The Voyage of the Narwhal

3 A RIOT OF OBJECTS

(JULY–AUGUST 1855)

It was homeward bound one night on the deep

Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep.

I dreamed a dream and thought it true

Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew.

With a hundred seamen he sailed away

To the frozen ocean in the month of May

To seek that passage around the pole

Where we poor sailors do sometimes go.

In Baffin’s Bay where the whalefish blow

The fate of Franklin no man may know.

The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell

Franklin and his men do dwell.

Through cruel hardships they vainly strove.

Their ships on mountains of ice was drove

Where the eskimo in his skin canoe

Was the only man to ever come through.

And now my hardship it brings me pain.

For my long lost Franklin I’d plow the main.

Ten thousand pounds would I freely give

To know on earth if Franklin do live.

—“LADY FRANKLIN’S LAMENT”

(TRADITIONAL BALLAD)

In her diary, Alexandra wrote:

On the calendar Lavinia keeps by our desks, she not only crosses off each passing day but counts the days remaining until October. She’s embarrassed when I catch her doing this, embarrassed to catch herself doing it. When we visit Zeke’s family, she wraps her arms around Zeke’s black dogs and buries her nose in their fur; the smell reminds her of him, she claims, his clothes often carried a faint odor of dog. But otherwise she puts up a brave front and tries not to talk about her worries.

Still, I can see how distracted she is and how hard she finds it to concentrate. Apart from her anxieties, she’s not used to sustained periods of work. I remind myself that at least I had my parents throughout my childhood, while she had no mother at all: of course this has shaped her, as has life with her brothers. On Tuesday, while we were trying to mix a difficult shade of greenish blue, she told me she was often invited to join in when their father read to them—if she wasn’t taking drawing lessons, or piano lessons, or being instructed in cookery or the management of the household—but she listened with only half an ear, sure she’d never use that knowledge. Erasmus and Copernicus would travel; Linnaeus and Humboldt would learn to engrave the plates and print the books that resulted from other men’s travels. But always, she said, always I knew I’d be left at home. So why bother to learn those lessons well?

Because, I wanted to say. Because there is something in the learning; and because we can never tell what we may someday need. Instead I pointed to our paints. When you were taking drawing lessons, I said, did you ever think we’d be doing this? It is my hope to distract her with the pleasures of our task.

We completed the plates of the annelids today and then Lavinia worked on her trousseau, arranging piles of embroidered white lawn and ribbon-threaded muslin. Waists and knickers, nightgowns and petticoats—most made by two young sisters, half French, from Chester. Her own stitching is clumsy, but she’s good enough not to ask me for help even though she knows I’ve sometimes supported myself by sewing. I told her something she didn’t know about me—in her back issues of the Lady’s Book, which she saves religiously, I pointed out the plates I colored by hand for Mr. Godey. A gown in green and yellow, not so different from a beetle’s wing covers, made her smile. “You could do this,” I told her. “If you don’t like working with plants and animals, I could help you find work coloring fashion plates when we’re done with the book.” She told me her brothers would think that frivolous work, especially as she has no need to earn her living.

We have two pair of cardinals nesting in the mock-orange near my window. A cecropia moth hatched from the cocoon Erasmus left on the windowseat. Last night my family came for dinner, and after we talked about the antislavery speeches Emily attended in Germantown, Harriet took me aside to whisper that she is with child again. Then Browning clumsily asked if we’d had any news. Of course this upset Lavinia. No mail, I answered quickly. Not yet. But it’s too soon for the whalers with whom the brig might cross paths to have returned to port.

After they left we read out loud to each other, as we do most evenings. Lavinia reads from Mary Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein and his monster; I read from Parry’s journal. The journal of the first voyage, when Parry was hardly older than Zeke and when his men were all in their early twenties; the one during which everything went right. Fine weather, remarkable explorations, good hunting, starry skies. This is how Zeke and Erasmus are faring, I said.

