The Arctic Grail Read online

  McClure finds a North West Passage, 1850-54

  On September 26, McClure prepared to abandon ship. A year’s provisions were stacked on deck, ready to be thrown into the boats if the Investigator went down. The men stood by with bundles of warm clothes, their pockets stuffed with ammunition and biscuit, prepared if necessary to leap from the foundering ship and try to struggle to shore across the grinding pack.

  The following night was worse – a seventeen-hour vigil in which huge bergs, three times as big as the ship, crashed against its sides until the oakum squeezed from the distended seams. Unable to flee, convinced they were doomed, the crew abandoned all discipline, broke open casks of liquor on deck, and soon became roaring drunk. As the ship was flung over broadside, an enormous heap of crushed ice threatened to bury her and all the sixty-six men aboard. Then, miraculously, the commotion died and the ship righted herself. The bitter cold had bound the rampaging ice into a solid, unmoving sheet.

  Exhausted and limp, shocked into silence, the drenched and inebriated sailors tried to snatch some rest. So great had been the pressure that nine-inch hawsers had snapped like threads, tearing all six ice anchors away.

  With the storm over and two feet of water pumped out of the hold, McClure, who had scarcely spoken a word since the turmoil, mustered his crew and coldly read out the Articles of War regarding ship’s discipline. He followed this with a savage tongue-lashing in which he called them a band of thieves, unworthy of the name of Englishmen. He was ashamed, he said, that such a rabble should walk the decks of a British ship. He promised that those who had opened the casks of liquor would be punished. Then he relented and reminded his men of the miracle that had saved them. Human strength had been ineffective; almighty Providence had preserved them from certain death. His words brought tears to the eyes of the most hardened seamen, who cheered their captain and promised to mend their ways.

  The terrible trial that all had gone through had sobered both the men and the officers, and McClure was now the commander of a happier ship. He himself took to reading the Bible, morning and night. As Miertsching put it, “he seems now to realize that he is not the good exemplary Christian which he used to think himself.”

  4 The Passage at last

  It was now October 1850. In a radius of five hundred miles to the northeast, eight British ships were frozen into the ice of Barrow Strait and two American vessels were caught in the moving pack in Wellington Channel, but McClure had no way of knowing that. With the Investigator sealed, covered, and protected by a vast wall of ice, he turned his attention again to the North West Passage.

  He must be sure that the water his lookout had seen in the distance actually was a continuation of Barrow Strait. On October 10, he led a sledge party across the ice to the land on the east side of the channel. He named it Prince Albert Land, but actually it was a peninsula of the vast Victoria Island. With Dr. Armstrong and a few companions he struggled up a fifteen-hundred-foot mountain, panting from the unaccustomed exercise, and from that vantage point saw in the distance the termination of the ice-packed channel, which he had named Prince of Wales Strait. Armstrong was convinced that “the highway to England from ocean to ocean lay before us,” but that wasn’t good enough for McClure. Nothing would do but that he himself set foot on the shore of the Passage.

  Eleven days later he led a sledge party on an exhausting five-day journey along the eastern shore of Banks Island to the end of the channel. There, at dawn on October 26, 1850, a fine, cloudless day, Robert McClure, standing on a six-hundred-foot promontory, confirmed the presence of a water route from Atlantic to Pacific. “Thank God!” a crew member muttered, as the copper sunrise brightened to reveal the land ahead curving off to the north toward the strait that would be named for McClure and to the southeast toward Melville Sound.

  It did not matter that Prince of Wales Strait was blocked and that no ship was ever likely to force its way through the ice stream by this route. It did not matter that they had seen the Passage from afar but had not conquered it. McClure knew now that his name would go down in the history books as the man who had made the greatest maritime discovery of the age. It was as well that he didn’t know that some of Franklin’s men had found another North West Passage two years earlier and that sentiment would favour the dead explorer. Nobody could take away from Robert McClure this moment of triumph.

