Chapter 6 Chapter 6 Goodser

Latitude 74 degrees 43 minutes 28 seconds north, longitude 90 degrees 39 minutes 15 seconds west Beach Island, 1845-46, Winter Private Diary of Dr. Harry Goodser: January 1, 1846 HMS Terror's furnaceman John Torrenton passed away early this morning.The first day of the new year.We are now in the fifth month of being trapped in the ice of Beach Island. His death was expected.It had become clear to us some months before that Torrenton was in the terminal stages of tuberculosis when he joined the expedition.Had his symptoms appeared a few weeks earlier late last summer, he would have been sent home by the hauler, and even after that we could have had two whaling ships to take him away.We encountered the two ships before sailing west across Baffin Bay and across Lancaster Sound into the Arctic wilderness where we are currently wintering.Ironically and sadly, Torrenton's doctors told him that sailing was good for his health.

Of course, Torunton was treated by the chief ship doctor of the Terror, Peddy and Dr. McDonald. During the diagnosis and treatment, I was present several times, and after the young furnace worker died this morning, several members of the Nether The crew escorted me to their boat. In early November, when his condition began to worsen, Captain Crozier relieved the twenty-year-old of his duties as a furnaceman in the poorly ventilated hold.In the bilge, the soot in the air alone is enough to suffocate a person with normal lung function.Since then, Torunton has embarked on the road of no return of tuberculosis patients spiraling downward to death.However, if it were not for other factors, Torunton might live a few more months.

Dr. Alexander MacDonald told me that Torrenton has been very weak in recent weeks, and he couldn’t even walk around the main cabin with his companions at the same table. Unfortunately, he contracted acute pneumonia on Christmas. He has been in critical condition since the beginning.I was startled when I saw his body this morning, how emaciated John Torrenton was.However, Dr. Petty and Dr. McDonald both explained that he had lost his appetite for two months. Even though he changed his diet to mainly canned soup and vegetables, he continued to lose weight. This morning I watched Pete and McDonald sort out the corpse.Torrunton wore a clean striped shirt, had recently cut his hair, and had clean nails.They wrapped strips of clean cloth around his head to keep his jaw from falling out, and more strips of white cotton around his elbows, hands, ankles and big toes.This was to attach the limbs to the torso in order to measure the poor boy's weight--eighty-eight pounds!It also prepares the body for burial.We did not consider autopsy at all, because tuberculosis complicated by acute pneumonia was obviously the cause of death of this young man, and without autopsy, there was no need to worry that other crew members would be contaminated by the internal organs of the corpse.

I assisted two of the Terror's fellow ship's doctors in lifting Torrunton's body and placing it in a coffin.The coffin was painstakingly crafted by their ship's able carpenter, Thomas Harney, and his mate, a man named Wilson.They did not use any fixed tenons.Two carpenters carefully designed and made the coffin from the ship's mahogany, and spread a layer of sawdust on the bottom. The sawdust piled up under Torrunton's head was particularly thick.Because the smell of decaying corpses is not strong at present, the smell of sawdust is mainly in the air. January 3, 1846

I've been thinking about John Torunton's funeral yesterday. There were only a few people from the Erebus, including myself, at the funeral, but Sir John, Lieutenant Colonel Fitzjian, and a few officers walked from our ship to theirs and then to the shore of Beach Island. Walked two hundred yards. I have never imagined a worse winter than the one that is tormenting us this year.We anchored on the leeward shore of Beach Island, at the southwestern tip of the sizeable Devon Island, but were frozen in this little bay.Even with the fickle ridges, the terrifying darkness, the howling winds, and the ice that constantly threatened us, Lieutenant Colonel Fitzjian and others told me that things were fine here, and that if we left this mooring, conditions would be fine. It would be a thousand times worse.Outside the moorings, you will meet the ice flowing down from the North Pole, as if you meet the gods of the north sending thousands of fire to the hostile army.

John Torrenton's shipmates carried the coffin, covered with blue woolen towels, over the ship's parapet (which was raised higher than usual by icicles) and lowered it gently overboard.The sailors of the Terror tied the coffin to a large sled.Sir John draped a flag over the coffin, and Torrendon's friend and tablemate put on their harnesses and pulled the sled about six hundred feet to the ice and gravel shore of Beach Island. Of course, it's all in near-total darkness, because even at noon in January the sun doesn't come out, and it hasn't been seen for three months.They told me that it would be more than a month before the "bright star" would reappear on the southern horizon.The only source of light for the whole procession--coffins, sledges, porters, officers, ship's doctor, Sir John, Royal Marines in full uniform (with the same coats as the others)-was our journey from the frozen sea The lantern that floated with us as we walked onto the ice bank.A few ridges of ice had risen between us and the sandy beach of Beech Island lately, but the men on the Terror had hacked and shoveled some of the ice beforehand, so we didn't have to take too many detours on this sad walk.

