Solomon Gursky Was Here (54 page)

Until we meet—I wish you well.

Ignoring him, Izzy fed the turnkeys ribald stories and stuffed their pockets with guineas. As a consequence, Ephraim was tossed a straw mattress that evening and discovered he now had a line of credit in the prison taproom. He promptly loosened the old boatman's tongue with gin and tobacco for his pipe.

The Orkney boatman, his voice hoarse, complained to Ephraim about the ruinous addiction of the Cree to spirituous liquors, and how they had become debased by their undying thirst for the noxious beverage, cursed to live out their days without any of the consolations which the Christian religion never fails to afford. A vain, fickle, and indolent race, he said, given to seducing each other's wives.

The boatman, given to fits of shivering, obviously feverish, would doze fitfully from time to time, coming abruptly awake to demand more gin and to resume his tale as if he had never let off. “I have seen reindeer too numerous to count, the herd extending as far as the horizon, and learned to eat its flesh raw.” The staple food for the voyage, he said, was pemmican, buffalo meat, dried and pounded with melted fat. But there were times, the boatman allowed, when fish and fowl were plentiful. River salmon, jack fish, the singular and beautiful gold eye, which could be caught in nets in the spring at Cumberland House. There was also ptarmigan, Canada grouse, mallard and wild swan.

Ephraim, who had never heard of such things, hungered for more details, but dared not interrupt the cantankerous boatman's flow.

If the boatman disapproved of savages, he also pitied them, his unbridled contempt reserved for the Canadian
voyageurs,
a riotous
lot, lazy and complaining, who thought nothing of wintering in the fur forts with Indian wives of twelve years of age, whom they often bartered for a season to one or another of their rude companions. “When the cold abates, which you—in your ignorance—might consider a mercy, and the sun prevails day and night on the barrens, then do the mosquitoes begin to swarm everywhere, flying into your ears and mouth, a hellish torment, and the only thing for it is to light a fire, dampen it, and fill your tent with stinging smoke. Without a doubt, it is the land God gave to Cain.”

“Then why did you undertake such an arduous voyage in the first place?”

“I had no way of knowing.”

“True.”

“For my sins, of all the men assembled in Mr. Geddes's house on June 14, 1819 , I was one of the four who agreed to join the expedition, tempted by the promise of adventure and a wage of forty pounds annually as well as free passage back to the Orkney Islands. I was most impressed with the Christian character of Mr. Franklin. He bore with him a translation of the Gospel of St. John in the Esquimaux lingo printed by the Moravian Society in London. He also carried with him gifts to conciliate any savages we might encounter. Looking-glasses, beads, nails, tea kettles and so forth.”

In that stifling cell that crawled with lice, cockroaches, and sewer rats, that stank of excrement and urine and reverberated with the hacking of men already taken with typhus, Ephraim dreamt of a cool white land where the summer sun never set and herds of reindeer extended as far as the horizon. He was jolted awake when one of the boatman's tormentors crept close to him, pretending to be the Bellman on his eve of execution visit. Ephraim lunged at him, grabbing his hand. Then, even as the man cried out, Ephraim gave his hand an even sharper twist, seemingly determined on uprooting his arm from its socket. “Tell me the name of your companion in the far corner.”

“Larkin.”

“Well now, he was with me in the Steel and he can tell you about me.”

In the morning, after another discouraging stroll through the exercise yard, Ephraim wakened the old boatman with gin and filled his pipe with tobacco.

“I want the sodomites' sausages when they come,” the old man said.

“And you shall have them. Now tell me more.”

“I would also find a straw mattress most beneficial.”

“Take mine.”

Coughing, clearing his faltering lungs of phlegm, the old man told him that they had espied their first icebergs some ninety miles off the coast of Labrador. A day later the brilliant coruscations of the aurora borealis appeared to them. “We did not encounter any difficulties until we quit York Factory in a small boat, bound for the interior. Then we couldn't make progress on that damned Steel River by sail. The current was running too fast for using oars so we were bloody well bound to commence tracking.”

“I don't understand.”

“Then you are blessed. What I'm saying is that we had to drag the boat by a line to which we were harnessed like beasts of the field. This is not easy at the best of times, but these were the worst for anybody but a mountain goat, considering the steep declivity of the high banks and the soft slippery footing. Aye, we were fortunate indeed to advance at the rate of two miles an hour. Are you for the dance upon nothing?”

