Voyage of the Narwhal Read online

  THE

  VOYAGE OF THE

  NARWHAL

  A NOVEL

  ANDREA BARRETT

  Dedication

  FOR CAROL HOUCK SMITH

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  PART I

  1. His Lists (May 1855)

  2. Past the Cave Where the Cold Arises (June–July 1855)

  3. A Riot of Objects (July–August 1855)

  4. A Little Detour (August–September 1855)

  PART II

  5. The Ice in Its Great Abundance (October 1855–March 1856)

  6. Who Hears the Fishes When They Cry? (April–August 1856)

  7. The Goblins Known as Innersuit (August–October 1856)

  PART III

  8. Toodlamik, Skin and Bones (November 1856–March 1857)

  9. A Big Stone Slipped from His Grasp (April–August 1857)

  10. Specimens of the Native Tribes (September 1857)

  11. The Nightmare Skeleton (October 1857–August 1858)

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Note on the Illustrations

  Copyright

  Also by Andrea Barrett

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  The Narwhal

  Arctic Navigation

  Mount of Polar Bear on Ice Floe

  Forms of Icebergs

  A Well-made Dry Deer Skin

  Scaling an Iceberg

  Drifting in the Ice

  Rough Skeleton of a Small Animal

  A Squirrel Partly Skinned, Showing Process

  Walrus Skull and Tusks

  Among Hummocks

  Framework for Mounting a Skin

  Skeleton of a Bird Mounted and Drying

  Inuit Implements

  Laboratory Skeleton Mounted and Drying

  The Woman’s Knife

  I hate travelling and explorers. . . . Amazonia, Tibet and Africa fill the bookshops in the form of travelogues, accounts of expeditions and collections of photographs, in all of which the desire to impress is so dominant as to make it impossible for the reader to assess the value of the evidence put before him. Instead of having his critical faculties stimulated, he asks for more such pabulum and swallows prodigious quantities of it. Nowadays, being an explorer is a trade, which consists not, as one might think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts after years of study, but in covering a great many miles and assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in color, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succession. For this audience, platitudes and commonplaces seem to have been miraculously transmuted into revelations by the sole fact that their author, instead of doing his plagiarizing at home, has supposedly sanctified it by covering some twenty thousand miles. . . . Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories. . . . So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable.

  —CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS, Tristes Tropiques (1955)

  PART I

  1

  HIS LISTS

  (MAY 1855)

  I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There . . . the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendor. There . . . snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe . . . What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?

  —MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein (1818)

  He was standing on the wharf, peering down at the Delaware River while the sun beat on his shoulders. A mild breeze, the smells of tar and copper. A few yards away the Narwhal loomed, but he was looking instead at the partial reflection trapped between hull and pilings. The way the planks wavered, the railing bent, the boom appeared then disappeared; the way the image filled the surface without concealing the complicated life below. He saw, beneath the transparent shadow, what his father had taught him to see: the schools of minnows, the eels and algae, the mussels burrowing into the silt; the diatoms and desmids and insect larvae sweeping past hydrazoans and infant snails. The oyster, his father once said, is impregnated by the dew; the pregnant shells give birth to pearls conceived from the sky. If the dew is pure, the pearls are brilliant; if cloudy, the pearls are dull. Far above him, but mirrored as well, long strands of cloud moved one way and gliding gulls another.

  In the water the Narwhal sat solid and dark among the surrounding fleet. Everyone headed somewhere, Erasmus thought. England, Africa, California; stony islands alive with seals; the coast of Florida. Yet no one, among all those travelers, who might offer him advice. He turned back to his work. Where was this mound of supplies to go? An untidy package yielded, beneath its waterproof wrappings, a dozen plum puddings that brought him near to tears. Each time he arranged part of the hold more of these parcels appeared: a crate of damson plums in syrup from an old woman in Conshohocken who’d read about their voyage in the newspaper and wanted to contribute her bit. A case of brandy from a Wilmington banker, volumes of Thackeray from a schoolmaster in Doylestown, heaps of hand-knitted socks. His hands bristled with lists, each only partly checked-off: never mind those puddings, he thought. Where were the last two hundred pounds of pemmican? How had half the meat biscuit been stowed with the candles and the lamp oil? And where were the last members of the crew? In his pocket he had another list, the final roster:

