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Authors: Robert Edric

BOOK: The Broken Lands
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The wounded animal continued toward them. The men it passed gathered behind and came after it. The air was filled with the smell of gunsmoke and with the cries and cheers of the men close enough to see that the hunt was about to draw to a successful conclusion. Some paused to look down at the splashes of blood on the ice.
A second blunderbuss was fired, and those still gathered beside the slab of ice saw Robert Sargent raise his weapon in the air and wave with his free arm. Twenty feet ahead of him the bear had finally fallen, its front legs buckling beneath it as it tried to continue running, its hind legs kicking uselessly behind it. Men gathered around
it and discharged their weapons into its white flanks. The air above the body grew dense with smoke.
Graham Gore shouldered his pistol and then returned it to the holster strapped across his chest.
Fitzjames ran forward and called for the hunters to stop firing. Men were already dancing around the corpse, and at his arrival they cleared a path for him and each man made claims for his own part in the killing.
The bear was dead, and despite the number of wounds it had received, there was surprisingly little blood on its coat, only a long dark smear on the ice where it had finally gone down.
He was joined by Reid, Goodsir and Gore.
Gore took out his pistol, held it to the dead creature’s skull and fired into it. He did this dispassionately, making the act appear almost a gesture of apology. At the recoil of the shot he stepped back, a look of surprise on his face, as though he were shocked by what he had done.
Around him the hunters fell silent. There was no wind and the gunsmoke hung in a pall above them.
They were all distracted from the corpse a moment later by the appearance of the party from the
Terror
, the leaders of which ran out from behind the mounded ice in which the bear had sought shelter. They ran to where the men from the
Erebus
were gathered. Two of them pulled something on ropes, which Fitzjames at first assumed to be the body of a seal they had shot. When the men came closer, however, he saw that what they were dragging was the small and bloody corpse of a cub, their ropes fastened to its hind paws.
“
That’s
where she was headed,” Reid said to him.
Solomon Tozer pushed through the men around the body of the larger bear, and without warning, he too discharged his rifle into it, followed by the marines who accompanied him. Satisfied, they stepped back from the corpse and began to argue with the marines from the
Erebus
about which party had been the first to kill their own bear.
Reid went alone to inspect the body of the cub, and saw that it had been shot just as many times as its mother. He untied the ropes
from its paws, and picking it up he carried it to the adult bear and threw it down beside her.
Philip Reddington approached Fitzjames and asked for permission to take one of the larger bear’s paws as a trophy. A few minutes later both it and the cub had been virtually dismembered in the quest for souvenirs. One man took the eyes and others the tongues. Yet another smashed loose several teeth and immediately offered them for sale as mementoes of the hunt.
Goodsir took his examples of fur, but could not bring himself to open up the body and take out part of the liver.
One of their burners was lit, and the men who had cut out the tongues cooked and ate them.
Shortly afterward they left the scene of the kill and returned to the ships in a broken line stretching for almost a mile over the darkening ice.
A number of foxes appeared out of the shadows to take advantage of the abandoned carcasss. Men fired at these, but none was hit. Fitzjames himself shot at one as it raced across the path immediately ahead of him. He missed, watching as the small animal darted left and right in a practiced maneuver of evasion which seemed to mock him before it finally bolted into a fissure and was lost.
F
itzjames set out to explore in the southwest accompanied by eleven men and provisioned for sixty days. He left the
Erebus
on the 4th of May, allowing for outward and homeward journeys of a month each, with orders to turn back on the 3rd of June whatever progress he might have made.
The midday temperature throughout February and March had fluctuated between minus 45 and minus 30, but during April this rose steadily to stand around 20 degrees. He hoped to make contact with any Eskimos he encountered, seek information from them regarding the land to the west, and barter with them for food and assistance. A sack of gifts, largely needles and other small tools, was included in his stores.
He took with him Reid, James Fairholme, Goodsir, Philip Reddington, five seamen and two marines, including David Bryant.
On the
Erebus
, Graham Gore was temporarily promoted to second in command, and he read out a speech of farewell as the expedition assembled itself on the ice and finally left the ships at noon on the 4th.
Fitzjames and Reid walked in front. Then came the seamen hauling their sledges, two men to each and the fifth walking between them and rocking them free whenever they became stuck. Others walked alongside them to their boundary posts, where they stood waving and shouting until the expedition was out of sight.
Despite their eventual destination, it was Fitzjames’ intention to
depart due west, to where the distant ice ridge broke the horizon, and then to follow this south until it became low enough for them to cross, or until, as Reid suspected, it eventually sank down into the surrounding plain.
They walked out of sight of the ships at three in the afternoon.
By sunset they had covered three-quarters of the distance over easy solid ice, Fairholme fixing and plotting their progress each hour against the tallest of the peaks ahead.
