The Arctic Grail Read online

  The refraction of the pale Arctic light played tricks with his eyes, as it had years before when John Ross saw his non-existent range of mountains. Icebergs seemed to float in the air with other icebergs upside down on top of them and even, sometimes, a third layer of icebergs on top of that. Kane’s imagination caused him to see strange objects floating in the heavens: “There is a black globe floating in the air about 3° north of the sun.… Is it a bird or a balloon? … on a sudden it changes shape.… It is a grand piano … you had hardly named it before it was an anvil … presto it has made itself duplicate – a pair of colossal dumbbells. A moment! and it is the black globe again.”

  At one point the entire horizon became distorted. Great bergs were suspended in the sky. His ship, the Advance, seemed to float “in the concave of a vast sphere.” Its consort, the Rescue, lay not far away “in mid-space, duplicated by her secondary image.”

  He missed “the soothing darkness of which twilight should have been the precursor.” There was no relief from “the perpetual light garish and unfluctuating.” He felt stimulated, could not sleep, his meal hours confused. For the first time he understood the disciplining value of alternate night and day.

  Smith Sound was their objective, but Smith Sound was clogged with ice. They headed for Lancaster Sound instead. On August 19, Captain Penny, the whaler, came alongside in the Lady Franklin. He had tried to reconnoitre Jones Sound, but that, too, was blocked.

  Two days later, at three in the morning, with the wind at gale force, another sail was reported ahead, a little schooner under a single reefed topsail and towing what appeared to be a yacht, “fluttering over the waves like a crippled bird.” This was John Ross’s Felix, towing the little Mary. Soon the Advance was alongside. The sailing master appeared with a cloak thrown over his night gear. “You and I are ahead of them all,” he cried in a stentorian voice. Ross came on deck shortly after, “apparently very little stricken in years and well able to bear his part in the toils and hazards of life.” Kane could not contain his admiration for the scarred Arctic veteran. It was on this very spot, off Admiralty Inlet, that Ross had been rescued seventeen years before and now “here he is again, in a flimsy cockle-shell, after contributing his purse and his influence, embarked himself in the crusade of search for a lost comrade.”

  Every one of the search ships was now concentrated in the Lancaster Sound area. Crowding on all possible sail, De Haven’s Advance, with the smaller Rescue struggling behind, made for the harbour at Port Leopold at the entrance to Barrow Strait where James Ross had spent the winter of 1848-49, only to find the entrance blocked by ice. Late that evening another topsail schooner worked its way through the pack, and two officers came aboard the Advance. These were Captain Forsyth of the tiny Prince Albert, Lady Franklin’s own vessel, and his eccentric and egotistical second, Parker Snow. Snow and Kane hit it off immediately, sitting up long into the Arctic night, swapping tales of travel and adventure over glasses of champagne. “To me,” Snow wrote, “it was a true feast for the mind; and I revelled in it to my heart’s content.”

  But Snow’s heart was not really content, for the Prince Albert had signally failed in her attempt to explore Prince Regent Inlet. Forsyth had got as far as Fury Beach, and there, faced by what he considered impenetrable ice conditions, had turned about and, to Snow’s irritation, decided to return to England. In vain Snow pleaded with him to stay – at least to let him take a boat to Fury Beach and perhaps to explore the coastline by sledge. But Forsyth’s mind was made up, and Snow, the amateur, didn’t know enough about ice conditions to argue. “The mantle of gloom spread itself abroad, in fog and despondency of spirits, over our little vessel, so joyous but a short time back.” Lady Franklin had squandered thousands of pounds for nothing.

  Snow played one last card: he suggested that Forsyth proceed to Port Leopold and attempt to use the harbour as a base for further exploration. But, as the Americans had discovered, the harbour was blocked. Forsyth decided to make a brief excursion to the mouth of Wellington Channel to pick up dispatches for England and then make haste for home.

