Читать книгу The Voyage of the Narwhal - Andrea Barrett - Страница 8

(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.

That night, with Zeke up on deck and not heaving into a basin, Erasmus slept soundly for the first time and so missed the actual collision. One great thump; by the time he woke and ran up on deck the Narwhal was moving backward, rebounding from a slope-sided iceberg and shorn of her dolphin striker and martingales. Past him ran Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau, Thomas Forbes on their heels with a sack of carpenter’s tools. Shouts and calls and terse instructions; what was damaged, what intact; a dark figure draped over the bowsprit, investigating, anchored by hands on his ankles and a rope at his waist. Erasmus rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to stay out of the way. Captain Tyler, standing next to Zeke as his crew worked, turned and said, “Had you taken the course I suggested…”

“This course is fine!” Zeke exclaimed. “The man in the crow’s nest must have been sleeping. You there!” He tilted his head back and hollered at the figure on the masthead: Barton DeSouza, Erasmus saw. Was that Barton? “You look sharp there!”

The moon was full and the berg gleamed silvery off the Narwhal’s bow. Barton muttered something Erasmus couldn’t hear. A hammer beat against a doubled wall of wood as Thomas and his helpers began repairing the damage. Nothing serious, Mr. Tagliabeau called back.

“It’s late,” Zeke pointed out. “They could do that tomorrow.”

“Better to do it now,” Captain Tyler said. “Suppose a squall were to strike in the next few hours?”

He turned his back, he called out orders, figures moved in response to his words. Zeke retreated—just when he should have asserted his authority, Erasmus thought. The men had instinctively looked to Captain Tyler during Zeke’s illness, reverting to what they knew; on the fishing and whaling ships where they’d served before, the captain was the sole authority. Here, with an expedition commander who couldn’t set a sail somehow in charge of the ship’s captain, they were all uneasy. Erasmus overheard them now and again, a grumpy Greek chorus: He’s never been north of New York; he doesn’t know how to roll a hammock; he changes his shirt twice a week—Sean Hamilton, Ivan Hruska, Fletcher Lamb. Each time Zeke gave an order they turned to the captain and waited for his nod before obeying.

Erasmus saw all this, but couldn’t fix it. For the next few days he focused instead on trying out the dredge and the tow nets. Already he could see that Zeke wouldn’t share his scientific work; after all he was to be alone, as he’d been on his first voyage. He tied knots, adjusted shackles, replaced a poorly threaded pin, remembering how shyly his young self had hung back from his companions. While he was working up the courage to be friendly, everyone else had been pairing off, or clumping in groups of three or four from which he was excluded. Everyone had been courteous but he’d been left with no particular friend; and at times he’d thought he might die of loneliness.

He was older now, he was used to it. Yet still he felt grateful when Dr. Boerhaave, who’d been reading near the galley, edged up and broke his solitude. “Those little purple-tinted shrimps,” he said, “are they Crangon boreas?”

Later, Erasmus would gain a clearer picture of Dr. Boerhaave’s face. For now, what he first noticed was his mind: quick and shining, sharp but deep, moving through a sea of thought like a giant silver salmon. Dr. Boerhaave, Erasmus learned quickly, knew as much natural history as he did. Although he was the better botanist, Dr. Boerhaave was the better zoologist and was especially knowledgeable about marine invertebrates.

As they probed their captives, Dr. Boerhaave said he’d been raised in the port of Gothenberg, but educated in Paris and Edinburgh. His excellent English he attributed to his years at sea. Over a group of elegant little medusae captured in their tow net—“Ptychogastria polaris,” Dr. Boerhaave said—he described his trips as ship’s surgeon aboard Scottish whalers and Norwegian walrus-hunters.

“I was curious,” he said. “I liked Edinburgh very much, but I didn’t want to set up a practice there and see the same people for the next forty years. And the idea of returning permanently to Sweden…” He shrugged.

Erasmus, embalming a medusa, said, “Commander Voorhees told me you’d been twice to the high arctic. With whalers? Or were those more formal expeditions?”

“The latter,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “On the Swedish exploring expedition I accompanied, we went up the west coast of Spitzbergen to Hakluyt’s Headland—not as far as Parry got, but we saw some of the same places that Franklin and Beechey explored with the Dorothea and the Trent.”

Franklin’s first voyage, so long ago. For a minute Erasmus thought how that had led, by an unexpected web of events, to their own voyage.

“Later I went with a Russian expedition to Kamchatka Peninsula and the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands, then into the Bering Straits. We’d hoped to reach Wrangel Island but were stopped by icepack in the Beaufort Sea.”

He drew an equatorial projection of the medusa before them, revealing the convoluted edges of the eight gastric folds. He had excellent pencils, Erasmus observed. The line they made was both darker and sharper than his own.

“What about you?” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Your own earlier journey—I read all five volumes of Wilkes’s narrative of the Exploring Expedition, it was very popular when the first copies arrived in Europe. But I don’t remember seeing your name mentioned. How is that so?”

Erasmus flushed and directed Dr. Boerhaave’s attention to some questionable seals on the preserving jars. “It’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you another time. How did you decide to join us?”

“I thought it would round out my picture of the high arctic,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Different ice, different flora and fauna. Anyway I was already on this side of the ocean. I came to America several years ago, to visit some of your New England philosophers. Emerson, Brownson and the others—it interests me, what they’ve done with the ideas of Kant and Hegel. You know this young Henry Thoreau?”

“I don’t,” Erasmus said.

“I met him and some of his friends in Boston, which was delightful. But all along I also hoped to do some exploring, either out west or in the arctic. At a dinner party I ran into Professor Agassiz, whom I’d once met in Scotland—we share an interest in fossil fishes. He put me in touch with some members of your Academy of Sciences, which is how I learned your expedition needed a surgeon. The position was just what I’d been hoping for.”

“Was it?” Erasmus said thoughtfully. “You might just as easily have had mine—you’re better trained. I expect you did both jobs at once on your other trips.”