  The discovery brought a surge of patriotic emotion to the heart of the often captious Dr. Armstrong. He confessed to “an indescribable feeling of pride and pleasure” at the thought that “the maritime greatness and glory of our country were still further elevated above all nations of the earth; the solution of this great enigma leaving nothing undone to confirm Great Britain’s Queen – Empress of the Sea.…”

  McClure arrived back at the ship on October 31, thin and exhausted, having rushed on ahead of his crew, lost his way, and wandered about without sleep for the whole of one freezing Arctic night. By the time he found the Investigator and was taken aboard, unable to speak, his limbs stiff with cold, he looked more like a corpse than a living human being.

  Two days later he made a formal announcement of his discovery to the ship’s crew, who would share in the reward, and told them that he hoped they would be home with their families the following year. They cheered him for that: three hearty cheers for the Queen, three more for the discovery of the Passage, three for their commander, three for the rest of the officers, three for sweethearts and wives, and a tiger, after which there was grog for all and extra bread and meat for supper.

  McClure, in victory, was uncharacteristically humble. He surprised his second officer, Samuel Gurney Cresswell, a gifted watercolourist, by declaring that “the world may speak of me or the ship as having done this but a higher power than me has directed us.” Cresswell, whose father, a close friend of Parry, would soon force a new search for the Investigator, didn’t expect such modesty, though, as he later remarked, the voyage “ought to make anyone a wiser and a better man.” But the sledge journey, together with the excitement of the discovery, had exhausted the captain, who was not a robust man. For the next month he was confined to his cot.

  He had not entirely forgotten the main object of the expedition – the search for Franklin. He dispatched three ambitious sledge journeys the following spring. These would have the dual purpose of solving several geographical puzzles while maintaining the hunt for the lost ships. Was Wollaston Land part of the newly discovered Prince Albert Land? Was Banks Land insular or was it part of Melville Island?

  The hundred-odd sledgers didn’t get away until April 1851. They lacked the enthusiasm of M’Clintock’s crews, who, unknown to them, were fanning out over the islands and channels to the east and north. The Investigator lay not in a sheltered harbour but in a perilous position in the middle of the newly discovered Prince of Wales Strait, and most of the men who left her thought themselves doomed, for they did not expect to find her in one piece when they returned. McClure himself expected a terrible upheaval when the ice broke up. He had prepared for that by placing a depot on one of the Princess Royal Islands containing three months’ provisions in case the ship should be crushed. If that happened, he hoped they might be able to reach the Mackenzie delta by small boat or sledge and then travel up the river to the nearest trading post. It was a long shot at best.

  With the threat of shipwreck hanging over the parties, the tensions that had abated the previous fall now returned. Robert Wynniatt, whose sledge party was ordered to follow the south shore of Melville Sound toward Cape Walker, broke his chronometer a week after his departure. He used that as an excuse to return to the ship, prodded, perhaps, by his reluctant crew. McClure, who thought he’d come back with word of Franklin, flew into a rage, turned him about, and sent him off again without a new instrument – an absurd and senseless act.

  Lieutenant Cresswell’s party, sent to explore the northeast coast of Banks Land, also came back a week early. Two of the men were suffering badly from frostbite, and another had
to have part of his foot amputated. Those of the party who weren’t disabled were sent out again after only two days’ rest to chart the south shore of Banks, another harsh decision by McClure, who was bitterly grieved that none of the three parties had managed either to find Franklin or to fulfil their secondary assignments. He would undoubtedly have been even angrier had he known that Wynniatt’s party was, at one point, no more than sixty miles from one of M’Clintock’s questing sledges.

  The one journey that might have been providential was not undertaken. Parry’s Winter Harbour, on Melville Island, was only a hundred miles away. Dr. Armstrong felt it was derelict of McClure not to leave a message giving his position there, as it was more than likely that somebody would find it. In fact, M’Clintock did visit it, seeking just such a message, and found nothing. McClure’s neglect doomed him to spend three more winters in the Arctic.

