The Discovery Of Slowness (19 page)

The other laughed back with white teeth. A handsome fellow. ‘The snow is wonderful, sir!'

No, it wasn't possible to detect irony in that statement. Yet … He put captain's wrinkles into his face, turned away brusquely, retiring into his cabin, slightly irritated.

He recalled polar magnetism. But how could one measure that?

Now it became seriously cold. The rigging iced over; ropes in use froze so stiff they couldn't be distinguished from fixed lines. The men on watch had not only to pump but also to beat the lines with sticks to keep them moveable. All manoeuvres with sails turned into adventures, and the cold got worse. Everybody coughed, heartbreakingly. John, on the other hand, was delirious with joy.

Since there continued to be no infractions of rules, he studied the snow and entered the shapes of snowflakes in his Logbook of Punishments. ‘In principle, snow is hexagonal,' he wrote. After all, research was the purpose of the trip. Amused, he thought of the admirals' faces when, after a long detour through Mother Russia, the Logbook of Punishments of the
Trent
would finally reach them.

For the first time the ships sailed through drift-ice. The floes clinked and scraped along the sides of the hull.

Nobody wanted to sleep. No one was used to this phenomenon of night being so bright. The low sun shone upon the white sails, the ice sparkled as if it were made of diamond caps and emerald grottoes; a frozen city grew and unfolded in wild shapes. Nautical
language was almost superfluous: they sailed from the ‘church' to the ‘fortress', then, bearing past the ‘cave', to the ‘bridge'. Ice shimmered below the surface of the water, reflecting light. The sea was cloaked in creamy white; seals swam in it as in luminous milk. The crew hung on the rigging and stared at the sparkling hunks of ice that kept pushing behind the ship's keel as though wanting to catch up with it. The sun sank toward midnight, red and weird: the largest banana in the world. It didn't even actually sink – it only went into hiding for a short time, took a bath, and reappeared to dry itself.

Beechey said, ‘All this is well and good, but how do we persuade the next watch to get some sleep?'

It was an evening sky of infinite duration, shadows becoming gigantically long, and when swathes of mist rose they turned at once into reddish clouds, changing colours up to the northern horizon.

John looked out on the ice, studied its forms, and tried to understand what they meant. It was true, then, that the sea could surpass itself with its own power. Here was the proof. Here he discovered the meaning of his dreams.

Hour after hour he drew shapes of icebergs in his Logbook of Punishments. He added colours: ‘Green on the left, red on the right, the reverse ten minutes later.' He tried to invent names for what he saw, but that didn't work very well. Rather, the sights were like music which would have to be transcribed in a score. The fine-ribbed sea lapped playfully round the ice shapes and bore them along in a rhythm, while they themselves seemed to make up a harmony as of musical sounds, although they were also in a sense splintered and split. Yet their effect was to create a feeling of calm and timelessness. Nothing like this could be ugly. Here it was peaceful. Far behind them, somewhere to the south, men worried about the misery of man. In London, time was a despot whom everyone had to obey.

Above 81 degrees of latitude the ice-floes turned into platforms, and those into islands. At one point, under the most favourable
crosswind, the
Trent
simply stood still and didn't budge. ‘Why don't we go on?' Reid called from below, and a few minutes later the second mate, Kirby, came on deck: ‘Why aren't we moving?'

Waiting made the crew restless. Yet in this case there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to be done about waiting. Perhaps the two ships locked into the ice-field might actually drift with it in the right direction. But then came the signal from the
Dorothea
. Buchan ordered, ‘Chop ice! Haul ship!'

Ten men tried to open up the ice ahead of the bow with axes and spades, ten more strained to pull a rope two ship-lengths ahead. A few hours later they were so exhausted that at the end of the watch they were giggling to keep from crying. And yet the whole effort was mounted only to satisfy their and Buchan's impatience. They tried even the most senseless actions if that gave them the feeling they were in motion.

But what if the ice-field was drifting south instead of north? Even then it would have been an open question whether Buchan noticed it. He liked to navigate ‘by instinct'.

