The Terror

6 GOODSIR

From the private diary of Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir:

John Torrington, stoker on HMS Terror, died early this morning. New Year’s Day. The beginning of our Fifth Month stuck in the ice here at Beechey Island.

His death was not a surprise. It has been obvious for several months that Torrington had been in the advanced stages of Consumption when he signed on the expedition, and if the Symptoms had manifested themselves just a few weeks earlier in the Late Summer, he would have been sent home on Rattler or even with the two whaling ships we encountered just before sailing west across Baffin Bay and through Lancaster Sound to the Arctic Waste where we now find ourselves wintering. The sad Irony is that Torrington’s doctor had told him that going to Sea would be good for his health.

Chief Surgeon Peddie and Dr. McDonald on Terror treated Torrington, of course, but I was present several times during the Diagnosis stage and was escorted to their ship by several of Erebus’s crewmen after the young stoker died this morning.

When his illness became Obvious in early November, Captain Crozier relieved the 20-year-old of his duties as stoker down in the poorly ventilated lowest deck — the coal dust in the air alone there is enough to asphyxiate a person with normal lungs — and John Torrington had been in a consumptive invalid’s Downward Spiral since then. Still, Torrington might have survived for many more months had not there been an Intermediating Agent of his death. Dr. Alexander McDonald tells me that Torrington, who had become too weak in recent weeks even to allow his short Constitutionals around the lower deck, helped by his messmates, came down with Pneumonia on Christmas Day, and it had been a Death Watch since then. When I saw the body this morning, I was shocked at how Emaciated the dead John Torrington was, but both Peddie and McDonald explained that his appetite had been waning for two months, and even though the ship’s surgeons altered his Diet more heavily toward Canned Soups and Vegetables, he had continued to lose weight.

This morning I watched as Peddie and McDonald prepared the corpse — Torrington in a clean striped shirt, his hair recently and carefully cut, his nails clean — binding the usual clean cloth around his head to keep the jaw from dropping, then binding him with more strips of white cotton at the elbows, hands, ankles, and big toes. They did this in order to hold the Limbs together while they weighed the poor boy — 88 Pounds! — and otherwise prepared his body for burial. There was no discussion of Postmortem Examination since it was obvious that Consumption accelerated by Pneumonia had killed the lad, so there was no worry of contamination reaching other crew members.

I helped my two surgeon colleagues from HMS Terror lift Torrington’s body into the coffin carefully prepared for it by the ship’s able Carpenter, Thomas Honey, and by his mate, a man named Wilson. There was no rigor mortis. The carpenters had left a residue of Wood Shavings along the bottom of the coffin, so carefully constructed and shaped out of standard ship’s mahogany, with a Deeper Pile of shavings under Torrington’s head, and because there was yet little Scent of Decay, the air was scented primarily by the wood shavings.

I keep thinking about John Torrington’s Burial late yesterday.

Only a small contingent of us attended from HMS Erebus, but along with Sir John, Commander Fitzjames, and a few officers, I made the Crossing on Foot from our ship to theirs, and hence the extra two hundred yards to the Shore of Beechey Island.

I have not been able to Imagine a worse winter than the one we have suffered frozen into this small anchorage in the lee of Beechey Island itself, set in the cusp of larger Devon Island, but Commander Fitzjames and others have assured me that our Situation here — even with the Treacherous Pressure Ridges, Terrible Dark, Howling Storms, and Constantly Menacing Ice — would be a thousand times worse out beyond this anchorage, out where the Ice flows down from the Pole like a hail of Enemy Fire from some Borean god.

John Torrington’s crewmates gently lowered his coffin — already covered with a fine blue wool — over the railing of their ship, which is Wedged High on its own pillar of ice, while other Terror seamen lashed the coffin to a large Sledge. Sir John himself draped a Union Jack over the coffin, and then Torrington’s friends and messmates set themselves into Harness and pulled the sledge the six hundred feet or so to the ice-and-gravel shore of Beechey Island.

All of this was performed in near Absolute Dark, of course, since even at midday, the sun makes no Appearance here in January and has not done so for three months. It shall be another month and more, they tell me, before the Southern Horizon welcomes back our Fiery Star. At any rate, this entire procession — coffin, sledge, manhaulers, officers, surgeons, Sir John, Royal Marines in full dress concealed under the same drab Slops the rest of us were wearing — was illuminated only by bobbing lamplight as we made our way across the Frozen Sea to the Frozen Shore. Men from Terror had chopped and shoveled away at the several recently arisen Pressure Ridges which stood between us and the graveled beach, so there were few Deviations from our sad Route. Earlier in the Winter, Sir John ordered a system of Stout Poles, ropes, and Hanging Lanterns to line the shortest route between the Ships and the graveled isthmus where several Structures had been built — one to house much of the ships’ stores, removed should ice destroy our vessels; another as a sort of emergency bunkhouse and Scientific Station; and a third housing the armourer’s forge, set here so that the Flames and Sparks should not ignite our tindered shipboard Homes. I have learned that Sailors fear fire at sea above almost everything else. But this Course of wooden Poles and Lanterns had to be abandoned since the ice is constantly shifting, rising up, and scattering or smashing anything set out on it.

