The Arctic Grail Read online

  John Ross, the perennial outsider, was the first to challenge the complacency of these greying experts early in 1847. Actually Ross, then in his seventieth year, was older than any of them except Barrow. His nephew was forty-seven, Parry was fifty-seven, Sabine was fifty-nine, Richardson was turning sixty. Mindful of his promise to Franklin, Ross began to worry about the expedition’s safety. In late January and again in February and March he pointed out to the Admiralty and to anyone else who would listen that the coming year would be Franklin’s third winter in the Arctic and that supplies would be running low.

  There was no word from Bering Strait. Nobody on the northern coast of Russian Alaska had any evidence of his passing. He must, then, be beset somewhere in that maze of frozen channels he had been sent to explore. If Franklin was to be relieved, he must be found that summer and he, Ross, was prepared to lead a rescue party. In fact, he had declined to take retirement, with the prospect of a fatter pension, in order to stay on the Navy’s active list for just that purpose.

  The Admiralty, however, preferred to listen to the advice of what came to be known as the Arctic Council – Parry, Barrow, James Ross, Sabine, Richardson – and turned him down. As James Ross remarked to Parry, there was “not the smallest reason of apprehension or anxiety for the safety and success of the expedition.…”

  John Ross was mortified, especially perhaps because it was his own example that had caused the complacency. He had spent four winters in the Arctic and lost three men only. If the much-maligned John Ross could do it, why not the popular Franklin? Everybody ignored the fact that Ross’s much smaller crew had survived because they had the help of Eskimo hunters and the use of the boats and supplies left behind by Parry. Here was a further irony: Parry’s disaster had contributed to Ross’s survival; but Ross’s survival had laid the groundwork for Franklin’s tragedy.

  Jane Franklin, meanwhile, was having her own qualms. She had spent the summer of 1846 in another whirl of travel, extending from the West Indies to the United States. As usual she had climbed mountains, visited and inspected factories, hospitals, and schools, and engaged in some lively conversations with public officials. In a sharp-tongued encounter with the mayor of Boston she castigated “the ferocity and folly of 4th July orations” and went on to remark that if the English “did not think quite so highly as deserved of the Americans, it was owing to their own bragging.”

  She returned that fall, dismayed by the lack of news from the Bering Strait, from which everyone had confidently assumed her husband would be dispatching letters home. She began to prepare herself for the worst and wrote to her friend James Clark Ross that it was perhaps better to remain in “happy ignorance” of any disaster than to know the truth. But she wouldn’t listen to his uncle. Her husband’s Arctic friends persuaded her that Sir John Ross was a pessimist – after all, he had been the only one to question the probability of success. “Sir John Ross’s plans are all absurd,” she was told.

  Sir John persisted. Twice he collared the Marquis of Nottingham, president of the Royal Society, who told him stiffly, “You will go and get frozen in like Franklin, and we shall have to send after you!” Ross was appalled by this callous response; but when the Royal Society asked the Arctic Council for advice, it got the same answer.

  Once again, the difficult Dr. King entered the fray with a plan of his own, which was as usual prescient. He urged the government to plant food caches in the area of Barrow Strait while he would lead a party down the Great Fish River to its mouth and then north between King William Land and Victoria Land, for he was convinced (again rightly) that the missing ships were caught in an ice-clogged channel somewhere north of the estuary. The Great Fish River, he insisted, was the best point from which to succour them, but both Parry and the younger Ross, when asked their opinion, pooh-poohed the idea. Ross said he couldn’t imagine any position in which the ships could be placed that would lead them to make for the Great Fish. Lady Franklin, like everybody else, was cool to Dr. King. “I do not desire that he shd be the person employed,” she said, in her forthright way. But she did hope that somebody would ask the Hudson’s Bay Company to explore the area in the hopes of finding some clue to her husband’s party.

