The Terror

³⁶ CROZIER

The third and last day on the ice was by far the hardest. Crozier had made this crossing at least twice before in the last six weeks with some of the earliest and larger sledge parties, but even with the trail less established, it had been much easier then. He’d been healthier. And he’d been infinitely less tired.

Francis Crozier was not truly aware of it, but since his recovery from his near-fatal withdrawal illness in January, his severe melancholia had made him an insomniac. As a sailor and then a captain, Crozier had always prided himself — as most captains did — on needing very little sleep and waking from the deepest sleep at any change in the ship’s condition: a slight change in the ship’s direction, the rising of wind in the sails, the sound of too many feet running on deck above him during any specific watch, any alteration in the sound of the water moving against the ship’s hull… anything.

But in recent weeks, Crozier slept less and less each night, until he’d fallen into the habit of only half dozing for an hour or two in the middle of the night, perhaps catching a nap of thirty minutes or less during the day. He told himself it was just the result of so many details to watch over and commands to give in the last days and weeks before taking to the ice, but in truth it was melancholia trying to destroy him again.

His mind was sodden much of the time. He was a smart man whose mind was stupid with the chemical by-products of constant fatigue.

Sleeping at Sea Camps One and Two had been damned near impossible for any of the men the past two nights, no matter how tired they were. There had been no need to erect tents at either camp since eight Holland tents there had been left up permanently over the past weeks, any wind or snow damage being repaired by the next party that came through.

The three-person reindeer-skin sleeping bags were many times warmer than the sewn-together Hudson’s Bay blanket bags, and these good bags had been drawn by lottery. Crozier had not even taken part in the lottery, but when, the first time he’d been on the ice, he’d come into the tent he shared with two other officers, he found that his steward, Jopson, had laid out a reindeer-skin bag tailored for him. Neither the ailing Jopson nor the men thought it right that their captain would have to share a bag with two other snoring, farting, shoving men — even other officers — and Crozier had been too tired and grateful to argue.

Nor had he told Jopson or the others that sleeping in a bag by one’s self was much chillier than his experience sleeping in three-man bags. The other men’s body heat was the only thing that kept them warm enough to sleep through the night.

But Crozier hadn’t tried to sleep through the night at either sea camp.

Every two hours he was up and walking the perimeter to make sure that the watch had changed on time. The wind came up during the night, and the men on watch huddled behind hastily erected low snow walls. Because the biting wind and blowing snow kept the men curled low behind their snow-block barriers, the thing on the ice would have been visible to them only if it actually stepped on one of the men.

It did not make its appearance that night.

During the fitful minutes of sleep he did find, Crozier was revisited by the nightmares he’d had during his January illness. Some of the dreams returned so many times — and startled the captain out of sleep so many times — that he remembered fragments of them. Teenaged girls carrying out a séance. M’Clintock and another man staring down into an open boat at two skeletons, one sitting up and fully clothed in peacoat and slops, the other just a mass of tumbled and gnawed bones.

Crozier walked through his days wondering if he was one of those skeletons.

But the worst dream, by far, was the Communion dream in which he was a boy or a sicker, older version of himself and was kneeling naked at the altar rail in Memo Moira’s forbidden church while the huge, inhuman priest — dripping water in shredded white vestments through which showed the raw, red flesh of a badly burned man — loomed over him and leaned closer, breathing carrion breath into Crozier’s uplifted face.

The men all rose in the dark a little after 5:00 a.m. on the morning of 23 April. The sun would not rise until almost 10:00 a.m. The wind continued to blow, flapping the brown canvas of the Holland tents and stinging their eyes as they huddled to eat breakfast.

On the ice, the men were supposed to heat their food thoroughly in small tins labeled “Cooking Apparatus (I),” using their small spirit stoves fueled by pints of ether carried in bottles. Even without wind, it was often difficult or nearly impossible to get the spirit stoves primed and started; in a wind like that morning’s, it was simply not possible, even when taking the risk of firing up the spirit stoves inside the tents. So — reassuring themselves that Goldner’s canned meats and vegetables and soups had already been cooked — the men just spooned the frozen or nearfrozen masses of congealed glop straight out of the cans. They were starving and had an endless day of man-hauling ahead of them.

Goodsir — and the three dead surgeons before Goodsir — had talked to Crozier and Fitzjames about the importance of heating Goldner’s tinned foodstuffs, especially the soup. The vegetables and meats, Goodsir had pointed out, had indeed been precooked, but the soups — mostly cheap parsnips and carrots and other root vegetables — were “concentrated,” meant to be diluted with water and brought to a boil.

