The Discovery Of Slowness (15 page)

John felt that after his conversation with the blind man, who might not even have really existed, he had greater strength than ever before. Besides, the scar on his forehead earned him a new, inexplicable respect, and that made him even stronger than he actually was.

The last will be the first, he told himself, and saying that he also recalled Walker and Pasley – after all, he was no saint.

The time had really come for him to have his own command.

Peace. Even if for the second time! After the first peace Napoleon had been imprisoned on Elba. But he had broken out and made himself master of France once more. War again, and then the great defeat. This peace seemed to be final now – all of London was blazing with flags.

For the officers there were balls and elegant dinners. Speeches in honour of … cheers, champagne and beer.

John stood on the side, somewhat detached. At the same time, he had nothing against this jubilation for peace. But it seemed to him that he was not well suited for general enthusiasms, and now less so than ever. He wasn't very happy about it. I have to manage, he thought, even out of a sense of duty, not to be completely out of step with the nation.

John talked about the
Investigator
and about Sherard with another officer. ‘How's that?' asked the other. ‘Sherard Lound? Are you sure his name wasn't Gérard? I heard about a Gérard Lound.' John asked for details.

This Gérard was supposed to have been second lieutenant on the
Lydia
on its voyage to the Central American coast. He had a somewhat dubious reputation. Also, there was thought to have been something between him and Lady Barbara Wellesley on the voyage around Cape Horn. Yes, yes! The captain himself had intervened, by the way – and the teller of the tale looked around – rather to the displeasure of the lady. Lound had disappeared without a trace after a skirmish in the year 1812, and there is a rumour that the captain himself …

John was not interested in these stories about love triangles, and he believed firmly that it was all a mix-up of names. Sherard Philip Lound built on Australian land and lived in wealth and pleasure; John did not want to doubt it.

Hugh Willoughby, a relative of that sculpted Lord Peregrine Bertie, had discovered islands hundreds of years ago on which the sun produced no days or hours. John had never forgotten that. Now it obtained a new meaning for him. John Franklin, lieutenant of the Royal Navy, currently unemployed and on half-pay like thousands of lieutenants, was the only one who knew precisely what he wanted. In society he kept his dream to himself. But in his own mind he said again and again, ‘Nobody has been to the North Pole yet.' Since the sun did not set there in the summer he was sure of two things: there would be open water and time without hours and days.

In London. John stayed at the Norfolk Hotel, where he had seen Matthew Flinders for the last time. He even managed to rent the same room; that was important to him.

Over there on that bed the captain had sat five years ago, pale and red-eyed from his imprisonment and all that worry. The French had changed the map of Australia without further ado: Spencer Gulf and the Gulf of St Vincent they had named after Bonaparte and Joséphine de Beauharnais, and the only man who would have never allowed this, Captain Nicholas Baudin, had perished in a storm. Add to all this his treatment as a spy, years of arrest in damp quarters, illness – poor Matthew.

Trim the tomcat, his only friend on Mauritius, had landed in the cooking pot of hungry natives. They sent the fur back to Matthew. Meanwhile, the maps were corrected again; one could even find Franklin Harbour once more. Only Trim Bay, an inlet in the extreme north of Port Philip, was not entered. If ever a settlement were to be built there, it must be called Trim City. John would work for that if he ever gained influence.

If Matthew were still alive. John thought, he'd want to go to the North Pole, too. Just to see what was there.

Dr Brown – Robert Brown of the
Investigator
– was now a well-known natural scientist. John needed his help for the North Pole project and looked for him.

It was towards noon. There seemed to be no one at the Royal Society whom he could ask. They all sat in the lecture hall listening to a disquisition about astronomy by a man named Babbage. John found himself a chair and concentrated. He knew so much about the stars that he could follow even a fast speech.

