The Arctic Grail Read online

  It was not an easy winter for Robert McClure and his men. In his haste to find a secluded harbour, McClure had chosen a trap – and he soon realized it. Suspecting that the ice in that sheltered backwater might not melt the following summer, he reduced rations. Dr. Armstrong insisted the diet wasn’t enough to keep the crew healthy; by April 1852, the men were losing flesh at an alarming rate. But McClure stuck to his quota. When three half-starved men stole some meat, he had them flogged.

  That April, when Sir Edward Belcher’s five-ship squadron was setting out from England and while Kennedy and Bellot were completing their own luckless three-month search, McClure set off on a quest of his own. Travelling by sledge across the rough pack of the strait, he started for Parry’s Winter Harbour on Melville Island – a journey that could have been made and should have been made the previous year. There, on the summit of Parry’s sandstone block, he found a flat tin case containing M’Clintock’s message and saw, to his dismay, that it had been left there the previous June.

  Now, as he realized the depth of his negligence and the seriousness of his position, Robert McClure sat down and wept like a child. Austin’s expedition, he realized, must have gone home. By now his would-be rescuers were all back in England. Everything he had worked for, the triumphs he had achieved, the charting of new lands as well as the crowning discovery of them all – the Passage – were as dust. There was little hope of succour; he would not live to bask in his success.

  By the time he returned in May, scurvy was making insidious inroads among his crew. By July, sixteen men were ill with it. Dr. Armstrong urged a more liberal diet to help the sufferers regain their strength, but McClure, with his mind agitated by the prospect of another winter in Mercy Bay, turned him down. Freshly killed muskoxen and a quantity of wild sorrel helped to stall the disease, but they were not enough to stop the hunger. One desperate man stole a loaf of bread, fresh from the oven, in spite of the sure knowledge that retribution would be swift. He received three dozen strokes of the cat on his bare back.

  McClure meant to stretch out his provisions as long as possible because it became clear, as August arrived, that Mercy Bay would remain ice locked. The bay was shaped like a funnel, fifteen miles deep and seven miles broad at the entrance, where shoals caught the ice to form a barrier. The previous September the portals of this cul-de-sac had been free of ice. But the season of 1852 was a backward one. By August 27 the young ice was strong enough to allow the crews to skate to the shore.

  Once again the land turned white. The men had nothing to occupy them – McClure was no Parry. One, Mark Bradbury, was clearly going mad. McClure gloomily climbed a nearby mountain to gaze out over the unbroken ice of the bay. He kept up a cheerful attitude in front of his company, but Miertsching could hear him praying and sighing alone in his cabin.

  On September 9, he assembled his crew and told them what they had already sensed: they were stuck for another winter. He put the best face on it he could, promising that all would return safely home, but then he was forced to reveal that the half-rations they had been existing on for the past year would be cut back again. He himself had turned over his private stock of food for the use of all.

  They were down now to one meal a day. Most ate their ration of half a pound of salt meat raw because it shrank so much in the cooking. In October, a delegation pleaded with the captain for an increase; the men were so hungry, they said, they couldn’t sleep. Again, McClure refused. Sub-lieutenant Robert Wynniatt went mad, like Bradbury. And so the year ended in despondency, each man thirty-five pounds lighter and twenty now ill with scurvy.

  As the winter of 1852-53 dragged on, the health of the men grew worse. The two mental cases howled all night, contributing to the pall of gloom. At one point the demented Wynniatt tried to kill his captain. A sailor coming on board stiff with cold fell and broke his leg. By the end of January, a clerk, Joseph Paine, and one of the mates, Herbert Sainsbury, were close to death.

  The ship itself seemed to echo the sufferings of the men, the bolts and fastenings cracking in the –60° cold. Miertsching noted that the doctor’s reports had reduced McClure to despair. “How it must affect our captain,” he wrote, “… when he sees his once-strong, rugged and hearty crew wasted away and scarcely with the strength to hold themselves upright.”