But later, after we went to our separate rooms, I read secretly in the journal of Parry’s second voyage. I never raise the subject of the Winter Island and Igloolik Esquimaux with Lavinia; if she knew what Parry hinted at about the women and their relationships with his men, she’d worry about this too. I lie in the dark and dream about that place and those people. I’d give anything to be with Zeke and Erasmus. Anything. I’m grateful for this position but sometimes I feel so confined—why can’t my life be larger? I imagine those Esquimaux befriended by Parry and his crew: the feasts and games, the fur suits, the pairs of women tattooing each other, gravely passing a needle and a thread coated with lampblack and oil under the skin of their faces and breasts. I dream about them. I dream about the ice, the snow, the ice, the snow.

SURROUNDED BY THAT ice and snow, Erasmus dreamed of home—less and less often, though, as the brig passed down Lancaster Sound. Around him were breeding terns and gulls, snow geese and murres, eiders and dovekies; the water thick with whales and seals and scattered plates of floe ice; a sky from which birds dropped like arrows, piercing the water’s skin. Sometimes narwhals tusked through the skin from the other side, as if sniffing at the solitary ship. They hadn’t seen another ship since passing a few whalers at Pond’s Bay, yet Erasmus was far from lonely. Dazzled, he looked at the cliffs, and knew Dr. Boerhaave shared his dazzlement.

“Anchor,” he begged Zeke. “Let us have some time up there.”

But Zeke said their schedule didn’t leave a minute to spare. Finally, when they tied up to an iceberg to take on fresh water, Erasmus was granted four hours. Ned and Sean Hamilton rowed him and Dr. Boerhaave to the base of a kittiwake rookery.

“We’ll climb,” Erasmus told Dr. Boerhaave. He was trembling, longing to split himself into a hundred selves who might see a hundred sights. “Straight up, and gather what we can.” To Ned and Sean, wandering along the bouldered shore, he handed a small cloth bag. “Put plants in here,” he said. “If you see anything interesting, while you’re walking…” Then he and Dr. Boerhaave began their ascent up the bird-plastered rock, guns and nets strapped to their backs.

Four hours, which passed like a sneeze. They brought back adult birds, eggs, dead chicks, and nests. On the Narwhal, Ned added the cloth bag to their treasures. “We walked east for a while,” he said. “We found a little field.” He reached into the specimen bag and spread handfuls of vegetation on the deck. “I brought you these,” he said. “Are they what you wanted?”

Erasmus turned over the bits; Ned had picked leaves and branches and single flowers, rather than carefully gathering whole plants complete with the roots. Back home Erasmus had barked at the maid when she dared to move his drying plants; here he blamed the mess on himself. He hadn’t realized anyone wouldn’t know how to take a proper specimen. Still he and Dr. Boerhaave were able to identify the little gold-petaled poppies and four varieties of saxifrage. Ned, Erasmus saw with some chagrin, had found a regular arctic meadow, which he himself had missed.

“You did wonderfully,” Erasmus said. “Thank you for these. Let me just show you the way scientists like to collect a plant.”

Briefly he explained to Ned about root and stem and leaf and flower and fruiting body. Later, Ned wrote down Erasmus’s words almost verbatim, along with a sketch of a proper specimen and some definitions:

Herbarium is the name for a collection of dried plant specimens, mounted and arranged systematically. The object with the flat boards and the straps is a press. Mr. Wells means to preserve samples of each interesting plant, to name those he can by comparing them against his books, and to keep a list: that is his job here. Dr. Boerhaave helps him. I may help too, they say, if I learn what they show me. It’s like learning to read a different language—pistil, stamen, pinnate, palmate—not so hard but who would have thought a man could spend his life on this? I made salad from a red-leaved plant he calls Oxyria, which looks like the sheep sorrel at home. He was surprised that it tasted so good.

WHERE BEFORE THEY’D been in waters familiar to Captain Tyler and the mates, and where Zeke was at a disadvantage, now they were in places none of them knew. Zeke had the charts of the explorers preceding him; Zeke had done his reading. It gave him a kind of power, Erasmus saw. For the first time, the other officers were dependent on Zeke’s knowledge. It no longer mattered that Zeke had never been in the arctic before, nor that all his knowledge came from books. Ice was ice, islands were islands; channels showed up where he predicted. Book knowledge was all they had, and for a while Captain Tyler and the mates were rendered docile by their lack of it. No one argued with Zeke’s orders.

