Prologue
Today’s delivery was the most difficult yet. I didn’t bother to count my steps — the double load and my gammy leg would have made the measure unreliable. Still, I am certain new ice is forming. The floe’s edge feels farther away than it has for months. If any ships were searching for us they surely would be well on their way home by now. The birds, too, have departed. For the first time since we set sail from Portsmouth, I am alone.
It is sad to part company with Coombs and McClintock. Though I cannot say either man paid me much heed during the voyage or over the course of our troubles, they have both been most generous since their deaths. What a surprise it was to have survived them. It was Coombs, after all, who most obsessed on the “Custom of the Sea.” He first made mention of it when our larder was still half-full. Alas, when it came time, Coombs could not muster much of an appetite and McClintock had no remaining teeth. If not for the sustenance they so gamely provided, I would never have had the strength to deliver them to the sea.
What a relief it is to be finally free of this chore. The little fortitude I gained from the summer sun is waning as fast as the light. The extra time it took to sink Coombs (for some reason the Welshman bobbed like a cork in the slush) almost scuppered me. Tonight I will burn the toboggan, a celebratory bonfire to retire it from its funebrial duty. Tomorrow, if the weather is fair, I will walk back to the water without it. Thirty-nine men I have delivered off the edge. With the fortieth my work will be done.
Last recorded entry in the journal of Jedediah Briggs, Midshipman on the HMS Corinthian, October 18, 1848
Chapter One
I trade in the tales of adventurers. Men, mostly white, all long-since dead. Ideally they are men who had the good form to die in extremis, after a suitably heroic battle between their indomitable will and nature’s merciless fury. An Arctic whaler locked in the ice. An ocean rower eaten by a shark. The Captain Ahabs. The Major Toms. Braggarts and boors, good riddance to them all. They can’t be trusted to tell their own tales.
As a general rule, survivors make shitty storytellers.
To be sure, I am capable of constructing a story out of a man’s full biography. I find, however, that those who have gone to great personal pain to escape society do not tend to function well when confined back to it. Sorting through the late-life misadventure typical of such characters—the marital discord, the mental breakdown, the bankruptcy—is more the job of the researcher I once was and not the storyteller I have become. Death in a whorehouse is a decent postscript for the hero of one of my tales. The years of despondency and alcoholism that preceded the climactic coronary are not.
Lawrence Oates’ suicidal walk into an Antarctic blizzard on gangrenous feet is the archetype of the stories I tell. His final words—I’m just going out and may be some time—are almost certainly a fiction first told by his boss, Robert Scott, shortly before he and the rest of his party also died. I have read each of their journals and am familiar with all of their lies. My professional opinion is that Scott likely told the dying Oates to leave, lest the others eat him. Regardless, with Oates out of the way, Scott gifted us with a very gallant gentleman, then set down his pen and died with every expectation we would say much the same of him. Both men were martyrs to the grand idea of sacrifice. To the nobility of exploration. To adventure and perseverance. As David Livingstone is said to have proclaimed, I am prepared to go anywhere as long as it is forward.
Dr. Livingstone spent the next decade wandering about in a daze, then died.
For years I trolled through the diaries of dead adventurers and reconstructed from their records tales of adversity and ingenuity. I assembled a cast of very gallant gentlemen. Then I traveled the world (or at least the pale, wealthy world where I was likely to find an audience) dressed up like Indiana Jones and convinced auditoriums full of soft, pasty people that somehow, miraculously, adventure is within us all. I am, I’m led to believe, a great storyteller. Until recently I was in the employ of a preeminent international geography magazine which, due to recent events, I am no longer permitted to name. Nevertheless, I earned a significant amount of money and a useful sort of fame after I abandoned academia to shill stories.
They are great stories. They are all lies.
