The Ice Child (8 page)

To the memory of Sir John Franklin

Born April 16, 1786, at Spilsby, Lincolnshire, Died June 11, 1847, off Point Victory in the frozen ocean, the beloved Chief of the Gallant Crews who perished with him in completing the discovery of the North-West Passage.

She edged around the side, trying to get out of the way of the crowds. There was another carved inscription on the edge of the marble, almost hidden from view.

This monument was erected by Jane, his widow
,

Who, after long waiting, and sending many in search of him, Herself departed to seek and find him in the realms of light July 18, 1875, aged 83 years.

Jo felt a lump come to her throat. Jane Franklin, his wife. Who had waited for him for thirty years.

Frowning, she looked down again at the papers she was carrying. She couldn’t find a mention of Franklin’s death. How did they know the date of it, if he and the ships had gone missing? It was so precise too. July 11, 1847. That was two years after they’d left London. He had died in the Arctic, in the ice, and someone knew the exact day.

“Frozen ship,” a voice said, as they edged past her. A small boy traced his finger along the picture of the icy hulls.

“Looks like they got caught somewhere,” his father said, as they walked on.

Jo followed the line of the boy’s finger, and farther down to the base of the memorial, where a second plaque had been added.

Here also is commemorated Admiral Sir Leopold McClintock

Discoverer of the fate of Franklin

She looked at the name for some time.

McClintock
, she scribbled on the top of the photocopy of the crew list.

Retrieving her bag from the floor, she edged out into the main aisle again, where there was more room. She got herself out of the crowds as best she could, and glanced down again at the photocopied sheets.

There were so many names.

Graham Gore … Harry Goodsir … Francis Crozier …

She glanced back again at the Wolfe monument at the chapel entrance. All those people, she thought, dying for England. She felt something rise in her chest, a claustrophobia, a reaction against the waste of life. They took boys too … two boys, for God’s sake, in subzero temperatures for years on end. And for what purpose, to what end? No ships ever went north of Canada or Alaska now, from west to east, or vice versa. You just couldn’t. It was all blocked off with ice. It was pitch black half the year. You couldn’t fight down one of the world’s greatest natural forces. You couldn’t defy it with a couple of ships. Even the few Russian icebreakers who could get through were nuclear powered. And yet the Victorians had filled their ships with their best men, men like Graham Gore. Who couldn’t paint.

“What the hell did he need to paint for, anyway?” Jo muttered. “Poor man.”

She turned away, into the crowd.

Five

Augustus Peterman was twelve years old in 1845.

He stood at the dock at Greenhithe and shivered. Not because he was cold; it was May, and the day was warm, and there was a breeze like summer coming up from the Channel and traveling here from his aunt’s house in Kent. He had come down lanes between orchards where the last blossom was still on the trees.

It was the sight of the ship that had set him trembling. The
Terror
towered over him, wide in the beam, with its almost two-foot square ribs rising out of the water. She was massive, breathtaking, beautiful.

Augustus knew her name. Every boy in England did. When he had first come onto the dock that morning, he had dared to run right to her mooring, to touch the only part of the stern that he could reach. This was the ship that nine years before, when he was only three, had gone to the Antarctic, the bottom of the world, and been heaved completely out of the water by ice, and lain on it like a helpless toy, dismasted, until the will of God and the skill of the crew had released her.

He leaned hard on
Terror
’s side, in the shadow of the great ship, his heart pounding with ecstatic pleasure.

“Is she big enough?” a man asked him.

He leapt back, ashamed at having been seen. “Yes, sir.”

It was an officer. More than that he didn’t know. He daren’t look up from the breeches to the face. But the voice had an Irish accent.

“Seen the bow?” the man asked.

“No, sir.”

A firm hand landed on his shoulder, and its pressure walked him forward. Augustus caught sight of the
Terror
’s armoring that reached back twenty feet from the stem.

“Know what’s under that?”

“No, sir.”

“Three inches of English oak doubled with two layers of African oak, laid diagonal,” the man told him. “Overlaid with two inches of Canadian elm, diagonal again. Five belts of timber ten inches thick.” The man slapped his back. “That is
Terror
,” he said. “That is what a British ship is made of.”

