The Journals of the Lost Donner Expedition

[MUSIC] 19th of May, 1845, we left England on a morning so bright and clear that half the man on deck called it a good omen. The whole of Greenhive had come down to the water to see us off, more people than I'd ever seen gathered in one place. And they were still arriving in carts and on foot, even as our lines were being cast free. Somewhere in the crowd a band was playing, though with all the noise around it I couldn't have told you what. Wives stood at the edge of the crowd holding their children up so the little ones could watch their fathers wave from the rail. Mother's pressed handkerchiefs to their mouths and tried to smile anyway, the way mothers do when they've decided not to let their sons see them cry. A steam tug took our line not long after and told us down past the mouth of the Thames, since there was no wind worth trusting that close to shore. And I remember standing at the rail, watching Greenhive get smaller and smaller behind us until it was just another smudge of grey along the coast. Sir John came out onto the deck of the Arabus before we weighed anchor and set a few words to the men close enough to hear him. But I remember him telling us our names would be written into the history of the world and that England would remember every man who sailed with him that day. I was proud to be one of those men, prouder than I had any right to be a 26 years old with nothing to my name but a lieutenant's commission. When the last line came off the dock and the current caught us, the whole harbour let out a cheer loud enough to send every goal on the rigging up into the air at once. And for a while that was the only sound any of us could hear. By the second week out I'd come to know the men I'd be living alongside and found I liked most of them well enough. Captain Reed ran the ship firm and checked the weather glass himself rather than trust another man's reading of it. Dr. Sutter, our surgeon, kept mostly to himself and never once grumbled over some small ache that didn't deserve his time. Ashby, who kept our charts, spoke so rarely that when he did say something the rest of us stopped talking to hear it. Hurst, the Boatson, had a voice that could carry across a gale and used it whether he needed to or not. Davey, barely 17 and on his first voyage, spent the first fortnight seasick and ashamed of it until half the older hands admitted they'd been the same at his age. Finn, our cook, complained about the flower every day without fail and I think the men would have worried more if he'd ever stop. We were on the whole as decent a crew as any man could hope to sail with. Most days ran the same after that and I came to like the sameness of it. We were up before dawn for the watch change, then there was the scrubbing of the decks, then whatever work Hurst had lined up for whoever wasn't needed elsewhere. In the evenings, once the work was done, men played cards or mended their clothes or just sat around talking about home. And I got into the habit of walking the deck after supper before turning in, watching the light change over the water. It was, in its own way, about as fine a way to spend a summer as I could have asked for, even as the air turned colder, weak by weak the further north we went. A few things from those weeks I remember more clearly than the rest, though none of them seemed to mean anything at the time. We ran into weather twice before we reached Greenland, nothing worse than any of the older hands had seen a dozen times before. Both times the wind picked up in the afternoon and didn't let go until the following morning. The ship rolling hard enough that half of us gave up trying to sleep and just held on until it passed. And both storms blew themselves out inside a day, leaving the decks washed clean by the rain and the men in decent spirits for having come through them. Somewhere past the Orkneys, we saw our first ice, small and scattered, drifting past the hole like pieces of a broken plate. And then bigger as the days went on until whole birds rose out of the water taller than our masts, blue-white and quiet. And the men would stop whatever they were doing just to watch one pass. Off the coast of Greenland, a whale surfaced, not twenty feet from where I stood at the rail. Close enough that I heard the breath leave its blowhold before I even saw the spray and Davy nearly went over the side trying to get a better look at it. If anything, I remember them now as some of the best weeks of my life. It was somewhere past the whalefish island that I first noticed the compass giving Ashby trouble. He mentioned it to Captain Reed almost in passing, already braced to be told it was nothing. The needle would swing a few degrees off true and then settle back again a minute later with nobody having touched it. And Ashby said this was ordinary enough that far north that compasses did strange things so close to the pole and Captain Reed agreed with him. And that was the end of it. Nobody thought to bring it up again. A few nights after that, Davy called me over to look at his watch lantern. He didn't say why, only