The Voyage of the Narwhal. Andrea Barrett

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      Zeke shrugged. “What can I do? We have to make our way through this place, and there’s no other way but to work the men as hard as they can stand. I promise things will be different when we reach the North Water.”

      It was like a single long nightmare, in which time passed too quickly and then, especially when they were bent to the capstan bars, refused to pass at all. The continuous light made things worse, not better: white, white, white tinged with blue, with gold, with green; white; more white. Their eyes burned, and as the sun looped around the sky, to the east in the morning, then south then west then finally in the north at night, with them still working, horribly sunburned, they began to yearn for the colors they never saw: sweet rich reds, the green of leaves. In their blurry sleepless state, with their bodies strained and aching, Erasmus wasn’t surprised that they should lose sight of what had brought them there. It was all the crew could do to keep the brig moving and out of danger.

      Zeke tried to keep the goals of the expedition alive by telling stories about Franklin; a way, he told Erasmus privately, of motivating the men. Off duty, they sprawled on the hatch covers or leaned against the boats while Zeke paced among them, describing Franklin’s three earlier voyages. Franklin as a young lieutenant, seeking the North Pole by way of Spitzbergen, turned back by ice and returning to England with badly damaged ships. Franklin commanding an expedition through Rupert’s Land, across the tundra to the mouth of the Coppermine River and exploring the coastline eastward in tiny canoes; Franklin in the arctic yet again, traveling down the MacKenzie River and exploring the coastline westward, nearly reaching Kotzebue Sound. In their winter camp on Great Bear Lake, Zeke said, Franklin had taught his men to read and Dr. Richardson, his naturalist companion, had lectured on the natural history of the region. After that last trip, Franklin had been knighted.

      Zeke spoke as if he were transmitting the great tradition of arctic exploration, of which they were now a part. As if the stories would heal the crew’s wounds and furies. But Erasmus noticed that Zeke never repeated these in the presence of Captain Tyler and the two mates. In a similar way, he was careful, himself, not to mention his disturbing dreams. Always he was sitting with his brothers at their father’s knee, with Zeke, transformed into a boy their own age, hovering in the doorway and looking longingly at their family circle. Always his father was telling marvelous tales, as if he’d never taught them real science. In ancient times, his father said, it was recorded that the sky rained milk and blood and flesh and iron; once the sky was said to rain wool and another time to rain bricks. It is always best to observe things for yourself.

      Erasmus tried not to think too much about what those dreams meant, or about the quarrels brewing. He shot burgomaster gulls and two species of loon, which the ravenous dogs tried to eat. Whenever they were stuck for a while, Joe tried to calm the dogs by unchaining them and letting them romp on the ice. They barked as if they’d gone insane and often proved difficult to retrieve; Zeke was forced to leave a pair behind when a berg suddenly sailed away from the brig. After that he no longer let Wissy run with the others but kept her tied to him by an improvised leash.

      Ivan Hruska nearly drowned; a floe cracked as he was fixing an ice anchor, tossing him into the surging water. It wasn’t true, as Erasmus had once believed, that immersion in this frigid fluid killed a man right away. Ivan was retrieved numb and blue and breathless, but alive. Fingers were caught between railings and lines, ribs were banged against capstan bars, skin was torn from palms and toes were broken by falling chisels. Dr. Boerhaave was kept busy attending to their injuries and preparing daily sick lists, which Zeke and Captain Tyler were forced to ignore:

      Seaman Bond: abrasions to distal phalanges, left

      Seaman Carey: two cracked ribs

      Seaman DeSouza: asthma, aggravated by excessive labor

      Seaman Hruska: bronchitis after immersion

      Seaman Jensen: avulsed tip of right forefinger

      Seaman Lamb: complaints of abdominal pain (earlier blow to liver?)

      Seaman Hamilton: suppurating dermatitis, inner aspect of both thighs

      Unromantic ailments, never mentioned in Zeke’s tales. Meanwhile Joe tried to cheer the men. In Greenland, Erasmus learned, Joe had held services among his Esquimaux converts, during which he accompanied their singing with a zither. Now he plucked and strummed and taught the men songs, singing with them while they hauled.

      A WEEK INTO Melville Bay, they were finishing their evening meal when the ice began to close in on them.

      “If we cut a dock here,” Captain Tyler said, indicating an indented portion of the large berg near them, “we should be safe, even if the drift ice closes full in to the shore.”

      “There’s no time,” Zeke said. “Suppose we make harbor inside this berg, and the floes seal off our exit? We could be here for weeks. And we’ve got the wind with us, for the moment.”

      They sailed on, with the men waiting tensely for orders. On deck, near the chained dogs, Erasmus and Zeke watched in silence. Soon the lead closed entirely and forced them to tie up to a floe. A second floe, which Nils Jensen estimated at some three-quarters of a mile in diameter and five feet deep, sailed past their sheltering chunk of ice, sheared half of it away without taking the brig, and proceeded serenely to shore. As it reached the land-fast ice, it rose in a stiff wave and shattered with a noise like thunder.

      “Would you get out of the way!” Mr. Francis said, shoving Erasmus in his exasperation. Erasmus pulled back against the rail.

      While Captain Tyler and Mr. Francis shouted and the men ran about with boathooks and pieces of lumber, a third floe pressed the Narwhal into the land-fast ice. Ned Kynd, his face as white as the ice, said, “We’re going to be crushed.”

      He pressed into the rail beside Erasmus, who silently agreed with him. The ice on one side drove them into the ice on the other; the brig groaned, then screamed; her sides seemed to be giving way and the deck timbers began to arch. The seams between the deck planks opened. Zeke leaned toward Ned: two young men, one blond, one dark; one calm and one afraid.

      “Don’t worry so,” Zeke said. He tapped Ned’s shoulder and smiled at Erasmus. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to us. Our bows are reinforced to withstand just this kind of pressure.”

      As if his words had been a spell the brig began to rise, tilting until the hawser snapped and they shot backward and across the floes like a seed pinched by a giant pair of fingers. For several hours they balanced on heaped-up ice cakes, until the wind changed and pulled the ice away and set them afloat once more with a dismal splash.

      Zeke ordered rum for all the men and thanked them for their labor. To Captain Tyler he said, “You don’t understand how well we’ve designed this ship to resist the ice. This is not your common whaler.”

      “If we had cut a dock,” Captain Tyler said in a choked voice. His face was mottled, red on his fleshy nostrils and chin, white along his broad forehead and down the sharp bridge of his nose. His hands, Erasmus noticed, were hugely knotted at the joints. “If we had…” Abruptly he turned the watch over to Mr. Tagliabeau and retired below, where he wrapped his head in a blanket.

      Later, perched on the hatch cover, Dr. Boerhaave whispered to Erasmus that he’d feared their skipper might suffer an apoplexy. They looked out at the ice, too wound up to sleep and longing to talk: not about what had just happened, but anything else. They were still a little awkward with each other. Dr. Boerhaave said, “This is very different from the СКАЧАТЬ