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Authors: Robert Edric

BOOK: The Broken Lands
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And even when there was nothing left to see but these few scattered pieces, the men on the
Erebus
sat and stared, some still unable to grasp the speed and ferocity with which their sister ship had been destroyed.
Fitzjames asked Reid why the activity in the ice had been so localized, why they themselves had been shaken only by its dying tremors.
“She dug herself into a bad spot in the first place,” Reid suggested. “Perhaps she drifted over a fault that would have been quick to break up in any case. Perhaps she was just ready to go.” It frustrated him to have to make such imprecise and useless guesses. Fitzjames saw this and did not pursue the matter.
By his own calculations the drifting ice had taken them twenty miles south since their return. There was now a possibility that they would come within sight of the most westerly part of King William Land, and he asked those who went regularly upon deck to keep a look-out for any indication of this.
Looking to where the
Terror
had finally been lost, he saw a number of the Eskimos approach the remaining few pieces of wreckage. They walked in a wide encircling movement rather than a direct line, conscious of the hidden danger in the ice beneath them.
Beside him, Thomas Evans started to cough again, and Reddington picked him up and carried him back to the hatchway. Fitzjames heard their cries as Reddington fell on the steep ladder and as both man and boy were pitched to the grating below.
T
hey sighted no land on their slow drift south, but after a week of firing signal flares in an attempt to make contact with anyone still alive and within reach over the low horizon, an answering flame rose directly ahead of them. Only Reid saw this, and he knew immediately that it had been fired too close to them to have come from the shore.
His news of the flare caused great excitement, and within minutes six men were on deck searching the surrounding ice. They fired further rockets, but received no answer. It was early evening, and as the sun began its descent a strong wind blew up. By nine it had become difficult to see and they returned below, some now convinced that Reid had been mistaken about what he had seen.
At first light the next morning, Reid, John Weekes and the two marines left the
Erebus
to search the ice on foot. The wind had fallen during the night and the early sun revealed that nothing other than the broken surface of the ice lay ahead of them.
They blew whistles and waited as the notes died around them. For two hours they heard nothing in reply except the call of a disturbed bird or the choking bark of an unseen fox as it loped away from them.
Approaching noon, and having changed the line of their search, Hopcraft called out that he could see something ahead.
There was a man on the ice, dead, facedown, and several yards beyond him another, also dead, this time in a sitting position, his
arms by his sides, his legs splayed. Beyond him lay a broken sledge, a trail of discarded packages stretching behind this in the direction the two men had come.
None of the four could identify the first man. His skin was blackened by exposure and he had lost both his lips to frostbite. David Bryant thought he might have been Alexander Berry, a seaman on the
Terror
. They searched his clothing, but found nothing to confirm this. He carried two target pistols, several watches, and beside him lay a bag of silver plate, which they immediately recognized as part of Crozier’s bartering collection.
Reid identified the sitting man as Richard Aylmore, the
Erebus
’ gunroom steward. This surprised him. Berry—if that was who the first man was—had left with Crozier, whereas Aylmore had been left in the charge of Stanley and Vesconte on the beach.
He pointed this out to the others and they began to speculate on how the two men had come together, and then why they had left the others and struck out across the ice, presumably in the hope of returning to the
Erebus.
Unwinding the scarves that bound Aylmore’s own darkened face, they saw that he too had lost his lips and most of his nose, and that the liquid in his eyes had frozen and forced these from their sockets on to his cheeks. Reid rewound the scarves and tried unsuccessfully to push the sitting man over.
Weekes suggested following the trail of spilled packages in the hope of finding anyone else who might have set out with them. He did not consider it likely that the two men would have attempted the journey alone.
His suggestion proved fruitful, and as they moved from object to object on the ice they saw at some short distance three more corpses.
Of these, only one was identifiable, the others having been visited by scavenging animals. This was Thomas Jopson, Crozier’s steward, and seeing him they feared the worst.
Like Berry, Jopson had been strong enough to leave with Crozier, and would have remained with him until being relieved of his duties.
