The Arctic Grail Read online

  Rae had a heavier cross to bear in the men that Richardson had engaged. These military people, with no previous Arctic experience, caused George Simpson “some degree of alarm and apprehension.” It was injudicious, he thought, not to have taken more experienced men, and he was right. None was used to carrying the heavy loads the Hudson’s Bay men were hardened to. At York Factory, the chief factor, John Bell, complained to Richardson about this, whereupon the doctor drew Rae’s attention to several of the Britishers trotting past, each with 180 pounds on his back. Rae was puzzled, for Bell wasn’t the kind of man to make such a complaint without evidence. Then he realized that they had seen the men cover only about twenty yards of trail before vanishing around a curve. He followed another track to discover that as soon as they were out of sight, they threw off half their load, which they had toted for only about fifty yards.

  Rae went to some pains to relate this anecdote because the army and navy boasted that their people, untrained in portage work, could do it as efficiently as Hudson’s Bay men. “I have never found it so,” he wrote. He considered that the men Richardson brought from England were “in every respect inferior for this kind of duty to the men I had with me in Repulse Bay, both as to strength, activity, willingness to do and knowledge of their work.” They grumbled continually, in direct contrast to the voyageurs of mixed blood, who would travel for months without uttering a word “that could offend a refined or sensitive woman.”

  “Had they been alone and starving they could not have killed anything, however abundant the game might have been,” he wrote in his unpublished autobiography. Rae, who believed that the leader of any expedition should be prepared to hunt for it, suited his own actions to this credo. Richardson’s journal is replete with references to Rae’s ability with a rifle (“A skilful hunter like Mr. Rae could supply the whole party with venison without any loss of time.…”).

  Rae had learned to shoot with an old flintlock as a boy in the Orkneys, where his sole amusements were boating, shooting, fishing, and writing. Cut off from the world – it took three weeks for the packet boat to get to Leith and back – he had led a solitary childhood. Educated by a tutor until he was sixteen (he taught himself natural history), he preferred lonely walks with his Newfoundland dog as his only companion. Later, he studied medicine in Edinburgh and graduated in 1833 before joining the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  In northern Canada the young doctor continued to be a loner, believing in the efficiency of small parties over large ones, a preference that apparently caused some raised eyebrows among his contemporaries. “Na, na, doctor,” the Governor of the Red River colony had said to him sarcastically in 1844. “Take as few men as possible, for none of ye will ever be seen back again.”

  Rae met “severe and hostile criticism” from his fellow fur traders when he introduced oars instead of the traditional paddles in canoes. His critics were stifled when he took part in a race – oars against paddles – and won.

  Now, in 1848, Rae, the loner, was travelling with a set of men whose training and outlook were totally different, “the most awkward, lazy, careless set I had anything to do with.” The expedition covered no new ground and found no trace of Franklin. It was, in Rae’s report to Simpson, “very expensive, very troublesome and far from satisfactory.” Simpson himself, who had supplied Rae’s services grudgingly, was under no illusions. He was convinced that Franklin and his company would never be heard of again.

  Richardson and Rae wintered at Fort Confidence. The following spring Richardson returned to London, leaving Rae to attempt an exploration of the two mysterious land masses to the north – Victoria and Wollaston lands. But Rae’s passage was blocked by the ice, and he returned empty-handed to winter at Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie.

  The other expeditions fared no better. Through a series of delays and mix-ups, the two ships, Plover and Herald, that were supposed to act as supply depots for the western search didn’t make their rendezvous off Alaska until July 1849, a year later than expected. The exploring party, under Lieutenant W.J.S. Pullen, made a remarkable seven-hundred-mile journey in small boats along the northern Alaska coast as far as the Mackenzie delta and found nothing. Pullen wintered with Rae at Fort Simpson, tried unsuccessfully to reach Banks Land the following spring, and finally returned to London via Canada in October 1851, having established beyond doubt that Franklin hadn’t got west of the Mackenzie.

