Minds of Winter Read online

  Also by Ed O’Loughlin

  Not Untrue and Not Unkind

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  Minds

  of

  Winter

  Ed O’Loughlin

  Copyright © 2016 Ed O’Loughlin

  Published in Canada in 2017 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Article “Horologists ponder mystery of how 19th-century chronometer survived fatal Arctic expedition,” reproduced with permission © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2009.

  “The Snow Man” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  O’Loughlin, Ed, author

  Minds of winter / Ed O’Loughlin.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0234-3 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0252-7 (EPUB).—

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0253-4 (MOBI)

  I. Title.

  PR6115.L68M55 2016 823’.92 C2016-905104-8

  C2016-907022-0

  Cover design: Jamie Keenan

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  for Simon

  The Snow Man

  One must have a mind of winter

  To regard the frost and the boughs

  Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

  And have been cold a long time

  To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

  The spruces rough in the distant glitter

  Of the January sun; and not to think

  Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

  In the sound of a few leaves,

  Which is the sound of the land

  Full of the same wind

  That is blowing in the same bare place

  For the listener, who listens in the snow,

  And, nothing himself, beholds

  Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

  Wallace Stevens

  One cannot map the sublime, or give it place names.

  Chauncey Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores

  Prologue

  Horologists ponder mystery of how 19th-century chronometer survived fatal Arctic expedition

  Timepiece linked to Sir John Franklin’s fatal Arctic exped­ition returns to Britain disguised as a carriage clock

  By Maev Kennedy

  Guardian, London,

  Wednesday 20 May 2009, 15.26 BST

  In a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, a valuable marine ­chronometer sits on a workbench in London, crudely disguised as a Victorian carriage clock, more than 150 years after it was recorded as lost in the Arctic along with Sir John Franklin and his crew in one of the most famous disasters in the history of polar exploration.

  ‘I have no answers, but the facts are completely extraordinary,’ said the senior specialist on horology at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, Jonathan Betts. ‘This is a genuine mystery.’

  When and how did the timepiece return to Britain, is it ­evidence that somebody survived the disaster, or of a crime – even murder?

  Betts has no idea – but he does know its shining brass mechan­ism could never have spent months in the ice, exposed to salt-laden Arctic gales. It must have been stolen from the ship, or from a crew member who cared for it up to the moment of their death.

  ‘This has never been lying around in the open air. I have handled a pocket watch recovered from the expedition, and it is so corroded it is not possible even to open the case. Conditions in the Arctic are so extreme this would have rusted within a day, and been a heap of rubbish within a month.’

  The chronometer returned to the same building – once the Admiralty store from which it was issued, now Betts’ clocks workshop at the Royal Observatory.

  The apparent fate of the superb timekeeper, made in London by John Arnold, after it was issued to Sir John’s ship, is clear from the official ledger also on Betts’ desk. Under ‘Arnold 294’, the faded sepia ink reads: ‘Lost in the Arctic Regions with the “Erebus”.’ In the final entry, on 26 June 1886, more than 40 years after it disappeared, it was officially written off.

  The fate of Franklin in 1845, his two superbly equipped ships carrying two years’ worth of supplies, including barrels of lemon juice to ward off scurvy, his 129 men who starved, froze and were poisoned to death in the ice, and the suggestion that some survived for a time by cannibalism, haunted the Victorian imagination.

  A record 32 rescue expeditions were sent, spurred on by his formidable widow, Jane.

  Inuit witnesses described Englishmen dying where they fell in the ice, apparently without ever asking how the natives survived such extreme conditions.

  Rescue expeditions brought back papers recording the death of Franklin, abandoned clothes and equipment, caches of supplies including poorly sealed tins of meat that may have killed many of the men, and eventually skeletons. Every scrap of evidence was recorded – but there is no record of anyone setting eyes on the chronometer again.

  It is clear to Betts that whoever converted it into a carriage clock for a suburban mantelpiece knew they were dealing with stolen property. The evidence of a crime concealed is on the dial, where Arnold’s name was beaten flat, and an invented maker’s name substituted – and then changed back again when the clock was sold 30 years ago and a restorer spotted Arnold’s name on the mechanism.

  The Observatory bought it when it came up for sale again 10 years ago, but its true history emerged when Betts dismantled it, and matched it with the 19th-century records. None of those who handled it after conversion could have guessed its connection with the Franklin expedition.

  It will be on public display for the first time in an exhibition opening on Saturday at the National Maritime museum, on ­Britain’s obsessive quest to find the legendary North West

  Passage to the east through the Arctic ice, which over centuries cost the lives of Franklin, his men and hundreds of other explorers and sailors.