Of the two others, one had suffered a severe wound to his leg, which had been crudely bandaged. Surprisingly, he wore no thick jacket, only a blue calico shirt, stiff with blood. His hands were
clasped as though in prayer and half his fingers were missing.
The third man had a bandaged jaw, the dressing strapped tightly under his chin and over his head. Pulling off his hood and cap they saw that he had short blond hair, tightly curled, and this led Bryant to suggest that he was William Strong, a seaman on the
Terror.
He too had lost his eyes, and the skin of both his cheeks was torn and hung in flaps.
Reid confirmed this identification by taking a letter and a paybook from Strong’s pocket. He tried to estimate how long the three men had been dead, but in their present condition this was difficult.
They resumed walking in the direction the men had come, continually signaling in an effort to attract the attention of anyone else who might still be alive on the ice.
They passed a small mound of clothing, neatly folded and held down by a can of preserved vegetables. A second sledge was found, both of its runners snapped, its small load scattered around it.
It was a short distance from this that they came upon the body of Charles Osmer, flat on his back in his sleeping-bag. His eyes and mouth were open wide and the skin of his face tightened by the wind, which had already scalped him. A mound of cans stood stacked close by, and alongside these lay a compass, its needle still quivering inside its rosewood case. By Osmer’s side lay a number of books and loose papers, Service Certificates mostly. Reid gathered these up and then covered Osmer’s face and said a short prayer.
Ahead of them lay a dozen more corpses, and scattered among these the stores and possessions the men had been carrying when they had fallen and died, claimed in equal measure by exhaustion, sickness and the cold.
They saw what at first looked to be a severed hand, but which turned out to be a kid glove with a measure of powder tied into each finger. Nearby was a pair of calf-lined bedroom slippers and a mass of broken Delftware, looking like small blue flowers on the ice. Turning one of the corpses, Bryant found a grass-weave cigar case he knew to belong to second master Macbean, and close to this a frozen packet of unreadable letters.
The two marines were reluctant to continue their grisly attempts
at identification, preferring instead to return to the
Erebus,
which was long since out of sight.
It was as Reid persuaded them to go on searching that John Weekes called out that he thought he could see someone moving. He pointed to where several mounds lay together fifty yards ahead of them and, unable to ignore the possibility that someone had survived, they all left Osmer and went to investigate.
At first it looked as though Weekes had been mistaken, that all he had seen was a piece of loose cloth, but as they knelt to examine each of these new corpses, the one in David Bryant’s hands groaned and then reached out feebly, the man’s stiff hooked fingers clawing the air. Bryant pulled him closer into his lap and brushed the loose ice from his eyes and mouth and spoke to him telling him he was saved.
They had found Abraham Seeley of the
Terror
but, hardly aware that he had been found, Seeley fell from Bryant’s arms and lay without moving. Further attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. Part of one side of his face had already been destroyed, whether by illness or other agents, they could only guess. He could not open his eyes and his lips were gone, exposing the swollen root of his tongue and what few loose teeth remained.
Gathering several pieces of discarded clothing, Reid wrapped these around the dying man and then poured water from his flask into the hole of his mouth. But this was like pouring raw spirit into a wound and Seeley gasped and jerked away.
By then it was turned midday, and seing no more bodies on the ice ahead of them, the four men turned back, taking turns to carry Seeley and frequently checking to see that he was still alive.
Reaching the ship, Seely was delivered to Goodsir, while Reid reported the details of what they had encountered to Fitzjames.
During their absence a party of Eskimos had climbed aboard the Erebus and had openly started to search the empty cabins, stealing bedclothes and whatever else they could carry. Only Couch and Graham Gore had been strong enough to confront them and eventually warn them off. It was Fitzjames’ belief that the Eskimos had waited for Reid and the others to leave before climbing aboard, convinced
that those left behind were in no condition to resist them. He wondered now if the natives didn’t also know about the bodies on the ice.
Two days later, Abraham Seeley was sufficiently recovered to tell them something of what had happened.
