The Arctic Grail Page 12

  But the path that Parry had chosen was rough. He had expected to find the smooth, flat expanse of ice that some whalers had reported. It did not occur to him that, as Scoresby had made clear, this condition only existed at an earlier time of year before the weather changed and the ice grew rougher. It is inconceivable that Parry was unaware of Scoresby’s thesis. Why didn’t he take him seriously? The answer must be that his old mentor, John Barrow, had no use for the whaler. Sometime after he snubbed Scoresby at Sir Joseph Banks’s home, he had penned an anonymous article in the Quarterly Review sneering at Scoresby’s “idle and thoughtless project of travelling over the ice of the sea to the North Pole.” That clashed with Barrow’s conviction that an “Open Polar Sea” existed – one reason, doubtless, why Parry built heavy boats rather than the light sledges Scoresby suggested. Scoresby, like most whalers, scoffed at the theory of an Open Polar Sea. When he heard it discussed at the home of his friends the Stanleys, he flatly predicted that Parry would never reach the Pole.

  Parry’s last voyage: toward the Pole, 1827

  Parry and his second-in-command, James Clark Ross, set off, each in charge of a boat-sledge with twelve men. Once again, they were unlucky with the weather. The season, now well advanced, was the most unfavourable he could have encountered. Parry had never seen such rain; twenty times as much fell that summer as had fallen in any of the seven previous summers he had spent in the Arctic. It came down in torrents, once for a steady thirty hours. But when the sun came out it shone so fiercely that the tar ran out of the seams of the boats.

  The weather played havoc with the ice. A turbulent expanse of broken cakes, piled one atop the other, stretched to the horizon – high, sharp, angular masses that impeded every step of the men dragging the boat-sledges. It was like trying to haul a cart through a stonemason’s yard, with stones ten times their normal dimensions. And there was worse: “pen knife ice” – needle-like crystals that tore at the soles of the boots – and slush, knee deep, that caused the men to revert to all fours. When there wasn’t rain there was fog, so thick it caused the party to grope blindly, yard by yard, from one hummock of ice to the next, trying to avoid the thousands of ponds that formed between the blocks.

  The need to launch and land the boats, to load, unload, and reload them, to make long circuits round ponds too shallow to navigate, slowed the expedition to a turtle’s pace. Parry had figured to make more than thirteen miles a day; he made scarcely half a mile. On one occasion it took two hours to move a hundred yards.

  He kept expecting to meet what he called “the main ice,” the smooth continuous plain the whalers had described. He couldn’t get it into his head that in summer it didn’t exist. His men were wet and exhausted, their fatigue aggravated by the scanty rations. Parry had underestimated greatly, allowing no more than a pound and a quarter of solid food a day, scarcely enough for men performing hard labour for ten hours.

  But there was a worse problem, which made the struggle even more heartbreaking. A stiff wind blowing down from the Pole was driving the ice before it. At last Parry understood what every one of the despised whaling captains knew, that even as his party plodded grimly north, the ice was moving south. They were on a treadmill. For every two steps they took forward, the ice took them one step back. On July 26, Parry recognized that although they seemed to have pushed ten or eleven miles north, they were actually three miles south of their starting point that day. He kept that knowledge from his men, who still believed they were pressing close to the 83rd parallel, at which point the company would receive the thousand-pound reward that parliament had offered to anyone who could get that far.

  Two days later Parry gave up. Even that goal was unattainable. He had managed to reach the hitherto unattainable latitude of 82°45′ – one quarter of a degree farther than Scoresby’s unofficial record. It was a considerable achievement, given the circumstances, and it would stand for fifty years, adding to Parry’s towering reputation as the greatest of the Arctic explorers.

  But, had he taken Scoresby’s advice, he would certainly have achieved more. The statistics of his journey are sobering. He and his party had clocked 978 miles of polar travel, but because of the circuitous route, the constant need to shuffle supplies back and forth, and the southward movement of the ice, it was discovered that when Parry reached his farthest point, he was only 178 miles north of the harbour where he’d anchored the Hecla.