Two women entered and sat down in the row behind him. John's neighbour turned round and said in an undertone, ‘Since when do women have any business in science? They should stay at home and make puddings.' The women heard it. The younger one leaned forward and said, ‘But the pudding is already done, or we wouldn't be here.' Then they both burst out laughing and infected others who had overheard the exchange. Dr Babbage asked the audience with some heat what was so funny about Galileo's discoveries; he pretended to want to laugh, too. But everyone quickly saw that he didn't really, for he took the stars too seriously.

After the lecture, John went up to the younger of the two women and asked her what she found especially interesting about astronomy. She looked at him quizzically and replied that she adored Charles Babbage. She didn't mean it seriously. John found this out with a few well-aimed questions, and she eventually admitted it. There was a twittering sound to her voice, and she enjoyed questions she could answer unseriously
at first. Now and then she laughed and hopped on one foot. A crazy young woman she was.

‘Our man of the Sandbank Council!' Dr Brown called out. ‘Do you still remember the Great Reef? What a giant you've become. A man whom no one can stop, am I right?' John pondered for a long time how to respond to this. He didn't care for such talk, but he needed Dr Brown.

‘I can be stopped,' he replied. ‘My mind is open to arguments.' Dr Brown laughed and exclaimed, ‘Good answer!' They had become strangers to each other after all those years.

But then they talked about Matthew Flinders and came closer again. Dr Brown had not forgotten the brave captain and had many words of love and respect for him. ‘But one thing is a shame: he invented a method whereby one can adjust a wrong declination of a compass by inserting a small metal rod, and he has never written it up.'

‘I know all about it,' said John.

‘What? Write a report, Mr Franklin, with all calculations and drawings. I'll submit it to the Royal Society and to the Admiralty. The invention shall bear Flinders's name.'

‘I'll do it,' answered John. Then he began to talk about the North Pole. Dr Brown raised his eyebrows, but he listened closely. In the end he promised to use his influence for John. A voyage to the North Pole, or some other voyage of discovery – good! He would speak with Sir Joseph and with Barrow. There was no money at present, but perhaps … ‘I'll write to you in any case and tell what I've found out, Mr Franklin, one way or the other.'

A written report was even harder than an oral one. For days John had laboured over it. Now he wanted to see something of London. He sought out Eleanor Porden, the lady with the pudding, and asked her whether she would drive him around a little in her carriage. She laughed and agreed at once.

Her father was an important architect, and rich. He had built castles and rotundas for the king. She was his only daughter.

‘Let's go to the Waterloo Panorama,' she proposed. ‘It's supposed to be very true to nature.' John recalled she had hinted that she wrote poetry. Rather not bring that up, he thought. But as soon as they were in the carriage they got to the subject. ‘Wait a minute. I'll read you a poem.' John hardly needed to wait; she read three poems at once. The rhymes seemed to have been done properly. To be sure, some words like ‘Well, now' and ‘woe' appeared a little too often.

‘I'm having some difficulty with love poems,' John said with a touch of formality. ‘Perhaps after so many years in the war I'm not well attuned to love.' The poet fell silent, taken aback, and after a few seconds said, ‘Well, now …' Since she was now quite still, John decided to recite the only poem he could recall:

It was, he explained, from ‘Johnny Newcome', but for him it was always a poem about voyages of discovery.

She was still silent.

He simply loved short poems, he said, subdued.

Eleanor pulled herself together. They were now close to the panorama. In the domelike tent John looked absent-mindedly at the many tin warriors and their little horses. The fallen soldiers, especially those of the lower ranks, were always a little smaller than the live ones. Their colour was paler, too; they seemed to blend with the earth. John explained to Eleanor the advantages and disadvantages of the fixed look by using the panorama landscape as a model. Then they went on a little tour through town.

‘Odd,' Eleanor remarked. ‘When you walk through a crowd you don't get out of anybody's way. All you do is apologise – that's the only thing that distinguishes you from a bear.' Her voice twittered. John mused about that. She watches me, he thought. Possibly she regards me favourably as a person. He began to prearrange his sentences in his mind to answer her.

