The Arctic Grail Read online

  His orders were to follow Parry’s route through Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait, ignoring Prince Regent Inlet – apparently a dead end – but stopping short of the great ice barrier that had frustrated Parry in 1819. When he reached Cape Walker, at the entrance to Melville Sound, he was to turn south or southwest and into unknown waters to try to find the channel that Dease and Simpson had explored. Having done that, he could proceed west, unimpeded, along a fairly familiar coastline all the way to the Bering Sea.

  Nobody, of course, could be sure of what lay in the heart of the Canadian Arctic. Here was a great blank space on the map – a quadrilateral seventy thousand square miles in size through which Franklin was ordered to proceed. Nobody knew what it contained. It might be a vast expanse of open ocean. It might be a large land mass, or perhaps two or three; no one knew, for only the peripheries had been explored. Franklin’s instructions also contained an afterthought. If he couldn’t get through to the south, then he was given permission to try an alternative route north through the unexplored Wellington Channel, which some (Barrow was one) supposed led to the “Open Polar Sea.” This unfortunate clause would be responsible for years of fruitless search in the wrong direction.

  Franklin’s proposed route from Cape Walker, 1845

  Franklin was given three months to organize his expedition. It would be the largest yet – 134 men on two barque-rigged sailing ships with twenty-horsepower auxiliary engines and screw propellers. Nobody except old John Ross asked why so many men were needed to trace the Passage. Ross felt that a smaller steam vessel would be more efficient and less expensive. The new engines, one of which came from a railway locomotive, were a problem because their fuel took up a great deal of room that might otherwise have been used for provisions, while their weight weakened the stern frame and after-posts of the ships.

  At 340 and 370 tons respectively, the Erebus and the refitted Terror were even larger than Parry’s ships. Their draft of water – nineteen feet – was greater than that of any previous Arctic vessel; but, in spite of the known Arctic shallows, the Navy ignored earlier setbacks. Ross’s Victory, with a draft of only nine feet, hadn’t been able to get over the bar of her winter harbour; Parry’s Fury had run aground and been abandoned; Back had almost lost the Terror after a terrible buffeting in the ice.

  John Ross seems to have been the only naval explorer concerned about the possibility of failure. He had several conversations with Franklin, urging him to leave depots of provisions at various points in case he should be wrecked or trapped in the ice and also, if possible, to leave a boat or two. His own party had been saved by Parry’s abandoned boats and provisions. But Franklin replied that he had no boats to spare. Later he described Ross’s suggestion regarding food depots as “an absurdity.”

  “Has anyone volunteered to follow you?” Ross asked.

  “No. None,” said Franklin.

  Incredibly, no one had given a second’s thought to the possibility that the expedition might encounter trouble. Optimism reigned. Success, it was felt, was all but certain. As Barrow had written in his original proposal: “There can be no objection with regard to any apprehension of the loss of ships or men.” No plans were made for a relief expedition; indeed, if one had been thought necessary, the whole project would have collapsed because of the extra cost. Franklin, desperate to get away, kept silent, fearing cancellation.

  “Then,” Ross told him, “I shall volunteer to look for you, if you are not heard of in February, 1847, but pray put a notice in the cairn where you winter, if you do proceed, which of the routes you take.” This advice, too, was ignored. By February of 1847, Franklin would still have another year of provisions stowed aboard his ships. His menus, however, depended heavily on salt meat. The crew would receive twice as much of it as they would of tinned meat. British sailors loved it, preferring it over other forms of diet. Even the small birds – dovekies – that they shot for sport would be preserved in salt, which made them useless as antiscorbutics.

  None of these men was a big-game hunter. Perhaps they expected the natives to supply them with fresh meat – an enormous task for such a complement. More probably Franklin intended to live solely on his own stock of provisions, keeping down scurvy with the classic Navy ration of an ounce of lemon juice a day – an inadequate dosage.

  He stocked his ships with twelve hundred books, including John Ross’s account of his four-year entrapment with its shrewd comment on the need for fresh meat to combat scurvy. But who listened to the discredited Ross? Parry had more clout, and Parry still harboured the naïve belief that scurvy could be held at bay by morale-building entertainment and lots of exercise – which actually accelerates the onslaught of the disease.

