The Arctic Grail Read online

  Meanwhile, she considered the vast areas in the eastern Arctic that had not been examined. What about Boothia Felix and the coastline from the mouth of the Coppermine to the Great Fish River? She had even sent off a letter to John Rae, suggesting, with considerable prescience, that he might consider examining the mouth of the Great Fish.

  The ever-troublesome Dr. Richard King entered the fray, urging that he be allowed to lead a government expedition to the mouth of the same river. The Navy wanted nothing to do with Dr. King, or the Great Fish River either, for that matter. But it had to do something, for the pressure was mounting. Thousands of dollars were pouring in, much of it from the United States, to underwrite the private expedition Lady Franklin was proposing. Thousands more were going to Sir John Ross for another private expedition. The Navy could not afford to be left behind.

  As a result, the Admiralty announced its own official expedition to the eastern Arctic – the most ambitious yet. It would dispatch no fewer than four big ships under Captain Horatio Austin to scour the Arctic for Franklin. James Ross’s views had become the official theory. Franklin had either gone west, following Parry’s old route to Melville Island or beyond, or he had gone north through the unexplored Wellington Channel. The Navy would concentrate on these areas.

  It is a measure of the Navy’s belated alarm that it was prepared to underwrite another expedition to be commanded, not by one of its own, but by a whaling captain, William Penny. Penny was no ordinary seadog; at forty-one, he was the acknowledged leader of the Davis Strait whalers. He had been in the Arctic since the age of eleven and had commanded a whaling ship for sixteen years. His opinions and advice were sought and accepted without question. His surgeon, Peter Sutherland, who accompanied him on the Franklin search, wrote that no words were more familiar to him than “What does Penny think of it?” Sutherland described him as “vigorous and full of energy and zeal in the Franklin cause.” Indeed, no more dedicated explorer set out in search of Franklin. Bluff, outspoken, unsophisticated, often difficult and quick to take offence, Penny attacked any project with a directness that commanded respect if not always affection. As one naval officer put it, “his enthusiasm blinds him.”

  Penny, the whaler, was certainly not the Admiralty’s choice; he was Jane Franklin’s. Her behind-the-scenes manoeuvring eventually confirmed him in his post, but it wasn’t easy. The Lords Commissioner of the Admiralty worried that discipline could not be maintained in the Arctic without Navy regulations. It was to them, in Sutherland’s phrase, “an experiment fraught with danger.” And what if it all worked? The results “would prove inimical to the strict rules of government service.”

  But the Navy reckoned without the artifice of Lady Franklin, who, supported by public opinion, made the selection of Penny virtually a fait accompli before the Admiralty realized what was happening. The expedition began as a private search to be financed by Lady Franklin herself. In the fall of 1849 she offered Penny the command, which he accepted, refusing any fee for his services. Then she urged him to apply to the Admiralty for permission to take a ship to the Arctic. At the same time, she convinced the Admiralty to underwrite the cost of the expedition that she had conceived for Penny. The Admiralty had to give in. Already the country was clamouring for more government effort in the Franklin search. “Let 1850 be the year to redeem our tottering honour, and let not the United States snatch from us the glory of rescuing the lost expedition,” read one letter to The Times. “A cry for help from 130 gallant men comes to us on the northern gale now blowing,” read another. “Oh! let them not cry in vain.” The idea of Franklin’s lady squandering her last penny on a private quest did not sit well with the English public, to whom she had become a heroine. The Navy capitulated.

  But a whaling captain commanding two government vessels? Penny himself knew that would not be an easy mouthful to swallow. January passed and so did February while the Admiralty dawdled. Penny himself was certain the Navy wouldn’t accept him. He wanted out, but Lady Franklin asked him to wait. In March, she got her way at last. Penny sailed in April in command of two relatively small ships, the Lady Franklin (200 tons) and the Sophia (100 tons), but not before he had what his friend Sherard Osborn called “a disagreeable conversation” with Austin, Osborn’s “hot headed” superior. The acrimony was papered over once the ships forgathered in the Arctic but was to break out later in a manner that again frustrated and delayed the Franklin search. Osborn’s note to his friend Penny saying “I feel certain … that the year 1851 will see Franklin’s expedition saved and on their road home” was symptomatic of the misplaced optimism of the time.

