Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (16 page)

“You wanted to be Franklin?” asks Annie. “Or go with him to the Arctic?”

“No, no.” Eldon can remember, with particular intensity, the cool chamber of his sickroom, the summer that Franklin left England. There had been ivy outside his window and all August, while his body burned with fever and his mind floated serene on the icy waters of the Barrow Strait, the rustling of the summer wind in the leaves had sounded like people whispering in another room.

“It saved me,” says Eldon. “Imagining Franklin. It possessed me entirely and I recovered because of that, because I didn’t dwell on my illness, on being ill.”

“And then they died,” says Annie.

“Disappeared.” Eldon leaves the window and comes back over to Annie. “Yes. Two years later, in forty-seven, they disappeared. And do you know that every year since then, up until McClintock came back in fifty-nine, there has been an expedition sent out to discover what happened to Franklin’s expedition. They have mapped more of Canada’s Arctic in looking for Franklin than was ever mapped by Franklin himself. And he was on a mapping expedition.” Eldon looks down at the photograph of himself again. How foolish he felt when he climbed the studio stairs. How foolish, and how desirable, to stand there with one hand balanced on the top of the world. “That’s what I wanted, Annie,” he says. “To go in search of Franklin. To be part of an expedition that went looking for him.”

“And you couldn’t do that, sir?”

“No. I am the man who copies out the journeys of other men. I am of no use to an expedition.”

Annie thinks that she would never have set sail in a ship called
Terror.
Was this not asking for trouble? Did Franklin never think of this himself?

“They found out what happened, didn’t they?” she says.

“Not really,” says Eldon. “Lady Franklin sponsored McClintock in fifty-seven and he found more than most.Some physical evidence—bodies, the only written record—but it’s still not clear if there were survivors and how long they lasted. Where Franklin is buried. What happened to the ships.” Eldon touches Annie lightly on the shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m keeping you from your duties.”

But I’m interested, thinks Annie. Interested in this story of the men who froze to death on the ice and the men who went to find them.

“But perhaps you’d like to borrow McClintock’s account of his search for Franklin? It’s quite fascinating.” Eldon goes to his bookshelves, takes the volume down, comes back, and hands
The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas
to Annie. “You’ll find it more interesting than the Johnson dictionary.”

Annie weighs the book in her hand, the solid, smooth heft of it. “You know, then?” she says.

“I know.”

“Because of the dictionary? I put it back in the wrong place?”

“You did.”

Annie is on the verge of apologizing, but Eldon doesn’t seem the least bit angry. In fact, he smiles at her and goes to his shelves, returns with another book. “Take this, too,” he says. “It’s Franklin’s account of his first two voyages. Harrowing. It has always made me wonder why he wanted to go on a third expedition. Had to, I suppose.” Eldon smiles again. “Just as you had to have books to read. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.” Annie looks down at the books in her hands. They are cooling in her grasp already, setting her skin ashiver. Had to. It is just like that, reading as necessary to her now as breathing. Or so it feels. “Thank you,” she says.

“Annie.” Eldon waves his hand towards his shelves and accidentally sets a lamp staggering on its base. “I am honoured that you would like to use my library. It is yours any time you desire. And perhaps,” he says excitedly, “we could talk about the books when you finish reading them? Wouldn’t that be good?” He flails out with his arms again, and this time succeeds in knocking over the lamp entirely.

Annie spends her next afternoon off lying on her bed reading the books Eldon has loaned her. She opens the book by Franklin and reads of his first two journeys to Canada’s Arctic. In his first expedition, from 1819—1822, travelling by canoe to explore the coast from the mouth of the Coppermine River to the Kent Peninsula, Franklin and his men were trapped by ice, went overland to hunt, split up into smaller groups. They were starving to death most of the time, boiled old hides to eat, ate their shoes, fried up old bones. There were instances of cannibalism among the men. It seemed a supreme act of luck that they managed to get out, any of them, alive. Not only alive, but intent to return.

The reader will probably be desirous to know how we passed our time in such a comfortless situation: the first operation after encamping was to thaw our frozen shoes.

