Horrible winter confusion

[igenlode]

I've managed to tie myself into worse knots than before in trying to re-establish my intended chronology for the d'Artois expedition. Reading what I've written it appears the plan for the expedition was as follows:

• Arrive midsummer Year 1
  Send supply ship Amélie back to Norway to report safe arrival of expedition
  
• Midsummer Year 2: return of supply ship to replenish provisions and allow for a change of personnel
  
• Midsummer Year 3: expedition due to return to Paris
  

What actually happens:

• Winter Year 1/2: overwinter as planned
  
• Summer Year 2: supply ship fails to arrive (and Raoul confirms 'over a year later' that the initial report failed to reach Paris)
  
• Winter Year 2/3: overwinter on short rations in the hopes of rescue in summer of Year 3
  
• Spring Year 3: vain attempt to reach Greenland across the ice. No ship arrives "in what remained of the year" after the venturers return.
  
• Midsummer Year 4(?): Wreck of the "Requin"
  

What is stated to happen in Paris during this period:

• 'Questions begin to arise' about the silence of the expedition at the same time as d'Artois prepares to ration supplies
  
• At the start of the story, the "Requin" sails in spring in search of expedition "of which there had been no news for three years"
  
• Rescue expedition planned "at the onset of that second winter" (c.f. I've cheated by implying that the rescue mission began to be planned a few months after the second anniversary, so that when Leroux says that no news of them had been heard for three years we're actually only 'in the third year', and not
  that many months into it). But I appear to have contradicted this in terms of how many winters are involved.
  

There definitely appears to be a conflict of dating here. I suspect the source of the confusion is due to inconsistency in what is being counted as 'a year' (January to January or June to June?), plus what looks like a possible change of mind as to how many years the expedition was originally planned for: at one point I'm saying "it's unlikely the expedition was planned for more than a year in any case" and yet at another point I'm talking about relief personnel arriving the next summer, clearly with the intention of passing a second year on the ice :-(



So if they set out, for the sake of argument, to arrive in June 1880, then after the first 'year' it will be summer 1881. They plan to return in summer 1882, and alarm bells start ringing back home "by the end of August" that year. Raoul is enrolled and is then on leave for six months before the "Requin" can sail in spring 1883. I think that was the timescale being used in 'Paris' terms above.

This would imply that the expedition overwinters in 1880/1 and then again on tight rations in 1881/2, before the sledging attempt in spring 1882. So there *is* a third winter in 1882/3 despite being 'only a few months into the third year'...? I can't get my head round how there can be three winters despite the passage of fewer than three years :-(

From the fact that 'winter' occurs for the first time only six months into the first year, I suppose, and then every twelve months thereafter.

|-----W-----|-----W-----|--x-W--X

(where '|' equals the anniversary of setting off and 'W' equals midwinter, 'x' equals the start of planning for the relief expedition and 'X' its departure)


But I think the text dating the planning of the expedition to "the onset of that second winter" has got to be just plain wrong; I suppose my thinking was that the Amélie was due to return in the second *summer* after they set out, so the second winter ought to be the one following that. Only they were originally planning to spend two winters on the ice before returning, one before the first anniversary of setting out and one after. So the winter following the second anniversary of setting out (which was also their intended return date) is in fact their *third* winter, because when you start your count at midsummer then each year consists of winter before summer, as opposed to starting it in January, and having summer approach first, followed by winter before the next twelve months starts...

Well, I've now managed to confuse myself even more horribly than before :-(
And if I'm confused, the odds are that so too will the readers be.

But the implication appears to be that there is indeed almost an entire undescribed extra twelve months between the failure of the Greenland expedition one summer (the last thing mentioned in my account of this period from d'Artois' point of view) and Raoul's arrival in early summer the next year, during all of which time, presumably, they are again living almost exclusively on seal meat and blubber.