The Voyage of the Narwhal

The acquaintances of the Narwhal’s crew gathered in little knots close to shore, followed by the cheering Toxies in their green outfits. Dotting the wharf in separate clusters were Zeke’s and Erasmus’s relatives and friends, their clothing splayed into wide colored planes by the wind whipping across the river. Alexandra had brought her entire family—her sisters, Emily and Jane; her brother, Browning; and Browning’s wife and infant son—all of them huddled so tightly that it was as if even here, in the open air, they couldn’t expand beyond the confines of the tiny house they’d shared since their parents’ deaths. They were small, neat, and yet somehow fierce-looking; abolitionists, serious young people. They dressed in the colors of sparrows and doves but more closely resembled, Erasmus thought, a family of saw-whet owls. Browning had a Bible in his hands.

Later, Alexandra would write in her diary about the argument she and Browning had over the verses he read out loud. Later she’d sketch a portrait of Erasmus during these last minutes, which showed his hand clasped nervously around a stay, his graying hair curled beneath a cap that made him look oddly boyish, the tip of his long, thin nose sniffing at the wind. But for now she only stood silently, watching him watch everyone. In the oily water around the pilings wood shavings swirled and tossed.

To the left of Alexandra’s family stood a group of employees from the engraving firm and some representatives from the Voorhees packet line; beyond them were Linnaeus and Humboldt, as plump and glossy as beavers, and Lavinia, leaning on both of them, overdressed in swirls of blue and green and flashing in the sun like a trout. At the tip of the wharf, befitting their support of the expedition, came Zeke’s family. His father stood suave and proud, his still-thick thatch of ruddy hair moving in the wind and revealing his massive eyebrows and the lynxlike tufts on his ears. His mother, shrouded in black for the death of an aunt, was weeping. Not surprising, Erasmus thought; she was famous for the way she coddled her only son. Flanking her were Zeke’s sisters, Violet and Laurel, beautifully dressed and seemingly contemptuous of their merchant husbands, who weren’t sailing north.

They waved; the water opened between the wharf and the ship; the tune piped by the Toxies’ piccolo player shattered in the breeze until the separate and unrelated notes merged with the calls of the gulls. Behind the mountains and beyond the north wind, Erasmus’s father had once read to him, past the cave where the cold arises, live a race of people called Hyperboreans. Here are the hinges on which the world turns and the limits of the circuits of the stars. Here there is no disharmony and sorrow is unknown. The figures on the wharf began to shrink. Everyone, except the dead, whom Erasmus had ever loved; every person who might be proud of him or admire his courage or worry over his fate. The faces faded, and then disappeared.

2 PAST THE CAVE WHERE THE COLD ARISES

(JUNE–JULY 1855)

Of the inanimate productions of Greenland, none perhaps excites so much interest and astonishment in a stranger, as the ice in its great abundance and variety. The stupendous masses, known by the name of Ice-Islands, Floating-Mountains, or Icebergs, common to Davis’ Straits and sometimes met with here, from their height, various forms, and the depth of water in which they ground, are calculated to strike the beholder with wonder; yet the fields of ice, more peculiar to Greenland, are not less astonishing. Their deficiency in elevation, is sufficiently compensated by their amazing extent of surface. Some of them have been observed near a hundred miles in length, and more than half that in breadth; each consisting of a single sheet of ice, having its surface raised in general four or six feet above the level of the water, and its base depressed to the depth of near twenty feet beneath.

The ice in general, is designated by a variety of appellations, distinguishing it according to the size or number of pieces, their form of aggregation, thickness, transparency, &c. I perhaps cannot better explain the terms in common acceptation amongst the whale-fishers, than by marking the disruption of a field. The thickest and strongest field cannot resist the power of a heavy swell; indeed, such are much less capable of bending without being dissevered, than the thinner ice which is more pliable. When a field, by the set of the current, drives to the southward, and being deserted by the loose ice, becomes exposed to the effects of a grown swell, it presently breaks into a great many pieces, few of which will exceed forty or fifty yards in diameter. Now, such a number of the pieces collected together in close contact, so that they cannot, from the top of the ship’s mast, be seen over, are termed a pack.

When the collection of pieces can be seen across, if it assume a circular or polygonal form, the name of patch is applied, and it is called a stream when its shape is more of an oblong, how narrow soever it may be, provided the continuity of the pieces is preserved.