  The third of the 1848 expeditions was that of James Clark Ross. Abandoning his promise never again to go north, Ross headed off in May, two months after John Richardson, in command of two big vessels, the Enterprise (450 tons) and the Investigator (400 tons), carrying three years’ provisions for his crews and another year’s provisions for the Franklin party.

  Ross was at the end of his career; this expedition would be his last. Still handsome at forty-eight, short, stout, and hawk-faced, with the most piercing black eyes his contemporaries had ever seen, he was no longer the energetic officer who had enlivened the crew of his uncle’s Victory. Clements Markham, the naval historian, who knew him, later wrote that he was “somewhat shaken by his Antarctic work, and lacked those qualities in a commander which are needed to keep his followers in high spirits and good humour.” But he could not leave his friend and former shipmate Crozier to an unknown fate; besides, it was generally held that he knew more about Crozier’s and Franklin’s intentions than any living man.

  His two senior officers, Leopold M’Clintock and Robert McClure, were destined to become Arctic heroes. As active and energetic as Ross had once been, they were first and foremost among the new generation of nineteenth-century explorers. McClure had gained his experience with George Back on the disastrous voyage of the Terror in 1836. M’Clintock, who had been in the Navy for seventeen years, seized the chance to go north; it would prove the turning point of his career.

  It was Ross’s task to follow Franklin’s route through Barrow Strait and then south or southwest, but he found his way through the strait blocked by impassable ice north of Somerset Island. The ships were frozen in for eleven months at Port Leopold on the northeast tip of the island. From this anchor point Ross carried out an unhurried exploration of the eastern shoreline of Peel Sound, using manpower to haul the heavy sledge-loads of tents, equipment, and provisions across the ice. Here M’Clintock began to develop the theories of Arctic sledging that he would refine in later excursions in search of Franklin. In thirty-nine days the party travelled five hundred miles, but at heavy cost to the men. Four broke down from hunger, exposure, and exhaustion; one had to be carried back to the ships; all were on the sick list for an average often days. Even Ross was forced to take to his bed. Only M’Clintock stayed healthy, but then M’Clintock, as an officer, walked ahead searching out the route; he didn’t have to suffer the drudgery of hauling in the traces. As he himself put it: “One gradually becomes more of an animal, under this system of constant exposure and unremitting labour.” But it didn’t occur to him, apparently, to use dogs as Ross himself had done on his earlier exploration of Boothia and King William Land.

  James Clark Ross’s fruitless search for Franklin, 1848-49

  If the party had had dogs and light sledges they might have succeeded in their quest, for at one point Ross was only 180 miles from the lost ships. But he couldn’t believe that Franklin had gone south through Peel Sound; all he could see for fifty miles was an unbroken sheet of ice. Astonishingly, in spite of all his Arctic experience, Ross didn’t appear to realize that a channel could be frozen one year, open the next.

  In fact, the Erebus and the Terror had sailed down this very stretch of water three years before, in the summer of 1846. But Ross was convinced that Franklin, faced with the ice, had followed the Admiralty’s second plan, which Ross himself had advised as an alternative to Franklin’s original instructions. According to this theory, Franklin had gone north by way of Wellington Channel to the so-called Open Polar Sea. It was this conviction by the most seasoned of all Arctic explorers that confused the Admir
alty, changed the direction of the search, and helped prolong it for another decade.

  2 Arctic fever

  For eighteen months, while the three search expeditions were out of touch with the world, Lady Franklin waited in hope, persisting in the belief that her husband and his companions were still alive. Her letters to him had been dispatched with each search party. Her friends, who also wrote letters to the missing explorer, were urged “to say nothing whatever that can distress his mind – who can tell whether they will be in a state of mind or body to bear it?” To her husband, she wrote: “I try to prepare myself for every trial which may be in store for me, but dearest, if you ever open this, it will be I trust because I have been spared the greatest of all.…”

  Outwardly, she continued her various activities – distributing anti-Chartist pamphlets, discussing everything from popery to mesmerism (this last with F.D. Maurice of the Christian Socialist movement). Inwardly she was in as much turmoil as the unruly states of Europe. Ross had promised her that he would be back in October, 1848, with Franklin and his ships, but October came and went with no word from any of the three expeditions. November found her, in her niece’s words, “much out of health & in deep despondency.” That despondency could only deepen, for the silence – the unbearable silence – continued. There was a creeping sense of finality that culminated in the death that year of Sir John Barrow. An era in Arctic exploration had ended.