Thousands of narwhals accompanied the brig up the ice-speckled strait, filling the air with their heavy, spooky exhalations—as if, Erasmus thought, the sea itself were breathing. Animal company was the only sort they had. In place of the great fleet filling the Sound four years ago, during Dr. Kane’s first voyage, were those long-tusked little whales, and seals and walrus, and belugas everywhere. Extraordinarily beautiful, he thought. Smaller than he’d expected, a uniform creamy smoothness over bulging muscles, moving like swift white birds through the dark water.

Barrow Strait was empty as well. The stark and radiant landscape flashed by so fast that Erasmus found himself making strange, clutching movements with his hands, as if he might seize the sights that were denied him. Even when they reached the cairns on Cape Riley and then, on Beechey Island, the graves of three of Franklin’s seamen and the relics of their first winter quarters, they lingered only briefly. These were, Erasmus and Zeke agreed, the very sites that Dr. Kane and the others had discovered in ’51. From the water the gray gravel sloped gently upward, stopping at jagged cliffs. Against the background of those cliffs, the grave mounds and headstones were very small. Erasmus, Dr. Boerhaave, Zeke, and Ned examined the limestone slabs tessellated over two of the graves, and the little row of flat stones set like a fence around each mound.

“If we exhumed them,” Dr. Boerhaave said, “even one, and could determine what he died from, we might gain some clues to the expedition’s fate.”

Zeke stepped back from the mounds. A tremor passed from his hands up his arms and shoulders and then rippled across his face. “We’re not graverobbers,” he said. “Nor resurrection men. Those are Englishmen, men like our own crew. They’re entitled to lie in peace. And what would we learn from violating them?”

“Suppose they were starving?” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Already, that first winter. In this cold, enough…remains would be left that we might determine that.”

“If that was me in there,” Zeke said, “if that was you—bad enough they’ve been left here all alone. Nothing you’d learn would tell us anything about where the expedition went.”

He gazed down at the graves and then back at Dr. Boerhaave. “When you were in medical school,” he said, “did you…?”

“Well, of course,” Dr. Boerhaave said. As Zeke shook his head and walked away. Dr. Boerhaave smiled at Erasmus, who smiled back at his friend.

After the three of them left, Ned lingered behind for a minute, placing a stone on each grave and saying a prayer. He told no one of the strange hallucination that seized him later. As he rinsed salt meat in water from the stream that trickled above the graves, he imagined that water seeping into the coffins, easing around the seamen’s bodies, who had been young, like him. Beneath the first layers of gravel the ground was frozen, it never melted, and he saw the bodies frozen too, preserved forever; cherished, honored. The vision comforted him, yet also angered him. In Ireland he’d seen corpses stacked like firewood or tossed loosely into giant pits. Here, where no one might ever have seen them, three young Englishmen had each been given a careful and singular grave, a headstone chiseled with verses, a little fence.

TIME PRESSED ON them even more sharply after that first glimpse of the lost expedition. As the sails filled, bellied out in the brisk breeze, Zeke said, “Franklin must have turned the Erebus and the Terror down Peel Sound after leaving Beechey Island. The ice is so heavy to the west, and when you think about Rae’s report—where else could he have gone? It’s the only place the earlier ships didn’t look. They were all sure he’d gone north somehow, after finding the route blocked to the west. But how could any of his men have reached a place even close to King William Land, if not by way of Peel Sound?”

Simple logic, Erasmus thought. And so it must be true. Even Captain Tyler shrugged and agreed with Zeke. They turned south, sure they were following Franklin’s trail. After thirty-five miles of hard sailing, fighting against the encroaching ice, the Narwhal was finally turned back by solid pack. No time for regrets, Zeke said. He retraced their route, rounding the walls and ravines of North Somerset and sailing down the east coast as far as Bellot Strait. Through here, Zeke hoped to pass back into Peel Sound.

Bellot Strait was completely choked with ice. The men stood mashed together on the bow, muttering with disappointment: “God damn this ice!” Captain Tyler said, before disappearing below. Their last chance to reach King William Land by water had just disappeared, Erasmus knew, and with it any chance of finding Franklin’s ships. But they might still find traces of the expedition by land, as Rae had done. On Zeke’s order they continued southward, along the massive hills and into the Gulf of Boothia.