  On March 2, McClure announced that he would put into operation a plan he had concocted the previous fall. Twenty of the strongest men would stay with the ship. Those who could not last another winter would attempt to reach civilization. One party would head for the depot and boat that he had cached at Princess Royal Island in Prince of Wales Strait. Thus supplied, it would try to reach the Mackenzie River. Another would travel to Port Leopold, where James Clark Ross had cached a boat, and attempt to reach the whaling grounds in Baffin Bay.

  It was a reckless scheme, born of desperation. McClure was, in effect, sending the sick to their deaths. As Armstrong observed, there was no hope that in their weakened condition they could survive such arduous and lengthy journeys. Sixteen were hospitalized; the demented Wynniatt couldn’t be made to understand that he was to leave the ship; Bradbury “must be handled like an idiot child.”

  Even healthy men in the prime of condition would be hard put to make those long journeys. On the other hand, McClure felt he had to take some action. If the forty weakest stayed, they would surely perish with the others. At least there was a chance that the twenty who remained might come through; for one thing, there would be fewer men to divide the provisions. And – such is the human condition – those detailed to leave expressed their delight at the prospect, while those who were chosen to stay with the ship were bitterly disappointed. It does not seem to have occurred to McClure that if by some miracle the ship was saved and he returned to England with the survivors, having abandoned the sick, he would never be able to raise his head again in civilized company.

  On April 5, with the sledges ready and a slim store of provisions packed for the journeys, John Boyle, one of the men designated to leave, died of scurvy. McClure immediately called all hands to the quarterdeck and delivered another of those eloquent, morale-building addresses that seemed to rally his crew. He told them to be true to themselves and to the service, not to despair but to look forward to the future with determination, and to bear all vicissitudes with the fortitude of British seamen. In the gloomiest hour, he declared, relief might come.

  The following day, he and Haswell walked the ice with Miertsching, discussing the problems of digging a grave for Boyle in the granite-hard ground and the slim possibilities of future survival.

  “Sir,” said McClure, addressing the missionary, “if next year in Europe you neither see nor hear of me, then you may be sure that Captain McClure, along with his crew, has perished and lies unburied but wrapped in the fur coat which you gave me, enjoying a long and tranquil sleep until awakened on the Day of Resurrection by the Redeemer in Whom is all my hope and trust …”

  At that point, the commander was interrupted by one of the seamen, who rushed up to announce that something black was moving on the heavy ice to the seaward – a muskox, perhaps.

  But it was not a muskox. A second seaman came running up. “They are men,” he cried. “First a man, then a sledge with men.”

  Apart from their fellows, they had not seen another human being for twenty-one months. Were these Eskimos, then? McClure and his companions held their breaths as one of the strangers drew nearer, his face, like an Eskimo’s, “as black as old Nick.”

  “In the name of God,” cried McClure, “who are you?”

  The stranger stepped forward and uttered a sentence that ran through them all like an electric shock.

  “I am Lieutenant Pim, late of the Herald, now of the Resolute. Captain Kellett is with her at Dealy Island.”

  This announcement must have momentarily confused McClure, for he had last encountered Kellett aboard the Herald in Kotzebue Sound. It did not matter, for one thing was clear. The miracle he had not dared to hope for h
ad come to pass; the relief that he had promised his crew was at hand. Once again in his darkest hour, Providence had smiled on Robert John Le Mesurier McClure.

  Chapter Six

  1

  The spirit rappers

  2

  Searching for the searchers

  3

  The blue devils

  4

  Ships abandoned

  5

  Relics of the lost

  Belcher’s ships in winter quarters (illustration credit 6.1)

  1 The spirit rappers

  The year 1853 opened without a hint of Franklin’s whereabouts. After more than seven years the unsolved mystery continued to tantalize the public, vying for space in the newspapers and illustrated periodicals with more recent events. France had a new emperor, Napoleon III. A steamship, the Pacific, had set a new Atlantic record from New York to Liverpool in just ten days. A sensational new novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was the talk of New York and London. The Duke of Wellington was dead at eighty-three; and Jane Franklin’s old beau, Peter Mark Roget, had just published his Thesaurus, at seventy-two.

