51 CROZIER

They’d hauled for two weeks to the southeastern-most tip of the island – the point where the King William Island shoreline abruptly began curving north and east – and then they’d stopped to set up tents, send out hunting parties, and catch their breath while waiting and watching for openings in the sea-strait ice to the south. Dr. Goodsir had told Crozier that he needed time to deal with the sick and injured they’d been hauling in their five boats. They named the campsite Land ’s End.

When Crozier was informed by Goodsir that at least five men needed to have feet amputated during the stop there – which meant, he knew, that those men would never go farther than this place, since even the ambulatory seamen no longer had the strength to haul the extra weight of men in boats – the captain renamed the wind-whipped point Rescue Camp.

The idea, so far discussed only between Goodsir and himself although suggested by Goodsir, was for the surgeon to stay behind with the men recovering from the amputations. Four had been operated on already and so far none had died – the last man, Mr. Diggle, was to have his amputation this morning. Other seamen too sick or weary to continue on could opt to stay with Goodsir and the amputees, while Crozier, Des Voeux, Couch, Crozier’s trusted second mate, Johnson, and any others with strength left would sail south down the inlet when – if – the ice relented again. Then this smaller group, traveling lightly, would head up Back River, returning with a rescue party from Great Slave Lake in the spring – or, with the help of a miracle, in the next month or two before winter arrived, providing that they ran into a rescue party moving north along the river.

Crozier knew that the chances of that particular miracle were so low as to be almost nil and that the chances of any of the sick men surviving at Rescue Camp until the following spring without help were not even worth discussing. There had been almost no easily hunted game all this summer of 1848, and August was proving to be no different. The ice had been too thick to fish through everywhere except in the few small leads and rare year-round polynyas, and they’d caught no fish even while in the boats. How could Goodsir and a few other attendants to the dying survive the coming winter here? Crozier knew that the surgeon had voluntarily signed his death warrant by volunteering to stay behind with the doomed men and Goodsir knew his captain knew it. Neither man spoke of it.

Yet that remained the current plan, unless Goodsir changed his mind this morning or a true miracle occurred and the ice opened up almost all the way to the shore this second week of August, allowing them all to set sail in two battered whaleboats, two battered cutters, and a single splintery pinnace, bringing the amputees, the injured, the starved, the too weak to walk, and the most advanced scurvy cases with them in the boats.

As potential food? thought Crozier.

This was the next issue that had to be dealt with.

The captain carried two pistols in his greatcoat whenever he went out of his tent now – his large percussion-cap revolver in his right pocket, as always, and the two-shot, twin-barreled little percussion pistol (what the American sea captain who’d sold it to him years ago had called “a riverboat gambler’s belly gun”) in his left pocket. He had not repeated his mistake of sending his best men – Couch, Des Voeux, Johnson, some others – out of camp at the same time while leaving such malcontents as Hickey, Aylmore, and the idiot giant Manson behind. Nor had Francis Crozier trusted Lieutenant George Henry Hodgson, his captain of the fo’c’sle, Reuben Male, or Erebus captain of the foretop Robert Sinclair since that day of near mutiny back at Hospital Camp more than a month earlier.

The view from Rescue Camp was depressing. The sky had been an unrelieved mass of low clouds for two weeks and Crozier hadn’t been able to use his sextant. The wind had begun blowing hard from the northwest again and the air was colder than it had been for two months. The strait to the south remained a solid mass of ice, but not the flat ice interrupted by occasional pressure ridges such as they’d crossed on the trek from Terror to Terror Camp so very, very, very long ago. The ice in this strait south of King William Island was a total jumble of full-sized and shattered icebergs, crisscrossing pressure ridges, the occasional year-round polynya showing black water ten feet below the ice level but leading nowhere, and countless razor-edged seracs and ice boulders. Crozier didn’t believe that any man in Rescue Camp – including the giant Manson – was up to man-hauling a single boat through that ice-forest and over those mountain ranges of ice.

The growls, explosions, crackings, blasts, and roars that now filled their days and nights were their only hope. The ice was agitated and torturing itself. Now and then, far out, it opened into tiny leads that sometimes lasted for hours. Then they closed with a thunderclap. Pressure ridges leapt to a height of thirty feet in a matter of seconds. Hours later, they collapsed just as quickly as new ridges thrust themselves up. Icebergs exploded from the pressure of the tightening ice around them.

It is only 13 August, Crozier told himself. The problem with that thinking, of course, was that instead of “only” 13 August, the season was now far enough along that it was time to be thinking, It is already 13 August. Winter was fast approaching. Erebus and Terror had been first frozen in place off King William Land in September 1846, and there had been no respite after that.

It is only 13 August, Crozier repeated to himself. Time enough, if only a small miracle was granted them, to sail and row across the strait – probably man-hauling some short ice portages – the seventy-five miles he estimated to the mouth of Back’s River, there to rerig the battered boats for travel upriver. With a bit more luck, the inlet itself beyond this visible ice jam would be free of ice – because of Back’s Great Fish River’s inevitable high summer flow northward and its warmer water – for as much as sixty miles of the way. After that, on the river itself, they would be racing the oncoming winter south each day while fighting their way upstream, but the voyage was still possible. In theory.

In theory.

This morning – a Sunday if the weary Crozier had not lost track – Goodsir was performing the last of the amputations with the help of his new assistant, Thomas Hartnell, and then Crozier planned to call the men together for a sort of Divine Service.

There he would announce that Goodsir would be staying with the crippled men and scurvy cases and he would bring into the open his plans to take a few of the healthiest men and at least two boats south within the coming week, whether the ice opened or not.

If Reuben Male, Hodgson, Sinclair, or the Hickey conspirators wanted to offer their alternate plans without challenging his authority, Crozier was ready not only to discuss them but to agree to them. The fewer men left at Rescue Camp the better, especially if it meant getting rid of the rotten apples.

The screaming started from the surgical tent as Dr. Goodsir began his operation on Mr. Diggle’s gangrenous left foot and ankle.

A pistol in each pocket, Crozier went to find Thomas Johnson to tell him to assemble the men.

Mr. Diggle, the most universally liked man on the expedition and the excellent cook Francis Crozier had known and worked with for years on expeditions to both poles, died of blood loss and complications immediately after the amputation of his foot and just minutes before muster was called.