  ZECHARIAH VOORHEES, Commander AMOS TYLER, Sailing Master

  COLIN TAGLIABEAU, First Officer GEORGE FRANCIS, Second Officer

  JAN BOERHAAVE, Surgeon ERASMUS D. WELLS, Naturalist

  FREDERICK SCHUESSELE, Cook

  THOMAS FORBES, Carpenter

  Seamen:

  ISAAC BOND, NILS JENSEN, ROBERT CAREY,

  BARTON DESOUZA, IVAN HRUSKA,

  FLETCHER LAMB, SEAN HAMILTON

  Fifteen of them, all hands counted. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, and Mr. Francis, who together would have charge of the ship’s daily operations, were experienced whaling men. Dr. Boerhaave had a medical degree from Edinburgh; Schuessele had been cook for a New York packet line; Forbes was an Ohio farm boy who’d never been to sea, but who could fashion anything from a few odd scraps of wood. Of the seven unevenly trained seamen, Bond had reported for duty drunk, and Hruska and Hamilton were still missing.

  Their companions, invisible in the hold, waited for directions—waited, Erasmus feared, for him to fail. He was forty years old and had a history of failure; he’d sailed, when hardly more than a boy, on a voyage so thwarted it became a national joke. Since then his life’s work had come to almost nothing. No wife, no children, no truly close friends; a sister in a difficult situation. What he had now was this pile of goods, and a second chance.

  Still pondering the puddings, he heard laughter and looked up to see Zeke hanging from the rigging like a flag. His long arms were stretched above a thatch of golden hair; as he laughed his teeth were gleaming in his mouth; he was twenty-six and made Erasmus feel like a fossil. Everything about this moment was tied to Zeke. The hermaphrodite brig abou
t to become their home had once been part of Zeke’s family’s packet line; with his father’s money, Zeke had ordered oak sheathing spiked to her sides as protection against the ice, iron plates wrapped around her bows, tarred felt layered between the double-planked decks. In charge of the expedition—and hence, Erasmus reminded himself, of him—Zeke had chosen Erasmus to gather the equipment and stores surrounding him now in such bewildering heaps.

  Where was all this to go? Salt beef and pork and barrels of malt, knives and needles for barter with the Esquimaux, guns and ammunition, coal and wood, tents and cooking lamps and woolen clothing, buffalo skins, a library, enough wooden boards to house over the deck in an emergency. And what about the spirit thermometers, or the four chronometers, the microscope, and all the stores for his specimens: spirits of wine, loose gauze, prenumbered labels and glass jars, arsenical soap for preserving bird skins, camphor and pillboxes for preserving insects, dissecting scissors, watch glasses, pins, string, glass tubes and sealing wax, bungs and soaked bladders, brain hooks and blowpipes and egg drills, a sweeping net . . . too many things.

  Erasmus stroked the wolf skins his youngest brother had sent from the Utah mountains. Just then he would have given anything for an hour’s conversation with Copernicus, who understood what it meant to leave a life. But Copernicus was gone, still, again, and the wolf skins were handsome, but where would they fit? The sledges, specially constructed after Zeke’s own design, had arrived two weeks late and wouldn’t fit into the space Erasmus had planned for them; and he couldn’t arrange the scientific equipment in any reasonable way. Every inch of the cabin was full, and they were not yet in it.

  On the Narwhal Zeke slipped his feet from the stay, hung by one hand for a second, and then dropped lightly to the deck. Soon he joined Erasmus among the wharf’s clutter, moving the theodolite and uncovering a crate of onions. “These look nice,” he said. “Do we have enough?”

  While they went over the provision lists yet again, Mr. Tagliabeau walked up with the news that their cook had deserted. He’d last been seen two days earlier, Mr. Tagliabeau reported. In the company of a red-headed woman who’d been haunting the docks.

