Specimen Drawings: A Verse Novel

• Chapter 1 Pigment and Salt: The Whaler's Berth
• Chapter 2 Pressed Saxifrage, Lat. 64° N
• Chapter 3 The Cartographer’s Eye
• Chapter 4 Tincture of Iron, Tincture of Scurvy
• Chapter 5 Lichen on Basalt
• Chapter 6 Soundings in the Baffin Deep
• Chapter 7 Scurvy Grass (Cochlearia officinalis)
• Chapter 8 Pack Ice in Indian Ink
• Chapter 9 The Rime of Coal Dust
• Chapter 10 Frozen Moss Campion
• Chapter 11 Driftwood and Desiccation
• Chapter 12 Studies in Frostbite
• Chapter 13 The Crushed Keel
• Chapter 14 Blubber Lamp Nocturne
• Chapter 15 Spores Beneath the Glacial Tongue
• Chapter 16 The Shivering Compass
• Chapter 17 Wintering in the Sledge-Box
• Chapter 18 Arctic Willow (Salix arctica)
• Chapter 19 Delirium in Prussian Blue
• Chapter 20 Flesh of the Narwhal, Dried
• Chapter 21 The Sinking Chronometer
• Chapter 22 Sedge in the Permafrost
• Chapter 23 Whiteouts and Erasures
• Chapter 24 The Bone Needle’s Measure
• Chapter 25 Seed Pods Under Snow
• Chapter 26 Folio Left on the Floe

I. Bill of Lading, Dundee Docks

The oak chests came aboard smelling of gum arabic and boiled horse-hoof glue, carried between two deckhands who cursed the weight of dry ground earths as though each firkin held gravel. They did not expect stones to rattle so cleanly inside seasoned deal. Mr. MacCormick, the third mate, spat dark juice into the harbor grease and marked my manifest with a thumb worn down to yellow leather: forty pounds of rag paper from the Inveresk mill, three dozen hog-bristle brushes bound in tin ferrule, one small field-press of kiln-dried ash with copper screws, six cakes of ox gall to cut the grease of blubber-lamps, and nineteen glass phials of pulverized color stopped with wax.

He asked if the girl was to be berthed in the hold with the tallow or in the sick-bay with the lime-juice casks. He did not look at my skirts, which were pinned high above the harbor scum with brass safety pins, but at the knuckles of my right hand, which were stained round the cuticles with cadmium yellow from finishing the plates of the Highland thistle monograph for the Botanical Society of Edinburgh two nights prior.

"The illustrator," my father said from beneath his muffler, "takes the clerk's pantry abaft the chronometer shelf. She requires thirty candle-feet of north light, or what the sky permits through the deck-prisms, and five pints of fresh water per week for the grinding slab."

The mate laughed once, like an axe striking a spruce knot. "She’ll take the grey water from the scuttle-butt like the rest of the livestock, sir, and she’ll sleep where the salt-beef doesn't drip."

They hoisted the paper aboard on a single whip. The three-ply Whatman boards lay forty to the parcel between sheets of tarred linen, dry as dried bone, stiff enough to hold their sizing against the damp of the Moray Firth, though we had not yet cleared the bell-buoy at Tayport. On the wharf, my cousin James stood with his hands tucked into his waistcoat pockets, looking at the Hesperus as if she were a coffin that had cost twelve hundred pounds to caulk. He had offered me three hundred pounds a year to draw the histology of diseased sheep kidneys for his practice in Cupar. He could not conceive why a woman who could render the tubules of an animal kidney with three-zero sable would prefer to sail into the pack ice to draw flowers that grew no taller than a thumbnail.

"They do not rot," I told him when the gangplank shook beneath the derrick.

"Everything rots north of the Orkneys, Clara," he said. "The ice only keeps the shape of it until the thaw."

The ship smelled of twenty-two voyages to the Greenland ground: train-oil soaked three inches deep into the white-oak knees, coal-smoke from the donkey-boiler that rattled on the fore-deck, and the sour cabbage that Captain Fairweather insisted on keeping in vinegar tubs near the mainmast to stave off the rot in his men’s gums. It was an honest stench, hard and greasy, that clung to the wool of my cloak before we had even loosed our topsails to the south-easterly breeze.

II. The Berth (Dimensions: Six Feet by Four)

The pantry is framed in larch-wood, scrubbed with soda until the grain rises in ridges like the skin on an old washerwoman’s thumb. Overhead, the heavy timber of the waterway groans whenever the helm is put over; every five minutes the rudder-chains take up their slack with a clank like iron pots dropped into a well. My bunk is an open drawer beneath the chart-locker. When I lie straight, my heels touch the partition that separates me from the second engineer’s spare brass fittings, and when I turn, my shoulder strikes the rack where my twenty-inch drying boards are wedged with folded paper to keep them from drumming.

I have established my order.

The cakes of color sit in an alder box with copper hinges: French ultramarine, for the edge of the lead water where the cold is deepest. Burnt umber and raw sienna, for the roots that cling to basalt detritus. Venetian red, for the stems of the low willow. Gamboge, though it runs foul if the damp reaches the gum. And flake white, six jars of it, heavy as lead shot, to mix the crust on the petals before the frost turns them to water.