“I'm too young. And then?”

“And then the water in the Hill River was so low we were obliged to jump into it, though it was freezing, and this we did several times a day to lift the boat over our shoulders. And next came the sprouts, and we were leaping in and out of the boat all day, working in wet clothes in freezing temperatures. I take it you're a Four by Two.”

“Yes.”

The old man began to chortle. “Gin. Tobacco. Steak-and-kidney pie. The turnkeys dancing attendance. I thought as much.”

“Did you now?”

He held out his tumbler for more gin.

“You've had enough.”

“I want more, lad.”

“Then tell me more.”

It was the long trek back from the interior that really exorcised the boatman; a time when they had to contend with fearful famine and cold, the thieving of rations by the Canadian
voyageurs
and the unspeakable treachery of Michel Teroahauté. “We ate the skin and bones of deer and the storms raged without and within. Don't you see? Mr. Franklin had to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Separate them. Hood and Back. Sending Back on his long trek.”

“Why?”

“How can you be such an idiot?”

“I wasn't there.”

“Hood had already got a savage with child at Fort Enterprise and now he lusted after the little Copper Indian harlot—after Green Stockings—who couldn't have been more than fifteen years old. But Back, an even worse whoremonger, was also smitten. That brazen girl would bathe in cold streams, displaying her cunny to the officers on the bank, inflaming them. She lay with both of them in turn. They took her from behind, like a bitch in heat.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Why, if not for me those two midshipmen would have fought a duel. I consulted with Dr. Richardson and then I removed the charges from their pistols. Then it was that Mr. Franklin sent Back away for the winter.”

“You were spying on the girl.” “I did no such thing. Mind, I did stumble on them fornicating in the bush once. Aye, and it was a disgusting sight. Not to you or your kind, perhaps, who have denied Christ. But you must understand that my Christian upbringing stood me no matter how far from civilization.”

“Though not necessarily when you came back to it.” “I am here falsely accused by my daughter and the court will see that soon enough. Now I must get some sleep.”

Prowling the men's courtyard the next morning, cursing the
chevaux de frise,
Ephraim loitered once again under the water cistern
that protruded immediately below the revolving spikes at the corner of the yard. And once again he saw that the turnkeys did not keep a constant watch on it. Back in his cell he roused the old boatman with gin and tobacco and pleaded with him to resume his tale.

“But where was I?”

“Mr. Back had been sent off to search for supplies and the rest of you were driven to eating deer skin.”

“Aye, for we had been abandoned by vile Akaitcho and his band of heathens. And by this time poor Mr. Hood was much inconvenienced by dimness of sight, giddiness, and other symptoms of sin, and we had to make frequent halts. Now did I tell you that Belanger and Ignace Perrault, unable to go on, had been left behind in a tent with a gun and forty-eight balls?”

“No. You did not.”

“That was the case. And then one morning Michel Teroahauté claimed that he had seen a deer pass near his sleeping place and he went off to chase him. He couldn't find him. But, he said, he had come by a wolf which had been gored by a deer and he brought portions of it back to camp. Only after we had eaten it did we grasp that it must have been a portion of the flesh of either Belanger or Perrault, both of whom the savage had slain, and then gone at their frozen bodies with a hatchet.”

Such was the failing boatman's increasing agitation that the rest of his tale was too garbled for Ephraim to comprehend, but he did sort out that in the days that followed the gale was relentless. Teroahauté, left alone with Mr. Hood in a tent, apparently murdered him with a shot of his gun. The priapic Mr. Hood died by the camp-fire,
Bickersteth's Scripture Help
lying next to his body, as if it had tumbled from his hand at the instant of his death. A raging Teroahauté then heaped scorn on the rest of the company. Dr. Richardson, alarmed to see Teroahauté now armed with two pistols, and an Indian bayonet, took advantage of an opportune moment and killed him with a shot through the head with his own pistol.

The boatman suddenly clutched at Ephraim, his good eye bulging, a rattle rising in his throat, and then fell back, dying, his tale incomplete. Searching his person Ephraim found a soiled and torn sketch
of a beautiful nude Indian girl, whom he would learn years later was Green Stockings, the daughter of Kesharrah, the prize that made such unforgiving enemies of Hood and Back.