  Zeke, his hands deep in onions, only laughed. “I saw that hussy,” he said. “What a flashing eye she had! But that it should be Schuessele who got her, with that monstrous beard of his. . .”

  The wind tore one of Erasmus’s lists away and sent it spinning through the masts. “We’re leaving in three days!” he shouted. Later he’d remember this display with embarrassment. “Three days. Where are we going to find another cook?”

  “There’s no need to get excited,” Zeke said. “The world is full of cooks. Mr. Tagliabeau, if you’d be so kind as to take a small recruiting tour among the taverns . . .”

  “Wonderful,” Erasmus said. “Do find us some criminal, some drunken sot.”

  They might have quarreled had not a group of young men dressed in Lincoln-green frock coats, white pantaloons, and straw hats trailing black ostrich feathers come dancing up the wharf. The United Toxophilites, Erasmus saw, making a surprise farewell to Zeke. The sight made him groan. Once he’d been part of this group of archers; once this had all seemed charming. Resurrecting the old sport of archery, flourishing the arrows retrieved from those first, magical trips to the Plains—as a boy, he’d participated in a meet that drew two thousand guests. But he’d lost his taste for such diversions after the Exploring Expedition, and he’d let his association with the Toxies lapse. Zeke, though, was part of the new young crowd that had taken over the club.

  “Voorhees!” the Toxies cried. All around them, crews from other ships stared. “Voorhees! Voorhees!”

  They gave Zeke three great cheers, hauled him down the length of the wharf, and formed a circle around him. Erasmus received courteous nods but no recognition. He listened to the mocking, high-spirited speeches, which likened Zeke to a great Indian chief setting off on a buffalo hunt. One youngster with a shock of red hair presented Zeke with a chalice; an elflike boy offered a patent-leather belt from which dangled a grease box and a tassel. Zeke accepted his gifts with a smile and a handshake, thanking each man by name and showing the poise that had made Erasmus’s sister call him a natural leader.

  Yet what had Zeke done? So very little, Erasmus thought as he eyed the grease box. A few years of sailing from Philadelphia to Dublin and Hull on the ships of his father’s packet line, investigating currents and ocean creatures, although often, as he’d admitted to Erasmus, he’d been too seasick to work. Other than that all his learning came from books. As a boy he’d insinuated his way into Erasmus’s family, through their fathers’ friendship and an interest in natural history. Now they were further bound by Lavinia. But that Erasmus should be standing in Zeke’s shadow, setting off for the arctic under the command of this untried youth—again he was amazed by his decision.

  Zeke, as if he heard what Erasmus was thinking, broke through the circle of green-coated men, seized Erasmus’s arm, and drew him into the center. “I couldn’t do this without Erasmus Darwin Wells,” he cried. “Three cheers for our chief naturalist, my right hand!”

  Erasmus blushed. Was this what he wanted? A kind of worship, mixed with disdain; as if Zeke wanted to emulate him, but without his flaws. But exactly this grudging caution had stranded him alone in midlife, and he pushed the thought aside. When the Toxies presented their green-and-gold pennant, he grasped the end marked with a merry archer and smiled at Zeke. Zeke made a speech of thanks; Erasmus made a shorter one, not mentioning that he’d known the club’s founders or that he’d learned to shoot a bow when some of these men were still children. As he spoke he saw Captain Tyler hanging over the Narwhal’s rail, gazing curiously at them. His face, Erasmus thought, was the size and color of a ham.

  The Toxies departed, Zeke climbed back on the Narwhal, and Erasmus was once more alone. He folded the pennant and tucked it into the wolf skins. Then he reconsidered the stowing of the sledges: back to front in a line down the center of the hold? or piled in a tight tower near the bow? He worked quietly for an hour, pushing down his worries by the repeated checking of items against his lists. Mr. Tagliabeau interrupted him, returning to the wharf in the company of a fresh-faced, dark-haired, blue-eyed boy.