Annie is desirous to know why Franklin went back to the Arctic after almost dying the first time. She hunches down into the blankets on her bed. The wind outside her attic bedroom creaks against the window glass. A cold expanse of desolation is easy to imagine up here.

…we went to bed, and kept up a cheerful conversation until our blankets were thawed by the heat of our bodies…

What could they possibly have talked about that was cheerful when they were freezing and starving to death? Their families? The summer in England they had sailed from, warm nights and days fragrant with flowers, the scent of new-mown hay in the fields. If they had allowed themselves just to be where they were and not to remember or wish, how could it have been stood? Annie is certain that they must have spent a lot of their cheerful conversation in either memory or wish. How else to survive a present that is unforgiving and unrelenting.

Franklin fared a lot better on his second expedition, exploring by ship the westward coast from the Mackenzie Delta. Everything went smoothly on this trip and, on the two expeditions, Franklin and his men mapped over seventeen hundred miles of Arctic coastline in the name of the British Empire.

Annie leaves John Franklin, happy and alive at the end of his book, and switches over to McClintock’s account of his search for the truth about what happened to the ill-fated third expedition to the Arctic.

The year Annie was born. The year Eldon Dashell lay feverish in his sick room, fifty-nine-year-old John Franklin left England to try and find a passage through the Polar Sea that would join the Atlantic to the Pacific. Franklin was actually the second choice of the admiralty to lead the expedition. The first choice, Sir James Ross, had promised his bride not to undertake any more voyages of exploration. He must have been grateful to his bride for this for the rest of his life, thinks Annie.

The two ships commissioned for Franklin’s use, the
Erebus
and the
Terror,
were fitted with railway steam engines and the bows plated with sheets of iron to break through the ice floes. They were provisioned for three years at sea with an astonishing amount of food that included forty-eight tons of canned and salted meat, and 3,684 gallons of liquor. The ships were to sail west through Lancaster Sound and the Barrow Strait as far as Cape Walker, and then proceed south towards the Bering Strait. If this way proved blocked by ice, it was possible to try a northward approach through the Wellington Channel, between Devon and Cornwallis islands.

Everything named for England. Why, thinks Annie, looking at the map in McClintock’s book. Why call a chunk of barren, icy land
North Somerset?
Was it merely a way to reassure themselves that they would be returning to England, that England was, in fact, still near at hand?
North Cornwall, Cambridge Bay, Lands End.
And then the names that made sense to Annie—
Whale Sounds, Fury Point, Cape Farewell, Point Turnagain,
the Esquimaux-named
Upernavik.
And then the name that made no sense,
Cape Bunny.
Not
Cape Rabbit,
but
Bunny
, as though the person who named it were five years old.

Annie runs her finger around the coast of Beechey Island, where Franklin and his men spent the first winter locked in ice with no sun for four months and temperatures dropping to a cold that killed in a matter of hours. What did they do during those long months of darkness? Read perhaps, from a library of twenty-nine hundred books, administered by a shipboard librarian. Wrote letters home, in the hopes that there’d be a whaling ship to pass them on to, that the letters would make it back to England before the expedition did. Named things, she thinks. Connected themselves to where they were, tamed the wild, unforgiving landscape into something as harmless and friendly as a bunny.

Two years passed and nothing was heard from the expedition. Lady Franklin began agitating for a rescue expedition, and in 1848 Sir James Ross, the man who had turned down the leadership of the original expedition, commanded a search along the Arctic coast. He found nothing. After Ross, there were searches every year, sometimes more than one at a time, sponsored either by the navy, or the government, or by Lady Franklin. But it wasn’t until McClintock’s expedition in 1858 that there were real answers as to what had happened to the souls aboard the
Erebus
and the
Terror.

Annie is surprised by McClintock’s book. She had thought that an expedition that had set off in search of Franklin would spend the time sailing towards the Arctic pondering what might have happened to Franklin and his men, imagining their possible fate. But McClintock doesn’t even mention Franklin for the first half of the book. Instead, he talks about what he’s seeing and experiencing, as though he’s on his own scientific survey of the Arctic.

