Ned, signed on for their own reasons, occupied with their own concerns, hardly aware of the facts. One was thinking, perhaps, about a belled cow walking high on a hill. Another about a pond and four locust trees, or about drinking whiskey or shoeing a horse, what he might buy when he was paid off, a young woman, an old quarrel, a sleigh’s runners slicing the snow.





THE LAST TIME Ned had sailed on a ship, he’d been sick and stunned and hadn’t known how to read or write. This time he’d do it differently; this time he’d keep a record. Before leaving Philadelphia he’d bought a lined copybook, of the sort boys used in school. That night he wrote:



The apple pies were very good. But Commander Voorhees still hasn’t eaten a mouthful, nothing I make tempts him. Today I saw a large school of bluefish. Mr. Wells came to visit while I made dinner and told me about the explorer we’re searching for. Except he is dead, also all his men I think. Not only frozen but starved. When he told me about the men eating each other I thought about home, and all this evening I’ve been remembering Denis and Nora and our voyage over, and all the others dead at home, and Mr. Wickersham who taught me to read and write, and everyone. I get along well enough with the seamen I bunk with, but don’t yet have a special friend among them and wish I did. Although I’ve heard Mr. Wells asking the other seamen for details of their lives, he didn’t ask me one thing about the famine years nor how or when I arrived in this country. Nor how it was that I happened to be free, with less than a dollar in my pocket, on the very afternoon Mr. Tagliabeau came looking for a replacement cook. Only he seemed surprised that I hadn’t heard about the famous Englishman. If I hadn’t tried to stop the fight between the two Spaniards that afternoon, and been fired for my pains and denied my last week’s wages, I wouldn’t have leapt at the chance for this position. When we return to Philadelphia in October I wonder if he’d help me find work away from the docks, perhaps in one of the inns out Germantown way.

OFF ST. JOHN’S, the scattered icebergs—pure white, impossibly huge, entirely covered with snow—cured Zeke like a drug. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, and Mr. Francis viewed them calmly, after their many whaling voyages. Erasmus, who’d seen similar bergs off Antarctica, restrained his excitement for the sake of appearances. But the men who hadn’t been north before gaped openly, and Zeke was overcome.

“Look! Look!” he shouted, racing about the deck and then diving into the cabin for his journal. His first entry, dated June 15, 1855, was a series of hasty sketches captioned with rough measurements: The largest iceberg is a quarter-mile across. Nils Jensen, who couldn’t read but had remarkable calculating skills, leaned over the drawing and murmured some numbers suggesting the berg’s volume and area. Other excited men crowded around, but perhaps only Erasmus saw, behind the hamlike shoulders of huge Sean Hamilton, the officers exchanging glances and sarcastic smiles.

That night, with Zeke up on deck and not heaving into a basin, Erasmus slept soundly for the first time and so missed the actual collision. One great thump; by the time he woke and ran up on deck the Narwhal was moving backward, rebounding from a slope-sided iceberg and shorn of her dolphin striker and martingales. Past him ran Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau, Thomas Forbes on their heels with a sack of carpenter’s tools. Shouts and calls and terse instructions; what was damaged, what intact; a dark figure draped over the bowsprit, investigating, anchored by hands on his ankles and a rope at his waist. Erasmus rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to stay out of the way. Captain Tyler, standing next to Zeke as his crew worked, turned and said, “Had you taken the course I suggested…”

“This course is fine!” Zeke exclaimed. “The man in the crow’s nest must have been sleeping. You there!” He tilted his head back and hollered at the figure on the masthead: Barton DeSouza, Erasmus saw. Was that Barton? “You look sharp there!”

The moon was full and the berg gleamed silvery off the Narwhal’s bow. Barton muttered something Erasmus couldn’t hear. A hammer beat against a doubled wall of wood as Thomas and his helpers began repairing the damage. Nothing serious, Mr. Tagliabeau called back.

“It’s late,” Zeke pointed out. “They could do that tomorrow.”

“Better to do it now,” Captain Tyler said. “Suppose a squall were to strike in the next few hours?”

He turned his back, he called out orders, figures moved in response to his words. Zeke retreated—just when he should have asserted his authority, Erasmus thought. The men had instinctively looked to Captain Tyler during Zeke’s illness, reverting to what they knew; on the fishing and whaling ships where they’d served before, the captain was the sole authority. Here, with an expedition commander who couldn’t set a sail somehow in charge of the ship’s captain, they were all uneasy. Erasmus overheard them now and again, a grumpy Greek chorus: He’s never been north of New York; he doesn’t know how to roll a hammock; he changes his shirt twice a week—Sean Hamilton, Ivan Hruska, Fletcher Lamb. Each time Zeke gave an order they turned to the captain and waited for his nod before obeying.

Erasmus saw all this, but couldn’t fix it. For the next few days he focused instead on trying out the dredge and the tow nets. Already he could see that Zeke wouldn’t share his scientific work; after all he was to be alone, as he’d been on his first voyage. He tied knots, adjusted shackles, replaced a poorly threaded pin, remembering how shyly his young self had hung back from his companions. While he was working up the courage to be friendly, everyone else had been pairing off, or clumping in groups of three or four from which he was excluded. Everyone had been courteous but he’d been left with no particular friend; and at times he’d thought he might die of loneliness.

He was older now, he was used to it. Yet still he felt grateful when Dr. Boerhaave, who’d been reading near the galley, edged up and broke his solitude. “Those little purple-tinted shrimps,” he said, “are they Crangon boreas?”

Later, Erasmus would gain a clearer picture of Dr. Boerhaave’s face. For now, what he first noticed was his mind: quick and shining, sharp but deep, moving through a sea of thought like a giant silver salmon. Dr. Boerhaave, Erasmus learned quickly, knew as much natural history as he did. Although he was the better botanist, Dr. Boerhaave was the better zoologist and was especially knowledgeable about marine invertebrates.

As they probed their captives, Dr. Boerhaave said he’d been raised in the port of Gothenberg, but educated in Paris and Edinburgh. His excellent English he attributed to his years at sea. Over a group of elegant little medusae captured in their tow net—“Ptychogastria polaris,” Dr. Boerhaave said—he described his trips as ship’s surgeon aboard Scottish whalers and Norwegian walrus-hunters.

“I was curious,” he said. “I liked Edinburgh very much, but I didn’t want to set up a practice there and see the same people for the next forty years. And the idea of returning permanently to Sweden…” He shrugged.

Erasmus, embalming a medusa, said, “Commander Voorhees told me you’d been twice to the high arctic. With whalers? Or were those more formal expeditions?”

“The latter,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “On the Swedish exploring expedition I accompanied, we went up the west coast of Spitzbergen to Hakluyt’s Headland—not as far as Parry got, but we saw some of the same places that Franklin and Beechey explored with the Dorothea and the Trent.”

Franklin’s first voyage, so long ago. For a minute Erasmus thought how that had led, by an unexpected web of events, to their own voyage.

“Later I went with a Russian expedition to Kamchatka Peninsula and the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands, then into the Bering Straits. We’d hoped to reach Wrangel Island but were stopped by icepack in the Beaufort Sea.”

He drew an equatorial projection of the medusa before them, revealing the convoluted edges of the eight gastric folds. He had excellent pencils, Erasmus observed. The line they made was both darker and sharper than his own.

“What about you?” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Your own earlier journey—I read all five volumes of Wilkes’s narrative of the Exploring Expedition, it was very popular when the first copies arrived in Europe. But I don’t remember seeing your name mentioned. How is that so?”

Erasmus flushed and directed Dr. Boerhaave’s attention to some questionable seals on the preserving jars. “It’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you another time. How did you decide to join us?”

“I thought it would round out my picture of the high arctic,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Different ice, different flora and fauna. Anyway I was already on this side of the ocean. I came to America several years ago, to visit some of your New England philosophers. Emerson, Brownson and the others—it interests me, what they’ve done with the ideas of Kant and Hegel. You know this young Henry Thoreau?”

“I don’t,” Erasmus said.

“I met him and some of his friends in Boston, which was delightful. But all along I also hoped to do some exploring, either out west or in the arctic. At a dinner party I ran into Professor Agassiz, whom I’d once met in Scotland—we share an interest in fossil fishes. He put me in touch with some members of your Academy of Sciences, which is how I learned your expedition needed a surgeon. The position was just what I’d been hoping for.”

“Was it?” Erasmus said thoughtfully. “You might just as easily have had mine—you’re better trained. I expect you did both jobs at once on your other trips.”

Dr. Boerhaave looked down at his drawing. “Differently trained, that’s all. And in a way it’s a relief simply to be responsible for the health of the crew and to have someone else in charge of the zoological and botanical reports. I’ve always thought both jobs were too much for one man to do well.”

“But we must be partners, then,” Erasmus said. “Real colleagues. May we do that?”

“Or course,” Dr. Boerhaave said. With his pencil he drew a delicate tentacle.





DR. BOERHAAVE WROTE to William Greenstone, an Edinburgh classmate who was now a geologist of some repute:



Although we’re not to Greenland yet, we’ve not been idle. I’ve examined all the men, so as to have an accurate point from which to assess their later health. On a journey this short, and with ample opportunities to acquire fresh food, there won’t be signs of scurvy, but the alternation in day length and the sleep deprivation may cause changes.

It’s an unusual situation for me, having an official naturalist on board. I worried that he—his name is Erasmus Wells—might be jealous of his position and equipment, and that I might have few opportunities for collecting and examining specimens. Yet in fact Mr. Wells is quite congenial and seems willing to let me share in his investigations. So far we’ve found nothing exciting but are in heavily traveled waters where everything we capture is well known. Yesterday we took a Cyclopterus spinosus though: not quite two inches long, covered with the typical conical spines, and very like those I saw off Spitzbergen; I was surprised to see it this far south.