  “Ned Kynd,” Mr. Tagliabeau said. “Twenty years of age.” Zeke hopped down to investigate. After making introductions all around, Mr. Tagliabeau added, “Ned would like to join our expedition.”

  Zeke, hovering once more near the mound of supplies, looked Ned over. “You’ve had experience cooking?”

  “In three places,” the boy said shyly. As he listed them, all in the rough area by the wharves, Erasmus noted his heavy Irish accent.

  “And have you been to sea?” Zeke asked.

  Ned blushed. “Just once, sir. When I made my crossing.”

  “But the sea suits you?”

  “My . . . circumstances then were not such that anyone could have enjoyed them. But I believe I would have, if I’d had work and meals and a place to sleep. I enjoyed being on deck very much. I like to watch the birds and fish.”

  “You’d be cooking for fifteen men,” Erasmus said. “You’re capable of that?”

  “I wouldn’t like to boast, but many a night I’ve cooked for three or four times that number. I was at a logging camp in the Adirondacks for some time, before I made my way to this city. Loggers are hungry men.”

  Zeke laid a hand on Erasmus’s shoulder. “If he can feed loggers, he can surely feed us.”

  “You’d be bunking in the forecastle,” Erasmus said. “With the seamen. They can be a bit rough.”

  “Not rougher than loggers, I wouldn’t guess.”

  “Done, then,” Zeke said. “And welcome. Gather your things and say your good-byes, we leave in three days.” Off he went, bounding down the wharf like an antelope.

  And so it was that Ned, hastily engaged to fill Schuessele’s shoes, came to join the expedition. Later Erasmus would think many times how little might have steered
Ned away. Mr. Tagliabeau might not have bumped into him beneath the chandler’s awning; the Toxies’ ostrich-feathered hats might have spooked him had he arrived but a few minutes earlier; Zeke might not have been there to interview him had he arrived but a little later. Any small coincidence might have done.

  THAT NIGHT ERASMUS was sleepless again. In the Repository, his family’s little natural history museum, he rose and paced the floors and tried to understand what he’d been doing. For twelve years he’d been camped out here, his world contracted to display cabinets stuffed with dead animals, boxes of seeds and trays of fossils, the occasional stray beam of light shining through the windows like a message from another planet. Framed engravings of eminent naturalists leaned down from the bookshelves, watching benignly as he bent to work that wasn’t work, and went nowhere. Who could understand that life? Or how he’d decided, finally, to leave it?

  Across the garden loomed the house he hadn’t slept in for more than a decade. Everything showed his father’s hand, from the carved ferns on the moldings to his own name. He was Erasmus Darwin for the British naturalist, grandfather to the young man who’d set off on the Beagle; his brothers were named after Copernicus, Linnaeus, and Alexander von Humboldt. Four boys gaping up at their father like nestlings waiting for worms. An engraver and printer by trade, Frank Wells’s passion had been natural history and his truest friends the Peales and the Bartrams, Thomas Nuttall and Thomas Say, Audubon of the beautiful birds and poor peculiar Rafinesque, who’d died in a garret downtown.

  On summer evenings, down by the creek, Mr. Wells had read Pliny’s Natural History to his sons. Pliny the Elder had died of his scientific curiosity, he’d said; the fumes of Vesuvius had choked him when he’d lingered to watch the smoke and lava. But before that he’d compiled a remarkable collection of what he’d believed to be facts. Some true, some false—but even the false still useful for the beauty with which they were expressed, and for what they said about the ways men conceived of each other, and of the world. Sometimes pacing, sometimes sitting on a tuft of grass, Erasmus’s father had passed down Pliny’s descriptions of extraordinary peoples living beyond the edge of the known. A race of nomads with legs like snakes; a race of forest dwellers running swiftly on feet pointed backward; a single-legged race who move by hopping and then rest by lying on their backs and raising their singular feet above their heads, like small umbrellas. Stories, not science—but useful as a way of thinking about the great variety and mutability of human nature. How easily, he’d said, might we not exist at all. How easily might we be transformed into something wholly different.