The Terror

⁴² PEGLAR

There hadn’t been enough fish and seal on the sled to serve it as a main dish to ninety-five or a hundred men — a few were too ill to eat anything solid — and even Mr. Diggle’s and Mr. Wall’s record at routinely performing loaves-and-fishes miracles with the limited ships’ stores did not allow them to fully succeed at this one (especially since some of the food on the Esquimaux sledge had been particularly putrid), but every man managed to get a taste of the savory blubber or fish along with the prepared Goldner soups or stews or vegetables.

Harry Peglar enjoyed the meal even though he was shaking with cold as he ate it and knew that it would only provoke the diarrhea that was already ripping him apart every day.

After the meal and before beginning their scheduled duties, Peglar and Steward John Bridgens walked together with their tin mugs of tepid tea. The fog muffled their own voices even as it seemed to amplify sounds from far away. They could hear men arguing over a card game in one of the tents on the far side of Terror Camp. From the northwest — the direction the two captains had walked before dinner — came the artillery rumble of thunder out over the pack ice. That sound had been going on all day, but no storm had arrived.

The two paused at the long line of boats and boat-sledges drawn up above the tumble of ice that would be the inlet’s shoreline if there ever came a thaw to the sea.

“Tell me, Harry,” said Bridgens, “which of these boats will we be taking if or when we must go to the ice again?”

Peglar sipped his tea and pointed. “I’m not certain, but I think Captain Crozier has decided to take ten of the eighteen here. We don’t have men well enough to haul more these days.”

“Then why did we man-haul all eighteen to Terror Camp?”

“Captain Crozier considered the possibility that we’d stay at Terror Camp for another two or three months, perhaps letting the ice around this point melt. We would have been better off with more boats, keeping some in reserve should others be damaged. And we could have hauled much more in the way of food, tents, and supplies in eighteen boats. With more than ten men in each boat now, it’ll be damned crowded, and we’ll have to leave too much of the stores behind.”

“But you think we’ll leave for the south with only ten boats, Harry? And soon?”

“I hope to Christ we do,” said Peglar. He told Bridgens about what he had seen that morning, what Goodsir had said about the Esquimaux’s stomachs being as full of seal meat as Irving’s had been, and how the captain had treated those present, perhaps excepting the Marines, as a potential Board of Inquiry. He added that the captain had sworn them to secrecy.

“I think,” John Bridgens said softly, “that Captain Crozier is not convinced that the Esquimaux killed Lieutenant Irving.”

“What? Who else could…” Peglar stopped. The cold and nausea that were always with him now seemed to surge up and through him. He had to lean against a whaleboat to keep his knees from buckling. He had never considered for an instant that anyone other than the savages could have done what he’d seen done to John Irving. He thought of the frozen pile of grey entrails on the ridgeline.

“Richard Aylmore is saying that the officers have led us into this mess,” said Bridgens in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. “He’s telling everyone who won’t inform on him that we should kill the officers and parcel out the extra food rations amongst the men. Aylmore in our group and that caulker’s mate in yours say we should go back to Terror at once.”

“Back to Terror…” repeated Peglar. He knew that his mind was dull with illness and exhaustion these days, but the idea made no sense at all. The ship was locked in the ice far out there and would be for months more, even if summer did condescend to appear this year. “Why don’t I hear these things, John? I’ve heard none of this seditious whispering.”

Bridgens smiled. “They don’t trust you not to tell, my dear Harry.”

“But they trust you?”

“Of course not. But I hear everything sooner or later. Stewards are invisible, y’know, being neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat. Speaking of which, that was a delightful meal, wasn’t it? Perhaps the last relatively fresh food we shall ever eat.”

Peglar didn’t answer. His mind was racing. “What can we do to warn Fitzjames and Crozier?”

“Oh, they have this information about Aylmore and Hickey and the others,” the old steward said nonchalantly. “Our captains have their own sources before the mast and around the scuttlebutts.”

“The scuttlebutts have been frozen solid for months,” said Peglar.

Bridgens chuckled. “That seems to be a very good metaphor, Harry, and all the more ironic for its literalness. Or at least an amusing euphemism.”

Peglar shook his head. He still felt the nausea from the idea that amidst all this illness and terror, any man among them would turn on another.

“Tell me, Harry,” said Bridgens, patting the inverted hull of the first whaleboat with his worn mitten. “Which of these boats might we be hauling with us and which will be left behind?”

“The four whaleboats will go for sure,” Peglar said absently, still mulling over this talk of mutiny and what he had seen that morning. “The jolly boats are as long as the whaleboats, but damned heavy. If I were the captain, I might leave them behind and take the four cutters instead. They’re only twenty-five feet long, but much lighter than whaleboats. But their draft may be too much for the Great Fish River if we can get there. The ships’ smaller boats and dinghies are too light for the open sea and too flimsy for much hauling and river work.”