At seven Franklin had arranged to fire a signal rocket by which the expedition might more accurately fix its position in the falling darkness, and at that hour all twelve men stopped walking and scanned the eastern horizon. Reddington was the first to see it, directing them all to where the single spark rose wavering into the night sky. This brief sighting was sufficient for Fairholme to align his instruments and confirm their position.
After this, their hands and faces numbed by the rapidly cooling air, they pitched their tents, each man unrolling his Mackintosh floor cloth and down sleeping-bag and sliding into this as best he could fully clothed.
The following day they reached the ice ridge and turned south, soon exhausted as they began traveling over more difficult terrain.
Fairholme and Reddington climbed a low crest in the hope of seeing the distant ships, but were foiled by the glare of the sun on the ice. They all wore black crepe and gauze shields to protect them from snow blindness, and some had on gutta-percha nose-guards lined with soft flannel to shield against burning.
They traveled south for a further four days before arriving at a breach in the ice barrier, by which they were able to make progress to the west. They walked between cliffs two hundred feet high, sheer for most of their height, and with an overhang the full length of their surface rim. It was darker and much cooler in this chasm and they kept their voices low for fear of causing any unstable ice above them to come loose. They walked less widely spaced, and the men pulling the sledges changed places hourly.
They did not emerge from the gorge at the end of the first day, and so they camped inside it, pitching their tents and stowing their
supplies close against its concave north wall in case of an ice-fall during the night.
They were woken at three the following morning by the noise of such a fall and, fearful that it might have blocked their way ahead, Fitzjames and Reid went to investigate. Fairholme and Reddington explored in the direction they had already come, and they were the first to return with the news that the collapse had taken place behind them and that any retreat back through the chasm was now out of the question.
“So the trap is sprung,” Goodsir said with a smile.
Several of the less experienced men asked him to explain. Fitzjames, too, regretted the flippant remark.
“What Mr. Goodsir means,” Reid said, “is that we need no longer harbor distracting notions about turning back and seeking out another path.”
“Precisely,” Goodsir said, unrepentant. He was the first to turn his back on the ice-fall and return to his sleeping bag.
The next day the path narrowed as the ice walls closed in on them, and they moved more slowly, forced to negotiate other recent falls. After midday the sun shone in on the upper edge of the north wall, penetrating no more than ten or fifteen feet below its rim. At the bottom of the canyon they traveled in a perpetual gloom.
It was only as they were about to pitch their tents for a second night in the gorge that Reid returned from scouting ahead with the news that they were close to emerging from it and into the open ice beyond.
“It’s hard to see clearly,” he told Fitzjames. “The cliffs are low and the light more vivid.”
“What do you suggest?” Fitzjames asked him, conscious of the need for them to halt for the day before it became too cold, but also of the desirability of escaping from the restricted path while the opportunity still existed.
“Go on,” Reid advised him. “Double up the men in the harnesses and march for as long as it takes. Get out and then rest until noon tomorrow.”
Fitzjames agreed with this and gave word to the others that they were going on.
They walked blindly in the pitch darkness, a guide with a lamp twenty feet ahead of them. They could see nothing of the ground over which they walked, not even the walls on either side of them. High above them they were able to make out the pinpoint of light of a solitary star, and by this means alone were they able to distinguish between the night sky and the dark walls rising beside them.
They emerged from the chasm at two in the morning, and as soon as they were back out in the open they pitched their tents and retired on cold rations, all of them frequently waking during the night, cold and stiff after their exertions.
At dawn they disturbed a pair of foxes tugging at the covering of one of the sledges. They shot and butchered these and cooked them in a fire using empty cases for fuel, and the roast meat, eaten with sweet porridge and molasses, invigorated them all.
Those complaining of numbness in their faces, toes and fingers were examined by Goodsir, but no one was found to be suffering from anything other than the most superficial frostbite, which he was able to treat.
They stayed at the camp until one in the afternoon, whereupon they resumed their journey to the west, all relieved to be back out in the open where they could again see and feel the sun.
A march of four hours took them beyond the contours of the ridge and revealed ahead of them a vast, low plain of ice, considerably larger than the one they had left behind. Their first sight of this pleased and disappointed Fitzjames in equal measure. It pleased him because it offered them the prospect of easy travel across its broad open surface, but disappointed him by its featurelessness. He had hoped to scan the horizon and see there the darker smudges of distant land, buried or emergent. He had even hoped that he might also have seen the frozen course of some hitherto undiscovered channel, soon to rupture and reveal itself as navigable, and it was only when Reid pointed out to him that the scene ahead of them was not so featureless as it first appeared that his hopes began to rise.
“Mark the line of that braided curve,” Reid told him, calling for Fairholme to join them and plot this barely visible mark on their charts. They studied the feature through their glasses, turning to examine it along its full length.