I think I’ll like my new companion. He’s somewhat fussy and tends to be melancholy, but he’s intelligent and well traveled. His formal education is spotty by our standards, but he’s read widely and seems more—I don’t know, more complicated than the usual run of Americans. Not quite so blindly optimistic, nor so convinced that one can make the world into what one wishes. Perhaps because he’s older. Except for him and me and the ship’s captain, the others are hardly more than children. I packed the bottom sampler you gave me carefully,and once we enter Baffin’s Bay I’ll do my best to obtain samples of the seafloor for you.

HERE WAS THE arctic, Erasmus thought, as the Narwhal moved through Davis Strait and the night began to disappear. Or at least its true beginning: here, here, here.

His eyes burned from trying to take in everything at once. Whales with their baleen-laden mouths broke the water, sometimes as many as forty a day. Belugas slipped by white and radiant and the sky was alive with birds. The men cheered the first narwhals as guardian spirits and crowded around Erasmus as he sketched. With one of Dr. Boerhaave’s excellent pencils he tried to capture the grooved spike jutting from the males’ upper jaws and the smooth dark curves of their backs. Nils Jensen, out on the bowsprit, watched intently as each surfaced to breathe and called back measurements—ten feet long, twelve and half—which Erasmus noted on his drawings.

One day the coast of Greenland appeared, the peak of Sukkertoppen rising above the fog and flickering past as they sailed to Disko Island. A flock of dovekies sailed through the rigging, and when Robert Carey knocked one to the deck Erasmus remembered how, as a little boy, he’d glimpsed three of these tiny birds in a creek near his home, bobbing exhausted where they’d been driven after a great northeaster. This one looked like a black-and-white quail in his hand. Bending over the rail to release it, he saw fronds of seaweed waving through ten fathoms of transparent water. As soon as they anchored at Godhavn he and Dr. Boerhaave sampled the shallows, finding nullipores, mussels, and small crustaceans. Then they saw people, floating on the water and looking back at them.

In tiny, skin-covered kayaks the strangers darted among the icebergs; their legs were hidden inside the boats, their arms extended by two-bladed paddles. Flash, flash: into the ocean and out again, water streaming silver from the blades. The paddles led to tight hooded jackets; the jackets merged into oval skirts connecting the men at their waists to the boats—like centaurs, Erasmus thought. Boat men, male boats. It was all a blur, he couldn’t see their faces.

Sean Hamilton tossed them bits of biscuit and Erasmus revised his first opinion: This was where the journey began, with this first sight of the arctic men he’d read about for so long. That these Greenlanders had traded with whalers for two centuries, been colonized by the Danes and converted by Moravian and Lutheran missionaries, made them less strange: but they were still new to him. On the first night in port, over a dinner of eider ducks at the huge-chimneyed home of the Danish inspector, he looked alternately at a bad engraving of four Greenlanders captured near Godthaab and brought to Copenhagen and, out the window next to the portrait, at the jumble of wooden huts and sealskin tents into which the mysterious strangers disappeared.

ON THE NARWHAL the crew made their final preparations. Thomas Forbes, Erasmus saw, kept his carpenter’s bench in perfect order. Ivan Hruska’s hammock had a hole in it, which he repaired beautifully. Mr. Francis appeared to regard the boatswain’s locker as a treasure chest, keeping close track of every marlinspike and bit of spun yarn he passed out. All this bustle pleased Erasmus. This was their last chance to ready the brig for her encounters with the pack, and finally, he thought, the men had been infected with the sense of urgency he’d had for months.

He and Zeke, equally busy, acquired sixteen ill-mannered Esquimaux dogs, a stock of dried codfish, bales of seal and caribou skins, full Esquimaux outfits for all the crew, and an interpreter, Johann Schwartzberg. After sharing a walk with him, Erasmus wrote:



He’s a Moravian missionary—an extremely interesting man. He’s lived among the Esquimaux both here and in Labrador, and he knows their language as well as Danish, English, and German. He’ll be invaluable if we meet Esquimaux around King William Land. When Zeke approached him, we learned that he’d followed the news of Franklin’s expedition avidly and had already heard about Rae’s discoveries. He seems genuinely thrilled to join us. The men call him Joe, and already I can see that he’s sensible, mild-tempered, good-humored, and handy.

It was Joe who determined how many knives and needles and iron bars they should barter for the fish and the furs, and Joe who examined each Esquimaux outfit for proper fit. Zeke asked Mr. Tagliabeau and Mr. Francis to work with the dogs; when they tangled the traces and crashed the sledge and fumbled helplessly, it was Joe who demonstrated how to control them. Buff and brown and white and black, long-haired, demonic, and curly-tailed, the dogs were nothing like the well-mannered hounds Zeke kept at home. With a peculiar turn of the wrist, Joe directed the whip toward the head of the most recalcitrant creature and clipped off a piece of its ear.

Zeke, watching this with Erasmus, caught his breath and said, “Oh, how cruel!”

Mr. Francis shot a contemptuous glance back over his shoulder. “Perhaps you’d like to reason with them?” There was something weasel-like about him, Erasmus thought. That narrow chest; the thick hair growing low on his forehead and shading his deep-set eyes. “Maybe you can persuade them,” Mr. Francis added.

“Would you take over?” Zeke asked Joe. He pulled Erasmus away. “A good commander recognizes those things that are abhorrent to him, or which he does badly, and gives others charge of them,” he said. “Don’t you think? Joe’s a fine teacher, and Mr. Tagliabeau and Mr. Francis are coarse enough to be good drivers.”

Joe also knew how to build a snow house and how to repair a sledge. And it was Joe who helped Erasmus overcome his initial discomfort around the short men with their glossy hair and unreadable eyes. Hyperboreans, Erasmus thought, recalling his father’s tales. Was it Pliny who’d claimed they lived to a ripe old age and passed down marvelous stories? But his unease was grounded in experience, not myth. At Malolo in western Fiji, he’d seen savages murder two of the Exploring Expedition’s men with no apparent provocation. In Naloa Bay he’d watched a native calmly gnaw the flesh of a cooked human head, which Wilkes had later purchased for their collection.

Yet the Esquimaux weren’t violent, only a little sullen. Joe said, “You need to understand that they’re doing us a favor—it hasn’t been a good year for seals, and they don’t have many spare skins. They’re trading with us because the Danish inspector is sympathetic to Commander Voorhees’s mission, and he ordered them to. You might give the men who bring you the best skins some extra token.”

Erasmus offered small metal mirrors and was rewarded with smiles, which made him more comfortable. When he sketched the strangers, emerging from the skin tents scattered at the edge of the mission or rolling their delicate boats upside down and then righting them with a touch of their paddles, the orderly shapes he made on paper ordered his feelings as well.

After a last dinner at the home of the Danish inspector, the crew slept and then made sail early the following morning. Their wildly barking dogs were answered by the dogs on shore. Even that sound pleased Erasmus. They’d made good time so far and now, on this first day of July, they were finally ready. His lists had been worthwhile after all, and all the worry, all the fuss.





LATER, WHEN HE’D try to tell his story to the one person who might most want to hear it, he’d puzzle over how to recount the events of the next few weeks. The incidents had no shape, he would think. They were simply incidents, which piled one atop the other but always had to do with a set of men on a ship, moving fitfully from one patch of water to the next. At the rails he and Dr. Boerhaave gaped at the broken, drifting floes of sheet ice Captain Tyler called “the middle pack.” A few inches thick, twelve feet thick; the size of a boat or of downtown Philadelphia; between these were the leads, the openings that sustained them. Without a sense of their passage through the pack, nothing that came later could be fully understood.

They saw the ice through a haze induced by the dogs, whose howling made sleep and even conversation impossible. No one knew what to do with them, nor how to manage their ravenous appetites; the loose ones broke into a barrel of seal flippers and gorged themselves until two died. Nothing was safe from them, and no one could control them but Joe. The constant noise and the lack of sleep made everyone nervous, and in the cramped officers’ cabin Erasmus felt a split, which perhaps had been there all along, begin to widen. He and Dr. Boerhaave found themselves allied with Zeke, while Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau always lined up with Captain Tyler, as if the arrangement of their berths marked emotional as well as physical territory. Joe, who slept in the forecastle with the seamen, maintained a careful neutrality. When the dogs tried to eat a new litter of puppies, Joe rescued them, raising an eyebrow but saying nothing when Zeke took one for himself.

“Wissy,” Zeke said, holding the squirming creature by the neck. “After the Wissahickon.” He ran his hand over her fluffy, fawn-colored head, her white front feet, the black spot on her back, withdrawing it when she turned and nipped him.

“It’s a river,” Erasmus explained to Joe. “Back home.” To Zeke he said, “Are you sure you want to keep her? They aren’t bred to be pets.”

“I don’t think Captain Tyler appreciates having her in the cabin,” Joe added.

But Zeke was adamant, working patiently to break her habit of chewing on everyone and everything, and she was by his side as they reached Upernavik. Nils Jensen counted the icebergs, cracked and grottoed or blue-green and crystalline, while Captain Tyler disagreed with Zeke about their route. A zigzag, west-trending lead had opened through the pack, and Zeke argued that they should try to force a passage directly west, as Parry had once done.

“The traditional route through Melville Bay to the North Water is longer in distance,” Captain Tyler said, kicking Wissy away from his ankles. “But ultimately it’s always quicker. Why don’t you discipline this creature?”

Finally, as the lead narrowed and then disappeared, Zeke agreed to Captain Tyler’s route and they slipped through the steadily thickening fog into the long and gentle curve of Melville Bay. Trying to describe this place to Copernicus later, Erasmus would seize a heavy mirror and drop it flat on its back from the height of his waist, so it shattered without scattering. Heavy floes grinding against each other on one side; against the land a hummocked barrier thick with grounded bergs and upended floes—and in between, their fragile ship.

In this mirror land they were all alone. “No surprise,” Captain Tyler said irritably, after the lookout reported the absence of ships. “The whalers always take the pack in May or June, when there’s less danger of being caught by an early winter.”

