The Arctic Grail Read online

  They now faced a fourth Arctic winter – a dreadful prospect, for they had lost the warmth of the ship and would be forced to exist on reduced rations in a makeshift shelter – no more than a hovel of spars and canvas, banked high with a nine-foot wall of snow.

  That winter, Thomas, the outspoken carpenter, died. Several more were too sick to work. Ross was left with thirteen men strong enough to shuttle provisions in seven long journeys through the snow from Fury Beach to Batty Bay, where he had cached the boats. On July 8, 1833, they set off once more, reached the boats in six days, and waited a month before a gale cleared the ice in Prince Regent Inlet. They embarked at last, rowing and sailing, three tiny dots on the grey expanse of Lancaster Sound, dwarfed by the Precambrian cliffs of Devon Island and the cloud-plumed glaciers of Baffin. To Ross, the change was magical. For the first time in four years he felt like a sailor; he had almost forgotten what it was like “to float at freedom on the seas.”

  They passed the mouth of the great fiord – the longest in the world – that Parry had named Admiralty Inlet; on August 25, they reached its companion, Navy Board Inlet. Then, at four in the morning of the following day, the lookout thought he saw a sail and woke James Clark Ross, who, peering through his telescope, saw that it was indeed a ship. Everyone was awake in an instant, firing rockets; but the wind was against them, and the sail vanished over the horizon. Another sail was spotted; it too seemed to diminish. But now John Ross’s luck returned. The wind calmed; the crew rowed like madmen; at last they saw the ship heave to.

  Ross was astonished when he identified the rescue vessel. She was the Isabella, the very ship that he had commanded on his first voyage in 1818. The whaling captain was equally astonished. He couldn’t believe his eyes as he told Ross that he had been dead for two years. Ross drily denied it. Now he learned that all England had long since given him up and that a rescue party under George Back was even then heading across the Canadian tundra searching for his remains.

  And so they climbed on board, a scarecrow gang, unshaven, filthy, starved down to their bones, half-clothed in tattered skins. It was four years since John Ross had left the west coast of Greenland with a complement of twenty-three men; of these, all but one had managed to survive.

  It was a remarkable feat. Ross’s understanding of scurvy had helped; so had the presence of the Eskimos, who were indispensable hunters. Parry’s discarded supplies were also a factor. And the very modesty of the expedition, strapped as it was for funds, contributed to its survival. In the Arctic, the Navy had indulged in a form of overkill: big ships, big crews. On his third voyage, Parry had 122 officers and men, more than five times the size of Ross’s crew. It’s doubtful that the Eskimo hunters could have kept that number alive and healthy for four winters. It was difficult enough for Ross’s party to travel north by stages, sleeping in snow trenches and tempting the buffeting seas in three small boats; a larger party could not have done it.

  The tragedy is that the Navy learned nothing from Ross – nothing of the benefits of freshly killed meat, nothing of the advantages of small exploratory parties. The next major expedition to invade the heart of the Arctic archipelago would be larger than ever, and its members would die from hunger and from the scurvy that Ross and his hunters had kept at bay.

  Ross returned to England to find himself a popular hero and a social lion. He dined with royalty. Hostesses scrambled to have him as a dinner guest. Four thousand fan letters clogged his post box. When he visited the continent, he was showered with medals and awards by foreign governments. A committee of parliament voted him five thousand pounds to cover his losses. Another eighteen thousand went to Felix Booth to cover his expenses, while the crew members received double pay. Booth was made a baronet, Ross a Knight Commander of the Bath.

  The expedition’s accomplishments were considerable, especially the discoveries and charts of James Ross, whose map of Boothia, for instance, was standard for the rest of the century. As for the North West Passage, John Ross hadn’t found it and was prepared to dismiss it. When a parliamentary committee asked him if its discovery would be of public benefit, he responded bluntly, “I believe it would be utterly useless.”

