Sean Hamilton tossed them bits of biscuit and Erasmus revised his first opinion: This was where the journey began, with this first sight of the arctic men he’d read about for so long. That these Greenlanders had traded with whalers for two centuries, been colonized by the Danes and converted by Moravian and Lutheran missionaries, made them less strange: but they were still new to him. On the first night in port, over a dinner of eider ducks at the huge-chimneyed home of the Danish inspector, he looked alternately at a bad engraving of four Greenlanders captured near Godthaab and brought to Copenhagen and, out the window next to the portrait, at the jumble of wooden huts and sealskin tents into which the mysterious strangers disappeared.
ON THE NARWHAL the crew made their final preparations. Thomas Forbes, Erasmus saw, kept his carpenter’s bench in perfect order. Ivan Hruska’s hammock had a hole in it, which he repaired beautifully. Mr. Francis appeared to regard the boatswain’s locker as a treasure chest, keeping close track of every marlinspike and bit of spun yarn he passed out. All this bustle pleased Erasmus. This was their last chance to ready the brig for her encounters with the pack, and finally, he thought, the men had been infected with the sense of urgency he’d had for months.
He and Zeke, equally busy, acquired sixteen ill-mannered Esquimaux dogs, a stock of dried codfish, bales of seal and caribou skins, full Esquimaux outfits for all the crew, and an interpreter, Johann Schwartzberg. After sharing a walk with him, Erasmus wrote:
He’s a Moravian missionary—an extremely interesting man. He’s lived among the Esquimaux both here and in Labrador, and he knows their language as well as Danish, English, and German. He’ll be invaluable if we meet Esquimaux around King William Land. When Zeke approached him, we learned that he’d followed the news of Franklin’s expedition avidly and had already heard about Rae’s discoveries. He seems genuinely thrilled to join us. The men call him Joe, and already I can see that he’s sensible, mild-tempered, good-humored, and handy.
It was Joe who determined how many knives and needles and iron bars they should barter for the fish and the furs, and Joe who examined each Esquimaux outfit for proper fit. Zeke asked Mr. Tagliabeau and Mr. Francis to work with the dogs; when they tangled the traces and crashed the sledge and fumbled helplessly, it was Joe who demonstrated how to control them. Buff and brown and white and black, long-haired, demonic, and curly-tailed, the dogs were nothing like the well-mannered hounds Zeke kept at home. With a peculiar turn of the wrist, Joe directed the whip toward the head of the most recalcitrant creature and clipped off a piece of its ear.
Zeke, watching this with Erasmus, caught his breath and said, “Oh, how cruel!”
Mr. Francis shot a contemptuous glance back over his shoulder. “Perhaps you’d like to reason with them?” There was something weasel-like about him, Erasmus thought. That narrow chest; the thick hair growing low on his forehead and shading his deep-set eyes. “Maybe you can persuade them,” Mr. Francis added.
“Would you take over?” Zeke asked Joe. He pulled Erasmus away. “A good commander recognizes those things that are abhorrent to him, or which he does badly, and gives others charge of them,” he said. “Don’t you think? Joe’s a fine teacher, and Mr. Tagliabeau and Mr. Francis are coarse enough to be good drivers.”
Joe also knew how to build a snow house and how to repair a sledge. And it was Joe who helped Erasmus overcome his initial discomfort around the short men with their glossy hair and unreadable eyes. Hyperboreans, Erasmus thought, recalling his father’s tales. Was it Pliny who’d claimed they lived to a ripe old age and passed down marvelous stories? But his unease was grounded in experience, not myth. At Malolo in western Fiji, he’d seen savages murder two of the Exploring Expedition’s men with no apparent provocation. In Naloa Bay he’d watched a native calmly gnaw the flesh of a cooked human head, which Wilkes had later purchased for their collection.
Yet the Esquimaux weren’t violent, only a little sullen. Joe said, “You need to understand that they’re doing us a favor—it hasn’t been a good year for seals, and they don’t have many spare skins. They’re trading with us because the Danish inspector is sympathetic to Commander Voorhees’s mission, and he ordered them to. You might give the men who bring you the best skins some extra token.”
Erasmus offered small metal mirrors and was rewarded with smiles, which made him more comfortable. When he sketched the strangers, emerging from the skin tents scattered at the edge of the mission or rolling their delicate boats upside down and then righting them with a touch of their paddles, the orderly shapes he made on paper ordered his feelings as well.
After a last dinner at the home of the Danish inspector, the crew slept and then made sail early the following morning. Their wildly barking dogs were answered by the dogs on shore. Even that sound pleased Erasmus. They’d made good time so far and now, on this first day of July, they were finally ready. His lists had been worthwhile after all, and all the worry, all the fuss.
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