“We left Philadelphia as soon as we could,” Zeke told him. “You know that. It’s not my fault.”

Meanwhile the seamen told stories of ships destroyed when wind drove the drifting pack against the coast. There was a reason, they said, why Melville Bay was called the breaking-up yard. Ships crushed like hazelnuts, they said, or locked in the ice for months: as if saying it would keep it from happening. We should have started sooner; we shouldn’t be here at all; I knew four men who died here—Isaac Bond, Robert Carey, Barton DeSouza. Even as they grumbled, half-aware that Erasmus listened, the open water vanished.

Captain Tyler ordered the sails furled and sent a man to the masthead, where he could call down the positions of the ice. For two days, while the wind was dead but a slim lead was open, they tracked the ship. On the land-fast ice they passed canvas straps over their shoulders and chests, then fastened their harnesses to the towline. Plodding heavily, they towed the brig as a team of horses might pull heavy equipment across a field. Erasmus, who’d volunteered to help, could stop when he was exhausted, or when his hands froze or his feet blistered; here he felt for the first time how much older he was than everyone but Captain Tyler. Zeke, so much younger, would always pull longer but never finished a full watch. The men pulled until their watch was complete, and for all that, on a good day, they might make six miles.

On bad days, when the channel disappeared, they warped the brig like a wedge between the consolidated floes. Two men with an iron chisel cut a hole near the edge of a likely crack and drove in an anchor; a hawser was fastened to the anchor and the other end wound around the ship’s winch. Everyone took his turn at the capstan bars. By the pressure of their bodies against the bars, the winch rotated, the hawser shivered, the ice began to groan. If the hawser didn’t break, nor the anchor pull loose, the brig inched forward into the little crack. For hours they worked and got nowhere; an inch, a foot, the length of the ship.





THOSE DAYS BLURRED in Erasmus’s mind. The great cliffs looming above him, the drifting bergs and shifting ice; brief bouts of sailing interspersed with long bouts of warping and tracking; the fog and wind and the brutal labor and the snatched, troubled bits of sleep; their wet clothes and hasty meals and Captain Tyler, red-faced, shouting at the men and occasionally whacking one with a fist or the end of a rope. Mr. Tagliabeau was somewhat less brutal with the men than the captain; Mr. Francis was worse.

“You have to do something about this,” Erasmus said to Zeke one day. He was sweating horribly, itching from the wool next to his skin, and he thought he knew just how the men, working three times as hard as he was, felt. Fletcher Lamb had walked away from the towline after tearing the skin off his wrist, and Mr. Francis had hit him on the side of his head and chased him back.

Zeke shrugged. “What can I do? We have to make our way through this place, and there’s no other way but to work the men as hard as they can stand. I promise things will be different when we reach the North Water.”

It was like a single long nightmare, in which time passed too quickly and then, especially when they were bent to the capstan bars, refused to pass at all. The continuous light made things worse, not better: white, white, white tinged with blue, with gold, with green; white; more white. Their eyes burned, and as the sun looped around the sky, to the east in the morning, then south then west then finally in the north at night, with them still working, horribly sunburned, they began to yearn for the colors they never saw: sweet rich reds, the green of leaves. In their blurry sleepless state, with their bodies strained and aching, Erasmus wasn’t surprised that they should lose sight of what had brought them there. It was all the crew could do to keep the brig moving and out of danger.

Zeke tried to keep the goals of the expedition alive by telling stories about Franklin; a way, he told Erasmus privately, of motivating the men. Off duty, they sprawled on the hatch covers or leaned against the boats while Zeke paced among them, describing Franklin’s three earlier voyages. Franklin as a young lieutenant, seeking the North Pole by way of Spitzbergen, turned back by ice and returning to England with badly damaged ships. Franklin commanding an expedition through Rupert’s Land, across the tundra to the mouth of the Coppermine River and exploring the coastline eastward in tiny canoes; Franklin in the arctic yet again, traveling down the MacKenzie River and exploring the coastline westward, nearly reaching Kotzebue Sound. In their winter camp on Great Bear Lake, Zeke said, Franklin had taught his men to read and Dr. Richardson, his naturalist companion, had lectured on the natural history of the region. After that last trip, Franklin had been knighted.

Zeke spoke as if he were transmitting the great tradition of arctic exploration, of which they were now a part. As if the stories would heal the crew’s wounds and furies. But Erasmus noticed that Zeke never repeated these in the presence of Captain Tyler and the two mates. In a similar way, he was careful, himself, not to mention his disturbing dreams. Always he was sitting with his brothers at their father’s knee, with Zeke, transformed into a boy their own age, hovering in the doorway and looking longingly at their family circle. Always his father was telling marvelous tales, as if he’d never taught them real science. In ancient times, his father said, it was recorded that the sky rained milk and blood and flesh and iron; once the sky was said to rain wool and another time to rain bricks. It is always best to observe things for yourself.

Erasmus tried not to think too much about what those dreams meant, or about the quarrels brewing. He shot burgomaster gulls and two species of loon, which the ravenous dogs tried to eat. Whenever they were stuck for a while, Joe tried to calm the dogs by unchaining them and letting them romp on the ice. They barked as if they’d gone insane and often proved difficult to retrieve; Zeke was forced to leave a pair behind when a berg suddenly sailed away from the brig. After that he no longer let Wissy run with the others but kept her tied to him by an improvised leash.

Ivan Hruska nearly drowned; a floe cracked as he was fixing an ice anchor, tossing him into the surging water. It wasn’t true, as Erasmus had once believed, that immersion in this frigid fluid killed a man right away. Ivan was retrieved numb and blue and breathless, but alive. Fingers were caught between railings and lines, ribs were banged against capstan bars, skin was torn from palms and toes were broken by falling chisels. Dr. Boerhaave was kept busy attending to their injuries and preparing daily sick lists, which Zeke and Captain Tyler were forced to ignore:

Seaman Bond: abrasions to distal phalanges, left

Seaman Carey: two cracked ribs

Seaman DeSouza: asthma, aggravated by excessive labor

Seaman Hruska: bronchitis after immersion

Seaman Jensen: avulsed tip of right forefinger

Seaman Lamb: complaints of abdominal pain (earlier blow to liver?)

Seaman Hamilton: suppurating dermatitis, inner aspect of both thighs

Unromantic ailments, never mentioned in Zeke’s tales. Meanwhile Joe tried to cheer the men. In Greenland, Erasmus learned, Joe had held services among his Esquimaux converts, during which he accompanied their singing with a zither. Now he plucked and strummed and taught the men songs, singing with them while they hauled.





A WEEK INTO Melville Bay, they were finishing their evening meal when the ice began to close in on them.

“If we cut a dock here,” Captain Tyler said, indicating an indented portion of the large berg near them, “we should be safe, even if the drift ice closes full in to the shore.”

“There’s no time,” Zeke said. “Suppose we make harbor inside this berg, and the floes seal off our exit? We could be here for weeks. And we’ve got the wind with us, for the moment.”

They sailed on, with the men waiting tensely for orders. On deck, near the chained dogs, Erasmus and Zeke watched in silence. Soon the lead closed entirely and forced them to tie up to a floe. A second floe, which Nils Jensen estimated at some three-quarters of a mile in diameter and five feet deep, sailed past their sheltering chunk of ice, sheared half of it away without taking the brig, and proceeded serenely to shore. As it reached the land-fast ice, it rose in a stiff wave and shattered with a noise like thunder.

“Would you get out of the way!” Mr. Francis said, shoving Erasmus in his exasperation. Erasmus pulled back against the rail.

While Captain Tyler and Mr. Francis shouted and the men ran about with boathooks and pieces of lumber, a third floe pressed the Narwhal into the land-fast ice. Ned Kynd, his face as white as the ice, said, “We’re going to be crushed.”

He pressed into the rail beside Erasmus, who silently agreed with him. The ice on one side drove them into the ice on the other; the brig groaned, then screamed; her sides seemed to be giving way and the deck timbers began to arch. The seams between the deck planks opened. Zeke leaned toward Ned: two young men, one blond, one dark; one calm and one afraid.

“Don’t worry so,” Zeke said. He tapped Ned’s shoulder and smiled at Erasmus. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to us. Our bows are reinforced to withstand just this kind of pressure.”

As if his words had been a spell the brig began to rise, tilting until the hawser snapped and they shot backward and across the floes like a seed pinched by a giant pair of fingers. For several hours they balanced on heaped-up ice cakes, until the wind changed and pulled the ice away and set them afloat once more with a dismal splash.

Zeke ordered rum for all the men and thanked them for their labor. To Captain Tyler he said, “You don’t understand how well we’ve designed this ship to resist the ice. This is not your common whaler.”

“If we had cut a dock,” Captain Tyler said in a choked voice. His face was mottled, red on his fleshy nostrils and chin, white along his broad forehead and down the sharp bridge of his nose. His hands, Erasmus noticed, were hugely knotted at the joints. “If we had…” Abruptly he turned the watch over to Mr. Tagliabeau and retired below, where he wrapped his head in a blanket.

Later, perched on the hatch cover, Dr. Boerhaave whispered to Erasmus that he’d feared their skipper might suffer an apoplexy. They looked out at the ice, too wound up to sleep and longing to talk: not about what had just happened, but anything else. They were still a little awkward with each other. Dr. Boerhaave said, “This is very different from the other expeditions I was on. Do you find it so? I’m curious about your earlier trip.”

“I was twenty-three the last time I did anything like this,” Erasmus said, watching the ice pieces spin in the tide. Twenty-three, barely older than Ned Kynd; often he’d been frightened half to death. When had his commander ever taken a minute to reassure him? The sky was lit like morning, although it was past ten o’clock; how delicious it was to be alive, under the shimmering clouds! Had the brig been shattered here, some of the crew would be dead by now and the rest drifting south on the fragments. He was alive, he was safe and warm. What was the point of keeping secret his time with the Exploring Expedition?

