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Authors: Robert Edric

BOOK: The Broken Lands
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“The stomach,” Stanley said.
“Empty.” Goodsir raised the limp bag and severed its connecting pipes.
“Then poisoned by what? A single can of food, an unfortunate coincidence?”
Goodsir could not deny this. He continued his examination of the liver, and after this the spleen, frustrated that no other explanation had so far suggested itself to him.
“I think you might close up the body,” Stanley said as he washed his hands and prepared to leave. “And I think we might all say our prayers that no one else has so far exhibited any symptoms.”
Goodsir nodded his agreement. He returned the organs and then pulled the flaps of skin back into position, securing these with a
dozen crude stitches and replacing Hartnell’s shirt and trousers before calling for his brother to resume his funeral preparations.
Coffins were built and tin plaques nailed to their lids. Wooden markers were carved for both men, containing the simple details of their names, ages, and the date they died. John Hartnell had been twenty-five, John Torrington twenty.
The bodies were dressed and their arms bound to their sides. A blue woolen blanket was wrapped around John Torrington, and Hartnell was folded inside a canvas shroud.
Loaded on to sledges, the two coffins were hauled to the beach.
The bay had been swept clean of loose ice by the strong winds, and everything was now etched in black and gray, with the occasional silvering of the ice where the half moon revealed itself through the liquid cloud.
Lanterns were set out on the beach to guide the coffin bearers through the darkness, and upon their arrival at the gravesite Franklin read the speech he had prepared.
It began to snow again as the ceremony progressed. Hartnell’s grave needed to be widened by a few inches, and sparks flew from the picks of the men chopping at the hard ground.
The snow began to fall more thickly, and at times the ships beneath them were lost to sight. A sense of urgency overtook the proceedings, but Franklin was determined that the burial should be carried out properly, and that both men should be laid to rest with as much propriety and ceremony as they would have received at home. He had examined their Service Certificates, knowing that he must later write letters of sympathy and regret to their families; it was with some relief that he saw neither man was married.
The graves were filled and the excess gravel built into low mounds above them. The markers were driven into place and stones collected to build borders.
When the final prayers were said, Crozier dismissed his own officers and returned with Franklin to the
Erebus,
where the two men remained alone together for the rest of the day.
The two unaccountable deaths had cast a small but inescapably dark shadow over the otherwise auspicious start to the expedition.
Crozier expressed his surprise that Franklin had allowed Goodsir to carry out his examination, but Franklin dismissed this veiled criticism by insisting that it needed to be done. Crozier remained unconvinced.
Occasionally, steward Hoar arrived to add fuel to the stove and to bring them drinks. When he called for a final time at midnight, Franklin asked him how the other men had taken the two deaths. Hoar said that the crew was pleased that the burials were over and that the taint of sickness was at last gone from the ship. Crozier said that his own crew felt the same. Only Thomas Hartnell continued to grieve.
When Fitzjames called at half past midnight to report some slight damage to the foremast rigging, both Franklin and Crozier were asleep in their chairs, the cabin as warm as a furnace.
O
ne of the first tasks Franklin had ordered upon establishing their winter quarters was for as much of their coal as possible to be unloaded from the ships and for this to be mounded on the shore. When the weather allowed, sledge parties went daily from both vessels and returned with their immediate requirements, which they stored in their fore-deck bunkers. In this way both Franklin and Crozier hoped to keep their ships clean. Prior to its removal, the fine dust had spread everywhere and had been a constant source of irritation to the two captains, both of whom had been raised and schooled under sail alone.
At the beginning of each week the decks of both ships were cleaned with hot sand, heated overnight in the galley ovens, and scrubbed dry from stern to prow, where the sand was then collected and bagged for further use.
One other day every week was set aside for doing the laundry, when the ships’ coppers were set out and each man delivered a bundle of clothes to be washed. Cleanliness was considered to have an important civilizing influence under those conditions, and for this same reason men were also encouraged to shave their beards, mustaches and side-whiskers on a regular basis, and to submit to the weekly dental inspections carried out by both surgeons. It was uncommon for beards to be worn on Arctic duty, because rather than protect exposed skin, as was first believed, the hair encouraged the formation of ice. Even the moisture from breathing froze hard when
the temperature was low, threatening the skin beneath with ice sores if not regularly rubbed away.
As the weather deteriorated throughout January and February, warrant officers were appointed to keep a watch on all the individuals and working parties who went ashore or out on the ice. A system of handing out and then collecting metal tags—in reality drilled and punched coins devised by paymaster Osmer—was used to ensure that no one remained unaccounted for when the call to return aboard was sounded at three each afternoon.
The first occasion this system proved its worth was when one of the
Terror’s
stewards failed to return from the most distant of the stores with a sack of cocoa beans he had set out to collect.
