The Voyage of the Narwhal

Why is it so difficult simply to capture what was there? That old problem of trying to show things both sequentially, and simultaneously. If I drew that scene I’d show everything happening all at once, everyone present and every place visible, from the bottom of the river to the clouds. But when I describe it in words one thing follows another and everything’s shaped by my single pair of eyes, my single voice. I wish I could show it as if through a fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture might appear and not just my version of it. As if I weren’t there. The river as the fish saw it, the ship as it looked to the men, Zeke as he looked to young Ned Kynd, the Toxies as they appeared to Captain Tyler: all those things, at once. So someone else might experience those hours for himself.

Irritated, he put down his pen. Even here, he thought, even in these pages meant only for his own eyes, he wasn’t honest. He’d left out the first mate’s self-important strut; the appalling sight of his own hands, which amid the onions had suddenly looked just like his father’s; and the sense that they were all posturing in front of each other, perhaps for the benefit of the green-coated boys. He rubbed at the stain on his thumb. Nor was it true, or not wholly true, that he wanted to paint the scene as if he weren’t in it. He did want his own point of view to count, even as he also wanted to be invisible. Such a liar, he thought. Although chiefly he lied to himself. He’d wrapped himself in a cloud. Beyond it the world pulsed and streamed but he was cut off; people loved and sorrowed without him. When had that cloud arrived?

STILL THEY WEREN’T ready to leave. Captain Tyler banished Zeke and Erasmus the next afternoon, while the men tore out and then rebuilt the bulkheads in the hold. The sledges hadn’t fit after all, in any configuration; the wood took more space than planned and the measurements on Zeke’s sketch had turned out to be wrong. A clock ticked in Erasmus’s chest: two days, two days, two days. They could leave no later, they were already late, the season for arctic navigation was short and the newspaper reporters and expedition’s donors were ready to send them off on Thursday. Did he have enough socks? The right charts, enough pencils?

He was wild with anxiety and stuck here at home, with Zeke and Lavinia and her friend Alexandra Copeland. They were in the front parlor, all four of them working. Maps and charts and drawings spread everywhere. Without explanation he rose and ran to the Repository, which he ransacked in search of Scoresby’s work on the polar ice.

He rolled the ladder along the shelves; the book was gone, yet he couldn’t remember packing it. And couldn’t bear the thought of explaining why it had suddenly seemed so crucial. The wry face Alexandra had made as he bolted embarrassed him. Yet her presence had been his idea—Lavinia couldn’t stay alone, with only the servants for company, and she hadn’t wanted to join Linnaeus or Humboldt. “A companion,” he’d proposed. “Who’d like to share our home, in return for room and board and a modest payment.”

Lavinia had chosen Alexandra, who’d accepted a pair of rooms on the second floor. When Linnaeus and Humboldt, unexpectedly generous, offered work hand-coloring the engravings they were printing for an entomology book, Alexandra had accepted that as well and made herself at home. Now there was no escaping her; sometimes she even followed him into the Repository. But she was good for Lavinia, he reminded himself. The way she pulled Lavinia into her work was wonderful. He took a breath and headed back.

At the parlor doorway he paused to watch his sister, who was frowning with concentration and shifting her gaze from the original painting pinned above her desk to the engraved copy she was coloring with Alexandra’s help. Caught up, he thought, as she’d never been helping him with his seeds. The plates showed four tropical beetles. The sun lit the brushes, the water jars, and the ruffled pinafores so dabbed with gold and rust and blue that the beetles seemed to have leapt from the plates to the women’s legs. “Has anyone seen my copy of Scoresby?” he asked.

“I’ve been reading it upstairs,” Alexandra said. She touched her brush to the paper, leaving three tiny golden dots. “I didn’t know you needed it.”

Erasmus, admitting his foolishness, said, “It’s not as if I have room for one more thing.”