  McClure had one slim hope of salvaging something from the three sledge journeys. One hundred miles south on the shores of Prince Albert Land, the party under Lieutenant Haswell had discovered a new band of Eskimos. McClure determined to seek them out: perhaps they could tell him something about Franklin’s lost expedition or at least help to fill in the geographical gaps. He took Miertsching and six men and, setting a cracking pace, in just four days reached the tents of the natives on June 2.

  Here, to his astonishment, an Eskimo woman drew an almost perfect chart of the area on the paper he supplied, showing the coastline of North America (which none of the natives had ever visited) and filling up blanks on the existing maps, making it clear that Wollaston Land was not an island but a peninsula on the southwest coast of Victoria Land. Of Franklin, however, there was no word.

  The Eskimos were astonished to learn from Miertsching that there were other lands inhabited by human beings. McClure was much taken with them, for he found them both amiable and intelligent. Their simple habits brought out in him an unexpected tenderness, and when it came time to depart, Miertsching noted that “the captain was so grieved at leaving these loving people helpless in this frightful region of ice that he could not refrain from tears.”

  A touching little scene was then enacted. In an impetuous gesture, McClure took off his thick red shawl and wound it round the neck of a young Eskimo woman who was standing nearby with a child on her back. She was startled and embarrassed because the idea of unreciprocated gift-giving was foreign to these Eskimos; it was part of their code always to offer something of equal value in return, and she had nothing to give him. To his great discomfiture she took the baby out from under her hood, covered it with kisses, and in a remarkable gesture, offered it to McClure in exchange. Miertsching had difficulty explaining that his captain was not proposing a barter. At last she understood and, laughing, accepted the shawl, which till then she had refused to touch. What animal was it that had a red skin? she asked. But there was no time to explain. One of McClure’s men was suffering badly from frostbite and he wanted to get back to the ship.

  Six weeks later, on July 14, the ice in Prince of Wales Strait broke up without incident. McClure started back north, hoping to skip through the North West Passage and thus complete his circumnavigation of the Americas. It was not possible. The same ice stream that had frustrated Parry blocked his way. On August 16 he made a sudden decision, to turn about, sail south again and then west to try to circle Baring (or Banks) Land. If it was an island, he could enter waters connected to Barrow Strait (this portion would shortly be named for him) from the far side and still make his way through the Passage.

  It was another daring decision, some would say a foolhardy gamble. The season was late. He knew nothing of the fogbound, ice-choked channels he was proposing to enter. He was chancing an encounter with “the frightful polar pack,” as Miertsching correctly termed it. He was risking his ship and the lives of his crew. Having discovered the Passage and vainly scoured the western Arctic for John Franklin, it would have been prudent to have returned the way he had come. Yet McClure was a man obsessed. He had seen the Passage, but he had not sailed through it. He didn’t want half the glory; he wanted it all.

  To his astonishment, the channel to the south was free of ice. He sped down it in a single day, rounded Nelson Head with a fresh breeze spurring him on, and by August 18 had covered three hundred miles without a check. The white world had come alive. Polar bears lumbered over the shore ice. Caribou pounded across the barren slopes. Seals basked in the sunshine. Geese, wild swans, and ducks rose in flocks from the water. At a landing on the southwest corner of Banks Land (Sachs Harbour), he left a note in a cairn for his erstwhile commander, Richard Collinson, who found it three weeks later. Collinson had already found an earlier note that McClure had left in the cache on one of the Princess Royal Islands near the entrance to Prince of Wales Strait.

  McClure’s luck continued to hold. He rounded the southwest cape of Banks Land and scudded north at speeds as high as seven knots. For a day he travelled up a broad lane of water created by the polar pack on his left and the island on his right. Then the lane began to narrow; the land became precipitous; the pack drew closer until it seemed as if he were in a kind of canyon with the crystalline scarps of ancient ice rising a hundred feet out of the sea on one side and the dizzier cliffs of sedimentary rock towering above him on the other. Soon the Investigator was so close to land that her boats had to be hauled up to prevent them from smashing against the serried rock walls on her starboard bow. By the time the ship stood off the cape that McClure named for Prince Alfred, the channel was no more than two hundred feet wide. The crews took to the boats and towed the ship past the promontory, blasting the projecting crags with black powder.

