The Arctic Grail Read online

  He returned to France, eager to be out again, unaware that the Arctic, which had already seduced his soul, would within two years also claim his body.

  3 The ambitions of Robert McClure

  Where was Robert McClure? To the Admiralty his whereabouts remained a mystery. He was supposed to have entered the Arctic with his ship, the Investigator, from the west in the company of his superior, Richard Collinson, in the Enterprise. Somehow the two had become separated. McClure had last been seen in August 1850 off Cape Lisburne on the northwest coast of Alaska. Collinson, arriving too late that year to follow, had turned back to Hong Kong for the winter and did not return to the search until the following August. But McClure was provisioned only until the following spring of 1852. If he were not found by then it was more than possible that he and his crew would share the fate of Franklin. The Cresswell family had every reason to be alarmed.

  McClure had spent twenty-six years in the Navy. This was his first command, and he intended to make the most of it. If he could find Franklin, or discover the North West Passage – or both! – he would be the most famous man in England, as well as the richest naval officer of his day. Most of the Arctic explorers were understandably ambitious, but in McClure, ambition was more naked and less admirable. M’Clintock, for instance, liked to attack and solve a problem such as Arctic sledging for its own sake. But one gets the distinct impression that McClure was out for McClure.

  He made important discoveries, but like old John Ross, he was ungenerous to the point of selfishness in his refusal to share his triumphs with others. Nonetheless, one must admire his daring. He took big chances and won, though he imperilled his crews as well as himself. He had more than his share of luck, too, and he knew how to make the most of it. But he was also unstable, subject to spasms of uncontrollable fury if the progress of his expedition – and thus his personal aspirations – was threatened.

  He had waited a long time for a command of his own. Like M’Clintock, McClure came from an army, not a navy, background. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he joined the Navy at the comparatively late age of seventeen. His Arctic career began when he served as mate of the Terror during George Back’s attempt to reach Repulse Bay in 1836. This disastrous expedition – he was sick for much of it – gained him no kudos. He did better in 1848, when he served as first lieutenant aboard the Enterprise during James Clark Ross’s failed attempt to find Franklin. In January 1850, three months after Ross returned, the new expedition set off. Collinson would be the leader. McClure was rewarded with command of the sister ship.

  Reserved and aloof, he was not comfortable in command. He did not have the easy confidence of a Parry or the cheerful buoyancy of a Franklin. He didn’t care much for his officers, who were young, inexperienced, and in some instances incompetent and slovenly. His crew was unruly and often sullen. In his dealings with them, McClure swung to extremes. On the one hand he flogged his men unmercifully for trifling breaches of discipline – his cook, for instance, got forty-eight lashes for blasphemy and profanity (a prerogative of cooks from time immemorial). That was unusual in an Arctic commander. Collinson, not the easiest of leaders, ordered only two floggings in five years of Arctic service. On the other hand, in moments of peril or privation McClure had the ability to gather his men together and rally them with a few words.

  He made little provision to while away the boredom of an Arctic winter as Parry had done; his crews were left largely to their own devices. On more than one occasion he put his fierce ambitions ahead of the safety of his people. Yet he managed to survive through four winters – from 1850 to 1854 – with a minimum of the discords that marked so many other northern voyages, partly through tough discipline but also because he was able in a tight spot to rouse his men to superhuman effort.

  It was not in Robert McClure’s make-up to be on familiar terms with his officers. The only man with whom he might be said to have had a warm relationship was a civilian supernumerary, Johann August Miertsching, a Moravian missionary from Labrador who had been brought along because he spoke the Eskimo tongue and could act as an interpreter. With Miertsching, McClure could, in a sense, relax the formality he thought proper to his command.

  The pious young evangelist – he was then thirty-two – was a favourite with all hands, strong, cheerful, and never out of sorts, probably because he had long been accustomed to exacting conditions in Labrador. Unlike the British sailors, dressed in their customary wool, the more practical missionary wore Eskimo clothing.