At the beginning of winter, Sir John ordered some strong stakes to be erected along the shortest route connecting the two ships to the gravel isthmus, with ropes and lanterns hung, for we had already built some buildings on the isthmus, one of which was One room (should the ship be damaged by ice) will allow us to store most of the stocks on both ships, another room will serve as a temporary accommodation for people and double as a scientific observation station; This is where flames and sparks can be avoided, lest you accidentally set the flammable cabin on fire.I have learned that what sailors fear most at sea is fire.However, the stakes and lanterns along the way were later abandoned, because the ice in the sea was constantly moving and rising, scattering or destroying our things.

It was snowing while the funeral was going on.The wind was as strong as usual in this arctic wasteland where even God forsaken.To the north of the burial ground rose a crag of blackness, as remote as a mountain on the Moon.The lanterns of the Erebus and the Terror were little bits of light in the howling blizzard.Occasionally, a patch of icy moon could be seen among the fast-moving clouds, but even the thin moonlight was quickly lost to the snow and darkness again.Dear God, this is a hellish desolation. In the hours after Torrunton's death some of the strongest men on the Terror were at work, helping him dig his grave with pickaxes and shovels.By Sir John's order, the grave was prescribed to be five feet deep.The hole was dug out of the hardest ice and rocky ground, and I knew the arduousness and laboriousness of this excavation project just by looking at it.The flag was removed, and the coffin was lowered carefully, even respectfully, into the narrow pit.The coffin was soon covered with snow, glistening in the lantern's light.One of Crozier's officers set the wooden headboard in place, and a giant sailor swung an oversized mallet and hammered it into the frozen gravel.This intricately carved wooden tombstone reads:

sincerely remember John Torunton In 1846 AD he January 1st On HMS Terror left this world twenty years old Sir John presided over the service and read the eulogy.His voice was low and monotonous as the funeral went on, interrupted only occasionally by the sound of the wind and the stomping of the attendees to avoid frostbitten toes.I must admit, between the howling wind and my wild thoughts (thinking of how lonely this place is, and the memory of the striped shirted body and tangled limbs that had just been lowered into that cold hole I was depressing here and here, most depressingly by the ever-dark cliffs above the gravel isthmus), and I hardly heard a word of Sir John's eulogy.

January 4, 1846 Another person has passed away. This time it was our Necromancer, twenty-five-year-old First Class John Hartney.Just after six o'clock in the afternoon (I still think of the time this way), as the table was being lowered down the chain and we were about to eat dinner, Hartney staggered into his brother Thomas and fell. He fell on the deck and coughed up blood, and died within five minutes.Doctor Stanley and I were by his side as he breathed his last in the bed area forward of the main cabin. We were shocked by his death.Hartney was completely free of symptoms of scurvy and tuberculosis.Lieutenant Colonel Fitzjian was with us at the time, and his expression of astonishment was written all over his face.If this means that plague or scurvy is starting to spread among the crew, we need to find out right away.We decided right away (before the curtains were drawn and no one had come to prepare Hartney for his burial) to conduct an autopsy for further examination.

