The Broken Lands by Robert Edric

days, during which time the closed northern exit to Wellington Channel was explored and charted in detail.
    Returning to the broken southern shore, Franklin suggested to his officers that they might now turn their attention to finding somewhere secure to spend their first winter in the ice. Ideally, he suggested, a protected harbor to the north of Barrow Strait, somewhere
from which they might make an early crossing south at the start of the following summer upon their release.
    They continued along the coast, putting out boats daily to examine more closely those places they had seen at a distance. Few of these proved suitable and they continued to the east, the two ships leap-frogging each other as one or other of them awaited the return of its boats.
    A likely place lay somewhere close to Beechey, a small island to the south of Devon, and connected to it by a slender umbilical isthmus, on either side of which were broad shallow bays. Additionally, both Devon and Beechey offered accessible landing-places where they might spend the winter ashore if the need arose.
    They had no detailed chart of Beechey. Nor, upon the map of Devon, was there any indication of the arm of the isthmus, as narrow as twenty feet in places, which connected the two land masses.
    The small island had been named in 1819 by Parry after William Beechey, who had accompanied Franklin on his own attempt on the Pole by the direct Spitsbergen route, his belated account of this voyage having been published only two years previously.
    Naming the small island, Parry had then sailed to the west without landing upon it. He named the much larger island after his home county, and Somerset to the south after the home of one of his lieutenants.
    They came within sight of Beechey on the 29th of September and entered the shallow passage between it and the mainland, sailing as close as possible to the connecting spit. The Erebus anchored here while the Terror sailed south around the island to explore the bay on the far side of this shingle divide.
    By late afternoon the two ships lay at anchor side by side. Beechey rose to the west and south of them, offering some protection from the turbulent gathering ground of Barrow Strait beyond, and to the north stretched the sheltering cliffs of Devon. The water in the shallow bay was calm and ice-free, and although it was certain to freeze over during the coming weeks, it was unlikely, judging by the settled contours of the shoreline, that the main flow of ice would enter the
bay, either to threaten their anchorage or to prevent their eventual departure.
    Franklin, Crozier and their officers dined together that evening, toasted their safe arrival, and speculated long into the early hours about the nature of the coming winter, against the rigors of which they now needed to prepare themselves.

SEVEN
    H enry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte. He enjoyed the rhythm and flow of his names and was proud to recite them in full whenever the opportunity arose, savoring and delivering them with the same exaggerated flourish with which he signed them. He addressed himself frequently, often in self-criticism, and by using all these names it seemed to him as though he were being rebuked—usually for his carelessness or haste—by every one of the ancestors from whom he had inherited them thirty-five years earlier.
    He wore at all times a cap upon which each of the names had been embroidered in gold thread by his mother, and inside which his wife and three daughters had added their own. He was convinced that he would rather lose his two small fingers than the cap.
    Upon arriving at Beechey, he began to map the unknown terrain around them. On his first day away from the ships he was accompanied by Fitzjames, and by Little, Hodgson and Irving from the Terror. They took Lady Franklin’s dog with them and, free after its long confinement, the animal raced ahead of them along the shore, the men following in a line abreast, each with his case of equipment.