The glass ink-bottles are sunk into holes bored through a two-inch plank of elm, which I have screwed to the deck-beams with my father’s turn-screw. The captain came below at six bells to inspect the carpenter-work. He is an Aberdeen man, small-eyed and dry as kippered herring, who wears his sea-boots even at table and has not taken off his woollen mitts since we passed the Bell Rock.

"You'll use no naked lamps after eight in the evening, Miss Reid," he said, touching the edge of my elm plank with a scarred finger. "The wood of this ship is seventy years dry where the blubber hasn't wet it. A drop of spirit from a spirit-lamp will go through her timbers like grease through a goose."

"I work by daylight only, Captain."

"There is no daylight where we are going, mistress," he said, turning back toward the companion-ladder. "Only a great white glare that will peel the skin off your eyes like the skin of a scalded plum, and then three months of grease-light. If you are to draw weeds, draw them quick while the sun has a leg to stand on."

He left his salt on the ladder-rungs. Everything here leaves salt. If I run my tongue along the edge of my clean rag paper, it tastes of the North Sea swell that broke over our quarter two hours out from the lights of Montrose.

III. The Grinding Slab

The porphyry slab is six inches square, taken from an old headstone cutter’s yard in Arbroath. It is heavy enough to kill a dog. When the ship lurches into the hollow of a green sea, the glass muller slides three barleycorns to the leeward, and I must catch it with my wrist before it cracks against the bulkhead.

To-day, being our third day out and the Pentland Firth behind us, I ground the lampblack.

The lampblack is for the outlines—the hard, unyielding veins that hold a saxifrage leaf against the wind that comes off the ice-tongues. A pencil will not do; graphite glazes on the paper when the air is below freezing, turning grey and greasy as lard, so that when one brings the sheet into the cabin stove, the lines run together like spiders in a peat fire. The ink must be carbon, bound with enough hide-glue to bite the fiber before the droplet freezes.

Through the deadlight, the water is the color of an old slate roof. A fulmar follows the wake, its wings stiff as tin plates, never flapping, merely tilting when the squall strikes the crest of the grey rollers. I watched it for an hour through the round glass while my arm moved in circles—grind, turn, gather with the horn spatula, grind again.

A woman who works with color must not be delicate about the dead. The best black comes from the bones of sheep burned without air; the finest yellow is the urine of cows fed on mango leaves, though God knows where the Dutchmen find them; the crimson that makes the throat of a bog-orchis look like an open wound is nothing more than the dried guts of an insect that lives on cactus in the Americas. We build our flowers out of dust and grease and dead men’s leavings, and then we are surprised when they look like life.

IV. First Encounter with the Mate’s Specimen

MacCormick brought me a weed this morning, held between his thumb and two fingers like a dead rat by the tail. He found it wedged into the hawse-pipe when they cleared the chain for the northern run off Cape Wrath.

"A botanical rarity, Miss," he said, laying it upon my blotting paper where it left a smear of black coal-tallow and bilge-ooze. "Native to the Dundee docks, I warrant. Very delicate."

It was a sprig of common knotgrass (Polygonum aviculare), bruised to a pulp by the link-iron and pickled in harbor brine until the leaves were as translucent as bladder-skin. Yet the small pink calyx had survived, shut tight against the salt, about the size of a louse’s egg.

"It is an annual," I said, without looking up from my ink-cake. "It grows in the gravel between the flagstones where the horses stand."

"Aye," he said, leaning his bulk against my pantry door until the larch boards creaked. "It’s a tough little devil, like everything that comes out of the Angus mud. You’ll find nothing so civil where we’re bound. Up there, the grass doesn't grow tall enough to hide an earwig. If you find four leaves on a stalk, you may call it an oak and be thankful."

"The Linnaean system does not take account of stature, Mr. MacCormick. A creeping birch with stems no thicker than horsehair is as much a birch as the trees in the Duke’s park at Dunkeld."

He looked at my glass phials, then at the small steel pins I use for setting out petals.

"You have twenty dozen pins there, Miss Reid. I counted them when your box was opened by the customs-man."

"Nineteen dozen and four."

"They'll be very useful for picking the frost out of your fingers when the nails start to lift," he said. His voice was not unkind; it was simply flat, like the sound of an iron shovel scraping snow off a stone hearth. "The doctor has five knives and three saws, and they are all too large for a lady's hand. If I were you, I’d keep the small ones where you can find them in the dark."

When he went out, he left the smell of old wool and plug tobacco in the tiny pantry. I took the knotgrass, rinsed the black harbor-oil from its joints with a saucer of tea, and pinned it to the cork strip beside the deadlight.

By noon, the salt had dried on it in fine white crystals, so that the pink lobes looked as though they had been dusted with ground loaf-sugar. I drew it in the margin of the first sheet of Whatman, five times natural size: the three stamens, the single style, the tiny seed three-cornered like a beechnut. It was not an Arctic plant, but it had come thirty miles north of the Butt of Lewis on the ironwork of our anchor, and that was something.