Pieces of very large dimensions, but smaller than fields, are called floes; thus, a field may be compared to a pack, and a floe to a patch, as regards their size and external form. Small pieces which break off, and are separated from the larger masses by the effect of attrition, are called brash-ice, and may be collected into streams or patches. Ice is said to be loose or open, when the pieces are so far separated as to allow a ship to sail freely amongst them; this has likewise been called drift ice. A hummock is a protuberance raised upon any plane of ice above the common level. It is frequently produced by pressure, where one piece is squeezed upon another, often set up on its edge, and in that position cemented by the frost. Hummocks are likewise formed, by pieces of ice mutually crushing each other, the wreck being coacervated upon one or both of them. To hummocks, the ice is indebted for the variety of fanciful shapes, and its picturesque appearance. They occur in great numbers in heavy packs, on the edges and occasionally in the middle of fields and floes. They often attain the height of thirty feet or upwards…

A bight signifies a bay or sinuosity, on the border of any large mass or body of ice. It is supposed to be called bight from the low word bite, to take in, or entrap; because, in this situation, ships are sometimes so caught by a change of wind, that the ice cannot be cleared on either tack; and in some cases, a total loss has been the consequence.

—WILLIAM SCORESBY, The Polar Ice (1815)

Zeke started heaving over the Narwhal’s rail before they cleared the bay. He had mentioned, Erasmus remembered, some seasickness on his father’s ships—but this was no spasm, a few hours’ illness and a night’s recovery. This was endless retching and a white-faced speechless headache. As they passed New York and surged ahead of the ship heading off to search for Dr. Kane, the elation Erasmus might have felt was squelched by worry over Zeke’s condition.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” he asked. Around him the crew hovered, disdainfully watching Zeke respond to the slightest swells.

“I thought it would be different this time,” Zeke whispered.

Erasmus, contemplating Zeke’s falsehood, remembered an image he’d long forgotten. A pale, frail, yellow-haired boy reading mounds of natural history books and explorers’ journals in a deep chair piled with pillows—that had been Zeke, aged thirteen or fourteen.

His own father, Erasmus remembered, had acted as a sort of uncle to Zeke during Mr. Voorhees’s business trips: an antidote to a houseful of women. He’d brought armfuls of books during the year Zeke spent in bed after a bout of typhus, and had later welcomed Zeke’s visits to the Repository. Erasmus, just back from the Exploring Expedition then, had been only vaguely aware that Zeke regarded him as some sort of hero. But after Zeke finished reading the journals of Franklin’s first voyage, Erasmus had heard him say to his father, “This is how I want to live, Mr. Wells—like Franklin and his men, like Erasmus. I want to explore. How can anyone bear to live and die without accomplishing something remarkable?”

Erasmus had dismissed those words as boyish fantasies, watching unsurprised as Zeke was funneled into his family’s business. He worked in the warehouse, he sat in the office, he traveled on the ships of the packet line; he complained he had no time for his own studies, yet acted like his father’s right hand. Then a lightning bolt struck a ship he was on, burning it to the waterline and killing some of the crew. Flames shooting into the night, shattered spars, the cries of the lost; Zeke had saved twenty-six passengers, herding them toward the floating debris and caring for them until their rescue. His descriptions of the incident, Erasmus believed, had made Lavinia fall in love with him. Afterward Mr. Voorhees, as a kind of reward, had allowed Zeke a certain amount of time for his scientific investigations on each voyage.

Erasmus, thinking those investigations were just a hobby, had expected Zeke to mature into a merchant captain. Yet Zeke kept reading and planning and making notes—dreaming, while no one paid attention, of a quest that would make his name. Until finally, at Lavinia’s birthday party, he’d surprised them all.

“In the water,” Zeke had once told Erasmus, “while I was floating there, knowing I might easily die, I understood I would not die. I was not sickly, I was very strong; I could keep my head in an emergency. I was destined—I am destined—to do something remarkable. Men have made themselves famous solely by mastering a subject which others have not yet seen to be important. And I have mastered the literature of arctic exploration.”

