Erasmus blushed. Was this what he wanted? A kind of worship, mixed with disdain; as if Zeke wanted to emulate him, but without his flaws. But exactly this grudging caution had stranded him alone in midlife, and he pushed the thought aside. When the Toxies presented their green-and-gold pennant, he grasped the end marked with a merry archer and smiled at Zeke. Zeke made a speech of thanks; Erasmus made a shorter one, not mentioning that hed known the clubs founders or that hed learned to shoot a bow when some of these men were still children. As he spoke he saw Captain Tyler hanging over the Narwhals rail, gazing curiously at them. His face, Erasmus thought, was the size and color of a ham.
The Toxies departed, Zeke climbed back on the Narwhal, and Erasmus was once more alone. He folded the pennant and tucked it into the wolf skins. Then he reconsidered the stowing of the sledges: back to front in a line down the center of the hold? or piled in a tight tower near the bow? He worked quietly for an hour, pushing down his worries by the repeated checking of items against his lists. Mr. Tagliabeau interrupted him, returning to the wharf in the company of a fresh-faced, dark-haired, blue-eyed boy.
Ned Kynd, Mr. Tagliabeau said. Twenty years of age. Zeke hopped down to investigate. After making introductions all around, Mr. Tagliabeau added, Ned would like to join our expedition.
Zeke, hovering once more near the mound of supplies, looked Ned over. Youve had experience cooking?
In three places, the boy said shyly. As he listed them, all in the rough area by the wharves, Erasmus noted his heavy Irish accent.
And have you been to sea? Zeke asked.
Ned blushed. Just once, sir. When I made my crossing.
But the sea suits you?
Mycircumstances then were not such that anyone could have enjoyed them. But I believe I would have, if Id had work and meals and a place to sleep. I enjoyed being on deck very much. I like to watch the birds and fish.
Youd be cooking for fifteen men, Erasmus said. Youre capable of that?
I wouldnt like to boast, but many a night Ive cooked for three or four times that number. I was at a logging camp in the Adirondacks for some time, before I made my way to this city. Loggers are hungry men.
Zeke laid a hand on Erasmuss shoulder. If he can feed loggers, he can surely feed us.
Youd be bunking in the forecastle, Erasmus said. With the seamen. They can be a bit rough.
Not rougher than loggers, I wouldnt guess.
Done, then, Zeke said. And welcome. Gather your things and say your good-byes, we leave in three days. Off he went, bounding down the wharf like an antelope.
And so it was that Ned, hastily engaged to fill Schuesseles shoes, came to join the expedition. Later Erasmus would think many times how little might have steered Ned away. Mr. Tagliabeau might not have bumped into him beneath the chandlers awning; the Toxies ostrich-feathered hats might have spooked him had he arrived but a few minutes earlier; Zeke might not have been there to interview him had he arrived but a little later. Any small coincidence might have done.
THAT NIGHT ERASMUS was sleepless again. In the Repository, his familys little natural history museum, he rose and paced the floors and tried to understand what hed been doing. For twelve years hed been camped out here, his world contracted to display cabinets stuffed with dead animals, boxes of seeds and trays of fossils, the occasional stray beam of light shining through the windows like a message from another planet. Framed engravings of eminent naturalists leaned down from the bookshelves, watching benignly as he bent to work that wasnt work, and went nowhere. Who could understand that life? Or how hed decided, finally, to leave it?
Across the garden loomed the house he hadnt slept in for more than a decade. Everything showed his fathers hand, from the carved ferns on the moldings to his own name. He was Erasmus Darwin for the British naturalist, grandfather to the young man whod set off on the Beagle; his brothers were named after Copernicus, Linnaeus, and Alexander von Humboldt. Four boys gaping up at their father like nestlings waiting for worms. An engraver and printer by trade, Frank Wellss passion had been natural history and his truest friends the Peales and the Bartrams, Thomas Nuttall and Thomas Say, Audubon of the beautiful birds and poor peculiar Rafinesque, whod died in a garret downtown.
