The Broken Lands by Robert Edric

boat, however, Franklin told him to remain aboard. Fitzjames stopped himself from asking why. Like many others, Franklin considered that the men ashore had done insufficient to help themselves while the opportunity to do so had still existed, and calling for silence he reminded all those around him that they were now in the Arctic, where the price of a mistake was all too often the life of the man who made it. Crozier stood beside him and nodded emphatically, looking hard at Fitzjames as he did so.
    Only fifteen years earlier, so many vessels had been caught by the sudden onset of the winter ice in that same part of the bay—known by whalers as the “breaking-up yard”—that over a thousand men had found themselves camped out on the ice. They had retrieved
most of their stores and then burned what remained of their vessels to keep warm. Not one of them had died or suffered anything but the slightest effects of scurvy before being rescued or reaching safety.
    The tales of individual vessels spread just as quickly and widely. In 1832 the Shannon of Hull had struck a berg there and lost sixteen men and three boys as she sank. Clinging to the wreckage, the frostbitten survivors were without food or fresh water for twenty-three days and kept themselves alive by drinking the blood of the three of their number who died during their ordeal. They had been rescued in a frozen stupor by a Danish brig, the drained corpses of their shipmates still among them.
     
    Captain Dannet saw the two ships on the morning of the 26th. His mate sighted them first and called him on deck. The sea in the Middle Passage was calm, and visibility good under a cloudless sky. There were bergs of all sizes scattered around them, but none of these presented any obstacle to the vessels navigating the broad channels between them.
    The Prince of Wales was moored to the largest of the surrounding bergs, one twice her own length, half as high and with a flat top. One of their boats had been pulled up on to this level surface and several men were now busy there unwinding and recoiling their harpoon lines.
    Dannet had made his first kill the previous evening, an immature female pike-whale, and this was lashed to his stern. A fog had come down an hour after the kill and they had been unable to flense and render the fish. This was now the task of the men gathered on the ice.
    On the Erebus, Fitzjames, Gore and Reid examined the whaler and the activity on the berg. Reid was the first to spot the fish, his attention drawn to it by the flock of birds which hovered above.
    Fitzjames gave the order to take in part of their sail.
    “Shall we wait for Sir John?” Gore asked. He had just eaten a large breakfast and the thought of seeing the whaler at work repulsed him.
    “She’s only a small fish,” Reid observed.

    Franklin, Fitzjames knew, would want to make contact with the vessel to determine the state of the ice further west. They were fifteen degrees east of the entrance to Lancaster Sound, their course west-southwest, and the ice was certain to be thicker and faster-moving the further they now sailed.
    The Erebus and Terror had been fourteen days in the bay and this was their first sighting of another vessel close enough to make contact. They too had spent the night moored in the lee of a small berg in the fog, and throughout the night the hulls of both ships had rubbed and ground along the ice, causing those who were new to the experience to wake in panic with fears of being holed in the darkness.
    The Erebus drew closer to the whaler and came alongside. A boat was lowered and Fitzjames, Gore, Reid and Des Voeux rowed across to her. Dannet greeted them and helped them aboard. On the far side of his ship the men on the ice hauled the head of the small whale up on to the level surface, and when this was done, Dannet untied the tail and let it fall back into the water with a loud slap. A minute later the whole carcass was lifted free and the claver of the birds