  Lady Franklin was equally hopeful – at least on the surface. But the letter that Penny carried to her lost husband suggested the depth of her fears. “I desire nothing,” she wrote, “but to cherish the remainder of your days, however injured & broken your health may be … I live in you my dearest – I pray for you at all hours.…”

  She and her niece Sophia were on the dock at Aberdeen on April 13 when the namesake ships set off for the frozen world. One week later Sir John Ross’s own expedition headed for Lancaster Sound. The two little ships under Ross’s command, Felix and Mary, had been bought with funds raised from the Hudson’s Bay Company and by public subscription. Thus did the oldest of all naval commanders keep the promise he had made to his friend in 1845.

  All the previous year, the seventy-two-year-old Ross had been urging an expedition using small, manoeuvrable vessels, manned by experienced whalers, and carrying Eskimo dogs and sleds to probe the hinterland. But when he offered to command it himself, the Arctic Council advised against it. Once again the Navy opted for large vessels and sledges that would be hauled by men and not animals. Only William Penny used dogs on the Franklin search.

  The official expedition, consisting of two sailing vessels and two steam cruisers, all under the command of Captain Austin, got under way in May 1850, provisioned for three years. This was the most ambitious and costly expedition ever sent north. The government was now committed to spending sixty thousand pounds on the eastern section of the search, and great things were expected from both Austin and Penny. Leopold M’Clintock, one of Austin’s officers, his gloom of the previous autumn long since swept away in the fervour of the new adventure, wrote that “success in our present expedition is the summit of all my waking dreams.” He carried a letter from Francis Crozier’s uncle that he determined to keep with him at all times in case he “should be the fortunate one to find our missing countrymen.” But Crozier’s bones had long since found their final resting place.

  At this point there were ten British ships heading for the Arctic, searching for John Franklin. That same month two American naval vessels left New York, bringing the number of search vessels to an even dozen. This, too, was Lady Franklin’s doing. For some time she had been corresponding with Henry Grinnell, a New York philanthropist and shipping merchant, who had been moved by her letter to the U.S. president. Since that time, the Franklin search had obsessed Grinnell. “It occupies all my thoughts,” he wrote her, “too much so perhaps for a man with a wife & six children.” Grinnell had underwritten the cost of the ships that an American naval officer, Edwin De Haven, would take to the Arctic. “Should they be so fortunate as to rescue your husband & his companions,” he wrote, “I shall feel as though my work was done on this earth.” For Henry Grinnell this was the beginning of his long fascination with the Arctic and the first of several expeditions he would cheerfully sponsor.

  Yet in spite of these ambitious projects Lady Franklin remained uneasy. She was no longer a tyro where the Arctic was concerned. She had seen everybody, read everything, digested it all. Before the decade was out she would know more about the North than any armchair expert. Suppose her husband’s ships had been beset in the ice in, say, James Ross Strait off King William Land, and, having abandoned their vessels, the men had made for the Great Fish River? That was very close to what had actually happened, but she could convince nobody of the soundness of th
is possibility.

  Expedition after expedition was setting off for the Arctic, but all were concentrating on the far North. The two American ships were heading for Smith Sound at the very top of Baffin Bay. The Navy had ordered Penny to explore Jones Sound, north of Lancaster Sound. But nobody, apparently, had considered looking at the coast to the south. There was no help for it: she herself would have to see to that. As she wrote to her friend Sir James Ross, “if everything else fails, the search will be deemed incomplete till this coast has been explored & it will be impossible for me to resign myself to its abandonment.”