  Miertsching got on well with McClure, but he was not blind to his flaws. It is his account of four winters spent with the Investigator’s crew that provides a more rounded picture of the commander than McClure’s own journals, sandpapered, adapted, and rewritten by the uncritical Sherard Osborn (he of the purple phrases), or the sour memoirs of Alexander Armstrong, the ship’s doctor, who did not care for his commander.

  After they reached the Straits of Magellan, it became obvious that the two ships could not stay together in the mist and fog, nor did they need to until they took to the ice. Collinson accordingly set a rendezvous point at Cape Lisburne off Alaska. McClure was on his own until then, his first port of call being Honolulu.

  The voyage to Honolulu in these early months of 1850 was not a happy one. Miertsching noted that “a devil of discord seems to have fixed his abode amongst us.” The young German had not experienced life aboard a man-of-war before and was shocked by the impiety of the brawling crew. “I have met insolent and Godless men, yet were they angels compared to these brazen sinners,” he wrote. “I feel as if my lot had been cast among half a hundred devils. The harsh rules of naval discipline are barely enough to keep them under control.”

  The California gold rush was then at its height. Ships loaded with adventurers were racing for the West Coast. But the Investigator, having rounded Cape Horn, was heading directly for Hawaii. The weather was dreadful. Seventeen of the crew were ill. And then, on May 15, 1850, the ship was almost lost because of the negligence of the officer of the watch, McClure’s first officer, William Haswell.

  Haswell had left the deck for a few minutes and in that brief time a squall struck the Investigator a dreadful blow, smashing all three masts. “The fury of the captain was terrible, positively inhuman,” Miertsching wrote. He kept out of the way on that and the following day, “the most unpleasant that I have yet experienced on board.” Haswell was placed under arrest, guarded in his cabin by two armed marines. Then McClure’s anger subsided as quickly as it had risen.

  When the missionary himself fell ill, McClure took him into his own cabin and poured out his apologies. He seemed to regret the fact “that he had so forgotten himself on that day and had not handled the affair as a sincere Christian should have done.” But then, Robert McClure had none of Parry’s religious passion, or Franklin’s. In one of his long discussions with Miertsching, he declared that no one at sea could hold to the form of Christianity as it was observed on land.

  “At sea,” he explained, “a man must have spirit and not hang his head.” The missionary, he declared, was not yet a true seaman. McClure said he’d known one naval officer who had tried to practise “land Christianity” aboard a man-of-war. “He learned by experience that it did not serve on board a ship; so he gave up the sea, and became a parson and writes tracts for old wives.”

  McClure was amused by Miertsching’s practice of handing out gospel leaflets to the crew. He’d do better, the commander said, giving them to “lost women,” who would receive them with more thanks than his sailors did. But the Arctic would shake McClure out of his cynicism, as it shook so many others.

  When the Investigator reached Honolulu harbour on July 1, 1850, McClure discovered to his alarm that Collinson, having waited four days, had set sail the previous morning for Bering Strait. If McClure didn’t catch him, so he was told, Collinson planned to take to the ice at once; the supply ship Plover, which had been anchored in the strait since 1849, would act as his consort. That was too much. W
as McClure to be denied his chance at fame and fortune? He had planned to get rid of some of his officers in Honolulu, especially Haswell, who was still under arrest. But now every hour counted. He was persuaded by the officers of two Royal Navy vessels in the harbour to change his mind after Haswell made a suitable apology. McClure was reluctant to do that, but there was little time to argue.

  He was in a frenzy to be off, working around the clock to provision his ship and then to round up those crew members who had indulged too freely on their shore leave and were lodged in jail. McClure paid their fines but found them unfit for duty. Two weeks later Miertsching noted that several were still on the sick list, not yet recovered from “the frightful excesses in Honolulu.” Two, in fact, took another month to recover, a tribute of sorts to the robust life on what were then known as the Sandwich Islands.

  The Investigator left port at six in the evening of July 4. McClure, who offered the missionary a celebratory glass of wine, “showed a composure which was forced.” He had decided upon a daring but dangerous gamble not just to catch up with Collinson, but also to beat him to the rendezvous point at Cape Lisburne, north of Kotzebue Sound – and then, if possible, to get ahead of him in what now appeared to be a race for the western Arctic.