Dr. Boerhaave looked down at his drawing. “Differently trained, that’s all. And in a way it’s a relief simply to be responsible for the health of the crew and to have someone else in charge of the zoological and botanical reports. I’ve always thought both jobs were too much for one man to do well.”

“But we must be partners, then,” Erasmus said. “Real colleagues. May we do that?”

“Or course,” Dr. Boerhaave said. With his pencil he drew a delicate tentacle.

DR. BOERHAAVE WROTE to William Greenstone, an Edinburgh classmate who was now a geologist of some repute:

Although we’re not to Greenland yet, we’ve not been idle. I’ve examined all the men, so as to have an accurate point from which to assess their later health. On a journey this short, and with ample opportunities to acquire fresh food, there won’t be signs of scurvy, but the alternation in day length and the sleep deprivation may cause changes.

It’s an unusual situation for me, having an official naturalist on board. I worried that he—his name is Erasmus Wells—might be jealous of his position and equipment, and that I might have few opportunities for collecting and examining specimens. Yet in fact Mr. Wells is quite congenial and seems willing to let me share in his investigations. So far we’ve found nothing exciting but are in heavily traveled waters where everything we capture is well known. Yesterday we took a Cyclopterus spinosus though: not quite two inches long, covered with the typical conical spines, and very like those I saw off Spitzbergen; I was surprised to see it this far south.

I think I’ll like my new companion. He’s somewhat fussy and tends to be melancholy, but he’s intelligent and well traveled. His formal education is spotty by our standards, but he’s read widely and seems more—I don’t know, more complicated than the usual run of Americans. Not quite so blindly optimistic, nor so convinced that one can make the world into what one wishes. Perhaps because he’s older. Except for him and me and the ship’s captain, the others are hardly more than children. I packed the bottom sampler you gave me carefully, and once we enter Baffin’s Bay I’ll do my best to obtain samples of the seafloor for you.

HERE WAS THE arctic, Erasmus thought, as the Narwhal moved through Davis Strait and the night began to disappear. Or at least its true beginning: here, here, here.

His eyes burned from trying to take in everything at once. Whales with their baleen-laden mouths broke the water, sometimes as many as forty a day. Belugas slipped by white and radiant and the sky was alive with birds. The men cheered the first narwhals as guardian spirits and crowded around Erasmus as he sketched. With one of Dr. Boerhaave’s excellent pencils he tried to capture the grooved spike jutting from the males’ upper jaws and the smooth dark curves of their backs. Nils Jensen, out on the bowsprit, watched intently as each surfaced to breathe and called back measurements—ten feet long, twelve and half—which Erasmus noted on his drawings.

One day the coast of Greenland appeared, the peak of Sukkertoppen rising above the fog and flickering past as they sailed to Disko Island. A flock of dovekies sailed through the rigging, and when Robert Carey knocked one to the deck Erasmus remembered how, as a little boy, he’d glimpsed three of these tiny birds in a creek near his home, bobbing exhausted where they’d been driven after a great northeaster. This one looked like a black-and-white quail in his hand. Bending over the rail to release it, he saw fronds of seaweed waving through ten fathoms of transparent water. As soon as they anchored at Godhavn he and Dr. Boerhaave sampled the shallows, finding nullipores, mussels, and small crustaceans. Then they saw people, floating on the water and looking back at them.

In tiny, skin-covered kayaks the strangers darted among the icebergs; their legs were hidden inside the boats, their arms extended by two-bladed paddles. Flash, flash: into the ocean and out again, water streaming silver from the blades. The paddles led to tight hooded jackets; the jackets merged into oval skirts connecting the men at their waists to the boats—like centaurs, Erasmus thought. Boat men, male boats. It was all a blur, he couldn’t see their faces.

Sean Hamilton tossed them bits of biscuit and Erasmus revised his first opinion: This was where the journey began, with this first sight of the arctic men he’d read about for so long. That these Greenlanders had traded with whalers for two centuries, been colonized by the Danes and converted by Moravian and Lutheran missionaries, made them less strange: but they were still new to him. On the first night in port, over a dinner of eider ducks at the huge-chimneyed home of the Danish inspector, he looked alternately at a bad engraving of four Greenlanders captured near Godthaab and brought to Copenhagen and, out the window next to the portrait, at the jumble of wooden huts and sealskin tents into which the mysterious strangers disappeared.

ON THE NARWHAL the crew made their final preparations. Thomas Forbes, Erasmus saw, kept his carpenter’s bench in perfect order. Ivan Hruska’s hammock had a hole in it, which he repaired beautifully. Mr. Francis appeared to regard the boatswain’s locker as a treasure chest, keeping close track of every marlinspike and bit of spun yarn he passed out. All this bustle pleased Erasmus. This was their last chance to ready the brig for her encounters with the pack, and finally, he thought, the men had been infected with the sense of urgency he’d had for months.

He and Zeke, equally busy, acquired sixteen ill-mannered Esquimaux dogs, a stock of dried codfish, bales of seal and caribou skins, full Esquimaux outfits for all the crew, and an interpreter, Johann Schwartzberg. After sharing a walk with him, Erasmus wrote:

He’s a Moravian missionary—an extremely interesting man. He’s lived among the Esquimaux both here and in Labrador, and he knows their language as well as Danish, English, and German. He’ll be invaluable if we meet Esquimaux around King William Land. When Zeke approached him, we learned that he’d followed the news of Franklin’s expedition avidly and had already heard about Rae’s discoveries. He seems genuinely thrilled to join us. The men call him Joe, and already I can see that he’s sensible, mild-tempered, good-humored, and handy.

It was Joe who determined how many knives and needles and iron bars they should barter for the fish and the furs, and Joe who examined each Esquimaux outfit for proper fit. Zeke asked Mr. Tagliabeau and Mr. Francis to work with the dogs; when they tangled the traces and crashed the sledge and fumbled helplessly, it was Joe who demonstrated how to control them. Buff and brown and white and black, long-haired, demonic, and curly-tailed, the dogs were nothing like the well-mannered hounds Zeke kept at home. With a peculiar turn of the wrist, Joe directed the whip toward the head of the most recalcitrant creature and clipped off a piece of its ear.

