The Arctic Grail Read online

  Now, in October, he struggled through the encroaching ice of the great gulf that lay at the bottom of Prince Regent Inlet. Ross, whose powers of description were considerable, pictured it later for his readers.

  Let them remember, he wrote, that “ice is stone – a floating rock in a stream.” Then “imagine, if they can, these mountains of crystal hurled through a narrow strait by a rapid tide; meeting, as mountains might meet, with a noise of thunder, breaking from each other’s precipices huge fragments, or rending each other asunder, till, losing their former equilibrium, they fall over headlong, lifting the sea around in breakers, and whirling it into eddies while the flatter fields of ice, formed against these masses … by the wind and the stream, rise out of the sea until they fall back on themselves, adding to the indescribable commotion and noise.…”

  At last Ross found a suitable harbour, which he named Felix Harbour after his patron. The land off which they anchored the Victory would be called Boothia Felix (it is now Boothia Peninsula) and the gulf, the Gulf of Boothia. No bottled stimulant ever received greater recognition.

  It was as well for Ross’s sanity that he had no idea in that late autumn of 1829 that he would be forced to spend four winters in the Arctic. No other explorer had spent more than two. The remarkable aspect of Ross’s long imprisonment is that he was able to bring his crew home virtually free of the scurvy that weakened other expeditions. This was no accident. Ross had divined what others had ignored and would continue to ignore for the next half century. He had learned from studying the Eskimos that “the large use of oil and fats is the true secret of life in these frozen countries, and that the natives cannot subsist without it, becoming diseased and dying under a more meagre diet.” Ross was convinced that if others had followed “the usage and experience of the natives,” fewer would have perished.

  He was on the right track: seal blubber is rich in Vitamin C. Of course, he was in an area where game and fish abounded, yet he had to depend on the Eskimos not only to hunt for fresh meat and fish but also to provide furs to replace the Navy issue of wool. Without the natives, the story of Ross’s four-year ordeal would have ended tragically.

  The Victory and its little tender were frozen in for eleven months. On July 24, 1830, the bay was free of ice, but to Ross’s dismay there was no way out of the harbour; it was too shallow, the tides were too low. He had chosen the worst possible wintering place. The crews struggled for two months but succeeded in moving the ships no more than three miles. Ross named his new anchorage Sheriff Harbour (after Sheriff Felix Booth, of course) and resigned himself to another winter in the ice.

  The following summer – 1831 – he waited again for the ice to set him free. Again he waited in vain. “To us,” Ross said, “the sight of ice was a plague, a vexation, a torment, an evil, a matter of despair.” Once more the Victory managed to make about three miles, to be stopped by an impenetrable ridge of ice. The new harbour was named for the ship but changed later to Victoria Harbour to honour the young princess who would shortly be queen.

  Again, the worst aspect of these three winters was boredom. The usual schools, lectures, and small entertainments soon palled. There was nothing to do, nothing to gaze out on, for the landscape and sky never changed. To Ross, even the storms lacked variety “amid this eternal sameness of snow and ice.” Some men were able to sleep through most of the winter. Others “dozed away their time in the waking stupefaction, which such a state of things produced.”

  It was not a happy ship; perhaps no ship could have been under the circumstances, although Parry had gone a long way to lighten the dark season for his crews. But Ross was not Parry, as William Light, a steward on the expedition, made clear in his published reminiscences of the voyage. Parry, Light recalled, knew how to bend, “but with Capt. Ross the case was different, he was trebly steeped in the starch of official dignity, the maintenance of which he considered to consist in abstracting himself as much as possible from familiar intercourse with those beneath and suffering no opportunity to escape him, by which he could shew to them that he was their superior and commander. The men were conscious that they owed him obedience; they were not equally convinced that they owed him their respect and esteem.”

  Light’s memoir, published with the aid of a ghost writer, draws aside the curtain of naval imperturbability that conceals so much. In no other instance was the English public allowed a peek at the lower deck, given an insight into the real feelings of the ordinary seamen or a hint at the tensions that often marred relations aboard crowded vessels trapped in the ice.