  The expedition’s orders were to swing round the outer islands of the Aleutian chain in a western sweep that would take it close to the Kamchatka Peninsula of Asia. That was Collinson’s route. But McClure proposed instead to sail directly north and cut through the fog-bound and uncharted Aleutian archipelago at its eastern end. In spite of thick mists, violent tides, shoals, and reefs, he managed it. The Investigator entered Kotzebue Sound on July 29, in half the time the trip round the Aleutians would have taken.

  Anchored in the sound at the northern limits of Bering Strait was the depot ship Plover. There was no sign of Collinson. McClure sailed on toward his rendezvous point at Cape Lisburne. En route, he was hailed by another Royal Navy vessel, the frigate Herald, commanded by Captain Henry Kellett, a genial Tipperary Irishman whose surveys of the Central American coastline had for three summers been interrupted by the Franklin search. Kellett’s current task was to keep the Plover supplied.

  Now McClure engaged in a deception that fooled nobody, certainly not the perceptive and experienced Kellett, who came aboard to discuss plans. McClure pretended to believe that Collinson in the Enterprise was ahead of him. That was manifestly impossible because Collinson had not taken McClure’s short cut through the Aleutians. Kellett knew this. He himself, in a much faster ship, had taken fifty days to reach this spot from the Sandwich Islands. Collinson, who had followed Kellett’s advice to take the long way round, was at this point still only thirty days out of Honolulu.

  McClure was proposing to enter the Arctic unaccompanied, which the Royal Navy considered too dangerous to allow. The orders had been unequivocal: the two ships were to stick together. McClure ignored this, using the fiction that he was actually trying to follow the Navy’s instructions and catch up to his superior.

  Kellett, as post captain, outranked him and could have stopped him. He tried everything short of a direct order to hold him back. McClure kept up the pretence, even to the point of hanging on to some personal mail for Collinson, which he said he would deliver when they met. Kellett later urged him by signal to wait at least forty-eight hours. McClure signalled back: “Important service. Cannot on my own responsibility.” In short, he dared his senior to halt him by direct order. This Kellett declined to do. The Admiralty hadn’t counted on such an impasse; there were no specific instructions as to what should be done if the ships failed to rendezvous off Alaska. So Kellett let McClure go.

  Away he went, into the grinding confusion of the pack. A tongue of ice, solid as granite, blocked their way. With a strong following breeze blowing, McClure ordered every shred of canvas up and then boldly turned the ship’s prow toward the very centre of the obstacle. The Investigator shuddered to a near standstill, the masts trembling so violently they seemed about to shake the ship to pieces. Then, suddenly, the ice split under the impact and they were through into open water.

  It required forty men in five boats to tow the Investigator around Point Barrow, an exhausting haul. Now they entered uncharted waters. Soon McClure could see the permanent polar pack ninety miles to the north, a stupendous, glittering wall of white, the growth of ages. He had never seen anything like it in Baffin Bay or in the straits of the eastern Arctic.

  By fits and starts, by luck and happenstance, sometimes beset, sometimes frustrated by blind channels, the Investigator groped her way along the northern coast of Alaska and then past the Mackenzie delta, seeking Banks Land, the distant mass spotted years before by Parry. All along the route they encountered Eskimos, many of whom had never before seen a white man. Like their predecessors, McClure and his officers were worried about the natives’ immortal souls and their lack of civilization. The commander who had dismissed the idea of Christianity aboard ship wrote in his journal: “Would that some practically Christian body … could send a few of their brethren amongst the tribes … to carry to them the arts and advantages of civilized life, and trust to God, in his own good time, showing them the way of eternal life.”

  McClure rounds the tip of Alaska, 1850

  Dr. Armstrong thought the Eskimos “the most filthy race on the face of the globe … thieving, cunning … treacherous and deceitful.…” He trusted that “the day is not far distant when the light of civilization will dawn on this poor, benighted but intelligent race of human beings.” Like so many other naval men, Armstrong thought it deplorable that the Hudson’s Bay Company had made no effort to remove them from “a state of heathen darkness.”