V. Instructions from the Royal Society

Before we sailed, Dr. Arbuthnot gave me his notebook. It is bound in sheepskin that has turned the color of ginger-bread from his tobacco pipes. On the first leaf, he had written in his dry, legal clerk’s script:

MEMORANDA FOR THE ASSISTANT NATURALIST (PLANTS)

1. The forms are minute; the collector must look to the hollows of stones and the dung-heaps of the Little Auk. 2. Let no drawing be made from specimens thawed by the stove; the cellular tissue collapseth upon the introduction of artificial heat, and the true habit of the plant is lost. 3. The colors of the petals must be noted instantly upon gathering, as the blue of the Gentianeae changeth to a dull liver-color within twenty minutes of the root being severed from the frost-ground. 4. In the matter of the Cryptogamia (Lichenes), the dry crust should be chipped with the cold-chisel together with the rock-face. Do not attempt to detach the plant from its stone, for they are one flesh. 5. Your paper must be kept between dry flannels beneath your bedding; if the size in the sheets freezeth before the wash is laid, the surface will break into small pits like the small-pox, and the ink will run like grease.

I have the flannels. They are four yards of Welsh wool, grey and greasy, that my aunt bought in the High Street. They smell of sheep-grease and vinegar, and they are spread now between my mattress-straw and the deal boards of the bunk. Every night I lie upon my sixty sheets of Whatman board, warming them with my ribs so that the frost does not get into the sizing.

If I die before we make the pack, they will find sixty sheets of white paper with the impression of my spine upon the back of them, like the leaf-fossils they break out of the shale at Brora.

VI. The Sound of the Hull

At sea, the wood does not rest.

The Hesperus is three hundred tons, bark-rigged, with three-inch oak planking on her sides and a five-foot shoe of iron-wood spiked onto her stem to break through the pancake ice. When she rises over the swell of the Atlantic, the timber talks through my pillow. It does not speak like the trees in the wood behind the manse at home, which have a long, whistling sigh that moves from the birch-tops down to the bracken; it speaks like an old house when the joists are drying out under the weight of the slates.

Tchick. That is the scarf-joint three feet from my ear. Krr-ung. That is the iron bolt that ties the deck-beam to the frame.

Sometimes, in the middle watch, between two and four of the morning, when the wind comes out of the north-west and the spray hits the bull’s-eye above my head with the sound of gravel thrown against a window, I sit up and light my half-inch of candle to look at the vials.

The colors do not move. In their glass graves, they are as quiet as the sands in an hour-glass: The lapis, which was mined in the mountains behind Persia and carried on camels to the sea. The madder, which grew in the wet ditches of Holland. The terra-verte, which came out of the side of a hill near Verona where the sheep graze among the junipers.

They have nothing to do with the sea. They are the dry earth, powdered until it cannot remember its own quarry, waiting for a drop of water to make it show its face again.

I took the camel-hair brush—the small one, marked No. 2, Winsor & Newton, London—and dipped it into my drinking mug. The water was brackish, tasting of the iron tank and the red-lead with which they seal the rivets, but it was wet enough. I touched the tip to the raw sienna cake, worked it twice on the corner of the porphyry slab until the bristle held a flat point like a sparrow’s tongue, and then, on the underside of the pantry shelf, where no mate or captain would ever see it, I drew the outline of an oak leaf.

Not an Arctic birch, nor a dwarf willow that crawls like a caterpillar among the stones, but a real oak leaf from the timber-woods at home: broad-shouldered, deep-lobed, with seven veins on either side of the rib, full of English sap and summer air.

The green wash took twenty minutes to dry in the cold air of the berth. It dried flat and pale, with a white crust of sea-salt along its northern edge, exactly like the rime that comes upon the grass before the martin leaves the eaves.

VII. Off the Faroes

The sea has turned from slate to an ugly, tallowy green that looks as though lime had been slaked in it. Captain Fairweather took his noon sight through a rift in the grey mist that was no broader than a church door, then came down to the mess-table with his thumbs tucked into his belt.

"The drift is coming down," he said to the surgeon, Dr. Oliphant. "We’ll see the first bergs before we make the sixty-third parallel. Small ones—growlers from the East Greenland current. Green as bottle-glass and hard as Aberdeen granite."

Oliphant is a young man from Edinburgh with bad teeth and three volumes of Mr. Darwin’s journals in his chest. He believes that the Arctic flora will prove to be the stunted survivors of an ancient garden that once covered the North Pole when the world was warm and moist like an orchid-house.

"The seeds," he said, spearing a piece of pork that was as yellow as old tallow, "must have been carried on the feet of the birds. A sandpiper may carry three hundred grains of swamp-mud in the cracks of its toes. Think of the diaspora, Miss Reid! Every gale that blows from the south is an act of colonization."

"The sandpipers do not land on the ice, Dr. Oliphant," I said, cleaning my fork with my bread. "And if they did, the seeds would find nothing to receive them but six hundred fathoms of sea-water or twelve feet of old snow."

"You have no poetry, Miss Reid," the surgeon said with a smile that showed the black stops in his premolars. "You have the eye of an appraiser. You look at a saxifrage as if you were going to sell it to an apothecary by the drachm."

"I am paid seventy-five pounds by the Society to draw what is there, sir. If I draw three stamens where there are four, the gentlemen in London will not call it poetry; they will call it five pounds off the quarter’s salary."

The mate looked up from his plate. He had the liver of a cod on his fork, dripping white oil into his beans.

"The lady is right, Doctor," he said. "The ice doesn't care about your poetry. You can recite the whole of the Psalms to a growler, and it will still take your bilge-keel off if you don't keep the lead going."