  The Prince Albert followed the Advance across the ice-choked waters of Barrow Strait and then westward in the lee of tall, broken cliffs to a long, projecting tongue of limestone known as Cape Riley. Two cairns could be seen on the shore, and here, for the first time, the Franklin searchers got a tantalizing series of clues to the lost expedition. Two ships of Austin’s flotilla, the Assistance and Intrepid, had reached the spot two days before and left a note reporting they’d found traces of what seemed to be a Royal Navy encampment. Other traces had been found ten miles away on Beechey Island – a peninsula, really – up Wellington Channel.

  Kane was eager to inspect these early traces. Here were circular mounds of limestone, marking, probably, the position of tents, along with other clues: a crude fireplace, the foundations of a larger, triangular enclosure, some bird bones, the rusting top of a food canister, a few scraps of canvas, some fragments of what appeared to be a boat. No other white man had been in the area since Parry, and Parry had not camped on this spot. Every sign pointed to the lost party.

  De Haven pressed on to Beechey Island. He was not alone. By August 27, through a series of happenstances, six vessels under three different commanders – De Haven, Penny, and Ross – were clustered within a quarter of a mile of each other off Beechey. The Arctic had conspired to thwart their plans: the Americans couldn’t get through the ice that blocked Smith Sound, nor could Penny penetrate Jones Sound. So here they all were, the officers gathered for a conference on the shore. Suddenly, Elisha Kane looked up and spotted one of Penny’s sailors dashing across the ice and crying out: “Graves, Captain Penny! Graves! Franklin’s winter quarters.” There was an immediate scramble over the loose shale and rough ice to the crest of the narrow isthmus connecting Beechey to the mainland, and there “amid the sterile uniformity of snow and slate,” Kane cast his eyes over a mournful spectacle.

  Three mounds, supporting three weathered headboards, marked the last resting place of a trio of Franklin’s seamen, who had died in the winter and early spring of 1846 of natural causes (their bodies were exhumed 138 years later). There was no doubt now, as the party encountered more and more relics, that this had been the main shore encampment for the two wintering ships. Rope fragments, sailcloth, tarpaulins, casks, clothing, blankets, and scraps of paper were strewn about, not to mention a small mountain of six hundred empty preserved-meat tins, each filled with pebbles to form some sort of ballast. There was even a pair of officer’s gloves, laid out to dry on a rock and never recovered.

  This discovery only deepened the mystery. Franklin had departed so hurriedly, apparently, he had failed to leave any kind of memorandum on paper suggesting the condition of the party or the direction it had taken. They might have gone anywhere. Beechey, Gibraltar-like in its contours, stood at the crossroads of the Arctic. Channels stretched off in every direction: Wellington Channel to the north, Barrow Strait to the west, Lancaster Sound to the east, Prince Regent Inlet and Peel Sound to the south. It was all incredibly puzzling. Franklin had certainly left a cairn, but the cairn contained no message. The party dug around it in every direction and found nothing. To Kane, as to the others, it was “an incomprehensible omission.”

  Area of the Franklin search, 1850-51

  A few hints began to appear. Sledge tracks pointed north along the east coast of Wellington Channel. Lieutenant Griffin of the Rescue traced them at intervals for forty miles. It looked as if Franklin had reconnoitred the upper waters of the channel, preparing to explore it more thoroughly when spring came.

  The following day, August 28, Austin arrived with his flagship and steam tender; his other two vessels were a few miles to the west. Forsyth, in Lady Franklin’s own little ship, had already left for England before the Beechey Island find, convinced that the route to the south was impassable. And so the great search that was supposed to sweep the whole of the Arctic was concentrated now in one tight little are
a off Barrow Strait.

  Kane made a round of all the ships. He saw John Ross once more; the “manly old seaman,” as Kane called him, felt that Franklin had probably gone farther west. Unlike Kane, the other British officers did not much care for Ross. To Penny, he was “an utterly selfish man … his manner is proverbial for false statements.” Indeed, Ross, badly undersupplied, was a drag on the company that winter and of little use as far as the search itself was concerned. But the British got on well with the Americans. Kane, when he boarded Austin’s flagship, the Resolute, found the officers “a gentlemanly, well-educated set of men.” All this neighbourly comradeship caused Austin to name the sheltering cove at Beechey Point, Union Bay.