Augustus grew hot. His mother would be looking for him. She would be furious, and she had a quick temper. But he couldn’t say that to this officer. No sailor here had a mother looking for him. That wouldn’t make him a man.

“Who are you?” he was asked.

He spoke his name.

“Look up at me, lad.”

Augustus obeyed. He saw a round but handsome face, with sandy-colored hair. Gold fringing on the jacket. A double row of buttons. A black stock below a white collar. Clean shaven. Blue eyes.

“You are Thomas Peterman’s son. Your uncle recommended you. And Mr. Reid, the ice master.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man nodded. “Your father was a fine seaman. A brave man.”

Gus said nothing. His father had been dead for four years, and he could not remember him. He only knew the story that his father had gone down by Home Bay in the Davis Strait. The harpooner of number two boat had delivered his blow, and the whale—the crew said the same whale that had passed several times under the ship, as gentle as you could please—had suddenly lunged upward. Her enormous bulk had struck the harpooner boat, capsizing it, throwing the crew into the water. The other boats killed her by lances as they tried to get the men out of the sea, and his father had been found still holding on to an oar, floating quite dead in the mess of blood and foam, killed instantly, they said, by the first strike of the fish.

The officer suddenly squatted down now on his heels. He looked up into Gus’s face. “I knew of him, Gus,” he said. “We met Esquimaux on the Whalefish Islands who had sailed with your father’s ship out of Hull one summer.”

Gus looked into the blue eyes.

The man held out his hand. “I am Francis Crozier,” he said.

Gus stared down at the open hand. He knew who Francis Crozier was, and the realization dried the words in his mouth. There was no way to reply. Crozier was second-in-command of the expedition, and captain of the
Terror
. If
Terror
was every boy’s dream of a ship, Crozier was every boy’s dream of an explorer. Only James Clark Ross was better known to him, and Ross was Crozier’s friend. Crozier had spent ten winters in the frozen seas. He had sailed at the right hand of Ross and, on those voyages, gone farther south in the world than any other man. Before that he had sailed with William Edward Parry, and gone farther north in the world than any other man. He had survived the loss of the
Fury
. He had been at sea since he was thirteen—thirty-six years. He had sailed the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea.

It was unusual for a captain to notice a boy, less still—unheard of—for him to offer to shake his hand. Gus extended his own small palm, to see it not quite swallowed up in Crozier’s grasp.

“I am indebted to you, Augustus,” the Irishman said softly, “for coming with us on this adventure.”

Gus tried to say something. It came out a blur, a few stumbled syllables. He stood open mouthed as Crozier walked away.

He was still standing like that when his mother found him. The first he knew of her was a stinging blow to the side of his head. Then she grabbed him by the wrist. “I’ve been searching high and low,” she muttered.

She took him to the long row of warehouses. There his name was taken, and he was given a pack, and she leaned down and kissed him roughly, just once.

As he stood on the dock with the feel of the swift kiss still on his cheek, waiting to board, he wondered about the great white bears.

Although Augustus had been out on nine whaling voyages, he had never seen a polar bear. All he knew of them, he had from his uncle. He would shudder at the dream of them, the unreal beasts that lived where nothing else could live. It was rumored that they could sleep in storms, covered with snow. That they could swim through ice. That they could be ten feet high at the shoulder and weigh as much as eight men.

Would they see one now, on this voyage?

Gus knew that it was hard to kill them. A bullet could be put through one, and it would still live. They were the white ghosts of the seas, creatures that could dive and stay underwater for inconceivable lengths of time. They were silent, patient killers, stalking the seal for hours, lying in wait for them above their breathing holes, or listening for the sound of the pups in the ice dens below them.

His father had never caught one, but his uncle had.

Gus knew the story by heart.