After dinner, I went up to the waist of the ship. The wind had dropped, but the swell was long and heavy, like the breathing of a fat sow in her straw. To the northward, where the sky ought to have been blue or grey or dark with rain, there was a pale, sulfurous blink along the water—a thin, yellow-white line that looked like the fat on the top of cold mutton broth.

"Ice-blink," the carpenter said as he passed me with his sounding-rod. "That’s the pack, forty miles off. The sun hits it and throws the glare up against the clouds like a lantern against a sheet."

It was not beautiful. It looked cold, cruel, and sterile, like the belly of a dead shark turned up in the wake.

I took my sketch-book out from under my apron—not the good Whatman, but the small pocket-book of Dutch paper that I bought with my own fourpence in Dundee—and with a stick of vine-charcoal I drew the horizon: one long, flat line, straight as a ruler, and above it that thin, sick smear of yellow-white that has no warmth in it.

When I touched the charcoal with my thumb to soften the edge of the sky, my skin came away grey and greasy. The dampness here has tallow in it; it comes from the blubber-scraps that have been trodden into the planks for forty years, rising up into the mist whenever the temperature falls toward forty degrees.

VIII. Cataloguing the Field Chest

Tonight I took an account of the small instruments, lest anything has shifted while we crossed the Roost of Sumburgh.

One brass pocket-microscope by Dancer of Manchester. The field is small, not much larger than a pin-head, but the lenses are clear, though the brass is already spotted with verdigris where my breath has hit the cylinder.

Three lancets in a shagreen case. These were my father’s when he was a dresser in the Royal Infirmary. The horn handles are cracked, but the steel is good Swedish plate; they will cut through a frozen leaf without tearing the cell-walls, if the hand is kept steady.

One dozen small glass jars with ground stoppers. These are empty now, smelling faintly of the oil of cloves in which they were rinsed. In three weeks, if the ice lets us into the bight at Disko, they will hold the green scum that grows in the melt-pools—the things that have no names, neither moss nor weed, but only a pulse of life that turns the ice pink or green before the autumn dark kills it.

Two quires of bibulous paper for drying. This is common grey paper, thick and soft as wool, that drinks the juice of the plants before they can rot under the press-screws.

I sat on the edge of the chart-shelf and watched the oil in the swinging compass-bowl. It tilted three degrees to the south, then five degrees to the north, never still, yet always returning to that dark, greasy point between the two copper pins.

The mate was singing on the deck above. It was an old song from the whaling ports, with no tune to it, only a long, dragging growl that matched the swing of the boom:

He has sixteen children between Peterhead and Stromness, so the cook says, and he does not know the names of five of them. He knows the name of every rock between the Bell and the North Cape, but he does not know the Latin for a docken-leaf.

Yet when he brought that knotgrass down the ladder, he had held it in the hollow of his palm so that the wind would not carry the small pink lobes away before I had seen them.

"It’s a poor thing," he had said, through his whiskers. "A Dundee weed. But it’s the last green thing you’ll see with a root in dirt until we fetch the Southland again."

I have placed the dried knotgrass between the leaves of Dr. Arbuthnot’s notebook, opposite his fifth rule concerning the Cryptogamia.

The pink is gone already. The salt has eaten it out, leaving only a dry, parchment grey, the color of a sheep’s tooth found upon the hill. But the three angles of the seed are sharp and true, and if I press my finger upon them through the paper, they prick the flesh like little thorns.

IX. The Sizing and the Cold

The great danger, which the books do not mention, is the behavior of the animal glue in the sizing.

The Whatman paper is sized with gelatine made from the skins of calves. In the ordinary air of an English drawing-room, or even in my father’s study with the sea-coal fire burning low in the grate, this glue remains elastic, yielding to the point of the crow-quill and receiving the wash of color as a dry lawn receives summer rain.

Here, as the latitude rises and the damp comes through the planking from the ice-drift, the glue hardens into a substance like horn.

This afternoon I tried a trial-plate upon a strip of four-ply. I dipped the quill into the black gall-ink and drew a circle three inches wide, intending to divide it into sixteen segments to show the arrangement of the stamens in the Caryophyllaceae. The ink did not sink; it sat upon the surface of the paper in round, black grease-drops, like water sprinkled upon a hot flat-iron. When I pressed the pen harder, the nib split with a small snap, and the sharp point gouged a white furrow through the size, turning up small, brittle shavings like horn-scrapings from a farrier’s knife.

I had to hold the paper over the donkey-boiler on the fore-deck for three minutes until the steam from the tallow-grease softened the surface.

The engineers looked at me from their hatchway, their faces black with Welsh coal-dust, their eyes red from the sulfurous draught of the small funnel.

"You’ll make a fine pudding of that paper, Miss," the second engineer said, leaning his bare forearms on the coaming. "The grease from that exhaust has five per cent tallow in it. If you put that before the gentlemen in London, they’ll think the Arctic plants grow on bacon-rinds."

"It takes the ink," I said.

And it did. The ink sank into the steamed fiber with a soft, fuzzy edge, like the hair on the back of an ermine’s tail. It is not the clean, hard line of the Edinburgh plates, but it will hold.

When I came aft again, the sun was going down behind the Faroes. The islands did not look like land; they looked like teeth—black, broken horse-teeth sticking up out of an ash-heap. There was no smoke from them, no light, nothing to show that any man had ever built a wall or boiled a pot upon their ridges.

