#outstanding stuff

Giggle giggle.

Chapter Forty-Nine: Crozier

The southward journey continues, or at least tries to...

Whether asleep or awake, Crozier is beset on all sides by nightmares. In the few minutes of sleep he can catch, he has visions of his Memo Moira sending him up to receive the Eucharist from a giant, dripping Tuunbaq-like priest who rises up out of the floor and reeks of blood. "He knows that his life will never be the same after receiving the Papist Eucharist. And he also knows that his life will end if he does not receive it." And in his waking hours, he and the men are subjected to the constant, terrifying feeling that the ice beneath them is breaking up to swallow them whole, as well as the news from Goodsir that their constant ice-slicked, sweat-dampened state is ruining the men's feet, rotting them gangrenously away and necessitating amputations.

Those unimaginably awful conditions are one thing I do feel the book captures better than the show often is able to (for obvious practical reasons, but still...). "The Holland tents were soaked and never dried. The sleeping bags...were soaked and frozen inside and out and never dried. When the men awoke in the morning after a few stolen minutes of fitful sleep - no amount of shivering could make one warmer..." Like, just the mental toll of being that cold for that long alone is bad enough! :(((

They're constantly trying to hunt but are constantly unsuccessful. They've shot at a few seals on the ice floes but the animals have always managed to escape down into the water to die before the men can reach them. ("Sometimes the hunters knelt on the ice to lap at the blood.")

One bright spot in all the darkness is the legendary Mr Diggle, who somehow manages to remain "the same energetic, obscene, efficient, bellowing, and somehow reassuring figure he had been for three years at his post... aboard HMS Terror." "...always the optimist...", Diggle has even cobbled together a crude seal-oil stove so as to be ready in the event that one of the hunting parties finally sees some success.

Still, even that optimism isn't enough and Crozier's thoughts grow darker... He reasons that the only thing that would really help them now would be to finally manage to kill Tuunbaq, who continues to stalk them. He still believes Tuunbaq to be a real animal of flesh and blood (unlike the rest of the men who believe it a wrathful god) and can't help but think not only of the feast Tuunbaq's body would provide but of the morale boost too. "So they would eat well for many week if they did manage to murder their murderer. And with every bite, Crozier knew, even eating the thing-flesh as they were the salt pork while on the march, there would be the pleasure of revenge, even if it had to be a dish best served cold."

The lengths he contemplates going to in order to accomplish this almost don't bear thinking about. First, he considers using himself as bait: "If it would work, Francis Crozier knew he would set himself out onto the ice as bait. If it would work. If it would save and feed even a few of his men."

Then, he thinks about bodies... He remembers Private Wilkes, who was pulled from the water just before the ice closed back over the drowned Marines, but who died from the cold shortly afterwards anyway. He thinks of how they just his left his body out on the ice when they moved on when they could've used it for bait. And he thinks of David Leys now - the man who's lain catatonic and useless since Tuunbaq's attack on Blanky. Not even the likes of Hickey and Aylmore seem to have thought of leaving Leys behind (or worse) but Crozier has... "But everyone must have had the same thought..." "Eat them." "Eat Leys first, then the others when they die." "Francis Crozier was so hungry that he could imagine eating human flesh. He would not kill a man in order to devour him - not yet - but once dead, why should all that meat be left behind to rot in the arctic summer sun?"

Crozier thinks briefly of the whaling ship Essex, the one famously sunk by a sperm whale in 1820, leaving her crew to drift and descend into cannibalism and almost all perish in their tiny whaleboats in the Pacific. Hard to tell whether it comes from Simmons himself, or is more on Crozier's part as a character but there's a bit that strikes me as amusing. Crozier recalls that the Essex's crew made landfall on Henderson Island but quickly found that the animals and plant life there would not be enough to sustain them. Conveniently left out is the fact that there wasn't enough animal and plant life because the crew went absolutely fuckin' hog-wild and burnt through it all, depleting all of the island's natural resources in the space of barely a fuckin' week! Like, God love them the poor bugger's were starving, but even still, they were the reason there wasn't enough food to last on that island!

Back in colder climes, the Expedition's men continue to drift, the ice being too weirdly broken up for them to row/sail/haul with any kind of purpose. Crozier maps their position as best he can and eventually realises just where they are: "We're in the strait. And since we have to be north of the Adelaide Peninsula, we've completed the goal of the Sir John Franklin Expedition. This is the North-West Passage. By God, you've done it." "There was a weak cheer followed by some coughing."