pointed. The flame inside the glass leaned hard to one side. Nothing was pulling at it. The sails above us were dead still, the air too calm to move a flame at all. We stood and watched it a minute or two without saying anything. Then Davy laughed, a little too quick and said the glass must be warped and we went back to our watch and didn't speak of it again. I've thought back often on the last ordinary evening we had, there was almost nothing remarkable about it. We had good weather that day, clear skies and barely a breath of wind, the kind of evening that made a man forget how far north we'd actually come. The sky stayed light long past midnight, the way it does up there in summer, pale gold along the horizon, even at two in the morning. And a few of the men stayed up on deck past the end of their watches just to look at it, myself among them. Fenn had managed something almost resembling a proper supper and there was some laughing over cards below decks. And Hurst told a story about a voyage he'd been on years before that nobody quite believed, but everyone enjoyed hearing anyway. I went to my bunk that night, the same as I'd done every night since Green High and slept without trouble. I didn't know that night that it would be the last one. 3rd of September, 1845. The ice closed around us for good on that day and there was no pretending otherwise. The pack had been tightening for the better part of two weeks, but we kept telling ourselves it would open again the way it always had before. It didn't. Hurst went out onto the ice one morning to take a sounding the way he did most mornings. And when he came back, he told Captain Reed, "Planes anything that we weren't moving again until the ice let us." I remember standing at the rail that first morning, listening to the ice work against the hull. A low grinding sound that came up through the deckboards and into your boots if you stood still enough to feel it. The ship tilted a few degrees to Starbird as the pressure built up around her sides, not enough to worry a man who knew ships the way Captain Reed did, but enough that anyone walking the deck, those first few days, caught themselves adjusting their step without quite meaning to. By the end of the week, nobody adjusted for it anymore. We walked the tilted deck the same as we'd have walked a level one, same as we did everything else that winter that we had no choice but to get used to. Nobody took it too hard, not at first. Spring would free us, Captain Reed had told the men, same as it freed every ship that got caught this way, and there wasn't a man aboard who didn't want to believe him. We had provisions enough, we had coal enough. All we had to do, he said, was see out the winter and let the ice do what ice always does eventually, which is melt. That's how it was supposed to go at least. What happened instead was that the weeks turned into months and the months war on us in ways I don't think any of us had let ourselves imagine back in September. The coal went faster than it should have, because Captain Reed had the ration cut twice before Christmas, and by January we were sleeping in every stitch of clothing we owned just to keep from waking up shivering. Some of the tinned food had gone bad for reasons nobody could explain, the tins swelling up and stinking when they were opened, and Fenn took to checking each one before he'd let it near the pot, though even he couldn't catch all of them. Then came the scurvy. It came on slow enough that a man could tell himself for weeks his gums were only sore from the cold, that his knee only ached because he'd slept on it wrong, until one morning he'd find a bruise the size of a shilling on his arm that hadn't been there the night before. From nothing at all. Dr. Sutter did what he could, which by his own account wasn't much, and he took to walking the lower deck twice a day just to look at the men's faces because he said he could tell who was going downhill before they could tell him themselves. Frostbite took two fingers off one of Hurst's hands by February and cost another man most of his toes. I watched men who'd been steady and good-natured back in Greenhithe, turned short-empered and quick to argue over nothing. over whose watch it was, over a missing spoon. I don't blame any of them for it now. Davey took it about as hard as anyone. He turned 18 somewhere in there, though nobody made much of it, and I caught him more than once, sitting alone below decks with his knees pulled up to his chest, not doing anything, just sitting. When I asked him about it, he told me he was fine, and I let it go, because we all told each other we were fine those months whether we were or not, and there didn't seem to be much use in saying otherwise. Somewhere in all of that, though I couldn't tell you exactly when, I noticed the birds had stopped. We'd had goals and fulmers following the ship on and off since Greenland, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd actually seen one. I mentioned it to Ashby one evening, mostly to make conversation, and he admitted he'd noticed the same about the seals. There should have been seals