Only the sea-birds, twenty thousand of them, circling the black stacks like midges over an open ditch, their cries coming down the wind like the whistling of a distant locomotive.

I went down into the pantry, closed the deal door, and bolted it from the inside with the iron bolt.

I have five inches of tallow candle left for the week. The flame burns blue at the base because the air in the berth is heavy with the breath of twenty-four men and the smell of the damp wool that hangs from the deck-beams.

I took the camel-hair brush and painted the date in the corner of the first plate:

June 14, 1883. Lat. 61° 40' N. Long. 6° 12' W. Wind N.N.W., freshening. Air 38° F. Water 36° F. Specimen: None.

Underneath, where the margin is widest, I ground a little Prussian blue—just enough to cover a copper sixpence—and laid it down in three flat washes, from the palest water-sky to the dark, murderous blue of the deep leads where the ice has not yet broken.

It is a cold color. It has iron in it. The man who invented it in Berlin made it out of bullock’s blood and potash, but the blood is gone and only the iron remains. When it dries, it has a hard, bronze sheen that looks like the skin of a horse-fly.

I lay down upon my paper, pulled the grey flannels up to my chin, and put the shagreen case with my father’s lancets under my ear so that they would not rattle on the shelf when the ship met the northern swell.

Through the timbers, four feet below my back, the sea went hush-hush-hush against the oak, like someone sweeping a stone floor with a birch broom. It will be five hundred miles of that sweeping before we see the moss on the rocks of Disko.

I blew out the candle to save the fat. In the dark, the deadlight was not black, but grey—a pale, milky, greasy grey that showed the round frame of the brass screw and the small, salt tears that were running down the outside of the glass, one after the other, toward the sea.

I. The Landfall at the Skerry

The anchor found bottom in five fathoms of kelp-water that smelled of rotten bladderwrack and iron ore. We had reached a small, nameless outcrop off the southern spit of Greenland, little more than an unhewn shoulder of gneiss shoveled out of the sea and left to freeze. The wind had dropped to an oily calm, leaving the ship rocking upon a slow, sickening heave that clapped the heavy yards against the masts like wet leather gloves.

The captain permitted the dinghy to drop for an hour to replenish the scuttle-butts from a stream that ran down a cleft in the stone. I climbed down the rope ladder with my field-press lashed across my back by two hemp halyards, my skirts bundled and tied around my knees with a length of cod-line so that I scrambled over the gunwale looking like a sack of dry meal. Mr. MacCormick stood in the stern-sheets, his hand on the steering oar, scanning the low cliffs with his pale, watery squint.

The land was neither green nor black. It was the color of a wet slate roof that had taken fifty winters of soot, cracked into geometric joints by the expansion of frost in the fissures. When the bow grated on the shingle, the sound set the teeth on edge—sharp, angular stones of mica-schist that had never been rounded by a river or washed by anything softer than sleet. I stepped into the surf before the sailors could catch my elbow; the salt-wash soaked through my calfskin boots in an instant, bitter and heavy with silt, aching against the ankle-bones with a dull ache that reached straight to the teeth.

On the scree above the high-water wash, where the droppings of the gulls had gathered in a hollow no wider than a dinner plate, grew the purple saxifrage (Saxifraga oppositifolia).

It was the first plant of the higher latitude, flattened so hard against the gneiss that it seemed less a living body than an embroidery worked in dark wool upon a slab of tombstone. Its stems were woody, thicker than wire, creeping in tangled cords through the grit to anchor every joint against the gales that bowl down the fjords. It had no height to speak of; three lines of growth were all it dared raise above the frost-riven rock. The leaves were minute, shaped like tiny stone scoops, edged with rigid bristles and tipped with a single limy pore that exuded a crust of white salt.

Between these grey scales opened the flowers: small, five-petaled cups of a sharp, angry magenta, each no larger than the nail of my little finger, but crowded so densely that the rock was smothered in patches the color of fresh venous blood.

II. The Portable Press

To press a high-latitude plant is to negotiate with stone. The roots do not yield to a gentle trowel; they wedge themselves into microscopic fractures, clinging with a dry, thread-like obstinacy that will leave the crown behind before the taproot surrenders.

I sat upon a boulder of grey syenite, the cold striking through my wool flannel petticoats until my hips were as numb as timber, and took out the bone-handled spatula. With careful, shallow strokes, I worked round the periphery of the cushion, lifting the gravel grain by grain. Underneath the living crust lay the dead growth of fifty seasons—brown, peat-like scales that had never rotted, preserved by the dry cold into a sponge of felted fibers that retained the smell of old meltwater.

When the clump came free, it was as light as a handful of dry down. I set it upon the grey drying paper.

The surgeon, Dr. Oliphant, had scrambled up the rocks behind me, puffing like an overloaded derrick and flourishing an empty zinc specimen-tin that rattled with loose labels. His cuffs were wet with foam, and his round spectacles had misted over until he had to peer over the rims like an owl in a hayloft.

"Observe the imbrication of the leaves, Miss Reid," he said, pointing with a dirty brass bodkin. "A defense against the drying winds! The plant lives in a virtual desert. Precipitation is negligible; it subsists upon the vapor of the ice-blink and the guano of the kittiwakes. If you draw it with long stems, you lie against the geography."

