The Voyage of the Narwhal. Andrea Barrett
fix it. For the next few days he focused instead on trying out the dredge and the tow nets. Already he could see that Zeke wouldn’t share his scientific work; after all he was to be alone, as he’d been on his first voyage. He tied knots, adjusted shackles, replaced a poorly threaded pin, remembering how shyly his young self had hung back from his companions. While he was working up the courage to be friendly, everyone else had been pairing off, or clumping in groups of three or four from which he was excluded. Everyone had been courteous but he’d been left with no particular friend; and at times he’d thought he might die of loneliness.
He was older now, he was used to it. Yet still he felt grateful when Dr. Boerhaave, who’d been reading near the galley, edged up and broke his solitude. “Those little purple-tinted shrimps,” he said, “are they Crangon boreas?”
Later, Erasmus would gain a clearer picture of Dr. Boerhaave’s face. For now, what he first noticed was his mind: quick and shining, sharp but deep, moving through a sea of thought like a giant silver salmon. Dr. Boerhaave, Erasmus learned quickly, knew as much natural history as he did. Although he was the better botanist, Dr. Boerhaave was the better zoologist and was especially knowledgeable about marine invertebrates.
As they probed their captives, Dr. Boerhaave said he’d been raised in the port of Gothenberg, but educated in Paris and Edinburgh. His excellent English he attributed to his years at sea. Over a group of elegant little medusae captured in their tow net—“Ptychogastria polaris,” Dr. Boerhaave said—he described his trips as ship’s surgeon aboard Scottish whalers and Norwegian walrus-hunters.
“I was curious,” he said. “I liked Edinburgh very much, but I didn’t want to set up a practice there and see the same people for the next forty years. And the idea of returning permanently to Sweden…” He shrugged.
Erasmus, embalming a medusa, said, “Commander Voorhees told me you’d been twice to the high arctic. With whalers? Or were those more formal expeditions?”
“The latter,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “On the Swedish exploring expedition I accompanied, we went up the west coast of Spitzbergen to Hakluyt’s Headland—not as far as Parry got, but we saw some of the same places that Franklin and Beechey explored with the Dorothea and the Trent.”
Franklin’s first voyage, so long ago. For a minute Erasmus thought how that had led, by an unexpected web of events, to their own voyage.
“Later I went with a Russian expedition to Kamchatka Peninsula and the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands, then into the Bering Straits. We’d hoped to reach Wrangel Island but were stopped by icepack in the Beaufort Sea.”
He drew an equatorial projection of the medusa before them, revealing the convoluted edges of the eight gastric folds. He had excellent pencils, Erasmus observed. The line they made was both darker and sharper than his own.
“What about you?” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Your own earlier journey—I read all five volumes of Wilkes’s narrative of the Exploring Expedition, it was very popular when the first copies arrived in Europe. But I don’t remember seeing your name mentioned. How is that so?”
Erasmus flushed and directed Dr. Boerhaave’s attention to some questionable seals on the preserving jars. “It’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you another time. How did you decide to join us?”
“I thought it would round out my picture of the high arctic,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “Different ice, different flora and fauna. Anyway I was already on this side of the ocean. I came to America several years ago, to visit some of your New England philosophers. Emerson, Brownson and the others—it interests me, what they’ve done with the ideas of Kant and Hegel. You know this young Henry Thoreau?”
“I don’t,” Erasmus said.
“I met him and some of his friends in Boston, which was delightful. But all along I also hoped to do some exploring, either out west or in the arctic. At a dinner party I ran into Professor Agassiz, whom I’d once met in Scotland—we share an interest in fossil fishes. He put me in touch with some members of your Academy of Sciences, which is how I learned your expedition needed a surgeon. The position was just what I’d been hoping for.”
“Was it?” Erasmus said thoughtfully. “You might just as easily have had mine—you’re better trained. I expect you did both jobs at once on your other trips.”
Dr. Boerhaave looked down at his drawing. “Differently trained, that’s all. And in a way it’s a relief simply to be responsible for the health of the crew and to have someone else in charge of the zoological and botanical reports. I’ve always thought both jobs were too much for one man to do well.”
“But we must be partners, then,” Erasmus said. “Real colleagues. May we do that?”
“Or course,” Dr. Boerhaave said. With his pencil he drew a delicate tentacle.
DR. BOERHAAVE WROTE to William Greenstone, an Edinburgh classmate who was now a geologist of some repute:
Although we’re not to Greenland yet, we’ve not been idle. I’ve examined all the men, so as to have an accurate point from which to assess their later health. On a journey this short, and with ample opportunities to acquire fresh food, there won’t be signs of scurvy, but the alternation in day length and the sleep deprivation may cause changes.
It’s an unusual situation for me, having an official naturalist on board. I worried that he—his name is Erasmus Wells—might be jealous of his position and equipment, and that I might have few opportunities for collecting and examining specimens. Yet in fact Mr. Wells is quite congenial and seems willing to let me share in his investigations. So far we’ve found nothing exciting but are in heavily traveled waters where everything we capture is well known. Yesterday we took a Cyclopterus spinosus though: not quite two inches long, covered with the typical conical spines, and very like those I saw off Spitzbergen; I was surprised to see it this far south.
I think I’ll like my new companion. He’s somewhat fussy and tends to be melancholy, but he’s intelligent and well traveled. His formal education is spotty by our standards, but he’s read widely and seems more—I don’t know, more complicated than the usual run of Americans. Not quite so blindly optimistic, nor so convinced that one can make the world into what one wishes. Perhaps because he’s older. Except for him and me and the ship’s captain, the others are hardly more than children. I packed the bottom sampler you gave me carefully, and once we enter Baffin’s Bay I’ll do my best to obtain samples of the seafloor for you.
HERE WAS THE arctic, Erasmus thought, as the Narwhal moved through Davis Strait and the night began to disappear. Or at least its true beginning: here, here, here.
His eyes burned from trying to take in everything at once. Whales with their baleen-laden mouths broke the water, sometimes as many as forty a day. Belugas slipped by white and radiant and the sky was alive with birds. The men cheered the first narwhals as guardian spirits and crowded around Erasmus as he sketched. With one of Dr. Boerhaave’s excellent pencils he tried to capture the grooved spike jutting from the males’ upper jaws and the smooth dark curves of their backs. Nils Jensen, out on the bowsprit, watched intently as each surfaced to breathe and called back measurements—ten feet long, twelve and half—which Erasmus noted on his drawings.
One day the coast of Greenland appeared, the peak of Sukkertoppen rising above the fog and flickering past as they sailed to Disko Island. A flock of dovekies sailed through the rigging, and when Robert Carey knocked one to the deck Erasmus remembered how, as a little boy, he’d glimpsed three of these tiny birds in a creek near his home, bobbing exhausted where they’d been driven after a great northeaster. This one looked like a black-and-white quail in his hand. Bending over the rail to release it, he saw fronds of seaweed waving through ten fathoms of transparent water. As soon as they anchored at Godhavn he and Dr. Boerhaave sampled the shallows, finding nullipores, mussels, and small crustaceans. Then they saw people, floating on the water and looking back at them.
In tiny, skin-covered kayaks the strangers darted among