  Ross might be a public hero, but he was still a pariah among his peers. In the Navy’s view he had not behaved like a gentleman. He had tried to seize too much credit for the explorations and discoveries of his nephew. He had seemed too eager for monetary gain, while his nephew, appearing before the select committee, made a point of showing his disinterestedness. “Ross will do himself harm by the eagerness he has shown on this matter,” John Franklin wrote to his new wife, Jane, “and no one is more annoyed at it than young Ross, of whom the uncle is very jealous.”

  Ross published his journal himself, without the help of John Murray, and proceeded, to the undoubted horror of his fellow officers, to use high-pressure methods to market it. He opened a subscription office in Regent Street and even engaged agents to peddle it from door to door, a most unseemly procedure in naval etiquette and one that caused Barrow to attack him for his “lust for lucre.” Another naval author, Captain Beaufort, made a point of telling the parliamentary committee that he had received no money from the publication of his own book because “I did not think that materials acquired in the King’s service ought to be sold.”

  The harshest blast, predictably, came from Barrow. In a long essay in the Quarterly Review he attacked the narrative as “ponderous,” called Ross a “vain and jealous man,” and railed against “the cold and heartless manner in which the bulk of narrative is drawn up – the unwillingness to give praise or make acknowledgement even to him [Ross’s nephew] on whom the safety of the expedition mainly depended.”

  These criticisms were well taken, but Barrow showed his own vanity and jealousy when he attacked the expedition as an “ill-prepared, ill-conceived … and ill-executed undertaking,” castigated Ross as “utterly incompetent to conduct an arduous naval enterprise for discovery to a successful termination,” and declared that the results of his four-year Odyssey “are next to nothing.” The same, of course, might have been said of Parry’s later voyages, and with more truth. But Parry was Barrow’s man and a gentleman; Ross was not. The Navy’s failure to analyse the very real strengths of his expedition was to cost it dear in the years to come.

  2 The indomitable Jane

  In John Ross’s absence the world had moved on. The railway locomotive had come into its own – a harbinger of the age of steam. Michael Faraday had discovered the principle of electricity, and two scientists had separately invented chloroform. The first sewing machine had been patented. The Empire had abolished slavery. George IV was dead, and John Franklin had left the Arctic wastes and the London drawing-rooms for the salubrious waters of the Mediterranean.

  Within a year of his return from the North, the widowed explorer had renewed his acquaintance with his wife’s friend Jane Griffin and proposed marriage. As he put it to his future father-in-law, a wealthy silk weaver, “The various interchanges of ideas and sentiments which have recently taken place between Miss Jane and myself have assured us not only of entertaining the warmest affection for each other, but likewise there exists between us the closest congeniality of mind, thought and feeling.…”

  In short, they were in love. They were married on December 5, 1828, and spent their honeymoon in Paris, where it was remarked that Franklin seemed remarkably plump and comfortable for a man who had once starved almost to the point of death.

  Jane Griffin was then thirty-six years old. In her younger days, she had had a host of suitors, for she was an elegant and lovely woman, a little shy but also highly intelligent. There were those who would come to think of her as “a tall, commanding looking person, perhaps with a loud voice too!” She was not flattered by this “visionary Lady Franklin” as she termed it, for she was small, slight, and soft spoken. Her reputation was at odds with her physical presence.

  Before she met John Franklin she had turned down all aspirants for her hand, an
act she came to regret in the case of at least two. One of these rejected suitors was Peter Mark Roget, who later distinguished himself by creating the thesaurus that still bears his name. When he married someone else, Jane Griffin confided to her diary, “… the romance of my life is gone – my dreams are vanishing & I am awakening to sober realities & to newly-acquired wisdom.”

  She was a confirmed, indeed a prodigious, diarist and correspondent and a voracious reader who thirsted after wisdom. She devoured books (295 in one three-year period) – books on every subject: travel, education, religion, social problems, but never novels, for novels in that day were considered frivolous, especially for a serious-minded young woman.