Zeke, watching this with Erasmus, caught his breath and said, “Oh, how cruel!”

Mr. Francis shot a contemptuous glance back over his shoulder. “Perhaps you’d like to reason with them?” There was something weasel-like about him, Erasmus thought. That narrow chest; the thick hair growing low on his forehead and shading his deep-set eyes. “Maybe you can persuade them,” Mr. Francis added.

“Would you take over?” Zeke asked Joe. He pulled Erasmus away. “A good commander recognizes those things that are abhorrent to him, or which he does badly, and gives others charge of them,” he said. “Don’t you think? Joe’s a fine teacher, and Mr. Tagliabeau and Mr. Francis are coarse enough to be good drivers.”

Joe also knew how to build a snow house and how to repair a sledge. And it was Joe who helped Erasmus overcome his initial discomfort around the short men with their glossy hair and unreadable eyes. Hyperboreans, Erasmus thought, recalling his father’s tales. Was it Pliny who’d claimed they lived to a ripe old age and passed down marvelous stories? But his unease was grounded in experience, not myth. At Malolo in western Fiji, he’d seen savages murder two of the Exploring Expedition’s men with no apparent provocation. In Naloa Bay he’d watched a native calmly gnaw the flesh of a cooked human head, which Wilkes had later purchased for their collection.

Yet the Esquimaux weren’t violent, only a little sullen. Joe said, “You need to understand that they’re doing us a favor—it hasn’t been a good year for seals, and they don’t have many spare skins. They’re trading with us because the Danish inspector is sympathetic to Commander Voorhees’s mission, and he ordered them to. You might give the men who bring you the best skins some extra token.”

Erasmus offered small metal mirrors and was rewarded with smiles, which made him more comfortable. When he sketched the strangers, emerging from the skin tents scattered at the edge of the mission or rolling their delicate boats upside down and then righting them with a touch of their paddles, the orderly shapes he made on paper ordered his feelings as well.

After a last dinner at the home of the Danish inspector, the crew slept and then made sail early the following morning. Their wildly barking dogs were answered by the dogs on shore. Even that sound pleased Erasmus. They’d made good time so far and now, on this first day of July, they were finally ready. His lists had been worthwhile after all, and all the worry, all the fuss.

LATER, WHEN HE’D try to tell his story to the one person who might most want to hear it, he’d puzzle over how to recount the events of the next few weeks. The incidents had no shape, he would think. They were simply incidents, which piled one atop the other but always had to do with a set of men on a ship, moving fitfully from one patch of water to the next. At the rails he and Dr. Boerhaave gaped at the broken, drifting floes of sheet ice Captain Tyler called “the middle pack.” A few inches thick, twelve feet thick; the size of a boat or of downtown Philadelphia; between these were the leads, the openings that sustained them. Without a sense of their passage through the pack, nothing that came later could be fully understood.

They saw the ice through a haze induced by the dogs, whose howling made sleep and even conversation impossible. No one knew what to do with them, nor how to manage their ravenous appetites; the loose ones broke into a barrel of seal flippers and gorged themselves until two died. Nothing was safe from them, and no one could control them but Joe. The constant noise and the lack of sleep made everyone nervous, and in the cramped officers’ cabin Erasmus felt a split, which perhaps had been there all along, begin to widen. He and Dr. Boerhaave found themselves allied with Zeke, while Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau always lined up with Captain Tyler, as if the arrangement of their berths marked emotional as well as physical territory. Joe, who slept in the forecastle with the seamen, maintained a careful neutrality. When the dogs tried to eat a new litter of puppies, Joe rescued them, raising an eyebrow but saying nothing when Zeke took one for himself.

“Wissy,” Zeke said, holding the squirming creature by the neck. “After the Wissahickon.” He ran his hand over her fluffy, fawn-colored head, her white front feet, the black spot on her back, withdrawing it when she turned and nipped him.

“It’s a river,” Erasmus explained to Joe. “Back home.” To Zeke he said, “Are you sure you want to keep her? They aren’t bred to be pets.”

“I don’t think Captain Tyler appreciates having her in the cabin,” Joe added.

But Zeke was adamant, working patiently to break her habit of chewing on everyone and everything, and she was by his side as they reached Upernavik. Nils Jensen counted the icebergs, cracked and grottoed or blue-green and crystalline, while Captain Tyler disagreed with Zeke about their route. A zigzag, west-trending lead had opened through the pack, and Zeke argued that they should try to force a passage directly west, as Parry had once done.

“The traditional route through Melville Bay to the North Water is longer in distance,” Captain Tyler said, kicking Wissy away from his ankles. “But ultimately it’s always quicker. Why don’t you discipline this creature?”

Finally, as the lead narrowed and then disappeared, Zeke agreed to Captain Tyler’s route and they slipped through the steadily thickening fog into the long and gentle curve of Melville Bay. Trying to describe this place to Copernicus later, Erasmus would seize a heavy mirror and drop it flat on its back from the height of his waist, so it shattered without scattering. Heavy floes grinding against each other on one side; against the land a hummocked barrier thick with grounded bergs and upended floes—and in between, their fragile ship.

In this mirror land they were all alone. “No surprise,” Captain Tyler said irritably, after the lookout reported the absence of ships. “The whalers always take the pack in May or June, when there’s less danger of being caught by an early winter.”

“We left Philadelphia as soon as we could,” Zeke told him. “You know that. It’s not my fault.”

Meanwhile the seamen told stories of ships destroyed when wind drove the drifting pack against the coast. There was a reason, they said, why Melville Bay was called the breaking-up yard. Ships crushed like hazelnuts, they said, or locked in the ice for months: as if saying it would keep it from happening. We should have started sooner; we shouldn’t be here at all; I knew four men who died here—Isaac Bond, Robert Carey, Barton DeSouza. Even as they grumbled, half-aware that Erasmus listened, the open water vanished.