On summer evenings, down by the creek, Mr. Wells had read Plinys Natural History to his sons. Pliny the Elder had died of his scientific curiosity, hed said; the fumes of Vesuvius had choked him when hed lingered to watch the smoke and lava. But before that hed compiled a remarkable collection of what hed believed to be facts. Some true, some falsebut even the false still useful for the beauty with which they were expressed, and for what they said about the ways men conceived of each other, and of the world. Sometimes pacing, sometimes sitting on a tuft of grass, Erasmuss father had passed down Plinys descriptions of extraordinary peoples living beyond the edge of the known. A race of nomads with legs like snakes; a race of forest dwellers running swiftly on feet pointed backward; a single-legged race who move by hopping and then rest by lying on their backs and raising their singular feet above their heads, like small umbrellas. Stories, not sciencebut useful as a way of thinking about the great variety and mutability of human nature. How easily, hed said, might we not exist at all. How easily might we be transformed into something wholly different.
In those old stories, hed said, were lessons about gossip and the imagination and the perils of not observing the world directly. Yet although he was a great collector of explorers tales hed traveled very little himself; Erasmus had never known what his father would most like to have seen. As a counterpoint to Pliny hed offered his sons the living, breathing science of his friends. Theyd helped design the Repository and delighted Erasmus and his brothers with accounts of their travels. When Lavinia was born, theyd named her after her dying mother and tried to distract their friend from his grief with bones and feathers.
Now Erasmus followed the tracks of those men across the polished floor. He stopped at a wooden case holding trays of fossil teeth. Beneath the third tray was a false bottom, which only he knew about; in the secret space below the molars was a womans black calf walking boot. His mothers; once hed had a pair. Before the servants took her clothes away, to be given piece by piece to the poor, hed stolen the boots shed worn most often. For years hed hidden them in his room, sometimes running his hands up the buttons as another boy might have fingered a rosary. Later, about to leave on his ill-fated first trip, hed given Lavinia the left boot after swearing her to secrecy. This other hed buried. Had it always been so small? The sole was hardly longer than his hand, the leather was cracking, the buttons loose. Where Lavinias was he had no idea.
Four years ago, when his father died, hed received the house, the Repository, a small income, and the care of Lavinia until she married. Which meant, he thought, that hed inherited all the responsibility and none of the freedom or even the solid work. Was it his fault he hadnt known what to do? The family firm had gone to his middle brothers, whod settled side by side downtown, within walking distance of their work: two moons, circling a planet that didnt interest him. Meanwhile Copernicus had headed west as soon as he received his share of the estate. Out there, among the Indians, he painted buffalo hunts and vast landscapes while Erasmus and Lavinia, left behind, leaned against each other in his absence.
Copernicus sent paintings back, some of which had already been shown at the Academy of Fine Arts. And sometimeswhen he remembered, when he could be botheredhe sent packets of seeds, shaken from random plants that had caught his eye. His afterthoughts, which had become Erasmuss chief occupation. Erasmus had examined, classified, labeled, cataloged, added them to his lists. He filed them in tall wooden towers of tiny drawers, alongside the seeds his fathers friends had brought back from China and the Yucatan and the Malay Archipelago, and those hed salvagedstolen, reallyfrom the collections of the Exploring Expedition. When his eyes grew strained and his skin felt moldy, he retreated out back, between the house and the river and behind the Repository, planting samples in oblong plots and noting every characteristic of the seedlings.
But all that was over now. He put the boot away and returned to bed. In Africa, his father had said, are a tribe of people who have no heads, but have mouths and eyes attached to their chests. Sleep eluded him yet again and his lists bobbed behind his lids. In Germantown and along the Wissahickon, people sent him socks and marmalade and then dreamed of this expedition. Vicarious travelers, sleeping while he could not and conjuring up a generic exotic land. Lavinia had friends like this, for whom Darwins Tierra del Fuego and Cooks Tahiti had merged with Parrys Igloolik and dUrvilles Antarctica until a place arose in which ice cliffs coexisted with acres of pampas, through which Tongan savages chased ostriches chasing camels. Those people sent six candles encased in brown paper but couldnt keep north and south straight in their minds, placing penguins and Esquimaux in the same confused ice and pleating a continent into a frozen sea.
None of them grasped the drudgery of such a voyage. Not just the planning and buying and stowing but the months sitting idly on the decks of a ship, the long stretches when nothing happened except that ones ties to home were imperceptibly dissolved and one became a stranger to ones life. No one knew how frightened he was, or the mental lists he made of all he dreaded. Ridiculous things, ignoble things. His bunk would be too short or too narrow or damp or drafty; his comrades would snore or twitch or moan; hed be overcome by longing for women; hed never sleep. Sleepless, he would grow short-tempered; short-tempered, hed say something wrong to Zeke and make an enemy. The coarse food would upset his stomach and dyspepsia would upset his brain; what if he forgot how to think? His hands would be cold, they were always cold; hed slice a specimen or stab himself. His joints would ache, his back would hurt, theyd run out of coffee, on which he relied; a storm would snap the masts in half, a whale would ram the ship. Theyd get lost, theyd find nothing, theyd fail.