  Among poignant artefacts, including a sledge flag embroidered by his widow with the motto ‘Hope on Hope Ever’, one of the still-sealed cans of meat and the revolting contents of another opened in the 1920s, visitors will see the rather dumpy carriage clock, with three fat little ball feet and a carrying handle crudely bolted onto the chronometer’s original brass case.

  Betts believes the only possible explanation for the conversion was to make Arnold 294 literally unrecognizable. Stealing a valuable piece of government property from an official expedition would have been a serious crime, punishable by transportation if not death. He yearns to know who dunnit.

  North West Passage: An Arctic Obsession, National Maritime Museum Greenwich, 23 May–20 January 2009

  North West Territories,
Canada

  They were driving on the sea ice a mile from the shore when a little brown creature ran out in front of them. It was heading out to sea, but the headlights confused it and it dithered in their beam. Nelson stood on the brakes and the car lurched to a stop, throwing Fay against her seat belt.

  ‘What is it?’ she said. And Nelson, who found he wanted to impress her, got out of the car and stood over the little animal. It had tried to hide under a tongue of drift snow but they could both see it plainly, the size of a hamster, its fur turned grey by the veneer of snow.

  Nelson put on his gloves and picked it up.

  ‘What is it?’ she said again, and he turned and held it up to her.

  ‘It’s a lemming. They live under the snow.’

  She joined him in the funnel of the lights. I’m standing on the open sea, she thought. It’s the Arctic winter, a month of night, and I’m standing on a frozen ocean, and that man is holding a lemming.

  The little rodent stopped struggling and sat quiet in Nelson’s palm, its nose twitching, staring at her with tiny black eyes. She reached out her hand then quickly withdrew it.

  ‘What’s it doing out here on the ice?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He turned a full circle, studying the problem. A mile to the south the North American mainland came to its end, a low snow-covered hump on the snow-covered sea. A timber fishing cabin, shuttered for the winter, sat on its edge, the only visible detail. To the north the sea ice stretched off to infinity, its snow carved by wind into motionless ripples. But there was no wind today, just a tremendous cold, silent apart from their idling engine.

  ‘It’s come from the land, I guess,’ he said. ‘Heading due north, right out to sea. I don’t know what it wants out there.’

  To the west, from where they had come, the ice-road curved out of view between tongues of black stubble, the willows which grew on the last sandy spits of the Mackenzie delta. To the east a distant string of lights, hard in the dusk, revealed their destination: the coastal hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk. Another ten minutes and we’d have been there, thought Fay. Instead, this. She hugged herself and shivered, already missing the warmth of the car.

  The sky was a sad shade of silver, turning pink in the south where the sun had tried and failed to clear the horizon. To the north, the stars held firm against the civil twilight.

  ‘Perhaps it’s lost,’ she said.

  Nelson cupped it in both hands. It sniffed between his fingers.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe it’s trying to kill itself. They say lemmings do that.’

  She had heard that too, of course. What else did anyone from London know about lemmings? But she had never expected to meet one. ‘I always assumed that thing about lemmings and suicide was just a legend.’

  Nelson didn’t seem to hear her. Having transferred the lemming to his left glove, he was stroking its back with one finger. The little creature stretched out its neck as if liking the attention. Nelson smiled to himself, then looked up at Fay.

  ‘I’m going to turn it around,’ he said. ‘I’ll let it go, pointing back towards the mainland. With a bit of luck it’ll find its way back to the shore. It would only die out there.’ He jutted his chin to the north. ‘Nothing to eat. Nothing to nest in.’

  That’s interfering with nature, Fay thought. But it was none of her business. The lemming was his.

  She watched Nelson cross the ice-road. Bubbles of trapped air quivered like ghosts in the black depths beneath them. At the far side he knelt and pressed the back of his glove against the ice, uncurling his fingers so the lemming could escape. But now it wouldn’t leave his glove, clinging to the bridge between index and thumb.

  ‘It doesn’t want to go,’ said Fay. ‘They must tame very easily.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ Nelson scooped the lemming from his palm, propelling it head first towards the foot of the snow bank. Startled, it vanished into its element, burrowing back towards the shore. Nelson peeled off a glove, took out a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘If you think about it,’ he said, ‘my hand is probably the only warm thing it’s ever come across in winter. No wonder it liked it.’

  They stood there together, waiting to see if the lemming would double back, bound for the sea again, and when the cigarette was finished and it hadn’t reappeared they got in the car and drove on to Tuktoyaktuk.

  Part One

  Cape Crozier

  77º30’S 169º20’E

  Van Diemen’s Land, 1841

  It had been intended that they would take the carriage all the way to the ball, but the evening was so mild that Sir John gave in to Sophia’s pleading to finish the journey on foot. These are the lieutenant-governor’s botanical gardens, Sir John reasoned; I am the lieutenant-governor: why must I take a carriage to the end of my own garden?