  Both Dr. King and John Ross kept pressing, each for his own expedition – King by land, Ross by sea – without any success. In November 1847, with still no news from Franklin and a third winter looming, a meeting was held at Lady Franklin’s home, without John Ross’s knowledge. A friend told him the details: “All my proposals were sneered at and my opinions scouted, while I was represented to be too old and infirm to undertake such a service.”

  To Ross’s annoyance, Lady Franklin chose his nephew to lead any expedition to which the Admiralty might agree; and it was clear, at last, that the Admiralty would agree if James Clark Ross was in charge. John Ross had suggested four small ships; his nephew opted for two large ones. Sir John, incensed by “the frigid treatment of the Admiralty,” convinced himself, if nobody else, that his nephew’s real purpose was not to seek the lost ships at all. “He knows better than to trust himself in such ships to follow the track of Franklin,” he told the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Auckland. “His object is the north-west Passage.”

  The elder Ross, indeed, was convinced that his old enemy Barrow was using the Franklin search as a cover for the realization of an old obsession: the North West Passage. It was a characteristically mean-spirited assessment, but there may well have been truth in it. After all, the two objectives were not incompatible: whoever found Franklin would almost certainly discover the route of the Passage also.

  Thus did the year fade out. In spite of the Admiralty’s tardy preparations for relief, optimism remained high. At the end of November, the Athenaeum interviewed a number of Arctic officers who purported to believe that Franklin had succeeded so well that he had already passed Bering Strait, “in which case they look for tidings, either by Russia or by the Isthmus of Panama by February next.” But by then Franklin had been dead for nearly half a year, and his hungry crews, weakened by scurvy, were planning to abandon their ice-bound vessels and attempt to drag their sledges overland, south toward the very region that the sharp-tongued Dr. King had vainly suggested searching.

  Chapter Four

  1

  The lost ships

  2

  Arctic fever

  3

  The American presence

  4

  The crusaders

  5

  The dutiful warmth of a son

  A contemporary journalistic impression of the Arctic aurora (illustration credit 4.1)

  1 The lost ships

  The Great Search began early in 1848, a year of turmoil in Europe. France and Italy were in revolt. Louis Philippe, the Citizen King, was forced to abdicate and flee Paris for the safety of London, while Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian patriot, left London to return in triumph to the newly liberated city of Milan.

  In England, too, where men of property had long enjoyed a form of democracy, change was in the wind, albeit peaceful change. The reform movement known as Chartism, organized by the new working class, had reached its zenith, paving the way for its successors, the Christian Socialists and the Fabian Society.

  By now the country and its government were beginning to show concern over the fate of the Franklin expedition. In March, in reply to a question in the House of Commons, the First Lord of the Admiralty announced that a stupendous sum – twenty thousand pounds – would be paid to anybody who “might render efficient assistance in saving the lives of Sir John Franklin and his squadron.” A later amendment offered half that sum to anyone who could merely discover what had happened to the lost ships.

  The government had already moved to comb the entire Arctic for the lost expedition – at least, it thought it had. It determined now to mount a complicated and ambitious three-pronged attack that would see four ships and an overland party as well explore the maze of islands and channels from three directions – east, west, a
nd south. James Clark Ross’s two ships would enter the archipelago from the east by way of Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait, move west to Melville Island and Banks Land, and then proceed south. Two more ships would sail round Cape Horn hoping to rendezvous that July in the Bering Strait to scour the Western Arctic. The land expedition under Sir John Richardson, Franklin’s friend and trail mate, would travel to the Canadian North West and follow the Mackenzie River to the Arctic coastline, to search eastward along the rim of Wollaston Land and Victoria Land (King’s suggestion without King as leader). The government, with an optimism bordering on naïveté, confidently expected that both of the naval expeditions would link up with Richardson. It was widely assumed that the fate of the expedition would be known by the end of the year.

  Lady Franklin herself was tempted to join Richardson. In one of

  the many letters she wrote to her missing husband – to be carried by one or other of the search parties – she told him, “It would have been a less trial to me to come after you … but I thought it my duty & my interest to remain, for might I not have missed you, & wd it have been right to leave Eleanor – yet if I had thought you to be ill, nothing should have stopped me.…” Like all those other cries from the heart, this letter was returned to her unopened.