That mastery was of little use during the first ten days of the voyage, which Zeke spent flat on his back, flounder pale, his oddly large palms and short, blunt fingers dangling over the side of his berth. Erasmus cared for him as well as he could, remembering his promise to his sister and his own early misreadings of Zeke’s character. Unpleasant work: yet for all his worry, there was still the great pleasure of being at sea again. The wind tearing the clouds to shreds, tearing his old dull life to shreds. In his journal he wrote:

How could I have forgotten what this was like? Thirteen years since I was last on a ship, waking to the sounds of halyards cracking against the masts, water rushing past the hull; and each day the sense of time stretching out before me as rich and vast as the ocean. I think about things I’ve forgotten for years. Outwardly this is much like my last voyage: the watches changing, the ship’s bell ringing, the routine of meals and duties. Yet in other ways so different. No military men, no military discipline; just the small group of us, gathered for a common cause. And me with all the time in the world to stand on the deck at night and watch the stars whirling overhead.

RAIN, FOUR DAYS in a row. Erasmus stayed in the cabin for much of that time, besotted with his new home. Between the bulkhead separating the cabin from the forecastle, and the equipment shelves surrounding the stepladder leading to the deck, everything else was squeezed: hinged table and wooden stools; lockers, hanging lamp and stove; and, stacked in tiers of three along the sides, six berths. Mr. Tagliabeau, Captain Tyler, and Mr. Francis occupied the starboard berths. On the port side, Dr. Boerhaave had the bottom, Zeke the middle, and Erasmus the upper berth, which was lined and curtained off with India rubber cloth. The rats creeping up from the hold at night might have seen the officers arranged like cheeses along their shelves and, on the opposite side of the bulkhead, the seamen swaying in their netted hammocks.

Yet physical discomforts didn’t seem to matter. With his curtain drawn, Erasmus could almost pretend he was alone; almost forget that Zeke lay just a few inches below him, Mr. Tagliabeau a few feet across from him. Two wooden shelves held his books, his journal, a reading lamp, his pens and drawing supplies. Compass, pocket-sextant and watch hung from particular pegs; rifle, flask, and pouch from others. Order, sweet order. Everything under his control, in a space hardly bigger than a coffin yet warm and dry and lit. As the rain tapered off on the fourth day he read and wrote in there, happy until he heard Zeke vomiting.

Delirious from lack of food, Zeke whimpered and called for his mother and sometimes for Lavinia. That boy in the invalid’s chair was still apparent in his eyes, although he’d already managed to make it clear that he resented whoever helped him. Erasmus opened his curtain, fetched a clean basin, soothed Zeke’s face with a damp cloth. Perhaps, he thought, Zeke wouldn’t remember this day or hold these acts against him. When Dr. Boerhaave, still a stranger, said, “Let me see what I can do,” and opened his medicine chest, Erasmus left Zeke in the doctor’s hands and went to get some fresh air. Low swells, a crisp breeze, the rain-washed sails still dripping and the clouds parting like tufts of carded wool. Beneath that sky the deck was dotted with men picking oakum. Which was Isaac, which was Ivan? Erasmus had made a resolution, after watching Alexandra’s ease with the same servants whose names he still forgot. On the Narwhal, he’d promised himself, he’d pay attention to everyone, not just the officers.

That was Robert, he thought. On that coil of rope. Sean, by the sturdy capstan. And in the galley, cooking as if he were dancing, Ned Kynd. A glance at the simmering carrots, a stir of the chicken fricassee, then a few quick kneads of the biscuit dough on a floured board.

Erasmus dipped a spoon in the stew pot and tasted the gravy. “Delicious,” he said, thinking with pleasure of the live chickens still penned on the deck. Fresh food for another several weeks; he knew, as Zeke and perhaps even Ned did not, how much this was to be relished. “You’re doing a fine job.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Ned said. “A pleasure to have such a tidy place to cook in. And then the sea—isn’t it lovely?”

“It is,” Erasmus agreed. They spoke briefly about menus and the state of their provisions; then about Ned’s quarters, which he claimed were fine. Never sick, always cheerful and prompt, Ned seemed to have made himself at home. Already he’d adopted the seamen’s bright neckerchiefs and was growing a spotty beard. After a few minutes’ chat about the weather and a spell of comfortable silence, Ned said, “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” Erasmus said, praying it wouldn’t be about Zeke.

“Could you tell me about this Franklin we’re looking for? Who he is?”

