Graham Gore, weak from exposure and illness, struggles back aboard the ice-trapped Erebus, where the hull lists under pressure from the frozen sea. He insists on attending an emergency command meeting despite obvious physical decline, and in the sick bay the surgeon, Stanley, tests his lucidity by asking the date; Gore answers after a heavy pause.

In the Great Cabin—still shadowed by Sir John Franklin’s recent death—Captain James Fitzjames convenes officers from Erebus and receives Lieutenant Irving from Terror, representing Captain Crozier. Irving begins to deliver grim news and a scriptural consolation, but Gore cuts him off to force clarity.

Fitzjames explains the crisis: tinned rations on both ships have been found rotten and inedible, implying they were defective from the outset. Asked about hunting, Gore reports that hours of effort yielded only three partridges and a missed gull, with no other sign of game—confirming that resupply by foraging is failing.

With provisions now insufficient to carry both crews through a third year in the ice, Fitzjames confirms Crozier’s recommendation to reduce everyone to two-thirds rations. Stanley warns that the already-sick men will worsen with less food, but Fitzjames argues the alternative is starvation, and he frames the cut as the only way to preserve a chance of bringing men home if the ice ever breaks.

Gore, distracted by the sour pain and bleeding in his bandaged palm, quietly asks what happens if the ice does not break up. The chapter ends on the ship’s ominous groaning as the ice shifts and crushes around them, underscoring their dwindling options and mounting despair.