  On August 20, with the ice pressing down from the northwest, the ship came to a halt. Shore parties, taking advantage of the lull, explored the barren headland and came upon an astonishing spectacle: masses of petrified trees lay piled up on the hills and in the gorges, some of them with trunks ten inches thick. Here was evidence that this frozen land had once been a temperate realm of thick forests and smiling meadows.

  That discovery was scarcely made before the Arctic returned to the attack with all its fury. Once again, the men were ordered on deck with bundles of belongings, ready to leave at any instant, while the high spring tide and the west wind hurled masses of ice down upon the ship, throwing her broadside against the floe to which she was anchored. Beams cracked. Doors sprang open. “This is the end!” McClure cried out, “the ship is breaking up; in five minutes she will be sunk!” He was about to cut the cables when another miracle occurred. The ice suddenly became motionless, and the catastrophe was averted.

  By now McClure was convinced that a Higher Power was shielding him, that no lives would be lost, that all would return safely to their homes. His pale and trembling followers were clinging to the bulwarks, too shaken to speak. He mustered them and promised that he would bring them to a safe winter harbour and would do his best to make life pleasant for them.

  He was, apparently, a changed man, all the daring, all the gambling spirit sucked out of him by this last encounter with the elements. Before many days had passed the Investigator entered the main channel northeast of Banks Island that would later be called McClure Strait. Melville Island lay on the port side. Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound lay ahead. For most of September the expedition moved southeastward, hugging the coast of Banks Island, a forbidding shore without a bay or a harbour that might offer shelter or protection – a passage, in Armstrong’s words, that “should never be again attempted; and … I feel convinced … will never be made again.”

  At last the Investigator reached a large bay, which McClure chose as his winter harbour. He named it Mercy Bay, causing the astringent doctor to remark later that “some of us not inappropriately said it ought to have been so called, from the fact it would have been a mercy had we never entered it.” For the bay was a cul-de-sac in which the crew would be confined for the next two years and from which the ship itself would never be freed.

  The
critical Dr. Armstrong felt, as did some of the others, that McClure should have taken his chances and gone on to Parry’s Winter Harbour or even to a berth farther east, thus completing the transit of the North West Passage. It’s more than possible that he might have accomplished that feat. A few days later, his sailing master, Stephen Court, found open water as far as the eye could see beyond Point Back, a promontory seven miles distant that had an unobstructed view of the channel.

  What had happened to the daring captain, who once gambled on a fast shortcut through the Aleutians and a perilous dash past the Arctic pack off Banks Island? Was it a failure of nerve, as some would later say? Perhaps; but if so it was understandable. McClure and his crew had come through a frightful experience. Providence had smiled three times on them. It was late in the season – September 23, a full week later than the date in 1850 when the American ships off Wellington Channel to the east had become “glued up” by the ice, to use Elisha Kane’s phrase. For once, McClure put the safety of his ship and the ship’s company ahead of his personal ambitions. He could not know that this latest decision would come close to being the death of all of them.

  5 Mercy Bay

  October 1851. Only three search ships remained in the Arctic. McClure in the Investigator was frozen in at Mercy Bay. Unknown to him, Collinson in the Enterprise was anchored off Victoria Land on the eastern shore of Prince of Wales Strait. Five hundred miles to the east, Bellot and Kennedy, having just been reunited, were snug aboard Lady Franklin’s little Prince Albert at Batty Bay in Prince Regent Inlet. Austin’s unproductive expedition had returned to England that same month. Press and public were urging the Admiralty to try again. Lieutenant Cresswell’s father was demanding an additional search for the Investigator, and with good reason.