“You mutinous bastards,” the captain choked from his bunk. “You’ve poisoned me. I can feel it in my bones.”

“Try not to talk, skipper,” the bos’n said, handing a steaming cup of soup across the bed. It was the best food left on board.

The captain swatted at it, weakly but with enough force to spill the contents across his blankets and bedclothes. The men’s hungry, mournful expressions made no impression on him.

“You’ve all been against me from the start,” the captain hissed. “From first steam to 80 degrees north. You wanted the glory for yourselves, and now you’ll die out here without my guidance.”

The mates tried to calm him down, but the captain was soon frothing at the mouth in a paroxysm of rage, or perhaps of death. Eventually they were able to get a bit between his teeth, and the surgeon gave him some morphine.

By nine o’clock the next morning, he was dead. The first mate sent a party trudging over the sea ice to the rocky short to bury him. When left to themselves, the deckhands began placing small wagers about how long the rest of them would survive without the only man aboard experienced in those icy waters. The officers, for their part, apparently saw to it that the arsenic bowl from the surgeon’s kit went missing.