The female had come right up to the ship across a floe, and had started licking the whale oil from the wood. They caught her with lassoes, with the rope heaved through the boat’s ring on the stem, and the rest thrown over her head. They had to be quick to take in the slack, drawing her tightly to the boat. It was a work of seamanship and art to pull her, ten men at a time, into the boat, while she thrashed, throwing her head from side to side for air. Her huge claws dug into the ice, the boat, and the sides of the ship. She was made fast to ring bolts in the deck, with ropes on each foot and around her neck.

The men had argued whether to keep or kill her. Alive, she might be taken back to England and sold, and fetch a fine price for exhibition, although her kind did not live long once captured and caged. Or they might kill her for the rich food she could provide, better than venison, and so much better than black whale-skin, with its coconut flavor, or even the gums of the whale with bone still embedded, which could be delicious. Better even than the mess of green from reindeer’s entrails, that the natives called
mariyalo
, and certainly better than boiled seal or walrus meat, which was always tough and tasteless.

They decided on slaughter.

She took the first blow, by a whale lance, with barely a shudder, still standing, her head a little lowered. At the second blow, which severed an artery and streamed blood, she turned her head in an almost full circle, and looked back over the rail, out onto the ice that she had left behind. While she swayed, they moved in on her and overcame her quickly, and she finished with her front paws folded under her, her back legs still straight.

It wasn’t until the cook’s fires were lit that they noticed the cub.

He was not far from the ship, on the ice, pacing forward, and then running hesitantly back. They all hung over the side and watched him, taking bets when he would run and when he would stand still and look up at where his mother had been taken. His uncle said that he stayed there for hours, and they threw bread down to him that he didn’t touch. Every now and again he would cry, and it was a sound like a dog chained and unfed. Eventually, sick of the noise, they lassoed him easily and hauled him up.

He was small and easily chained to the deck where his mother’s blood and skin still lay. As they broke free of the ice and sailed, the captain ordered the deck swabbed, and the cub pulled hard on the chain while the water ran under him.

He choked on the chain for a whole week, his uncle said, pacing up and down as the ship endured a five-day storm. They tried to get him to eat, but he refused everything, all the while vomiting a thick, oily, fish-smelling milk from his stomach.

On the eighth day when they came up on deck, the cub was dead.

It was a pity and a shame, his uncle told him.

All the money they could have made by selling him in Hull.

It was midmorning when Gus was taken down onto
Terror
’s lower deck.

Only half the crew were there, but it was already crowded.

The officers had cabins—tiny rooms, six feet long and five feet wide, it was true, barely enough room for a man to stand and dress—but the seamen were more cramped still. Their quarters were forward, at the bow, taking up less than half the deck. Right in the center of the smoky, dim berthing was the galley, where the cookstove belched. Above Gus’s head swung the galley tables, suspended on pulleys that were winched down when the crew ate. Forward of the galley was the sick bay, although as Gus came down he could already see that all the floor of the berthing space and the sick bay was packed with boxes of provisions.

The man who had brought him below was called Torrington.

“New to the navy,” he said, as the first men looked up at them.

The nearest sailor looked them both up and down. “You’re a pair, then, Torrington.”

Torrington grinned at Augustus. “I worked a couple of coasters. Steam, you see. I worked steam engine, not sail.”

“And you, boy,” the other asked. “What of you?”

“Whalers,” Gus said. “Out of Hull.”

“Gone to Lancaster Sound?”

“No, sir. Frobisher Bay.”

The man walked over to him. “You’re the boy the captain knows. Knows the men on your ships.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Handpicked, you are.”

“Yes, sir,” Gus said.

The man leaned down. He smelled of coal dust. Gus saw the black dust ingrained in his neck and fingertips, and realized, too, that it was over his clothes.

“You can call me Mr. Smith,” he said. He jerked his thumb at Torrington. “You know what a stoker is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m a stoker, see? And this here”—he nodded at Torrington—“this here’s a stoker. So they say. Only difference between us is that he’s a leading stoker. Younger’n me, mind. By eight year. Not used to frozen latitude neither. Not served under Crozier neither.” He stared John Torrington down. “Not been with Crozier for four years in the ice, like me. But that’s a leading stoker. And I’m a stoker, plain, understand.”