working the cracks all winter, breathing holes everywhere you looked, and there weren't any. First said he hadn't heard a fox bark in weeks either. I was out checking the lines with him, and two others not long after, and I crossed a long stretch of ice without finding a single track that wasn't our own. Not a fox, not a hare, not so much as a bird's footmark. One of us had much to say about it. Even the wind sounded wrong. It would come across the ice hard enough to sting your face raw and drive the loose snow in sheets, and you'd brace for the noise that kind of wind makes, and it wouldn't come. Just the snow hissing past, and your own breathing, and the ice popping and shifting somewhere underneath you. First said the flat ground, and the cold, played tricks with sound out here, and maybe he was right. He had a better answer, so that's the one we settled on. It was Ashby who first saw the stone using the glass from the deck one clear afternoon in January. He said there was something sticking up out of the ice a few miles off, gray and flat-sided in a way that didn't look quite like any rock formation he'd seen this far north. Though he was quick to say it was probably nothing, probably just rock. Captain Reed had a look through the glass himself and agreed it was likely nothing. Nobody organized a party to go out and look closer. There was too much else to think about, and the days were too short and too cold to spend walking several miles over broken ice for a rock that looked strange from a distance, so we left it where it stood. I think about that more than I'd like to admit now. How easy it was at the time to let it be. In January 20th, 1846, Dr. Sutter forced the matter in the end. He went to Captain Reed with a count of how many men could still do a full day's work against how many couldn't, and however that conversation went between the two of them in private. Captain Reed called the rest of us together the next morning. Everyone who could still stand, crowded into the mess with our breath fogging in the lamplight. I remember fenced standing near the stove with his arms crossed and Davy close beside him, and Ashby off to one side with his cap pulled low, and not one of us saying a word while we waited to hear why we'd been called down. He didn't waste words. The ice shows no sign of loosening this season, he said, and if we sit here waiting on a spring that doesn't come, we'll run out of coal and food before the ice ever lets us go. He said it plainly, the way he said everything, and nobody interrupted him. Then he said the thing none of us wanted to hear. We have to start thinking about what it means to leave the ships behind. Nobody spoke for a while after that. I looked around at the other faces in that room and didn't see much surprise on any of them, which told me plainly enough that every man there had already done the same arithmetic in his own head, whether he'd said it aloud or not. Captain Reed didn't ask for opinions that morning, and nobody offered any. He only said we'd talk more of it in the days ahead, and then he dismissed us. Dr. Sutter caught my eye on the way out, and gave me the smallest nod, glad, I think, that it had finally been said, whatever came of it now. I went back up on deck and stood at the rail, looking out at all that white, wondering what was waiting for us out there if it came to that. The March, April, 2nd, 1846. We left the ships on the 2nd of April, 31 of us in all, pulling two sledges loaded with what tents and provisions we could carry and still make any kind of distance. Captain Reed had argued for taking one of the ship's boats along, lashed down on top of the larger sledge, in case we struck open waters somewhere along the way, and nobody argued with him about it, even though every man there could see what that boat was going to cost us in the pulling. The harnesses were canvas straps run over each man's shoulders and chest, tied off the ropes at the front of the sledge, and eight men pulled at a time in rotation, while the rest walked alongside or fell in behind to push where the ground allowed it. Davy pulled in the same rotation as me those first few days, and Fen walked near the back with what was left of his stores lashed to his own back rather than trust them to the sledge. I took my turn in harness like everyone else. I don't think any of us understood that first morning what kind of work it was going to be. Not really, not until we'd been at it a few hours and felt what the weight did to a man's legs and back over broken ice that never once ran flat for more than a few yards together. One day ran into the next after that first one. We broke camp before first light, working stiff fingers into harness straps that had frozen hard overnight and pulled until the light failed, however many hours that gave us, which wasn't many that early in the season. Camp took almost as much out of a man as the pulling did. We dug what shelter we could into the snow and got the tents up before the cold set in on anyone who stood still too long. You'd wake every hour or so shivering wherever your bedding had come loose and