  He could not have continued. His men were suffering from chilblains, snow blindness, and incipient scurvy. By the time they reached the first solid land – no more than a rock in the sea – they had been fifty-six hours without rest, were unable to comprehend orders, and, as Parry noted, had “a wildness in their looks.” They recovered and reached the Hecla on August 21, 1827, after an absence of sixty-one days.

  Once again, Parry had missed his target. It would have been easier if the Admiralty, buoyed up by his optimism, hadn’t felt it necessary to announce that he was going to the Pole. “I wish I could say we have been successful but this we have not,” he wrote ruefully to his Isabella. He was crazy with desire to “clasp my dear girl to my heart.” All the reserve found in his journals vanished when he poured out his soul to her in these letters from shipboard. “How can I express the anxiety of my fond heart, my beloved Isabella, as I approach the English shores! … Daily, almost hourly, I have prayed for you my love.…”

  She had already received one letter from Hammerfest. It all but prostrated her. “I could not open it my hands trembled and my heart beat too violently but in a few moments I calmed.…”

  As he approached London, Parry grew more ardent. He landed at Inverness but was held up at Durham for lack of horses; the Duke of Wellington, travelling the same road, had commandeered all the available transport. He used the delay to express “the unspeakable joy and comfort” her letter, received at Edinburgh the previous night, had given him. All the frustrations of the polar trip were dissipated when he learned for the first time that he was to become a father. He was ecstatic: “Oh, my darling wife, how can I ever be thankful enough for all God’s mercies to me? … You well know, sweet girl, all your Edward feels on such an occasion, for you know every inmost feeling of my heart.… Tell me when you write more particularly about yourself. You cannot, dearest girl, write on any subject one ten-thousandth part so interesting to your Edward.… You are quite right, love; success in my enterprize is by no means essential to our joy, tho’ it might have added something to it; but we cannot, ought not to have everything we wish.…”

  He and Franklin arrived home from their respective expeditions about the same time and, by coincidence, walked into the Admiralty with their reports within fifteen minutes of one another. Both would soon be knighted. Parry stubbornly insisted that although the Pole would be more difficult to reach than anybody had previously believed, he himself could not “recommend any material improvement in the plan lately adopted.”

  This arrogant and egotistical assessment flew in the face of all reason and experience. It was too much for William Scoresby, who publicly recorded his disagreement. The whaler pointed out that the Eskimos invariably used dogs and light sledges and that their umiak, a light boat only thirty feet long, carried as many passengers as Parry’s large, heavy craft but could be hoisted on the backs of six or eight men. The boat should weigh no more than four or five hundred pounds, said Scoresby. Parry’s had weighed 1,450. The Russians, too, had used light sledges and dogs and had managed to make direct distances on the ice much longer than Parry had, some of them travelling “many leagues a day without difficulty.”

  “Why was it,” Scoresby asked, “that our expedition assisted by all that natural ardour so peculiar to British seamen, could seldom complete more than four or five miles a day …? Surely it was not that our adventurers were less capable, less hardy, less enterprizing than others?” He listed three reasons: the boat-sledges were too heavy, the season too far advanced, and Parry had chosen the wrong meridian to ascend. He was too far east, th
ough, of course, he had no way of knowing that. But Scoresby was convinced from a study of Parry’s narrative that the Pole could be gained only by an approach from the west. In that he would again be proven right, but not until long after his death.

  Many years later, a very different kind of explorer, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company, writing to Governor George Simpson, was to make his own assessment of official Arctic travel. The way to get credit, Rae wrote sarcastically, “… is to plan some … scheme … and after having signally failed, return with a lot of … reasons – sufficiently good to gull John Bull – for your failure.”

  The two newest knights were both heroes in the public eye, but, it seemed, their Arctic exploits were behind them. Parry, safe in his sinecure as naval hydrographer, would never again be sent on an expedition. Franklin would soon be counted too old to attempt a fourth. For the moment the public was satiated by tales of polar ice, and the Navy, too, had grown weary of the Arctic. It seemed as if the great adventure, on which Barrow and “the Parry school” (as it came to be called) had embarked with such enthusiasm, was at an end.

