The Arctic Grail Read online

  Jane Franklin had by now become an international heroine. Because of the sympathy her cause had engendered, Kennedy was able to travel from the fishery he managed on the Saugeen River in Canada West to London at no personal cost. The mayor of Hamilton helped get him a free ride to New York. Henry Grinnell, Lady Franklin’s American supporter, got him free passage across the Atlantic. Aboard the Cunard steam packet he met another future Franklin searcher, the pompous Sir Edward Belcher, who was so impressed he got him a British railway pass. (Belcher, who did not care for many of his colleagues, was later heard to remark that “Kennedy is better than any of your Backs or Raes.”) The proprietor of the Adelphi Hotel, sympathetic to Kennedy’s mission, refused to charge him for food or lodging.

  Lady Franklin was also impressed, if not by Kennedy’s credentials, at least by his natural simplicity, his integrity, and his good humour. He had, after all, abandoned his business and, over the protests of his family, hurried to her side. This was a man who had crisscrossed North American forests, prairies, and mountains by canoe, York boat, Red River cart, or toboggan from Fort Chimo in Ungava to the Oregon Territory.

  And he had known her husband! His earliest memories went back to the summer of 1819, when John Franklin had arrived at Cumberland House by canoe. Kennedy was only five at the time, but he would always remember Franklin teaching him his ABCS and preaching in the local church – the first religious ceremony the young Kennedy could remember. A strict teetotaller – the Prince Albert was alarmingly dry – he had quit the Hudson’s Bay Company after a fruitful thirteen-year association because he disapproved of the company selling liquor to his mother’s people. His earnest idealism charmed Lady Franklin, while Bellot’s bubbling enthusiasm delighted her.

  In Joseph-René Bellot, Jane Franklin saw something of the son she never had. His almost childlike eagerness to be of service was touching, his shyness and modesty enchanting. Of all the various adventurers who tested themselves in the chilling gloom of an Arctic winter, this slight young Frenchman with the dark eyes, the sensitive nostrils, and the full lips of a poet is surely the most attractive.

  He came from a poor working-class family, one of seven children sired by a blacksmith, but his intelligence was such that his home town paid for his education. He never forgot the sacrifices his parents had made for him. As a naval cadet he sent home part of his meagre pay and peppered his journals with expressions of gratitude to them and reproaches to himself for neglecting to write home often enough. He was impetuously brave. He had saved one comrade from drowning at the risk of his own life and was severely wounded by a lance during a skirmish in Madagascar – an injury he described as no more than a scratch. For that he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour; he was not yet twenty.

  Bellot’s youthful ardour, like Kennedy’s, was stimulated by the nobility of Lady Franklin’s cause. He was convinced that France should play her part in the great crusade and asked for leave so that he could personally represent the French Navy in the search. How could France resist such a chivalrous request? The Minister of Marine cheerfully gave his assent.

  Bellot in the meantime had shot off a letter to Kennedy, asking for a berth on the expedition and remarking that Franklin’s “glory and success have made him a citizen of the world, and it is but justice that all seamen should take the most lively interest in his fate.” Though he was ardently patriotic, his views had been broadened internationally by the idea of the Great Exhibition of 1851 – history’s first world’s fair, which was about to open in London, with its gargantuan greenhouse, known as the Crystal Palace. As Bellot later put it to Lady Franklin: “If any credit is given to me for my zeal in a foreign cause, it only originated after the universal exhibition was ordered, which blotted out all narrow-minded prejudices of nationality.” After he met her, these high-minded principles became more personal: “… it is with all my feelings, with all the dutiful warmth of a son, I have embarked in that cause.”

  The Admiralty was not so enthusiastic. A naval officer from a foreign command serving under an untutored mixed-blood from the wilds of subarctic America? It was madness; the pair couldn’t possibly get along; the crew would mutiny! In the end Lady Franklin prevailed, as she usually did. After all, it was she and her supporters, not the Navy, who were paying for the voyage. The Navy need not have worried. The mixed crew of Shetland Islanders and Canadians took to the young first mate immediately, and the voyage that followed, though arduous, was one of the happiest in Arctic annals.