  In January 1849, public prayers were being said in sixty churches for the safety of the expedition; fifty thousand friends, relatives, and well-wishers joined in the supplication. Jane Franklin was now committed heart and soul to the task of finding her missing husband, an obsession that did not sit well with her twenty-four-year-old stepdaughter, Eleanor. She was planning to marry the Reverend Philip Gell that year and resented her stepmother’s insistence on committing every penny of her private resources – and more – to the search. Franklin had left without making any arrangements for Eleanor, since he fully expected to return. In the end, Jane Franklin settled five hundred pounds a year on the couple, who were married in June. It made it harder for her to finance an expedition of her own, but the Gells didn’t think it was enough.

  She was by now employing every means to speed the search. She went to Hull and other ports with William Scoresby to interview whalers heading out for Davis Strait and Baffin Bay, urging them to carry extra provisions in case they encountered the lost ships. In the apartments she had taken in Spring Garden, London, with her faithful niece, she received a steady stream of callers – anyone and everyone who had anything to tell her about the expedition or any suggestions to make about a search. She even visited a clairvoyant, who gave her the usual optimistic but inconclusive reading.

  She launched into a campaign of eloquent letter writing that would have no end until the dénouement, ten years later. In April she wrote to Zachary Taylor, the new American president, dangling before him the carrot of the twenty-thousand-pound prize but also appealing to his humanitarian and patriotic instincts. “I am not without hope that you will deem it not unworthy of a great and kindred nation, to take up the cause of humanity … and thus generously make it your own,” she wrote. There was also the puzzle of the North West Passage; American seamen might wrest from Britain the glory of solving that problem, and if they did, “I should rejoice that it was to America we owe our restored happiness.” Faced with what one British parliamentarian, Sir Robert Inglis, called “the most admirable letter ever addressed by man or woman to man or woman,” the president pledged he would do what he could.

  The Admiralty, to whom she addressed another letter, was less forthcoming. She wanted to borrow two ships and fit them out at her own expense. “It will not be, I trust, and ought not be a reproach to me, that I use every means and argument I can think of, that is upright and true, to move you to the consideration of my request,” she declared. But the Admiralty was unmoved. It had sent a supply ship, the North Star, out after James Ross; that ought to be enough. She wanted to go with it, but was refused and had to be content with sending another letter to her husband, who by this time had been dead for almost two years.

  She was, in the words of a friend, in a “restless, excited state of feeling.” She could not be still. She had to do something. With her niece she decided to travel that summer of 1849 to the Shetlands and Orkneys to interview more whalers who might have some news of the missing men. She went to the house where her husband had stayed before setting off. She took cake and cherry brandy with the seventy-five-year-old mother of John Rae (“the most beautiful old lady we have ever beheld,” wrote Sophia). In August, she was heartened to learn that the Tsar of Russia, touched by one of her appeals, was offering to send a search expedition to the Siberian coast. In September her hopes soared when a bottle was retrieved from the sea with news of Franklin; it was, alas, old news dropped off in 1845 when the ships were scarcely under way. Then a whaling seaman turned up to claim he’d talked to some Eskimos who had seen Franklin and his men that March. For a brief time she felt the thrill of released emotions. It was premature; the story was quickly discredited.