  Light was very hard on John Ross – sometimes, out of ignorance or prejudice, too hard. At one point, for instance, he complained of being fed on a diet of salmon instead of salt meat. “In this unpardonable manner did Capt. Ross persevere in forcing upon his men a kind of food which … was injurious to their health and totally unfit to support the physical strength.…” But Ross knew better. He recognized the signs of incipient scurvy that first spring of 1830 and moved when he could to stamp it out. As he wrote in his diary: “… the first salmon of the summer were a medicine which all the drugs in the ship could not replace.”

  Light was undoubtedly closer to reality in his assessment of Ross as a haughty, unsociable, and almost hermit-like officer who treated his men with iron authority but little compassion and kept to his cabin, sustaining himself on his sponsor’s gin. He was the oldest man on the voyage – he passed his fifty-fifth year on this Arctic trip – and he hadn’t been to sea for a decade. He belonged to another, tougher era. As Light put it, “the quarterdeck of a British man of war is not the one best adapted to teach a man urbanity and civility toward his inferior!”

  Ross also possessed a towering ego. He took nobody’s advice and grew angry or stubborn when any was offered. The men blamed him for getting them into such a pickle by choosing the wrong harbour. There were times, according to Light, when they came close to mutiny. Ross himself alluded to one such incident during his evidence to the select committee that examined him after his return.

  To the crew, it seemed he lacked both energy and enthusiasm – qualities that distinguished James Clark Ross, his nephew. In fact, many of the expedition’s most notable discoveries were made by the younger man, though his uncle tried to grab as much of the credit as he could. This was John Ross’s great failing as an explorer; he lacked magnanimity, as Sabine had discovered over a decade before.

  James Clark Ross was more popular than his uncle and far more energetic, “the life and soul of all the schemes and plans,” to quote Light. In times of stress, the men came to him for advice. He was by far the most experienced Arctic hand on board, a veteran of five previous expeditions. Only four others had had any Arctic experience, and these were limited to two years or less.

  During the first two winters the ship was frozen into the ice, James Ross roved along the Boothia coastline by dogsled and small boat. Of the six hundred miles of new territory charted by the expedition, two thirds were his. It was he who discovered that Prince Regent Inlet came to a dead end in the Gulf of Boothia, he who collected most of the specimens, and he who paid daily visits in good weather and bad to the observatory that had been set up on the shore.

  In the spring of 1830 he crossed a body of water (later named for him) to a bald and forbidding land later named for King William IV of England. It was actually an island, but Ross didn’t realize that – a mistake that would help to doom the lost Franklin expedition seventeen years later. He and his sledging crew followed the coast northwest to its northern point, which he named Cape Felix – a fourth nod toward his uncle’s sponsor. Here he was astonished at the spectacle of vast masses of ice blocks hurled up on the shore, as far as half a mile above the high-tide mark. What had caused this amazing pressure? Ross could not know that this was the work of the great ice stream pouring down from the Beaufort Sea – the same ice that would eventually trap Franklin’s ships.

  The coastline turned toward the southwest, and Ross proceeded twenty
-five miles in that direction to a promontory he named Victory Point. To the southwest open sea stretched off in the distance toward Point Turnagain. The unexplored gap was only about two hundred miles, as the crow flies, but Ross didn’t have the supplies to go farther.

  His crowning achievement – the one for which he is remembered – came in the spring of 1831, when he located the North Magnetic Pole, then on the western coast of Boothia Felix. This was the great object of his ambition. “It almost seemed as if we had accomplished every thing that we had come so far to see and to do,” he declared, “as if our voyage and all its labours were at an end and that nothing now remained for us but to return home and be happy for the rest of our days.” His uncle tried to seize part of the glory for that, too, a claim that deepened the rift between them.

