“We walked east for a while,” he said. “We found a little field.” He reached into the specimen bag and spread handfuls of vegetation on the deck. “I brought you these,” he said. “Are they what you wanted?”
Erasmus turned over the bits; Ned had picked leaves and branches and single flowers, rather than carefully gathering whole plants complete with the roots. Back home Erasmus had barked at the maid when she dared to move his drying plants; here he blamed the mess on himself. He hadn’t realized anyone wouldn’t know how to take a proper specimen. Still he and Dr. Boerhaave were able to identify the little gold-petaled poppies and four varieties of saxifrage. Ned, Erasmus saw with some chagrin, had found a regular arctic meadow, which he himself had missed.
“You did wonderfully,” Erasmus said. “Thank you for these. Let me just show you the way scientists like to collect a plant.”
Briefly he explained to Ned about root and stem and leaf and flower and fruiting body. Later, Ned wrote down Erasmus’s words almost verbatim, along with a sketch of a proper specimen and some definitions:
Herbarium is the name for a collection of dried plant specimens, mounted and arranged systematically. The object with the flat boards and the straps is a press. Mr. Wells means to preserve samples of each interesting plant, to name those he can by comparing them against his books, and to keep a list: that is his job here. Dr. Boerhaave helps him. I may help too, they say, if I learn what they show me. It’s like learning to read a different language—pistil, stamen, pinnate, palmate—not so hard but who would have thought a man could spend his life on this? I made salad from a red-leaved plant he calls Oxyria, which looks like the sheep sorrel at home. He was surprised that it tasted so good.
WHERE BEFORE THEY’D been in waters familiar to Captain Tyler and the mates, and where Zeke was at a disadvantage, now they were in places none of them knew. Zeke had the charts of the explorers preceding him; Zeke had done his reading. It gave him a kind of power, Erasmus saw. For the first time, the other officers were dependent on Zeke’s knowledge. It no longer mattered that Zeke had never been in the arctic before, nor that all his knowledge came from books. Ice was ice, islands were islands; channels showed up where he predicted. Book knowledge was all they had, and for a while Captain Tyler and the mates were rendered docile by their lack of it. No one argued with Zeke’s orders.
Thousands of narwhals accompanied the brig up the ice-speckled strait, filling the air with their heavy, spooky exhalations—as if, Erasmus thought, the sea itself were breathing. Animal company was the only sort they had. In place of the great fleet filling the Sound four years ago, during Dr. Kane’s first voyage, were those long-tusked little whales, and seals and walrus, and belugas everywhere. Extraordinarily beautiful, he thought. Smaller than he’d expected, a uniform creamy smoothness over bulging muscles, moving like swift white birds through the dark water.
Barrow Strait was empty as well. The stark and radiant landscape flashed by so fast that Erasmus found himself making strange, clutching movements with his hands, as if he might seize the sights that were denied him. Even when they reached the cairns on Cape Riley and then, on Beechey Island, the graves of three of Franklin’s seamen and the relics of their first winter quarters, they lingered only briefly. These were, Erasmus and Zeke agreed, the very sites that Dr. Kane and the others had discovered in ’51. From the water the gray gravel sloped gently upward, stopping at jagged cliffs. Against the background of those cliffs, the grave mounds and headstones were very small. Erasmus, Dr. Boerhaave, Zeke, and Ned examined the limestone slabs tessellated over two of the graves, and the little row of flat stones set like a fence around each mound.
“If we exhumed them,” Dr. Boerhaave said, “even one, and could determine what he died from, we might gain some clues to the expedition’s fate.”
Zeke stepped back from the mounds. A tremor passed from his hands up his arms and shoulders and then rippled across his face. “We’re not graverobbers,” he said. “Nor resurrection men. Those are Englishmen, men like our own crew. They’re entitled to lie in peace. And what would we learn from violating them?”
“Suppose they were starving?” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Already, that first winter. In this cold, enough…remains would be left that we might determine that.”
“If that was me in there,” Zeke said, “if that was you—bad enough they’ve been left here all alone. Nothing you’d learn would tell us anything about where the expedition went.”
He gazed down at the graves and then back at Dr. Boerhaave. “When you were in medical school,” he said, “did you…?”
“Well, of course,” Dr. Boerhaave said. As Zeke shook his head and walked away. Dr. Boerhaave smiled at Erasmus, who smiled back at his friend.
After the three of them left, Ned lingered behind for a minute, placing a stone on each grave and saying a prayer. He told no one of the strange hallucination that seized him later. As he rinsed salt meat in water from the stream that trickled above the graves, he imagined that water seeping into the coffins, easing around the seamen’s bodies, who had been young, like him. Beneath the first layers of gravel the ground was frozen, it never melted, and he saw the bodies frozen too, preserved forever; cherished, honored. The vision comforted him, yet also angered him. In Ireland he’d seen corpses stacked like firewood or tossed loosely into giant pits. Here, where no one might ever have seen them, three young Englishmen had each been given a careful and singular grave, a headstone chiseled with verses, a little fence.
TIME PRESSED ON them even more sharply after that first glimpse of the lost expedition. As the sails filled, bellied out in the brisk breeze, Zeke said, “Franklin must have turned the Erebus and the Terror down Peel Sound after leaving Beechey Island. The ice is so heavy to the west, and when you think about Rae’s report—where else could he have gone? It’s the only place the earlier ships didn’t look. They were all sure he’d gone north somehow, after finding the route blocked to the west. But how could any of his men have reached a place even close to King William Land, if not by way of Peel Sound?”
Simple logic, Erasmus thought. And so it must be true. Even Captain Tyler shrugged and agreed with Zeke. They turned south, sure they were following Franklin’s trail. After thirty-five miles of hard sailing, fighting against the encroaching ice, the Narwhal was finally turned back by solid pack. No time for regrets, Zeke said. He retraced their route, rounding the walls and ravines of North Somerset and sailing down the east coast as far as Bellot Strait. Through here, Zeke hoped to pass back into Peel Sound.
Bellot Strait was completely choked with ice. The men stood mashed together on the bow, muttering with disappointment: “God damn this ice!” Captain Tyler said, before disappearing below. Their last chance to reach King William Land by water had just disappeared, Erasmus knew, and with it any chance of finding Franklin’s ships. But they might still find traces of the expedition by land, as Rae had done. On Zeke’s order they continued southward, along the massive hills and into the Gulf of Boothia.
Zeke grew cool and distant, hardly speaking except to give orders and treating Captain Tyler as if he were the skipper of a ferryboat. He allowed no stops, neither for the men to hunt nor for Erasmus to gather specimens. The winds and currents here seemed to concentrate the ice, which poured into the bay from the north and then swirled and massed, several times almost crushing the brig. The men grew nervous and muttered among themselves. Out here, far from the traditional whaling grounds, they seemed to wake as a group from a dream. Why had they come? Because they needed work, Erasmus slowly understood; not because they were inspired by the expedition’s goals but because they’d needed jobs back in the spring, when Zeke was recruiting men. They’d signed on because the wages were good and because, despite all Zeke’s stories, they had not really been able to imagine their task. The men who’d never been to sea before had had no useful information, no way to imagine what lay before them; those with whaling experience must have imagined that searching for Franklin would be like searching for whales.
The idea of moving just for the sake of moving, pressing deeper and deeper into the ice with no assurance of reward, was as strange to them, Erasmus thought, as flensing a bowhead would have been to