Arctic Drift

Fitzjames made his way to his stateroom, retrieving a compass, a gold watch, and some letters written to his family. He opened the ship’s log to the last entry and wrote a final notation in a shaky hand, then squeezed his eyes shut in defeat as he closed the leather-bound book. Tradition would dictate that he take the logbook with him, but instead he locked it in his desk atop a portfolio of daguerreotypes.

Eleven crewmen, the sane remnants of the ship’s original complement of sixty-eight men, were waiting for him in the Great Cabin. The captain slipped into a parka and boots alongside his crew, then led them up the main hatchway. Shoving aside the top hatch, they climbed onto the main deck and into the elements. It was like stepping through the gates of a frozen hell.

From the dark, dank interior of the ship, they entered a blistering world of bone white. Howling winds hurled a trillion specks of crystalline ice at the men, peppering their bodies with the force of a hundred-degrees-below-zero windchill. The sky could not be distinguished from the ground, nor up from down, in the dizzying vortex of white. Fighting the gusts, Fitzjames felt his way across the snowbound deck and down a stepladder to the frozen ice pack below.

Unseen a half mile away, the expedition’s sister ship, HMS Terror, sat locked in the same ice sheet. But the relentless winds reduced visibility to just a few yards. If they should miss locating the Terror in the ravaging winds, they would wander around the ice pack and die. Wooden marker posts had been planted every hundred feet between the two ships for just such a contingency, but the blinding conditions made finding the next marker post a deadly challenge.

Fitzjames pulled out his compass and took a bearing at twelve degrees, which he knew to be the direction of the Terror. The sister ship was actually due east of his position, but her nearness to the magnetic north pole produced a deviated compass reading. Silently praying that the ice pack had not materially moved since the last bearings were taken, he hunched over the compass and began trudging across the ice in the targeted direction. A rope line was passed back to all the crewmen, and the party proceeded across the ice field like a giant centipede.

The young commander shuffled along, head down and eyes glued to the compass, as the frigid wind and blowing snow stung his face. Counting a hundred paces, he stopped and peered about. With an initial sense of relief, he spotted the first marker post through the cottony swirls. Moving alongside the post, he took another bearing and proceeded to the next marker. The string of men leapfrogged from marker to marker, clambering over uneven mounds of snow that often rose thirty or forty feet high. Fitzjames focused all his energy on the journey, shaking off the disappointment of abandoning his ship to a contingent of madmen. Deep down, he knew it was a matter of survival. After three years in the Arctic, nothing else now mattered.

Then a deep boom shook his hopes. The sound was deafening, even over the howling winds. It sounded like the report of a large ca

Since the two expedition ships had become trapped in the ice in September 1846, they had been propelled over twenty miles, pushed by the massive blanket of ice called the Beaufort ice stream. An unusually frigid summer kept them icebound through 1847, while the current year’s spring thaw had materialized only briefly. The ravages of another cold spell again made it doubtful that the ships would break free over the coming summer. In the meantime, a shift in the ice could be fatal, crushing a stout wooden ship like it was a box of matches. In another sixty-seven years, Ernest Shackleton would watch helplessly as his ship the Endurance was crushed by an expanding ice pack in the Antarctic.

With his heart racing, Fitzjames increased his pace as another thunderous crack echoed in the distance. The rope in his hands grew taut as the men behind struggled to keep up, but he refused to slow. Reaching what he knew was the last marker pole, he squinted into the tempest. Through the blasting swirls of white, he caught a brief glimpse of a dark object ahead.

“She’s just before us,” he shouted to the men behind him. “Step lively, we’re nearly there.”

Moving as one, the group surged toward the target. Climbing over a rugged mound of ice, they at last saw the Terror before them. At one hundred and two feet, the vessel was nearly identical in size and appearance to their own ship, down to the black-painted hull with a wide gold band. The Terror barely resembled a ship now, however, with its sails and yardarms stowed away, and a large canvas awning covering her stern deck. Snow had been shoveled up in mounds nearly to the rails for insulation, while the mast and rigging were coated in a thick layer of ice. The stout bomb ship, as she was originally designated, now looked more like a giant spilt carton of milk.

Fitzjames boarded the ship, where he was surprised to see several crewmen scurrying about the ice-covered deck. A midshipman approached and led Fitzjames and his men down the main hatch and into the galley. A steward passed around shots of brandy while the men shook the ice from their clothes and warmed their hands by the cookstove. Savoring the liquor as it warmed his belly, the captain noticed a beehive of activity in the dim confines, with crewmen shouting and shoving stores about the main passageway. Like his own men, the crew of the Terror were frightful souls to look at. Pallid and emaciated, most of the men fought the advanced ravages of scurvy. Fitzjames had already lost two of his own teeth to the disease, a vitamin C deficiency that causes spongy gums and bleeding scalp. Though casks of lemon juice had been carried aboard and rationed regularly to all the crew, the juice had lost its efficacy over time. Combined with a shortage of fresh meat, the disease had left no man untouched. And as the sailors all knew, left unchecked, scurvy could eventually prove fatal.

The captain of the Terror presently appeared, a tough Irish-man named Francis Crozier. An Arctic veteran, Crozier had spent the better part of his life at sea. Like many before him, he had been drawn to the search for a passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific through the unexplored regions of the Arctic. The discovery of the Northwest Passage was perhaps the last great feat of seaborne exploration left to conquer. Dozens had tried and failed, but this expedition was different. Armed with two Arctic-ready ships under the command of an enigmatic leader in Sir John Franklin, success had been all but guaranteed. But Franklin had died the year before, after attempting a dash for the North American coastline too late in the summer. Unprotected in the open sea, the ships became trapped when the ice closed in around them. The strong-willed Crozier was determined to lead his remaining men to safety and salvage glory from the failure that was lying before them.

“You’ve abandoned the Erebus?” he asked Fitzjames pointedly.

The younger captain nodded in reply. “The remaining crew members have gone out of their heads.”

“I received your earlier message detailing the troubles. Most peculiar. I’ve had one or two men lose their wits for a time but have not experienced such a mass breakdown.”

“It is damned perplexing,” Fitzjames replied with obvious discomfort. “I am just thankful to be off that lunatic asylum.”

“They are dead men now,” Crozier muttered. “And we might be as well, soon enough.”

“The pack ice. It’s fracturing.”

Crozier nodded. Pressure points in the ice pack ruptured frequently from the underlying movements. Though most of the fracturing occurred in the fall and early winter as the open seas initially froze, the spring pack was also witness to dangerous thaws and convulsions.