So Blanky was proud of the job he and Reid had done leading both ships more than 250 miles south and then west of their first wintering spot at Beechey and Devon Islands. But Thomas Blanky also cursed himself for a fool and a villain for helping lead the two ships and their 126 souls 250 miles south and then west of their wintering spot at Beechey and Devon.

The ships could have retreated from Devon Island, back through Lancaster Sound and then down Baffin Bay, even if they’d had to wait two cold summers, or even three, to escape the ice. The little bay there at Beechey would have protected the ships from this open-sea ice abuse. And sooner or later the ice along Lancaster Sound would have relented. Thomas Blanky knew that ice. It behaved the way arctic ice was meant to behave – treacherous, deadly, ready to destroy you after a single wrong decision or moment’s lapse, but predictable.

But this ice, thought Blanky as he stomped about the dark stern to keep his feet from freezing, seeing the lanterns glowing port and starboard where Berry and Handford paced with their shotguns, this ice was like no ice in his experience.

He and Reid had warned Sir John and the two captains fifteen months ago, right before the ships became frozen in place. Go for broke, Blanky had advised, agreeing with Captain Crozier that they needed to turn tail while there were still the slightest open leads, needed to seek out open water as close to the Boothia Peninsula as fast as they could steam that long-ago September. The water there close to a known coast – at least the east side of it was known to old Discovery Service and whaler veterans such as Blanky – almost certainly would have stayed liquid for another week, perhaps two, into that lost-opportunity September. Even if they hadn’t been able to steam north along the coast again because of hummocky floes and old pack ice – Reid called it screw pack ice – they would have been infinitely safer behind the shelter of what they now were certain, after the dead Lieutenant Gore’s sledge expedition last summer, was James Ross’s King William Land. That landmass, as low, frozen, windswept, and lightning-ravaged as they now knew it to be, would have sheltered the ships from this Devil-sent constant northwest blast of arctic wind, blizzards, cold, and endless assaulting sea ice.

Blanky had never seen ice like this. One of the few advantages of pack ice, even when your ship was frozen in like a musket ball blasted into an iceberg, was that the pack ice drifted. The ships, while seemingly motionless, moved. When Blanky had been ice master on the American whaler Pluribus in ’36, winter had roared in on the twenty-seventh of August, taking everyone including the experienced one-eyed American captain by surprise and freezing them into Baffin Bay hundreds of miles north of Disko Bay.

The next arctic summer had been bad – almost as cold as this last summer, 1847, during which there had been no summer ice melt, air warmth, or return of birds or other wildlife here – but the whaler Pluribus was in more predictable pack ice and drifted more than seven hundred miles south until, late that next summer, they’d reached the ice line and been able to sail their way south through sludge-ice seas and narrow leads and what the Russians called polynyas, cracks in the ice that opened up as you watched, until the American whaler reached open water and could sail southeast to a Greenland port for refitting.

But not here, Blanky knew. Not in this truly godforsaken white hell. This pack ice was, as he’d described to the captains a year and three months ago, more like an endless glacier being pushed down from the north pole. And with the mostly uncharted bulk of arctic Canada to their south, King William Land to their southwest, and Boothia Peninsula beyond their reach to the east and nor’east, there was no real ice drift here – as Crozier’s and Fitzjames’s and Reid’s and Blanky’s repeated sun and star sextant readings kept telling them – just a sickening pivot around a fifteen-mile circumference. It was as if they were flies pinned to one of the metal music disks no longer used by the men in the Great Room below. Going nowhere. Always returning to the same spot again and again.

And this open pack ice was more like the coastal fast ice of Blanky’s experience, only here at sea the ice was twenty to twenty-five feet thick around the ships rather than the three-foot depth of regular fast ice. So thick that the captains couldn’t keep open the usual fire holes that all ships locked in the ice kept free all winter.

This ice didn’t even allow them to bury their dead.

Thomas Blanky wondered if he had been an instrument of evil – or perhaps just of folly – when he had used his more than three decades of ice-master skills to get 126 men the impossible 250 miles through ice to this place where all they could do was die.

Suddenly there came a shout. Then a shotgun blast. Another shout.

Blanky tugged his right overmitten off with his teeth, let it drop to the deck, and raised his own shotgun. Tradition was for the officers on watch not to be armed, but Captain Crozier had ended that tradition with a single order. Every man on deck was to be armed at all times. Now, with his mitten off, Blanky’s thin wool underglove allowed his finger to crook through the trigger guard of the shotgun, but his hand immediately felt the biting cold of the wind.

It was Seaman Berry ’s lantern – the port watch – whose glow had disappeared. The shotgun blast had sounded as if it had come from the left of the midship winter canvas rigging, but the Ice Master knew that wind and snow distorted sounds. Blanky could still see the glow of the starboard-side lantern, but it was bobbing and moving.

“ Berry?” he shouted toward the dark port side. He could almost feel the two syllables hurled astern by the howling wind. “Handford?”

The starboard lantern glow disappeared. At the bow, Davey Leys’s lantern would have been visible beyond the midship tent on a clear night, but this was no longer a clear night.

“Handford?” Mr. Blanky began moving forward to the port side of the long tent covering, carrying his shotgun in his right hand and the lantern he’d lifted off the sternpost in his left. He had three more shotgun shells in his right greatcoat pocket, but he knew from experience how long it took to fumble them out and load them in this cold.

“ Berry!” he bellowed. “Handford! Leys!” One of the dangers now was that the three men would shoot each other in the dark and storm on the tilted, icy deck, although it had sounded as if Alex Berry had already discharged his weapon. There had not been a second blast. But Blanky knew that if he moved to the port side of the frozen tent pyramid and Handford or Leys suddenly came around to investigate, the nervous men might fire at anything, even a moving lantern.

He moved forward anyway.

“ Berry?” he shouted, coming within ten yards of the port watch station.

He caught a blur of movement amid the driving snow, something far too large to be Alex Berry, and then there came a crash louder than any shotgun. A second explosion. Blanky staggered back ten paces toward the stern as casks, wooden kegs, boxes, and other ship’s stores flew through the air. It took him a few seconds to realize what had happened; the permanent pyramid of frozen canvas running fore and aft along the centre of the deck had suddenly collapsed, throwing thousands of pounds of accumulated snow and ice in each direction even while flinging wide the deck stores beneath – mostly flammable pitch, caulkers’ materials, and sand to put down for traction atop the snow deliberately shoveled onto the deck – and also sending the mainmast’s lower spars, which had been rotated fore and aft more than a year ago to act as ridgepoles for the tent, crashing down onto the main hatch and ladderway.