The Arctic Grail Read online

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  The Croker Mountains

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  Winter Harbour

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  Fame, fortune, and frustration

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  Innuee and kabloonas

  Ross and Parry encounter the Etah Eskimos (as drawn by John Sacheuse) (illustration credit 1.1)

  1 John Barrow’s obsession

  In the published memoirs of that stubborn and often maddening Arctic explorer Sir John Ross, there is a remarkable illustration of an encounter that took place on August 10, 1818, between two British naval officers and a band of Greenland Eskimos.

  The most striking thing about this drawing is the contrast of cultures it depicts. The Eskimos are dressed, as one might expect, in jackets, trousers, and boots made from fur and sealskin, perfectly adapted for the harsh climate of ultima Thule. The two men who greet them are attired exactly as they would be had they been envoys to some palm-fringed island in the South Pacific or off the coast of Africa. There they stand, resplendent in cocked hats, tailcoats, and white gloves, swords dangling from their waists, the points of their buckled shoes that once trod the parquet floors of Mayfair sinking into the soft snow – costumed actors in a savage land.

  Behind them, against a magnificent backdrop of chiselled mountains, their two ships float at anchor – square-rigged vessels of the kind that defeated the French at Trafalgar but that will prove hopelessly unfit for Arctic channels. The seamen aboard are shivering in regulation wool and broadcloth, since no exploring nation has yet recognized the need for special Arctic clothing.

  Officers and natives are equally startled by this unexpected encounter. The two peoples view the world in ways as different as their appearance. Almost a century will pass before either recognizes the need to understand or learn from the other.

  The British officers have until now met only one Eskimo, the Anglicized interpreter John Sacheuse, whom they call Sackhouse. The Eskimos here, on the rim of Melville Bay on the western shore of Greenland, have never before seen a white man. To the naval officers, who stand peering at these strange, squat creatures, muffled in furs, the moon itself could scarcely seem more remote than this bleak, treeless shore. To the Eskimos, their astonishing visitors must be celestial beings. In a dialect Sacheuse can hardly understand they ask, “Where do you come from, the sun or the moon?”

  The picture is all the more remarkable because it was sketched by Sacheuse himself. A young Christianized native from southern Greenland, he had stowed away two years earlier on a whaling ship and eventually reached England, where he studied drawing under one of the Nasmyth family of landscape and portrait artists.

  Sacheuse has here recorded a historic moment, for this is the first Arctic expedition of the nineteenth century, the new beginning of a long quest, first for the North West Passage, later for the North Pole. That quest, pursued for most of the century, will foster a golden age of exploration. Ship after ship – British at the outset and later American, Scandinavian, Austrian, and Italian – will sail off through the ice-clogged northern seas on the most romantic of voyages, seeking a Passage that may not exist and has no commercial value and an almost unidentifiable pinpoint at the top of the world that has very little scientific significance.

  The two naval officers in Sacheuse’s illustration are Commander John Ross, captain of the Isabella and leader of the expedition, and his second-in-command, Lieutenant William Edward Parry of the Alexander. Both men have an appointment with history, but history will not treat them equally. Ross’s reputation will be clouded by the events of this first journey. He will never quite recover from the resulting wave of sarcasm and vituperation. Parry, the taller of the two, will go on to acquire a towering reputation as “the beau ideal of the Arctic officer.” History, like life, is not always fair. Ross did not deserve the extremes of criticism levelled against him; Parry did not merit the excessive adulation he received. In the tangled web of Arctic channels, luck was often as important as skill; in the hierarchy of the Royal Navy, class and cronyism often outweighed ability. Parry had luck and class. John Ross had neither.

  Ross’s assignment was to try to fill up some of the blank spaces on the map of the Arctic. There were so many of them, so much to discover! Was Greenland an island, for instance, or was it connected to North America? Nobody knew; Ross was asked to find out. Did Baffin Bay exist or was it a figment of an earlier explorer’s imagination? Nobody was quite sure. Another of Ross’s tasks was to determine its existence. But the most important of all his instructions was “to endeavour to ascertain the practicability of a Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean along the Northern Coast of America.”