  She was incurably restless and had travelled a great deal with her father before her marriage. In her voluminous journal she conscientiously noted everything in her cramped, spidery hand – every plaque, every historic tablet, every monument, every church, the chief products and industries of every town, even the distances covered. She believed in self-improvement. At nineteen, she had worked out a plan to organize her time and enrich her mind, with every moment given over to some form of study.

  Jane Griffin belies the stereotype of the Victorian woman of means, languid at her needlework, simpering fetchingly at the society balls. A description of her multitude of activities leaves one slightly out of breath, for she indulged herself in a kaleidoscope of worthy interests. She was a member of the Book Society. She took lectures at the Royal Institution. She visited Newgate Prison and the Vauxhall Gardens. She attended meetings of the British and Foreign School Society. Nor did she take a back seat at fashionable dinner parties. She took on the redoubtable Dr. Arnold on the subject of fagging (of which she disapproved) and reprimanded the family of Benjamin Disraeli when they repeated some gossip about John Franklin’s last parting from his dying wife. Her voice trembled with anger as she “replied to all this unfeeling nonsense.” She did not know Franklin well at this point; but they had met on occasion, and she felt it proper to give him a going-away present of a silver pencil and a pair of fur-lined gloves.

  She was a shrewd observer of the human species and described almost everyone she met. John Ross, for instance, was “short, stout, sailor-looking & not very gentlemanly in his person, but his manners & his language are perfectly so; his features are coarse & thick, his eyes grey, his complexion ruddy & his hair of a reddish, sandy hue. Yet notwithstanding his lack of beauty, he has a great deal of intelligence, benevolence & good humour in his countenance.” She would revise that opinion in her later years and even ban Ross’s portrait from her gallery, but her assessments, while sharp, were reasonably benign. Franklin’s friend John Richardson “was not well dressed – & looks like a Scotchman as he is – he has broad & high cheek bones, a widish mouth, grey eyes & brown hair – upon the whole rather plain, but the countenance thoughtful, mild & pleasing.…”

  In the months before her marriage, the peripatetic woman set off with her father on another trip, this time to Russia. Her fiancé would have liked to accompany her on the same ship, but she did not feel it proper and, in her peremptory way, put him off. Her objection, she told him, arose “from a strong sense of impropriety in the arrangement, as well as from a conviction that we should all be placed in a number of awkward and disagreeable situations during long and rough voyages and journeys which it would be extremely unpleasant for me to partake in and impossible to avoid.…” He joined her in St. Petersburg, where she did her best to note down not only everything she saw but also everything she didn’t see. They were married immediately after their return.

  In many ways, Jane Griffin was the exact opposite of her complacent, easy-going, humourless husband. “What an irritable, impatient creature I am by comparison,” she told him. In that odd partnership, hers was the stronger will, but she was clever enough not to show it. “You are of a much more easy disposition than myself,” she had written before their marriage. “… It must be my province, therefore, … to combat those things that excite my more sensitive temper; while it must be and shall be yours … to control even this disposition whenever you think it improperly excited and to exert over me … the authority which it will be your privilege to use and my duty to yield to. But do I speak of duty? You are of too manly, too generous, too affectionate a disposition to like the word and God forbid I should ever be the wretched wife who obeyed her husband from a sense of duty alone.” Her wedding ring, she told him, would not be “the badge of slavery, but the cherished link of the purest affection.”

  She loved him and she was fiercely ambitious for him. He became an extension of her. “I never can be a happy person,” she once wrote, “because I live too much in others.” Certainly she lived in her husband, and, when it was necessary, pushed and prodded him along in her subtle fashion.