It had been a calm day, with a temperature of minus 35, no higher or lower than the previous fortnight, and if not actually lit by the light of the sun, then a day that suggested to all who ventured out that this was shortly to return to them.
At three, warrant officer John Lane checked his drilled coins and saw that he was one short. The missing man, Edward Genge, had been seen by others making his way to the store.
At half past three, Lane reported the absence to Crozier, who suggested that Tozer be informed. Crozier himself believed that an error had been made and that Genge would be in the galley or in his hammock. A search was carried out, but Genge was not found, after which Lane, Tozer and two other marines left the
Terror
and went ashore.
The temperature had fallen rapidly since midday, and halfway between the shore and the storehouse, Lane and one of the marines turned back, both insufficiently dressed against the cold. Only Lane went back out on the frozen sea to await the return of the others.
Tozer reappeared a few minutes later, carrying a man over his shoulder, running as fast as the weight would allow and frequently stumbling and falling. The other marine followed behind pulling a sledge. Lane ran over the ice to meet them, taking the unconscious Genge’s legs and running with Tozer back to the
Terror
, where the alarm was raised and Peddie prepared a bed in his surgery to receive the injured man.
Almost unbelievably, it seemed that Genge had entered the store, smoked a pipe, and there, amid the mounds of casks and crates, and well insulated from the outside, had fallen asleep. Later, the door had blown open, and when Tozer had found him, Genge was unconscious. Unsuccessfully attempting to revive him where he lay, Tozer had then lifted him and carried him back to the ship.
Genge remained unconscious for several hours longer, and upon coming round was fed three pints of warm broth and informed that he was to be punished for his carelessness.
The following morning the store was revisited and sealed, and afterward there was a suggestion that Genge and others had been pilfering from the supplies of canned goods kept there. Upon these suspicions becoming common knowledge, an inquiry was set in motion with Fitzjames at its head, assisted by Vesconte and Fairholme.
Fitzjames interviewed Genge and, badly shaken by his near fatal carelessness, Genge confessed that he and several others had been supplying men on both ships with food extra to their rations.
Reporting all this to Franklin, both Fitzjames and his captain were dismayed that such corruption and disregard for the well-being of the expedition as a whole should already be present, and Franklin was determined that all the facts of the thefts should be brought into the open before others were charged with their part in them, and before any punishment was decided upon.
Genge, it transpired, was working with one of the
Erebus’
marines, William Braine, in the supply of these foodstuffs to both crews.
Confronted with his partner’s sick-bed confession, Braine immediately admitted his part in the scheme. He was genuinely remorseful for what he had done, his shame and disgrace all that much greater for his being a marine. He was handed over for punishment to David Bryant, who sought permission to flog him. Both Franklin and Fitzjames reluctantly agreed to this, and the punishment was carried out ashore, without an audience other than that of the marines and the men of the inquiry party. Fitzjames marked off each of the dozen strokes in the punishment book, and called for warm water to be thrown on Braine’s bleeding back after the fourth and eighth stroke. Braine fell unconscious after the tenth, and the final two strokes
were delivered by simply laying the whip across his back.
Later, upon reporting to Fitzjames that he had dressed Braine’s wounds, Stanley informed him that the man was also showing symptoms similar to those of Hartnell and Torrington. Alarmed by this, Fitzjames reported the news to Franklin, for whom it came as yet another painful disappointment after the events of the previous few days, during which he had slept for only two or three hours each night, and who himself now looked unwell, exhausted and drawn.
Communicating this news, it was clear to Fitzjames that Franklin did not wish to discuss the matter any further, and so he returned to Stanley, who had by then been joined by Goodsir.
“I’ve spoken to him,” Goodsir said, meaning Braine. “Hartnell and Torrington were involved.”
Fitzjames already knew this, but only then did the full significance of the fact—two names among two dozen others—strike him. “Have you found some contaminated food common to them all?” he asked.
Neither Stanley nor Goodsir answered him and he was aware of some reluctance on the part of both men to speak.
“What is it?”
“Mr. Goodsir believes it may be connected with the canning process and not necessarily the food itself,” Stanley said, suggesting that he did not share his assistant’s belief.
“Whatever it is, we may be able to isolate it,” Goodsir said more optimistically. “Even if it were somehow connected with the cannisters themselves we might yet find a way—”
“But so many of our supplies are canned,” Fitzjames said.
“So were Ross,’ so were Parry’s. Ross opened cans of soup and meat ten years old and found them as nutritious and as untainted as the day they were canned,” Goodsir said.
Their ensuing conversation lasted an hour, ending only when Stanley rose and left them, promising to approach Franklin concerning the treatment and observation of Braine.
