The men knew. Crozier knew what they knew. They knew it was the Devil out there on the ice, not some overgrown arctic bear.
Captain Francis Crozier did not disagree with the men's assessment — for all his pish-posh talk earlier that night over brandy with Captain Fitzjames — but he knew something that the men did not; namely that the Devil trying to kill them up here in the Devil's Kingdom was not just the white-furred thing killing and eating them one by one, but everything here — the unrelenting cold, the squeezing ice, the electrical storms, the uncanny lack of seals and whales and birds and walruses and land animals, the endless encroachment of the pack ice, the bergs that plowed their way through the solid white sea not even leaving a single ship's length lee of open water behind them, the sudden white earthquake up-eruption of pressure ridges, the dancing stars, the shoddily tinned cans of food now turned to poison, the summers that did not come, the leads that did not open — everything. The monster on the ice was just another manifestation of a Devil that wanted them dead. And that wanted them to suffer.