  Once again, everybody, including the most seasoned Arctic hands, reckoned without the vagaries of the Arctic weather, the sluggishness of sea travel in an era of sail, and the presence of the daunting ice streams pouring down from the permanent polar pack.

  Richardson had had no lack of enthusiastic volunteers when he organized his party in the late winter of 1847-48. These included two clergymen, a Welsh justice of the peace, several country gentlemen, and some scientific foreigners. He rejected them all in favour of the best-qualified man available, John Rae, who had just been promoted Chief Trader in the Hudson’s Bay Company and given grudging permission to go on the search by Governor George Simpson.

  A seasoned Arctic hand with an unsurpassed record for northern travel, Rae was surprised and flattered to be selected. He knew Richardson by reputation and liked what he’d heard, especially “his disregard of self in volunteering to remain behind with the feeble and sick [during the first Franklin expedition] the nobleness of which few men unless placed under similar circumstances can realize.”

  Rae knew whereof he spoke, for he himself had tramped over much of the same country, though with better success than Franklin. Indeed, his long snowshoe journeys were prodigious. In one two-month trek in the winter of 1844-45, he had travelled on foot a circuitous twelve hundred miles from the Red River Colony to Sault Ste Marie and thrived on it. His one companion, who was admittedly rather fat, lost twenty-six pounds; Rae gained two.

  To the gold-braided bluecoats of Arctic exploration, John Rae was an outsider and, in spite of his many accomplishments, would always be one. He did not fit the pattern set by Parry, Ross, and Franklin. Like most Hudson’s Bay men, he didn’t consider it a stigma to go native. Indeed, he brought his adaptation of Indian and Eskimo methods to a fine art. He copied the native way of life, adopted native dress, native shelter, native food, and native travelling methods. He wore deerskin clothing, built snow houses, drove dogteams, slept under caribou blankets, and used Arctic peat and reindeer moss for fuel north of the timber line. And no party in which Rae acted as leader ever suffered from scurvy.

  He preferred to travel light, by small boat, snowshoes, or light dogsled. He was not only a crack shot with a rifle but had also made himself an expert on animal habits. Unlike Franklin and Richardson, who would not stoop to hunt – and didn’t know how anyway – Rae insisted on personally providing his small band of companions with fresh meat.

  He was a lean, tireless man with a handsome angular face, deep-set intelligent eyes, and black side-whiskers, “muscular and active, full of animal spirits,” in the words of the author R.M. Ballantyne, who met him in 1846. Like many of his colleagues, he cared as little for the Navy as the Navy cared for him. The pious young officers were shocked, as their journals show, because the fur traders had little interest in either Christianizing or civilizing the Eskimos. The fur traders, for their part, considered the naval men to be bumbling amateurs. That, generally, was Rae’s assessment.

  Rae had been assigned by the Hudson’s Bay Company to follow in Thomas Simpson’s trail and complete the mapping of the northern coastline of North America. His explorations in 1846 and 1847 were prodigious. He had studied the art of surveying as he studied everything else. Unencumbered by heavy sledge-loads of provisions, tents, or equipment, by large numbers of followers, or by the umbilical cord of an ice-locked vessel, he was able to cover the coastline at record speeds.

  When Richardson engaged him, Rae had just completed that successful exploration for the company. He had arrived at Repulse Bay in August 1846, after a nine-hundred-mile journey from York Factory by boat. Finding it impossible to complete his survey of Melville Peninsula that year, he resolved “with a boldness and confidence in his resources that has never been surpassed” (to quote Richardson) to spend the winter on its inhospitable shores. No other land party had ever wintered on the Arctic coast. All others had carried enough provisions with them to see them through a summer journey. Rae was different. He settled down at Repulse Bay, which Parry had rediscovered a quarter of a century before. Unlike Parry, snug aboard the Hecla and warmed by his Sylvester stove, Rae and his men lived on shore. Parry had plenty of provisions. So did John Ross who followed him. Rae had nothing.