Captain Tyler ordered the sails furled and sent a man to the masthead, where he could call down the positions of the ice. For two days, while the wind was dead but a slim lead was open, they tracked the ship. On the land-fast ice they passed canvas straps over their shoulders and chests, then fastened their harnesses to the towline. Plodding heavily, they towed the brig as a team of horses might pull heavy equipment across a field. Erasmus, who’d volunteered to help, could stop when he was exhausted, or when his hands froze or his feet blistered; here he felt for the first time how much older he was than everyone but Captain Tyler. Zeke, so much younger, would always pull longer but never finished a full watch. The men pulled until their watch was complete, and for all that, on a good day, they might make six miles.

On bad days, when the channel disappeared, they warped the brig like a wedge between the consolidated floes. Two men with an iron chisel cut a hole near the edge of a likely crack and drove in an anchor; a hawser was fastened to the anchor and the other end wound around the ship’s winch. Everyone took his turn at the capstan bars. By the pressure of their bodies against the bars, the winch rotated, the hawser shivered, the ice began to groan. If the hawser didn’t break, nor the anchor pull loose, the brig inched forward into the little crack. For hours they worked and got nowhere; an inch, a foot, the length of the ship.

THOSE DAYS BLURRED in Erasmus’s mind. The great cliffs looming above him, the drifting bergs and shifting ice; brief bouts of sailing interspersed with long bouts of warping and tracking; the fog and wind and the brutal labor and the snatched, troubled bits of sleep; their wet clothes and hasty meals and Captain Tyler, red-faced, shouting at the men and occasionally whacking one with a fist or the end of a rope. Mr. Tagliabeau was somewhat less brutal with the men than the captain; Mr. Francis was worse.

“You have to do something about this,” Erasmus said to Zeke one day. He was sweating horribly, itching from the wool next to his skin, and he thought he knew just how the men, working three times as hard as he was, felt. Fletcher Lamb had walked away from the towline after tearing the skin off his wrist, and Mr. Francis had hit him on the side of his head and chased him back.

Zeke shrugged. “What can I do? We have to make our way through this place, and there’s no other way but to work the men as hard as they can stand. I promise things will be different when we reach the North Water.”

It was like a single long nightmare, in which time passed too quickly and then, especially when they were bent to the capstan bars, refused to pass at all. The continuous light made things worse, not better: white, white, white tinged with blue, with gold, with green; white; more white. Their eyes burned, and as the sun looped around the sky, to the east in the morning, then south then west then finally in the north at night, with them still working, horribly sunburned, they began to yearn for the colors they never saw: sweet rich reds, the green of leaves. In their blurry sleepless state, with their bodies strained and aching, Erasmus wasn’t surprised that they should lose sight of what had brought them there. It was all the crew could do to keep the brig moving and out of danger.

Zeke tried to keep the goals of the expedition alive by telling stories about Franklin; a way, he told Erasmus privately, of motivating the men. Off duty, they sprawled on the hatch covers or leaned against the boats while Zeke paced among them, describing Franklin’s three earlier voyages. Franklin as a young lieutenant, seeking the North Pole by way of Spitzbergen, turned back by ice and returning to England with badly damaged ships. Franklin commanding an expedition through Rupert’s Land, across the tundra to the mouth of the Coppermine River and exploring the coastline eastward in tiny canoes; Franklin in the arctic yet again, traveling down the MacKenzie River and exploring the coastline westward, nearly reaching Kotzebue Sound. In their winter camp on Great Bear Lake, Zeke said, Franklin had taught his men to read and Dr. Richardson, his naturalist companion, had lectured on the natural history of the region. After that last trip, Franklin had been knighted.

Zeke spoke as if he were transmitting the great tradition of arctic exploration, of which they were now a part. As if the stories would heal the crew’s wounds and furies. But Erasmus noticed that Zeke never repeated these in the presence of Captain Tyler and the two mates. In a similar way, he was careful, himself, not to mention his disturbing dreams. Always he was sitting with his brothers at their father’s knee, with Zeke, transformed into a boy their own age, hovering in the doorway and looking longingly at their family circle. Always his father was telling marvelous tales, as if he’d never taught them real science. In ancient times, his father said, it was recorded that the sky rained milk and blood and flesh and iron; once the sky was said to rain wool and another time to rain bricks. It is always best to observe things for yourself.

Erasmus tried not to think too much about what those dreams meant, or about the quarrels brewing. He shot burgomaster gulls and two species of loon, which the ravenous dogs tried to eat. Whenever they were stuck for a while, Joe tried to calm the dogs by unchaining them and letting them romp on the ice. They barked as if they’d gone insane and often proved difficult to retrieve; Zeke was forced to leave a pair behind when a berg suddenly sailed away from the brig. After that he no longer let Wissy run with the others but kept her tied to him by an improvised leash.

Ivan Hruska nearly drowned; a floe cracked as he was fixing an ice anchor, tossing him into the surging water. It wasn’t true, as Erasmus had once believed, that immersion in this frigid fluid killed a man right away. Ivan was retrieved numb and blue and breathless, but alive. Fingers were caught between railings and lines, ribs were banged against capstan bars, skin was torn from palms and toes were broken by falling chisels. Dr. Boerhaave was kept busy attending to their injuries and preparing daily sick lists, which Zeke and Captain Tyler were forced to ignore:

Seaman Bond: abrasions to distal phalanges, left

Seaman Carey: two cracked ribs

Seaman DeSouza: asthma, aggravated by excessive labor

Seaman Hruska: bronchitis after immersion

Seaman Jensen: avulsed tip of right forefinger

Seaman Lamb: complaints of abdominal pain (earlier blow to liver?)

Seaman Hamilton: suppurating dermatitis, inner aspect of both thighs

Unromantic ailments, never mentioned in Zeke’s tales. Meanwhile Joe tried to cheer the men. In Greenland, Erasmus learned, Joe had held services among his Esquimaux converts, during which he accompanied their singing with a zither. Now he plucked and strummed and taught the men songs, singing with them while they hauled.