  That was the real quest – to find the elusive transcontinental channel that had obsessed and frustrated English mariners and explorers from Elizabethan days. As Martin Frobisher had declared, “it is still the only thing left undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and remarkable.”

  The swashbuckling Frobisher, friend of Drake and Hawkins, was the first to seek the Passage in three voyages between 1576 and 1578. He was as optimistic as he was naïve. He was sure that Frobisher “Strait” led westward to the Pacific and that a fortune in gold lay on an island near its mouth. His backers were more interested in the gold, which turned out to be iron pyrites, so that Frobisher never managed to explore the strait, which we now know to be only a bay.

  Seven years later, a more hard-headed Elizabethan, John Davis, a friend of Walter Raleigh, tried again. He rediscovered Greenland, which had been forgotten after the failure of the Norse colonies three centuries before. Then he crossed the ice-choked strait that bears his name to chart the east coast of a new land (Baffin Island). He was convinced the mysterious Passage existed but was frustrated in his attempts to sail farther north by an implacable barrier of ice.

  Like Frobisher before him, Davis had noted a broad stretch of water north of Ungava. As every schoolchild knows, Henry Hudson sailed through this strait – it is named for him – in 1610. On bursting out into a seemingly limitless sea he thought he had reached the Pacific. It was, in fact, Hudson Bay, and it was there, after a dreadful winter, that he met his death at the hands of a mutinous crew, four of whom were later murdered in a skirmish with the natives.

  Those who survived were brought home by Hudson’s first mate, Robert Bylot, whose pardon was ensured through that feat of seamanship. Bylot made two more mercantile voyages to the great bay and concluded there was no navigable passage leading to the Pacific from its western shores.

  The next year, 1616, the indefatigable Bylot made a fourth Arctic voyage with the brilliant William Baffin as his pilot. They managed to get through the ice that had stopped Davis, travelling three hundred miles farther north than he had – a record that stood for more than two centuries – and mapped the entire bay that now bears Baffin’s name. They also found three broad openings, any one of which might lead to lands unknown and which they named for their patrons, Sir James Lancaster, “Alderman Jones,” and Sir Thomas Smith. These deep, navigable sounds were to play their part in the nineteenth-century exploration of the frozen world. Two led to the North West Passage. The third – Smith Sound – was the gateway to the North Pole.

  After that, interest in the Passage dwindled. When Luke Foxe returned in 1631 after exploring the Foxe Channel and Foxe Basin north of Hudson Bay, he reported that there could be no route to the Orient south of the Arctic Circle. That killed all hope of a commercially practical Passage. There was a brief flurry a century later when Christopher Middleton explored the west coast of Southampton Island in Hudson Bay. He thought the channel known as Roes Welcome Sound might lead to the Passage, but all it led to was a cul-de-sac, which he ruefully named Repulse Bay. Such is the resilience of the questing spirit that a century later Repulse Bay again became a target for those aiming at the secret of the North West Passage. Once again, Repulse Bay repulsed them.

  For, just as the Elizabethans had forgotten about the existence of Greenland, so the British of the
Regency period had forgotten the whereabouts of Frobisher’s discoveries and, even more astonishing, had disputed whether there really was a Baffin Bay at all. In spite of the fact that whaling ships had been operating in Davis Strait for two centuries and had undoubtedly penetrated the bay, Baffin’s discoveries became suspect. Finally, the bay was removed from the maps of the time.

  Indeed, except for Hudson Bay and part of Baffin Island, the Arctic region was a blank on the map. Even the northern continental coastline remained an enigma. Only two overland explorers had managed to reach the Arctic waters: Samuel Hearne at the Coppermine’s mouth in 1771, Alexander Mackenzie at the Mackenzie delta in 1789. From the tip of Russian Alaska to the shores of Hudson Bay, everything, save for these two pinpoints, was uncharted and mysterious. It was quite possible, for all anyone knew, that a chunk of North America could reach as far as the Pole itself. But one thing was certain: if somewhere in that fog-shrouded realm a Passage linking the oceans was found to exist, it couldn’t be much more than a curiosity.

