The Voyage of the Narwhal. Andrea Barrett

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      LATER, WHEN HE’D try to tell his story to the one person who might most want to hear it, he’d puzzle over how to recount the events of the next few weeks. The incidents had no shape, he would think. They were simply incidents, which piled one atop the other but always had to do with a set of men on a ship, moving fitfully from one patch of water to the next. At the rails he and Dr. Boerhaave gaped at the broken, drifting floes of sheet ice Captain Tyler called “the middle pack.” A few inches thick, twelve feet thick; the size of a boat or of downtown Philadelphia; between these were the leads, the openings that sustained them. Without a sense of their passage through the pack, nothing that came later could be fully understood.

      They saw the ice through a haze induced by the dogs, whose howling made sleep and even conversation impossible. No one knew what to do with them, nor how to manage their ravenous appetites; the loose ones broke into a barrel of seal flippers and gorged themselves until two died. Nothing was safe from them, and no one could control them but Joe. The constant noise and the lack of sleep made everyone nervous, and in the cramped officers’ cabin Erasmus felt a split, which perhaps had been there all along, begin to widen. He and Dr. Boerhaave found themselves allied with Zeke, while Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau always lined up with Captain Tyler, as if the arrangement of their berths marked emotional as well as physical territory. Joe, who slept in the forecastle with the seamen, maintained a careful neutrality. When the dogs tried to eat a new litter of puppies, Joe rescued them, raising an eyebrow but saying nothing when Zeke took one for himself.

      “Wissy,” Zeke said, holding the squirming creature by the neck. “After the Wissahickon.” He ran his hand over her fluffy, fawn-colored head, her white front feet, the black spot on her back, withdrawing it when she turned and nipped him.

      “It’s a river,” Erasmus explained to Joe. “Back home.” To Zeke he said, “Are you sure you want to keep her? They aren’t bred to be pets.”

      “I don’t think Captain Tyler appreciates having her in the cabin,” Joe added.

      But Zeke was adamant, working patiently to break her habit of chewing on everyone and everything, and she was by his side as they reached Upernavik. Nils Jensen counted the icebergs, cracked and grottoed or blue-green and crystalline, while Captain Tyler disagreed with Zeke about their route. A zigzag, west-trending lead had opened through the pack, and Zeke argued that they should try to force a passage directly west, as Parry had once done.

      “The traditional route through Melville Bay to the North Water is longer in distance,” Captain Tyler said, kicking Wissy away from his ankles. “But ultimately it’s always quicker. Why don’t you discipline this creature?”

      Finally, as the lead narrowed and then disappeared, Zeke agreed to Captain Tyler’s route and they slipped through the steadily thickening fog into the long and gentle curve of Melville Bay. Trying to describe this place to Copernicus later, Erasmus would seize a heavy mirror and drop it flat on its back from the height of his waist, so it shattered without scattering. Heavy floes grinding against each other on one side; against the land a hummocked barrier thick with grounded bergs and upended floes—and in between, their fragile ship.

      In this mirror land they were all alone. “No surprise,” Captain Tyler said irritably, after the lookout reported the absence of ships. “The whalers always take the pack in May or June, when there’s less danger of being caught by an early winter.”

      “We left Philadelphia as soon as we could,” Zeke told him. “You know that. It’s not my fault.”

      Meanwhile the seamen told stories of ships destroyed when wind drove the drifting pack against the coast. There was a reason, they said, why Melville Bay was called the breaking-up yard. Ships crushed like hazelnuts, they said, or locked in the ice for months: as if saying it would keep it from happening. We should have started sooner; we shouldn’t be here at all; I knew four men who died here—Isaac Bond, Robert Carey, Barton DeSouza. Even as they grumbled, half-aware that Erasmus listened, the open water vanished.

      Captain Tyler ordered the sails furled and sent a man to the masthead, where he could call down the positions of the ice. For two days, while the wind was dead but a slim lead was open, they tracked the ship. On the land-fast ice they passed canvas straps over their shoulders and chests, then fastened their harnesses to the towline. Plodding heavily, they towed the brig as a team of horses might pull heavy equipment across a field. Erasmus, who’d volunteered to help, could stop when he was exhausted, or when his hands froze or his feet blistered; here he felt for the first time how much older he was than everyone but Captain Tyler. Zeke, so much younger, would always pull longer but never finished a full watch. The men pulled until their watch was complete, and for all that, on a good day, they might make six miles.

      On bad days, when the channel disappeared, they warped the brig like a wedge between the consolidated floes. Two men with an iron chisel cut a hole near the edge of a likely crack and drove in an anchor; a hawser was fastened to the anchor and the other end wound around the ship’s winch. Everyone took his turn at the capstan bars. By the pressure of their bodies against the bars, the winch rotated, the hawser shivered, the ice began to groan. If the hawser didn’t break, nor the anchor pull loose, the brig inched forward into the little crack. For hours they worked and got nowhere; an inch, a foot, the length of the ship.