  Equally bewildered, the Eskimos were convinced that the ship had been carved out of a single enormous tree and asked where such trees grew. Since community property was part of their way of life, they thought nothing of pilfering any object they wanted. One enterprising man even went so far as to slip his hand into McClure’s pocket, and a woman tried to conceal a large anvil by hiding it under her, like a hen sitting on an egg. This misunderstanding of the natives’ views confirmed the British belief that the Eskimos were an immoral lot desperately in need of divine guidance.

  The natives at Cape Bathurst were enchanted by Miertsching, who spoke their language, wore their dress, and told them wonderful and exciting tales about a great good Spirit who had created the sun, moon, stars, rocks, and water. They accepted it all with amazement and wonder. They had their own concept of Heaven and Hell – remarkably like the Christian one – a good land with a good spirit who looked after the animals so that they did not disappear from the land, and a bad land with a bad spirit who did great harm. They believed that each person who died would be sent to the destination he had earned in life.

  Miertsching, who was beginning to love these simple, cheerful people, was reluctant to leave them. Their chief pleaded with him to stay and tell them more of his marvellous stories, even offering his sixteen-year-old daughter as a lure. A throng followed him to the beach where fifteen kayaks paddled off to the ship to bid him farewell. But Miertsching worried too about the Eskimos’ souls. “Why has the Lord banished these folk here where no missionary can reach them?” he wondered.

  As the Investigator sailed slowly east between gathering masses of ice, the land on its starboard bow began to rise until, on the western side of Franklin Bay, the mainland cliffs soared to seven hundred feet. McClure tried to continue, but the ice blocked him and he was shouldered northward in a zigzag course toward a lofty, mountainous land of dizzy scarps backed by two-thousand-foot peaks. Here, on August 7, under a towering promontory that he named Lord Nelson Head, he planted a flag and took possession of the territory, naming his discovery Baring Land, after the first lord of the Admiralty. He did not yet know that he had landed on Banks Land – actually Banks Island – which he had been trying to reach ever since leaving Point Barrow.

  Like every other successful explorer in the frozen seas,
McClure had luck on his side. Caught in the grip of the moving ice, unable to round the southern shore of the new land, no longer master of his own fortunes, he found himself driven steadily northward up a narrow channel that followed the eastern shore of Baring (or Banks) Land. Was this a bay, a dead end? If it was a strait, he could scarcely bring himself to contemplate the possibilities – which included the discovery of the North West Passage.

  On September 9 he was only sixty miles from the western stretch of Barrow Strait (actually Viscount Melville Sound) – only another sixty miles from territory already explored, the final gap to connect the East and the West.

  “I cannot describe my anxious feelings,” he wrote. “Can it be possible that this water communicates with Barrow’s Strait, and shall be the long sought North west Passage? Can it be that so humble a creature as I am will be permitted to perform what has baffled the talented and wise for hundreds of years!” He was aware that Providence was on his side: “… all praise be ascribed unto Him who hath conducted us so far in safety.” Of John Franklin there was no mention.

  Then, on September 17, young ice frustrated his passage. He had come as far as possible that season. Should he try to find an anchorage farther south in some sheltered bay or should he allow his ship to become frozen into the pack? The next day he sent his ice mate aloft. From the crow’s-nest the lookout could see for twenty miles. In the distance the land veered off to the northeast and northwest, leaving a clear expanse of water beyond. There could be no uncertainty now. Barrow Strait lay dead ahead and beyond that Melville Island, which Parry had reached thirty years before. The last link in the Passage was in sight.

  McClure was determined to stay in the pack ice. It was dangerous; but he had not come this far to turn back, and he had no intention of relinquishing the ground gained. He reckoned on being trapped in the ice; instead, he was caught in the moving pack. A dreadful gale, blowing down the channel, forced the ice south and with it his ship, anchored to a vast floe. Like an unhorsed rider in a cattle stampede, McClure was helpless. The Investigator was borne remorselessly back the way she had come. For more than a week she was in daily peril. Swept thirty miles south, she was whirled about and once again forced north, in danger of being crushed against the cliffs of the newly discovered Princess Royal Islands in the middle of the channel.