  Jane Franklin, in her sixtieth year, was very much alive and as determined as ever to find her lost husband, in spite of two more setbacks. Both of her ships had returned to England with no news. Kennedy and Bellot had come back the previous October in the Prince Albert, eager to set out again. Bellot, who was back in France and newly promoted, was doing his best to persuade his government to join in the search. Commander Edward Inglefield had returned a month later in the Isabel, having probed the northern reaches of Baffin Bay without success.

  Inglefield had wangled a leave of absence from the Navy in order to take the Isabel north. He was Lady Franklin’s devoted admirer, a member of that dwindling congregation who remained convinced her husband was alive. An attractive, darkly handsome young man, Inglefield had considerable common sense and interests that ranged beyond the narrow confines of the quarterdeck. He was an inventor (the Inglefield anchor), a collector of old glass, an able watercolourist, and an active gardener. Aware of the smouldering discontent that could threaten any Arctic voyage, he had decided to dine at the same time as his crew and eat exactly the same food, bringing no extra delicacies for his officers’ mess. Though he found no trace of Franklin, his discoveries on that brief summer voyage in 1852 were among the most significant made during the great search.

  He quickly disposed of the tale of murder by the natives told by John Ross’s interpreter, Adam Beck. Beck had claimed the bodies of the Franklin crew were buried beneath a cairn at North Omiak, Greenland. Inglefield took it apart and found only animal bones. More important, he ventured into Smith Sound, at the head of Baffin Bay.

  Inglefield was convinced he was on the threshold of the mysterious Open Polar Sea. After passing between the two glowering capes that mark the sound’s entrance, he could see the grey waters stretching off through seven points of the compass, unobstructed by ice. He said later that “wild thoughts of getting to the Pole – of finding our way to Behring Strait – and most of all of reaching Franklin and giving him help, rushed rapidly through my brain.” Before he turned back he had reached, by his own calculations, a latitude of 78° 28′ 21″N, “one hundred and forty miles farther north than any previous navigator,” a boast that ignored both Buchan and Parry, who had crossed the 80th parallel east of Greenland. The Pole was still 860 statute miles away, but Inglefield had discovered the only practical way to reach it – the “American route,” as it came to be called. He named many of the landmarks, one for Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate, to gratify his wish that “there is nothing worth living for but to have one’s name inscribed on the Arctic chart,” and many more that would be closely associated with later explorers – Littleton Island and Cape Sabine in particular.

  Then, having found no evidence of Franklin’s passing, he turned south to examine Jones Sound, which also held no clue to the missing ships. He sailed into Lancaster Sound, by now the accepted highway to the western Arctic, picked up mail from Sir Edward Belcher’s five-ship search party at Beechey Island, and returned to England, convinced that “nothing but the most improbable accident could have brought Sir John Franklin to these shores.”

  The Illustrated London News praised Inglefield’s summer search as “a patriotic and humane act,” and so it was, for he had made considerable personal sacrifice to outfit the expedition. Lady Franklin offered to sell the Isabel to pay his expenses, but Inglefield would have none of it. Instead, like Kennedy, he was prepared to go out again. It is a tribute to the force of Jane Franklin’s personality that she inspired this kind of dedication.

  By this time she had achieved near sainthood in her campaign to find her husband. She had the support of the public and the applause of the press. “Indomitable” was the adjective most often used to describe her. Because of her persistence, seven ships were frozen into the ice of the Arctic archipelago: McClure at Mercy Bay on Banks Island, Collinson at Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island, and Belcher’s five vessels in the Wellington Channel, at Beechey Island, and in Melville Sound.

