Chapter Text
In the early morning hours of the 17th of October, not yet ten hours after Alexander Mason’s head had been pulped, another day where the coastline of Adelaide Peninsula was not yet in sight, a second mutiny commenced in camp.
As he slept in the harness, too tired to get into bedrags and comfortable enough (which was, not at all) in his heavy slops, Burt was not witness to the actual event. But he had been told, later on, what had occurred.
The ringleader, William Wallace, a seaman who was still well muscled despite the ration cuts and furious marching, led two of his compatriots over to Henry Butler and brought him a demand.
“We want a pinnace. We don’t like how you killed Alex Mason. Or that you did it at all. He ain’t done anything,” he said. “We don’t think the ice’ll melt anymore, neither. We want a pinnace and a musket so we can sail down Back’s River and hunt for food.”
“How will three men pull a pinnace to a river more than a hundred miles away, Mr Wallace?” asked Butler, feigning calm as he rubbed his eyes from the attempt at sleep.
“A lightly loaded pinnace, Henry. We could take only the most necessary provisions, and maybe a few more men, like John Coleman or Tom-”
“You aren’t having anymore of my men. If you want to go off on your own, go, but you won’t have a pinnace nor any of my men.”
Wallace sighed. “Fuck you, Butler.”
“Aye, I imagine-”
He did not get to finish the sentence. Charles West, the drunk who had become infernal in his company ever since being deprived of his pleasures, drew a knife. Before Butler had time to jerk back, he had put the knife fully in the man’s shoulder. It came out on the other side clean. Butler screamed. Someone drew a shotgun. By now, Burt had woken up.
He wanted to help them. He truly, truly did - but it would mean his death too, and he was not that brave of a man. He watched the proceedings from his place in the hauling line.
Thomas Wallows blasted William Wallace in the chest with both barrels, killing him before he hit the ground and ripping up his organs enough that they were unconsumable. Charles West and Stoker Charles Fletcher, the other mutineer, ran off into the elements, but Ed Smith managed to hit Fletcher in the chest with one of his long muskets. All their shots managed to miss Charles West, and he was not seen again by any of the mutineers, though not for lack of effort. Ed Smith finished Fletcher off with a shot to the head, and the two corpses were dragged onto one of the pinnaces by Maynard and Coleman.
The recovered steward, Hoar, carefully drew the knife out of Butler’s shoulder, giving him the camp’s remaining laudanum, but it was still extremely painful.
Burt himself was assigned to cutting up the bodies, as Wallows, Smith, Fischer, and John Maynard went off to hunt for West. It was not so much a capture-and-execute mission, but a mission to recapture missing cattle, or dray animals. Even so, West would have been better off if he was caught immediately, thought Burt, to spare him the horror of dying of sheer thirst or starvation or cold out in the bare white nothing.
It was no longer his problem. He had long since been past the point of vomiting at every little thing - but this was not every little thing. He had eaten from a friend and one of his acquaintances, yes, but actually cutting up their corpses as their eyes bared into you was a task like no other.
He completed it. He had no other option. Butler was not the king of this camp, even de jure anymore. He floated in and out of consciousness as a result of the laudanum, and half the time he was awake he was moaning and groaning and cursing William Wallace for his predicament. As Burt was assigned to nurse him, during midday on one of their more frequent halts to marching, Butler had told him something.
“Fletcher.. before he died.. I..” he coughed and spat. His red beard continued to recede.
Burt frowned. “Before he died, what? Pleaded for a reprieve?”
“He said that Wallows had told him and Will Wallace and Charlie West to mutiny.” he spat. “ That he’d gotten fed up with Butler. That the ice wouldn’t… wouldn’t melt, like he had said to me. He wanted to go south. To the river. Christ. But then Wallows was the first one to raise a gun. Did you notice that Wallace was saying ‘Tom’, before Wallows shot him?”
“Oh,” said Burt. He didn’t know what to say to that.
“I don’t think he even genuinely cares about getting anyone out anymore. Maybe not even himself. He just wants chaos. War in Heaven. Between men who have nothing against each other.”
“Hell,” remarked Burt. “War in Hell.”
“Aye,” said Henry Butler.
Hours after Butler’s wounds were stitched by Hoar, the remaining eight men of the company (nine in total, but Butler could not haul) pulled the pinnaces, four men and dogs to a boat, to the base of a large crested hill. Butler eventually decided that if they did not see the coastline from that hill, they would turn about and head in another direction to seek the coastline of Adelaide Peninsula.
The three men with telescopes scaled the mountain in an hour. Butler could not climb it, so he gave his telescope to John Coleman and the three of them, Coleman and Burt and Wallows, made their way to the top. Burt slipped several times on the uneven ground, and Coleman pulled him up. It was an extremely clear day, and they could see miles in any direction.
They could see the coastline, and the strait. Aside from the edges, where bergy bits floated in the stream of the Simpson Strait, the way was wide open. It would close up in November, yes, but that would be enough time to at least get three fourths of the way to their destination. Coleman and Burt began to laugh, and even embraced, but not Wallows, who stood solitarily to the side. He affixed his scope to the left, down some, and then said aloud,
“Ship ahead. The sails are taken up, the anchor is down. The way is free, but they aren’t moving. We can take it up to Edinburgh.” he said, voice in complete monotony.
Burt and Coleman affixed their spyglasses frantically to the position he had pointed out, and grinned.
“Erebus, I make it.” said Coleman.
“Aye, probably. Unless the Terror men took it down here, for some reason. That Esquimaux man… at the meeting with Anderson… he said, ‘The ship at Utjulik.’ This must be Utjulik, whatever that means.”
“Can nine men sail HMS Erebus?” asked Coleman.
“Probably, plus whoever is aboard that we find,” said Burt. “We can take them along with us, if this fellow here doesn’t kill them.” he pointed his spyglass at Wallows.
Wallows only smiled.
After Burt and Coleman embraced and laughed some more, they turned to start down the mountain.
With a groaning Butler in the rear, guarded by John Coleman, the other six men of the camp were informed of the developments. They began to start up a cheer, and four men were assigned to ready the salt-stained sails which, although extremely stiff, were still functional. Additional lumber was dumped off the pinnaces to lighten the load, as they figured they would be able to hunker down in the ship.
With only nine men remaining, and one of them boat-bound, a hastily-called meeting led by Butler decided their next actions.
“We could abandon one pinnace here, along with supplies we don’t need. Nine men is more than enough for one boat. Attach all the dogs to one boat and have two or three of our healthiest direct them to the correct place.” announced Butler.
Although Butler tried to frame it as an order, it was not approved until the majority of the mutiny voiced their support. The only men to disagree were Burt and Steward Hoar, who wanted to take them both up onto HMS Erebus. The weight that would be lost by abandoning an entire boat won out, however, and the remaining seven men agreed to drop it. They only kept Speedy, the boat named after Lord Cochrane’s ship,
They piled most of their lumber aboard it, their spent shells, the corpse of Alexander Mason, and the bones of the animals they’d hunted. The pinnace they kept was filled to the brim with canned goods, their remaining Esquimaux items, and their guns.
Steward Hoar passed out the remaining Esquimaux meat as they approached, and they ate cold seal and bear and whatever else was in the bag. Then they pulled the pinnace from the base of the mountain, attached all eight dogs to their harnesses, and hauled.
They found that two men and eight dogs were more than enough to pull their reduced weight. They slid across the gravel like butter on a knife, and seven men sat in the boat and had conversations and laughed, even Henry Butler, for the first time since the mutiny.