John ordered music to give the hauling crew at least some cheer. Seaman Gilbert led the way, fiddling. He was just the right man for the job. His musical skills could indeed produce a limited range of distinct tones, yet they were not good enough to make anyone stop and listen.

Oddly, the closer John came to their objective, the more strongly he sensed that he no longer needed it. The complete silence, the absolute timelessness – what, seriously, should he do with them? He was a captain and had a ship; he no longer wanted to be a strip of shore, a coastal rock which looked on for millennia without guilt. Clock time was as essential as weights and measures, because goods and labour had to be distributed justly in this world. The hourglass had to be turned, the ship's bell had to be struck every half-hour so Kirby didn't have to pump longer than Spink and Back didn't have to freeze longer than Reid. That wouldn't be any different at the Pole, and John was content with it because he was content now
with everything, except perhaps with Buchan's overall command.

He was ineluctably drawn to the Pole, but not because he wanted to start all over again from then on. After all, it had already begun. The goal had been important only for the sake of finding the path to it. He had now taken that path, and the Pole reverted to being a mere geographical concept. He longed only to remain en route – just as he was now, on a voyage of discovery – for the rest of his life. Franklin's System of Life and Travel.

Buchan had taken their bearings in relation to the stars and had made his calculations. So had Franklin. Buchan arrived at 81 degrees 31 minutes; Franklin at 80 degrees 37 minutes. Flustered, Buchan calculated once more and met John by a few minutes, just to save face. Evidently the ice was drifting southwards more quickly than they could chop their way open to the north.

Then two gigantic ice-fields slunk toward each other and took the
Dorothea
in the middle, squeezing her until the timber of her frame cracked and the ship was even slightly lifted. A short while later the same thing happened to the
Trent
, only less severely. Now they sat tight, as though riveted in place. An iceberg approached more and more closely from aft as if to mock them.

‘I'd like to know how the iceberg does it,' said Spink. ‘Perhaps someone's pulling him from below.' He pointed down to the sea and meant it as a joke, but they all remembered the narwhal and remained silent.

At all events, it was still as never before; the ship didn't move an inch. Suddenly Gilfillan, the ship's doctor, stormed out of his cabin, shouting, ‘I think some liquid is running under my bed!'

Franklin went down with the carpenter and asked to be shown the place. Below Gilfillan's bunk was the spirits store. ‘Nothing's allowed to run there,' the commander concluded. They listened inside the chamber where rum was stocked: yes, something's running there! The supply master checked their inventory. Nothing was missing.

Thus they found the leak. A worker at the shipyards had taken
out a rotten bolt and had simply smeared some tar over the gap, rather than putting in a new bolt and securing it. The tar didn't stop the water, but it prevented the gap from being seen from the outside. When the
Trent
had been made waterproof again some liquid of a sort still ran down a few gullets. Hours later they got back on their feet and realised that the ship floated again in the open sea.

The ice did as it pleased.

They saw stormy petrels fishing and flying so tightly along the valleys between mountains of waves that the space seemed as snug as a cannonball inside its barrel. Young codfish, shimmering like golden crystals, were lying on the deck in the low light, spread out like treasure lifted from the sea. They saw bears, white masses of fur, irresistibly lured by the burning fish-oil, padding nearer and nearer over snow hills and across ponds. Nothing could stop them.

One day a herd of walruses tried to overturn the boat with their tusks and round skulls – a furious mass attack. When shortly afterward the men stood on the ice-floe, the animals tried to tip the other end of the ice with their weight, inviting them to a sliding-party that would have ended on their tusks. The sailors fired their muskets, but not until the heavy leading bull was killed did the herd at last swim away.

The next outing on foot was even more dangerous, because heavy fog came up and each man had to hold on to the next by his jacket. They wanted to walk back to the ship by following their own tracks. John Franklin checked the direction with his compass. But it became apparent all of a sudden that the tracks were strangely fresh and, in addition, became more and more numerous. According to both compass and clock time they should have been back on the ship long ago.

