“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 other expeditions I was on. Do you find it so? I’m curious about your earlier trip.”
“I was twenty-three the last time I did anything like this,” Erasmus said, watching the ice pieces spin in the tide. Twenty-three, barely older than Ned Kynd; often he’d been frightened half to death. When had his commander ever taken a minute to reassure him? The sky was lit like morning, although it was past ten o’clock; how delicious it was to be alive, under the shimmering clouds! Had the brig been shattered here, some of the crew would be dead by now and the rest drifting south on the fragments. He was alive, he was safe and warm. What was the point of keeping secret his time with the Exploring Expedition?
“When you asked why you never saw my name in Wilkes’s book,” he said, “there were nine civilians listed as ‘Scientifics’ among all those Navy men; I was the tenth. Wilkes never listed me because I joined the expedition at the last minute and didn’t receive a salary.”
He swallowed. Two floes touched and then parted, as if finishing a dance. “My father arranged it,” he admitted. “The young woman to whom I was engaged”—Sarah Louise Bettlesman, he thought; still he could see her face, and remember her touch—“her lungs were weak, she died six months before we were to be married. I couldn’t get back on my feet after that, and my father was worried. He pulled some strings, and after promising Wilkes he’d pay my keep for the voyage, he landed me a berth as Titian Peale’s assistant.”
“I am so sorry,” Dr. Boerhaave said gently. “But I’m sure Wilkes felt lucky to have you.”
While the ice waltzed around the bow and the clouds cavorted overhead, Erasmus told the rest of the story that had preoccupied him as he sorted and sifted his seeds.
The six ships of the Exploring Expedition had left Virginia in 1838. For the next four years they’d cruised the Pacific, from South America to the Fiji Islands, New Zealand and New Holland, the Sandwich Islands, the Oregon territory and more. Although Erasmus had been lonely, out of place, and often lost, he’d seen things he couldn’t have imagined: cannibals, volcanic calderas, sixty-pound medusoids; the meke wau, or club dance, of the Fiji natives—natural wonders and also, always, Wilkes’s brutality toward his men and his constant disregard of the needs of the Scientifics. The naval men had called the Scientifics bug catchers, clam diggers, and Wilkes had blocked their way at every turn.
They weren’t allowed to work on deck, because of naval regulations and the bustle required to sail a ship. Below decks there was little light and less fresh air, and Wilkes forbade dissections there, as he found the odors distasteful and believed they spread disease. Their primary goal was surveying, Wilkes said, and he let nothing interfere with that. Day after day, Erasmus and his companions had watched the golden hours slip by while the naval men took topographical measurements of whatever island or coast was before them. Amazing plants and animals, always just out of reach. They’d set scoop nets when they could, consoling themselves with invertebrate treasures. When they thought they might expire from heat and anger, they threw themselves over the rail and into the swimming basin the men had made from a sail hung in the water. In early 1840, as they set off to explore the Antarctic waters and search for a landmass beneath the ice, Wilkes arranged to leave all the Scientifics behind at New Zealand and New Holland, so that whatever geographical discoveries he made need not be shared but might be wholly to the glory of the Navy.
He left all except Erasmus, too insignificant to worry about. On a shabby, poorly equipped ship, Erasmus and the sailors had nearly frozen to death. But they’d seen ice islands several hundred feet high and half a mile long, with gigantic arches leading into caverns crowned with bluffs and fissures. Ice rafts, some carrying boulders the size of a house. The sea had been luminous, lit like silver, and the tracks they left across it looked like lightning. Their boots leaked so badly they had to wrap their feet in blankets; their pea jackets might have been made of muslin; their gun ports failed to shut out the sea. Erasmus had been awed, and very cold, the night two midshipmen first caught sight of the Antarctic continent. Climbing up the rigging to join them, he’d seen the mountains for himself and then the wall of ice that almost shattered their ship. From that journey had come Wilkes’s famous map, charting the Antarctic coast.
Everything after that was sordid; how could he tell Dr. Boerhaave? The quarrels among Wilkes and his junior officers, one ship wrecked and another sunk with all hands; crewmen massacred by the Fiji Islanders and then the retaliatory raids; floggings and a near mutiny and so many specimens lost. He fell silent for a minute. “The real point,” he finally said, “isn’t what we discovered but what happened when we returned. Everyone ignored us. Or mocked us.”
“That’s not in Wilkes’s Narrative,” Dr. Boerhaave said.
“It’s not,” Erasmus agreed. “Who ever writes about the failures?”
Yet this was the part he couldn’t get past, the part that had twisted all the years since. Wilkes court-martialed on eleven charges and then, in a fury of wounded pride, impounding all the diaries and logbooks and journals and charts, and all the specimens.
“He took our notes,” Erasmus said. “Our drawings, our paintings—he took them all.”
Back in Washington, the specimens that hadn’t been lost in transit disappeared like melting ice. Wilkes had compelled the Scientifics to work on what was left there in Washington, although all the good comparative collections and libraries were in Philadelphia. Then he’d ruined what work they completed. They’d come back to a country in the midst of a depression; what the men in Congress wanted wasn’t science but maps and guides to new sealing and whaling grounds. Wilkes, with his endless charts, had satisfied the politicians. But meanwhile he delayed the expedition’s scientific reports again and again.
“And then,” Erasmus said, “after Titian Peale and I had spent years working