you'd curl up tighter and try to get back to whatever thin sleep you'd managed before. The first man we lost was one of the stokers four days out and it happened so quietly that the two men walking nearest him didn't even realize he'd stopped moving until they'd gone another 20 yards without him. His heart gave out, Dr. Sutter told us, weakened by months of scurvy and pushed past what it had left to give. We buried him as best the ground allowed, which wasn't much of a burial at all, more a covering of snow and stone over where we'd laid him and we said what words seemed right and kept walking, because there wasn't anything else to do. Hurst went four days after that, he'd been slower than the rest of us since his fingers went in February, favoring that hand without ever saying so, and I think the cold had done more damage to him than any of us understood, on top of what the frostbite had already weakened. He collapsed in harness on a Tuesday afternoon, went down onto one knee and then the rest of the way, and by the time Dr. Sutter reached him there wasn't anything left to do but confirm what all of us already knew from looking at his face. Captain Reed said a few words over him that I don't remember well enough now to set down honestly. We were 29 men after that, instead of 30, and the sledge didn't get any lighter for losing him. Three days after we lost Hurst, Captain Reed sent Ashby ahead of the main party to scout a path around a stretch of pressure ridges that looked too broken to drag the sledge through directly. He was gone longer than any of us expected, the better part of two hours, and when he came back his face had a look on it I hadn't seen on him before, not even in September when the ice first closed around us. He told Captain Reed he'd found an opening in the ice, off to the west of the ridge line, low to the ground, and easy to miss unless a man was looking right at it. But a crack, he said, and not a crevasse either, though those were the first two things Captain Reed asked him about. Ashby said it went back into the ice at a steady, even angle, with sides too straight and too smooth to have happened on their own. It looked carved, he said. Nobody quite knew what to do with that. Captain Reed asked him twice more to describe it, and both times Ashby gave the same answer and close to the same words, which wasn't like him. A few of the men laughed it off gently, not wanting to call a friend a liar over it. I didn't laugh. I don't know why I didn't exactly, except that Ashby wasn't a man who said things he didn't mean, and he wasn't smiling when he said it. Captain Reed decided we'd see it for ourselves before deciding what to make of it, and he took myself, Ashby, and two of the able-bodied hands with him, leaving Dr. Sutter in charge of the rest back at the sledges. It took nearly an hour to reach it, cutting across broken ice where every step cost real effort, and when we got there, I understood why Ashby had come back looking the way he had. The opening sat low in a wall of what looked from a distance like an ordinary rock outcropping through the ice. Up close, the rock wasn't ordinary at all. The sides of the opening ran straight up. across at angles no frost or wind could have cut, and the surface of the stone, where you could see it under the rhyme, was smooth in a way that stone simply isn't. Not stone that spent however many thousand years getting rained on and frozen and thought out again. There were no icicles anywhere near the opening, and every one of us noticed it before anyone set it out loud. Ice had formed everywhere else that winter had touched, off every rock and rope and spar on the ships, off every outcropping we'd passed on the march. Not here, and when Captain Reed held his bare hand up close to the opening, he pulled it back almost at once. The air coming out was warmer than the air around us, he said, not by a little either. None of us went further than a few steps past the opening that first day. Ashby held a lantern up and out in front of him, and the light carried deeper into that tunnel than it should have, landing on smooth walls that curved away into the dark without a single seam or joint that any of us could find. Captain Reed called us back before anyone got the idea to press on, and none of us argued with him about that either. We walked back to the sledges without saying much of anything, and that evening Captain Reed called us together again, the same as he had back on the ship in February, except this time there was no ship to go back to, and no spring left to wait on. He laid it out plainly, same as always. We had food for perhaps another week if we rationed hard. We were still the better part of 200 miles from anywhere a man could reasonably expect to find help. And now, less than an hour's walk from where we stood, there was shelter and warmth and air that didn't bite at a man's lungs when he breathed it in. Nobody said the word cave, nobody said the word tomb either, though I think more than one of us was thinking it. I watched Davey's face while Captain Reed spoke, and for the first time since we'd left the