  The flotilla moved out to avoid getting trapped by the freeze-up. With masses of new ice groaning and grating against her sides, the Advance cast off, struggling past ice tables fourteen feet thick and hummocks like cones of crushed sugar, forty feet high. Soon the ice stream covered the entire expanse of water and De Haven, following orders, knew it was time to head for home; the Americans had no intention of wintering in the Arctic.

  First, however, the smaller Rescue, which had become separated from her sister ship, had to be located – and quickly, if they were to get free of the ice. It was now so cold that coffee froze in the mugs. Kane, in spite of all his Arctic reading, was not prepared for this. The British capacity for understatement had made it seem all too easy. “We are literally running for our lives,” he wrote in his journal. “We are staggering along under all sail, forcing our way while we can.” The English vessels followed in their wake, a compliment, Kane thought, to his commander’s seamanship.

  The Rescue was found far to the west, sheltered by the cliffs of Griffith Island in Barrow Strait. De Haven took her in tow. The two little vessels headed eastward in a race with time and ice, leaving four ships of the British squadron lost in the mist. Kane felt a wave of disappointment. He had hoped to winter in the company of his new English friends; now he realized that if they became beset, they would be at least fifty miles from the nearest ship. That interval, “in these inhospitable deserts, was as complete a separation as an entire continent.”

  He could hear the sounds of the Advance crunching through the new ice like a “rasping noise of close-grained sugar.” His own limbs had stiffened and as he tried to warm them in his tiny cabin, De Haven came down to tell him that the worst had happened: the ice had caught them; they were frozen in for the winter – “glued up,” in Kane’s phrase, in the mouth of Wellington Channel.

  The ice pushed them helplessly north up these unexplored waters for more than two months, without a sail fluttering from the frozen spars. They passed the highest latitude attained in the channel until that time and were then capriciously borne back again past their starting point. All around them, in their icy cradle, the uproar of the surging pack rang in their ears. Kane tried to describe it: “a wild yet not unmusical chorus.” It was almost as if the ice were alive, he thought, issuing animal-like shrieks or plaintive cries, like those of a nighthawk.

  Would the Grinnell Expedition suffer the fate of Franklin? He thought it likely. He kept a portrait of Sir John in his cabin in a gutta-percha frame, and sometimes, in the dark of the Arctic night, he spoke to it, “a good, genuine hearty representative of English flesh and blood.” In his imagination he saw himself shaking hands with the missing explorer. How, he wondered; and where? There was no sign of the lost expedition anywhere along the Wellington Channel.

  The American vessels were not equipped to ward off the stinging cold, which grew fiercer as the winter advanced. Food congealed. Barrels of fruit had to be chopped apart with an axe. Sauerkraut resembled mica or slate. Butter and lard had to be carved with a cold chisel and mallet. When one seaman tried to bite into an icicle, a piece of it froze to his tongue. Two others lost all the skin on their lips. Facial hair turned to cardboard, and if a man stuck out his tongue it froze to his beard; contact with the metal of a gun penetrated two layers of wool mittens with a sensation of scalding water.

  It was dangerous to walk too far from the ship over the rumpled ice. The frost, Kane found, seemed to extend to the brain. An inertia crept over the system; the desire to sit down and rest was almost uncontrollable; drowsiness and death could easily follow.

  The British were stubbornly sticking to woollens – broadcloth and felt boots – but the Americans wore furs: boots of dogskin, breeches of sealskin, jumpers of reindeer hide, and caps and masks of wolfskin – all of which helped to hide the ghastly pallor of their features, starved for sun. By Christmas their faces were bleached to a waxy paleness. One man told Kane he was the palest of the party. Since there were no mirrors on board he was unconscious of his own ghostly appearance, “as white as a cut potato,” Kane said.

  In these pitch-dark conditions, morale began to drop. Men moped and grew testy. It required an effort to wash. At Christmas there was an attempt at play-acting. Never in his life had Kane enjoyed “the tawdry quackery of the stage” so much. The activities that followed seemed exhausting. A foot race knocked out all the officers except Griffin of the Rescue; one of Kane’s messmates actually fainted. The tell-tale signs of scurvy were clearly apparent. Simply climbing a ladder caused the strongest man to pant for breath. Most of the crew sank into indolence and apathy in the everlasting dark. Kane, who had once carped at the eternal light of Arctic summer, now cursed the Stygian gloom of winter: “I long for the light. Dear, dear sun, no wonder you are worshipped!”