“A pressure ridge,” Fairholme suggested.
Fitzjames agreed with him.
Reid shook his head. “The last of the nip to freeze over. Those irregularities are the last of its floating blocks to be caught and frozen as it closed in on them.”
“You mean there’s flowing water beneath?”
“Was,” Reid said. “When we get closer I can find out if they were frozen into place last year or the one before.”
“Or perhaps even the one before that,” Fitzjames said, feeling some of his initial disappointment return.
Reid then pointed out to them that the ice farther north was more heavily folded than elsewhere along the ridge.
“That’s what caused our explosions,” he said matter of factly. “And the reason we didn’t feel the tremors is because they were absorbed by what we’ve just come through.”
“Perhaps they forced the ice to split and create our gulley,” Goodsir suggested, to which Reid nodded his agreement.
Fitzjames examined this distant upheaval, searching south and west for an indication that open water had already appeared in conjunction with it. Even at that distance—he judged the near-vertical slabs to be five miles away—the disturbance had clearly taken place on a large scale.
“How high do you think they’re standing?” he asked Reid.
Reid guessed at a hundred feet, adding that he was more concerned with discovering
why
they had been so violently raised.
They continued walking south until the shadows of the ridge ran downhill and swept over them, chilling them as fully and as suddenly as the first surge of cold water over a bather’s feet.
By the end of the first week they had traveled sixty miles, ten less than Fitzjames had hoped for.
David Bryant and his marine private began to suffer from blindness, and Goodsir treated them, substituting goggles for their gauze
and then thickening and darkening the lenses of these by the addition of spare pieces he carried.
On their fourteenth day, Reid, who had advanced ahead of them over a broad sweep of more broken ice, returned with the news that he had spotted something to the south.
“Land?” Fitzjames asked hopefully.
Reid shook his head. “Something on the ice.”
He led them back to where he had made the sighting, and they examined the dark shape through their glasses, its outline lost in the liquid glimmer all around them.
“A morse,” Reddington suggested, meaning a walrus.
“Too far south, surely,” Fitzjames said.
“If it is, then it means open water near by,” Reid said, unconvinced, but silencing them all and causing them to search around the object for any sign of this. They saw none.
“Wreckage,” Fairholme said as he moved ahead of them and was the first to approach the shattered prow of a small boat firmly embedded in the ice. They speculated on how it had come to be there, deciding finally that it was old flotsam, ten or fifteen years old perhaps, and that it had been lost or abandoned by a whaler far to the north, afterward becoming trapped in the drift and being carried farther and farther south each year.
They searched the area around it but found nothing more. Goodsir attempted to chip away the ice into which the prow was frozen to determine how much more of the boat existed beneath the surface, but the old ice defeated his efforts and broke beneath his blows in only the smallest of chips.
Going on, they began to stumble over rougher ground, frequently falling and tipping their sledges. Climbing a piece of ice which rose to shoulder height, Fairholme indicated the flow lines all around them stretching in unbroken furrows from north to south, and fanning there like a horse’s tail. He also pointed out that the terrain in the direction they were traveling was more faulted and uneven than that over which they had already come.
Later, a second low range, flat-topped and less spectacular than the first, rose and stretched across their western horizon.
They made no further progress that day, and for the following four days continued to travel toward this new landmark.
On the fifth day one of their sledges was damaged, its runner breaking loose of its brass fittings. This caught against a block of ice and then snapped as easily as an old bone.
“New ice,” Reid called to them as a repair was attempted, having released himself from the harness and climbed the low cliff which now faced them. This stretched unbroken for as far as they could see and was covered over most of its length by an old fall of snow
The others climbed up after him, manhandling the sledges and stores up the steep slope. They were encouraged by the new terrain ahead of them, smooth again, and less angular than the faulted sea ice over which they had come.
“Permanent land ice,” Reid told them, indicating the full extent of the channel beneath them. “We’ve crossed what might or might not be open water in the summer, but this stays as it is.”
“So are we near land?” Goodsir asked him.
“Perhaps even on it.”
“We surely haven’t reached some promontory of the continental coast,” Fitzjames said, scarcely daring to believe that this was what they had achieved.
Reid doubted this. It was his guess that they had crossed a channel which remained frozen most summers and that they were now on the edge of a permanent ice shelf which had grown outward from a large land mass even farther to the west, an island rather than any part of the mainland, and that to reach the channel between it and the mainland they would now need to turn due south again. It was too early to see if the water in the frozen channel resumed flowing, but they might at least be able to determine the course of this waterway and find out whether or not the ice was likely to break up of its own accord, or if it became shallow enough and sufficiently loose for them to forge a passage through it once the ships had come several degrees farther south and into contact with it.

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