ships, he didn't look afraid so much as tired. He'd stopped caring, I think, which way the next step took him so long as it was warm at the end of it. I understood the feeling, I think all of us did by then. Captain Reed didn't order anyone into that opening that night, and I've always respected him for that, whatever else I might say about the choices that came after. He only asked each man to think on it overnight, and to be ready to say in the morning whether he meant to walk on into the open ice with what strength he had left. I lay awake a long time that night, turning it over, and I don't believe I was the only one who did. On April 14th, 1846, we went in the next morning. I won't pretend the decision took very long once the sun came up, and every man had to say out loud which way he meant to go. Twenty-six of us chose the opening. Three chose to keep walking on their own across the ice, and I think about them still, though I never learned what became of them, and I'm not sure I want to. Captain Reed didn't try to talk any of them out of it. He shook each man's hand and wished him well, and turned back toward the opening without watching them go, and I understood, even then, that he didn't trust himself to watch for very long. The tunnel sloped down gently enough that you almost didn't notice you were descending until you looked back and saw how far above the entrance had gotten. I remember the exact moment my boots crossed from the ice outside onto the bare stone floor of the tunnel, because the change happened at a single line, not by degrees. One step I was in the cold that had been in my bones for the better part of a year. The next step I wasn't. The frost that had covered every surface of the ships all winter long simply wasn't here, not ten yards past the opening. No rhyme on the walls, no ice underfoot. Not bare stone, dry, and even, like the cold had never reached this far. Nobody spoke going in, not out of any agreement, just because none of us seemed to have anything to say. Our own footsteps came back muffled and small. Every sound stopped where it was made. A man could raise his voice into that passage and get nothing back, no echo at all, in a space that by rights should have carried one. First would have had a word for it, some boatsons instinct for how sound ought to move, but Hurst wasn't there to say it, and the rest of us only knew that it was wrong. The tunnel opened after a while into a hallway wide enough for four men to walk abreast, and that's where the light started, though none of us could say where it came from. It wasn't torch light and it wasn't daylight. A flat white light with no lamp or flame or fixture behind it anywhere a man could point to and say, "There, that's the source of it." Ashby ran his hand along the wall near where the light seemed strongest and found nothing, no warmth, no give, nothing but the same smooth stone as everywhere else. There was nothing to look at beyond the walls themselves, no carvings, no writing, no markings of any kind that any of us could find, and Dr. Sutter looked harder than most of us, running his fingers over long stretches of wall like he expected to find something under the surface his eyes had missed. Davy ran his fingers along one corner to be sure it was really there, and I checked another a little further on. Neither of us found so much as a seam, not even where a corner should have caught a fingernail. Just stone that curved from one wall into the next with no seam between them anywhere, always branched off from the main one every so often, leading to rooms that stood empty in a way that felt deliberate rather than abandoned. The first room we came to stopped every one of us in the doorway at once. Rose of what I can only call capsules stood in careful lines across the floor, waste high things made of some material clear enough to see through, but not quite like any glass I'd ever handled, each one shaped roughly to the size and form of a man lying down. Every single one of them was empty. Up close, the material wasn't cold to the touch the way glass would have been, and it wasn't warm either. It simply didn't seem to register as any temperature at all when Ashby laid his palm flat against the nearest one, which he did without asking anyone, and then pulled his hand back and didn't try it again. After Sutter walked the Rose counting under his breath, and when he reached the end, he went back and counted again, out loud this time, so the rest of us could follow along with him. 129. He said it like a man who didn't quite trust a number even after counting it twice. One of the hands, a young fellow named Coil, said, "Well, enough beds for all of us then. Nobody else laughed. I don't think anyone even looked at him. We just kept looking at the capsules, empty in their neat, even rose, and nobody said anything at all for a long while. We found other rooms after that, and I want to try to set down every one of them because most looked enough alike that describing them all would just be describing the same room over again. What I will say is what we didn't find in any of them. No treasure, no