  That was not enough for the resolute and persevering widow. She had now passed her sixtieth year but had lost none of her energy or commitment. “We are all growing old & shattered, grey haired & half-toothless,” she wrote in one of the letters she dispatched to her long-dead spouse. She still clung stubbornly to the belief that he or some of his men might still be alive. The handful of die-hards who shared this slim hope offered a variety of wistful theories. Perhaps he was living among the Eskimos in the High Arctic beyond the Wellington Channel. Perhaps he had managed to cross the polar sea to reach the coast of Siberia and was a prisoner or a guest of the aborigines. Or perhaps, as young Bellot believed, he was living on Boothia Peninsula, sustained by native hunters.

  She could not give up. If the public imagination was captured by her tenacity, the officialdom of several countries must have been exasperated by her obstinacy. Her correspondence was voluminous. She wrote to everybody – long, graceful, pleading letters in a neat, minuscule hand, asking for help. She wrote to the new emperor of France. She wrote to the Tsar of Russia. She wrote again and again to the British Admiralty. She kept up her correspondence with Henry Grinnell, the New York philanthropist who had backed the first American expedition to the Arctic.

  There she struck a chord. Elisha Kent Kane, the literary ship’s doctor on that expedition, was determined to go north again, this time in full command of another Grinnell expedition. It was one of two obsessions to which the remarkable doctor was slave that season. The other was an extraordinary nineteen-year-old named Margaret Fox, as celebrated in her own way as Kane, the Arctic hero and popular lecturer. To some she was close to being a saint, to others a mystic, to a few the servant of the Devil, and, to a vociferous minority, a charlatan.

  Margaret Fox was a medium, a “spirit rapper,” who communicated, so it was said, with the souls of the dead. She wasn’t just an ordinary medium. With her younger sister, Katharine, she was the medium, the original, copper-plated genuine article, the mould from which all future mediums were fashioned. The cult of spiritualism, with all its exotic paraphernalia, began with the Fox sisters in 1848. Before they made their startling claim, there were no such things as séances, tables that lifted, ectoplasm, voices from the void, or any of the trappings of the occult that to this day are to be found in those dark and curtained rooms where the bereaved and the curious gather hoping to hold converse with the dead.

  By the time Elisha Kane discovered the Fox sisters, during their Philadelphia engagement in November 1852, spiritualism had swept the country. One million Americans believed in it. From a popular social fad it was developing into a religious movement. Famous figures of known probity – judges, senators, clerics, professionals, journalists – flocked to see the sisters perform or attended private séances to declare they were perfectly genuine. Some, like Charles Beecher Stowe (the son of Uncle Tom’s creator), might call their gift “demonic,” bu
t others – the great editor Horace Greeley was one – were captivated by the “perfect integrity and good faith” of these innocent-looking children with their dark, lustrous eyes, their impassive features, and their remarkable translucent skin, which to many gave them an other-worldly look.

  The efforts made to prove them fraudulent served only to enhance their appeal and their notoriety. The sisters sat at the séance tables with their hands and arms unconcealed while the spirits spelled out, in a series of sepulchral raps, the answers to questions thrown at them. It was all quite marvellous, rather like the tap-tapping of the new telegraph keys, using the code that Mr. Samuel Morse was in the process of patenting. The mixture of the scientific and the occult excited the imagination. If signals could transmit messages from the living, why not from the dead? Even when the sisters were stripped mother-naked, as they were during one investigative séance, the rappings continued.

  The phenomenon was known as “the Rochester Rappings” because it had all begun at the Fox home near Rochester, New York, in 1848. The two girls – Katharine was then thirteen, Margaret sixteen – had scared their mother out of her wits when the mysterious sounds were heard, apparently out of nowhere. The two children had merely meant to tease their parent, but the impact was so startling that it got beyond control before they could reveal their secret. In fact, they did not confess it for forty years, although a few investigators caught on to it early in the game and even published their suspicions, without much effect.