"I draw what the calipers measure, Doctor," I replied, without shifting my eyes from the root. "Three lines from the crown to the lowest petal. The stems do not rise; they crawl. If they rose half an inch higher, the drift would plane them off flat like a carpenter's adze."

"A magnificent adaptation," he murmured, his breath forming small clouds that vanished instantly into the dry air. "The struggle for existence written upon a scrap of moss! Consider the ancestors of this little creature, Miss Reid, flourishing upon the slopes of a warmer world, slowly beaten down, compacted, dwarf-born, until they learn to lie flat beneath the heel of the frost!"

"It is not a moss," I said. "It has two styles, ten stamens, and a superior ovary. It is as much an angiosperm as the roses in the garden at Perth."

The sailors were filling the water-casks below, their shouts echoing back from the black rock wall with a harsh, hollow ring. They worked quickly, eyeing the mouth of the bay where three large fragments of drift-ice were turning slowly in the current, their submerged spurs showing a cold, electric turquoise beneath the swell. A place like this had no hospitality for men. The rocks gave back nothing but the echo of their boots, and the stream was so cold that the men swore it made their iron hoops brittle when they rolled the tuns into the wash.

I placed the saxifrage between two sheets of bibulous paper, laid them between the ash-boards of the small press, and tightened the four brass thumb-screws until the sap gave a faint, wet click inside the fiber. A tiny droplet of crimson juice squeezed out from the crushed calyx and marked the margin of the grey wood.

III. The Composition of Magenta

In the berth, the plant must be drawn before the violet cast of the petals turns to the color of wet liver.

The cabin lantern gave a yellow, greasy ray that made all the reds appear as brown as tea-leaves. I had to open the small sliding hatch of the pantry and work by the grey glimmer that filtered down through the deck-prism, though the draught from the companionway carried a stream of cold air that made the flame of my alcohol spirit-lamp gutter and smoke against the ceiling.

The color of the saxifrage is a difficulty that the manuals of botanical watercolor do not resolve.

Mr. Syme’s Nomenclature of Colours calls it 'purplish red,' and bids the artist mix carmine with a touch of Prussian blue and a grain of flake white to give it body. But the carmine of the London shops is made from cochineal, an insect of the warm plains of Mexico; it has a rich, velvety warmth that belongs to the petals of carnations and the drapery of Italian cardinals. It has nothing to do with the glare of this northern rock.

The color of the saxifrage on the skerries is thin, fierce, and acid. It is the purple of frostbitten ears, the purple of blood that has been thinned by vinegar and salt.

I took the slab of Arbroath porphyry and ground a small lump of rose madder with two drops of stale rain-water. The madder gave a clean, pale wash, but it lacked the bite. To find the true hue, I was forced to add a micro-grain of smalt—the pulverized cobalt glass that my father used for the veins of his anatomical injections. It is an intractable pigment, coarse and gritty, that settles into the hollows of the paper like sand and refuses to obey the brush.

The paper, too, protested. The gelatine sizing was now so cold that it would not drink the tint.

I took the plate of four-ply Whatman and warmed it across my knees, rubbing the dry grain with the flat of my palm until the friction raised a faint heat. My skin was dry, peeling in small white shreds along the knuckles from the salt and the soda of the ship's soap; when I rubbed the paper, it made a dry, whispering sound like a snake passing over gravel.

I drew the dissection first, using the crow-quill and the carbon ink: Figure 1: The flower, viewed from above, magnified six diameters, showing the five imbricated petals and the ten stamens inserted on the disk. Figure 2: A single leaf, magnified twelve diameters, showing the fimbriate margin and the terminal lime-secreting gland. Figure 3: The capsule, mature, two-beaked, splitting between the styles.

My fingers were stiff. Every quarter of an hour I had to put my right hand under my armpit to thaw the small joints, counting fifty swings of the pendulum in the captain’s chronometer before I took up the pen again. If the steel nib grew too cold, the ink gathered at the point in a thick, jellied blob that would drop without warning and ruin twelve hours of stippling.

Outside, the ship groaned as she met the swell from the Davis Strait. The timbers in the pantry bulkhead slipped past one another with a sound like two dry boots squeaking together in church.

IV. The Surgeon's Philosophy

Dr. Oliphant brought his brass balance into my pantry at two bells in the first watch. He had nowhere else to work; the mess-table was occupied by the first mate and the specksioneer, who were playing at draughts with buttons cut from salt-beef bones and drinking rum that smelled of molasses and tar.

He set the scales upon the edge of my grinding slab, leveling the brass tripod with three small wedges of cedar-shingle.

"The specific gravity of the leaves," he said, breathing through his teeth as he adjusted the pointer. "A curious matter, Miss Reid. They contain a higher proportion of mineral salts than any plant of the Scottish hills. They are half rock already. If one burns them upon a platinum foil, the ash leaves an exact skeleton of the leaf in calcium carbonate."

"The lime comes from the stone," I said, laying down the red wash with the No. 2 brush. "The plant drinks the drainage of the syenite and leaves the salt upon its tips because it cannot breathe it away."

"You reduce everything to mechanics, Miss Reid! You are a strict materialist. Have you no sense of the drama of the species? Here is a little organism that has outlived the mammoth. It sat upon these very ledges when the ice-cap extended down to the Thames. It saw the glaciers plow the valleys of Westmorland. It watched the reindeer pasture where St. Paul’s now stands, and it will be sitting here when the Hesperus is nothing more than six hundredweights of rusty iron at the bottom of the Baffin sea."

