The Voyage of the Narwhal. Andrea Barrett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ course,” Erasmus said, praying it wouldn’t be about Zeke.

      “Could you tell me about this Franklin we’re looking for? Who he is?”

      Erasmus stared at him, a piece of carrot still in his mouth. “Didn’t Commander Voorhees explain all this to you, when you signed on?”

      Ned cut biscuits. “That Franklin was lost,” he said. “That we were to go and search for him…but not much more than that.”

      Where had Ned been these last years? While Ned slipped the biscuits onto a tin, Erasmus leaned against the water barrel and tried to summarize the story that had riveted everyone else’s attention.

      “Sir John Franklin was, is, English,” he said. “A famous explorer, who’d already been on three earlier arctic voyages.”

      The chicken simmered as Erasmus explained how Franklin had set off with over a hundred of the British Navy’s finest men. For ships he had James Ross’s old Erebus and Terror, refitted with hot-water heating systems and experimental screw propellers. Black-hulled, white-masted, the ships had left England in the spring of 1845, provisioned for three years. Each had taken along a library of some twelve hundred books and a hand organ, which played fifty tunes. The weather was remarkably fine that summer, and hopes for a swift journey high. Toward the end of that July they were seen by a whaler, moored to an iceberg at the mouth of Lancaster Sound; after that they disappeared.

      “Disappeared?” Ned said. His hands cut lard into flour for a pie crust.

      “Vanished,” Erasmus replied. Everyone knew this part of the story, he thought: not just himself and Zeke, but Lavinia and all her acquaintances, even his cook and his groom. “How did you miss this?”

      “There was starvation in Ireland,” Ned said sharply. “How did you miss that? I had other things on my mind.”

      The chronology of these two events fell into line. Ned, Erasmus realized, must have been part of the great wave of Irish emigrants fleeing the famine. He was still just a boy, he could almost have been Erasmus’s son. “Forgive me,” he said. He knew nothing of Ned’s history, as he’d known nothing of his servants’ lives at home. “That was stupid of me.” Of course the events in Ireland had shaped Ned’s life more than the stories of noble Franklin, unaccountably lost; or noble Jane, his wife, who by the time Zeke proposed their voyage had organized more than a dozen expeditions in search of her husband.

      Ned sliced apples so swiftly they seemed to leap away from his knife, and Erasmus, after an awkward pause, explained how ships had converged from the east and west on the areas in which Franklin was presumed to be lost, while other expeditions traveled overland. All had made important geographical discoveries, but despite the rockets fired, the kites and balloons sent adrift in the air, the foxes tagged with messages and released, no one had found Franklin. Erasmus’s fellow Philadelphian, Dr. Kane, had been with the fleet that reached Beechey Island during the summer of 1851, finding tantalizing traces of a winter camp.

      Erasmus tried, without frightening Ned, to describe what that fleet had seen. Three of Franklin’s seamen lying beneath three mounds; and also sailcloth, paper fragments and blankets, and six hundred preserved-meat tins, emptied of their contents and refilled with pebbles. But no note, nor any indication of which direction the party had headed on departing. Subsequent expeditions hadn’t found a single clue as to Franklin’s whereabouts. The Admiralty had given up the search a year ago, declaring Franklin and his men dead.

      “Why would Commander Voorhees want to do this, then?” Ned asked. “If the men are dead?”

      “There was news,” Erasmus said. “Surprising news.”

      In the fall, just as Zeke had said at Lavinia’s party, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company had startled everyone. Exploring the arctic coastline west of Repulse Bay, not in search of Franklin at all but purely for geographical interest, he’d come across some Esquimaux. A group of thirty or forty white men had starved to death some years before, they said, at the mouth of a large river. They wouldn’t lead Rae to the bodies, and Rae had thought the season too far advanced to embark on a search himself. But the Esquimaux had relics: Rae purchased a gold watch, a surgeon’s knife, a bit of an undervest; silver forks and spoons marked with Franklin’s crest; a golden band from a cap.

      “The part that set everyone talking, though,” Erasmus said, “was the last story the Esquimaux told Dr. Rae.”

      Three pies were taking shape; he filched some apple slices. Was it wrong, he wondered, to bring up the subject of starvation with a boy who might have seen it directly? Was it wrong to talk so freely with a subordinate? But Ned, crimping the crusts together, said, “Well, tell me.”

      Erasmus, leaving out the worst parts, described the Esquimaux tale of mutilated corpses and human parts found in cooking kettles. There could be no doubt, Rae had said, that his countrymen had been driven to cannibalism as a last resort.

      “What an uproar Rae caused!” Erasmus said. He registered Ned’s pallor, but he was caught in his own momentum now. “You’d have thought he killed the men himself, from the public’s response. The Admiralty dismissed his findings and said Englishmen don’t eat Englishmen. But they declared the fate of Franklin’s expedition resolved, despite the fact that Rae’s story accounted for less than a third of the crew.”

      “You look for the rest, then?” Ned asked.

      “We look.”

      He wound up with the facts that had set them off on their own quest. Although the Admiralty had given up, Lady Franklin persisted, bombarding the press with pleas for further, private expeditions.

      “Until the ships are found,” Erasmus said, “there’s no proof that all the men are dead. Dr. Kane is still searching for them, but he headed for Smith Sound before Rae’s return. Franklin might have reached that area if he’d headed north through Wellington Channel, but now we know he went southwest and that Kane’s a thousand miles from the right place. We have all the facts Dr. Kane was missing, and our job is to search in the area Rae insufficiently explored.”

      Ned finished the pies and then looked up. “Commander Voorhees made it sound as if we were going to rescue survivors,” he said. “Yet it seems we’re only going after corpses.”

      “Not exactly,” Erasmus said, flustered. “There may be some survivors, we hope there are. We go in search of them, and of news.”

      He left the galley feeling uneasy, a biscuit in his hand. He’d imagined that the ship’s crew shared his and Zeke’s thoughts: the story of Franklin clear in their minds, the goals of the voyage sharply defined and their own tasks understood. Now he wondered if they were like Ned, signed on for their own reasons, occupied with their own concerns, hardly aware of the facts. One was thinking, perhaps, about a belled cow walking high on a hill. Another about a pond and four locust trees, or about drinking whiskey or shoeing a horse, what he might buy when he was paid off, a young woman, an old quarrel, a sleigh’s runners slicing the snow.

      THE LAST TIME Ned had sailed on a ship, he’d been sick and stunned and hadn’t known how to read or write. This time he’d do it differently; this time he’d keep a record. Before leaving Philadelphia he’d bought a lined copybook, of the sort boys used in school. That night he wrote:

      The apple pies were very good. But Commander Voorhees still hasn’t eaten a mouthful, nothing I make tempts him. Today I saw a large school of bluefish. СКАЧАТЬ