The only things out there on the ice or under the ice were the white bears and the thing stalking the men of Erebus and Terror.

John Irving had a terrible thought. For a second he was tempted to go back and test the lock to the Dead Room.

Then he had an even more terrible thought.

Only half of William Strong and Thomas Evans had been found.

Lieutenant John Irving stumbled aft, feet sliding on the ice and slush as he fumbled and felt his way toward the central ladderway to fight his way up and out toward the light of the lower deck.

From the private diary of Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir:

Saturday, 20 November, 1847 -

We do not have enough food to survive another Winter and Summer here in the ice.

We should have had. Sir John had Provisioned the two ships for Three Years at extraordinarily full rations for all hands, Five Years for reduced but still adequate rations for men doing heavy work each day, and Seven Years with serious rationing but adequate for all men. By Sir John’s Calculations – and those of his ships’ captains, Crozier and Fitzjames – HMSs Erebus and Terror should have been amply provisioned until the year 1852.

Instead, we shall be running out of our last edible supplies sometime next spring. And should we all perish because of this, the Reason is Murder.

Dr. McDonald on Terror had been suspicious of the canned food supplies for some Time, and he shared his concerns with me after the Death of Sir John. Then the problem with spoiled and Poisonous canned foods on our First Outing to King William Land last Summer – tins removed from a deeper part of Stores beneath Deck – confirmed the problem. In October, the four of us Surgeons petitioned Captain Crozier and Commander Fitzjames to allow us to take a Full Inventory. Then the Four of us – aided by crewmen assigned to help us move the hundreds upon hundreds of crates, barrels, and heavy cans in both lower decks, orlop decks, and holds, and to open and test selected samplings – had done the Inventory twice so as not to make a mistake.

More than Half the canned Food aboard both ships is worthless.

We reported this three weeks ago to both captains in Sir John’s large and freezing former cabin. Fitzjames, while nominally still a mere Commander, is called “Captain” by Crozier, the new Expedition Leader, and others follow suit. In the secret meeting were the four of us surgeons, Fitzjames, and Crozier.

Captain Crozier – I have to remember that he is Irish after all – flew into a rage the likes of which I have never seen. He demanded a full explanation, as if We Surgeons had been responsible for the Stores and Victuals on the Franklin Expedition. Fitzjames, on the other hand, had always had his doubts about the canned goods and the victualler who had canned them – the only member of the Expedition or the Admiralty who seems to have expressed such reservations – but Crozier remained incredulous that such an act of criminal fraud could have been carried out on ships of the Royal Navy.

John Peddie, Crozier’s chief surgeon on Terror, has seen the most Sea Duty of any of us four Medical Officers, but most of it had been aboard HMS Mary - along with Crozier’s boatswain John Lane – and that was in the Mediterranean, where very little of the Ship’s Stores had consisted of Canned Goods. Similarly, my nominal superior on Erebus, Chief Surgeon Stephen Stanley, had little experience with such Great Quantities of Canned Provisions aboard ship. Sensitive to the Various Diets thought Necessary to prevent scurvy, Dr. Stanley was shocked into speechlessness when our Inventory suggested via sampling that almost half the remaining tins of food, vegetables, meat, and soup may well be Contaminated or otherwise Ruined.

Only Dr. McDonald, who had worked with Mr. Helpman – Captain Crozier’s Clerk in Charge – during the provisioning, had his Theories.

As I recorded some Months ago in this Journal, besides the 10,000 cases of preserved cooked meats aboard Erebus, our tinned rations include boiled and roast mutton, veal, a wide variety of vegetables including potatoes, carrots, and parsnips, various types of Soups, and 9,450 pounds of Chocolate.

Alex McDonald had been our Expedition’s medical liaison with the Captain Superintendent of the Deptford Victualling Yard and with a certain Mr. Stephan Goldner, our Expedition’s Victualling Contractor. McDonald reminded Captain Crozier in October that four contractors had put in bids to provide Canned Ship’s Stores for Sir John’s expedition – the firms of Hogarth, Gamble, Cooper amp; Aves, and that of the aforementioned Mr. Goldner. Dr. McDonald reminded the Captain – and astonished the rest of us – by reporting that Goldner’s bid was only half that of the other three (Much Better Known) victuallers. In addition, while the other contractors set a schedule of delivering the food in a month or three weeks, Goldner had promised immediate delivery (with the crating and drayage thrown in for no charge). Such immediate delivery was impossible, of course, and Goldner’s bid would have required him to lose a fortune if the food had been the quality advertised and cooked and prepared in the ways advertised, but no one except Captain Fitzjames appears to have taken notice of this.

The Admiralty and the three Commissioners of the Discovery Service – everyone involved in the selection except for the experienced Comptroller of the Deptford Victualling Yard – immediately recommended accepting Goldner’s offer at a full-payment value, or more than 3,800 pounds. (A fortune for any man, but especially for the foreigner that McDonald explained Goldner to be. The man’s only canning factory, Alex said, was in Golatz, Molavia.) Goldner was given one of the largest consignments in the history of the Admiralty – 9,500 cans of meats and vegetables in sizes weighing one to eight pounds, as well as 20,000 cans of soup.

McDonald had brought one of Goldner’s handbills – Fitzjames recognized it at once – and looking over it made my mouth water: seven kinds of mutton, fourteen preparations of veal, thirteen kinds of beef, four varieties of lamb. There were listings for jugged hare, ptarmigan, rabbit (in onion sauce or curried), pheasant, and half a dozen other varieties of game. If the Discovery Service wished to have seafood, Goldner had offered to provide canned lobsters in the shell, cod, West Indian turtle, salmon steaks, and Yarmouth bloaters. For fine dining – at only fifteen pence – Goldner’s handbill offered truffled pheasant, calf’s tongue sauce piquant, and beef à la Flamande.

In reality, said Dr. McDonald, we’re used to receiving salt horse in a harness cask.

I had been at Sea long enough to recognize the terms – horse flesh substituted for beef until the sailors called the barrels a harness cask. But they ate the salted meat readily enough.

Goldner cheated us much worse than that, continued McDonald in front of a livid Captain Crozier and an angrily nodding Commander Fitzjames. He substituted cheap foods under labels that sold for much more on the handbill – regular “Stewed Beef” under a label reading “Stewed Rump Steaks,” for instance. The former is listed at nine pence, but he charged fourteen pence by changing the label.

Good God, man, exploded Crozier, every victualler does that to the Admiralty. Cheating the Navy is as old as Adam’s foreskin. That can’t explain why we’re suddenly almost out of food.