  Although recent research suggests that lead poisoning from badly soldered tins may have been a factor in the Franklin tragedy, the main cause of death was clearly scurvy. Franklin himself would succumb earlier than most of the others, perhaps as a result of the infirmities of age. But the remaining crew, almost to a man, dropped in their tracks, their gums blackened, their teeth rattling loosely in their heads, their flesh spongy and sunken from internal bleeding – weakened, debilitated, and only half comprehending the truth that the disease, growing within them for months, had at last brought them down.

  John Ross was also concerned about the inexperience of Franklin’s officers, none of whom except Crozier and the two Greenland ice masters had any polar background. Franklin chose Crozier to command the Terror because he had been James Ross’s second-in-command in the Antarctic and had also been on three of Parry’s expeditions. Some of the most pleasant weeks in Van Diemen’s Land had been spent with Crozier and Ross when the two stayed with the Franklins before and again after their explorations. The forty-eight-year-old Crozier, a relatively untutored Irishman, had fallen in love with John Franklin’s niece, Sophia Cracroft; but Sophia, who was to become Lady Franklin’s lifelong (and unmarried) companion, preferred Ross, who was already spoken for. Now, with Ross married, Crozier resumed his suit in England without success and was understandably gloomy when the expedition departed. If one Navy wife, Lady Belcher, is to be believed, Crozier told a fellow officer that he didn’t expect to come back. “Look at the state our commander’s ship is in, everything in confusion,” he is said to have told a friend; “he is very decided in his own views but has not good judgement.”

  The most strident criticism of all came not from a naval man but from a civilian, the wiry and waspish surgeon-naturalist Richard King, who didn’t believe in sea expeditions. He was still convinced, after his journey with George Back, that the best way to find the Passage was by taking an overland route from the mouth of the Great Fish River and north along the west coast of Boothia. Moreover, his experience with the natives and fur traders had convinced him of the superiority of small parties of no more than six men, all hunters, led by seasoned Arctic travellers. Franklin had a copy of King’s book with him, giving King’s reasons for believing that Boothia was actually a peninsula and King William Land an island. But few took much account of King. If his theories had been accepted, Franklin’s ships might have been spared their tragic ordeal in the ice and the Passage discovered and even navigated in mid-century. At the very least, the search for the missing expedition would have been shortened.

  But the Admiralty, which controlled Arctic exploration, leaned towards expensive sea voyages, and so did the Geographical Society, whose board was dominated by senior naval officers. Worse, King was impetuous, self-confident to the point of arrogance, and never reticent about pushing his views in the bluntest possible manner – views that differed radically from the Navy’s. He was convinced, again rightly, that the unexplored Arctic quadrilateral contained large land masses separated by narrow, ice-blocked channels. But the Establishment of aging Arctic hands, led by Barrow, allowed themselves to believe that most of it was open water. King wanted to send a second overland party to explore Victoria Land and Wollaston Land before any sea expedition was launched. Had that cour
se been followed, it would have been discovered that both areas were part of the great mass now known as Victoria Island. In short, there was no wide open ocean between Cape Walker and Banks Land, through which Franklin was ordered to sail. His vessels were not designed for the kind of coastal manoeuvring they were to encounter.

  But King had no friends in the hierarchy. His shrill attacks had made him a powerful enemy. As he himself later wrote, “Sir John Barrow hated me at once and for ever for thus having pointed out the manifest incompleteness of his polar scheme. He vowed he would smash the impudent fellow who presumed to differ with him on a subject he flattered himself was exclusively his own.”

  Yet one can’t help sympathizing with Barrow, who was publicly attacked in two issues of the Athenaeum magazine in January and February of 1845, before Franklin set off. King not only published his letters to the second secretary – in itself a breach of ethics as far as the naval establishment was concerned – but he also expressed himself in the most insulting fashion. “Had you advocated in favour of polar land journeys with a tithe of the zeal that you have the Polar Sea Expeditions, the North West Passage would have long since ceased to be a problem and instead of a baronetcy you would have received a peerage for the country would have saved at least £200,000 … if you are really in earnest upon this subject, you have but one cause to pursue, search for the truth and value it when you find it.…” Noting that seven of ten polar expeditions had failed since Barrow entered the field, King predicted the next one would be “a lasting blot in the annals of our voyages of discovery.”