  But no one, at that point, had reckoned on that much-despised explorer John Ross, the scarred veteran of half a dozen battles not only with Napoleon’s navy but also with Barrow and his disciples. Ross was determined to go north again, and, like those of so many other explorers, his motives were mixed. It was not just that he wanted to find the North West Passage for the honour and glory of Great Britain. Having made himself a laughing stock over the illusory Croker Mountains, he was determined to regain his honour – a word much used by all explorers of that period – by succeeding where his enemies had failed.

  The Navy, of course, had no intention of sending him anywhere. He needed private funds, and who better to supply him than the country’s leading distiller and philanthropist, Sheriff Felix Booth, who required nothing more than that his name be permanently attached to some barren piece of rock extending into the forbidding Arctic seas.

  Thus it came about that the longest peninsula in the Arctic and also its biggest gulf both bear today the name of a popular brand of British gin. In one way or another, Ross got his revenge.

  Chapter Three

  1

  Endless winter

  2

  The indomitable Jane

  3

  Enter the Honourable Company

  4

  Prison warden

  5

  A matter of honour

  6

  The Arctic puzzle

  John Ross’s crew saved by the Isabella (illustration credit 3.1)

  1 Endless winter

  For most of the decade, John Ross had nursed his wounded pride at his Scottish home – North West Castle, he called it – at Stranraer. A prodigious writer with a voluminous correspondence, he addressed his roving intellect to a variety of inquiries, ranging all the way from the “science” of phrenology to the principles of steam propulsion. It was Ross’s Treatise on Navigation by Steam that showed him to be ahead of his time and also ahead of the British Navy, which was strongly committed to sail. Lord Melville, for one, was convinced that “the introduction of steam was calculated to strike a fatal blow to the naval supremacy of the Empire.”

  Ross felt hard done by. In exploding the myth of the Croker Mountains, Parry had made him a laughing stock. His own boasts hadn’t helped. In some quarters those who exhibited an excess of vanity were now said to be afflicted with “Ross-ism.” The Navy had promoted him and Lord Melville had assured him that the service held him in high esteem, but Ross was not taken in by that hollow accolade. When other expeditions were mounted, he was passed over. Parry and Franklin were heroes, but Ross was ignored. That rankled.

  But now, in 1827, the Passage beckoned once more. Parry was back after another failure; he and Franklin had not been able to link their separate explorations. Ross saw a chance to regain his lost honour – and at Parry’s expense. All he had to do was cruise down Prince Regent Inlet beyond Parry’s last point of discovery and continue on to Franklin’s Point Turnagain, and the laurel would be his. He went to Melville with a proposal to send a steam vessel to the Arctic in one final, victorious sweep. But the Admiralty wasn’t planning any further expeditions, especially one led by John Ross in a steam-powered ship.

  Ross didn’t give up. If the government wouldn’t support an expedition, other patrons might. He went to see his old friend Felix Booth, the distiller, and sheriff of London, who was sympathetic. He felt that Ross had been slighted through anonymous rumours. There was also some suggestion that an American expedition was being formed to seek the Passage. That would never do!

  Booth was prepared to advance seven thousand pounds to Ross’s three thousand to make up the total amount the explorer had calculated the expedition would cost. There was, however, a hitch: the government award of twenty thousand pounds promised to the first expedition to sail through to the Pacific. Booth didn’t want anyone to think he was after private gain.

  The events that followed were twisted into an ironic, indeed a ludicrous, sequence. With Booth retiring from the plan, Ross was forced to go back to the government with a new Arctic scheme. The government, of course, turned it down, and, being unaware of Booth’s position, persuaded parliament to cancel the reward, apparently to discourage all Arctic schemes in general and John Ross’s in particular. This had the opposite effect from the one intended, for it brought the scrupulous Felix Booth back into the picture. In the end he committed more than seventeen thousand pounds to the venture.