They had lost their way and had wandered in circles.

John ordered the men to build an emergency shelter out of ice-plates. Reid made no bones about the fact that he would have preferred to go on simply at a right angle to where they had been walking.

‘We'll stay warm that way, and we've got to arrive somewhere.'

‘I take my time before I make mistakes,' Franklin countered amiably. He ordered them all to wrap themselves up as warmly as possible and sit round the oil lamp. The muskets were carefully loaded in case a polar bear should come by.

John crouched and reflected. Whatever the others put forward – proposals, theories, questions – he only nodded and thought some more.

Even when Reid whispered to Back, ‘You're quite right about the “handicap”,' John pushed all questions aside. He now needed only time.

A while later Reid asked, ‘Should we simply wait here, sir?' But John still wasn't ready. There was no reason to end his reflections prematurely, even if death was at the door. At last he got up.

‘Mr Back, fire a musket every three minutes, thirty times all told. After that, fire every ten minutes for three hours; after that, once an hour for two days. Please repeat.'

‘Won't we be dead by then, sir?'

‘Possibly. But until then we fire. Please confirm.'

Back repeated his instructions, stuttering. Just as nobody counted any longer on getting an explanation, John said, ‘The entire ice-field is turning round. It's the only solution. That's why we are walking in circles, even when according to the compass we are always marching in the same direction. If there had been a wind we would have noticed it at once.'

Four hours later they heard a faint shot in the fog, and then again and again answers to their own shots. An hour after that they heard voices calling out; men with ropes became visible at last; and, behind them, barely a hundred feet away, they saw the towering stern of the
Trent
.

‘You're a lucky dog, sir,' Back remarked, relieved and insolent but without a trace of condescension. On the contrary. Reid pulled a face. To him Back said, ‘If we had listened to you we would now be somewhere else; we'd probably be icicles.' Reid was silent. He suddenly gave himself a jolt and stamped
violently on a snowflake. John wondered. How could one stamp on a snowflake? Or was there still something else?

In the bright light of day, and from the mainmast, one could observe the entire labyrinth. Even if they had gone in the ‘right' direction they would have missed the ship by a wide margin. Had they gone in the opposite direction they would have reached a point where nobody would have looked for them. It would have been a death trap of the first order, but John wasn't caught in it.

It's easier for me now, he reflected, and there are no more problems with Back. The kings of the schoolyard are beginning to listen to me. He had hardly thought of this when suddenly he knew: Back reminded him of Tom Barker, his schoolmate of twenty years ago.

They had not even reached latitude 82 degrees north, and already Buchan wanted to turn back. ‘We ought to find a sheltered anchorage and repair everything.'

‘We ought …' John noted the unaccustomed words. He felt challenged to contradict.

‘The polar summer would be over before we were done with that. The damage isn't really that great. Let's have one last try.'

‘Do you want to play daredevil?'

‘Sir, so far we've discovered nothing and proved nothing.'

‘I'll tell you something,' Buchan replied. ‘I believe that what you want to prove is something personal. I've watched you. You want to prove that you're no coward. Perhaps cowardice is your problem.'

John decided that he didn't have to think about such remarks. ‘Only a single try, sir. We haven't much time left, but the open polar sea can't be very far.'

‘Oh, to hell with you! And what if there's a storm?'

‘By then we'll surely be in a proper channel and will be sheltered. We have to try farther west.'

Buchan wavered. The summer was nearing its end. That was a fact.

‘I'll decide.'

For five days they sailed north-west past a wall of pack-ice – the
Trent
first, and the
Dorothea
a quarter-mile behind. John looked through the telescope. ‘They're sailing too close to the pack-ice. When the wind stops, they'll drift on to the lee shore with the tide.' Beechey nodded: ‘They're bored. They want to watch the seals. And yet the weather outlook isn't very good.' John ordered sail reduced to a minimum. Only as a precaution.