  The expedition left Stromness in June 1851 to the strain of the time-worn sailor’s ditty, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” It was an emotional parting. Both Jane Franklin and her “French son,” as she now called him, were moved to tears. “I must supply your mother’s place,” she had told him, but now she could scarcely speak. “Take care of yourself,” was all she was able to say. The spirited young man, who had danced the schottische a few nights before, now sobbed like a child. “We are really very fond of him,” Sophia Cracroft wrote, “– his sweetness & simplicity & earnestness are most endearing.” It was some time, she noted, before he could screw up his courage to say a last good-bye to her aunt.

  “Poor woman!” he wrote in his journal, after the ship got under way. “If you could read my heart you would have seen how much the somewhat egotistical desire of making an extraordinary voyage has been succeeded in me by a real ardour and genuine passion for the end we aim at.” A short time later, as the little sloop rolled and pitched, he was violently seasick and badly bruised by being thrown about his cabin. “O shame! O despair,” he scratched on the page. But he bore the misery without flinching. He had tried to harden himself to such conditions before leaving France and insisted on sleeping under a single blanket on a mattress three inches thick, “just enough to say I do not sleep on the boards.” He might be frail in appearance but he was convinced that “will and moral energy can always take the place of physical strength.”

  In another marked act of chivalry, John Hepburn, who had almost starved with Franklin in 1820, insisted on joining the ship. Now fifty-seven, he had vivid memories of those early days. Bellot was as fascinated by these tales as he was by the voyageur songs that Kennedy sang. He insisted on transcribing some of them in his journal. Kennedy, he wrote, was his kind of man. “Dear Mr. Kennedy! how kind and conscientious he is! …” The admiration was mutual. “I am a man of his heart, he says, and he really wins my heart by his simple straight forwardness. Poor man! He does not belong to our time, and his perfectly primitive education has made him too good to lead the men of our day!”

  Bellot, a Catholic, was impressed by Kennedy’s profoundly Protestant faith “and the piety … with which he entreated the great God of Jacob to inspire our resolutions and direct our understandings.… What limit can there be to the daring of a man who is not only persuaded, but convinced, that whatever he does is at the suggestion and by the permission of God?”

  The veteran trader’s French, Bellot realized, was more than a century out of date – “some of those old expressions have a perfume quite peculiar to themselves.” This quaint form of the language so pleased Bellot that he made the mistake of remarking on it, only to discover, to his embarrassment, that Kennedy considered it a defect that he wanted Bellot to help him correct. “God forbid that I should think of spoiling him,” wrote Bellot. “I am too selfish to … divest his language of its charming originality.”

  Early in July they came upon the two American ships, which having reached Greenland after their long winter in the ice, were now heading back for Beechey Island. Elisha Kane came on board and looked with astonishment at Bellot. “I have seen many things here to surprise me,” he declared, “but what I least expected to find here was a French officer.” The two romantics got along famously, visiting back and forth as the three ships struggled together across the ice-choked waters of Davis Strait. Bellot, with his usual enthusiasm, took to the Americans. “Go a-head! is their captain’s maxim,” he wrote. “With stout ships and
bold resolution they have triumphed over everything.… Such are the daring pioneers of civilisation amidst the vast plains of America … the word impossible is not in their dictionary.”

  But he also noted that the American sailors were fed up and planning to desert at the first opportunity. Under no circumstances, they declared, would they endure another winter in the Arctic. They did not get the double pay of their English counterparts, and they had no intention of doing anything to help the expedition continue north. Their officers were powerless, their captain, De Haven, badly shaken. After some weeks, the two expeditions parted, Kennedy heading for the mouth of Lancaster Sound and the Americans eventually turning toward home.