“When you asked why you never saw my name in Wilkes’s book,” he said, “there were nine civilians listed as ‘Scientifics’ among all those Navy men; I was the tenth. Wilkes never listed me because I joined the expedition at the last minute and didn’t receive a salary.”

He swallowed. Two floes touched and then parted, as if finishing a dance. “My father arranged it,” he admitted. “The young woman to whom I was engaged”—Sarah Louise Bettlesman, he thought; still he could see her face, and remember her touch—“her lungs were weak, she died six months before we were to be married. I couldn’t get back on my feet after that, and my father was worried. He pulled some strings, and after promising Wilkes he’d pay my keep for the voyage, he landed me a berth as Titian Peale’s assistant.”

“I am so sorry,” Dr. Boerhaave said gently. “But I’m sure Wilkes felt lucky to have you.”

While the ice waltzed around the bow and the clouds cavorted overhead, Erasmus told the rest of the story that had preoccupied him as he sorted and sifted his seeds.

The six ships of the Exploring Expedition had left Virginia in 1838. For the next four years they’d cruised the Pacific, from South America to the Fiji Islands, New Zealand and New Holland, the Sandwich Islands, the Oregon territory and more. Although Erasmus had been lonely, out of place, and often lost, he’d seen things he couldn’t have imagined: cannibals, volcanic calderas, sixty-pound medusoids; the meke wau, or club dance, of the Fiji natives—natural wonders and also, always, Wilkes’s brutality toward his men and his constant disregard of the needs of the Scientifics. The naval men had called the Scientifics bug catchers, clam diggers, and Wilkes had blocked their way at every turn.

They weren’t allowed to work on deck, because of naval regulations and the bustle required to sail a ship. Below decks there was little light and less fresh air, and Wilkes forbade dissections there, as he found the odors distasteful and believed they spread disease. Their primary goal was surveying, Wilkes said, and he let nothing interfere with that. Day after day, Erasmus and his companions had watched the golden hours slip by while the naval men took topographical measurements of whatever island or coast was before them. Amazing plants and animals, always just out of reach. They’d set scoop nets when they could, consoling themselves with invertebrate treasures. When they thought they might expire from heat and anger, they threw themselves over the rail and into the swimming basin the men had made from a sail hung in the water. In early 1840, as they set off to explore the Antarctic waters and search for a landmass beneath the ice, Wilkes arranged to leave all the Scientifics behind at New Zealand and New Holland, so that whatever geographical discoveries he made need not be shared but might be wholly to the glory of the Navy.

He left all except Erasmus, too insignificant to worry about. On a shabby, poorly equipped ship, Erasmus and the sailors had nearly frozen to death. But they’d seen ice islands several hundred feet high and half a mile long, with gigantic arches leading into caverns crowned with bluffs and fissures. Ice rafts, some carrying boulders the size of a house. The sea had been luminous, lit like silver, and the tracks they left across it looked like lightning. Their boots leaked so badly they had to wrap their feet in blankets; their pea jackets might have been made of muslin; their gun ports failed to shut out the sea. Erasmus had been awed, and very cold, the night two midshipmen first caught sight of the Antarctic continent. Climbing up the rigging to join them, he’d seen the mountains for himself and then the wall of ice that almost shattered their ship. From that journey had come Wilkes’s famous map, charting the Antarctic coast.

Everything after that was sordid; how could he tell Dr. Boerhaave? The quarrels among Wilkes and his junior officers, one ship wrecked and another sunk with all hands; crewmen massacred by the Fiji Islanders and then the retaliatory raids; floggings and a near mutiny and so many specimens lost. He fell silent for a minute. “The real point,” he finally said, “isn’t what we discovered but what happened when we returned. Everyone ignored us. Or mocked us.”

“That’s not in Wilkes’s Narrative,” Dr. Boerhaave said.

“It’s not,” Erasmus agreed. “Who ever writes about the failures?”

Yet this was the part he couldn’t get past, the part that had twisted all the years since. Wilkes court-martialed on eleven charges and then, in a fury of wounded pride, impounding all the diaries and logbooks and journals and charts, and all the specimens.

“He took our notes,” Erasmus said. “Our drawings, our paintings—he took them all.”

Back in Washington, the specimens that hadn’t been lost in transit disappeared like melting ice. Wilkes had compelled the Scientifics to work on what was left there in Washington, although all the good comparative collections and libraries were in Philadelphia. Then he’d ruined what work they completed. They’d come back to a country in the midst of a depression; what the men in Congress wanted wasn’t science but maps and guides to new sealing and whaling grounds. Wilkes, with his endless charts, had satisfied the politicians. But meanwhile he delayed the expedition’s scientific reports again and again.

“And then,” Erasmus said, “after Titian Peale and I had spent years working on the mammals and birds and writing up our volume, Wilkes said it wasn’t any good, and he blocked its publication.”

He stopped; he couldn’t imagine telling Dr. Boerhaave how he’d retreated from Washington to the safety of the Repository, turning finally to his seeds. Half living at home, half not; most of the privacy he’d required, without the fuss of having to set up an independent household. When he desired the kind of company he wouldn’t want his family to meet, he visited certain establishments downtown or returned to Washington for a few days. Small comforts, but they were all he’d had as he wasted the prime of his young manhood. Although there were days when he’d deluded himself into thinking he might still salvage something resembling science from that voyage, in the end it was only Wilkes who’d triumphed. Despite his setbacks he’d had the great success of his Narrative. Even Dr. Boerhaave, across the ocean, had read it.

“It’s such a bad book,” Erasmus exclaimed. “Anyone knowing the people involved can see the pastiche of styles—the outright plagiarism of his subordinates’ diaries and logbooks. Wilkes made those volumes with scissors and paste, and an utter lack of honor. He stole the book, then had copyright assigned to him and reprinted it privately. It made him rich.”

“There’s a certain unevenness of style,” Dr. Boerhaave agreed. He picked at a frayed bit of whipping on a line. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know—that’s a terrible story.” The string unraveled in his hand. “It’s to your credit you’ve put that voyage behind you and joined up with Commander Voorhees.”

“It’s not a question of credit,” Erasmus said. Although he felt a wonderful sense of pardon, hearing those words. “Only—I want the chance to have one voyage go well. I want to discover things Wilkes can’t ruin. And—you know, don’t you, that my sister is engaged to marry Zeke?”

“I didn’t,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “I had no idea. Commander Voorhees never mentioned…you’ll be brothers-in-law?”

“I suppose,” Erasmus said. “Of course.” He picked up the scrap of string, unsure whether he should speak so personally. “My sister’s very dear to me,” he said. “Even though she’s so much younger—our mother died when she was born, I helped raise her. I came on this voyage partly because she wanted me to watch over Zeke. He’s so young, sometimes he’s a bit…impulsive.”

“So he is,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “You’re a kind brother.”

Was that kindness? He’d lost the person he loved; he wanted to spare Lavinia that. Surely that was his simple duty. He asked, “Do you have brothers and sisters, yourself?”

Dr. Boerhaave smiled wryly. “One of each,” he said. “Both in Sweden, both married—excellent but completely unremarkable people. They’ve never been able to understand why I wanted to travel, or why I should be so entranced by the arctic. We write letters, but almost never see each other. They’re very good about looking after our parents.”

He was cut off, Erasmus thought. Cut off from home; or free from ties to home. What did that feel like? “And in Edinburgh,” he asked, “…does someone wait for you there? A woman friend?”

“Friends,” Dr. Boerhaave said. Not boastingly, or in any indelicate way; just a simple statement. “Now and then, between trips, I’ve grown close to someone, and I stay in touch with them all. But every few years I go off like this, and it never seemed fair to get too entangled with any one woman, and then ask her to wait. I’ve been alone for so long it’s come to seem normal.”

He turned his head to follow a string of murres spangling, black and white, across the bow. “I love those birds,” he said. “The sound their wings make. What about you? Are you…does someone wait for you at home?”

“No one but my family—not since my fiancée passed on.”

“Such a pair of bachelors!” Dr. Boerhaave said.

There was a moment, then, as the murres continued pouring past them, in which anything might have been asked and answered. Erasmus might have asked what Dr. Boerhaave really meant by “alone”—with whom he shared that aloneness, and on what terms. Dr. Boerhaave might have asked Erasmus what he’d done since Sarah Louise’s death for love and companionship: surely Erasmus hadn’t dried up completely? But the moment passed and the two shy men asked nothing further of each other. Erasmus didn’t have to say that he’d lived like a monk, except for brief entanglements that had left him feeling lonelier than before; that he’d not been able to move past the feeling that if he couldn’t have Sarah Louise, he wanted no one. Or that, despite his love for his family, he’d often felt trapped living at home but hadn’t been able to move. Where would he move to? Every place seemed equally possible, equally impossible. His father had tried to be patient with him but once, irritated by an attack of shingles, he’d spoken sharply. Erasmus, he’d said, was like a walking embodiment of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Set moving, he moved until someone stopped him; stopped, he was stuck until pushed again. Just like you, Erasmus had wanted to say. But hadn’t.





THAT NIGHT HE lay in his bunk, mulling over what he’d revealed. Perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned that voyage at all—yet how could Dr. Boerhaave know him if he didn’t share the biggest fact of his life? All those wasted days. While he’d been stalled a host of other, younger men had thrown themselves into the search for Franklin. Now that search was also his.

Back home he’d resisted the frenzy surrounding any mention of Franklin’s name. That men sold cheap engravings of Franklin’s portrait on the streets, or that because of Franklin he and Zeke had been interviewed in the newspapers and had gifts pressed in their hands, had nothing to do with him. The syrupy letters of a Mrs. Myers, saying she lived on a widow’s mite but wanted to donate three goose-down pillows to aid in their search; the way, when he ordered socks in a shop, clerks came out from behind their counters to ask questions in breathless voices, as if not only Franklin and his men were heroes but so were he and Zeke—that puffery had made him uneasy. He’d focused on the practical, the everyday. Still there might be men alive, living off the land or among the Esquimaux; he and Zeke searched for them, not just for Franklin.