A WEEK INTO Melville Bay, they were finishing their evening meal when the ice began to close in on them.

“If we cut a dock here,” Captain Tyler said, indicating an indented portion of the large berg near them, “we should be safe, even if the drift ice closes full in to the shore.”

“There’s no time,” Zeke said. “Suppose we make harbor inside this berg, and the floes seal off our exit? We could be here for weeks. And we’ve got the wind with us, for the moment.”

They sailed on, with the men waiting tensely for orders. On deck, near the chained dogs, Erasmus and Zeke watched in silence. Soon the lead closed entirely and forced them to tie up to a floe. A second floe, which Nils Jensen estimated at some three-quarters of a mile in diameter and five feet deep, sailed past their sheltering chunk of ice, sheared half of it away without taking the brig, and proceeded serenely to shore. As it reached the land-fast ice, it rose in a stiff wave and shattered with a noise like thunder.

“Would you get out of the way!” Mr. Francis said, shoving Erasmus in his exasperation. Erasmus pulled back against the rail.

While Captain Tyler and Mr. Francis shouted and the men ran about with boathooks and pieces of lumber, a third floe pressed the Narwhal into the land-fast ice. Ned Kynd, his face as white as the ice, said, “We’re going to be crushed.”

He pressed into the rail beside Erasmus, who silently agreed with him. The ice on one side drove them into the ice on the other; the brig groaned, then screamed; her sides seemed to be giving way and the deck timbers began to arch. The seams between the deck planks opened. Zeke leaned toward Ned: two young men, one blond, one dark; one calm and one afraid.

“Don’t worry so,” Zeke said. He tapped Ned’s shoulder and smiled at Erasmus. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to us. Our bows are reinforced to withstand just this kind of pressure.”

As if his words had been a spell the brig began to rise, tilting until the hawser snapped and they shot backward and across the floes like a seed pinched by a giant pair of fingers. For several hours they balanced on heaped-up ice cakes, until the wind changed and pulled the ice away and set them afloat once more with a dismal splash.

Zeke ordered rum for all the men and thanked them for their labor. To Captain Tyler he said, “You don’t understand how well we’ve designed this ship to resist the ice. This is not your common whaler.”

“If we had cut a dock,” Captain Tyler said in a choked voice. His face was mottled, red on his fleshy nostrils and chin, white along his broad forehead and down the sharp bridge of his nose. His hands, Erasmus noticed, were hugely knotted at the joints. “If we had…” Abruptly he turned the watch over to Mr. Tagliabeau and retired below, where he wrapped his head in a blanket.

Later, perched on the hatch cover, Dr. Boerhaave whispered to Erasmus that he’d feared their skipper might suffer an apoplexy. They looked out at the ice, too wound up to sleep and longing to talk: not about what had just happened, but anything else. They were still a little awkward with each other. Dr. Boerhaave said, “This is very different from the other expeditions I was on. Do you find it so? I’m curious about your earlier trip.”

“I was twenty-three the last time I did anything like this,” Erasmus said, watching the ice pieces spin in the tide. Twenty-three, barely older than Ned Kynd; often he’d been frightened half to death. When had his commander ever taken a minute to reassure him? The sky was lit like morning, although it was past ten o’clock; how delicious it was to be alive, under the shimmering clouds! Had the brig been shattered here, some of the crew would be dead by now and the rest drifting south on the fragments. He was alive, he was safe and warm. What was the point of keeping secret his time with the Exploring Expedition?

“When you asked why you never saw my name in Wilkes’s book,” he said, “there were nine civilians listed as ‘Scientifics’ among all those Navy men; I was the tenth. Wilkes never listed me because I joined the expedition at the last minute and didn’t receive a salary.”

He swallowed. Two floes touched and then parted, as if finishing a dance. “My father arranged it,” he admitted. “The young woman to whom I was engaged”—Sarah Louise Bettlesman, he thought; still he could see her face, and remember her touch—“her lungs were weak, she died six months before we were to be married. I couldn’t get back on my feet after that, and my father was worried. He pulled some strings, and after promising Wilkes he’d pay my keep for the voyage, he landed me a berth as Titian Peale’s assistant.”

“I am so sorry,” Dr. Boerhaave said gently. “But I’m sure Wilkes felt lucky to have you.”

While the ice waltzed around the bow and the clouds cavorted overhead, Erasmus told the rest of the story that had preoccupied him as he sorted and sifted his seeds.

The six ships of the Exploring Expedition had left Virginia in 1838. For the next four years they’d cruised the Pacific, from South America to the Fiji Islands, New Zealand and New Holland, the Sandwich Islands, the Oregon territory and more. Although Erasmus had been lonely, out of place, and often lost, he’d seen things he couldn’t have imagined: cannibals, volcanic calderas, sixty-pound medusoids; the meke wau, or club dance, of the Fiji natives—natural wonders and also, always, Wilkes’s brutality toward his men and his constant disregard of the needs of the Scientifics. The naval men had called the Scientifics bug catchers, clam diggers, and Wilkes had blocked their way at every turn.

They weren’t allowed to work on deck, because of naval regulations and the bustle required to sail a ship. Below decks there was little light and less fresh air, and Wilkes forbade dissections there, as he found the odors distasteful and believed they spread disease. Their primary goal was surveying, Wilkes said, and he let nothing interfere with that. Day after day, Erasmus and his companions had watched the golden hours slip by while the naval men took topographical measurements of whatever island or coast was before them. Amazing plants and animals, always just out of reach. They’d set scoop nets when they could, consoling themselves with invertebrate treasures. When they thought they might expire from heat and anger, they threw themselves over the rail and into the swimming basin the men had made from a sail hung in the water. In early 1840, as they set off to explore the Antarctic waters and search for a landmass beneath the ice, Wilkes arranged to leave all the Scientifics behind at New Zealand and New Holland, so that whatever geographical discoveries he made need not be shared but might be wholly to the glory of the Navy.