The surgeon could not name the poisons that could be lurking in unboiled Goldner soups — and perhaps even in the meats and vegetables — but he kept reiterating the need for full heating of the tinned foods, even while on the march on the ice. These warnings were one of the main reasons Crozier and Fitzjames had ordered the heavy iron whaleboat stoves transported to Terror Camp over the ice and pressure ridges.

But there were no stoves here at Sea Camp One or at Sea Camp Two the next night. The men ate all the tinned foods cold from the can when the spirit stoves failed — and even when the ether of the little stoves lighted, there was just enough fuel to melt the frozen soups, not bring them to a boil.

That would have to suffice, thought Crozier.

As soon as breakfast was finished, the captain’s belly began rumbling with hunger again.

The plan had been to fold up the eight Holland tents at both sea camps and haul them to Terror Camp on the sledges, to serve as backup should the groups have to go out on the ice again soon. But the wind was too high and the men were too weary even after just one day and night on the ice this trip. Crozier conferred with Lieutenant Little and they decided that three tents would be enough to bring along from this camp. Perhaps they would do better the next morning after Sea Camp Two.

Three men in harness broke down that second day on the ice on 23 April 1848. One began vomiting blood onto the ice. The other two simply fell in their tracks and were unable to pull for the rest of that day. One of those two had to be set onto a sledge and hauled.

Not wanting to reduce the number of armed pickets walking behind, ahead, and to the sides of the procession of sledges, Crozier and Little tied on harnesses and man-hauled for most of that endless day.

The pressure ridges weren’t as high during this middle day of the crossing and the previous sledge tracks had left a virtual highway on this stretch of open sea ice, but the wind and blowing snow eliminated almost all of these advantages. Men pulling a sledge could not see the next sledge fifteen feet in front of them. The Marines or sailors carrying weapons and walking along as guards could see no one else when they were twenty feet or more from the sledges and had to walk within a yard or two of the sledge parties so as not to get lost. Their usefulness as lookouts was nil.

Several times during the day, the lead sledge — usually Crozier’s or Lieutenant Little’s — would lose the worn sledge track, and everyone would then have to stop for up to half an hour while some men unharnessed themselves, tied on a rope so as not to get lost in the howling snow, and walked left and right of the false route, seeking out the faint depressions of the actual track on a surface quickly being covered by inches of blowing snow.

To lose the route midway like this would cost not only time, it might well cost all of them their lives.

Some of the sledge teams hauling heavier loads this spring had done this nine miles of flat sea ice in under twelve hours, arriving at Sea Camp Two only hours after the sun had set. Crozier’s group arrived long after midnight and almost missed the camp completely. If Magnus Manson — whose keen hearing seemed as unusual as his size and low intelligence — had not heard the flapping of tents in the wind far to their port side, they would have marched past their shelter and food cache.

As it was, Sea Camp Two had been largely destroyed by the day’s incessant and rising winds. Five of the eight tents had been blown away into the darkness — even though they had been secured by deep ice screws — or simply torn to tatters. The exhausted and starving men managed to pitch two of the three tents they’d manhauled from Sea Camp One, and forty-six men who would have been comfortable but crowded in eight tents squeezed into five.

For the men taking turns on watch that night — sixteen of the forty-six — the wind, snow, and cold were a living hell. Crozier stood one of the 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. watches. He preferred being able to move since his one-man sleeping bag would not allow him to get warm enough to sleep anyway, even with men stacked like cordwood around him in the flapping tent.

The final day on the ice was the worst.

The wind had stopped shortly before the men roused themselves at

5:00 a.m., but as in evil compensation for the gift of the blue skies to come, the temperature dropped at least thirty degrees. Lieutenant Little took the measurements that morning: the temperature at 6:00 a.m. was –64 degrees.

It’s only eight miles, Crozier kept telling himself that day as he pulled in harness. He knew that the other men were thinking the same thing. Only eight miles today, a full mile less than yesterday’s terrible haul. With more men dropping from sickness or exhaustion, Crozier ordered the accompanying guards to stow their rifles, muskets, and shotguns on the sledges and to tie on to the harnesses as soon as the sun rose. Every man who could walk would pull.

Lacking guards, they trusted in the clarity of the day. The brown blur of King William Land was visible as soon as the sun rose — the wall of high bergs and jostled coastal ice along its rim distressingly more visible, distantly gleaming in the thin, cold sunlight like a barrier of broken glass — but the clear light ensured they would not lose the old sledge tracks and that the thing on the ice could not sneak up on them.

But the thing was out there. They could see it — a small dot loping along to the southwest of them, moving much faster than they could haul. Or run, should it come to that.

Several times during the day, Crozier or Little would unstrap from harness, retrieve their telescopes from the sledges or their Male Bags, and look across the miles of ice at the creature.

