Perhaps it was the black cliff face Looming over All that murdered my Spirits this second burial. Although I deliberately stood where my back was to the Cliff this time, closer to Sir John so that I could hear the Words of Hope and Solace, I was always aware of that cold, black, vertical, lifeless and lightless slab of insensate Stone behind me – a portal, it seemed, to that Country from Which No Man Has Ever Returned. Compared to the Cold Reality of that black, featureless stone, even Sir John’s compassionate and inspired words had little effect.

The morale on both ships is very low. We are not yet a Full Week into the new year, and already two of our Company have died. Tomorrow the four of us surgeons have agreed to Meet in a Private Place – the carpenter’s room belowdecks on Terror - to discuss what should be done to avoid more Mortality in what seems to be a Cursed Expedition.

The headstone on this second grave read

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

JOHN HARTNELL, A.B. OF H.M.S.

EREBUS

DIED JANUARY 4TH, 1846

AGED 25 YEARS

‘THUS SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS, CONSIDER YOUR WAYS’

HAGGAI, I., 7.

The wind has come up in the last hour, it is almost Midnight and most of the lamps are out here on the lower deck of Erebus. I listen to the wind howl and think of those two cold Low Heaps of Loose Stone out on that black, windy isthmus, and I think of the dead men in those two cold Holes, and I think of the Featureless Black Face of Rock, and I can imagine the fusillade of snow pellets already working to eradicate the letters on the wooden headstones.

Captain Sir John Franklin had rarely been so pleased with himself.

The previous winter frozen in at Beechey Island, hundreds of miles northeast of his present position, had been uncomfortable in many ways – he would be the first to admit that to himself or to a peer, although he had no peers on this expedition. The death of three members of the expedition, first Torrington and Hartnell so early in January, then Private William Braine of the Royal Marines on 3 April, all of consumption and pneumonia, had been a shock. Franklin was not aware of any other Navy expedition losing three men of natural causes so early in their endeavor.

It was Franklin himself who had chosen the inscription on the thirty-two-year-old Private Braine’s headstone – “Choose this day whom ye shall serve,” Joshua, ch. xxiv, 15 – and for a short while the words had seemed as much a challenge to the unhappy crews of Erebus and Terror, not yet near mutiny but neither so far away from it, as it was a message to the nonexistent passersby of Braine’s, Hartnell’s, and Torrington’s lonely graves on that terrible spit of gravel and ice.

Nonetheless, the four surgeons met and conferred after Hartnell’s death and decided that incipient scurvy might be weakening the men’s constitutions, allowing pneumonia and such congenital defects as consumption to rise to lethal proportions. Surgeons Stanley, Goodsir, Peddie, and McDonald recommended to Sir John that the men’s diet be changed – fresh food when possible (although there was almost none except polar bear possible in the dark of winter, and they had discovered that eating the liver of that great, ponderous beast could be fatal for some unknown reason) and, failing finding fresh meat and vegetables, cutting back on the men’s preferred salted pork and beef, or salted birds, and relying more on the tinned foods – vegetable soups and the like.

Sir John had gone along with the recommendation, ordering the diet on both ships changed so that no less than half the meals were prepared with tinned foods from stores. It seemed to have turned the trick. No more men died, or were even seriously sick, between Private Braine’s death in early April and the day both ships were freed from their icy imprisonment within the harbor of Beechey Island in late May of 1846.

After that, the ice broke up quickly and Franklin, following the paths through the leads chosen by his two fine ice masters, steamed and sailed south and west, going, as the captains of Sir John’s generation liked to say, like smoke and oakum.

Along with the sunlight and open water, animals, birds, and aquatic life returned in plenitude. During those long, slow, arctic summer days, where the sun remained above the horizon until almost midnight and the temperature sometimes rose above freezing, the skies were filled with migrating birds. Franklin himself could identify the petrels from the teals, eider ducks from the little auks, and the sprightly little puffins from all others. The ever-widening leads around Erebus and Terror were alive with right whales that would have been the envy of any Yankee whaler, and there was a profusion of cod, herring, and other small fish, as well as the large beluga and bowhead whales. The men put out the whaling boats and fished, often shooting some of the small whales just for sport.

Every hunting party came back with fresh game for the tables each night – birds, of course, but also those confounded ringed and harp seals, so impossible to shoot or catch in their holes in the winter, now brazen on the open ice and easy targets. The men did not enjoy the taste of the seals – too oily and astringent – but something about the blubber in the slimy beasts appealed to all their winter-starved appetites. They also shot the large bellowing walruses visible through telescopes tusking away for oysters along the shores, and some hunting parties returned with the pelts and flesh of the white arctic fox. The men ignored the lumbering polar bears unless the waddling beasts seemed ready to attack or contest the kill of the human hunters. No one really liked the taste of the white bears and certainly not when there was so much tastier game to be found.

Franklin’s orders included an option: if he “found his way toward the Southern Approach to the North-West Passage blocked by Ice or other Obstacles,” to turn north and to follow the Wellington Passage into “the Open Polar Sea” – in essence, to sail to the north pole. But Franklin did what he had done without question his entire life: he followed his primary orders. This second summer in the arctic, his two ships had sailed south from Devon Island, Franklin leading HMS Erebus and HMS Terror past Cape Walker into the unknown waters of an icy archipelago.

The previous summer, it had seemed as if he would have to settle for sailing to the north pole rather than finding the North-West Passage. Captain Sir John Franklin had reason to be proud of his speed and efficiency so far. During his shortened summer voyage time that year before, 1845 – they had departed England late and Greenland even later than planned – he had nonetheless crossed Baffin Bay in record time, passed through Lancaster Sound south of Devon Island, then through Barrow Strait, and found his way south past Walker Point blocked by ice so late in August. But his Ice Masters reported open water to the north, past the western reaches of Devon Island into the Wellington Channel, so Franklin obeyed his secondary orders and turned north toward what could be an ice-free passage into the Open Polar Sea and the north pole.

There had been no opening to the fabled Open Polar Sea. The Grinnell Peninsula, which might have been part of an unknown Arctic Continent for all the men of the Franklin Expedition knew, had blocked their way and forced them to follow open water north by west, then almost due west, until they reached the western tip of that peninsula, turned north again, and encountered a solid mass of ice that extended north from the Wellington Channel apparently to infinity. Five days of sailing along that high wall of ice convinced Franklin, Fitzjames, Crozier, and the ice masters that there was no Open Polar Sea north of the Wellington Channel. At least not that summer.