He left all except Erasmus, too insignificant to worry about. On a shabby, poorly equipped ship, Erasmus and the sailors had nearly frozen to death. But they’d seen ice islands several hundred feet high and half a mile long, with gigantic arches leading into caverns crowned with bluffs and fissures. Ice rafts, some carrying boulders the size of a house. The sea had been luminous, lit like silver, and the tracks they left across it looked like lightning. Their boots leaked so badly they had to wrap their feet in blankets; their pea jackets might have been made of muslin; their gun ports failed to shut out the sea. Erasmus had been awed, and very cold, the night two midshipmen first caught sight of the Antarctic continent. Climbing up the rigging to join them, he’d seen the mountains for himself and then the wall of ice that almost shattered their ship. From that journey had come Wilkes’s famous map, charting the Antarctic coast.

Everything after that was sordid; how could he tell Dr. Boerhaave? The quarrels among Wilkes and his junior officers, one ship wrecked and another sunk with all hands; crewmen massacred by the Fiji Islanders and then the retaliatory raids; floggings and a near mutiny and so many specimens lost. He fell silent for a minute. “The real point,” he finally said, “isn’t what we discovered but what happened when we returned. Everyone ignored us. Or mocked us.”

“That’s not in Wilkes’s Narrative,” Dr. Boerhaave said.

“It’s not,” Erasmus agreed. “Who ever writes about the failures?”

Yet this was the part he couldn’t get past, the part that had twisted all the years since. Wilkes court-martialed on eleven charges and then, in a fury of wounded pride, impounding all the diaries and logbooks and journals and charts, and all the specimens.

“He took our notes,” Erasmus said. “Our drawings, our paintings—he took them all.”

Back in Washington, the specimens that hadn’t been lost in transit disappeared like melting ice. Wilkes had compelled the Scientifics to work on what was left there in Washington, although all the good comparative collections and libraries were in Philadelphia. Then he’d ruined what work they completed. They’d come back to a country in the midst of a depression; what the men in Congress wanted wasn’t science but maps and guides to new sealing and whaling grounds. Wilkes, with his endless charts, had satisfied the politicians. But meanwhile he delayed the expedition’s scientific reports again and again.

“And then,” Erasmus said, “after Titian Peale and I had spent years working on the mammals and birds and writing up our volume, Wilkes said it wasn’t any good, and he blocked its publication.”

He stopped; he couldn’t imagine telling Dr. Boerhaave how he’d retreated from Washington to the safety of the Repository, turning finally to his seeds. Half living at home, half not; most of the privacy he’d required, without the fuss of having to set up an independent household. When he desired the kind of company he wouldn’t want his family to meet, he visited certain establishments downtown or returned to Washington for a few days. Small comforts, but they were all he’d had as he wasted the prime of his young manhood. Although there were days when he’d deluded himself into thinking he might still salvage something resembling science from that voyage, in the end it was only Wilkes who’d triumphed. Despite his setbacks he’d had the great success of his Narrative. Even Dr. Boerhaave, across the ocean, had read it.

“It’s such a bad book,” Erasmus exclaimed. “Anyone knowing the people involved can see the pastiche of styles—the outright plagiarism of his subordinates’ diaries and logbooks. Wilkes made those volumes with scissors and paste, and an utter lack of honor. He stole the book, then had copyright assigned to him and reprinted it privately. It made him rich.”

“There’s a certain unevenness of style,” Dr. Boerhaave agreed. He picked at a frayed bit of whipping on a line. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know—that’s a terrible story.” The string unraveled in his hand. “It’s to your credit you’ve put that voyage behind you and joined up with Commander Voorhees.”

“It’s not a question of credit,” Erasmus said. Although he felt a wonderful sense of pardon, hearing those words. “Only—I want the chance to have one voyage go well. I want to discover things Wilkes can’t ruin. And—you know, don’t you, that my sister is engaged to marry Zeke?”

“I didn’t,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “I had no idea. Commander Voorhees never mentioned…you’ll be brothers-in-law?”

“I suppose,” Erasmus said. “Of course.” He picked up the scrap of string, unsure whether he should speak so personally. “My sister’s very dear to me,” he said. “Even though she’s so much younger—our mother died when she was born, I helped raise her. I came on this voyage partly because she wanted me to watch over Zeke. He’s so young, sometimes he’s a bit…impulsive.”

“So he is,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “You’re a kind brother.”

Was that kindness? He’d lost the person he loved; he wanted to spare Lavinia that. Surely that was his simple duty. He asked, “Do you have brothers and sisters, yourself?”

Dr. Boerhaave smiled wryly. “One of each,” he said. “Both in Sweden, both married—excellent but completely unremarkable people. They’ve never been able to understand why I wanted to travel, or why I should be so entranced by the arctic. We write letters, but almost never see each other. They’re very good about looking after our parents.”

He was cut off, Erasmus thought. Cut off from home; or free from ties to home. What did that feel like? “And in Edinburgh,” he asked, “…does someone wait for you there? A woman friend?”

“Friends,” Dr. Boerhaave said. Not boastingly, or in any indelicate way; just a simple statement. “Now and then, between trips, I’ve grown close to someone, and I stay in touch with them all. But every few years I go off like this, and it never seemed fair to get too entangled with any one woman, and then ask her to wait. I’ve been alone for so long it’s come to seem normal.”

He turned his head to follow a string of murres spangling, black and white, across the bow. “I love those birds,” he said. “The sound their wings make. What about you? Are you…does someone wait for you at home?”

“No one but my family—not since my fiancée passed on.”

“Such a pair of bachelors!” Dr. Boerhaave said.