The glacier serves to remind one at once of Time and of Eternity. Surely all who gaze upon this ice-overwhelmed region, this wide expanse of “terrestrial wreck,” must be similarly assured that here “we have no abiding place.”

Annie gets up and walks around the bedroom. Her arm has gone numb from where she was lying on it. She shakes it out in front of her body. From Tess’s side of the room Annie’s bed looks adrift, a raft of shadow snugged up against the sheer wall.

McClintock finally starting talking about Franklin when his ship, the
Fox,
reached Beechey Island. There they erected a tablet from Lady Franklin.

This tablet is erected near the spot where they passed their first Arctic winter, and whence they issued forth to conquer difficulties or to die.

They established a winter base near Bellot Strait and, from there, ventured forth by sled on a series of journeys to determine where Franklin’s men had gone after their first winter. Some of the Esquimaux they met on these forays had relics from the Franklin Expedition—silver cutlery, buttons, bits of lead from the ships—these were bought or bartered back by McClintock and his crew. From interviews with the Esquimaux, McClintock found out the fate of the ships. One had sunk. The other had been forced up onto the ice and crushed to bits. The men had left for the “large river,” taking a lifeboat or two with them. The following winter their bones were found there. One old woman told McClintock, “They fell down and died as they walked along.”

Annie tries to imagine how strength could just flutter out of a body, softly, like a moth rising in the dusk. It is what happened to her own family.
They fell down and died as they walked along.
On a road, in Ireland. On the shifting, unsteady pans of ice in northern Canada. At almost the same time. And Annie is the record of her family. She is the cairn they left, what remained for the world to see after they had gone. Franklin’s men left a note under rocks at Point Victory. A few lines on an admiralty report form to say that they’d wintered on Beechey Island, to say that all was well. And then, around the sides of the paper, a report from the second year saying that the ships were deserted, that men had died, including Franklin, that the remaining souls were heading out on April 26, 1848, for the Fish River.

Annie leans up against the wall by her bed, the strict flat of it hard against her spine. Were there people who saw her family die? Were there those who would remember her as belonging to them?

McClintock and his crew found one of the twenty-eight-foot boats Franklin’s men had been pushing over the ice towards Fish River. It was lashed onto a crudely fashioned sledge, the whole contraption, according to McClintock’s estimation, in excess of fourteen hundred pounds. Inside the boat were two skeletons, one of a young person, the other of a middle-aged man. The latter was perhaps an officer. The bodies had been obviously disturbed by animals. The sledge, loaded down with many unnecessary items such as silk handkerchiefs, teaspoons, dinner knives, needle-and-thread cases, would have required about seven men to move it over the ice. Had the others gone for help and left these two men, perhaps sick or too weak to come along? The only food in the boat was forty pounds of chocolate and some tea. There was a Bible, a prayer book, and the novel,
The Vicar of Wakefield.

McClintock’s search ended with his placing his own record under the cairn at Point Victory, a record stating all the explorations and discoveries his party had made. Because it was his voyage, thinks Annie, closing the book. John Franklin was just as much a place as Cape Farewell or Point Victory, something to head towards, something to take bearings from, but truly, the journey was McClintock’s.

All the dead weren’t found. Even with McClintock’s new evidence, there still could have been survivors. And why, thinks Annie, holding
The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas
against her chest, why have I never questioned Mrs. Cullen’s account of my family’s death? Why could I not believe, as Jane Franklin believed and kept believing, that out there, against all odds, there was perhaps one who had made it through alive. One person. One soul.

“The boots,” says Annie, when she returns the books on Franklin to Eldon. “The boots are barely imaginable, and they’re perhaps the easiest thing to imagine.”

“What boots?” Eldon has made their book discussion a formal arrangement. He sits opposite Annie in front of the fire. He has poured them tea.

“The frozen boots.” Annie notes that there’s not quite enough milk in the pitcher for a second cup of tea. “Franklin and his men had to put on frozen boots every morning and walk across the ice. It is hard enough to have cold feet, but to put cold feet into boots of ice.” She sips her tea. It is a bit odd to be here, in the library with Mr. Dashell, talking about books. They are both nervous. But, she thinks, putting her teacup back onto the saucer, they are both enjoying this, too.