On 1 July, after weeks of warming weather, the cold and snow returned in earnest. A blizzard blew out of the southeast, directly into the eyes of the men hauling their sledges. Slops were pulled out of baled heaps in the boats. Welsh wigs were dug out of valises and packs. The snow added hundreds of pounds to the weight of the sledges and the boats atop them. The men so sick that they were being carried in those boats, lying atop supplies and folded tents, burrowed under the canvas covers for shelter.
The men hauled forward through three days of continuous driving snow out of the east and southeast. At night, lightning crashed and the men cowered low against the canvas floors of their tents.
Today they had stopped because too many of the men were sick and Goodsir wanted to administer to them, and because Crozier wanted to send parties ahead to scout and larger armed parties north into the interior and south out onto the sea ice to hunt.
They needed food badly.
The good news and the bad news was that they had finally finished the last of the Goldner canned foods. When the steward Aylmore, who on captain’s orders had continued to eat and grow fat on the tinned foods, hadn’t died from the terrible symptoms that killed Captain Fitzjames – although two other men who were not supposed to be eating from the cans had – everyone went back on the tinned foods to supplement the little remaining salt pork and cod and biscuits.
The 28-year-old seaman Bill Closson died screaming silently and convulsing from gut pains and paralysis, but Dr. Goodsir had no clue what might have poisoned him until one of his mates, Tom McConvey, confessed that the dead man had stolen and eaten a Goldner can of peaches that no one else had shared.
In the very brief burial service for Closson – his body lying without even a canvas shroud under the loose pile of rocks because Old Murray, the sailmaker, had died of scurvy and there was no extra canvas left anyway – Captain Crozier had quoted not from the Bible the men knew but from his fabled Book of Leviathan.
“Life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’” the captain had intoned. “It seems it is shorter for those who steal from their mates.”
The eulogy, such as it was, was a hit with the men. Although the ten boats they had been dragging and hauling on sledges for more than two months all had old names assigned to them from when Erebus and Terror still sailed the seas, the man-hauling teams of seamen immediately renamed the three cutters and two pinnaces always hauled during the afternoon and evening stint of hauling – the part of the day they hated the most since it meant regaining ground already won through the sweat of the long morning. The five boats were now officially named Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short.
Crozier had grinned at this. It meant the men were not so far gone into hunger and despair that their English sailors’ black humour did not still hold a cutting edge.
The mutiny, when it came, was made vocal by the last man on earth that Francis Crozier would have imagined opposing his command.
It was the middle of the day and the captain was trying to get a few minutes’ sleep while most of the men were out of camp doing reconnaissance or hunting. He heard the slow shuffle of many screw-heeled boots in the snow outside his tent, and he knew immediately that there was trouble outside the usual range of daily emergencies. The furtive sound of the footsteps as he came up from his light sleep warned him of the defiance to come.
Crozier pulled on his greatcoat. He always carried a loaded pistol in the right pocket of this coat, but recently he had begun carrying a smaller two-shot pistol in his left pocket as well.
There were about twenty-five men assembled in the open area between Crozier’s tent and the large Sick Bay tent. The blowing snow, thick scarves, and filthy Welsh wigs made some of them hard to identify at first glance, but Crozier was not surprised to see Cornelius Hickey, Magnus Manson, Richard Aylmore, and a half dozen of the more vocal resenters in the second row.
It was the first row facing him that surprised him.
Most of the officers were off commanding the scattered hunting and scouting parties Crozier had sent out that morning – Crozier realized his mistake too late, sending away all of his most loyal officers, including Lieutenant Little and his second mate Robert Thomas, Tom Johnson, his faithful bosun’s mate, Harry Peglar and some others, all at once, leaving the weaker men congregated here at Hospital Camp – but standing in front of this group was young Lieutenant Hodgson. Crozier was also shocked to see Reuben Male, captain of the forecastle, and Erebus’s captain of the foretop, Robert Sinclair, here. Male and Sinclair had always been good men.
Crozier strode toward the gathering so quickly that Hodgson actually took two steps back and collided with the giant idiot, Manson.
“What do you men want?” rasped Crozier. Wishing that his voice was not such a hoarse croak, he put as much volume and authority into it as he could. “What the hell is going on here?”
“We need to talk to you, Captain,” said Hodgson. The young man’s voice was trembling with tension.
“About what?” Crozier kept his right hand in his pocket. He saw Dr. Goodsir come to the opening of the Sick Bay tent and look out in surprise at the mob. Crozier counted twenty-three men in the group, and, despite the wigs pulled low and scarves pulled high, he noted who each man was. He would not forget.
“About going back,” said Hodgson. The men behind him began muttering assent with the crowd murmur that was always the hive-mind sound of mutineers.
Crozier did not react at once. One piece of good news here was that if it was an active mutiny, if all the men including Hodgson and Male and Sinclair had already agreed to take control of the expedition by force, Crozier would be dead by now. They would have acted in the twilight dimness at midnight.
And the only other piece of good news was that while two or three of the seamen here were carrying shotguns, all the other weapons were out with the sixty-six men hunting today.
Crozier made a mental note never to allow all of the Marines to leave the camp again at the same time. Tozer and the others had been eager to hunt. The captain had been so tired that he had not thought twice about giving them permission to go.
The captain looked from face to face. Some of the weaker ones in the crowd looked down immediately, ashamed to meet his gaze. The stronger ones like Male and Sinclair stared back. Hickey looked at him with eyes so hooded and cold they could have belonged to one of the white bears they’d encountered – or perhaps to the thing on the ice itself.
“Go back to where?” snapped Crozier.
“To T-terror Camp,” stuttered Hodgson. “There’s canned food and some coal and the stoves there. And the other boats we left.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Crozier. “We’re at least sixty-five miles from Terror Camp. It would be October – solid winter – before you reached it, if you ever did.”
Hodgson wilted, but the captain of Erebus’s foretop said, “We’re a hell of a lot closer to the camp than we are to this river we’re killing ourselves to haul the boats to.”
“That’s not true, Mr. Sinclair,” rasped Crozier. “Lieutenant Little and I estimate that the inlet to the river is less than fifty miles from here.”
“The inlet,” sneered a seaman named George Thompson. The man was known for drunkenness and laziness. Crozier could not cast the first stone at him for the drinking, but he despised laziness.
“The mouth of Back’s River is fifty miles south down the inlet,” continued Thompson. “More than a hundred miles from here.”
“Watch your tone, Thompson,” warned Crozier in a tone so low and deadly that even that lout blinked and looked down. Crozier looked around the crowd again. He spoke to all the men. “It doesn’t matter if it’s forty miles down the inlet to the mouth of Back’s River or fifty miles, odds are good that it will be open water… we’ll be sailing the boats, not dragging them. Now go back to your duties and forget this nonsense.”