The Arctic Grail Page 22
Austin had left all sledging arrangements to Leopold M’Clintock, who had studied these techniques under James Clark Ross three years before. On that trip, he and Ross had managed, not without considerable suffering, to stay away from their ships for forty days. This time, M’Clintock planned a sledging trip of eighty days. He had learned a good deal from his earlier experience and had spent the intervening months experimenting with sledge design, cooking gear, and provisions. When the expedition set out from England, he was two months short of thirty-one – a lithe, wiry, muscular Irishman with a lean, intelligent face and a small body, who seemed to have been built for sledging.
He came from an impoverished branch of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. One of twelve children, he had gone to sea at the age of eleven, so small that it was said to find him in his midshipman’s berth was like searching for a flea in a blanket. Promotion came slowly because he was not from a naval family. Without a patron he was forced to rely on sheer ability, and in that he was not deficient. Clements Markham later wrote that he was “quite unrivalled as an Arctic first lieutenant.” He served as second-in-command aboard the Assistance, which, Markham said, was “the happiest, the healthiest, the cleanest, the dryest, and the most efficient ship that ever wintered in the Arctic regions.”
This was M’Clintock’s big chance, and he intended to make the most of it – not, one suspects, through any thrust of naked ambition but simply because he had that curious, roving, disciplined mind that caused him to apply himself to the problem at hand and try to solve it. Like so many of his fellow Britons, he was an avid collector: everything from the skins of Arctic birds to the eggs of gulls. Indeed, everything was the object of M’Clintock’s curiosity. On one occasion he even measured the astonishingly broad grin of an Eskimo: it came to a remarkable four and a half inches.
Yet few knew M’Clintock’s inner thoughts. His journal reveals little; his conversations were terse. He was reserved – unruffled to the point of muteness, an odd characteristic in an Irishman. “I could not have conceived so much calmness to have been the property of only one man,” Charles Parry, the explorer’s brother, wrote of him. “In the greatest difficulties, and under the most aggravating circumstances, his face would not alter a muscle.… No outward show of anxiety, no nervous irritability, no unnecessary noise, ever betokened an anxious mind.” M’Clintock rarely raised his voice, gave orders softly, and never appeared to show the least anxiety when the Arctic gales screamed in the rigging or the ponderous floes threatened to crush his ship.
He had applied himself rigorously to the problems of Arctic land travel. His meticulous attention to detail and his inventiveness would give him his place in history as “the Father of Arctic Sledging.” That was an overstatement, a simplification at the very least. M’Clintock was the father of naval sledging only. Much was made by naval historians such as Sir Clements Markham of M’Clintock’s record sledge journeys during the Franklin search. But Hudson’s Bay traders, using dogs, snowshoes, and lighter, more flexible sleds, had made much longer ones with less resultant fatigue. The Navy, however, didn’t recognize any records but its own, and to this day M’Clintock is regarded as the undisputed king of the sledgers.
Certainly he improved the Navy’s own sledging practice, building on his experiences with Ross. One of his techniques in the fall of 1850 was to establish a series of depots thirty miles apart in order to stretch out the travelling time. Another was to use auxiliary sledges that would start off with the main party, later transferring their loads to the sledges pressing on before returning to base. M’Clintock even thought of equipping his heavily loaded sledges with sails, but it apparently did not occur to him that the loads could be lighter if the crews were trained as hunters to shoot their own food, especially on Melville Island, which abounded in muskoxen.
Nor did he consider the use of Eskimo dogs and trained dog drivers. Penny’s expedition was the only one that had brought dogs along, a bit of foresight that allowed Penny to travel easily from ship to ship; but then, he wasn’t Navy. M’Clintock was to use dogs occasionally in future years, but he preferred the naval tradition of manhauling. There seems to have been a feeling that it was a form of cheating to use animals for transport. As for the idea of using dogs for food – that was too repulsive! This tradition persisted into the next century with the tragic journey of Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole. Scott and his men, dragging their heavy sledges on foot, died of hunger and exhaustion. Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian, beat them to the Pole, ate his dogs, and lived.