John experienced the city as rather bewildering. If only people
would go about their business and stay their course in a clear and orderly fashion. But there were constantly unexpected turns and arbitrary collisions. Everyone under twenty and male was sparring with someone of the same kind. Either the assailant or the victim could be counted on to get under John's feet. And then the coachmen! Worried, John stared at these thoughtless creatures with their round hats, watched how they passed each other in the most unmanageable places, hub to hub, racing as fast as they could. All of London seemed to be in love with speed. Good thing there were pedestrian walks now – elevated paved strips along the roadways. But if one ran into four drunken soldiers on these pavements, one would be pushed over the edge and so be doubly endangered. If one stood still to gain a larger perspective, somebody would at once jostle one from behind and step on one's heels. Throughout all this unpleasantness, Eleanor continued their conversation, unperturbed.

‘Would you like to meet my father, Mr Franklin?'

‘I can't support a wife,' John answered. He had stumbled into a fence and had to pluck a sleeve from the wrought-iron tip. ‘I'm on half-pay and I don't want other people's money except for an expedition. We should write to each other, though. I regard you well, too.'

Miss Porden could look out of the corner of her eyes in such an oblique fashion that you had to be prepared for everything. ‘Mr Franklin,' she said, ‘that was too fast for me.'

John looked for work in vain. Hungry sailors and melancholy officers were sitting around everywhere in the ports. Most of the ships had been scrapped or were still kept around for a few years as prison hulks, like the old
Bellerophon
.

The clerk at the Navy Office assumed a pained expression when John told him he wanted to go on voyages of discovery or none at all.

‘But everything's been discovered,' said the man. ‘We just have to watch over it.'

‘I can wait,' John said brightly.

He had confidence in the future. Hadn't he been lying on a
battlefield with paralysed legs barely a year ago? He had got away then – how, no one could say – and he wasn't dead or mad or even lame. He didn't know how that had come about, but it gave him courage. Now, too, his chances were slight. Might not something inexplicable happen to him again?

He delivered his account of Matthew's compass correction and decided to go to Lincolnshire. He told Dr Brown and a few others how they could reach him there. Then he said his farewells.

The mail-coach stood ready in front of the Saracen's Head in Snow Hill. It was five o'clock in the afternoon.

‘Spilsby?' asked the coachman. ‘That must be a slow place.' John found his judgment about the insolence of coachmen confirmed. But then he learned that the remark had not been directed at him. Every place was called slow if mail-coaches rarely went there.

John rode outside to save money. He noted with pleasure that he was no longer afraid of falling off. So fifteen years at sea had not been in vain.

John viewed the moonlit night from the roof of the coach. He observed many sturdy church towers with notched crowns growing smaller and smaller in the distance as they passed from hill to hill, and farms bunching up together fearfully.

One could see the plight of the villages two miles off, first by the badly patched roofs, then by the broken windows. Crop failures during this and the previous year – there was no money.

All at once he saw why the night was so unnaturally bright: a fire was burning. Somewhere to the east, in the direction of Ely, it burned in at least three places. What was happening in this land? John was a sailor. He didn't count on grasping everything at once. But one could feel ill at ease in the country after so many years.

He already knew from letters what to expect at home: new faces, lack of money, and worried reports. In 1807, Thomas, the eldest, had taken his life, because the family fortune had run through his fingers in financial speculations. Six years ago Grandfather had died; Mother in the year following. Father now
lived in a farmhouse outside the village, cared for by one of his daughters.

The horizon was dark again. John admitted to himself that he felt cold.

They reached Boston in the early forenoon. Here John heard some news. There were ‘Luddites' about. These were unemployed men who painted their faces black at night and smashed the mechanical looms to pieces. And in Horncastle there was now supposed to be a navigable canal to Sleaford and even a library.