As he’d told Dr. Boerhaave the story of his earlier voyage, he’d seen how different it was from his present journey. This one was worthwhile. This one meant something. And when he finally slept, he dreamed he saw a column of men walking away from a ship. The ship was sinking, slowly and silently; the men turned their backs to it. Erasmus could see faces. A blond man with a broken nose, a short man with dark eyes and a mole on his chin. But not Franklin, nor any of the officers; no one whose portrait had been reproduced in the newspapers. Simply a group of strangers, waiting for help.

The dream both embarrassed and delighted him. Since the days of his first expedition, he’d not let himself admire anyone, nor been willing to bend his life to follow something greater. But he woke rejuvenated, feeling as if a great hand had reached down and brushed him from an eddy back into the current.





AS THEY CONTINUED to struggle through Melville Bay, Zeke rolled off the names of the headlands they passed and said wistfully, “Wouldn’t you like to have your name on something here?” Around his berth he’d built a rodent’s nest of maps and papers. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to discover something altogether new?”

At night he pored over the accounts of Parry and Ross and Scoresby, sometimes reading passages aloud to the men while he paced the decks and they worked. He showed little interest in the amphipods Erasmus found clinging to the warping lines, or the snow geese and terns and ivory gulls that swooped and sailed above them. Nor was he interested in the miraculous refractions, which painted images in the sky near the sun. Sometimes whole bergs seemed to lift themselves above the horizon and float on nothingness, but Zeke no longer raptured over them. And Erasmus noticed that Zeke’s journal—a handsome volume, bound in green silk, which Lavinia had given him—showed only a few scrappy entries.

“You’ve had no time?” Erasmus asked.

Zeke shook his head. “I keep meaning to,” he said. “Lavinia made me promise I’d write in here, for her to read when we get back. But it’s so large, and water spots the cover—and anyway I have this.”

He showed Erasmus another notebook; he’d been keeping it for several years, he said, under his pillow at night and in his pocket during the day. Erasmus stared at the battered black volume, troubled that he hadn’t known about it before.

“I started it when I began wishing I could do something to find Franklin,” Zeke said. “It’s where I keep notes on things I’ve read, little reminders to myself, and so forth.”

He held it out and Erasmus read the pages where it fell open. The titles of four books Zeke meant to read and seven he’d recently read, a letter to the Philadelphia paper praising Jane Franklin’s continued quest for her husband, some thoughts about scurvy and its prevention (FRESH MEAT, underlined twice. In the men, watch for bleeding gums, spots and swollenness of lower limbs, opening of old sores and wounds), a recipe for pemmican, a drawing of a sledge runner, a Philadelphia merchant’s quoted price for enough tobacco to supply the crew for eighteen months.

“Interesting,” Erasmus said, although he was taken aback by this hodgepodge. Where was the urgency of their quest? “I can see this is where you kept track of what you learned while we were planning the trip. But what about now? Don’t you—describe things? Write about what you’ve seen each day, and the progress we’re making?”

“That’s not important,” Zeke said. On the cabin table a candle burned, casting improbable shadows. “Or not as important as planning ahead for what’s to come. I like to use this for thinking, writing down what’s really significant. Captain Tyler may run this brig on a daily basis. But I’m the one with the vision. I’m the one who has to keep us on track in the largest sense.”

“I could do the mundane part,” Erasmus offered. “Keep a record of our daily life, I mean. Then you’d be free to keep a more personal account.”

“Why don’t you take this?” Zeke said, indicating Lavinia’s gift. “It’s a good size, you’ll have plenty of room.” He lifted a stack of pages and let them slip along his thumb: a whirring noise, like wing beats. “When we get home, we can tell Lavinia we worked on it together.”





THE WIND GREW fierce again. Not far from Cape York, Zeke gave in to Captain Tyler’s wishes and ordered a dock cut in the land-fast ice, where they might shelter until the gale passed. Above them a glacier poured between two cliffs crowded with nesting murres: black rock streaked with streams of droppings, the clean white river of ice; more soiled rock secreting waves of ammonia and an astonishing squawking noise. As birds left their eggs to seek fish in the cracks between the floes, a hunting party fired at them. Dr. Boerhaave, perched on a boulder, stayed behind to examine the parasites in the slaughtered birds’ feathers. Zeke and Erasmus and Joe headed up the glacier’s tongue.

They climbed joined by a long rope, which Joe looped around their waists as protection against the crevasses. Wissy, attached to Zeke by a separate rope, led; then Zeke and behind him Erasmus, who kept listing to the glacier’s edge where it met the cliff, and where plants grew in the rocky, sheltered hollows. Chickweeds and sorrel and saxifrages, willows hardly bigger than his hand—but Zeke pulled on him like a farmer tugging a reluctant cow. In the rear Joe called out instructions when he detected a weakness in the ice. The lichens alone, Erasmus thought, would have repaid a week’s visit; he didn’t have a minute with them. The heaps of envelopes he’d brought for seeds were useless. The white bells of arctic heather like dwarfed lilies of the valley, the inch-high tangle of rhizomes, everything spreading vegetatively in a season too short for most plants to set seeds—he should be taking notes, copious notes, but they were moving too fast.

What was Zeke pulling him toward? A rough, craggy object half-embedded in the ice; he was missing his chance with the cliffside plants for the sake of a rock. By the time he caught up to Zeke, about to complain, Zeke was digging out one side of the boulder, assisted by Wissy’s frantic paws. “What’s so interesting?” Erasmus asked.

“I don’t know,” Zeke said. “It caught my eye, it looked so out of place—what is this doing here?”

Erasmus bent and saw that the side of the boulder opposite his hands was chipped and fractured in a way that suggested human interference. Elsewhere was a crust he recognized. “It’s a meteorite,” he told Zeke, annoyed that he hadn’t discovered it himself.

Joe caught up to them, out of breath, and inspected the chipped side. “One of the iron stones!” he exclaimed.

“Why do you call it that?” Erasmus asked. He could feel where flakes the size of fingernails were missing.

“There are Esquimaux around here,” Joe said. “The ones Ross called Arctic Highlanders. Even as far south as Godhavn we’ve heard stories of how they use the odd rocks stuck in the glaciers. They chip harpoon heads from them.”

Erasmus inspected the rock more closely and probed it with his knife: a siderite, he decided, metallic iron alloyed with nickel. A similar specimen had fallen in Gloucestershire in 1835—but how remarkable to find one here! And for Joe to know the story that made sense of it. “Ever since Ross explored this area, people have been wondering about the source of the northern tribe’s iron,” he said to Zeke. “They must have been getting it from this stone, or from others like it.”

Joe nodded. “Somewhere near here are supposed to be three large ones, which the Esquimaux have named. And perhaps smaller ones like this as well.”

Zeke tapped the lumpy, dull-colored rock. “We can’t leave such an important discovery here.”

“You can’t take it,” Joe exclaimed. “The natives need these. They call them saviksue, they believe they have a soul.”

Erasmus looked at Joe, at Zeke, at the rock. He couldn’t help himself, he coveted it.

“Them,” Zeke said. “You acknowledge yourself that there are others. I’m only taking this small one.”

Over Joe’s protests Zeke and Erasmus chipped the ice away with their knives, until the rock was free. It was as heavy as a man. “Just help us roll it to the ship,” Zeke begged; and Joe finally agreed.

In the eerie pink light they sweated and struggled and pushed, all the time hearing the distant gunshots and the indignant roar of the birds. Erasmus, as the angle of the glacier grew steeper, slipped near a patch of meltwater and fell. Joe and Zeke, roped on either side of him, tumbled seconds later. The meteorite, free of their hands, rolled clumsily as they untied the knots that tangled them. It gathered speed and lurched down slantwise, leaping over a last ridge of ice to plunge into the gap where the glacier had pulled away from the side of the cliff.

Erasmus heard it shatter and leapt to his feet. Running after it, too late to save it, stumbling and slipping and hoping, still, that he might retrieve a piece, he stayed upright most of the way down the glacier but skidded off the last, lowest ledge. He was flying; his eyes were open. He was arcing over the stony shore, heading for the ice, praying that he’d die quickly. He saw a patch of darkness the size of a dining-room table, an open pool in the ice; then he was underwater. Then under ice.

The water burned him like fire and scoured his mouth and eyes, but even as he thrashed and struggled and felt his limbs numb he saw the fish schooling around his legs, and the murres serenely swimming like fish, and the cool, green, glowing underside of the ice. He had a few minutes, he thought, remembering Ivan’s near drowning. No more. Something shimmered white: belugas? He fainted, or froze, or drowned. When he came to himself again he was looking up at Dr. Boerhaave’s anxious face.

“Am I alive?” he asked.

“Just barely,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Ned pulled you out.”

“Did you see the meteorite?”

Dr. Boerhaave shook his head.





THEY COULDN’T RECOVER even a single piece of the stone before Captain Tyler hurried the Narwhal into a suddenly open lead. In his berth, recovering from his chilly bath, Erasmus rested for a day. When he felt better he thanked Ned.

“It was nothing,” Ned said. “I was gutting a fish, looking right at the hole in the ice where you landed. All I did was run over with the boat hook.”

With Dr. Boerhaave’s help, Erasmus wrote up a description of the meteorite to send to Edinburgh. The weather grew fine—warm during the day; just below freezing during the gleaming north light that was as close as they came to night—and as Erasmus wrote to Dr. Boerhaave’s friend he noted the odd combination of summer and winter features: cool air, hot sun; black cliffs, white ice. On the cloudless day when they reached the North Water, he felt as though he were home during harvesttime.

The air was warm, the water gleaming like steel and the icebergs elevated against the horizon. The men had stripped off most of their clothes. Mr. Tagliabeau was urging them on at the capstan bars when the lookout shouted, “We’re here!” and the brig broke into open water. All hands stopped work and gave three cheers. Mr. Tagliabeau and Captain Tyler embraced one another and then, to Erasmus’s astonishment, shook Zeke’s hand. Joe broke out his zither and played several cheerful tunes; Captain Tyler ordered the sails set; and they were free of the pack.