Strangely, to the English there was something noble, something romantic, about strong young men marching in harness through the Arctic wastes, enduring incredible hardships with a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts. They were like the knights of old, breaking new paths, facing unknown perils in their search for the Grail. The parallel is by no means inexact, for M’Clintock had given his sledges the names that suggested knightly virtues – Inflexible, Hotspur, Perseverance, Resolute. Each sledge proudly carried a banner of heraldic design and each had its own motto (Never Despair … Faithful and Firm), some even in Latin.
The sledge crews trained daily beneath the frowning cliffs of Griffith Island on the ice of the strait in which Austin’s ships were beset. It must have been a stirring if incongruous spectacle to see them drawn up in line – fifteen sledges in two long rows, their crews in white cotton jumpers, their pennants flapping briskly in the polar wind. Off they went, loping across the ice like so many schoolboys, each six-man crew dragging a load of more than a ton.
At six o’clock on the evening of April 15, their training completed, they set out with the inevitable three hearty cheers of their comrades ringing in their ears. But it was not romantic. Within a fortnight, M’Clintock had to send back a third of his men, suffering from exhaustion, rheumatism, and frostbite. A week later, more returned to the ship. M’Clintock could write, as he did later, about creating a new age of chivalry (“we are made to feel as did the crusaders of old”), but the reality was grimmer. One Arctic veteran, Captain Henry Kellett, was to write that sledge travelling was far more dreadful than battle. “I have been a long time at sea,” he declared, “and seen varying trying services, but never have seen such labour, and such misery after. No amount of money is an equivalent.… Men require much more heart and stamina to undertake an extended travelling party than to go into action. The travellers have their enemy chilling them to the very heart, and paralyzing their very limbs; the others the very contrary.”
The sledges set off in eight directions. M’Clintock’s own party of four sledges and an auxiliary was given the longest and most difficult task: to probe westward down Barrow Strait to Parry’s farthest point on Melville Island. M’Clintock went seventy miles past Parry’s western limit. There at Cape Dundas, as he stood atop a high sandstone cliff, he could see, looming out of the fog to the southwest, the barren expanse of Banks Land. But there was no sign of Franklin.
Had the missing ships gone up Wellington Channel, as the clues suggested and so many believed, and then worked their way west to become beset north of Melville Island? If so, it was likely that the lost party would try to make its way overland, probably to the head of Busnan Cove, which Parry had described as “one of the pleasantest and most habitable spots we have yet seen in the Arctic region.” M’Clintock headed in that direction and found evidence of Parry’s passing – the wheels of his cart and even the bleached bones of a ptarmigan his men had eaten more than three decades before. But no evidence of Franklin.
They continued on, dragging their sledges to Parry’s Winter Harbour. There they encountered the great block of sandstone, ten feet high, twenty feet across, on which Parry’s surgeon, Fisher, had carved an inscription. Again there was no hint that Franklin had been there – nor the missing Robert McClure, who was thought to be in the area. That June, wading through newly formed pools of water and slush, they headed back to the ship. As M’Clintock had planned, they had been absent for eighty days
and travelled 875 statute miles – a journey that was called “unprecedented.” But John Rae easily outstripped M’Clintock’s record. That same year, 1851, he and two others travelled 1,060 miles in thirty-nine days, “a feat never equalled in Arctic travel” in the view of the Geographical Society’s Sir Roderick Murchison.
Other sledge parties headed for Cape Walker, the point at which Franklin had been ordered to turn south. Here was a mighty pile of conglomerate sandstone towering a thousand feet above the sea on an islet at the tip of an undiscovered land mass now named for the Prince of Wales – but not a clue to the lost ships, not a scrap of paper, not a cairn, not a trace. One party tried to follow Franklin’s intended route to the southwest from Cape Walker but found the pack so dense and heavy they were certain Franklin couldn’t have gone that way. Another party headed down the western shores of Peel Sound, whose eastern limits had been explored by Ross and M’Clintock in 1849. Faced with a dreadful blizzard, they had to turn back, agreeing with the previous investigators that Peel Sound was impassable, frozen solid to the bottom and rarely if ever open to navigation. That was wrong. In 1846 Franklin had found it clear of ice. But by now, all the Navy men were convinced that every route to the south was permanently blocked. Franklin must be somewhere to the north.
