The Arctic Grail Read online

  The Times went on to urge “a little more continuous perseverance.” Why, it asked, must ships return home with eighteen months’ provisions instead of spending another winter in the ice? “We shall never attain our end by sailing up to the ice and then sailing back again.” Lady Franklin’s campaign was bearing fruit.

  Now Sherard Osborn, the most prolific and also the most enthusiastic of the literary explorers – he had been captain of the steam tender Pioneer under Austin – entered the fray. In February 1852, he published Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal in which he pleaded, in the purplest of passages, for a renewed search up Wellington Channel: “Franklin and his matchless followers need no eulogy from me; the sufferings they must have undergone, the mystery that hangs over them, are on every tongue in every civilized land.

  “The blooming child lisps Franklin’s name, as with glistening eye and greedy ear it hears of the wonders of the North, and the brave deeds there done. Youth’s bosom glows with generous emotion to emulate the fame of him who has gone where none as yet have followed. And who amongst us does not feel his heart throb faster in recalling to recollection the calm heroism of the veteran leader, who, when about to enter the unknown regions of which Wellington Channel is the portal, addressed his crews in those solemn and emphatic words of Holy Writ – his motto, doubtless – ‘Choose ye this day whom ye will serve’; and found in that blissful choice his strength and his endurance.”

  Like Osborn, the old Arctic hands were convinced, as were the public and press, that Franklin had vanished somewhere up the Wellington Channel. Seven of the ten leading experts consulted agreed with that assessment. In a speech to the Geographical Society in late November, 1851, Osborn captured the prevailing optimism. “The instructions of Sir John Franklin were to proceed to the northward of Wellington Channel if possible,” he declared, conveniently forgetting that Franklin’s instructions were to go that way only if the route to the southwest were blocked. Osborn swallowed whole the tale that the expedition was equipped for six or seven years. To cries of “Hear! Hear!” he asked his audience if they believed that Franklin and his officers were the kind of men likely to turn their backs on their duty after being absent for only eighteen months. He said he had once opposed the theory of an Open Polar Sea, but more recent observations had convinced him that the water was clear above Wellington Channel and that Franklin could have forced his way up the channel and on to the Bering Sea. Thus did the naval establishment also grasp at straws.

  Penny, in a letter read to the meeting, declared that there was no doubt as to the route Franklin had taken. The whaler used negative evidence to support his theory: the fact that he had found no traces of the expedition along the Wellington Channel, he explained, proved that Franklin had gone on to points yet unexplored without stopping.

  In the spring of 1852, the Navy gave in to the pressure. This time it proposed to send five ships on the search under the crusty Sir Edward Belcher, a Nova Scotia-born veteran of the War of 1812 and perhaps the least desirable officer to put in charge of a complicated search. Belcher’s orders were to look for the lost explorer somewhere to the north of Beechey Island.

  But then there was heard another cry from the heart. To the importunings of a wife were added the pleadings of a parent. The father of Lieutenant Samuel Gurney Cresswell, second mate aboard Robert McClure’s Investigator, reminded the Admiralty and the public that another expedition besides Franklin’s was lost in the Arctic. McClure’s ship, separated from its consort, had last been seen in Bering Strait in the summer of 1850, heading east. Almost two years had passed and nothing more had been heard from it. The Navy, which had acted tardily when Franklin went missing, could not afford more foot-dragging. One lost expedition was bad enough. Two would be disastrous.

  Francis Cresswell pointed out that if McClure was in trouble, he would undoubtedly head for Parry’s old Winter Harbour on Melville Island; the massive sandstone block made an obvious post box. Hastily, the Navy split Belcher’s squadron in two. One sailing vessel, accompanied by a steam tender, would move west to Melville Island to search for McClure. Two other ships would move up the Wellington Channel to search for Franklin. A fifth would anchor off Beechey Island to act as a supply vessel, thus allowing the expedition to increase the length of its stay, as The Times had urged.