  The Prince Albert was less than ninety tons, “a small, fairy-looking craft” in Kennedy’s words, originally designed for the fruit trade in the Azores and now the tiniest vessel ever to enter the Arctic archipelago. She was, however, far more manoeuvrable than the Navy’s heavy ships. By September 9, having failed once again to get past Fury Beach in Prince Regent Inlet, she stood off the harbour at Port Leopold, as others had done before.

  The way was clear to the harbour, but it was difficult to tell whether or not the harbour itself was open. The supplies cached by James Clark Ross in 1848 lay at Port Leopold and also, probably, a message from Austin. There was no thought of turning back as Forsyth had done. As Bellot declared, “it would be a disgrace for an expedition like ours not to press forward, when we think of what Parry and Ross did, who had neither provisions at Fury Beach nor a steam vessel at Port Leopold.” Kennedy agreed. “Like Cortez,” he said, “I have burned my ships, and there is too much ice behind for us to dream of returning.”

  Kennedy determined to scout the ice-choked harbour in a small gutta-percha boat with four of his men. All they took with them were signal rockets and lanterns. While the others waited aboard ship for their return, the young Frenchman snatched a few hours’ sleep. He was awakened at eight; the news was bad: the ice was closing in. From the yardarm he could see that the passage Kennedy had taken was blocked. He could not get back to the ship. Had he been able, Bellot wondered, to reach the cache of provisions that Ross had left at Port Leopold? Was there no way he could rejoin the Prince Albert?

  Bellot was distraught. “May God help us!” he cried to his journal. “I no longer think of success; all my prayers are for the safety of my companions. Dear parents! Dear friends! may the thought of you sustain and preserve me from temptations to which I may yield.”

  He decided that he would, if necessary, push forward through the ice toward the harbour and lose the ship. Lady Franklin had told him that the Prince Albert was not as important as men’s lives. At the very worst they could exist on Ross’s stores. He took the watch that night, let off signal rockets, and waited. There was no reply. When morning came he was shaken to discover that the Prince Albert was no longer off Port Leopold. The ice stream had made his decision for him, driving his ship back miles down Prince Regent Inlet.

  His ice master, John Leask, pointed toward the stern with tears in his eyes. A solid wall of new ice barred the way to the north, cutting off all hope of rescuing Kennedy by sea.

  Leask turned toward Bellot. “What is to be done?” he asked. “What is your opinion?”

  Now, for the first time, the realization sank in that he, Joseph-René Bellot, aged twenty-five, was in sole command of the ship and in control of the expedition – that the crew must follow his orders, that he must make the decisions, that his captain was marooned somewhere to the northwest, and that the lives of five missing men now depended entirely upon his judgement and resolve. And the murderous Arctic winter was already closing in.

  Chapter Five

  1

  Grasping at straws

  2

  “A French officer will never hang back”

  3

  The ambitions of Robert McClure

  4

  The Passage at last

  5

  Mercy Bay

  The Investigator trapped off Banks Island (illustration credit 5.1)

  1 Grasping at straws

  By the fall of 1851, with only one ship – Kennedy’s – somewhere in the eastern Arctic and all the others home, Jane Franklin was once more in despair. Austin’s reports had confirmed the general belief that her husband had spent his first winter at Beechey Island. But where on earth had he gone the following spring of 1846? Had both vessels sunk with all hands? In all the history of Arctic exploration that had never happened. Had he been forced to change his original route? If so, why hadn’t he left cairns to mark his passage? And what had become of the cylinders he had been instructed to throw overboard when he left Lancaster Sound? None had been recovered. Not so much as a pile of stones, a post, or a fragment of equipment had been discovered by the sledge crews that had explored the middle Arctic for a thousand miles or more.

  Every effort had been made to communicate with the missing expedition. Sailors had painted or chalked gigantic messages on the cliffs. Ships had left caches of food and clothing. Foxes had been trapped and released wearing collars carrying messages in the unlikely event that some of Franklin’s men might shoot them for food. Balloons were sent off with papers carrying information about the location of the rescue ships. Blue lights were flashed, guns fired, rockets exploded in the Arctic night. But the Arctic remained silent.