“So it’s the four whaleboats, four cutters, and two pinnaces, you think?” asked Bridgens.

“Yes,” said Peglar, and had to smile. For all his years at sea and all his thousands of volumes read, Subordinate Officers’ Steward John Bridgens still knew very little about some things nautical. “I think those ten, yes, John.”

“At best,” said Bridgens, “if most of the sick recover, that leaves only ten of us to man-haul each boat. Can we do that, Harry?”

Peglar shook his head again. “It won’t be like the sea ice crossing from Terror, John.”

“Well, thank the dear Lord for that small blessing.”

“No, I mean that we’ll almost certainly be man-hauling these boats over land rather than sea ice. It’ll be much harder than the crossing from Terror, where we man-hauled only two boats at a time and could put as many men on a team as we needed to get over the rough parts. And the boats now will be even more heavily laden with stores and our sick than before. I suspect that we’ll have twenty or more in harness for each boat hauled. Even then, we’ll have to haul the ten boats in relays.”

“Relays?” said Bridgens. “Dear heavens, it will take us forever to move even ten boats if we’re constantly going back and forth. And the weaker and sicker we become, the slower we will go.”

“Yes,” said Peglar.

“Is there any chance that we shall get these boats all the way to the Great Fish River and then up the river to Great Slave Lake and the outpost there?”

“I doubt it,” said Peglar. “Perhaps if a few of us survive long enough to get the boats to the mouth of the river and the right boats make it and they’re rigged just perfectly for river running and… but, no, I doubt if there’s any real chance.”

“Then why on earth would Captains Crozier and Fitzjames put us through such labour and misery if there is no chance?” asked Bridgens. The older man’s voice did not sound aggrieved or anxious or desperate, merely curious. Peglar had heard John pose a thousand questions about astronomy, natural history, geology, botany, philosophy, and a score of other subjects in precisely that same soft, mildly curious tone. With most of the other questions, it had been the teacher who knew the answer quizzing his student in a polite way. Here, Peglar was sure that John Bridgens did not know the answer to this question.

“What’s the alternative? “ asked the foretop captain.

“We could stay here at Terror Camp,” said Bridgens. “Or even return to Terror, once our numbers have… decreased.”

“To do what?” demanded Peglar. “Just to wait to die?”

“To wait in comfort, Harry.”

“To die?” said Peglar, realizing that he was almost shouting. “Who the fuck wants to wait in comfort to die? At least if we get the boats to the coast — any of the boats — some of us may have a chance. There might be open water east to Boothia. We may be able to force passage up the river. At least some of us. And those who make it will at least be able to tell the rest of our loved ones what happened to us, where we were buried, and that we were thinking of them in the end.”

“You are my loved one, Harry,” said Bridgens. “The only man or woman or child left in the world who cares whether I am alive or dead, much less what I may have thought before I fell or where my bones will lie.”

Peglar, still angry, felt his heart pounding inside his chest. “You’re going to outlive me, John.”

“Oh, at my age, and with my infirmities and proclivities toward illness, I hardly think…”

“You’re going to outlive me, John,” grated Peglar. He shocked himself by the intensity of his voice and Bridgens blinked and fell silent. Peglar took the older man’s wrist. “Promise me you’ll do one thing for me, John.”

“Of course.” There was none of the usual banter or irony in Bridgens” voice.

“My diary… it’s not much, I have trouble even thinking, much less writing these days… I’m quite sick with this Goddamned scurvy, John, and it seems to addle my brain… but I’ve kept the diary for the past three years. My thoughts are in it. All of the events we’ve experienced are put down there. If you could take it when I… when I leave you… just take it back with you to England, I’d appreciate it.”

Bridgens only nodded.

“John,” said Harry Peglar, “I think Captain Crozier is going to decide to take us on the march soon. Very soon. He knows that every day we wait here we get weaker. Soon we won’t be able to haul boats at all. We’ll begin dying by the dozens here at Terror Camp before long, and it won’t take that thing on the ice to carry us away or kill us in our beds.”

Bridgens nodded again. He was looking down at his mittened hands.

“We’re not on the same man-hauling teams, won’t share the same boats, and may not even end up together if the captains decide to try for different escape routes,” continued Peglar. “I want to say goodbye today and never have to do it again.”

Bridgens nodded mutely. He was looking at his boots. The fog rolled over the boats and sledges and moved around them like some alien god’s cold breath.

Peglar hugged him. Bridgens stood upright and brittle for a moment and then returned the hug, both men clumsy in their many layers and frozen slops.

The captain of the foretop turned then and walked slowly back toward Terror Camp and his tiny circular Holland tent with its group of off-duty shivering, unwashed men huddling together in inadequate sleeping bags.

When he paused and looked back toward the line of boats, there was no sign of Bridgens at all. It was as if the fog had swallowed him without a trace.