  Why, then, was the British Admiralty dispatching two shiploads of seamen in a new search for a navigable channel through the unknown Arctic? The answer is that the Navy had to find something for its ships, its men, and, most important, its officers to do now that Europe was at peace. Britain controlled the seas. Napoleon had been packed off to exile in 1815. There were no wars left for the Royal Navy to fight. Its new enemy would be the elements themselves.

  By 1817, when the idea of a renewed search for the North West Passage was first proposed, 90 per cent of all naval officers were unemployed, eking out a miserable existence on half pay, which was not much above starvation scale, and yearning for an opportunity – any opportunity – that would restore them to service and bring them promotion. Most of the able seamen had been discharged after the defeat of France; their numbers had dropped from 140,000 to 19,000. But the officers, who belonged to a different class, were kept on; in fact, their strength was actually increased to 6,000. This time-honoured custom led to a ridiculous disproportion. In the British Navy there was an officer for every three men.

  Under such conditions promotion was impossible. To reach high rank, a young lieutenant like Edward Parry would have to have some miraculous feat to perform. No wonder, then, that men who had never seen a palm tree or an iceberg were desperate to go to the ends of the earth – literally – if not for the glory of King and Empire at least to serve their own ambitions. The Navy was eager to send them. What matter if the ships were too big and cumbersome and the crews too large for effective Arctic service? What matter if the Passage was commercially impractical? England was about to embark on a new age of discovery in which it was the exploit itself that counted. Like the headwaters of the Nile and the mysterious Congo, the Passage was there, waiting to be conquered, and so was the North Pole. The race to succeed took on some of the aspects of an international sporting event. How humiliating it would be for England if a mariner from another nation – a Russian, perhaps, or an upstart American – should get there first and seize the prize!

  The moving spirit behind this new attitude was an Admiralty bureaucrat named John Barrow, Jr., a moon-faced man with short-cropped hair, bristling black brows, and the tenacious temperament of a bull terrier. He came from humble farming stock in North Lancashire, and the position he held for the best part of forty years – second secretary to the Admiralty – sounds humble enough; but he was a powerful figure in the service. John Ross, who didn’t care for him, said that Barrow gave the impression that he was first secretary, and, in fact, there were some then and later who thought he was.

  Certainly Barrow’s career was remarkable. He had left school at thirteen and risen to his position through a combination of hard work, energy, and administrative ability, as well as an instinct for getting to know the right people and choosing the most influential patrons. In his job he took all the latitude allowed. He was responsible for the internal operations of the Admiralty, but in that role he could be highly selective. If you wanted to get on in the Navy it was useful to be on the right side of the second secretary – and it helped if you were a member of the upper crust. Barrow, the dirt farmer’s son, had some of the snobbery of the British working class.

  He has been called the father of modern Arctic exploration. He wasn’t imaginative, but he was curious. He shared with his contemporaries that passion for charts and statistics that was the mark of the English adventurer. The “most honourable and useful” employment for the Navy in peacetime, Barrow felt, was to complete the geographical and hydrographical surveys that had been launched in the previous century by such seamen as Cook and Vancouver. Napoleon was no sooner locked up in St. Helena (Barrow’s suggestion) than the Admiralty dispatched an expedition to the Congo, the first for which Barrow was responsible.

  But it was not the fetid jungles of the Dark Continent that caught Barrow’s fancy; it was the Arctic. Although he had travelled in both Africa and China, he had been drawn to the polar regions ever since he had made a youthful voyage to Greenland on a whaler. A little learning had made Barrow an expert. He hadn’t even seen an iceberg, but he had fallen in love with the idea of the Arctic. His understanding of that mysterious realm was, to put it charitably, imperfect. Its known terrors failed to dampen his enthusiasm or smother his optimism. Barrow always overestimated the ability of nineteenth-century expeditions to bull their way through the appalling pressures of the shifting ice pack. To him, the discovery of the Passage was a kind of joyride – a romantic excursion into the Unknown.

  Barrow himself didn’t believe there was a Baffin Bay. In his optimism he was convinced of the presence of an “Open Polar Sea” – a temperate ocean, free of ice, surrounding the Pole and walled off from the rest of the world by a frozen barrier. He was wrong on both counts, but then who knew what really lay in the uncharted North? Was there really open water hidden beyond the fog? Were there islands, peninsulas, channels? Or, as many believed, was there a clear, easily navigable route that would link Europe with Asia?

