Terror and Erebus

Gwendolyn MacEwen

Being an account of the search by Rasmussen for the remains of the Franklin expedition

Rasmussen:
King William Island... latitude unmentionable.
But I'm not the first here.
They preceded me, they marked the way
with bones
White as the ice is, whiter maybe,
The white of death,
of purity
But it was almost a century ago
And sometimes I find their bodies
Like shattered compasses, like sciences
Gone mad, pointing in a hundred directions
at once -
The last whirling graph of their agony.
How could they know what I now know,
A century later, my pockets stuffed with
comfortable maps -
That this was, after all, an island,
That the ice can camouflage the straits
And drive men into false channels,
Drive men
into white, sliding traps...?
How could they know, even stand back and see
The nature of the place they stood on,
When no man can, no man knows where he stands
Until he leaves his place, looks back
and knows.
...

Carol Wilson