3 A RIOT OF OBJECTS (#ulink_2d7d37e8-e1e0-503a-aedc-ec8c2dfd236e)


(JULY–AUGUST 1855)

It was homeward bound one night on the deep

Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep.

I dreamed a dream and thought it true

Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew.

With a hundred seamen he sailed away

To the frozen ocean in the month of May

To seek that passage around the pole

Where we poor sailors do sometimes go.

In Baffin’s Bay where the whalefish blow

The fate of Franklin no man may know.

The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell

Franklin and his men do dwell.

Through cruel hardships they vainly strove.

Their ships on mountains of ice was drove

Where the eskimo in his skin canoe

Was the only man to ever come through.

And now my hardship it brings me pain.

For my long lost Franklin I’d plow the main.

Ten thousand pounds would I freely give

To know on earth if Franklin do live.

—“LADY FRANKLIN’S LAMENT”

(TRADITIONAL BALLAD)





In her diary, Alexandra wrote:

On the calendar Lavinia keeps by our desks, she not only crosses off each passing day but counts the days remaining until October. She’s embarrassed when I catch her doing this, embarrassed to catch herself doing it. When we visit Zeke’s family, she wraps her arms around Zeke’s black dogs and buries her nose in their fur; the smell reminds her of him, she claims, his clothes often carried a faint odor of dog. But otherwise she puts up a brave front and tries not to talk about her worries.

Still, I can see how distracted she is and how hard she finds it to concentrate. Apart from her anxieties, she’s not used to sustained periods of work. I remind myself that at least I had my parents throughout my childhood, while she had no mother at all: of course this has shaped her, as has life with her brothers. On Tuesday, while we were trying to mix a difficult shade of greenish blue, she told me she was often invited to join in when their father read to them—if she wasn’t taking drawing lessons, or piano lessons, or being instructed in cookery or the management of the household—but she listened with only half an ear, sure she’d never use that knowledge. Erasmus and Copernicus would travel; Linnaeus and Humboldt would learn to engrave the plates and print the books that resulted from other men’s travels. But always, she said, always I knew I’d be left at home. So why bother to learn those lessons well?

Because, I wanted to say. Because there is something in the learning; and because we can never tell what we may someday need. Instead I pointed to our paints. When you were taking drawing lessons, I said, did you ever think we’d be doing this? It is my hope to distract her with the pleasures of our task.

We completed the plates of the annelids today and then Lavinia worked on her trousseau, arranging piles of embroidered white lawn and ribbon-threaded muslin. Waists and knickers, nightgowns and petticoats—most made by two young sisters, half French, from Chester. Her own stitching is clumsy, but she’s good enough not to ask me for helpeven though she knows I’ve sometimes supported myself by sewing. I told her something she didn’t know about me—in her back issues of the Lady’s Book, which she saves religiously, I pointed out the plates I colored by hand for Mr. Godey. A gown in green and yellow, not so different from a beetle’s wing covers, made her smile. “You could do this,” I told her. “If you don’t like working with plants and animals, I could help you find work coloring fashion plates when we’re done with the book.” She told me her brothers would think that frivolous work, especially as she has no need to earn her living.

We have two pair of cardinals nesting in the mock-orange near my window. A cecropia moth hatched from the cocoon Erasmus left on the windowseat. Last night my family came for dinner, and after we talked about the antislavery speeches Emily attended in Germantown, Harriet took me aside to whisper that she is with child again. Then Browning clumsily asked if we’d had any news. Of course this upset Lavinia. No mail, I answered quickly. Not yet. But it’s too soon for the whalers with whom the brig might cross paths to have returned to port.

After they left we read out loud to each other, as we do most evenings. Lavinia reads from Mary Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein and his monster; I read from Parry’s journal. The journal of the first voyage, when Parry was hardly older than Zeke and when his men were all in their early twenties; the one during which everything went right. Fine weather, remarkable explorations, good hunting, starry skies. This is how Zeke and Erasmus are faring, I said.

But later, after we went to our separate rooms, I read secretly in the journal of Parry’s second voyage. I never raise the subject of the Winter Island and Igloolik Esquimaux with Lavinia; if she knew what Parry hinted at about the women and their relationships with his men, she’d worry about this too. I lie in the dark and dream about that place and those people. I’d give anything to be with Zeke and Erasmus. Anything. I’m grateful for this position but sometimes I feel so confined—why can’t my life be larger? I imagine those Esquimaux befriended by Parry and his crew: the feasts and games, the fur suits, the pairs of women tattooing each other, gravely passing a needle and a thread coated withlampblack and oil under the skin of their faces and breasts. I dream about them. I dream about the ice, the snow, the ice, the snow.

SURROUNDED BY THAT ice and snow, Erasmus dreamed of home—less and less often, though, as the brig passed down Lancaster Sound. Around him were breeding terns and gulls, snow geese and murres, eiders and dovekies; the water thick with whales and seals and scattered plates of floe ice; a sky from which birds dropped like arrows, piercing the water’s skin. Sometimes narwhals tusked through the skin from the other side, as if sniffing at the solitary ship. They hadn’t seen another ship since passing a few whalers at Pond’s Bay, yet Erasmus was far from lonely. Dazzled, he looked at the cliffs, and knew Dr. Boerhaave shared his dazzlement.

“Anchor,” he begged Zeke. “Let us have some time up there.”

But Zeke said their schedule didn’t leave a minute to spare. Finally, when they tied up to an iceberg to take on fresh water, Erasmus was granted four hours. Ned and Sean Hamilton rowed him and Dr. Boerhaave to the base of a kittiwake rookery.

“We’ll climb,” Erasmus told Dr. Boerhaave. He was trembling, longing to split himself into a hundred selves who might see a hundred sights. “Straight up, and gather what we can.” To Ned and Sean, wandering along the bouldered shore, he handed a small cloth bag. “Put plants in here,” he said. “If you see anything interesting, while you’re walking…” Then he and Dr. Boerhaave began their ascent up the bird-plastered rock, guns and nets strapped to their backs.

Four hours, which passed like a sneeze. They brought back adult birds, eggs, dead chicks, and nests. On the Narwhal, Ned added the cloth bag to their treasures. “We walked east for a while,” he said. “We found a little field.” He reached into the specimen bag and spread handfuls of vegetation on the deck. “I brought you these,” he said. “Are they what you wanted?”

Erasmus turned over the bits; Ned had picked leaves and branches and single flowers, rather than carefully gathering whole plants complete with the roots. Back home Erasmus had barked at the maid when she dared to move his drying plants; here he blamed the mess on himself. He hadn’t realized anyone wouldn’t know how to take a proper specimen. Still he and Dr. Boerhaave were able to identify the little gold-petaled poppies and four varieties of saxifrage. Ned, Erasmus saw with some chagrin, had found a regular arctic meadow, which he himself had missed.

“You did wonderfully,” Erasmus said. “Thank you for these. Let me just show you the way scientists like to collect a plant.”

Briefly he explained to Ned about root and stem and leaf and flower and fruiting body. Later, Ned wrote down Erasmus’s words almost verbatim, along with a sketch of a proper specimen and some definitions:



Herbarium is the name for a collection of dried plant specimens, mounted and arranged systematically. The object with the flat boards and the straps is a press. Mr. Wells means to preserve samples of each interesting plant, to name those he can by comparing them against his books, and to keep a list: that is his job here. Dr. Boerhaave helps him. I may help too, they say, if I learn what they show me. It’s like learning to read a different language—pistil, stamen, pinnate, palmate—not so hard but who would have thought a man could spend his life on this? I made salad from a red-leaved plant he calls Oxyria, which looks like the sheep sorrel at home. He was surprised that it tasted so good.

WHERE BEFORE THEY’D been in waters familiar to Captain Tyler and the mates, and where Zeke was at a disadvantage, now they were in places none of them knew. Zeke had the charts of the explorers preceding him; Zeke had done his reading. It gave him a kind of power, Erasmus saw. For the first time, the other officers were dependent on Zeke’s knowledge. It no longer mattered that Zeke had never been in the arctic before, nor that all his knowledge came from books. Ice was ice, islands were islands; channels showed up where he predicted. Book knowledge was all they had, and for a while Captain Tyler and the mates were rendered docile by their lack of it. No one argued with Zeke’s orders.

Thousands of narwhals accompanied the brig up the ice-speckled strait, filling the air with their heavy, spooky exhalations—as if, Erasmus thought, the sea itself were breathing. Animal company was the only sort they had. In place of the great fleet filling the Sound four years ago, during Dr. Kane’s first voyage, were those long-tusked little whales, and seals and walrus, and belugas everywhere. Extraordinarily beautiful, he thought. Smaller than he’d expected, a uniform creamy smoothness over bulging muscles, moving like swift white birds through the dark water.

Barrow Strait was empty as well. The stark and radiant landscape flashed by so fast that Erasmus found himself making strange, clutching movements with his hands, as if he might seize the sights that were denied him. Even when they reached the cairns on Cape Riley and then, on Beechey Island, the graves of three of Franklin’s seamen and the relics of their first winter quarters, they lingered only briefly. These were, Erasmus and Zeke agreed, the very sites that Dr. Kane and the others had discovered in ’51. From the water the gray gravel sloped gently upward, stopping at jagged cliffs. Against the background of those cliffs, the grave mounds and headstones were very small. Erasmus, Dr. Boerhaave, Zeke, and Ned examined the limestone slabs tessellated over two of the graves, and the little row of flat stones set like a fence around each mound.

“If we exhumed them,” Dr. Boerhaave said, “even one, and could determine what he died from, we might gain some clues to the expedition’s fate.”

Zeke stepped back from the mounds. A tremor passed from his hands up his arms and shoulders and then rippled across his face. “We’re not graverobbers,” he said. “Nor resurrection men. Those are Englishmen, men like our own crew. They’re entitled to lie in peace. And what would we learn from violating them?”