It was snowing during the burial. The wind was blowing hard, as it always does here on this godforsaken Arctic Waste. Just north of the burial site rose Sheer Black Cliffs, as inaccessible as the Mountains of the Moon. The lanterns lit on Erebus and Terror were only the dimmest of glows through the blowing snow. Occasionally a fragment of Cold Moon would appear from between quickly moving clouds, but even this thin, pale moonlight was quickly lost in the snow and dark. Dear God, this is truly a Stygian bleakness.

Some of the strongest men from Terror worked almost without pause since the hours right after Torrington’s death, using pickaxe and spade to excavate his Grave — a regulation five feet deep, as commanded by Sir John. The Hole had been dug out of the most Severely Frozen ice and rock and one glance at it revealed to me what Labour had gone into its excavation. The flag was removed, and the coffin was lowered carefully, almost reverently, into the narrow Pit. Snow immediately covered the top of the coffin and Glistened in the light from our several lanterns. One man, one of Crozier’s officers, set the wooden headboard in place and it was driven down into the frozen gravel with a few slams of a giant wooden hammer wielded by a giant of a seaman. The words on that carefully carved headboard read

Sir John conducted the Service and spoke the Eulogy. It went on for some time and the soft drone of his soft voice was interrupted only by the Wind and by the stamping of Feet as the men tried to avoid frostbite of the toes. I confess that I heard little of Sir John’s eulogy — between the howling wind and my own wandering thoughts, oppressed by the loneliness of the place, by the memory of the striped-shirted body, limbs bound, that had just been lowered into that Cold Hole, and oppressed most of all by the Eternal blackness of the cliffs above the graveled isthmus.

Another man is dead.

One of our own here on HMS Erebus, twenty-five-year-old John Hartnell, an able seaman. Just after what I still think of as 6:00 p.m., just as the tables were being lowered on chains for the men’s dinner, Hartnell stumbled against his brother, Thomas, fell to the deck, coughed blood, and was dead within five minutes. Surgeon Stanley and I were with him when he died in the cleared part of the forward area of the lower deck which we use for Sick Bay.

This death stunned us. Hartnell had shown no symptoms of scurvy or consumption. Commander Fitzjames was there with us and could not hide his consternation. If this were some Plague or beginning of Scurvy moving through the crew, we needed to know at once. It was decided then and there, while the curtains were drawn and before anyone made ready to prepare John Hartnell for his coffin, that we would do a Postmortem Examination.

We cleared the table in the Sick Bay area, shielded our Actions further by moving some crates between the milling Men and ourselves, drew the curtain around our Labours as best we could, and I fetched my instruments. Stanley, although Chief Surgeon, suggested that I should do the work since I had studied as an anatomist. I made the initial Incision and began.

Immediately I realized that in my Haste I had used the inverted-Y incision that I had used in training on cadavers when I was in a rush. Rather than the more common Y, with the two arms of the incision reaching down from the shoulders and meeting at the base of the sternum, my upsidedown Y incision had the arms of the Y starting near each hip and meeting near Hartnell’s umbilicus. Stanley commented upon it and I was embarrassed.

“Whatever is faster,” I said softly to my fellow surgeon. “We must do this quickly — the men hate knowing that bodies of their crewmates are being opened”.

Surgeon Stanley nodded and I continued. As if to Confirm my statement, Hartnell’s younger brother, Thomas, began shouting and crying from just the other side of the curtain. Unlike Torrington’s slow decline on Terror, giving his crewmates time to come to terms with his death, time to parcel out his belongings and prepare letters for Torrington’s mother, John Hartnell’s sudden collapse and death had shocked the men here. None of them could abide the idea that the ship’s surgeons were cutting into the body. Now only the bulk, rank, and demeanor of Commander Fitzjames stood between the angry brother, confused seamen, and our Sick Bay. I could hear that the younger Hartnell’s messmates and Fitzjames’s presence were holding him back, but even as my scalpel cut through tissue and my knife and rib spreader opened the corpse for examination, I could hear the Muttering and Anger just a few yards beyond the curtain.

First I removed Hartnell’s heart, cutting away part of the trachea with it. I held it up to the lantern light, and Stanley took it and washed away blood with a dirty rag. We both inspected it. It looked normal enough — not visibly diseased. With Stanley still holding the Organ close to the light, I made one cut in the right ventricle, then one in the left. Peeling the tough muscle back, both Stanley and I reviewed the valves there. They seemed healthy.