  He even wrote to Franklin’s old nemesis Lord Stanley (and published that letter, too), predicting that Franklin would “have to ‘take the ice,’ as the pushing through an ice blocked sea is termed.” Stanley made no reply.

  Nobody listened to King, who in addition to hitting the naval establishment below the belt had also managed to antagonize the fur-trading establishment. He had already angered the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose ideas of Arctic travel paralleled his own, by denouncing the fur traders as destroyers of the native population. King sympathized with the Indians and Eskimos, saw the value of learning from them, and in fact had helped found the British Ethnological Society. But he could expect no backing for his ideas from the one powerful interest that might have been expected to sympathize with him. In his second published letter to Barrow, the irascible doctor announced that any leader of a land expedition who co-operated with the fur-trade monopoly was “wholly unfit to command.”

  King’s strictures were brushed aside in the rising chorus of enthusiasm sweeping across Great Britain. As Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Geographical Society, exulted shortly after the Erebus and the Terror left their Thames berths in May, “I have the fullest confidence that everything will be done for the promotion of science, and for the honour of the British name and Navy, that human efforts can accomplish. The name of Franklin alone is, indeed, a national guarantee.…”

  Lieutenant James Fitzjames, soon to be gazetted a captain and Franklin’s second-in-command on the Erebus, was especially enthusiastic. “We are very happy. Never was more so in my life.… You have no idea how happy we all feel – how determined we all are to be frozen and how anxious to be among the ice. I never left England with less regret.…” Fitzjames, who found Franklin “really a most delightful person,” was all for mounting an expedition to the Pole on his return. Parry had told him it was perfectly possible.

  In the days before the expedition sailed, Franklin appeared haggard, wan, and nervous. He was suffering from influenza and one night before the departure was so tired that he fell asleep on a sofa. His wife sat beside him, embroidering the traditional flag for him to take to the Arctic, but he looked so chilly she covered his feet with the Union Jack. He felt its touch, woke, and started up in alarm. “Why,” he said, “there’s a flag thrown over me. Don’t you know they lay the Union Jack over a corpse!”

  By the time the expedition was ready to leave, Lady Franklin was, according to Crozier, “in a sad state.” She had spent those final days in her husband’s cabin aboard the Erebus. Now, with her stepdaughter, Eleanor, she travelled down the Thames as the two ships were towed to a small village near Gravesend. A week later, on May 19, 1845, the ships sailed. Eleanor noticed that a dove had settled on one of the masts and remained there for some time – a good omen. They watched for two hours. “Dear Papa left in excellent spirits,” Eleanor reported to her Aunt Sophie, “– he puts his trust in God His only Refuge & Strength, and believing on Him he surely will be established and, I trust, preserved.…”

  Franklin watched them standing on the pier as the Erebus moved off – two dwindling figures on the shore. He pulled out his pocket handkerchief and waved it repeatedly, hoping they could still see it.

  Aboard ship, the mood was jovial. When the expedition left the Orkneys and the tugboats departed, there was a lively demonstration. Charles Hamilton Osmer, purser on the Erebus, described it to his wife: “Never, no never shall I forget the emotions called forth by the deafening cheering … the suffocating sob of delight mingled with the fearful anticipation of the dreary void … could not but impress on every mind the importance and magnitude of the voyage we have entered upon. There is something so thrilling in the true, hearty British cheer.…”

  Crozier, in the Terror, was not so effusive. In a last letter to his closest friend, James Clark Ross, written from Disco Island in Greenland, he poured out his heart: “In truth I am sadly lonely and when I look back to the last voyage I can see the cause and therefore no prospect of having a more joyous feeling.” He was still pining for Sophia Cracroft, whom he had last seen aboard Franklin’s ship as they were towed down the Thames. His gloom was increased by the lateness of the season. Crozier, who had been with Parry, remembered ruefully how the ice had blocked their progress. He feared the ships would “blunder into the ice and make a second 1824 out of it,” a reference to Parry’s third abortive voyage when the Fury was lost.