“Suppose they were starving?” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Already, that first winter. In this cold, enough…remains would be left that we might determine that.”

“If that was me in there,” Zeke said, “if that was you—bad enough they’ve been left here all alone. Nothing you’d learn would tell us anything about where the expedition went.”

He gazed down at the graves and then back at Dr. Boerhaave. “When you were in medical school,” he said, “did you…?”

“Well, of course,” Dr. Boerhaave said. As Zeke shook his head and walked away. Dr. Boerhaave smiled at Erasmus, who smiled back at his friend.

After the three of them left, Ned lingered behind for a minute, placing a stone on each grave and saying a prayer. He told no one of the strange hallucination that seized him later. As he rinsed salt meat in water from the stream that trickled above the graves, he imagined that water seeping into the coffins, easing around the seamen’s bodies, who had been young, like him. Beneath the first layers of gravel the ground was frozen, it never melted, and he saw the bodies frozen too, preserved forever; cherished, honored. The vision comforted him, yet also angered him. In Ireland he’d seen corpses stacked like firewood or tossed loosely into giant pits. Here, where no one might ever have seen them, three young Englishmen had each been given a careful and singular grave, a headstone chiseled with verses, a little fence.





TIME PRESSED ON them even more sharply after that first glimpse of the lost expedition. As the sails filled, bellied out in the brisk breeze, Zeke said, “Franklin must have turned the Erebus and the Terror down Peel Sound after leaving Beechey Island. The ice is so heavy to the west, and when you think about Rae’s report—where else could he have gone? It’s the only place the earlier ships didn’t look. They were all sure he’d gone north somehow, after finding the route blocked to the west. But how could any of his men have reached a place even close to King William Land, if not by way of Peel Sound?”

Simple logic, Erasmus thought. And so it must be true. Even Captain Tyler shrugged and agreed with Zeke. They turned south, sure they were following Franklin’s trail. After thirty-five miles of hard sailing, fighting against the encroaching ice, the Narwhal was finally turned back by solid pack. No time for regrets, Zeke said. He retraced their route, rounding the walls and ravines of North Somerset and sailing down the east coast as far as Bellot Strait. Through here, Zeke hoped to pass back into Peel Sound.

Bellot Strait was completely choked with ice. The men stood mashed together on the bow, muttering with disappointment: “God damn this ice!” Captain Tyler said, before disappearing below. Their last chance to reach King William Land by water had just disappeared, Erasmus knew, and with it any chance of finding Franklin’s ships. But they might still find traces of the expedition by land, as Rae had done. On Zeke’s order they continued southward, along the massive hills and into the Gulf of Boothia.

Zeke grew cool and distant, hardly speaking except to give orders and treating Captain Tyler as if he were the skipper of a ferryboat. He allowed no stops, neither for the men to hunt nor for Erasmus to gather specimens. The winds and currents here seemed to concentrate the ice, which poured into the bay from the north and then swirled and massed, several times almost crushing the brig. The men grew nervous and muttered among themselves. Out here, far from the traditional whaling grounds, they seemed to wake as a group from a dream. Why had they come? Because they needed work, Erasmus slowly understood; not because they were inspired by the expedition’s goals but because they’d needed jobs back in the spring, when Zeke was recruiting men. They’d signed on because the wages were good and because, despite all Zeke’s stories, they had not really been able to imagine their task. The men who’d never been to sea before had had no useful information, no way to imagine what lay before them; those with whaling experience must have imagined that searching for Franklin would be like searching for whales.

The idea of moving just for the sake of moving, pressing deeper and deeper into the ice with no assurance of reward, was as strange to them, Erasmus thought, as flensing a bowhead would have been to him. Every order Zeke gave brought a grumble: we should have anchored in Cresswell Bay; the men need fresh meat; the floes are scraping away the siding—Mr. Francis, Ned Kynd, Mr. Tagliabeau.

Fletcher Lamb, who was stropping his razor when they crashed into one of the monstrous bergs, jolted his hand and cut off the tip of his left ring finger. Two of the dogs, knocked to their feet, turned on each other and filled the air with chunks of fur and a spray of blood; a kettle slipped overboard. When the Narwhal was finally forced to stop, separated from King William Land by the full width of Boothia, the men began clamoring to turn around the same day they dropped anchor.

Discouraged, Erasmus stared at the charts. They’d not discovered even the smallest scrap of new coastline; the excellent map of the Rosses detailed every cove they saw. Yet here, no matter what the crew thought, they might begin their real search for any traces of Franklin and his men. This was the place, Erasmus thought: the true beginning after all. What began, instead, was the death of the dogs.

The dozen left after the earlier mishaps tore around the ship, raising and lowering their heads and tails and all the while barking furiously at some invisible threat. The lead dog, enormous and black, fell first: a damp heap at the base of the mainmast. His white-footed consort followed, then two of the puppies Joe had earlier saved: red-eyed, fevered, frothing. They turned on Zeke and Erasmus and Dr. Boerhaave, who worked frantically to help them. Dr. Boerhaave wrote:



Why did I never make time for some veterinary training? In my autopsies I’ve found nothing more than livers that appear to be mildly enlarged, but I can’t be sure of this: what does a healthy dog’s liver look like? At Godhavn we heard rumors of a mysterious disease among the dogs of southern Greenland, but our own appeared to be in perfect health and continued so throughout Lancaster Sound. I should have been paying more attention. I’m not sure of the course of rabies in canines but was forced to consider this, and when four fell on their sides, pawing at their jaws, I ordered them shot to prevent the spread of disease. Commander Voorhees, who is sentimental about animals, was furious with me and we had an argument—he can’t seem to grasp the idea that the sick dogs may endanger the men. In any event my efforts weren’t successful: we lost the last adult today and only Wissy and one other puppy are left. I’m grateful none of us were bitten. On dissection I found no apparent brain inflammation, nor anything unusual in the spinal cord or nerves. Why didn’t I think to bring along a book of veterinary medicine?

The flesh on Fletcher Lamb’s injured finger has begun to mortify beneath the bandage I applied. I’ve debrided and irrigated the wound, but remain worried.

ZEKE HAD BEEN keeping Wissy in the cabin, where he hoped she might be safe, but the day after the other remaining puppy died she began running about, crashing off the bunks and the walls. Zeke held her in his arms, despite her mad strength; he tried to feed her tidbits and wouldn’t let Dr. Boerhaave touch her. She squirmed and bit and then lay still, her head thrown back and her eyes blankly staring. Above her a tern cut through the rigging, back and forth and around the shrouds.

“You know what we have to do,” Dr. Boerhaave said.

Zeke handed her to Robert Carey, who’d proved his skill with a gun by obtaining numerous birds on Beechey Island. Afterward Zeke wouldn’t look at Dr. Boerhaave and nothing Erasmus said could console him. Dr. Boerhaave retreated to a corner on deck, turning a skull around in his long fingers and staring at his notes as if he might bring the dogs back to life. Caught between the two men, Erasmus wondered what the dogs’ deaths meant.

Here they were, he thought, blocked from further sailing by ice, and blocked from overland travel by the lack of it. The snow on the land was mostly gone, except high on the hills and in hidden hollows; the land-fast ice was heaved and cracked and waterlogged. Even if they could cross Boothia, the strait between its far side and King William Land could no longer be frozen solid, but must be a mass of loose and shifting floes. Sledging was impossible; sledge travel was meant for spring, when the sun had returned but the ice was smooth and solid everywhere. Why, then, had they brought dogs and sledges in the first place?

But he knew the answer. Ever since they’d acquired the dogs, he’d worried that Zeke meant to overwinter somewhere if the brig failed to reach its destination. Some of the crew must have guessed this as well, but they’d all wanted to believe the dogs wouldn’t be needed. Then, after every stage of their desired route had been blocked, Ned had seized Erasmus’s arm and said, “Some of the men say we won’t go home this summer now. That we’ll stay all winter, in the ice—is it true?”

Erasmus hadn’t known what to say. He’d seen Zeke take out a new set of maps and scribble in his little black book; but now the dogs were gone. Once, but only once, Zeke leaned his head against the mast and said, “I wonder if someone poisoned them.”

“You know that’s not true,” Erasmus said gently. Everyone else pretended not to hear him.

Joe, perhaps wishing to deflect attention from the dead dogs and Zeke’s foul mood, told stories that caused a different kind of uneasiness. The West Greenlanders among whom he’d lived, he said, had wonderfully designed harpoons and winter houses made of stone and turf with seal-intestine windows and seal-blubber lamps. How warm those houses could be in winter! So warm, he said, packed with bodies and lamps, that the women wore only fox-skin knickers unless they had visitors.

A hush fell over the men. For a moment, in that silence, they visualized warm, curved flesh decorated with those flirtatious frills. In Melville Bay they’d traded tales of the women who’d taken up with members of both Parry’s and Franklin’s earlier expeditions, and Ivan Hruska and Robert Carey had talked about Esquimaux men who’d brought their wives aboard the visiting ships and offered them in trade for knives and wood. Perhaps they’d all hoped for a similar chance.

“Of course we forbade this kind of display among our converts,” Joe said. “No nakedness, we told them. And no exchanging wives.” Afterward Erasmus, who’d overheard part of his story and seen the men’s faces, spoke sharply to him.





EVERYONE WAS TIRED and hungry for fresh meat; with Zeke still sulking over the dogs, Erasmus took matters into his own hands and went ashore July 28 with Isaac Bond. The first caribou he’d ever seen bolted across the boggy ground, fleeing before the swarms of insects and then before Isaac, who shot four times and brought down two. They peeled the skins off carefully. In their hindquarters, Erasmus found freshly laid eggs of the warble fly and, in the hides, hundreds of holes where the larvae of a previous year’s infestation had eaten their way out. Isaac, wielding a long knife, regarded the skinned purple carcasses and said they weren’t so different from the deer he’d hunted as a boy. He cut off the heads, took out the tongues; peeled off the flesh, set the skulls aside.