  This was still not enough for Lady Franklin. Every nook and cranny of that wrinkled and treeless realm must be scoured for her missing husband. There were still some corners that had not been looked at, some rumours that had not been laid to rest. And so with the help of funds lavished upon her by a sympathetic public, she bought Donald Beatson’s steam yacht, Isabel, and got permission from the Navy to employ a young, firm-jawed officer, Edward Inglefield, to take it north along the east coast of Baffin Bay and thence on to Lancaster Sound and Beechey Island with supplies for Belcher’s naval squadron.

  The ambitious young man had additional ideas. He didn’t want to be a mere transport captain; he wanted to be an explorer. In spite of the clear evidence that Franklin had entered Lancaster Sound and wintered at Beechey Island, he insisted that both Jones and Smith sounds also be examined – an area, he claimed, “to which it is well known that Sir John Franklin’s attention had been sometimes directed.”

  Had Franklin gone up Wellington Channel into the Open Polar Sea and then sailed east through Jones or Smith sounds to emerge into Baffin Bay, there to be murdered by Eskimos, as Adam Beck, John Ross’s native interpreter, had claimed? Or, having reached the polar sea, had he sailed west toward Bering Strait as many believed? In short, did one of these other entrances hold the clue to the puzzle? It was unlikely but possible. Previous expeditions had found both inlets blocked by ice, but if open they could well lead westward into the uncharted webwork of Arctic islands. Inglefield, of course, was also using the Franklin search to do a little exploring on his own. His other purpose was to solve “the much vexed question of the entrance into the Great Polar Basin.” In short, for Inglefield, it was the Pole, not the Passage, that beckoned. Meanwhile, on his roundabout route to Beechey Island he ought at least to be able to lay to rest Adam Beck’s dark pronouncement about John Franklin’s murder.

  Now at last, it seemed to Lady Franklin in that spring of 1852, every corner of the great archipelago would be scrutinized. Nine ships were in the Arctic. Inglefield was well to the north. Belcher’s five ships patrolled the centre. McClure in the Investigator and Collinson in the Enterprise, having reached Alaska, were somewhere to the west. And her own sloop, the Prince Albert, under William Kennedy was presumably searching the southern maze of channels. Everything that could be done had been done, or so it seemed. Surely before another year was out, the mystery would be solved.

  2 “A French officer will never hang back”

  For all of the winter of 1851-52, Jane Franklin was out of touch with the Prince Albert. Kennedy and Bellot had sailed from Stromness in the Orkneys on June 3, 1851. She could not know that on September 9 the pair had become separated, with Kennedy marooned and perhaps dead from exposure in a small boat at Port Leopold while Bellot in the schooner was helpless to save his captain, having been forced by wind and current back down Prince Regent Inlet.

  Bellot found a sheltered harbour at Batty Bay, a tiny indentation on the inlet’s western coastline, and there on those bleak and rubbled shores he pondered the responsibilities that had been thrown on his young shoulders. Kennedy was some fifty miles to the north. Bellot could only hope that he had landed safely in his flimsy gutta-percha craft and had found James Ross’s cache of provisions.

  He was frantic to reach him, but the treacherous weather had made a sea voyage unpredictable. He decided instead to move north by land, following the coastline, naively expecting to achieve his goal in three days. He left on foot on September 10 with three men. Lacking snowshoes and thus unable to take dogs or sledges, the quartet laboured through the heavy drifts, never quite sure where they were.

  Kennedy and Bellot search for Franklin, 1851-52r />
  Bellot’s seamen ministered to him affectionately, as if he were their little brother. He had insisted on travelling light, rationing them to a pound of pemmican a day, and no biscuit. But they hid some biscuits in their pockets anyway – not for themselves but because they feared an unadulterated diet of pemmican might affect their young leader’s stomach. At night when he was asleep they tucked him snugly in his buffalo-hide blanket.

  But after two nights of hard struggle, they were forced to give up. In fact, it was touch and go whether they would get back to the ship alive. They threw their baggage aside and just managed to stumble aboard, played out and bitterly disappointed. All agreed that had they gone ten more miles they would never have returned.