bones, no bodies, no sign that anything violent had ever happened inside those walls, not one mark of struggle or damage anywhere we looked. Just room after room of the same smooth stone and the same soft light and the same order, everything in its place, nothing broken, nothing out of line, like the whole place had been kept up for a visit that never came. One room stopped us longer than the rest. Shelves ran along both walls, waste high and evenly spaced, and on them sat objects that didn't belong together, not anywhere in the world. A sword of some old design, straight-bladed and short, the kind I'd only ever seen drawings of in books about the Romans. A brooch of hammered metal that Ashby said looked norse, though he couldn't say how he knew that, only that it did. A mask cast in some dark bronze, its face carved into an expression none of us recognized from any people any of us had ever heard of. Tools of chipped stone, the kind a man might dig out of a riverbank and call very, very old. Ben picked one of them up without thinking much about it, turned it over in his hand, then set it back down exactly where he'd found it, careful about the placement in a way that surprised me, given how little Ben generally cared about where things sat. None of us discussed why we all did that. We put back whatever we picked up every time, and not one of us had to be told to. Nobody said what all of us were thinking, which was that every one of those objects looked as though it had been said on that shelf the day before. Not buried, not worn, not touched by the hundreds or thousands of years that should have separated a Roman blade from a Viking brooch and both of those from whatever hand had shaped that mask. Nobody explained it because there wasn't anyone among us who could have. The last room we found that day was the largest one yet. and at first, walking in, I thought we'd circled back to the room with the capsules because there they were again. The same waist-high shapes and the same clear material, empty the same way. Dr. Sutter didn't need to count this time. But this room was different, and it took a moment standing in the doorway from me to understand how. The capsules in the first chamber had stood in straight, even rows, all facing the same direction, like beds and barracks. These were arranged in a circle wide enough that the far side of it was hard to make out clearly in that flat white light, and every single one of them faced inward toward the center, toward each other. Like chairs set around a table, or like something else we had no name for and didn't try to give one. Nobody said anything. I looked around at the others, and every face I saw was doing the same thing mine was, looking at that circle and reaching for some ordinary explanation, and not finding one. Then, without anyone suggesting it out loud, we turned around and walked back out the way we'd come, and nobody spoke of what we'd seen in that room. Not that night, not for a long while after. April 15, 1846. Captain Reed didn't want to commit us to a place none of us understood, not while the ships still stood as an alternative, however poor that alternative had become. So we turned back and made the ships again in a few hard days of walking, slower going than the march out had been, because there were fewer of us now to share the pulling, and less in any man's belly to walk on. We lost two more men on that return. Men I'd marched beside since Greenhive. The walk back felt like its own kind of defeat. We were retracing our own sledge marks in the snow, rather than breaking new ground, I could see it on the faces around me. We'd spent so much of ourselves getting away from those ships, and turning back toward them and admitting it had counted for nothing. The ships themselves had gotten no kinder in our absence, but food remained wouldn't have fed the men we'd left behind for more than a handful of days, and those who'd stayed had gone through most of it while we were away rather than see it wasted on men who might never come back at all, which I understood even if it left less than I'd hoped to find. The coal was gone entirely by then, every last scrap of it, and the men who'd stayed aboard had taken to breaking up bits of the ship herself for what little burning they could manage. Spare planking and whatever else could be spared without opening the hull to the weather. I remember standing in what had been the officer's mess and finding it half-stripped of its own paneling and nobody apologizing for it, because there wasn't anything left to apologize for. Two more died in the days right after we returned, worn down past the point their bodies could recover from no matter how little work we asked of them now. There was nothing left to do at that point, but sit in the cold and count down whatever time the last of our stores would buy us. It was fenn of all people who went back first. He told Captain Reed straight out that he'd rather freeze walking toward warmth than freeze sitting still waiting on supplies that weren't coming, and he took three other men with him and walked the whole way back to that