Side by side they crowned a rock, antlers branching above white bone and lidless eyes. Erasmus, under their gaze, knelt and pointed out the joints most easily severed. Left went the knife, and right and left and down: intestines steaming, a large smooth liver, stomach pouring out masses of green paste. In another pile ribs and shoulders, haunches and loins and tongues. They wrapped the meat in the skins and Erasmus hefted his end of one bloody bundle and then froze at the sight of his own reflection in the eyes. The thread of their voyage had broken, he thought, the plot unraveled, the point disappeared; nothing was left but the texture of each moment and the feeling of his soul unfurling after years in a small dark box.

“Are you all right?” Isaac said. “Is this too heavy?”

The caribou were watching themselves being carried away. “Let’s try to drag the bundles,” Erasmus said. “Down to the boat.”

The odd humming feeling persisted in his head. And when he and Isaac climbed aboard the Narwhal and found Zeke standing on the quarterdeck with Joe, talking to three Esquimaux while the crew gawked from the bow, at first Erasmus thought he’d hallucinated them.

“They’re so short,” Isaac whispered.

He stepped back toward the railing, and Erasmus involuntarily squeezed the meat in his arms. What if these strangers were dangerous? Or if the crew members did something to anger them? Zeke and Joe had no weapons; Erasmus, leaving Isaac to deal with the bloody mass, hurried to Zeke’s side.

Joe and the Esquimaux spoke at some length. Then the Esquimaux stood quietly while Joe explained that these people, very different in dress and habits from those they’d met at Godhavn, wandered inland each summer in small family groups, searching for caribou. The camp of this particular group, Joe said, was several miles away, out of sight of the ship—they’d seen the hunting party, and had sent a delegation to investigate. “They invite our leaders to their camp,” Joe said. “Three of us, to go with the three of them.”

Zeke said, “You and me, of course.” He was silent for a minute. “And Captain Tyler,” he added.

Erasmus felt a little thrill at the idea that his figure, crouched near the skulls, had been the sight that drew the Esquimaux; then a fierce disappointment that he should not be included in the delegation. When he took Zeke’s arm and begged to come, Zeke shook him off and said he couldn’t ignore Captain Tyler’s rank.

The crew watched in silence as the six men dropped down the side of the brig, rowed to shore, and disappeared over a low hill. Three and three, dressed entirely differently, Zeke’s pale hair glowing behind the darker heads. The crew murmured behind them: suppose they’re murderers; suppose they’re cannibals; suppose they’re plotting to return with a great crowd and take over the ship—Fletcher Lamb with his bandaged hand, Barton DeSouza, Robert Carey.

Out loud, over the muttered comments, Dr. Boerhaave said, “What if they don’t come back?”

“There’s no point in even thinking like that,” Erasmus said. Although he was worried himself; if something happened to Zeke, how would he explain to Lavinia that he’d stayed safely on the brig?

“Shall we look at the bones from the mergansers?” Dr. Boerhaave said. “I finished the other set while you were hunting.”

From the sea he pulled a dripping sack. The water was boiling with Cancer nugax; he and Erasmus had learned to take advantage of the little shrimps’ hunger, hanging their roughly cleaned skeletons over the side in a fine-mesh net. Erasmus, still distracted, opened the sack to find that the voracious creatures had cleaned everything perfectly. The sight of the disarticulated bones calmed him a bit.

Dr. Boerhaave, making notes, said, “I’m ashamed to admit this, but—don’t you sometimes experience the search for Franklin’s remains as just…distraction? I wish our only task was simply to observe this amazing place and its creatures.” In the breeze his soft brown hair with its streaks of gray lifted from his forehead and fell and lifted again, like partridge feathers.

“But it’s not,” Erasmus said, clutching a fistful of wing bones. He looked down at the beautiful planes and knobs in his hands. Zeke would be fine, he had Joe to help him; the Esquimaux had seemed quite friendly. “But I know what you mean. Would you pass me that wire?”

When he looked up again it was early evening, and Zeke and Joe and Captain Tyler were hopping back onto the deck unharmed. Erasmus followed Zeke down into the empty cabin, a jawbone still in his hand.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

“It went well,” Zeke said. “Joe didn’t have much trouble interpreting—he says the dialect is similar to that of the West Greenlanders. They liked our gifts.”

Up on deck, Captain Tyler began lashing down everything movable. “Esquimaux will steal anything,” Erasmus heard him tell the men. “Everything. And you can be sure they’ll be visiting now that they know we’re here.”

“But—what were they like?” Erasmus asked Zeke. “What were they wearing? What were they eating? What do their dwellings look like inside?”

“Interesting,” Zeke said. “Different. I was concentrating on the conversation with our host. Don’t you want to know if I heard any news of Franklin?” A huge smile split his face. “I’ve been waiting years for this,” he said. “Don’t you understand? Ever since I was a boy reading your father’s books.”

Suddenly he looked like that boy again, and Erasmus was reminded of something Lavinia had told him a few days after her birthday party. “How can I discourage him from this trip?” she’d said. “We fell in love talking about Franklin, you don’t know how many hours I’ve spent listening to his stories and plans. He cherishes that in me, he says he loves the way I listen.” Erasmus had asked her if she truly shared Zeke’s enthusiasm, and she’d sworn she did. Or at least one part of it: “I admire Franklin’s wife,” she’d said. “Her steadfastness.”

“I’m sorry,” Erasmus said, abashed. “Of course I want to know.”

“I asked the oldest man point-blank if he’d ever seen a ship frozen in the ice, or white men marching anywhere around here,” Zeke said. “He said no but I thought I saw him exchange a look with the man sitting next to him. They’ve asked us to return tomorrow. Will you come?”





OF COURSE ERASMUS went, as did Ned, Mr. Tagliabeau, Thomas Forbes, several other men, and Joe—still their only interpreter, despite all the evenings Zeke had spent with him, transcribing into his black book Joe’s version of the Esquimaux names for things. This time Captain Tyler, Mr. Francis, and a small detachment stayed behind to guard the ship. Dr. Boerhaave nearly stayed behind as well; Fletcher Lamb had returned to his hammock, complaining of shooting pains in his limbs and face, and Dr. Boerhaave was worried. But there was nothing he could do for Fletcher after giving him a few drops of laudanum, and so he joined the delegation.

They carried offerings of duff and dried apples, as well as knives and needles and files and beads to barter. Over the hills they went, into a rough and scrubby land bare of trees and veiled by a light drizzle. As they walked Erasmus listened to Joe, who was trying to teach Zeke some things about this group called the Netsilik. Now and then Erasmus bent to gather pebbles; he’d been lax, he felt, about examining the area’s geological structure.

“You might want to be a bit more…cautious,” Joe was saying to Zeke. “About asking directly for information; it’s not these people’s nature to respond to pointed questions, they dislike being cross-examined. And if I could let them know that we’ll barter for everything they tell us, that they’ll be rewarded?”

“Fine,” Zeke said impatiently. “Fine, fine, fine.”

Erasmus and the others could hardly keep up with him. In the treeless, featureless landscape, the six tents forming the camp stood out starkly. A bunch of dogs, tied away from the tents, howled like wolves.

“They’d eat the tents in an instant if they were free,” Joe said as they approached. All around, on the rough stony ground, were dog carcasses, bits of rotted meat and blubber, and broken bones. Thomas Forbes tripped over something and Dr. Boerhaave, bending down, said, “I believe that’s a human femur.” The bone was still shrouded in bits of leathery skin.

Thomas leaped backward, stumbling on the shallow pit in which the bone had been interred. The flat pieces of limestone meant to cover the body were small and quite light, Erasmus saw, and had clearly been pushed aside by a hungry fox or a dog. Thomas cursed and then bent over, very pale.

Joe said, “It’s not what you think. It’s not that they disrespect their dead: but they believe that a heavy weight placed upon the deceased’s body hinders the spirit from moving on. Of course the dogs uncover them, the dogs are always hungry.”

“Savages,” Thomas said. Later he would disappear for a day in the company of a young Netsilik woman, recently widowed, whatever discomfort he felt with the tribe’s habits apparently overcome. But now Erasmus saw Thomas look with dislike on the man who emerged from a strong-smelling tent to greet them. The stranger had a sparse moustache and a tuft of hair between his chin and his lower lip; the bottom of his nose was bent to one side, as if it had been broken but not set. When he spoke, Erasmus heard the word kabloona.

“White man,” Joe translated. In the light rain they stared at each other. The tent, Erasmus saw, was too small for them all to sit inside. They seated themselves on stones just in front of its opening.

Everything smelled of caribou. Behind him Erasmus could see how the rain saturated the hides, which hung heavily on the poles; how the rain dripped through the tiny holes drilled by warble flies when the animals had still been alive. Here too there were animal skulls, scores of skulls, jaws and eye sockets tilted among rocks and lichens. Zeke and the man who’d welcomed them—Oonali, he called himself—did all the talking, with Joe acting as interpreter. In return for the clasp knives and tobacco Zeke offered, and after Zeke had made it clear that he’d be honored to see Oonali’s hunting outfit, Oonali brought out a bow and some arrows that Zeke admired.

“I’d love to bring these home to the Toxophilites,” he said to Erasmus. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

Erasmus was scratching steadily in Lavinia’s journal—he couldn’t write fast enough, he couldn’t get down all the details. He sketched the bow: fir strengthened with bone and made more elastic by cunning springs of plaited sinew. He didn’t sketch the curiously twisted bowstring or the slate-headed arrows, as Zeke had by then arranged to trade a pair of axe heads for the entire outfit. Next to him Dr. Boerhaave scribbled similarly, while Ned, who’d stuck his head beneath the door flap, turned his head slowly from one view to the next. Whalebone vessels and walrus-tusk knives, spoons made from what looked to be hollowed-out bones.




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