None of the other sledge expeditions turned up a single clue to Franklin’s fate. In total, they had covered 7,025 miles on foot and explored 1,225 miles of new land. Bathurst Island, which Parry had seen only in the distance from his ship, was now on the map. So was the northern tip of Prince of Wales Land. Penny had been up Wellington Channel and beyond by sledge and boat and had seen, in the distance, the strait separating Devon and Bathurst islands that now bears his name. For more than fifty miles ahead all he could see was open water. Was Franklin somewhere beyond? He had picked up a piece of English elm, which he disregarded at the time. It was almost certainly from one of the missing ships.
Now there occurred one of those odd contretemps involving two disparate personalities that affected and prolonged the Franklin search. Penny was convinced that Franklin had gone up Wellington Channel and beyond into the Arctic Ocean. He could not follow his instincts, being forced to turn back for lack of provisions, but he was certain he was on the right track. The channel was still a mass of floating ice. His own little ships couldn’t force their way through to continue the exploration, but a steamer probably could. And so he asked Austin to lend him one of the steam tenders for that purpose. Austin refused, either through sheer stubbornness, as Penny claimed, or through a misunderstanding, as Austin claimed.
Whatever took place on August 11, it was not a propitious meeting. It was, in fact, the culmination of a series of acrimonious encounters between two men of opposite temperament who struck sparks off each other whenever they met. Penny’s first interview with Austin – a blunt-spoken whaler meeting a crusty naval veteran – had not been pleasant. Austin had the reputation of being difficult, even rude, and often unpredictable. During their meetings that season – happily infrequent – they had done their best to get along, but frequent apologies were often followed by later recriminations.
Penny, aboard Austin’s vessel, brusquely outlined his explorations past Wellington Channel.
“You say we have been acting in concert,” he told Austin. “Let us prove the sincerity of that concert. Give me a steamer and with the little Sophia I will go miles further.”
Austin drew himself up but did not reply, whereupon Penny declared, “Then I know the truth of your sincerity and will have nothing more to do with you.”
This teapot tempest, which was witnessed by the Sophia’s captain, Alexander Stewart, had considerable significance. For if Penny had got through the ice of Wellington Channel with steam power and explored the country farther to the north, he could have killed all speculation that Franklin had gone that way and thus have changed the course of the search. As it was, the vast majority of Arctic experts, not to mention the English press and public, remained convinced that Franklin was to be found somewhere beyond Wellington Channel.
If Penny had been a naval officer, if Austin had been less officious, it’s possible, even likely, that events would have taken a different turn. But in the labyrinthine saga of the Franklin search, personality and temperament were as significant as seamanship. Although Austin had provisions for three years – enough to allow Penny to winter north of Wellington Channel – the naval commander decided to abandon the search in the area of Lancaster Sound. He was convinced that Franklin had entered the Arctic by way of Jones Sound, to the north, but his exploration in that direction was also fruitless. Blocked by ice, his ships saved at the last moment, he limped back to England, as did the others. A committee of naval officers studied the Penny-Austin dispute and found no fault with their colleague. The Admiralty never again employed Penny. Even Lady Franklin couldn’t get him a ship in the continuing search for her husband.
Meanwhile, the great quadrilateral to the south remained unexplored. More than six years had passed since the Erebus and the Terror had left England, and in spite of the tantalizing clues from Beechey, no one yet knew their fate. Public interest by this time had been whipped to a frenzy. The quest for the missing ships had been transformed into something more exalted than a mere search. As Leopold M’Clintock had divined, it had taken on the trappings of a crusade. “Since the zealous attempts to rescue the Holy Sepulchre in the middle ages,” one writer of the day declared, “the Christian world has not so unanimously agreed on anything as the desire to recover Sir John Franklin, dead or alive, from the dread solitude of death into which he has so fearlessly ventured.”