There was a moment, then, as the murres continued pouring past them, in which anything might have been asked and answered. Erasmus might have asked what Dr. Boerhaave really meant by “alone”—with whom he shared that aloneness, and on what terms. Dr. Boerhaave might have asked Erasmus what he’d done since Sarah Louise’s death for love and companionship: surely Erasmus hadn’t dried up completely? But the moment passed and the two shy men asked nothing further of each other. Erasmus didn’t have to say that he’d lived like a monk, except for brief entanglements that had left him feeling lonelier than before; that he’d not been able to move past the feeling that if he couldn’t have Sarah Louise, he wanted no one. Or that, despite his love for his family, he’d often felt trapped living at home but hadn’t been able to move. Where would he move to? Every place seemed equally possible, equally impossible. His father had tried to be patient with him but once, irritated by an attack of shingles, he’d spoken sharply. Erasmus, he’d said, was like a walking embodiment of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Set moving, he moved until someone stopped him; stopped, he was stuck until pushed again. Just like you, Erasmus had wanted to say. But hadn’t.

THAT NIGHT HE lay in his bunk, mulling over what he’d revealed. Perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned that voyage at all—yet how could Dr. Boerhaave know him if he didn’t share the biggest fact of his life? All those wasted days. While he’d been stalled a host of other, younger men had thrown themselves into the search for Franklin. Now that search was also his.

Back home he’d resisted the frenzy surrounding any mention of Franklin’s name. That men sold cheap engravings of Franklin’s portrait on the streets, or that because of Franklin he and Zeke had been interviewed in the newspapers and had gifts pressed in their hands, had nothing to do with him. The syrupy letters of a Mrs. Myers, saying she lived on a widow’s mite but wanted to donate three goose-down pillows to aid in their search; the way, when he ordered socks in a shop, clerks came out from behind their counters to ask questions in breathless voices, as if not only Franklin and his men were heroes but so were he and Zeke—that puffery had made him uneasy. He’d focused on the practical, the everyday. Still there might be men alive, living off the land or among the Esquimaux; he and Zeke searched for them, not just for Franklin.

As he’d told Dr. Boerhaave the story of his earlier voyage, he’d seen how different it was from his present journey. This one was worthwhile. This one meant something. And when he finally slept, he dreamed he saw a column of men walking away from a ship. The ship was sinking, slowly and silently; the men turned their backs to it. Erasmus could see faces. A blond man with a broken nose, a short man with dark eyes and a mole on his chin. But not Franklin, nor any of the officers; no one whose portrait had been reproduced in the newspapers. Simply a group of strangers, waiting for help.

The dream both embarrassed and delighted him. Since the days of his first expedition, he’d not let himself admire anyone, nor been willing to bend his life to follow something greater. But he woke rejuvenated, feeling as if a great hand had reached down and brushed him from an eddy back into the current.

AS THEY CONTINUED to struggle through Melville Bay, Zeke rolled off the names of the headlands they passed and said wistfully, “Wouldn’t you like to have your name on something here?” Around his berth he’d built a rodent’s nest of maps and papers. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to discover something altogether new?”

At night he pored over the accounts of Parry and Ross and Scoresby, sometimes reading passages aloud to the men while he paced the decks and they worked. He showed little interest in the amphipods Erasmus found clinging to the warping lines, or the snow geese and terns and ivory gulls that swooped and sailed above them. Nor was he interested in the miraculous refractions, which painted images in the sky near the sun. Sometimes whole bergs seemed to lift themselves above the horizon and float on nothingness, but Zeke no longer raptured over them. And Erasmus noticed that Zeke’s journal—a handsome volume, bound in green silk, which Lavinia had given him—showed only a few scrappy entries.

“You’ve had no time?” Erasmus asked.

Zeke shook his head. “I keep meaning to,” he said. “Lavinia made me promise I’d write in here, for her to read when we get back. But it’s so large, and water spots the cover—and anyway I have this.”

He showed Erasmus another notebook; he’d been keeping it for several years, he said, under his pillow at night and in his pocket during the day. Erasmus stared at the battered black volume, troubled that he hadn’t known about it before.

“I started it when I began wishing I could do something to find Franklin,” Zeke said. “It’s where I keep notes on things I’ve read, little reminders to myself, and so forth.”

He held it out and Erasmus read the pages where it fell open. The titles of four books Zeke meant to read and seven he’d recently read, a letter to the Philadelphia paper praising Jane Franklin’s continued quest for her husband, some thoughts about scurvy and its prevention (FRESH MEAT, underlined twice. In the men, watch for bleeding gums, spots and swollenness of lower limbs, opening of old sores and wounds), a recipe for pemmican, a drawing of a sledge runner, a Philadelphia merchant’s quoted price for enough tobacco to supply the crew for eighteen months.

“Interesting,” Erasmus said, although he was taken aback by this hodgepodge. Where was the urgency of their quest? “I can see this is where you kept track of what you learned while we were planning the trip. But what about now? Don’t you—describe things? Write about what you’ve seen each day, and the progress we’re making?”

“That’s not important,” Zeke said. On the cabin table a candle burned, casting improbable shadows. “Or not as important as planning ahead for what’s to come. I like to use this for thinking, writing down what’s really significant. Captain Tyler may run this brig on a daily basis. But I’m the one with the vision. I’m the one who has to keep us on track in the largest sense.”

“I could do the mundane part,” Erasmus offered. “Keep a record of our daily life, I mean. Then you’d be free to keep a more personal account.”

“Why don’t you take this?” Zeke said, indicating Lavinia’s gift. “It’s a good size, you’ll have plenty of room.” He lifted a stack of pages and let them slip along his thumb: a whirring noise, like wing beats. “When we get home, we can tell Lavinia we worked on it together.”

THE WIND GREW fierce again. Not far from Cape York, Zeke gave in to Captain Tyler’s wishes and ordered a dock cut in the land-fast ice, where they might shelter until the gale passed. Above them a glacier poured between two cliffs crowded with nesting murres: black rock streaked with streams of droppings, the clean white river of ice; more soiled rock secreting waves of ammonia and an astonishing squawking noise. As birds left their eggs to seek fish in the cracks between the floes, a hunting party fired at them. Dr. Boerhaave, perched on a boulder, stayed behind to examine the parasites in the slaughtered birds’ feathers. Zeke and Erasmus and Joe headed up the glacier’s tongue.