  The shores of the bay were devoid of wood or even shrubs for fuel. Rae taught his men to gather the withered stems of the Andromeda tetragona, a small herb that grew in the rocks, and to pile it up in cocks, like hay, for fuel. Others used rocks, earth, and snow to build a house that would shelter the party of sixteen. Rae killed enough deer, with the help of his Eskimo interpreter, to keep the party well fed and free of scurvy until spring.

  John Rae crosses Melville Peninsula, 1846-47

  The following summer he completed his survey of the unexplored section of the Gulf of Boothia, giving it the name of Committee Bay. To chart the 625 miles of new coastline, he travelled 1,200 miles on foot, living entirely off the land, before recrossing the isthmus to Repulse Bay and embarking for York Factory. On September 6, 1847, fifteen months after setting out, he was back with all of his men healthy, a remarkable achievement regarded as a near miracle. Only then did he learn that John Franklin was missing and that anxiety was being felt for him in England.

  He had proved that there was no western exit from the Gulf of Boothia. He was also convinced that John Ross was right and Thomas Simpson wrong: Boothia Felix was not an island but a peninsula: there was no Passage there. But the Navy, which ignored so much, ignored that, too. It puzzled Rae. Why had John Barrow taken up Simpson’s view without question “in opposition to that of their own officers although the latter had the testimony of the Eskimos in their favour?” The answer, of course, was that Barrow trusted neither John Ross nor the heathen natives. The open-minded Rae was not privy to Admiralty politics.

  Rae reached London in the winter of 1847-48, where Richardson made him his second-in-command. They embarked from Liverpool for North America at the end of March. The plan was to take four boats down to the mouth of the Mackenzie and try to probe the unknown lands across the channel. No one knew exactly what lay between the mainland and Parry’s discoveries to the north. The only clues were two bald and forbidding shorelines on the far side of the narrow strait north of the Coppermine country that Thomas Simpson had briefly explored. One was called Wollaston Land, the other Victoria Land. Both were actually part of the same vast island, 135,000 square miles in size, but nobody realized that. And it was into this mysterious and unmapped realm that Franklin’s instructions were supposed to take him.

  Richardson hoped to reach the Mackenzie delta by the end of August to launch his coastal search. That was perilously late: Thomas Simpson had turned back from Point Barrow as early as August 4, Franklin f
rom Point Turnagain on August 23. But Richardson left England at a time when the official public attitude to the Franklin expedition was one of sublime complacency. The Times remarked that same week that “although these precautions are most proper … we do not ourselves feel any unnecessary anxiety as to the fate of the ships.… We place great hope in the materiel as well as the personnel of the expedition, for ships better adapted for the service, better equipped in all respects, or better officered and manned, never left the shores of England.…”

  The exploring party consisted of five British seamen and fifteen British soldiers – sappers and miners who joined Richardson in Montreal. Rae was later to write that during the summer’s operations he had “work enough and suffered more petty annoyance (the most disagreeable of all) than I was ever subjected to before.” He would not, he said, engage on another such expedition for double the pay.

  He admired Richardson, but the doctor had now reached the age of sixty and lost some of his spryness. He tired easily and had to turn his load over to a younger seaman. He tended to be irritable, and George Simpson’s admonition to Rae to “make every allowance for any little testiness he may shew & ascribe it to his great anxiety to accomplish the object of his mission creditably” suggests that Rae had reported minor quarrels to the governor. Rae, who was used to travelling in all kinds of weather, was undoubtedly frustrated at times by the slower pace of the older man, who had difficulty divesting himself, in Simpson’s phrase, of “recent habits of personal ease & comfort.” Nonetheless, the two got on remarkably well. Richardson, an even-tempered and pious man (he prayed for his daughters three times a day), had nothing but praise for Rae in his letters home. In 1856, in a letter to Richardson, Rae made an apologetic reference to the journey, remarking that “very, very often I showed a very ill temper and a hastiness that was not right.”