5 The dutiful warmth of a son
For most of 1850 England waited for news. It came first with Lady Franklin’s own ship, the little Prince Albert, which returned in October, within a few days of the transport North Star, which had been sent out in 1849 to supply James Ross’s fruitless expedition. But the two pieces of information that she brought – one incomplete, the other dubious – only served to tease and torment an already inflamed public.
Something had been discovered at last, but what? Parker Snow had gone ashore at Cape Riley and had seen the remains of five or six tents and one or two artifacts, including a piece of British rope and canvas. Could these have come from the lost party? He could not be certain, for his superior, Forsyth, eager to get home before the weather closed in, had declined to follow the others up the channel to Beechey Island.
But Snow had a more sensational story, which he proceeded to rush into print. It took up a full chapter in his own account of the voyage – a book that scooped all the other would-be scribes trapped in the ice of Barrow Strait.
Snow reported that John Ross’s Eskimo interpreter, Adam Beck, had encountered a group of Eskimos during the outward voyage of the Felix who insisted that Franklin and his men had been murdered by Greenland natives near Cape York in 1846. Few of the others believed this tale. Penny, the most experienced of all, bluntly rejected it. His own interpreter, Carl Petersen, a Greenlander who spoke the language well – probably better than Beck – had talked to the same Eskimos and got nothing from them. But Beck, when interrogated by several other officers, stuck to his story. John Ross, with his usual stubbornness, backed his interpreter and insisted the story was true (though he continued on to Beechey Island). Actually, it was poppycock, a distorted rumour based on the death of a single member of the crew of the transport North Star, which had been forced to winter in the vicinity the previous year. But Snow made the most of it in his book, even though he was sceptical about its truth. It was, for a budding writer, too good a tale to ignore. “I am extremely doubtful whether I should put it down or not,” he began, but “I think it my duty to narrate it strictly as it came to hand.” And so he did, with the crocodile tears flowing freely.
Jane Franklin, already close to a breakdown, was infuriated by Snow’s report of Ross’s stand. She had contributed a hundred pounds to his expedition; now, she said, she wished she could
have added to the gift the phrase “with a deep sense of gratitude to Sir John Ross for murdering her husband.”
Equally maddening and frustrating was the failure of the inexperienced Forsyth, whose two ice masters had quarrelled and contradicted each other about the state of Prince Regent Inlet. There was no help for it; she would have to draw on her funds to send the Prince Albert back out again under a different captain to do what Forsyth had failed to do. For she still believed it possible that her husband and his men were somewhere to the south of Prince Regent Inlet.
The two men she chose for the task were as unlikely a pair as had ever been sent to the Arctic. The new captain, William Kennedy, was a tough Canadian fur trader, the son of a Cree woman and a Hudson’s Bay factor. He had never been to sea in his life. The second-in-command would be Joseph-René Bellot, a twenty-five-year-old sub-lieutenant on leave from the French Navy, who knew nothing of the Arctic except what he had read in books.
They were a study in contrasts. Years of hard travel by canoe and dogsled across the Labrador wilderness had weathered Kennedy. His broad, flat face with its distinctive cheekbones indicated his mixed blood. With his craggy features and his vast tangled beard, he looked older than his thirty-seven years. The diminutive Bellot was barely twenty-five, a cheery, round-faced youth, introspective but bursting with that élan that is said to characterize his race.
Kennedy knew little about the sea but was a seasoned wilderness traveller. Bellot, who had never pulled a sledge or slept in the snow, was a good navigator. They were poles apart in blood, background, upbringing, outlook, and temperament, but they got along famously, perhaps because they were united in what they considered to be a sacred cause. Unsullied by personal ambition, they volunteered their services to embark on a long and dangerous mission without pay. They were not out to prove a point, to advance themselves politically, to gain fame or fortune, or to redress a personal slight. Kennedy made it clear that he would be quite prepared to serve under Bellot, if Lady Franklin so chose. Both men came to London of their own accord to answer her heartbreaking call for help – two outsiders from alien worlds with no link to any of the several British establishments involved in the search for her husband.