Members of Crozier’s party had returned to the beach only four days after their departure. Dragging the boats overland had proved far more difficult than any of them had imagined, and a large part of the supplies they hauled had been discarded. Men had fallen and died from the very beginning, the weakest of these barely out of sight of the beach where they had landed. Crozier himself had continued marching, allowing his party to become drawn out over several miles, a distance which increased with every day. Peddie and Blanky had gone with him, and Thomas Hodgson had been left in charge of the first abandoned boat. This, and the supplies it contained, had been hauled for only eight days before the men pulling it had dropped and died in their harnesses.
Seeley’s small audience sat silenced and stunned by everything they heard.
To help him get through everything he wanted to tell them, Fitzjames recited a list of names to him, and when Seeley knew for certain that those mentioned were already dead, he would close his eyes; otherwise he would do nothing and Fitzjames would go on reading. Every one of the Service Certificates collected by Osmer had come from dead men.
As far as Seeley knew, Stanley and Vesconte were still alive on the King William shore, but there was little chance now of any of those in their charge leaving and following in Crozier’s wake. The losses among the sick and exhausted had been great, averaging one a day during the first week, and then twice that number in the days which followed.
Ater two hours of this, Abraham Seeley fell unconscious, and later that night, attended by Goodsir and Des Voeux, he died without coming round.
The next day the boy Thomas Evans died, and three days after that Joseph Andrews was found dead in his bunk.
All three corpses were carried to the engine room and laid alongside those already there.
On the night of the 14th of July, having been confined to his own bed since the questioning of Seeley, Fitzjames remarked in his journal that it would have been better for Reid to have found the man dead than for him to have brought him back alive to pass on his baton of suffering and dread to those few still aboard the
Erebus.
 
Fitzjames came upon Goodsir leaning over their stern, a cloth held to his mouth to catch the spray of blood which accompanied his violent coughing. He eased himself down on a balk of fallen timber.
A week had passed since the testament and death of Abraham Seeley had stripped them of the last of their hope and turned them all from men struggling to survive into men waiting to die.
“Alexander the Great,” Good sir said unexpectedly, distracting Fitzjames from his thoughts.
“What of him?”
Goodsir swung his bandaged arm at the scene around them. The sky was leaden with cloud and the ice dark.
“When Alexander the Great looked out from a hilltop and saw the width and breadth of his domain stretching before him he wept because there were no worlds left for him to conquer.”
He came and sat beside Fitzjames, wrapping a fur over his shoulders. He started coughing again and leaned forward with the cloth pressed to his face. Fitzjames held him, unable to steady him or absorb his shaking.
Reid and Gore found them like this an hour later and helped them both below.
Later that night, Fitzjames unwrapped his bandage to find that the hardened skin of his sole and heel had become completely detached from his foot, leaving the wet flesh beneath exposed. Alarmed by this, but in surprisingly little pain, he called for Goodsir, who came and looked and confessed that there was nothing he could do except keep the wound clean and hope for it to heal. It was a solution in which neither man could believe.
Fitzjames lay awake all night, listening to the comings and goings
all around him, as though he were an animal in a shared burrow, picking up every vibration and sound of his fellow creatures.
The next morning Bryant arrived with the news that the Eskimos had once again been aboard, and that a kettle had been found tied to their foremast stuffed to the brim with buttons, cap badges, insignia and other pieces of braid. Couch later delivered this to him, tipping out and sifting through its contents as though it were a hoard of soft gold coins.
They still saw and heard the natives out on the ice, and the threat of an attack still stoked the nightmares of some of them. But a regular watch was no longer kept, and only when the evidence of a small fire was found at the base of their mizzen stump was any real, but again fruitless attempt made to keep the Eskimos from climbing aboard unchallenged.
Des Voeux died in a fit of delirium three days later, and the next day Philip Reddington went out on the ice to check their traps and did not return.
A brief search was made for him, but nothing was found. Saddened by the loss, they could only conclude that he had abandoned them, and that he was attempting against all the odds to return to the shore, driven more by what he was leaving behind than what he expected to find there if he succeeded, guided and perhaps sustained by the trail of abandonment and marker corpses which had already led Reid and the marines to the dying Seeley.

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