  On June 5, her own modest expedition was ready to set off for that purpose in the ninety-ton Prince Albert, a former pilot boat lent by a friend and outfitted with funds from other friends and Lady Franklin’s own dwindling fortune. The commander would be Lieutenant Charles Codrington Forsyth, a man with no Arctic experience whom she had known in Van Diemen’s Land. The first officer was a civilian, W. Parker Snow, one of the several eccentric figures who enliven the tale of the Franklin search. Snow had volunteered for the mission because of a dream, which he thought showed him exactly where Franklin was – somewhere in the region of the North Magnetic Pole. As a dreamer, the quixotic Snow was closer to the mark than the practical naval men, who refused to take him seriously. His career, to put it mildly, had been checkered and a little unsavoury. After four years at sea as a youth he had landed up in the Australian bush leading a wild, perhaps criminal existence. The rest of his forty-one years had been equally turbulent. Arrested while on naval service, released when he saved a man attacked by a shark, robbed of all his possessions, temporarily blind, weak, and destitute, he had in his later years become a reasonably successful writer. One of the several schemes he proposed for the succour of the Franklin crews was that convicts should be employed in the search on the grounds that they were mentally resourceful. Snow would have known, for he had mingled with such people, but the notion was not one that would recommend Snow to the Admiralty as a level-headed explorer.

  Nonetheless Lady Franklin chose him, perhaps because of his enthusiasm for Prince Regent Inlet and Boothia Felix. She herself drafted the orders. Forsyth was to proceed down the inlet to the narrowest point of Somerset Island and then, with Snow, sledge south, past the farthest point reached by James Ross.

  Had they been able to do so, they might have unlocked the riddle of the lost party, for of all the thirteen ships searching the Arctic from the Bering Sea to Lancaster Sound, only this one was headed in the right direction. Sir John Franklin was a stubborn man, with the reputation of following his orders to the letter. Those orders had been explicit. He was to head west to Cape Walker and then he was to head south. Only if ice blocked the way was he to attempt an alternative route through the Wellington Channel. Lady Franklin was one of the few who believed it was more than possible that Franklin had found a way to stick to his original instructions. But then, she knew her husband better than any of her naval friends did.

  3 The American presence

  Of the nine ships that left England in 1850 to probe the Arctic channels from the east, only one got back that year. All through the dark Arctic winter the other eight were imprisoned in the ice of Barrow Strait and Wellington Channel. From this central point sledging parties searching for Franklin fanned out in every direction except the right one.

  This was the most remarkable winter yet in the annals of Arctic exploration. Scores of men, dragging heavy sledges, were crawling and sliding over insular land masses that had scarcely been noted on earlier maps. The Arctic had never seen such activity and would not see it again in that century. At last the mysterious contours of that drab and silent realm were being unlocked.

  As usual, the official naval accounts tended toward the prosaic. The journals kept by the new generation of British polar explorers were no more revealing than those of the earlier ones. Wide-eyed expressions of enthusiasm, gloomy premonitions of doom were subdued by the British tendency to understatement. Hardships were minimized, human foibles went unreported, personal philosophies were omitted. The British were rarely introspective; Arctic exploration was old stuff to them. The stiff upper lip prevailed.

  But now a very different presence had insinuated itself into the frozen world. For the first time, two American naval vessels had entered the mysterious archipelago. For a time they were within hailing distance of the British ships clustered in the frozen channel just west of Lancaster Sound.

  These were the two little vessels (Advance, 144 tons, and Rescue, 81 tons) that Henry Grinnell, the New York shipping magnate, had bought for thirty thousand dollars at Lady Franklin’s behest and then turned over to the U.S. government so that they might be placed under naval discipline. The expedition is notable, not so much for its commander, Lieutenant Edwin De Haven (who discovered Grinnell Land), but for its chief medical officer, a sickly, twenty-nine-year-old surgeon named Elisha Kent Kane. This was the expedition that launched Kane into an orgy of Arctic exploration, that made him the best-known explorer of his day, and provided, through his own colourful accounts, the stimulus for future expeditions. Both Roald Amundsen, the conqueror of the North West Passage, and Robert Peary, the polar explorer, were reared on Kane’s version of his Arctic exploits. His Arctic journal and his subsequent published account of that first memorable winter in the ice, with its extravagant descriptions, romantic overtones, and lively portrayal of the harsh polar conditions, contrasted sharply with the phlegmatic accounts of the British.