  Bellot saw that a land journey was impossible: the ground was too rugged, the snow too deep. He would have to wait until the sea ice would bear his weight and then travel along the coast by dogsled. He realized there was no further point in scrambling to save Kennedy. By this time his captain had either found James Ross’s cache at Port Leopold or was dead of exposure.

  He had been too impulsive; he must plan more carefully. His men must fashion snowshoes, sew moccasins, adapt the sledges. “We must not go like a parcel of thoughtless children,” he admonished himself – following that with another rueful realization, “command invests one with a terrible moral responsibility.”

  The winter closed in. The ptarmigan and Arctic hares shed their summer coats and turned as white as the falling snow. The crew swathed the ship in a woollen tent. The ice that froze in the bay was broken up by fierce squalls, making sledging impossible. Bellot and his crew were in a torment over their lost captain. “Every wind that blows makes us think of the mental suffering of our friends.…”

  Out of deference to Kennedy, Bellot insisted on continuing the regular calls to prayer that had been a feature of life aboard the Prince Albert. He noticed that during these rituals some of the crew members had tears in their eyes. One seaman who so forgot himself as to indulge in mild profanity received a sharp rebuke from the young lieutenant. Had not the captain banned bad language aboard his ship?

  At last, on October 13, he set off with two seamen and the ship’s doctor, for he knew that Kennedy suffered badly from rheumatism and might need medical aid. They took food for nine persons and four dogs, extra clothing, shoes, medical supplies, buffalo robes, and a portable kitchen – and lost almost all of it a few hours later when one of the sledges broke through the ice. Back they went to the ship, empty handed, downcast. Bellot made immediate plans to set out again. “I must harden myself also to the most vexatious disappointments,” he said. “With God’s help, I promise myself that I will not return from a third attempt without having reached Port Leopold.”

  Two days later, with nine men in a small boat, he set off again to retrieve the lost baggage. Steering the craft through open leads of water, they recovered most of it, frozen up in the ice. But the sledge was broken. To return to the ship, repair it, and make preparations for a fourth voyage would take a week.

  Bellot made a bold decision. Underequipped as it was, the party would make a dash for Port Leopold, hoping the good weather would hold. He dispatched one man to the Prince Albert to report the change of plan and then set off.

  They camped that night in a sheltered ravine. Bellot slept uneasily, worrying over his decision and musing about his odd situation. He couldn’t help smiling a little at the contrasts that had distinguished his brief career. Here he was, many thousands of miles from his native land, commanding men of a foreign nation, a French commissioned officer among men bound solely by civil engagement. A Catholic, he was doing his best to keep alive in their minds a different religion, the precepts of which he delivered in a tongue that was not his own. Yet he was comforted by his awareness that there was not one of these men who did not regard him as a fellow countryman and was prepared to obey him as if that were really the case. The reason, Bellot recognized, was that all were united in a common crusade. He asked himself, as he tossed in his buffalo blanket, “What is there to prevent nations from forming a similar union of efforts directed towards a common end?”

  The following afternoon they reached Cape Seppings near Port Leopold. In the distance, Bellot could see a tent left by James Clark Ross. The party began to fire their rifles. Through his telescope Bellot could see something black: a moving object? He dashed off ahead of his companions and was soon greeting his five missing comrades, all sporting ragged beards. Kennedy had supposed the ship had been forced out into the Atlantic and had returned to England. Unruffled, he had planned to winter at Port Leopold and continue the search for Franklin on foot, his greatest privation being the lack of a Bible. He had finished building an Eskimo sledge and was making shoes from canvas when Bellot reached him. Had the ship’s party arrived a day later he would have been gone. They sat up for most of the night, swapping stories, singing songs, and drinking hot chocolate taken from James Ross’s stores. The entire company was reunited aboard the Prince Albert on October 26.