“I’ll get it.” As Alexandra put down her brush and moved away, Lavinia called for tea and leaned over the table on which Erasmus and Zeke had spread their papers: rather too close to Zeke’s shoulder, Erasmus thought. As if she were pulled by the fragrance of Zeke’s skin; as if she did not have the sense to resist the almost farcical beauty that made women stare at Zeke on the street and men hum with envy. It pained him to watch her betrayed by her body’s yearnings. To him she was lovely, with her wide hazel eyes and rounded chin, now charmingly smudged with blue. Yet he suspected that to the gaze of others—perhaps even Zeke—she was merely pleasant-looking. She seemed to know that herself, as she knew that among her monthly meetings of earnest young women, gathered to discuss Goethe and Swedenborg and Fourier, she was valued more for her sensibility than for her brilliance. One by one those women had married and disappeared from the meetings, leaving behind only Alexandra and her. Once, when he’d been voicing his concerns about Zeke, she’d said, “I know I love him more than he loves me. It doesn’t bother me.” Then had flushed so darkly he’d wanted to pick her up and pace her around the floor, as he’d done when she was an infant and needed comforting.

As Lavinia traced their planned route with her index finger, past Devon and Cornwallis and Beechey Island, where Franklin’s winter camp had been found, then south along Boothia Peninsula and King William Land, Erasmus thought how maps showed only two things, land and water. To someone who hadn’t traveled, their journey over that arctic map might seem a simple thing. Turn left, turn right, go north or south, steer by this headland or that bay. He and Zeke, who’d pored over their predecessors’ accounts, knew otherwise. Ice, both fluid and solid, appeared and disappeared with consistent inconsistency; one year an inlet might be open, the next walled shut. Lavinia, unaware of this, traced the route backward and said with satisfaction, “It’s not so very far. You’ll be home before October.”

“I hope,” Zeke said. “But you mustn’t worry if we’re not—many expeditions have to winter over. We’ve provisioned for a full eighteen months, in case we’re frozen in.”

While Lavinia gazed at the deceitful map, Alexandra returned with Erasmus’s book and then asked the question Lavinia might have been framing in her mind. “I haven’t understood this all spring,” she said. “If you take this route, which you say concentrates most efficiently on the areas in which you have some evidence of Franklin’s presence, how can you also search for signs of an open polar sea? De Haven and Penny reported Jones Sound clogged with ice when they were there.” She smoothed her paintstained garment. “Ross found most of Barrow Strait frozen, and Peel Sound as well. Even if you manage to approach the region of Rae’s discoveries, which lies south of all those areas, surely you can’t also simultaneously head north?”

Erasmus lifted his head in surprise. The same question had worried him for months, but he’d pushed it aside; Zeke hadn’t mentioned his desire to find an open polar sea since the evening that had launched them all on this path. Lavinia’s twenty-sixth birthday party, back in November; Alexandra had been present that night as well, although Erasmus had hardly noticed her. He’d been full of hope that Lavinia was about to get what she most desired.

He’d spared no expense, dressing the Repository’s windows with greenery and lining the sills with candles, scrubbing the dissecting table and shrouding it with crisp linen, on which he’d spread biscuits, a roasted ham, a turkey and a salmon in aspic. Lavinia had rejected her first three suitors—too dull, she’d said. Too weak, not smart enough. While her friends married and produced their first children she’d held out for Zeke and somehow won him. Erasmus had been terrified for her during her long campaign, then relieved, then worried again: his own fault. Zeke had asked for her hand but been vague about the details, and Erasmus had failed to press him. His father would have known better, he thought. His father wouldn’t have permitted Lavinia to bind herself for an uncertain length of time. The damage was done, but secretly Erasmus had hoped Zeke might choose the party to announce a wedding date.

In the kind light of the candles Lavinia might have been a candle herself, radiant in white silk trimmed with blue ribbons. She stood perfectly still when Zeke, just as Erasmus had hoped, silenced the room and said, “I have an announcement!”

Erasmus had sighed with relief, not noticing that Lavinia looked confused. Zeke rested his elbow on a case that held a bird-of-paradise. “You’ve all heard the news announced by John Rae earlier this month,” he said. He stood with his chin up, his chest out, one hand dancing in the air. “No doubt you share both my sorrow at what appears to have been the fate of Franklin’s expedition, and my relief that some news—however fragmentary, and possibly incorrect—has been obtained.”