  On the face of it, this restless, driven man had no business being in the Arctic. He had a damaged heart and, in fact, would die before the decade was out. When he was a medical student suffering from rheumatic fever, he had gone to his bed each night never knowing whether he would wake the next morning. He was slender and fragile but comely. A housemaid in the residents’ dormitory at the Blockley Hospital in Philadelphia described him then as “so pretty, with his sweet young face, and complexion like a girl’s and his curly hair.… There was never so fine a gentleman came to Blockley with his pretty, gentle manners.”

  He was both sensitive and rebellious. At school he had courted expulsion. As for the navy, he detested its harsh discipline and its authoritarianism. Heavy weather made him seasick. When the Grinnell Expedition, as it was called, reached the Whalefish Islands off Greenland, he was so ill that De Haven tried to send him home. Kane stubbornly refused. Why? What was this delicate young semi-invalid thinking of to traipse off to a chill, forbidding realm at the top of the world, far from hospitals and creature comforts, far from medical attention and a loving family?

  There was another side to Elisha Kent Kane’s temperament that belied his apparent fragility. He was an irrepressible adventurer. This was by no means the first time he had gone to the ends of the earth – literally. Much of his young life had been crammed with romance in the far corners of the world – Mexico, Egypt, the Mediterranean, Brazil, the African coast, the interiors of India and China. He had explored the catacombs of Thebes, stood at the entrance to the pass at Thermopylae, walked across the Peloponnesus, and once hung suspended from a bamboo rope attached to a two-hundred-foot crag over a volcanic crater in the Philippines.

  For much of that time he was ill. He had contracted “tic fever” in Macao, “coast fever” in Africa, and “congestive typhus” during the Mexican War, in which he was also wounded in the abdomen by a lance during hand-to-hand combat as the head of a guerrilla company. Yet he kept on. Indeed, a fellow medical student had long been convinced that his chronic heart problem led him to court reckless escapades for, as he himself put it, he groaned “with the miserable tediousness of small adventures.” Doomed to an early grave, he had nothing to lose. There was, perhaps, more to it than that. His journal entries suggest that Kane was out to prove something, not just to himself but also to his family and especially to his father, who tended to think of him (at least in young Kane’s view) as a bit of a scapegrace.

  Kane was the eldest of seven children born to pa
rents who were pillars of the Philadelphia upper class, as austere as the Arctic itself. His mother was a society beauty, his father a prominent judge who had been attorney general of Pennsylvania. They did not want him to go to the Arctic. Kane, ever the rebel, went anyway, his resolve no doubt stiffened by parental opposition. He couldn’t quit. To have left the ship before the voyage proper had begun would have been to endure a humiliation worse than all the ailments and infirmities that the Arctic might visit upon him.

  Kane exhibited an almost childlike enthusiasm that July for the strange new world that surrounded him. The icebergs fascinated him as they fascinated every Arctic traveller. He saw them in metaphysical terms. They seemed to him the material for a dream. “An iceberg,” he wrote, “is one of God’s own buildings, preaching its lessons of humility to the miniature structures of man.…”

  They crossed Melville Bay, a half moon bitten out of the western coast of Greenland, which Kane saw as a “mysterious region of terrors” – never still, never silent. The vast floes, some a mile across and estimated to weigh more than two million tons, converged irresistibly upon each other at the rate of a mile an hour, crumpling like corrugated cardboard before the enormous pressure – grinding, cracking, crumbling in the dynamic process the seamen called “hummocking.” The sound and the fury of the restless pack never ceased. “Tables of white marble were thrust into the air, as if by invisible machinery.” A floe would heave up ten feet, then fling itself atop another with a rasping crunch. A second would slide on top and then a third, causing the others to break away, “and then, just as you were expecting to see the whole pile disappear, up comes a fourth, larger than any of the rest, and converts all its predecessors into a chaotic mass of crushed marble.”