  Kennedy intended leaving on his overland journey far earlier than M’Clintock’s naval crews had done the previous year; he was, after all, accustomed to overland travel in the dark of winter. His men would not haul heavy sledges; they would use dogteams and live in snow houses. Bellot asked himself why the British government had not asked the Hudson’s Bay Company about the native mode of travel. “Not one of its naval expeditions,” he noted, “has possessed the means of travelling by land.” Bellot’s approach to the Eskimos – it was Kennedy’s approach, of course – differed from the official attitude that they were a poor, sad race from whom the white man could learn little. “It is impossible,” he noted, “not to reflect on the question of the relative happiness enjoyed by the savages, compared with the so-called misfortunes produced by their intercourse with Europeans.”

  Undoubtedly Kennedy, the mixed-blood Cree, influenced Bellot in these musings. The former fur trader liked to tell the story of a Cree chief who refused to give his daughter in marriage to a Hudson’s Bay officer. “My daughter to you? You do not even know how to hunt!”

  But if Kennedy helped to broaden Bellot’s mind on the subject of aboriginal superiority, Bellot could not budge Kennedy’s belief in the literal truth of the Bible. After one sharp religious discussion that left them both in bad humour, he gave up. Bellot the liberal Catholic didn’t believe in predestination any more than he believed in the Holy Ghost; to him, the only real freedom was “the omnipotence of free will.” But he wasn’t going to get into any more arguments.

  At the beginning of January 1852, Kennedy set off on a preliminary sled trip to Fury Beach to see if Franklin had been there. He hadn’t. Some of the crew had tried to get out of the journey by pleading illness, but Bellot, who was eager to prove “that a French officer will never hang back but … is always eager to be foremost,” shamed them. The main sledge journey began on February 25, almost six weeks before M’Clintock’s crews had dared to face the elements. It was one of the longest in Arctic history – 1,265 statute miles in ninety-five days compared to M’Clintock’s “record” of 875 miles in eighty days. But it found no trace of Franklin.

  Kennedy and Bellot described a great clockwise circle from Batty Bay, down Prince Regent Inlet, west across Somerset Island and Peel Sound to cross and recross Prince of Wales Island before sledging north to Cape Walker and then east along Barrow Strait to Port Leopold and back to the ship at Batty Bay.

  But they did not go as far south as the region of the North Magnetic Pole, as Kennedy had originally planned and as Lady Franklin had ordered, perhaps because Kennedy was suffering from snow blindness and also because, in the haze of winter, both men thought they saw a land barrier blocking Peel Sound – the same mirage-like phenomenon that had bedevilled John Ross thirty-four years before. Thus they also assumed that Franklin couldn’t have come that way. It would have been more profitable had Kennedy listened to Bellot, who at the outset wanted to go to the bottom of Prince Regent Inle
t and talk to the Eskimos that John Ross had encountered on his trip to Boothia Felix. Bellot reasoned that if more than a hundred men were lost in the area, the Eskimos would at least have heard of it. He was right, but he deferred to Kennedy.

  This three-month journey, which was abruptly ended when scurvy began to strike the party, had one positive result. They had seen a narrow gorge leading westward across Boothia from Prince Regent Inlet. Kennedy became convinced that this was not an inlet but a strait, cutting Boothia in two and separating it from Somerset Island. This time he was right, and Bellot, who was dubious about it, was wrong. Thus they had become the first white men to stand at the northernmost point of the American continent and had also discovered another route leading to the North West Passage, though not a navigable one. Lady Franklin had urged Bellot to name some of the new features after some of his friends, a suggestion that Bellot refused, believing such honours should be reserved for the English. But now Kennedy, the most modest of explorers, insisted on naming the new strait for Bellot, and Bellot Strait it remains on the maps.

  By the time the journey ended and the Prince Albert returned home, Joseph-René Bellot felt that he had acquitted himself well. “I was afraid on two occasions that my courage would fail,” he wrote, “but, fortunately, at the critical moment I recollected my position and my character. Thanks to Heaven for it!”