And all the while, one had to keep moving – waving arms and shaking legs and stamping feet – or extremities would freeze.

On a normal arctic summer, Mr. Des Voeux reminded Goodsir, citing their previous summer of ice-breaking southward from Beechey Island as an example, temperatures at this latitude on a sunny June day with no wind might rise as high as 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Not this summer. Lieutenant Gore had taken measurements of the air temperature at 10:00 p.m. – the time they stopped to make camp with the sun still on the southern horizon and the sky quite bright – and the thermometer read only −2 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature at their midday tea and biscuit break had been +6 degrees.

The Holland tent was small. In a storm it would save their lives but this first night out on the ice was clear with almost no wind, so Des Voeux and the five sailors decided to sleep outside on their wolfskins and tarps with only their Hudson’s Bay Company blanket sleeping bags for shelter – they would retreat to a very crowded tent if bad weather blew in – and after debating with himself for a moment, Goodsir decided to sleep outside with the men rather than inside with just Lieutenant Gore, as capable and affable a fellow as Gore was.

The daylight was maddening. It grew dim around midnight, but the sky was as light as an 8:00 p.m. London evening in midsummer, and Goodsir was damned if he could fall asleep. Here he was more physically tired than ever before in his life and he couldn’t sleep. The aches and pains from the day’s exertions also impeded sleep, he realized. He wished he’d brought some laudanum with him. A small draught of that would moderate the discomfort and allow him to sleep. Unlike some surgeons with a doctor’s certificate to administer drugs, Goodsir was not an addict – he used the various opiates only to allow himself to sleep or to concentrate when he had to. No more than once or twice a week.

And it was cold. After eating the heated soup and beef from the tins and walking through the ice jumble to find a private place to relieve himself – also an outdoor lifetime first for him and one, he realized, that must be accomplished quickly if frostbite of very important areas was to be avoided – Goodsir settled in on one of the large six-foot-by-five-foot wolfskin-blanket sleeping robes, unrolled his personal sleeping bag, and crawled deep into it.

But not deep enough to get warm. Des Voeux had explained to him that he had to remove his boots and slide them down into the bag with him so that the leather would not freeze solid – at one point Goodsir had pricked the bottom of his foot on the nails hammered through the sole of one of the boots – but all the men left on all their other clothes. The wool – all the wool, Goodsir realized not for the first time that day – was soaked through with his sweat and exhalations from the long day. The endless day.

For a while around midnight, the light deepened toward twilight enough that a few stars – planets, Goodsir now knew from a private lecture at the ad hoc observatory atop the iceberg two years ago – became visible. But the light never disappeared.

Nor did the cold. No longer moving or exerting itself, Goodsir’s thin body was defenseless against the cold that came in through the sleeping bag’s too-wide opening and that crept up from the ice through the hair-out wolfskin pad beneath him, crawling through the thick Hudson’s Bay Company blankets like some cold-fingered predator. Goodsir began to shake. His teeth chattered.

Around him, the four sleeping men – there were two on guard duty – snored so loudly that the surgeon wondered if the men on both ships miles northwest of them on the ice, beyond the countless pressure ridges – dear God, we have to cross those again going back – could hear the rasping and sawing and snorting.

Goodsir was shaking. At this rate he was sure he would not survive until morning. They would try to roust him out of his blanket and bag and find only a frozen, curled corpse.

He crawled as far down into the sewn-blankets sleeping bag as he could, pulling the ice-ridged opening closed above him, inhaling his own sour-sweat smell and exhalations rather than be exposed to that freezing air again.

In addition to the insidious light and the even more insidious creeping cold, the cold of death, Goodsir realized, the cold of the grave and of the black cliff wall above the Beechey Island headstones, there was the noise; the surgeon had thought himself accustomed to the groan of ship’s timbers, occasional creakings and snappings of supercold ship’s metal in the dark of two winters, and the constant noise antics of the ice holding the ship in its vise, but out here, with nothing separating his body from the ice except a few layers of wool and wolfskin, the groaning and movement of the ice beneath him was terrible. It was like trying to sleep on the belly of a living beast. The sense of the ice moving beneath him, however exaggerated, was real enough to give him vertigo as he curled more tightly into a fetal position.

Sometime around 2:00 a.m. – he had actually checked his pocket watch by the light filtering in through the bag opening – Harry D. S. Goodsir had begun drifting off into a state of semiconsciousness vaguely resembling sleep when he was pounded awake by two deafening explosions.

Struggling with his sweat-frozen bag like a newborn trying to chew through its caul, Goodsir managed to free his head and shoulders. The freezing night air hit his face with enough cold force to make his heart stutter. The sky was already brighter with sunlight.

“What?” he cried. “What has happened?”

Second Mate Des Voeux and three of the seamen were standing on their sleeping bags, long knives they must have slept with in their gloved hands. Lieutenant Gore had burst from the Holland tent. He was fully dressed with a pistol in his bare – bare! – hand.

“Report!” Gore snapped at one of the two sentries, Charlie Best.

“It was the bears, Lieutenant,” said Best. “Two of them. Big bastards. They’ve been snooping around all night – you remember we saw them about half a mile out before we stopped to make camp – but they kept coming closer and closer, circling like, until finally John and me had to shoot at them to drive them away.”

“John” was twenty-seven-year-old John Morfin, Goodsir knew, the other sentry this night.

“You both fired?” asked Gore. The lieutenant had climbed to the highest point of nearby heaped snow and ice and was searching the area with his brass telescope. Goodsir wondered why the man’s bare hands hadn’t already frozen to the metal.

“Aye, sir,” said Morfin. He was reloading his breech-loading shotgun, his wool gloves fumbling with the shells.

“Did you hit them?” asked Des Voeux.

“Aye,” said Best.

“Didn’t do no good,” said Morfin. “Just with shotguns over about thirty paces. Them bears have thick hides and thicker skulls. Hurt ’em enough though that they went away.”

“I don’t see them,” said Lieutenant Gore from ten feet up on his ice hill above the tent.

“We think they come out of those little open holes in the ice,” said Best. “The bigger one was running that way when John fired. We thought it went down, but we went out on the ice far enough to see there weren’t no carcass there. It’s gone.”

The sledge-hauling team had noticed those soft areas in the ice – not quite round, about four feet across, too large for the tiny breathing holes ring seals made, seemingly too small and too far separated for the white bears, and always crusted over with several inches of soft ice. At first, the holes had raised hopes for open water, but in the end they were so few and far between that they were only treacherous. Seaman Ferrier, walking ahead of the sledge late in the afternoon, had almost fallen through one, his left leg going in to above the knee, and they’d all had to stop long enough for the shivering sailor to change into different boots, woollies, socks, and trousers.