He went on about the tragic disappearance of Franklin and his men, the many rescue attempts, the details of what Rae had discovered—old news to Erasmus, who’d followed every newspaper article. His guests listened, glasses in hands, among them women who would have listened with equal interest had Zeke been reciting the agricultural products of China; anything, Erasmus imagined them thinking, for this chance to gaze at Zeke blamelessly. Yet his own sister was the woman Zeke had chosen. “Perhaps you also feel, as I do,” Zeke added, “that now that the area has been defined, someone has to search further for any possible survivors.”

A guest stepped sideways then, so that Erasmus caught sight of Lavinia’s face. She looked as puzzled as he felt.

“To that end,” Zeke continued, “I’ve been able to obtain the backing of a number of our leading merchants for another expedition. Our valiant Dr. Kane has been searching for Franklin in the wrong area, and although we’re all worried about him—and although I’d be the first to go in search of him if a relief expedition wasn’t already being organized—something more is needed. I propose to set forth this spring, to search more thoroughly for Franklin in the areas below Lancaster Sound. While I’m there, I also propose to study the region, and to further investigate the possibility of an open polar sea.”

Everyone had cheered. Erasmus had stretched his lips in something like a smile, hoping no one would notice his surprise. What merchants, when, how…did everyone know about this but him? Lavinia, even, who might have hidden her knowledge—but she wore a smile as forced as his own. Zeke must have made these arrangements in secret, taking pleasure in presenting his plan only when it was complete.

After the flurry of congratulations, after the first buzz of questions about where Zeke might go, and how he might get there, and what sort of ship and crew he envisioned, Zeke took Lavinia’s hands. She beamed as if his announcement were the ideal birthday present, and when a guest sat down at the piano and began to play, she and Zeke led the crowd to the floor.

Erasmus went outside to have a cigar and calm the storm in his chest. He was watching the smoke rise through the still night air when Zeke appeared with two glasses and a bottle. He had to ask questions, Erasmus thought. Fatherly questions, although that role still felt odd: what this meant in terms of the engagement, whether Zeke wanted to marry Lavinia before he left—or release her, perhaps, until he returned.

Leaning against one of the fluted porch columns, Zeke filled the glasses and lit a cigar for himself. Erasmus opened his mouth to speak, and Zeke said, “Erasmus—you must come with me. When are you going to get another chance like this?”

Erasmus choked, coughing so hard he bent double. All the expeditions he’d already missed—was this what he’d been waiting for? Even Elisha Kent Kane had spurned him, sailing off with a crew of Philadelphians younger but no smarter than himself. Perhaps Zeke sensed his discouragement, and the extent of his wounded vanity.

“You’re ideal for this,” he said. “Where could I find anyone else as knowledgeable about the natural history of the polar regions? Or as familiar with the hardships of such a journey?”

The idea of serving under a man so much younger than himself was preposterous, but it seemed to him that Zeke was looking for a partner, not a subordinate. Surely Zeke wouldn’t ask for his help if he didn’t regard him as an equal, even—naturally—a superior? Erasmus said, “You’re kind to think of me. But you might have asked me earlier—I have responsibilities here, and of course my own work…”

Zeke bounded from the porch to the grass below. “Of course!” he said, pacing before the columns. “It’s a huge imposition—I wouldn’t think of asking you if your work weren’t so invaluable…but that’s why you’re the right person. I didn’t want to bother you until I was sure I had backing for the expedition. Think of what we’ll see!”

Somewhere in those icy waters, Franklin and his men might still be trapped in the Erebus and the Terror. Even if they couldn’t be found, many new species, even new lands, were there to be discovered. Erasmus thought of being free, this time, to investigate everything without the noxious Navy discipline. He thought of northern sights to parallel, even exceed, his brief experience in the Antarctic; of discoveries in natural history that might prove extraordinarily important. Then he thought of his sister, who appeared on the porch with her white dress foaming like a spray of catalpa blossom.

“You should go in,” she said to Zeke. “All the guests are longing to talk with you.”

He leapt up the steps and she steered him inside. With a swirl of skirts she turned to Erasmus.

“Will you go?” she said.

Eavesdropping, he thought. Again. She’d done this since she was a little girl, as if this were the only way she could keep track of her brothers.

“Please? You have to go with him.”

He had his own reasons, Erasmus thought. For going, or staying. “Did he keep this secret from you?”