They climbed joined by a long rope, which Joe looped around their waists as protection against the crevasses. Wissy, attached to Zeke by a separate rope, led; then Zeke and behind him Erasmus, who kept listing to the glacier’s edge where it met the cliff, and where plants grew in the rocky, sheltered hollows. Chickweeds and sorrel and saxifrages, willows hardly bigger than his hand—but Zeke pulled on him like a farmer tugging a reluctant cow. In the rear Joe called out instructions when he detected a weakness in the ice. The lichens alone, Erasmus thought, would have repaid a week’s visit; he didn’t have a minute with them. The heaps of envelopes he’d brought for seeds were useless. The white bells of arctic heather like dwarfed lilies of the valley, the inch-high tangle of rhizomes, everything spreading vegetatively in a season too short for most plants to set seeds—he should be taking notes, copious notes, but they were moving too fast.

What was Zeke pulling him toward? A rough, craggy object half-embedded in the ice; he was missing his chance with the cliffside plants for the sake of a rock. By the time he caught up to Zeke, about to complain, Zeke was digging out one side of the boulder, assisted by Wissy’s frantic paws. “What’s so interesting?” Erasmus asked.

“I don’t know,” Zeke said. “It caught my eye, it looked so out of place—what is this doing here?”

Erasmus bent and saw that the side of the boulder opposite his hands was chipped and fractured in a way that suggested human interference. Elsewhere was a crust he recognized. “It’s a meteorite,” he told Zeke, annoyed that he hadn’t discovered it himself.

Joe caught up to them, out of breath, and inspected the chipped side. “One of the iron stones!” he exclaimed.

“Why do you call it that?” Erasmus asked. He could feel where flakes the size of fingernails were missing.

“There are Esquimaux around here,” Joe said. “The ones Ross called Arctic Highlanders. Even as far south as Godhavn we’ve heard stories of how they use the odd rocks stuck in the glaciers. They chip harpoon heads from them.”

Erasmus inspected the rock more closely and probed it with his knife: a siderite, he decided, metallic iron alloyed with nickel. A similar specimen had fallen in Gloucestershire in 1835—but how remarkable to find one here! And for Joe to know the story that made sense of it. “Ever since Ross explored this area, people have been wondering about the source of the northern tribe’s iron,” he said to Zeke. “They must have been getting it from this stone, or from others like it.”

Joe nodded. “Somewhere near here are supposed to be three large ones, which the Esquimaux have named. And perhaps smaller ones like this as well.”

Zeke tapped the lumpy, dull-colored rock. “We can’t leave such an important discovery here.”

“You can’t take it,” Joe exclaimed. “The natives need these. They call them saviksue, they believe they have a soul.”

Erasmus looked at Joe, at Zeke, at the rock. He couldn’t help himself, he coveted it.

“Them,” Zeke said. “You acknowledge yourself that there are others. I’m only taking this small one.”

Over Joe’s protests Zeke and Erasmus chipped the ice away with their knives, until the rock was free. It was as heavy as a man. “Just help us roll it to the ship,” Zeke begged; and Joe finally agreed.

In the eerie pink light they sweated and struggled and pushed, all the time hearing the distant gunshots and the indignant roar of the birds. Erasmus, as the angle of the glacier grew steeper, slipped near a patch of meltwater and fell. Joe and Zeke, roped on either side of him, tumbled seconds later. The meteorite, free of their hands, rolled clumsily as they untied the knots that tangled them. It gathered speed and lurched down slantwise, leaping over a last ridge of ice to plunge into the gap where the glacier had pulled away from the side of the cliff.

Erasmus heard it shatter and leapt to his feet. Running after it, too late to save it, stumbling and slipping and hoping, still, that he might retrieve a piece, he stayed upright most of the way down the glacier but skidded off the last, lowest ledge. He was flying; his eyes were open. He was arcing over the stony shore, heading for the ice, praying that he’d die quickly. He saw a patch of darkness the size of a dining-room table, an open pool in the ice; then he was underwater. Then under ice.

The water burned him like fire and scoured his mouth and eyes, but even as he thrashed and struggled and felt his limbs numb he saw the fish schooling around his legs, and the murres serenely swimming like fish, and the cool, green, glowing underside of the ice. He had a few minutes, he thought, remembering Ivan’s near drowning. No more. Something shimmered white: belugas? He fainted, or froze, or drowned. When he came to himself again he was looking up at Dr. Boerhaave’s anxious face.

“Am I alive?” he asked.

“Just barely,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Ned pulled you out.”

“Did you see the meteorite?”

Dr. Boerhaave shook his head.

THEY COULDN’T RECOVER even a single piece of the stone before Captain Tyler hurried the Narwhal into a suddenly open lead. In his berth, recovering from his chilly bath, Erasmus rested for a day. When he felt better he thanked Ned.

“It was nothing,” Ned said. “I was gutting a fish, looking right at the hole in the ice where you landed. All I did was run over with the boat hook.”

With Dr. Boerhaave’s help, Erasmus wrote up a description of the meteorite to send to Edinburgh. The weather grew fine—warm during the day; just below freezing during the gleaming north light that was as close as they came to night—and as Erasmus wrote to Dr. Boerhaave’s friend he noted the odd combination of summer and winter features: cool air, hot sun; black cliffs, white ice. On the cloudless day when they reached the North Water, he felt as though he were home during harvesttime.

The air was warm, the water gleaming like steel and the icebergs elevated against the horizon. The men had stripped off most of their clothes. Mr. Tagliabeau was urging them on at the capstan bars when the lookout shouted, “We’re here!” and the brig broke into open water. All hands stopped work and gave three cheers. Mr. Tagliabeau and Captain Tyler embraced one another and then, to Erasmus’s astonishment, shook Zeke’s hand. Joe broke out his zither and played several cheerful tunes; Captain Tyler ordered the sails set; and they were free of the pack.