Erasmus stared at him, a piece of carrot still in his mouth. “Didn’t Commander Voorhees explain all this to you, when you signed on?”

Ned cut biscuits. “That Franklin was lost,” he said. “That we were to go and search for him…but not much more than that.”

Where had Ned been these last years? While Ned slipped the biscuits onto a tin, Erasmus leaned against the water barrel and tried to summarize the story that had riveted everyone else’s attention.

“Sir John Franklin was, is, English,” he said. “A famous explorer, who’d already been on three earlier arctic voyages.”

The chicken simmered as Erasmus explained how Franklin had set off with over a hundred of the British Navy’s finest men. For ships he had James Ross’s old Erebus and Terror, refitted with hot-water heating systems and experimental screw propellers. Black-hulled, white-masted, the ships had left England in the spring of 1845, provisioned for three years. Each had taken along a library of some twelve hundred books and a hand organ, which played fifty tunes. The weather was remarkably fine that summer, and hopes for a swift journey high. Toward the end of that July they were seen by a whaler, moored to an iceberg at the mouth of Lancaster Sound; after that they disappeared.

“Disappeared?” Ned said. His hands cut lard into flour for a pie crust.

“Vanished,” Erasmus replied. Everyone knew this part of the story, he thought: not just himself and Zeke, but Lavinia and all her acquaintances, even his cook and his groom. “How did you miss this?”

“There was starvation in Ireland,” Ned said sharply. “How did you miss that? I had other things on my mind.”

The chronology of these two events fell into line. Ned, Erasmus realized, must have been part of the great wave of Irish emigrants fleeing the famine. He was still just a boy, he could almost have been Erasmus’s son. “Forgive me,” he said. He knew nothing of Ned’s history, as he’d known nothing of his servants’ lives at home. “That was stupid of me.” Of course the events in Ireland had shaped Ned’s life more than the stories of noble Franklin, unaccountably lost; or noble Jane, his wife, who by the time Zeke proposed their voyage had organized more than a dozen expeditions in search of her husband.

Ned sliced apples so swiftly they seemed to leap away from his knife, and Erasmus, after an awkward pause, explained how ships had converged from the east and west on the areas in which Franklin was presumed to be lost, while other expeditions traveled overland. All had made important geographical discoveries, but despite the rockets fired, the kites and balloons sent adrift in the air, the foxes tagged with messages and released, no one had found Franklin. Erasmus’s fellow Philadelphian, Dr. Kane, had been with the fleet that reached Beechey Island during the summer of 1851, finding tantalizing traces of a winter camp.

Erasmus tried, without frightening Ned, to describe what that fleet had seen. Three of Franklin’s seamen lying beneath three mounds; and also sailcloth, paper fragments and blankets, and six hundred preserved-meat tins, emptied of their contents and refilled with pebbles. But no note, nor any indication of which direction the party had headed on departing. Subsequent expeditions hadn’t found a single clue as to Franklin’s whereabouts. The Admiralty had given up the search a year ago, declaring Franklin and his men dead.

“Why would Commander Voorhees want to do this, then?” Ned asked. “If the men are dead?”

“There was news,” Erasmus said. “Surprising news.”

In the fall, just as Zeke had said at Lavinia’s party, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company had startled everyone. Exploring the arctic coastline west of Repulse Bay, not in search of Franklin at all but purely for geographical interest, he’d come across some Esquimaux. A group of thirty or forty white men had starved to death some years before, they said, at the mouth of a large river. They wouldn’t lead Rae to the bodies, and Rae had thought the season too far advanced to embark on a search himself. But the Esquimaux had relics: Rae purchased a gold watch, a surgeon’s knife, a bit of an undervest; silver forks and spoons marked with Franklin’s crest; a golden band from a cap.

“The part that set everyone talking, though,” Erasmus said, “was the last story the Esquimaux told Dr. Rae.”

Three pies were taking shape; he filched some apple slices. Was it wrong, he wondered, to bring up the subject of starvation with a boy who might have seen it directly? Was it wrong to talk so freely with a subordinate? But Ned, crimping the crusts together, said, “Well, tell me.”

Erasmus, leaving out the worst parts, described the Esquimaux tale of mutilated corpses and human parts found in cooking kettles. There could be no doubt, Rae had said, that his countrymen had been driven to cannibalism as a last resort.