"If it outlives the ship, Doctor, it will be because it does not require three tons of Welsh steam-coal a day to keep its heart beating," I said. "The plant is three lines high. A gale that would take our main-topmast out of the hounds passes over it as if it were a flat stone. There is no drama in being small; it is merely an economy."

He looked at me through his round glasses, his eyes magnified into pale, liquid balls.

"You have a very chilling view of nature, Clara."

"I have spent eight years drawing the organs of sheep and the teeth of field-voles for twenty-four shillings a plate, Dr. Oliphant. When one has spent three weeks rendering the liver-fluke through a lens of an eighth-inch focus, one does not look for sentiment in the mud. Nature is an employer who pays very small wages and dismisses her staff without a character."

He laughed, though the sound was pinched by the cold of the cabin. "Your father told me you were an enthusiast."

"My father is a minister's son who believes that God created the thistle to teach the Scotsmen industry," I told him, blowing upon the wet red plate to keep the wash from pooling toward the left margin as the ship rolled. "He has never had to clean the grease out of sheep-tubules with a badger-hair blender. My enthusiasm is for the sizing of the paper and the durability of the pigments. If the red turns brown in thirty years, the Society will have wasted their seventy-five pounds, and that would be an injustice to both of us."

He did not reply, but took a pair of ivory-pointed tweezers and began laying small, dried fragments of the saxifrage into the brass pans of his balance. The pans were tiny, no larger than shirt buttons, suspended by three threads of raw silk. When the ship rose to the long, northern roll, the balance-beam swayed three degrees to the leeward, and he had to sit with his hands poised, waiting for the dead-center between the pitches to drop his grain-weights into the scale.

The silence between us was filled only by the regular, rhythmic breathing of the bilge-pumps forward and the small, dry tick of his tweezers against the brass.

V. The Dissection

To see the interior of the leaf, one must split it while it is half-frozen. If it is permitted to thaw completely, the cells collapse into a dark, watery jelly that cannot be sliced; if it is frozen hard, the blade shatters it like a chip of flint.

I held the small leaf between my left thumb and forefinger, feeling the small, prickly margin indenting the skin. With the third lancet—the one with the narrow, curved blade that my father had used for operations upon the eye—I made a single longitudinal cut from the terminal pore to the petiole.

Under the Dancer microscope, the architecture was revealed.

The upper surface was protected by a cuticle of incredible thickness, three times the depth of the epidermis in an English saxifrage, appearing under the lens like a slab of yellowish horn, perfectly clear and without pores. Beneath this armor lay the palisade cells: small, green cylinders packed together as tight as the timber piles under the Dundee wharves, each charged with granules of chlorophyll that were dark and dense, the color of crushed parsley.

There were no air spaces. The leaf had no room for breath; it was packed solid, a tight wedge of living cells designed to hold every drop of sap against the fierce, dessicating suction of the Arctic wind.

At the very tip, where the lime-pore opened to the sky, there was a minute reservoir lined with cells that had turned entirely to stone. They were encrusted with crystals of calcite—sharp, four-sided rhombs that caught the yellow light of my spirit-lamp like tiny bits of diamond.

The plant was building its own monument. It was turning its own waste into a rampart of limestone to shield its growing tip from the frost.

I drew this at fifty diameters on the lower half of the second sheet: Figure 4: Transverse section of the leaf through the hydathode, showing the deposition of calcium carbonate. Figure 5: A single palisade cell with chloroplasts, drawn with the camera lucida.

The camera lucida is a small prism of glass mounted on a brass stem that reflects the image of the object onto the paper, so that the hand appears to draw over the shadow of the thing itself. It is a tricky, treacherous instrument; if the eye moves half a line to the left, the whole drawing slips two inches to the margin, and the proportions are lost.

My neck began to burn with a dull, iron stiffness from hanging over the tube. My right eyelid twitched with the strain of keeping the other eye closed against the smoke of the tallow candle that stood by my elbow.

Through the bulkhead, I could hear the second engineer cleaning the valves of his bilge-pump with an iron reamer. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. He was two feet from my head, separated only by two inches of larch planking, yet we were each in our own separate vault: he with his tallow and his iron packings, and I with my ten stamens and my cakes of French madder, both of us burrowing northward into the great white deadness of the charts.

VI. The Watch on Deck

At four bells in the middle watch—two hours after midnight—the light had not died.

It had merely changed its nature. The sun had dipped three fingers below the horizon behind the coast of Greenland, leaving a sky of pale, watery apple-green that stretched without a cloud from east to west. There was no night; only a wide, open, sleepless twilight that made the ship look dirty and small, like an old shoe left upon a clean terrace.

I went up to the waist to empty my wash-saucer over the rail.

The deck was white with rime, the crystals lying along the seams of the planks in long, glittering lines like the veins in marble. The rigging was coated with a thin skin of ice that had gathered from the sea-fog, and whenever the halyards struck the masts, small, brittle scales of glaze fell down upon the deck with a dry rattle like the spilling of dried peas.

Mr. MacCormick was standing by the binnacle, his pea-jacket buttoned up to his chin, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his canvas trousers. He had an old woollen stocking pinned round his neck with a brass safety pin to keep the draught from his throat.