“He had to, he said he needed…”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“As if you ever tell me anything,” she said. “And who are you to criticize him? Especially since Father died: all you do is mope around, sorting your seeds—do you think I haven’t seen you at eleven in the morning still in bed? So Linnaeus and Humboldt can run the business without you. So you haven’t found anyone to fall in love with since Sarah Louise.”

Sarah Louise, he thought. Still the simple sound of her name made him feel like he’d swallowed a stone. A dull ache, which never quite left him. As Lavinia knew.

“Copernicus isn’t married either,” she continued, “but you don’t see Copernicus moping around, you don’t see Copernicus wasting his life…I need you.”

A snarl of guilt and tenderness caught at him. As children, he and his brothers used to bolt for the woods and return hours later, to find Lavinia waiting by a window with an unread book in her lap. He’d been the one she looked up to, the one who tied her shoes and taught her to read. Sometimes, when the other boys weren’t around and he’d remembered not just that her birth had cost him his mother, but that she’d never had a mother, they’d drawn very close. Then his brothers would tumble in and he’d abandon her again. Back and forth, oldest and youngest. He had failed her often enough.

She drew him inside, to a corner behind a case of stuffed finches. “This is who I love,” she said fiercely. “Do you understand? Do you remember what that feels like? What if something happens to him? You have to take care of him for me.”

“Lavinia,” he said. Her hands, squeezing his left arm, were very hot. Once, after Zeke had been describing the shipwreck that made him a local hero, Erasmus had found her weeping in the garden. Not with delayed fear over what might have happened to Zeke, not with hysteria—but with longing, she’d managed to make him understand. A boundless desire for Zeke. When he’d tried to remind her that Zeke had flaws as well as virtues, she’d said, “I know, I know. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the way I feel when he touches my hand, or when we dance and I smell the skin on his neck.” The strength of her feelings had embarrassed him.

“You know this means waiting even longer,” he said. “Has he mentioned a date?” His fault, he thought again. Why hadn’t he asked Zeke himself?

“Not exactly. But when he gets home, I know he’ll want to settle down.”

Of course he wanted her to marry Zeke, not just to ease his own responsibilities but because he wanted her happy. Didn’t he? She’d cared first for their father and then him. “You’re sure…” he said. “You feel sure of his feelings for you?”

“He loves me,” she said passionately. “In his own way—I know he does.”

A blinding headache had seized him then, blurring the rest of the party. And through a process he still didn’t understand, he’d been led to this table and Alexandra’s pointed questions; to the fact that, in two days, he’d be sailing north in the company of a young man he’d known for ages yet couldn’t imagine accepting orders from.

One of the maids came in with the tea tray: Agnes? Ellen? The servants were Lavinia’s province; as long as meals appeared on time Erasmus didn’t notice who did the work. He thought they didn’t know this, although Lavinia sometimes reproached him. And although once he’d overheard the staff in the kitchen referring to “the seedy-man” and then laughing furiously. Now he avoided the eyes of the girl with the tray and drew a breath, waiting to hear what Zeke would say about the open polar sea.

“You read a lot,” Zeke said to Alexandra. If he was startled that she’d remembered his comment at the party, it didn’t show. “I’ve noticed that. So you must have learned about the stretches of open water persisting all winter and recurring in the same places every year. What the Russians call polynyas. Inglefield found open water in Smith Sound. Birds have been seen migrating northward from Canada. A warm current flows northward beneath the surface, several people have observed it—suppose it leads to a temperate ocean, free from ice, surrounding the North Pole beyond a frozen barrier?”

“Suppose,” Alexandra said. Her right hand sketched an arc in the air, as if she were still holding her paintbrush.

“When Dr. Kane left,” Zeke continued, “he said he was going to look for signs of this phenomenon if he could. So there’s nothing so strange in my wanting to look as well.”

Many times in the months since the party Erasmus had sat in the offices of wealthy men, while Zeke proposed their search for Franklin. A portrait of Franklin in full-dress uniform hung in the Narwhal’s cabin—Franklin, Franklin, Zeke had said, as he asked the men for money. It made sense that he concentrated on this aspect of the voyage—how proud the merchants were, contributing to such a good cause! In Zeke, Erasmus thought, they saw a young man who could succeed at anything. The man they’d dreamed of being, the man they hoped their sons might be. Other expeditions might have failed, but Zeke’s would not.