  These were the last letters that could be sent that summer of 1845. The next mail to friends and loved ones, they hoped, would be posted from Russia, after the Passage had been navigated. The company now numbered 129, five men having been invalided home from Greenland.

  And so they set off across Baffin Bay, two stubby ships, gleaming in their fresh black and yellow paint, to be glimpsed by some Greenland whalers and then never seen by Europeans again, each loaded down with mountains of provisions and fuel and all the accoutrements of nineteenth-century naval travel: fine china and cut glass, heavy Victorian silver, testaments and prayer books, copies of Punch, dress uniforms with brass buttons and button polishers to keep them shiny, mahogany desks, slates, arithmetic books, lead lining for sturdy boats and heavy oak for cumbersome sledges, most of them to be found years later – bits and pieces of European civilization, tarnished and rotting on the cold shores of an unmapped Arctic island.

  6 The Arctic puzzle

  In the tangled chronicle of Arctic exploration, the Franklin saga stands as the centrepiece. The flurry of polar inquiry touched off by John Barrow and the Royal Navy in 1818 provided the curtain raisers for the drama that followed, a drama that exhausted the British and stimulated the Americans. Before the mystery of the expedition’s whereabouts was solved, the emphasis had been on the search for the Passage. In the years that followed, the eyes of the world were turned to the North Pole.

  John Franklin was last seen by a whaling ship on June 25, 1845, his two vessels tethered to an iceberg. Neither he nor any of his 128 officers and crew were ever seen again by white men. No one knows how he died or what it was that killed him. His body was never found. Men and ships combed the Arctic for twelve years before the fate of his expedition was finally unravelled. For all of that time Englishmen waited in suspense, devouring each chapter of the Gothic mystery as it unfolded in the popular prints.

  Between 1848 and 1859 more than fifty expeditions were mounted to search for the aging explorer. Untold funds were
squandered. Ships foundered, were lost or abandoned. Men died of mishap and scurvy. When the great search finally came to an end (if it ever did, for Franklin relics are still turning up in the Arctic), the white curtain of uncertainty had been drawn aside, the great archipelago of islands and channels had been mapped and charted, and the secret of the North West Passage – or, as it turned out, passages – had been unlocked. Yet a new century would dawn before anybody was able to take a ship through the Arctic labyrinth from ocean to ocean.

  Franklin in death succeeded where he had failed in life. The mystery of his disappearance elevated him from minor Arctic hero to near sainthood. He became, unwittingly, the symbol of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration. Even today when one thinks of the North West Passage, one thinks of Franklin. Had he failed in his quest and retreated, as others did, his name would be half forgotten. Today every schoolchild knows it, but how many have heard of Ross, Parry, Back, or Richardson?

  Of all the Arctic Odysseys, the tale of the Franklin search is the most complicated, the most frustrating, and the most ambiguous. It needn’t have taken twelve years. It didn’t have to cost a sultan’s ransom. The Arctic Establishment in Great Britain was singularly myopic; for a decade it dispatched ships to every corner of the Arctic but the right one. It moved with maddening slowness, refusing to heed the Cassandras who urged that speed was essential if Franklin was to be saved. Its early optimism, which knew no bounds, turned to pessimism in the final years of the search. It was not the British Navy that discovered the final truth about the lost ships. It was a private expedition, launched and paid for by the dead explorer’s indomitable widow.

  If the Establishment had listened to its critics in the first years of the search, Franklin’s fate would have been known by 1847 or 1848 and some of his men rescued alive. But the Arctic puzzle would have remained, most of the seventy-thousand-square-mile quadrilateral still a blank space on the map to be explored and claimed by any other nation with the will or the funds to conduct a probe. By the time the British era of exploration gave way to the American, the British had established title to most of the North American Arctic. In short, all this bumbling about in the ice streams seeking the lost Franklin party made it possible for Canada to claim the Arctic as its own. Ironically, Canada’s insistence on its sovereignty rests on a strong historical base made possible by the singular intransigence of what is known as the Parry school of Arctic explorers.