“What an uproar Rae caused!” Erasmus said. He registered Ned’s pallor, but he was caught in his own momentum now. “You’d have thought he killed the men himself, from the public’s response. The Admiralty dismissed his findings and said Englishmen don’t eat Englishmen. But they declared the fate of Franklin’s expedition resolved, despite the fact that Rae’s story accounted for less than a third of the crew.”

“You look for the rest, then?” Ned asked.

“We look.”

He wound up with the facts that had set them off on their own quest. Although the Admiralty had given up, Lady Franklin persisted, bombarding the press with pleas for further, private expeditions.

“Until the ships are found,” Erasmus said, “there’s no proof that all the men are dead. Dr. Kane is still searching for them, but he headed for Smith Sound before Rae’s return. Franklin might have reached that area if he’d headed north through Wellington Channel, but now we know he went southwest and that Kane’s a thousand miles from the right place. We have all the facts Dr. Kane was missing, and our job is to search in the area Rae insufficiently explored.”

Ned finished the pies and then looked up. “Commander Voorhees made it sound as if we were going to rescue survivors,” he said. “Yet it seems we’re only going after corpses.”

“Not exactly,” Erasmus said, flustered. “There may be some survivors, we hope there are. We go in search of them, and of news.”

He left the galley feeling uneasy, a biscuit in his hand. He’d imagined that the ship’s crew shared his and Zeke’s thoughts: the story of Franklin clear in their minds, the goals of the voyage sharply defined and their own tasks understood. Now he wondered if they were like Ned, signed on for their own reasons, occupied with their own concerns, hardly aware of the facts. One was thinking, perhaps, about a belled cow walking high on a hill. Another about a pond and four locust trees, or about drinking whiskey or shoeing a horse, what he might buy when he was paid off, a young woman, an old quarrel, a sleigh’s runners slicing the snow.

THE LAST TIME Ned had sailed on a ship, he’d been sick and stunned and hadn’t known how to read or write. This time he’d do it differently; this time he’d keep a record. Before leaving Philadelphia he’d bought a lined copybook, of the sort boys used in school. That night he wrote:

The apple pies were very good. But Commander Voorhees still hasn’t eaten a mouthful, nothing I make tempts him. Today I saw a large school of bluefish. Mr. Wells came to visit while I made dinner and told me about the explorer we’re searching for. Except he is dead, also all his men I think. Not only frozen but starved. When he told me about the men eating each other I thought about home, and all this evening I’ve been remembering Denis and Nora and our voyage over, and all the others dead at home, and Mr. Wickersham who taught me to read and write, and everyone. I get along well enough with the seamen I bunk with, but don’t yet have a special friend among them and wish I did. Although I’ve heard Mr. Wells asking the other seamen for details of their lives, he didn’t ask me one thing about the famine years nor how or when I arrived in this country. Nor how it was that I happened to be free, with less than a dollar in my pocket, on the very afternoon Mr. Tagliabeau came looking for a replacement cook. Only he seemed surprised that I hadn’t heard about the famous Englishman. If I hadn’t tried to stop the fight between the two Spaniards that afternoon, and been fired for my pains and denied my last week’s wages, I wouldn’t have leapt at the chance for this position. When we return to Philadelphia in October I wonder if he’d help me find work away from the docks, perhaps in one of the inns out Germantown way.

OFF ST. JOHN’S, the scattered icebergs—pure white, impossibly huge, entirely covered with snow—cured Zeke like a drug. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, and Mr. Francis viewed them calmly, after their many whaling voyages. Erasmus, who’d seen similar bergs off Antarctica, restrained his excitement for the sake of appearances. But the men who hadn’t been north before gaped openly, and Zeke was overcome.

“Look! Look!” he shouted, racing about the deck and then diving into the cabin for his journal. His first entry, dated June 15, 1855, was a series of hasty sketches captioned with rough measurements: The largest iceberg is a quarter-mile across. Nils Jensen, who couldn’t read but had remarkable calculating skills, leaned over the drawing and murmured some numbers suggesting the berg’s volume and area. Other excited men crowded around, but perhaps only Erasmus saw, behind the hamlike shoulders of huge Sean Hamilton, the officers exchanging glances and sarcastic smiles.