“It’s a theory,” Zeke told Alexandra now. “An interesting theory. In the arctic one can never predict where the ice will allow one to go, nor one’s speed, nor even always one’s direction. My plan is to follow this route and search for Franklin. But were conditions to be unexpectedly good—were one of the northern channels to be open, say—it’s possible we’d do some exploring.”

“Possible,” Alexandra said. “Hence you provision for eighteen months?”

“For safety’s sake,” Zeke said. He stroked his eyebrows, taming the springy golden tufts; perhaps aware that Lavinia followed the gesture intently. And perhaps, Erasmus thought, a bit annoyed that Alexandra didn’t. A sensible woman, she seemed immune to Zeke’s charms.

Lavinia, tearing her eyes from Zeke’s hand, said, “I don’t see here on the maps where you’d head north at all.”

“Only if he were driven to it,” Alexandra said. “Were he to raise this money to search for Franklin, and then purposefully head in another direction, that would be quite wrong.”

Zeke gazed steadily at her, and she gazed as steadily back. “The maps never tell us what we need,” he said, turning toward Lavinia. “That’s part of the reason we go.”

Later Erasmus would realize that for all his alertness to Zeke’s gestures and the women’s responses he hadn’t been paying sufficient attention. The lamps were lit, the sun was setting, they were munching delicious chocolate cake; the maps beckoned and he was dreaming of glory. His own glory, his own desires. They might find survivors of Franklin’s expedition; or if not, surely better evidence of what had happened than Rae’s dispiriting tale. With any luck they’d find other things as well. All sorts of specimens, not just plants but seaweeds, fishes, birds—he would write a book. He’d sketch his specimens and write their descriptions; his talent was for drawing from nature, capturing the salient features as only a trained observer could. Copernicus, so skilled with color and light, would turn the sketches into paintings; Linnaeus and Humboldt would prepare the plates. Together they’d make something beautiful. For years, in the light of his disappointments, he’d pretended to himself that he wasn’t ambitious—but he was, he was. And lucky beyond belief to be part of this voyage. A blaze of excitement blinded him.

“And you, Erasmus,” Alexandra said. “What do you think of all this?”

“In the polar regions,” he said, “it’s true that one must be flexible, and take what opportunities are offered.”

He looked down at the volume she’d relinquished. He would bring it, after all. Surely there was room for one small book. “Zeke and I will respond to what we find, and decide accordingly.”

THAT NIGHT, IN her diary, Alexandra wrote:

It’s not Lavinia’s fault her brothers underestimate her. I know she’ll be different once the men leave and we’re on our own; her mind dissolves in Zeke’s presence. I’ll be glad when we can be ourselves. This house is so beautiful, so spacious—what would my parents think, I wonder, if they were alive to see me in these two gorgeous rooms I now call my own? The window over my bed looks down on a planting of dwarf trees. My bed-linen is changed weekly, by someone other than me. And this painting is such a pleasure, so much more satisfying than needlework. So much better paid. Beneath the lining of my sewing box I’ve already tucked a surprising sum. Soon I’ll be able to purchase some books of my own, an extravagance when I have the Repository shelves to browse through, once the men leave…I’m impatient for them to go, I am. And wish that, like Erasmus, I might have the luxury of sleeping out there.

Does he know that he rocks the toe of his boot in the air whenever Zeke speaks? I wonder what Erasmus was like as a boy. Before he grew so frozen, before he sat with his chin tucked into his collar like that, and his right hand wringing his left so strongly one wonders he doesn’t break the bones. Lavinia says that when she was a girl he was fond of beetles and moths, and teased the succession of governesses who raised her. I can’t imagine him teasing anyone.

THE NARWHAL SET sail on May 28, in such a wild flurry that everything important seemed still undone and nothing Erasmus meant to say got said. He and Zeke stood on the deck in their new gray uniforms, waving their handkerchiefs. Above them the Toxophilites’ pennant streamed in the wind, snapping straight out then beginning to droop, snapping straight out again. Terns hung motionless in the high currents, and Erasmus felt as though he himself were hanging between two worlds.