We cleared out the tables in the bed area, brought in some crates, screened off the outsiders from us so that our movements would not be disturbed, and enclosed the autopsy area as much as possible with drapes.I also bring my tools.Although Stanley was the chief ship doctor, he suggested that I should do the dissection because I had professional training in anatomy.I made the first incision and began to dissect. In a hurry, I made the "inverted Y" incision, which I was accustomed to when dissecting cadavers quickly during my training.The common Y-shaped incision method is to cut diagonally from the two shoulders, so that the two arms of the Y-shaped shape meet below the sternum, but I used the inverted Y-shaped incision method, and the two arms of the Y-shaped shape are from the place close to the hip joint. To start, angle upwards to meet near Hart's navel.Stanley criticized me a bit, which made me feel a little embarrassed. "Speed ​​is the most important thing." I whispered to the ship's doctor partner, "We need to finish the work as soon as possible, and the crew must not want to know that their partner is being disembowelled by us." Doctor Stanley nodded, and I went on, as if to prove what I had just said, when Thomas, Hartney's brother, began to cry from the other side of the curtain.Hartney's death was very different from Torrenton's.Torrunton was slowly dying on the Terror. The people on board had time to adjust their mentality to face his death, and also had time to pack his personal belongings and write letters to his mother for him.But John Hartney suddenly fell down and died, and everyone on board was terrified.No one could bear the fact that the ship's doctors were slashing at his dead body.Now, only the size, class and poise of Lieutenant Colonel Fitzjian stand between the angry brother, the panicked crew and our hospital bed area.I could hear Thomas rushing in if his tablemates hadn't held him back, and Fitzgerald was there.I could still hear the whining and anger a few yards beyond the drapes as I ran the scalpel through the musculature and opened the body with the knife and rib spreaders. I first took Hartney's heart out and cut off several blood vessels connected to it.I held the heart up to the lantern and Stanley took it over and washed the blood off with a cloth.We both stared at it.It looked normal with no obvious lesions.Stanley continued to hold the organ under the light, and I made a cut in the right ventricle and the left ventricle.After peeling back the tough heart muscle, Stanley and I inspected the valves inside.Looks healthy too. After throwing Hartney's heart back into his abdominal cavity, I slit open the lower half of the sailor's lung with a quick stroke of the scalpel. "There," said Stanley. I nodded.There were not only obvious bruises and signs of tuberculosis, but also symptoms that suggested that the sailor had recently suffered from acute pneumonia.John Hartney suffered from tuberculosis as did John Torrenton, but the older, stronger (according to Stanley), rougher, and louder sailor concealed his symptoms, and even I also concealed it.Only today did he pass out and die, minutes away from bacon for dinner. When his liver was pulled up and cut off, I held it up to the light, and Stanley and I believed that, in addition to seeing enough evidence to confirm that he had tuberculosis, we also saw evidence that Hartney was a heavy drinker. Just a few yards away through a curtain, Hartney's younger brother Thomas yelled angrily, and was only restrained after Lieutenant Colonel Fitzkin sternly reprimanded him.I could hear several other officers—Lieutenant Goer, Lieutenant Visconti, Lieutenant Fairhorn, and even DeVos, the ship's second officer—coming out to appease and intimidate this near-mob crowd. sailor. "Have we seen enough?" Stanley asked in a low voice. I nod again.Hartney showed no signs of scurvy in his body, face, mouth, or organs.Although we still cannot understand how tuberculosis or acute pneumonia or both could have killed the corporal so quickly, it is at least clear that we need not fear that the plague was responsible for his death. The noise from the crew quarters was getting louder, so I quickly put a small piece of lung, liver, and some organs into the abdominal cavity, right next to the heart.I didn't take the time to put the organs back in place, just roughly tucked them together.Then I put Hartney's breast plate roughly back in place (I turned it upside down, as I found out later), and Stanley's chief surgeon sewed up the inverted Y incision with a large needle and thick sail line, His movements are quick and confident, a skill that any sailmaker would envy. For the next minute, we help Hartney back into his clothes, the stiff body already starting to cause us trouble, and we push back the curtain.In a lower and magnetic voice than mine, Stanley assured Hartney's brother and the others that there was only one thing left for us to do, which was to wash the body of our shipmate so that it could be prepared for burial . January 6, 1846 This funeral was actually more sad for me than the previous one.Once again we walked solemnly from the ship to the cemetery, this time featuring the Erebus and her crew, although Dr Macdonald, Petty the ship's doctor, and Captain Crozier also joined us from the Terror. The coffin was again covered with flags.They wore three pieces of clothing for Hartney's upper body, including his brother Thomas's best shirt, but wrapped only a shroud around his naked lower body.The coffin was placed in the black-draped main cabin bed area with the top half of the lid uncovered until hours later when the funeral took place.The sled slowly walked from the ice sea to the ice shore again, and the lantern floated in the dark night.There are some stars tonight, and it is not snowing.The marines had something to do because there were three big pyrenes sniffing around in the ice and coming up to us like a few white ghosts looming between the giant walls of ice and the soldiers had to fire their muskets to drive them away, behold It turns out they shot one of the bears in the side. Sir John read the eulogy again, but this time it was shorter than before, for Hartney was not so agreeable as young Torrunton.Once again we walked back to the ship across the creaking, screeching, whimpering icefields, only this time in the cold with dancing starlight for company.The only sound behind us was the fading scrape of shovels and pickaxes as a few crewmen filled the freshly dug hole with frozen earth by the immaculate tomb of Torruntown. . Perhaps it was the black cliff overlooking the whole that spoiled my mood at the second funeral.This time I deliberately chose to stand with my back to the cliff, and as close as possible to Sir John, so that I could hear his words of hope and comfort, but I kept feeling that whole cold, black, vertical, untouched place. Behind me lay the lifeless, lifeless thick stone without a gleam of light, as if it were a gateway to "a country from which no one ever came back alive."Sir John's words of sympathy and encouragement had little effect compared with the cold reality presented by the black, expressionless stone. The mood on both ships was gloomy.Not even a week into the new year, and two of our buddies died.Tomorrow the four of us doctors have made an appointment in a secluded place - the captain's cabin of the Terror's main cabin - to discuss what to do to avoid further loss of life on this seemingly cursed expedition. The tombstone of the second grave reads: sincerely remember John Hartney First Class Seaman, HMS Nether he died in AD January 4, 1846 Twenty-five years old "Thus says the LORD of hosts: 'Examine your ways.'" Haggai Chapter 1 Verse 7 During the last hour of the day, the wind picked up.It was almost midnight, and most of the lights in the main cabin of the Erebus were extinguished.Listening to the howling of the wind, I thought of the two cold low piles of gravel on the dark, windy gravel, I thought of the two dead men lying in the cold pit, and I thought of the invisible On the black rock surface with an expression, one can imagine that the snow particles, like a volley of guns, have begun to hit the two wooden tomb slabs violently, destroying all the words on them.