  The North West Passage had glamour. There was a good deal of talk, then and later, about the advancement of science, but it was the elusive Passage that caught the imagination. Certainly science would be advanced – seas charted, coastlines mapped, thousands of minute observations recorded, the flora and fauna of the new land meticulously noted, geological specimens collected, the habits of the natives exhaustively studied. The keeping of records of every kind was a British obsession. But all this was incidental to the Great Quest. Nobody gave out handsome prizes for scientific discoveries, but there would be a sultan’s ransom for the first man who could thread his way through the Arctic labyrinth. National honour was at stake. As Barrow put it, “it would be somewhat mortifying if a naval power but of yesterday should complete a discovery in the nineteenth century, which was so happily commenced by Englishmen in the sixteenth.” He meant Russia.

  To the Royal Navy, anything seemed possible in those heady post-Napoleonic days. The frustrations and failures of the Elizabethan and Jacobean explorers were forgotten or minimized. Had not Nelson triumphed over the French Navy? Every Englishman was convinced that the nineteenth century belonged to Britain. It was inconceivable that a couple of stout ships could not sweep through the Arctic in a single winter to the greater glory of the Empire. As Barrow, the super-optimist, put it in his convoluted prose, “from the zeal and abilities of the persons employed in the arduous enterprise everything may be expected to be done within the scope of possibility.”

  Whoever discovered the answer to this puzzle would be rich beyond his wildest dreams. Nudged by Barrow, the Royal Society persuaded parliament to offer a series of prizes to anyone who could solve the mystery – or even part of it. The first explorer to reach a longitude of 110 degrees west would get five thousand pounds. Twenty degrees farther west, to the meridian of the Mackenzie, the ante was doubled. At 150 degrees west, the prize reached fifteen thousand pounds; and if the Pacific were attained, it would be twenty thousand –
an enormous sum in those tax-free days, equal to well over a million dollars in 1988.

  But there was another prize to be captured, as elusive as the North West Passage and even more difficult to attain. The North Pole represented the ultimate in geographical discovery. Like that of the Passage, its value was symbolic rather than commercial. Whoever managed to reach it would gain lasting renown, not only for himself but also for his country.

  As the leading maritime nation, Great Britain could not afford to ignore this trophy. Thus Barrow planned two expeditions for the spring of 1818. He was convinced, as many were (though without a shred of evidence), that a belt of temperate water, free of ice, surrounded the Pole. If a ship could force its way through the intervening pack, the rest of the voyage would be simple. Of course it wasn’t simple, as Captain David Buchan quickly learned. Buchan was in command of two ships, Dorothea and Trent, assigned to navigate the seas north of Spitzbergen. There he got an object lesson in the power of moving ice. At one point his frustrated crews, dragging the two ships through the pack with anchors and ropes, found after three days of struggle that they had actually been pushed back two miles.

  The savage storm that soon followed all but wrecked both vessels. Nipped by the great bergs, hurled from floe to jagged floe (the Trent‘s bell tolling mournfully as she rolled from side to side), they were fortunate to limp back to Spitzbergen, where the attempt on the Pole was called off. Both ships returned to England in October. The expedition is notable only because Buchan’s second-in-command, the commander of the Trent, was Lieutenant John Franklin, making the first of four journeys into the frozen world that would, in the end, claim him and thus immortalize his name.

  The second expedition that Barrow planned was to seek the North West Passage by sailing up through the dubious Baffin Bay. Somewhere along its western side, Barrow felt sure, there must be an entrance that would lead, presumably, to Russia. The Navy searched diligently for an officer who had experience with ice conditions and found none. Finally, it hit on Commander John Ross, who had spent two seasons in the Baltic, which, though not very frigid, was as close as any naval officer had come to polar conditions. At that time, there were seven hundred officers with the same rank as Ross. He was one of only forty-six who were actively employed. Naturally he jumped at the chance; it was his only hope of being promoted to post captain.