It was at least two miles away and moving on all fours. From this distance, it might be just another white arctic bear of the kind they had shot and killed in such plentitude in the last three years. Until, that is, the thing took to its hind legs, rose up above the surrounding ice blocks and minibergs, and sniffed the air as it stared in their direction.

It knows we’ve abandoned the ships, thought Crozier, staring through his brass telescope that had become scuffed and scarred from so many years” use at both poles. It knows where we’re going. It’s planning to get there first.

They pulled on through the day, stopping only at the mid-afternoon sunset to eat frozen chunks out of cold cans. Their rations of salt pork and stale biscuits had been used up. The ice walls separating King William Land from the pack ice glowed like a city with ten thousand burning gas lamps in the minutes before darkness spread across the sky like spilled ink.

They still had four miles to go. Eight men were on sledges now, three of the seamen unconscious.

They crossed the Great Ice Barrier separating the pack ice from land sometime after 1:00 a.m. The wind stayed low but the temperature continued to drop. During one pause to rerig ropes for the lifting of the sledges over a thirty-foot wall of ice, made not at all easier by the passage of sledges in weeks past since the movement of the ice had tumbled a thousand new ice blocks into their path from the towering bergs on either side, Lieutenant Little took another temperature reading. It was –82 degrees.

Crozier had been working and giving commands from within a deep trench of exhaustion for many hours. At sunset, when he’d last looked to the south at the distant creature loping ahead of them now — it was already crossing the sea ice barrier in easy leaps — he had made the mistake of taking his mittens and gloves off for a moment so as to write some position notes in his log. He had forgotten to don the gloves before lifting the telescope again and his fingertips and one palm had instantly frozen to the metal. In pulling his hands away quickly, he had ripped a layer of skin and some flesh off his right thumb and three fingers on that hand, and lifted a swath off his left palm.

Such wounds did not heal up here in the arctic, especially not after the early symptoms of scurvy had set in. Crozier had turned away from the others and vomited from the pain. The sickening burning in his ravaged fingers and left palm only grew worse through the long night of hauling, tugging, lifting, and pushing. His arm and shoulder muscles bruised and bled internally under the pressure of the harness straps.

For a while on the last barrier, around one thirty in the morning, with the stars and planets shimmering and shifting in the endless clear but murderously cold sky overhead, Crozier stupidly considered leaving all the sledges behind and making a dash for Terror Camp, still a full mile away across the frozen gravel and drifted snow. Other men could come back with them tomorrow and help fetch these impossibly heavy burdens the last mile or so.

Enough of Francis Crozier’s mind and command instincts remained for him to reject this thought at once. He could do just that, of course, abandon the sledges — the first party in weeks to do so — and ensure their survival by staggering across the ice to the safety of Terror Camp without their burdens, but he would lose all leadership forever in the eyes of his 104 surviving men and officers.

Even though the pain from his torn hands caused him to vomit frequently and silently onto the ice wall as they pulled and pushed the sledges over — a distant part of Crozier’s mind noticed that the vomitus was liquid and red in the lantern light — he continued giving orders and lending a hand as the thirty-eight men well enough to continue the struggle managed to get the sledges and themselves over the Barrier and onto the ice and runner-scraping gravel of the shoreline.

If he hadn’t been sure that the cold would rip the skin of his lips off, Crozier might have fallen to his knees in the dark and kissed the solid ground as they heard that new sound of gravel and stone protesting under the sledge runners for the final mile.

There were torches burning at Terror Camp. Crozier was in the lead harness of the lead sledge as they approached. Everyone tried to stand tall — or at least stagger in an upright position — as they pulled the dead-weight sledges and the unconscious men on them the last hundred yards into camp.

There were men fully dressed in slops and outside the tents waiting for them. At first Crozier was touched by their concern, sure that the two dozen or so men he saw in the torchlight had been on the verge of sending out a rescue party in search of their overdue captain and comrades.

As Crozier leaned into the harness, pulling the last sixty feet or so into the light from the torches, his hands and bruises aflame with pain, he prepared a little joke for their arrival — something along the lines of declaring it Christmas again and announcing that everyone would sleep the next week through — but then Captain Fitzjames and some of the other officers stepped closer to greet them.

Crozier saw their eyes then: Fitzjames’s eyes and Le Vesconte’s and Des Voeux’s and Couch’s and Hodgson’s and Goodsir’s and the others’ there. And he knew — through Memo Moira’s Second Sight or his demonstrated captain’s sense or just through the clear, unfiltered-by-thought perception of a completely exhausted man — he knew that something had happened and that nothing would now be as he had planned or hoped and might never be again.