Dropping Hartnell’s heart back into his abdominal cavity, I dissected the lower part of the able seaman’s lungs with quick strokes of my scalpel.

“There,” said Surgeon Stanley.

I nodded. There were obvious signs of scarring and other indications of Consumption, as well as signs that the seaman recently had been suffering from pneumonia. John Hartnell, like John Torrington, had been tubercular, but this older, stronger — and according to Stanley — harsher and louder sailor had concealed the Symptoms, perhaps even from himself. Until today, when he keeled over and died just minutes before getting his salt pork.

Pulling and cutting the Liver free, I held it under the light, and both Stanley and I believed that we noticed adequate confirmation of the consumption as well as indications that Hartnell had been too heavy a Drinker for too long a time.

Just yards away on the other side of the curtain, Hartnell’s brother, Thomas, was shouting, furious, being held in check only by Commander Fitzjames’s stern bark. I could tell from the voices that several of the other officers — Lieutenant Gore, Lieutenant Le Vesconte and Fairholme, even Des Voeux, the mate — had joined in calming and intimidating the Mob of sailors.

“Have we seen enough?” whispered Stanley.

I nodded again. There had been no sign of Scurvy on the body, on the face or in the mouth, or in the organs. While it remained a Mystery how the consumption or pneumonia or a combination of the two had been able to kill the able-bodied seaman so quickly, it was at least obvious that we had nothing to fear from some Plague-like Disease.

The noise from the crew’s Berthing Space was growing Louder, so I quickly thrust the lung samples, liver, and other organs back in the abdominal cavity with the heart, taking no care to set them in proper place, more or less squeezing them into a Mass, and then I returned Hartnell’s chest plate roughly back in place. (Later I was to Realize that I had set it in upside down.) Chief Surgeon Stanley then closed up the inverted-Y incision, using a large needle and heavy sail thread with a quick, confident motion that would have done credit to any sailmaker.

Within another minute we had Hartnell’s clothes back on — rigor mortis was beginning to be a problem — and we thrust the curtain aside. Stanley — whose voice is deeper and more resonant than mine — assured Hartnell’s brother and the other men that all we had remaining was to wash their crewmate’s body so that they could prepare it for burial.

For some reason this Burial Service was Harder on me than the first. Again we had the solemn Procession from the ship — with only Erebus and its crew involved this time, although Dr. McDonald, Surgeon Peddie, and Captain Crozier joined us from Terror.

Again the flag-covered coffin — the men had dressed Hartnell’s upper body in three layers, including his brother Thomas’s best shirt, but had wrapped his naked lower body in only a shroud, leaving the top half of the coffin open for several hours in the black-creped Sick Bay on the lower deck before the nails were hammered in for the burial service. Again the slow sledge procession from the Frozen Sea to the Frozen Shore, lanterns bobbing in the black night, although the stars were out this Midday and no snow fell. The Marines had work to do, since three of the Great White Bears came sniffing closer, looming like white wraiths out of the ice blocks, and the men had to fire muskets at them to drive them away — visibly wounding one bear in the side.

Again the Eulogy from Sir John — although shorter this time, since Hartnell was not as well liked as young Torrington had been — and again we walked back across the creaking, squeaking, moaning ice alone, under the stars dancing in the Cold this time, the only sound behind us the dwindling scrape of spades and pickaxes filling in the frozen soil in the new hole next to Torrington’s nicely tended grave.

Perhaps it was the black cliff face Looming over All that murdered my Spirits this second burial. Although I deliberately stood where my back was to the Cliff this time, closer to Sir John so that I could hear the Words of Hope and Solace, I was always aware of that cold, black, vertical, lifeless and lightless slab of insensate Stone behind me — a portal, it seemed, to that Country from Which No Man Has Ever Returned. Compared to the Cold Reality of that black, featureless stone, even Sir John’s compassionate and inspired words had little effect.

The morale on both ships is very low. We are not yet a Full Week into the new year, and already two of our Company have died. Tomorrow the four of us surgeons have agreed to Meet in a Private Place — the carpenter’s room belowdecks on Terror — to discuss what should be done to avoid more Mortality in what seems to be a Cursed Expedition.

The headstone on this second grave read

The wind has come up in the last hour, it is almost Midnight and most of the lamps are out here on the lower deck of Erebus. I listen to the wind howl and think of those two cold Low Heaps of Loose Stone out on that black, windy isthmus, and I think of the dead men in those two cold Holes, and I think of the Featureless Black Face of Rock, and I can imagine the fusillade of snow pellets already working to eradicate the letters on the wooden headstones.