  Apart from the unexplained scrap of British elm found by Penny off Wellington Channel, only one other clue had appeared, and it, too, was not identified. The indefatigable John Rae, on his third Arctic journey, exploring the south coasts of Wollaston and Victoria lands (which he proved, at last, to be one and the same) had picked up on August 21, 1851, two fragments of wood that had clearly been part of a Royal Navy vessel. But years would pass before anyone realized they were almost certainly from one of the Franklin ships. Rae had stood on the east coast of those desolate shores and gazed across Victoria Strait toward King William Land. He had wanted to cross over, but the state of the ice made that impossible. Franklin Point, as it came to be called, was only fifty miles to the east, and it held the clue to the riddle. But Rae could not reach it.

  The country grasped at straws, clinging to the belief that the lost crews might still be alive, and so did Lady Franklin. She and Sophia Cracroft bombarded the press with anonymous letters and the Admiralty with signed petitions urging more action. William Penny belatedly discovered a whaling captain who had been the last to board the Erebus in Baffin Bay; he claimed that Franklin had told him he had rations for five years and could easily stretch that to seven. A yachtsman named Donald Beatson was convinced Franklin was alive in the polar sea north of Alaska; with Jane Franklin’s encouragement, he proposed to take a schooner east from Bering Strait, where two other naval vessels, Investigator and Enterprise, had also apparently vanished. Beatson’s plans fell through, so nothing came of that. An adventurous young naval lieutenant, Bedford Pim, thought Franklin might be in Russia and got the government’s permission to hike across Siberia to find him. Lady Franklin gave him five hundred pounds, but nothing came of that, either.

  If all this were not enough, Lady Franklin was persuaded to open her husband’s will in the presence of her stepdaughter, Eleanor, and Eleanor’s husband, the Reverend Philip Gell. She did not want to do so; it would be an admission, she felt, that the family had given him up for lost. That would certainly dampen the public’s ardour for the search and perhaps dry up the flow of public money that was supporting her private expeditions. Her outward posture was a defiant insistence that John Franklin was still alive. If, in her secret heart, she had doubts, she quenched them. Her considerable energies were devoted to the one overriding purpose. Did she really believe her aging spouse could have sustained himself in the Arctic after six years? Perhaps not. Like the quest for the Passage, the search had for her become an end in itself; it was the sheet anchor in her life’s unquiet channel. Equally important – perhaps more important to her than the question of life or death – was John Fra
nklin’s reputation. She had once told him that it took precedence over “the selfish enjoyment of your society.” That reputation, bruised in his Tasmanian years, could be restored only if it could be proved decisively that he, ahead of all others, had located the North West Passage. That was her goal: to give to him the gift of immortality, and she pursued it with an awesome tenacity.

  The will caused another estrangement with the Gells. Made out in 1829, a year after Franklin’s second marriage, it left all the property that his first wife had brought to their marriage to Eleanor. Jane Franklin would get the income from her husband’s estate, which included the ten thousand pounds that was Jane’s at the time of her marriage. But there was a problem. She had her missing husband’s power of attorney and had been using up all the proceeds from the full estate on the search. Now the Gells insisted that she pay back every penny of their portion, if and when his death was finally admitted – with no allowance being made for the money she had already diverted to them. This left her even more dependent on public support for her cause.

  In this gloomy autumn, with Captain Austin’s ambitious expedition branded a failure and the Navy reluctant to mount another, there was one bright spot: public opinion was still on her side. The Times summed it up in an editorial immediately after Austin’s return in October 1851. The paper called for a complete review of the Franklin search as well as the government’s plans for the future: “… though we do not think the geographical importance of these expeditions commensurable with the cost or exposure of a single sloop’s crew, we unhesitatingly admit that our obligation to rescue those who have been dispatched on the enterprise is of a very different magnitude. It signifies supremely little whether Boothia Felix is a peninsula, an island, or a gulf … but it does impinge most emphatically to our national honour that we should ascertain the fate of our missing countrymen, and redeem them, if living, from the dangers to which they have been consigned.”