  For the Victory, in Light’s phrase, was “a house divided.” Uncle and nephew were often at loggerheads, and the crew tended to take sides. There were times when the two Rosses, who shared the same small cabin, scarcely spoke to one another. At one point in the early spring of the second winter, when nerves were frayed and tempers undoubtedly ran high, “the fire which had been concentrating for some time in their breasts, like the lava in the craters of Vesuvius and Etna, burst forth with an explosion, which terrified the other inmates of the cabin” – in the overheated prose of Light’s collaborator, Robert Huish. The argument, whatever it was about, was settled when John Ross sent for a magnum of Booth’s gin. But two months later, the two were at such odds that James Ross refused to attend divine service and went for a walk on the shore. If Light is to be believed, he didn’t miss much. The elder Ross didn’t have Parry’s evangelism; he babbled through the prayer book so fast that Light, for one, scarcely understood a word he said.

  The tensions and monotony of this two-year confinement were alleviated from time to time in the winter by the presence of the Eskimos. The seamen taught them to play football and leapfrog, to the natives’ obvious enjoyment, and, with the permission of the husbands, borrowed the women for their sexual pleasure. John Ross liked them, too, in a fatherly, stand-offish kind of way. They were, he declared, “among the most worthy of all the rude tribes yet known to our voyagers, in whatever part of the world.” But, although they kept his people warm, well fed, and free of the sexual tensions that often threaten the sanity of active men in an isolated environment, they remained barbarians to Ross.

  “We were weary for want of occupation, for want of variety, for want of the means of mental exertion, for want of thought, and (why should I not say it?) for want of society.… Is it wonderful that even the visits of barbarians were welcome, or can any thing more strongly show the nature of our pleasures than the confession that these visits were as delightful; even as the society of London might be …?”

  Nonetheless, their gluttony repelled him. “Disgusting brutes!” he wrote in his journal. They were uncivilized, in his definition of the word, and therefore lesser beings. “Is it not the fate of the savage and the uncivilized on this earth to give way to the more cunning and the better informed, to knowledge and civilization? It is the order of the world; and the right one.…”

  The crew felt closer to the Eskimos than Ross did; but then, they were closer, in more ways than one. The steward felt that Ross was interested only in what he could get from the natives. As long as they had geographical information that he needed, he received them well, but once he got from them everything they knew, his attitude changed and they were no longer permitted aboard ship. “There was scarcely a sailor who did not draw a comparison between the treatment which they received from the savage and untutored Esquimaux in their snow built huts, and that which the Esquimaux received from the tutored and civilized Europeans in the comparatively splendid cabin of the Victory.…”

  Ross made a vain attempt to move one Eskimo family who had built their snow hut close to the ship – too close to suit the captain. A hilarious confrontation followed. Ross had claimed the land in the name of the King, but neither he nor his nephew could make the Eskimos understand that the land they had lived on for centuries was no longer theirs. The white men explained the purpose of their visit, or tried to. The Eskimos in reply offered them a slice of seal blubber. The white men asked how long the family intended to stay. The Eskimos asked if they had any fish-hooks with them. The white men explained they’d taken possession of the land in the King’s name. The Eskimos remarked, chattily, that the seals were becoming very scarce. It had not occurred to them that anybody owned the land any more than anybody owned the sea or the air. They were planning an immediate trip inland in search of caribou. The naval officers, seeing their snow huts, had come to the wrong conclusion: to a white man, a house meant permanence, but the Eskimos could build one in a couple of hours. They could pack a light sled in half an hour with all their worldly possessions. No landlord or tax collector ever came to their door. The concept of permanence, of real estate, of tithe, title, and deed, was foreign to them.

  All over the globe at this time, the British were attempting to foist their own concept of morality on totally different cultures. John Ross was no exception. He needed an Eskimo interpreter such as John Sacheuse, who had been on his first expedition and died shortly afterward. On Boothia Felix he found a likely candidate, a young man named Poowutyuk, whom he took aboard the Victory and endeavoured to train. But neither one had the slightest understanding of the other’s culture.