To be clear, I have not been dishonest to the historical record. I have been faithful to the word set down by my subjects and am certain I have been telling their tales as they wished them to be told. But in being true to their word, I am complicit in their lies. I have seen the smudge marks in the margins of these men’s journals. They are the fossilized tracks of the tears that once infused their emotionless text. They are our secret. These men died believing no one wanted to know of the special sort of insanity that sets in when a man realizes he has just committed a very slow suicide.
My adventure, when it came, was of a different sort. I, too, kept a journal, but it adds nothing to my narrative. Unlike the articulate and even hand of Victorian explorers who documented each day’s adventure with clinical precision (Frederick lost his two remaining toes today, poor chap. Wind stiffening, NNE), my notebook contains little more than the doodles of a madman. There are drawings of birds—robins I think—even though I saw no birds and have no particular affinity for the things. There is what I believe to be a map, although it too might be a bird, albeit unfinished. What text there is mostly appears in bursts of single words and short phrases, scattered throughout the journal with no regard to relative size or orientation, as random and informative as something sneezed onto the page. The overall effect is about as sensible as an envelope of cutout words, the ransom note of a glue-less psycho. In a moment of early lucidity, I took the time to carefully record an inventory of the contents of the sled: skin (caribou?); rifle; shell (1); fuel cans (2); knife; and so on. The food items I boxed off into a corner of the page, like in a larder, crossing each off in turn as the list became less a tool for rationing and more a countdown to what I assumed would be my eventual starvation. Of the scant legible prose contained in the journal, two pieces stand out. The first—a note to my wife—primarily comprised a bulleted list of things I thought she ought to do upon discovery of my body. It could charitably be described as stoic, if not for the fact that it was immediately followed by a much more effusive letter to a former and entirely estranged girlfriend. In my defense, I have a tendency to sentimentality when I’m hungry, something my wife will not bear. Remarkably, these were not among the several pages I ate.
There are, of course, no timestamps.
As a historian, I am satisfied that my failings as a diarist are unlikely to disappoint any future biographers, if for no other reason than my story no longer attracts the interest of anyone. The popular account of what happened has already been told. A stick of kindling fed into the fire of modern media—a brief flame of infamy, told rapturously once, before a couple of days when it was scrolled in type across the bottom of bigger, breaking stories. Besides, I survived, memory intact and much else in ruins. If anyone wants to know what really happened on the ice they can read my account here.
Chapter Two
In the early part of my career—the earnest, honest part—I was a marine archaeologist. My focus was the North: searching for the lost ships of the Franklin expedition; exhuming the corpses of dead whalers; scrabbling along beaches in search of trinkets, tin cans, or teeth in the sand. It was good work. The Arctic is chock full of such artifacts. The only problem is that for most of the year they are encased beneath ten feet of ice.
To get around this obstacle, I timed my trips north to coincide with the short window each summer when the land was thawed and the ice gone. I’d set up research camps on nameless islands, filled with graduate students who mucked about the mud in search of my treasure. Like migratory birds, we would drop in and flit around, with one eye always on the timing of our escape. Mangy icebergs lingered offshore, relics of the winter past. We would stay a few weeks, a month at most, and leave as snow flurries signaled winter’s return.
Aside from that short spell each summer, the beaches and bays in which we worked are usually frozen solid. The windswept snow on the land slopes down and fuses to the flat, white plane of solid sea ice. In much of the Arctic, through most of the year, you can walk off the land and onto the ocean as easily and mindlessly as you step off your driveway and onto the street. The Inuit have been using the sea ice—the floe—for ages. They need it to get around, to hunt and to camp. It is a crucial piece of traditional Arctic infrastructure. But it has a limit. There is always a point some ways out where the sea’s solid surface stops and the ocean becomes fluid again. They call that place The Edge.
For years, I have read my adventurers’ accounts of The Edge. They were outsiders who bumped up against the thing in their boats, stymied in their attempts to sail onward by a great, white wall of impenetrable ice. Others, arriving from the opposite side, stopped and stared forlornly at an impassable expanse of extremely cold water. To those explorers, The Edge was a perilous place. It was the horizon made manifest in a single, straight line. It was the end from either side.