The Terror

by Dan Simmons

“Say you arrive at where you winter in the ice with seventy-five percent of your ninety tons unburned,” continued Ross, boring ahead like a ship through soft ice, “that leaves you what… how many days’ steam under normal conditions, not ice conditions? A dozen days? Thirteen days? A fortnight?”

“Then, laddie,” whispered Ross, “if we’ve not heard from ye by 1848, I’ll come looking for you myself. I swear it.”

We shall be beyond the reach of even the Hardy Whalers from this point on. As far as the World Beyond our intrepid Expedition is concerned, as Hamlet said, The rest is silence.

Captain Sir John Franklin remained serene through all of this because of two things: his faith and his wife. Sir John’s devout Christianity buoyed him up even when the press of responsibility and frustration collaborated to press him down. Everything that happened was, he knew and fervently believed, God’s will. What seemed inevitable to the others need not be in a universe administered by an interested and merciful God.

“It’s hard to describe. My own guess is that Captain Crozier is completely sober now for the first time in thirty years or more. The whiskey never seemed to compromise the man’s competence—he’s a fine sailor and officer—but it put a… buffer… a barrier… between him and the world. Now he’s there more. Missing nothing. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

coming weeks or months. Now Crozier used Blanky as a messenger. “Mr. Blanky, would you be so good as to go forward and pass the word to the men not hauling that we will not be stopping for supper? They should retrieve the cold beef and biscuits from the appropriate sledge boxes and pass them out to the Marines and men in harness along with the word that everyone should eat on the march and drink from the water bottles they carry under their outer clothing. And also please ask our guards to make sure that their weapons are ready. They might wish to remove their outer mittens.” “Yes, Captain,” said Blanky and disappeared ahead into the gloom. Crozier could hear the crunch of his hobnailed wooden foot. The captain knew that within ten minutes, every man on the march would understand that the thing on the ice was following them and closing the gap.

“I won’t forget that you were foolish enough to bring this idea to me, but I’ll try to forget the tone you used and the fact that you came like a mob of mutineers rather than like loyal members of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy wanting to talk to their captain. Go on with you now.”

If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the arctic night under a sky gone mad, toward a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilized hearth? And toward a fate too frightening to imagine.

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the last six months has persuaded him otherwise.