Bitter Passage

by Colin Mills

In May 1845, Sir John Franklin left the Thames in command of two Royal Navy ships—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—to seek a navigable sea route across the top of the Americas.

One hundred and twenty-nine men sailed north across Baffin Bay, bound for Lancaster Sound. Three years later, they had not returned. HMS Enterprise, commanded by Captain Sir James Clark Ross, and HMS Investigator, under Captain Edward Bird, left England in 1848 to search for Franklin.

Absolute faith unsettled him. He thought it lazy for a man to submit so utterly to an invisible power, especially one so capricious.

“Look at that,” Adams said. “The wind over the water is like the breath of God. Do you know your Psalms? Oh, to ‘dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord.’”

She was the only person to whom he could ever reveal himself, and yet so many truths remained unspoken between them. The pair of them were like swordsmen dancing around in a mock bout, each anxious not to injure the other with their sharp blades.

“I think time stops here,” he said. “There is nothing to measure its passage. The seasons change, but each year is the same as the one before. If I stood on this spot a thousand years ago, I daresay it would have looked just as it does today: rock, ice, and wind.

Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.’” “Frankenstein’s last words to Walton, I believe?”

That is when I understood—beauty’s temporary nature is what makes it exquisite. We desire it so, for we know it will not last.”