Bathsheba Demuth

This article contains spoilers for The Terror and The North Water.
Of all the horrors of a 19th-century European voyage to the Arctic—noses and cheeks turned necrotic by frostbite, snow blindness, sea madness, broken bones badly knit—perhaps most ghastly was scurvy. The disease often starts with stiff limbs and ulcerating skin. Gums bleed and blacken, then engorge and protrude over the teeth or their absent weeping sockets like a dark second set of lips.

On the first day of summer, Siberia and I were the same temperature. In Verkhoyansk, roughly 3,000 miles northeast of Moscow, a searing week ended in an afternoon hotter than any before recorded north of the Arctic Circle. Half a planet away in New England, a thermometer under my tongue gave the same reading: 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. In a human, this is the clinical threshold for a fever.We had also been too hot for too long, Siberia and I.