The open water might as well have been on the surface of the moon.

During the lengthening night of 15 September, 1846, the temperature plummeted to below zero and the ice began moaning and scraping against both ships’ hulls. In the morning, everyone who came on deck could see for themselves that in each direction the sea had become a white solid stretching to the horizon. Between sudden snow squalls, both Crozier and Fitzjames were able to get adequate sun sightings to fix their positions. Each captain figured that they were beset at roughly 70 degrees 5 minutes north latitude, 98 degrees, 23 minutes west longitude, some twenty-five miles off the northwest shore of King William Island, or King William Land, whichever the case might be. It was a moot point now.

They were in open sea ice – moving pack ice – and stranded directly in front of the full onslaught of Ice Master Blanky’s “moving glacier,” bearing down on them from polar regions to the northwest from all the way to the unimaginable North Pole. There was not a sheltering harbour, to their knowledge, within one hundred miles and no way to get there if there were one.

At two o’clock that afternoon, Captain Sir John Franklin ordered the boiler fires to be drawn on both Erebus and Terror. Steam was let down in both boilers. Just enough pressure would be kept up to move warmed water through the pipes heating the lower decks of each ship.

Sir John made no announcement to the men. None was required. That night as the men settled into their hammocks on Erebus and as Hartnell whispered his usual prayer for his dead brother, thirty-five-year-old Seaman Abraham Seeley, in the hammock next to him, hissed, “We’re in a world of shit now, Tommy, and not your prayers nor neither Sir John’s is going to get us out of it… not for another ten months at least.”

It has been one year, two months, and eight days since Sir John’s eventful conference aboard Erebus, and both ships are frozen in the ice roughly where they were that September day in 1846. Although the current from the northwest moves the entire mass of ice, over the past year it has rotated ice, icebergs, pressure ridges, and both trapped Royal Navy ships in slow circles so that their position has remained about the same, stranded some twenty-five miles north-northwest of King William Land and slowly revolving like a blotch of rust on one of the metal music disks in the officers’ Great Room.

Captain Crozier has spent this November day – or rather those hours of darkness which once included daylight as a component – searching for his missing crewmen William Strong and Thomas Evans. There is no hope for either man, of course, and there is great risk that others will be taken by the thing on the ice, but they search nonetheless. Neither captain nor crew would have it any other way.

Four teams of five men each, one man to carry two lanterns and four ready with shotguns or muskets, search in four-hour shifts. As one team comes in frozen and shaking, a replacement team waits on deck in cold-weather slops, guns cleaned, loaded, and ready, lanterns filled with oil, and they resume the search in the quadrant the other team has just quit. The four teams are moving out from the ship in ever-widening circles through the ice jumbles, their lanterns now visible to the lookouts on deck through the icy mist and darkness, now obscured by growlers, ice boulders, pressure ridges, or distance. Captain Crozier and a seaman with a red lamp move from quadrant to quadrant, checking with each team and then returning to Terror to look in on the men and conditions there.

This goes on for twelve hours.

At two bells in the first dogwatch – 6:00 p.m. – the last search parties all come in, none having found the missing men but several seamen shamefaced at having fired their weapons at wind shrieking among the jagged ice or at the ice itself, thinking some serac a looming white bear. Crozier is the last one in and follows them down to the lower deck.

Most of the crewmen have stored their wet slops and boots and gone forward to their mess at tables that have all been cranked down on chains and the officers gone aft for their meal by the time Crozier comes down the ladder. His steward, Jopson, and first lieutenant, Little, hurry over to help him out of his ice-rimmed outer layers.

“You’re frozen, Captain,” says Jopson. “Your skin is white with frostbite. Come back aft to the officers’ mess for supper, sir.”

Crozier shakes his head. “I need to go talk to Commander Fitzjames. Edward, has there been a messenger from his ship while I was out?”

“No, sir,” says Lieutenant Little.

“Please eat, Captain,” persists Jopson. For a steward he’s a large man, and his deep voice becomes more of a growl than a whine when he’s imploring his captain.

Crozier shakes his head. “Be so kind as to wrap up a couple of biscuits for me, Thomas. I’ll chew on them as I walk to Erebus.”

Jopson shows his displeasure at this foolish decision but hurries forward to where Mr. Diggle is busy at his huge stove. Just now, at dinnertime, the lower deck is as toasty warm as it’s going to be in any twenty-four-hour period – the temperature rising as high as the mid-forties. Very little coal is being burned for heat these days.

“How many men do you want to go with you, Captain?” asks Little.

“None, Edward. After the men have eaten, I want you to get at least eight parties on the ice for a final four hours of searching.”

“But, sir, is it advisable for you to…,” begins Little but then stops.

Crozier knows what he was going to say. The distance between Terror and Erebus is only a little more than a mile, but it is a lonely, dangerous mile and sometimes takes several hours to cross. If a storm comes up or the wind simply starts blowing the snow, men can become lost or no longer make progress into the gale. Crozier himself has forbidden men to make the crossing alone and when messages have to be sent, he dispatches at least two men along with orders to turn back at the first bad weather. Besides the two-hundred-foot-high iceberg now rising between the two ships, often blocking views even of flares and fires, the pathway – although worked at being kept shoveled open and relatively flat almost every day – is really a maze of constantly shifting seracs, ice-stepped pressure ridges, upturned growlers, and ice jumble mazes.

“It’s all right, Edward,” says Crozier. “I’ll take my compass.”

Lieutenant Little smiles even though the joke is wearing thin after three years in the area. The ships are beset, as far as their instruments can measure, almost directly over the north magnetic pole. A compass is about as useful here as a divining rod.

Lieutenant Irving sidles up. The young man’s cheeks glisten from applied salve where frostbite has left white patches and caused the skin to die and peel back. “Captain,” begins Irving in a rush, “have you seen Silence out on the ice?”

Crozier has taken his cap and muffler off and is rubbing the ice out of his sweat- and mist-dampened hair. “You mean she’s not in her little hidey-hole behind the sick bay?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you look elsewhere on the lower deck?” Crozier is mostly worried that with most of the men gone on watch and out in search parties, the Esquimaux witch has gotten into something she shouldn’t have.

“Aye, sir. No sign of her. I’ve asked around and no one remembers seeing her since yesterday evening. Since before… the attack.”

“Was she on deck when the thing attacked Private Heather and Seaman Strong?”