opening in a single push. When he returned two days later, he looked better than any of us had looked in months. Color in his face, steadier on his feet. He said the chambers themselves were the warmest place he'd ever stood in his life, and that nothing had happened to him in there beyond sleeping better than he had since England. More men went after that a few at a time, sleeping in the chambers or just near them and coming back to report the same thing every time. No voices, no dreams worth mentioning, no sense of anything watching or waiting or wanting, despite how it had felt just standing in that doorway the first time we'd seen it. Just warm and quiet, and the kind of sleep that let a man wake feeling almost like himself again. Davey slept there three nights running before Captain Reed finally allowed himself to go, and I remember Davey looking younger when he came back than he had any right to look, given everything like he'd gotten back some small part of what the winter had cost him. Men who'd stopped speaking much at all in the weeks before, talked again, telling old stories, even laughing some. The kind of laughing I hadn't heard since before the ice ever closed around us. Ashby kept his charts again in the evenings, out of habit, more than need, and Finn managed something almost like a joke most days, which for Finn was as good a sign as any that a man was coming back to himself. I went myself eventually and I won't pretend I didn't sleep better in that stone room than I had in longer than I could remember. I'd wake some mornings and forget for a moment where I was, forget the ships, forget the ice, forget all of it, lying there in the warm, quiet feeling something close to safe. It would be easy now to write only the dread and leave that part out. It wouldn't be true. It was Dr. Sutter who noticed what none of the rest of us had thought to look for. He'd gone in to check on a man's fever one evening, nothing more than his ordinary rounds, and he came back to where Captain Reed and I were sitting with a look on his face I hadn't seen since the morning he counted the capsules the first time. He told us after that he'd almost decided not to mention it at all because he half hoped that if he kept measuring he'd find one chamber that didn't match and could tell himself the rest had been coincidence. He told us he'd measured one of the empty chambers against one of the sleeping men, out of nothing more than a doctor's habit for measuring things. Then he'd measured another chamber against another man, then a third. He said the chambers weren't roughly the size of a man as a birth built for anyone reasonably grown would be. They were exact, the width at the shoulder, the length head to heel, even the curve where a man's back would rest. He'd checked three different chambers against three different men and every single time the fit was close enough that it couldn't have been guesswork or some rough average taken from the measurements of ordinary men. I remember looking over toward the doorway that led back down into the chambers and thinking, though I said it to no one, that I hadn't once stopped to ask myself how well the one I'd slept in had actually fit. Captain Reed called us together the next evening, all of us who were left, which by then wasn't very many men at all. He didn't waste time getting to it. If we stay aboard these ships, we perish. That much I think every man here already understands better than I could tell it to him. Nobody argued. If we walk out onto that ice again, with what strength remains to any of us, we perish there instead, only slower and colder and further from anything resembling a grave a man could be found in. Still, nobody argued. And if we go down into those chambers, he stomped there. He didn't finish it, and I don't believe it was because he'd forgotten what he meant to say. I think he simply couldn't make himself say the rest of it out loud and looking around at the rest of us standing there in that cold I understood why because not one of us needed him to finish the sentence. We all already knew how it ended. Captain Reed dismissed us the way he had that morning in the mess, and this time nobody asked him to stay and talk it through further. Each man already knew, privately, which chamber he meant to walk toward if it came to that and when. It came to that the next morning. There were no speeches. Nobody prayed out loud, though I expect most of us were praying all the same, just not where anyone else could hear it. Ashby went first without a word to anyone, walking down into the chambers, and the rest of us followed after him one at a time, spaced out by however long it took each man to find whatever nerve he needed to find. Davey went. Fen went, pausing to nod at me on his way past. It was the nod of a man who expected to see me again, not one leaving for good. Dr. Sutter went after that. Captain Reed was the last of the others to go, waiting until every other man had gone through before he went himself, which I suppose was the kind of man he'd always been. From that first morning at Greenhithe, straight through to this