Zeke grew cool and distant, hardly speaking except to give orders and treating Captain Tyler as if he were the skipper of a ferryboat. He allowed no stops, neither for the men to hunt nor for Erasmus to gather specimens. The winds and currents here seemed to concentrate the ice, which poured into the bay from the north and then swirled and massed, several times almost crushing the brig. The men grew nervous and muttered among themselves. Out here, far from the traditional whaling grounds, they seemed to wake as a group from a dream. Why had they come? Because they needed work, Erasmus slowly understood; not because they were inspired by the expedition’s goals but because they’d needed jobs back in the spring, when Zeke was recruiting men. They’d signed on because the wages were good and because, despite all Zeke’s stories, they had not really been able to imagine their task. The men who’d never been to sea before had had no useful information, no way to imagine what lay before them; those with whaling experience must have imagined that searching for Franklin would be like searching for whales.

The idea of moving just for the sake of moving, pressing deeper and deeper into the ice with no assurance of reward, was as strange to them, Erasmus thought, as flensing a bowhead would have been to him. Every order Zeke gave brought a grumble: we should have anchored in Cresswell Bay; the men need fresh meat; the floes are scraping away the siding—Mr. Francis, Ned Kynd, Mr. Tagliabeau.

Fletcher Lamb, who was stropping his razor when they crashed into one of the monstrous bergs, jolted his hand and cut off the tip of his left ring finger. Two of the dogs, knocked to their feet, turned on each other and filled the air with chunks of fur and a spray of blood; a kettle slipped overboard. When the Narwhal was finally forced to stop, separated from King William Land by the full width of Boothia, the men began clamoring to turn around the same day they dropped anchor.

Discouraged, Erasmus stared at the charts. They’d not discovered even the smallest scrap of new coastline; the excellent map of the Rosses detailed every cove they saw. Yet here, no matter what the crew thought, they might begin their real search for any traces of Franklin and his men. This was the place, Erasmus thought: the true beginning after all. What began, instead, was the death of the dogs.

The dozen left after the earlier mishaps tore around the ship, raising and lowering their heads and tails and all the while barking furiously at some invisible threat. The lead dog, enormous and black, fell first: a damp heap at the base of the mainmast. His white-footed consort followed, then two of the puppies Joe had earlier saved: red-eyed, fevered, frothing. They turned on Zeke and Erasmus and Dr. Boerhaave, who worked frantically to help them. Dr. Boerhaave wrote:

Why did I never make time for some veterinary training? In my autopsies I’ve found nothing more than livers that appear to be mildly enlarged, but I can’t be sure of this: what does a healthy dog’s liver look like? At Godhavn we heard rumors of a mysterious disease among the dogs of southern Greenland, but our own appeared to be in perfect health and continued so throughout Lancaster Sound. I should have been paying more attention. I’m not sure of the course of rabies in canines but was forced to consider this, and when four fell on their sides, pawing at their jaws, I ordered them shot to prevent the spread of disease. Commander Voorhees, who is sentimental about animals, was furious with me and we had an argument—he can’t seem to grasp the idea that the sick dogs may endanger the men. In any event my efforts weren’t successful: we lost the last adult today and only Wissy and one other puppy are left. I’m grateful none of us were bitten. On dissection I found no apparent brain inflammation, nor anything unusual in the spinal cord or nerves. Why didn’t I think to bring along a book of veterinary medicine?

The flesh on Fletcher Lamb’s injured finger has begun to mortify beneath the bandage I applied. I’ve debrided and irrigated the wound, but remain worried.

ZEKE HAD BEEN keeping Wissy in the cabin, where he hoped she might be safe, but the day after the other remaining puppy died she began running about, crashing off the bunks and the walls. Zeke held her in his arms, despite her mad strength; he tried to feed her tidbits and wouldn’t let Dr. Boerhaave touch her. She squirmed and bit and then lay still, her head thrown back and her eyes blankly staring. Above her a tern cut through the rigging, back and forth and around the shrouds.