Giving up on sleep, he lit a candle and reached for his journal. On his earlier voyage this had been his constant, sometimes sole, companion, but tonight it let him down. Pen, inkpot, words on white paper; an inkstain on his thumb. He couldnt convey clearly the scene at the wharf. He gazed at his first messy attempt and then added:
Why is it so difficult simply to capture what was there? That old problem of trying to show things both sequentially, and simultaneously. If I drew that scene Id show everything happening all at once, everyone present and every place visible, from the bottom of the river to the clouds. But when I describe it in words one thing follows another and everythings shaped by my single pair of eyes, my single voice. I wish I couldshow it as if through a fan of eyes. Widening out from my single perspective to several viewpoints, then many, so the whole picture might appear and not just my version of it. As if I werent there. The river as the fish saw it, the ship as it looked to the men, Zeke as he looked to young Ned Kynd, the Toxies as they appeared to Captain Tyler: all those things, at once. So someone else might experience those hours for himself.
Irritated, he put down his pen. Even here, he thought, even in these pages meant only for his own eyes, he wasnt honest. Hed left out the first mates self-important strut; the appalling sight of his own hands, which amid the onions had suddenly looked just like his fathers; and the sense that they were all posturing in front of each other, perhaps for the benefit of the green-coated boys. He rubbed at the stain on his thumb. Nor was it true, or not wholly true, that he wanted to paint the scene as if he werent in it. He did want his own point of view to count, even as he also wanted to be invisible. Such a liar, he thought. Although chiefly he lied to himself. Hed wrapped himself in a cloud. Beyond it the world pulsed and streamed but he was cut off; people loved and sorrowed without him. When had that cloud arrived?
STILL THEY WERENT ready to leave. Captain Tyler banished Zeke and Erasmus the next afternoon, while the men tore out and then rebuilt the bulkheads in the hold. The sledges hadnt fit after all, in any configuration; the wood took more space than planned and the measurements on Zekes sketch had turned out to be wrong. A clock ticked in Erasmuss chest: two days, two days, two days. They could leave no later, they were already late, the season for arctic navigation was short and the newspaper reporters and expeditions donors were ready to send them off on Thursday. Did he have enough socks? The right charts, enough pencils?
He was wild with anxiety and stuck here at home, with Zeke and Lavinia and her friend Alexandra Copeland. They were in the front parlor, all four of them working. Maps and charts and drawings spread everywhere. Without explanation he rose and ran to the Repository, which he ransacked in search of Scoresbys work on the polar ice.
He rolled the ladder along the shelves; the book was gone, yet he couldnt remember packing it. And couldnt bear the thought of explaining why it had suddenly seemed so crucial. The wry face Alexandra had made as he bolted embarrassed him. Yet her presence had been his ideaLavinia couldnt stay alone, with only the servants for company, and she hadnt wanted to join Linnaeus or Humboldt. A companion, hed proposed. Whod like to share our home, in return for room and board and a modest payment.
Lavinia had chosen Alexandra, whod accepted a pair of rooms on the second floor. When Linnaeus and Humboldt, unexpectedly generous, offered work hand-coloring the engravings they were printing for an entomology book, Alexandra had accepted that as well and made herself at home. Now there was no escaping her; sometimes she even followed him into the Repository. But she was good for Lavinia, he reminded himself. The way she pulled Lavinia into her work was wonderful. He took a breath and headed back.
At the parlor doorway he paused to watch his sister, who was frowning with concentration and shifting her gaze from the original painting pinned above her desk to the engraved copy she was coloring with Alexandras help. Caught up, he thought, as shed never been helping him with his seeds. The plates showed four tropical beetles. The sun lit the brushes, the water jars, and the ruffled pinafores so dabbed with gold and rust and blue that the beetles seemed to have leapt from the plates to the womens legs. Has anyone seen my copy of Scoresby? he asked.
Ive been reading it upstairs, Alexandra said. She touched her brush to the paper, leaving three tiny golden dots. I didnt know you needed it.
Erasmus, admitting his foolishness, said, Its not as if I have room for one more thing.