one. None among us believed it salvation. I want that written down plainly in case this account is ever read by anyone who wonders whether we went into those chambers with hope in our hearts. We didn't. Yet none of us could name another course, not one that didn't end the same way with more suffering folded into it first. Captain Reed shook my hand before he went in himself, the same as he'd shaken the hands of the three men who chose the ice instead of the tunnel weeks before. And he told me he was glad it had been me keeping this account, whatever that was worth to either of us at that point. I didn't know what to say back to him, so I only nodded. Then he went in and I was alone in that hallway for the first time since we'd found it. I went in last. The chamber nearest to the doorway was open and waiting. The way Dr. Sutter had said it would be, shaped to fit me in ways I didn't let myself think too closely about. I lay back into it, and the material took my weight, the way water might, except dry and warm, and closer to comfortable than anything I'd felt since England. I pray God forgives me for placing my faith in something I can't name. What follows was found bound into the same volume in a different hand immediately after the preceding page, where a date would ordinarily head the entry the paper is damaged beyond legibility. No explanation has been found among the recovered papers for the presence of this second account. We left England this morning, and I confess I've never in my life seen a crowd such as the one gathered at the water to see us off. Half of Greenhithe must have turned out, and more arriving still as I write this, squeezed onto the dock in their Sunday best, despite it being a Tuesday, waving up at men they'd never met and would likely never see again. It was a band somewhere in the crowd, though I couldn't tell you what they played over all the shouting, and more than one woman had her children up on her shoulders just to watch the ships. I saw a man not much older than myself, kiss his wife goodbye four times before an officer finally called him aboard, and nobody laughed at him for it, not even the officer. Sir John himself came out to see us off properly, same as he always does, they tell me, instead of few words about duty and history that I'm ashamed to admit I didn't catch the whole of, what with the crowd carrying on the way it was. A great cheer went up when he finished. I confess I felt more moved by it than I expected to, on a morning I'd otherwise resolved to keep my wits about me. It was on the dock not long before that I met Lieutenant. For the first time, he's to serve alongside me on this voyage, and I took to him at once, though I'll say he looked terribly tired for a man just beginning an expedition, more tired than a man rightly ought to look on a morning with everything still ahead of him and nothing yet behind him worth being tired over. I put it down to a poor night's sleep and thought no more of it. A man's entitled to look however he likes the morning he leaves everything he knows behind him. Later, while we were boarding, I noticed him standing apart from the rest at the rail, looking north. Not toward the sea exactly, or not only the sea, but nothing in particular that I could find when I followed his eyes to see what had caught them. I asked him what he was watching for. He didn't answer straight away, and when he did, he asked me something odd instead. Have we sailed this route before? I laughed because it seemed the natural thing to do. Of course not, I told him. You've only just come aboard same as the rest of us. He nodded slowly, not persuaded so much as deciding it wasn't worth arguing. "Purgive me," he said. "I had the strangest feeling I'd forgotten something." I told him that was only nerves, the kind every man feels, setting out on a voyage of this size, and he agreed that it probably was, and we didn't speak of it again. We boarded within the hour, same as ships always do once the tide and the tugs are ready for them, and I didn't think of his question again until I sat down tonight to write this. My first entry, in the little book I mean to keep faithfully for as long as this voyage lasts. Somebody should keep an honest account of it. I've decided it might as well be me. Lieutenant, stood at the rail beside me as the last of England went under the mist behind us, and neither of us said very much. He looked better for having slept, whatever had troubled him that morning no longer showing on his face. I'm glad to be starting out with a man like that beside me, and I told him so. He thanked me for it. Then he looked back out at the water, north again, the same as before, and said he supposed a man could get used to do anything given enough time. I told him I supposed he could. I didn't know that morning what this voyage would ask of either of us. Hey guys, Rex here. Thanks for staying till the end. You're the reason why I keep making these. And if you're new, I'm on YouTube and Spotify both, so wherever you do your listening, I'm there. Hit subscribe, leave the lights on, and I'll see you in the next one.