  The Rescue, badly battered by the ice, had to be temporarily abandoned. Her crew crowded aboard the Advance. Kane was now one of thirty-three men all jammed together in a room no bigger than his father’s library in Philadelphia. There were no partitions, no privacy.

  The symptoms of scurvy increased daily. Kane, as medical officer, had his men kick a football about on the ice until their legs ached and slide down icy slopes until they could slide no more, then tramp across the ice. Like Parry, Kane believed that exercise was an antiscorbutic. In fact, it increased the symptoms of the disease.

  The sun returned on January 29 after eighty-six days of total darkness. It was arranged that all hands give three hearty cheers when the orb appeared briefly on the eastern horizon, but Kane did not take part. Instead he found a solitary hummock of ice, a mile from the ship, where he could drink in the rosy light of dawn in solitary tribute. “Never, till the grave-sod or the ice cover me, may I forgo this blessing of blessings again!” he wrote dramatically.

  By February 10, the two ships – one crammed with thirty-three men, the other, empty, drifting beside it – had been carried more than three hundred miles. Kane could feel the scurvy in his limbs – it was as if he had taken a bad beating. Nineteen men, including De Haven, now suffered from ulcerated gums and blotched limbs. The worst off were those who preferred salt meat, hardtack, and beef to vegetable foods. Kane got the idea of treating olive oil, lime juice, potatoes, and sauerkraut as medicine rather than food. The men took it in a spirit of martyrdom and began to get well.

  By March the Advance was still locked in its cradle of ice, partially suspended on two frozen hummocks. Men were sent across to the Rescue to dig an eight-foot pit around her hull so she might be repaired. This novel dry-dock worked. That same month the first open leads of water appeared. In April, the Rescue’s crew returned to their ship. On June 5, the break-up came so suddenly that the men had to scramble to reload the vessels with the accumulation of eight months – supplies and equipment – for ice as solid as rock was quickly becoming part of the ocean again.

  Seated on the deck of the Advance, Kane saw a spectacle before him, strange but sublime, as a series of frozen waves rippled across the white expanse “as if our ice was a carpet shaken by Titans.” This astonishing spectacle – a seemingly solid surface swelling, rising, and falling – produced in him a feeling of nausea. Soon the white world became a mosaic, the “calves” of bergs, of every shape and thickness – honey-combed, cellular, water-sodden – broke away
, shifting and rising to form a granular stream.

  The Advance was still attached to a submerged mattress of ice. De Haven anchored a cable to a berg on the starboard bow and let the swell drive the block against the ship like a great battering ram. At last, after eight months and twenty-four days, they were free. By early July they were back among the whalers of Baffin Bay and within a week picked up letters and mail sent to them by a vessel from New London. Kane spent twenty-four hours devouring the news from home. His scurvy had long since vanished and he had never felt healthier, probably because the Arctic was so free from communicable diseases.

  On July 12 they spied another sail and heard across the waters the faint sound of a hand-organ grinding out “The Garb of Old Gael.” To their surprise and delight it was a familiar ship – Lady Franklin’s own Prince Albert, heading back to the Arctic on a second expedition and under the command of a new master, a Canadian, Captain William Kennedy.

  Another year had gone by. New expeditions were being planned. But the fate of John Franklin remained as dark and mysterious as the Arctic night. After a futile quest in Baffin Bay, the two American ships returned to New York on September 7 to report defeat.

  4 The crusaders

  While the Americans were locked in the drifting pack up Wellington Channel, their British counterparts were preparing an ambitious series of sledge journeys for the spring of 1851. William Penny and Sir John Ross managed to get their small vessels into Assistance Bay, a snug cove on the south coast of Cornwallis Island. Austin’s four-vessel squadron was beset in the ice some fifteen miles to the west in a narrow channel (now Resolute Passage) just off Griffith Island.