  After two years of idleness, in which he was offered and turned down a commercial job in Australia, Franklin was at last given command of a twenty-six-gun frigate in the Mediterranean. He left early in 1830. Jane was not allowed to travel with him but had no intention of staying home. She joined him the following autumn and almost immediately plunged into a whirlwind of Middle Eastern travel through Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land. Franklin hastened to explain that she travelled “not out of vulgar curiosity … but in order to inform herself and broaden her mind so she can be more interesting to others.…”

  When Sir John returned to England in 1833 after his Mediterranean service, Lady Franklin was in Alexandria, preparing for a trip up the Nile. That did not stop her from directing his career by long distance. At her suggestion, he went, rather diffidently, to see the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, to ask for further employment. Sir James, besieged by scores of other half-pay officers demanding the same thing, told him there was nothing available.

  “You will fancy, my dearest, that your shy, timid husband must have gathered some brass on his way home,” he wrote to his wife, describing his attempt, “or you will be at loss to account for his extraordinary courage.” He had done it, he said, “because I knew you would have wished me to do so.…”

  He had been planning to join her at Naples, but she would have none of it. Only by staying in England, close to the Admiralty, could he be sure of getting a posting. “Your credit and reputation,” she declared, “are dearer to me than the selfish enjoyment of your society.”

  Now she pushed him further. A ship or a station were not comparable, she told him, to an expedition, preferably another Arctic exploration. “The character and position you possess in society and the interest – I may, say celebrity – attached to your name, belong to expeditions and would never have been acquired in the ordinary line of your profession.” An expedition by ship this time, she felt, would be best. She would not want him to ruin his health “if you should feel to be unequal to any of your former exertions.” On the other hand, “a freezing climate seems to have a wonderful power of bracing your nerves and making you stronger.”

  She badly wanted him to go after the ultimate prize: the North West Passage. There was talk, she said, of reviving the search. She made it sound like a contest, a prizefight, perhaps. James Clark Ross was a contender, for either the Passage or the Antarctic. He could take only one; somebody else would surely step in and undertake the other. Sir Edward Parry was on his way back from Australia (he had taken the job that Franklin had turned down), “and he will be working hard for the vacancy or perhaps Richardson. I wish him well and young Ross also.… I grudge them nothing of their well-earned fame. But if yours is still dearer to me.… You must not think I undervalue your military career. I feel it is not that, but the other, which has made you what you are.…”

  In spite of what she said, the Navy had, for the time at least, given up all intention of seeking the Passage. Public excitement over Arctic heroism was flagging. The Edinburgh Review captured the general sentiment in 1835 when it declared that the effort and funds expended on the search might be better applied to other p
urposes: “It may doubtless gratify the national vanity to plant the standard of England even upon the sterile regions … but … if no advantage can be gained by revisiting such inhospitable regions, it must be admitted that the mere knowledge of their existence, and of the indentations of their shores, is comparatively useless, and utterly unworthy of that sacrifice or risk of life and resources by which it may have been acquired.”

  The British government clearly agreed. After a second stint of idleness, Franklin was offered a post as governor of Antigua, a tiny palm-fringed speck in the Caribbean. That was too much for Lady Franklin – an almost insulting comedown for an Arctic hero. To her it was a minor post, no more important than that of first lieutenant on a ship of the line. When a better offer came, the Franklins accepted it. At least it sounded better: governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), a penal colony off the south coast of Australia. The day would come when both would bitterly regret the decision.

  3 Enter the Honourable Company

  In June 1833, when Franklin was preparing to leave his Mediterranean command and return to England, George Back arrived at Fort Alexander on Lake Winnipeg to launch a rescue operation for John Ross, who had been missing for four years. Here, a twenty-five-year-old Hudson’s Bay clerk, Thomas Simpson, wrote down his first impression of the explorer, a generally favourable assessment, tinctured with a touch of the fur trader’s suspicion of all naval men. “He seems a very easy, affable man,” Simpson wrote, “deficient, I should say, in that commanding manner with the people so necessary in this savage country. From my soul I wish them every success in the generous and humane objects of the expedition.…”

  Five years later, the same Thomas Simpson had revised his opinion. He attacked Back’s account of the expedition as “a painted bauble, all ornament and conceit, and no substance.” As for the explorer himself: “Back, I believe to be not only a vain but a bad man.”