“How was the flogging?” Goodsir asked Fitzjames when they were alone, and after they had sat for several minutes in silent contemplation of all that had been suggested.
“I’ve seen too many to tell you it was barbaric.”
“But do you believe it was necessary?”
Fitzjames nodded once.
“And having headed the inquiry, you consider yourself responsible for what happened to the man?”
“I
am
responsible,” Fitzjames said.
Goodsir did not pursue the painful subject. Instead, he took down a flask and shook from it a marble of ice, studying it in his palm before handing it to Fitzjames.
“Another of your specimens?” Fitzjames said, taking it from him, still distracted, and less intrigued than usual by what his friend was about to reveal.
“No—one of Scoresby’s.”
At the mention of the name, Fitzjames examined the ball more closely: it was old and opaque, and seemed no more than a piece of moulded ice in which some impurities, grains of sand or silt, had been frozen.
From a label attached to the flask, Goodsir told him the exact date twenty-eight years earlier when Scoresby had collected the ice, and the precise location of the berg in Baffin Bay from which it had come.
As the ice melted, Fitzjames felt the impurities settle in his palm. Goodsir took his hand and blew away much of the water. Then leaning close he breathed upon the few dozen grains which lay exposed. He withdrew, and Fitzjames looked more closely at what he held. The specks which had been at the heart of the icy kernel appeared to agitate, and then to his amazement, and all within no more than five or ten seconds, each of the tiny black dots sprouted a set of minute legs and metamorphosed into a spider. In an instant the two dozen insects had scattered in all directions over his fingers and beneath the cuff of his sleeve.
Watching him, Goodsir burst into laughter. He caught one of the spiders, squashed it on his thumbnail and held it up for Fitzjames to see. He told him its forgettable Latin name, but nothing could distract Fitzjames from the sudden and almost casual resurrection in which he had participated, all thought of the flogging now gone from his mind.
“Twenty-eight years?” he said absently, catching another of the insects and then watching it drop from an invisible thread close to his-face, swinging from side to side on the draught of his breath.
“Perhaps a hundred and twenty-eight years,” Goodsir told him. “Who knows? Perhaps even a thousand and twenty-eight years.”
“Are you serious?”
“Perfectly, and it is my intention to retrieve further specimens.”
“Do you believe they can survive for so long without food or air?”
Still grinning, Goodsir nodded. “These otherwise intolerable conditions suit them perfectly. I melted another of Scoresby’s samples in Edinburgh, caught its occupants in a glass tube at room temperature and they never revived. They thrive only in the cold. Even now this latest clutch will be making its way outside.”
“To lay their eggs and wait another hundred years?”
“Very possibly. Endure, survive, thrive.” Goodsir returned the flask to the shelf from which he had taken it. “Did you know,” he said, causing Fitzjames, who had risen to leave, to pause for a moment, “that the recent excavators of Pompeii came across the petrified bodies of the city guards still standing to attention at each of the gates and in the doorways of all the public buildings? All around them was panic and mayhem, but these men, perfectly alert and aware of everything that was happening, of the red-hot ash pouring down upon them, remained standing to attention even as they were being buried alive and the flesh burned from their bones. Incredible.”
“And is that how you imagine
we
might all one day be discovered? Locked in the ice, our palms to our brows, peering into the distance of the Passage.”
“Cabot, Frobisher, Davis.”
“What of them?” Fitzjames said, stooping in the low doorway.
“They all sailed into the ice in vessels sheathed with lead so convinced were they of emerging into a warm tropical sea full of not so warm-hearted tropical boring worms.”
Fitzjames considered this for a moment, and was in some uncertain way gratified by the revelation and the common bond of faith
it exposed, as fleeting but as undeniable as the miracle of the spiders which still ran up his arm.
 
Ever since his fall two months earlier, Edward Little had been unable to walk any distance on his injured leg, and recently the pain from this had grown worse. On board the
Terror
this was of little inconvenience to him, but ashore and on the ice it now caused him pain even to stand upon it.
On one occasion, walking with Irving and Hodgson on a fishing expedition to where a hole had been cut in the ice of the outer bay, he fell and lay clutching his leg in agony, having done his best until then to disguise the pain from the others. They helped him to his feet and then supported him as they made their way back to the
Terror
. Little asked them not to let anyone know what had happened, but Irving argued that Peddie ought to make another examination of the injured limb. Reluctantly, Little agreed, and the surgeon was sent for.
The original swelling had barely subsided, and Peddie expressed his surprise at this, realizing immediately the extent of Little’s prolonged suffering and deception. The earlier, darker bruising was reduced, but the skin all around this remained discolored and could not be dismissed as easily as Little would have liked.

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