Also years later, once he himself had become familiar with the barrens, Ephraim would discover that it was the vile Akaitcho and his Indian band that ultimately rescued the starving party, bringing them dried deer meat, some fat, and a few tongues.

Before parting with the survivors of Franklin's party, Akaitcho, denied his promised reward of goods, said to them: “The world goes badly, all are poor, you are poor, the traders appear to be poor, and I and my party are poor likewise; and since the goods have not come in, we cannot have them. I do not regret having supplied you with provisions, for a Copper Indian can never permit white men to suffer from want of food on his lands, without flying to their aid. I trust, however, that we shall, as you say, receive what is due to us next autumn; and in all events it is the first time that the white people have been indebted to the Copper Indians.”

Hours after the Orkney boatman had died his body was dumped into a cart and taken to St. Bartholomew's Hospital to be privately dissected.

The next morning in the exercise yard Ephraim saw that the wall by the water cistern was still unattended. Back braced painfully against the rough stone, he slithered up the wall, just as he had once been taught by a sweep's climbing boy. He grasped the cistern and shot over its crown. His back badly torn, he then made a grab for the rusty bar supporting the
chevaux de frise
and edged along it until he came to the Press Yard buildings. There he risked a jump of nine feet to the roof, spraining his ankle, but still managing to hobble clear of Newgate and the adjoining buildings. Emerging on the sloping roof of a house on a nearby street, he rested briefly, concealed behind a chimney stack, hugging his throbbing ankle. Then he slid down a drainpipe to the street and made directly for Izzy Garber's lodging in Wentworth Street, where he could count on a healing salve for his torn back, a warming fire, meat pies and wine, and ribald stories.

Three

THE

NEWGATE CALENDAR

IMPROVED

Being

INTERESTING MEMOIRS

of

NOTORIOUS CHARACTERS

Who have been convicted of Offences

AGAINST THE LAWS OF ENGLAND

During the seventeenth century; and continuing to the present time, chronologically arranged;

COMPRISING

WITH

Occasional Remarks on Crimes and Punishments,
Original Anecdotes, Moral Reflections and Observations
on particular Cases; Explanations of the Criminal
Laws, the Speeches, Confessions, and
LAST EXCLAMATIONS OF SUFFERERS.

EPHRAIM GURSKY

Several times convicted—sentenced once to Coldbath Fields, once to Newgate— And finally, on October 19, 1835, transported to Van Diemen's Land.

Perhaps never natural talents were more perverted than by that notorious Jew, Ephraim Gursky, celebrated for his daring escape from Newgate in
The Weekly Dispatch
and
The People's Journal
. We could scarcely believe that even in the melancholy catalogue of crimes, a young man proficient in Latin, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish (the patois of his people), could be found descending to the degraded character of forgerer of official documents and letters, ravisher, panderer, and gentleman pickpocket.

Ephraim Gursky was born in Liverpool. By his own account his father, Gideon Gursky, was a Jew of Russian origin. He had been a well-known opera singer in Moscow until an affair with the Baroness K., a favourite of the Czar, had led to a scandal, and the lovers had been obliged to flee for their lives. Ephraim claimed to be the issue of that ill-starred union. After his mother died in childbirth, he was raised as a Jew by his father's second wife, whose maiden name was Katansky. Gideon Gursky earned his living as a cantor in a Liverpool synagogue. Though not affluent, he sent young Ephraim to school. Ephraim made indifferent progress, and gave early evidence of a daring and wicked disposition. While among his companions, if any mischievous project was set on foot, young Ephraim was sure to be their leader, and promoted it as far as in his power. Weary of the floggings he endured by the hand of his cruel stepmother, who constantly reproached him for both his bastardy and Christian blood, Ephraim ran away from home at the age of twelve. He worked in the coal mines in Durham and added to his income by delivering newspapers in a nearby village. There he was noticed and patronized by a gentle schoolmaster, Mr. William Nicholson, who taught him Latin and penmanship. As a reward for such kindness, Ephraim absconded with Mr. Nicholson's sterling silver candlesticks and, consequently, a complaint to this effect was made to the local constabulary by Mrs. Nicholson.