  In November, within a week of each other, both Richardson and Ross returned to England to report failure. Ross, with six of his company of sixty-four dead and another twelve sick, had managed at last to escape from the ice, which pushed him out of Lancaster Sound and into Baffin Bay. Ross’s own health was broken. The Times correspondent reported from Portsmouth that “the opinion in naval circles in this port is decidedly against any further waste of money and sacrifice of life and comfort in such an adventure, which, it is believed, will yield nothing but repeated disappointments.” That provoked a chorus of protest in the paper’s letters column, but Leopold M’Clintock had been equally sour in his journal that fall when for twenty-four days they had been “utterly helpless, fearful lest every breeze should drift us upon the land and dash our ships to pieces.” It struck M’Clintock then that “our situation and final release should be a salutary rebuke to those who advocate attempting a North West Passage.… Surely this ought to be the last polar expedition.”

  But, of course, it wasn’t. In a little more than a year, M’Clintock, the acknowledged sledging expert, would be at it again, trudging across the snow-covered granites of the wrong island, heading, like everybody else, in the wrong direction.

  With the return of Richardson and Ross, a kind of Arctic fever swept England. Books about polar journeys, dioramas showing Arctic vistas, newspaper and magazine articles about northern adventure, complete with engravings, all combined to whet public interest and pique curiosity. Where was Franklin? Why hadn’t he been found? How could two ships and 129 men vanish from sight, without a word, without a hint for almost five years?

  And where was John Rae? Had he found anything? Nobody knew. The problem of communication bedevilled the searchers and frustrated the search. Letters took six months to reach their destination, whether they moved by ship round Cape Horn or travelled through the northern interior by York boat, canoe, toboggan, or dogsled. Rae was operating blindly, with no idea of what was going on in the rest of the Arctic. Richardson sent him a dispatch when he reached Lake Winnipeg in August 1849. Rae didn’t get it until the following spring. At that, Richardson’s news was already several months old. He told Rae that James Clark Ross would probably make contact with him on Great Bear Lake. Even as he wrote those words, Ross’s ship was being driven back into Baffin Bay. Yet in April of 1850, Rae still believed Ross’s sledge teams were combing the western Arctic.

  In November 1849, the Admiralty bestirred itself to seek some further help from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The correspondence moved as ponderously as the great Arctic ice streams, as ships crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic with messages between the company’s London and Montreal headquarters. Sir George Simpson was totally in the dark. He had no idea that Rae’s attempt to explore Victoria Land had failed. He told Rae to go west from the Mackenzie delta to Point Barrow, not knowing that Lieutenant Pu
llen of the supply ship Plover in Bering Strait had already covered that ground. Rae didn’t get Simpson’s message until June 25, 1850. He sensibly ignored it and postponed further search until 1851, when he would again travel east to Wollaston and Victoria lands.

  Long before that, in the fall of 1849, with James Ross reporting impassable ice conditions in Barrow Strait, the Admiralty had turned its attention to the west. If ships couldn’t pierce the unknown Arctic core from the east, perhaps they could enter the Arctic Ocean from Bering Strait and proceed eastward.

  Fortunately, Ross’s two ships, Enterprise and Investigator, were now available and were quickly refitted. Captain Richard Collinson in the Enterprise would lead the expedition. Lieutenant Robert McClure, Ross’s former second-in-command, would command the Investigator. The two ships left Plymouth on January 20. This was only the first of six expeditions that would be sent off in 1850 to search for John Franklin.

  The assumption at the time was that Franklin had somehow gone farther west. There was no basis for this belief, and it didn’t sit well with Lady Franklin. Besides, it was all very well to send two ships off to the Bering Sea, but it would be winter before they reached Alaska; that could delay their search for another year. She resolved to fit out her own expedition – the ships would have to be small to be within her means – but she was confident she could raise funds in America. She was determined that her husband be found, alive or dead. “There is no trial,” she declared, “that I am not prepared to go through if it become necessary.” But she kept up the pressure on the Admiralty with the aid of such powerful friends as Richard Cobden, the free trader, who pushed her cause in parliament.