  Ross’s second-in-command would be his nephew James, now an experienced Arctic traveller. John Ross believed that Parry’s ships and crews had been far too large. His company would total no more than twenty-three. His ship would be an eighty-five-ton Liverpool steam packet, the Victory, its tonnage increased to one hundred and sixty-five by a series of improvements but still less than half the tonnage and draught of the Hecla or the Fury. A sixteen-ton tender, the Krusenstern, accompanied the expedition, which reached Disco Island off the west coast of Greenland on July 28, 1829.

  Now it was John Ross who was lucky, for this was the mildest season in the memory of Greenland’s oldest inhabitants. Steaming northwest across Baffin Bay, Ross expected at any hour to encounter the ice that had trapped Parry. To his astonishment and delight, the ocean was clear. “But for one iceberg … we might have imagined ourselves in the summer seas of England.” At six on the morning of August 4, he found his men scrubbing the decks barefoot – a remarkable spectacle. Two days later, he entered Lancaster Sound. He had crossed Baffin Bay in nine days; Parry on his second voyage had taken two months.

  In the sound, some disagreeable memories returned to haunt him. He couldn’t resist a crack at Parry in his journal. Sir Edward had not uttered so much as a whisper at the time to support his later belief that Lancaster Sound was a strait. Even if he had done so, Ross felt he had been justified in turning back. Now, it was his turn to solve the problem that had stumped Parry. If he ever returned to England, Ross told himself, he would be received in a very different manner.

  His luck continued to hold. He breezed down the sound and into Prince Regent Inlet in thirty-six hours, again outdoing Parry. The only difficulty was the steam engine, which hadn’t worked properly since the start of the voyage. Ross seemed to be spending half his time in the engine room helping the men fix boiler leaks and faulty pumps. The engine was soon abandoned in favour of sail, a circumstance that was to provoke a lively, choleric, but ultimately ineffective pamphlet war between Ross and the builder, Braithwaite, each of whom blamed the other for the problem.

  On August 12, the expedition passed Fury Beach. There was no sign of Parry’s vessel, but the tent poles of the previous expedition were clearly visible in the shadow of the glowering limestone cliffs. It had always been Ross’s plan to replenish his own stores from those left by Parry, but to his mortification, he found that the current and the tide made it impossible to land.

  John Ross and
James Clark Ross, 1829-33

  On he went. Cresswell Bay, named by Parry, seemed on first inspection to be a passage to the west – an apparent victory over his rival and hailed as such by some of Ross’s supporters on board. Ross, however, took no joy in this revelation, or later claimed he didn’t. “I would rather find a passage anywhere else,” he told his nephew, because, as he said later, “I am quite sure that those who have suffered as I have from a cruelly misled Public Opinion will never wish to transfer such misery to a fellow creature if their hearts are in the right place.” As it eventually turned out, Cresswell Bay was an inlet that led nowhere.

  The Victory returned north and this time found an anchorage off Fury Beach, strewn with Parry’s supplies, all in good condition. The crew stowed as much as they could on board. “God bless Fury Beach,” they cried as they rowed back to the ship. At least they weren’t going to starve.

  Ross again pushed south down into the inlet. On August 16 he passed Parry’s farthest point and entered unknown waters, breaking out some bottles of his sponsor’s gin in celebration. By the end of September he had gone three hundred miles farther than Parry and was only two hundred and eighty miles from the point where Franklin had turned back in 1821. But, of course, there was a land mass blocking the way.

  Now his luck ran out. The Arctic turned fickle. Buffeted by gales and raging seas, almost crushed by jostling icebergs, he gave up. Like the others, he had failed, and, like the others, he was tormented by that failure. Could he have got through the Passage if the engine hadn’t given out? Could he have achieved his ambitions in a bigger ship? The answer, though he didn’t know it, was no, for Prince Regent Inlet was virtually a dead end. There was one narrow channel leading through the great mass of land to the west (later to be named Bellot Strait), but it was so constricted that Ross had missed it on his voyage south.