  Poowutyuk thought of the ship’s crew as one big Eskimo-style family, where each individual foraged for himself. The best foraging, he quickly discovered, was in the steward’s cabin, where the food was kept. One night he appropriated a variety of foodstuffs, including a jugged hare and a roast grouse, both intended for the captain’s table. These he stuffed into his baggy sealskin trousers while he searched about for a comfortable place in which to consume them.

  His eye settled on a tub, half full of flour – to him a warm sort of snow. He climbed inside in his wet furs and proceeded to demolish his trove of delicacies. Ross, deprived of his dinner, set up a hue and cry to uncover the thief, who to the astonishment of the search party eventually rose from the tub “like a ghost from the tomb,” covered from head to foot in flour.

  Poowutyuk was proud that he had been able to look after himself. The idea of theft was unknown to him. As the steward said, he believed that “as the hare was every man’s property before it was killed, it was equally so afterward.” Ross didn’t see it that way. He ordered the Eskimo youth to suffer a dozen blows on the back with a stick. Poowutyuk was more puzzled than pained by this treatment. It didn’t occur to him that he was being punished. But what was going on? Was it some sort of ritual or custom? A ceremony, perhaps? At last he had it figured out. Since it was too cold for him to disrobe, and since his garments were thick with flour, and since he couldn’t reach his own back, the accommodating kabloonas were beating the flour out of him, as he had seen them beating rugs. He submitted quite cheerfully while Ross, uncomprehending, drew up a code of punishment for any more immoral acts that might occur in the future, oblivious to the fact that no one had yet been able to teach the Eskimos what, in the white man’s view, an immoral act was.

  Thus passed three winters. Ross had come to the melancholy conclusion that the Victory would never escape from the ice and that they would have to sink her in the spring, hike overland to Fury Beach, subsist on Parry’s stores, and then make their way out of the inlet and into Lancaster Sound in small boats. There, he hoped, the whaling fleet would succour them.

  He realized that this would be a race against time, for he had calculated his rations would run out in June. In April 1832, the crews began the exhausting drudgery of sledging supplies forward to set up a series of depots for the march north. It was a tedious business. That month they were able to move forward eighteen miles, no more, yet they had covered a total of one hundred and ten. The distance to Fury Beach – a twisting, switchback route that curled around bays, capes, and inlets – was three hundred.


  On May 29, they beached the tender and moored the Victory so that she would sink in ten fathoms of water. It was a dismal moment for Ross, who had sailed on thirty-six different vessels and until this moment had never abandoned one.

  Now the struggle began to get to Fury Beach before the supplies ran out. Ross put his men on two thirds of the normal rations. They slept each night in trenches dug in the snow, huddled together in their blanket bags. Ross, in Light’s phrase, was a “featherbed traveller” who rode for most of the journey on a sledge with a blind man, a cripple, and three invalids. The small size of the party was an asset; a larger one might easily have perished.

  By the time they reached Fury Beach on July 1, they were weak from hunger. Boxes of Parry’s foodstuffs lay scattered along the beach, and the ravenous men rushed at them. To their anger, Ross stopped them. Up stepped Thomas, the carpenter – Ross’s one indispensable man and therefore bolder than the others – crying out that this action was “shameful and scandalous.” Light, too, was angered and disgusted by the action and said so in his memoirs, but again he was far too harsh on his captain. Ross knew that half-starved men can make themselves ill by sudden gluttony. He distributed small portions, but after he retired, his crew pilfered the rest, hiding it under their blankets. In Ross’s words, they “suffered severely from eating too much.”

  Three of the Fury’s boats lay on the beach, but it was a month before the channel was clear enough to allow them to get away. They proceeded up the coast in fits and starts until, at last, relief seemed at hand. It was all illusion. On September 1, standing on a high promontory above Cape Clarence at the northern tip of Somerset Island, Ross looked out on Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound and saw a solid mass of ice. The inlet, too, was closed. There was no help for it; they must leave the boats behind and return by sledge to Fury Beach.