The Ice Child by Elizabeth Cooke

lives upon it, the Esquimaux. Crozier, Smith told him after barely a week at sea, was a hunter who could bring down the caribou and trap foxes. Crozier was a singing man, Smith said, with a fine Irish voice, quite fair and light. And Crozier could dance, and did dance, with the Esquimaux women, and he could play a penny pipe, and he could tell good stories, and he arranged theater plays and helped the men act in them. And he was a jolly sort, Smith said—all this information imparted while Smith hung in a hammock bunk above him at night, and the ship heaved and rolled—yes, the captain was a true jolly sort when he was not black dogged, as all men were black dogged sometimes without light or women or change of company.
    “Course,” Smith told him one night as they ate at the galley table, “he’ll never take command of a voyage, like Franklin.”
    Gus had stuffed the last piece of bread greedily into his mouth. “Why?” he asked.
    “Never command an expedition. He ain’t no gentleman.”
    “He is too,” Gus objected.
    Smith just laughed. “He weren’t brought up with a silver spoon in London,” he said. “He’s like the rest of us, ballast. Be he the best that ever were on the sea, bring his ship through fire and storm and monster, even find the Orient—you’ll see. They’ll not give him a knighthood like Ross. They’ll not have him to see Her Majesty. Not him.”
    There was a silence around the table.
    “I’m not ballast,” Gus finally said.
    “We all are, boy,” Smith retorted. “Think we’ll partake in the glory when we get home? Think that? Think you’ll sit down with fine ladies? Think Parlyment will grant yer a living? Think they’ll hold any parade for yer?” Smith began to laugh. “No, they won’t. And neither will they for he.”
    A couple of the seamen opposite nodded assent as Gus glanced around the table.
    “Ballast,” Smith repeated, wiping his tin plate with his sleeve. “Needful for a ship, boy. Make no mistake. But not one of them, like Sir John. Not us, lad. And not Crozier. Not him.”
    The voyage across the Atlantic was stormy.
    The Erebus carried heavy sail, and the ship roared on through high seas, occasionally losing sight of the Terror . On June 27 a thick fog came down as they rounded Greenland. On board the Terror they could see nothing, not even the sturdy little Baretto Junior , the transport that accompanied them.
    Gus was allowed up on deck that morning. Alongside him at the rail was Wildfinch, a boy of nineteen from Woolwich, who had suffered terribly with seasickness and was able to stand, in the little swell of the fog, for the first real time.
    “Are there Esquimaux here, Gus?” he asked.
    “Yes,” Gus said. “All down this shore, and Danish.”
    “And where we dock, in Disko?”
    “Yes.”
    Wildfinch turned to look at him. He had a broad, flat, open-looking face, very thin hair for a lad, and skin with little red lesions, like red fleabites. Torrington had said that Wildfinch came from Whitechapel, a place that Gus knew only by reputation. There was a rumor that Wildfinch’s mother was a pure-gatherer, scouring the streets at night for animal droppings to sell to tanneries. The other men said it as a joke, but Gus thought it a better living than others in Whitechapel. At least Wildfinch’s mother wasn’t a whore, or a thief.
    He felt sorry for the lad, who, at seven years his elder and a good foot taller than him, nevertheless seemed lost.
    “Are they wild?” Wildfinch asked.
    “Who?”
    “The Indians.”
    Gus smiled. “Not as wild as anything in Whitechapel,” he said.
    Wildfinch reddened.
    “They are good hunters,” Gus said. “They’ll come alongside. They’ll barter. You can give them something, a piece of soap, or candles, or cloth, and they’ll give you maybe a tobacco pouch. It’s all in skin, Robert. They sew skins something perfect, they do. Furs and the like.”
    Wildfinch looked out in the direction of the coast, east of