"You're late with your weeds, Miss Reid," he said, without turning his head from the compass-card.

"The ink takes three times as long to dry in this air, Mr. MacCormick. The gum will not set."

"Aye. Nothing sets here except the water. And that sets faster than a man likes."

He pointed with the stem of his clay pipe toward the northern lead.

The horizon was no longer clear. A long, white wall had risen out of the water, not tall, but perfectly straight and level, like the white-washed wall of an orchard seen from three miles off. It had no breaks in it, no gaps where a ship might find an entrance; it sat upon the leaden water like a great, flat lid that had been lowered upon the sea to keep it still.

"The main pack," he said. "The middle ice of Baffin's Bay. In three days we'll be into the drift of it. If the wind comes round to the sou’-west, it will jam us against the land-ice before we can fetch the shelter of Upernavik."

"Is the ice hard?" I asked.

He looked at me then, his small, blue eyes watery with the cold and rimmed with red lids that had no lashes left upon them.

"It’s not ice like you see in Scotland, Miss," he said. "It’s not the stuff that freezes on a mill-dam that you can break with a stone. It’s five winters old, some of it. It’s as hard as the iron in that winch-drum, and it has the weight of the whole polar basin behind it. When it takes a ship by the quarter, it doesn't break her boards; it just squeezes her until her bolts draw out of the knees with a bang like a four-pounder gun, and she sits there with her ribs sticking through her skin like an old horse that’s died in a ditch."

He spat over the bulwark. The dark brown spot of tobacco-juice hit the ice on the waterways and froze before it could run into the scuppers.

"And there's no weeds on it," he added. "Not an inch of moss. Not enough dirt to fill a tooth. You can walk forty miles over the floe and see nothing but the tracks of a bear that’s looking for something to kill, and when he doesn't find it, he eats his own paws."

"The saxifrage grows in the gravel," I said. "Where the land is."

"There is no land where we are going," the mate said, turning back to the compass. "There’s only rocks with the ice on the back of them, and then more ice, and then the place where the world ends. If I were you, I’d keep that dried flower of yours in your pocket. It’s the last piece of garden you’ll see until the Hesperus brings her oil back to the Tay—if she ever brings it."

VII. The Labeling

I went below to the berth. The cold had crept into the bunk; the grey flannels were stiff to the touch, and when I sat upon the straw mattress, the dried stalks inside crackled like broken glass.

I laid the finished plate upon the drying board and trimmed the margins with the straight-edge and the horn-handled shoe-knife.

The Whatman board was three-ply, heavy and white, with the water-mark of the manufacturer—J. Whatman, Turkey Mill, 1881—visible in the upper left corner when the sheet was held against the yellow flame of the candle. It looked clean, vast, and silent, like the sky over the skerries before the sun went down.

In the lower right-hand corner, I drew the three lines for the formal inscription with the ruling-pen and the black carbon ink:

Plate II. Saxifraga oppositifolia, Linn. In rupibus maritimis, Lat. 64° 12' N., Long. 51° 40' W. Legit C. Reid, 19 Junii, 1883. Ad naturam pinxit.

Underneath the formal title, in the small, narrow script that my father had taught me when I was twelve years old and copying the names of the grasses for his herbarium, I added the field-notes:

Habit: dwarf, densely caespitose, forming small cushions three to six inches in diameter upon the bare gneiss. Leaves opposite, quadrifariously imbricated, four lines in length, carinate, the margins ciliated with rigid white setae; apex with a single sunken hydathode encrusted with carbonate of lime. Calyx segments five, ovate, obtuse. Petals five, obovate, two lines long, of a bright purplish-crimson, drying to a dull violet-grey. Stamens ten; filaments subulate, red. Ovary half-inferior; styles two, divergent, persistent upon the capsule.

Observation: The flowers were open though the root-fibers were still held in the frozen soil four lines below the moss-layer. The scent is faint, resembling that of bruised elder-leaves with a slight bitterness of salt. No insects were seen upon the blossoms, but several small black acarids (mites) were observed running among the stem-scales. The lime-crust upon the leaves is not removed by rain, but appears to be dissolved by the first snows of autumn.

I blew upon the ink until the shine died out of it.

The ship gave a heavy, shuddering lurch as she met the first drift-ice of the Davis Strait. Overhead, through the deck-prism, came the sound of the carpenter's mallet: clop, clop, clop, as he wedged the chocks under the long-boat to secure her against the northern gale.

I took the specimen from the press.

It was flat now. The life was crushed out of it, but the geometry remained: the ten stamens like tiny spokes of an iron wheel, the five petals spread out upon the paper as thin as a dried wafer, the little white lime-pores at the tip of the leaves showing like dots of white paint upon the dark green scales.

It had lost its juice, its coldness, and its scent of wet stone. It was no longer a plant that lived upon the edge of the glacier; it was an entry in an index, a dry shadow that could be tied into a folio with green tape and kept in a mahogany press in Burlington House for two hundred years without changing a line.

I placed it between the leaves of the dry cartridge-paper, laid my forty pounds of Whatman board on top of it, and pulled the grey flannels over my shoulders.

The timber of the waterway groaned above my head—krrr-ung, tchick, krrr-ung—and four feet beneath the floor of my pantry, the grey Greenland water swept along the oak planking, carrying the ship two miles an hour nearer to the ice that has no flowers.