  So the party alighted at the magnetic observatory, that curious new wooden building crowning the hill, and – defying convention – old Sir John Franklin, viceroy of Van Diemen’s Land and famed Arctic explorer, set out on foot for a ball in his honour.

  A footman with a lantern led them down the steep path to the Derwent, though it was still light enough to see through the trees. Sir John followed after him, a fat bouncing shadow on short sailor’s legs. I ought to walk with Uncle, thought Sophia, who – her Aunt Jane being then absent, travelling in New ­Zealand – was accompanying Sir John tonight. But for now it did not matter. There would be time enough to adjust their order of march before they reached the ball, when the ladies would pause to unpin their dresses and change their shoes for satin slippers.

  Checking her pace, Sophia moved close to her younger cousin Eleanor and took her by the arm. They had quarrelled again that afternoon, and although Sophia was not yet quite ready to forgive her uncle’s daughter she needed her company now. Otherwise she might find herself walking alongside Henry Elliot, her uncle’s private secretary; it was to escape Elliot’s unwelcome proximity in the carriage that Sophia had campaigned to finish the journey on foot.

  Eleanor, feeling her cousin’s touch, turned her head and smiled up at Sophia. Their dresses whispered together as they walked side by side. In the darkness behind them Lieutenant Kay, who had taken leave of his magnetic duties to attend the ball, was attempting to interest Elliot in his science, his phrases syncopated by the tramping of their shoes. And young Henry Elliot, son of the Earl of Minto and destined for high service, responded to the eager naval scientist with a lack of interest so beautifully polite, so drily amused, that Sophia had herself only teased out its meaning that morning.

  It pained her still to think of that instant of revelation. It had occurred very close to where they were now, as she had walked in the gardens with Elliot, confiding to him her opinions of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the winter sun bright on the Derwent Water, and she had glanced sideways for a moment, to assure herself of his enchantment, and had noticed for the first time, truly noticed, that he had long since fallen silent, and that, as he looked away from her, back towards the town itself and his place in the governor’s office, there was a curiously droll turn to the corners of his lips. She had herself fallen quiet, and to his credit Elliot had made every appearance of alarm and consideration when she had stammered an excuse – that she had left her book on a bench by Commander Crozier’s magnetic observatory, which stood in a clearing nearby – and went back to look for it. She would fetch it herself; Elliot’s duties must be calling him.

  What a cold little person he was. Quite insubstantial and un­romantic compared to the officers of Erebus and Terror, lately returned from their glorious Antarctic cruise. But why should she concern herself with Elliot, or feel slighted in any way? It was not as if she had set her cap at him. He was known to have an understanding with a young lady in England.

  They passed out of a grove of native Australian gum trees which, not yet felled by the botanic custodians, screened the magnet
ic observatory from the river below. As one, Sophia and Eleanor came to a halt and even Lieutenant Kay fell silent. Sir John, taken aback, took off his cocked hat and wiped his forehead, which already glistened from the short walk. ‘Well, now,’ he said. ‘Well now indeed.’

  ‘They are on fire, Sophia!’ whispered Eleanor, and she squeezed Sophia’s arm.

  Beneath them, lashed together in the estuary, the Terror and the Erebus blazed from stem to stern. They are bomb ships, recalled Sophia, who had studied her uncle’s profession. That is why they were given such infernal names. Perhaps, being creatures of fire, that is why the Admiralty has opposed them to the ice.

  Lieutenant Kay was beside them now, smiling. ‘It’s a clever device, is it not? There are hundreds of mirrors fixed in the rigging, multiplying the lights of the lanterns and candles. I was aboard Terror this morning when the boatswain collected the men’s shaving mirrors. The rest of the mirrors are trade goods, carried as gifts for any savages they should meet.’

  They stood a few moments longer, admiring the scene. The two little ships, dressed with every scrap from their flag lockers, were merely the brightest stars in a constellation of lights. Braced thirty yards offshore in a web of taut cables, they were approached by a pontoon made of row-boats lashed together, decked with planks, roofed with canvas and decorated with silver wattles. This floating bridge was set on either side with lines of burning torches that danced with their own reflections in the tide. The river too flickered with fireflies – the boats of guests who arrived by water, or of uninvited townsfolk who had come to watch and listen from outside the circle of light. Music was loud across the water: the band of the 51st Regiment of Foot striking up an air. Sophia, entranced, heard the notes step out boldly then artfully trip themselves, like a pretty girl with a club-foot, at once jaunty, romantic and sad. She found herself fixed to the spot, listening, while her uncle and Lieutenant Kay hurried after the footman who had continued down the path. Perhaps it is just this occasion that moves me, Sophia thought, and the lights on the water. Perhaps it is not that music at all.