The Arctic Grail Page 28
It was simple enough: the two sisters had double-jointed toes, which they had learned to crack with very little effort. On this flimsy foundation was constructed the great edifice of modern spiritualism, and that was the work not of the two children but of Leah Fox Fisher, their older, widowed sister, who knew a good thing when she saw it and exploited both girls for most of their lives.
Elisha Kent Kane did not for an instant believe in spirit rappings. Out of sheer curiosity, he had dropped in on the sisters at the Union Hotel and, seeing Margaret – so innocent, so demure – reading by the window, thought he’d knocked on the wrong door. The contrast between his concept of a stage medium and this innocent child-woman captured the explorer’s imagination, and his heart.
Margaret was to insist that Kane fell in love at first sight, and certainly that assessment accords with his known impetuosity. His letters to her, which she published after his death under the title of The Love Life of Dr. Kane, may have been edited or changed; there is no way of knowing. But to anyone who has read his original, unexpurgated journal (as distinct from the published version), the letters ring true. They sound like Kane: passionate, heartfelt, brooding, egotistical, and more than a little condescending:
“… you write to me entirely as to a friend … I write as to a lover, overflowing with the feeling of the moment.…”
“Whatever may be my faults, I have at least loved you. Were you an empress, darling Maggie, instead of a little nameless girl, following an obscure and ambiguous profession, it would be the same.…”
“I am sick … sick with hard work, and with nobody to nurse or care for me … is it any wonder that I long to look – only to look – at that dear little deceitful mouth of yours; to feel your hair tumbling over my cheeks.…”
Kane may be the only lovesick swain in history who reversed the accepted mode of romantic entreaty and told the object of his affections that she was not worthy of him: “Maggie, dear, you have many traits which lift you above your calling. You are refined and lovable; and, with a different education would have been innocent and artless; but you are not worthy of a permanent regard from me. You could never lift yourself up to my thoughts.… Maggie, darling, don’t care for me anymore. I love you too well to wish it.… I really am sold to different destinies … I have my own sad vanities to pursue. I am as devoted to my calling as you, poor child, can be to yours. Remember then, as a sort of dream, that Doctor Kane of the Arctic Seas loved Maggie Fox of the spirit rappings.”
That was the problem – the spirit rappings. From the outset, Kane was convinced that Margaret was living a life of deception. All through the early months of 1853, as he planned his next assault on the Arctic, he tried to convince her to change her mode of life. They had one thing in common: they were both celebrities of the first order. Kane was mesmerizing thousands with his eloquent lectures about his Arctic Odyssey, mingling with the “great men,” as he told Margaret. She had given private sittings to such notables as James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, and George Bancroft.
“I speak for humanity and not for money,” he told her during a successful lecture campaign in Boston. That wasn’t entirely true, since he was raising funds for his next expedition – as much as fourteen hundred dollars for a single appearance. But “when I think of you dear darling, wasting your time and youth and conscience for a few paltry dollars and think of the crowds who come nightly to hear of the wild stories of the frozen north, I sometimes feel that we are not so far removed after all. My brain and your body are each the sources of attraction and I confess there is not so much difference.”
But, of course, there were vast differences between them, in temperament, age, education, background, upbringing, and outlook. She was a placid, untutored teenager, one of six children from the poverty-stricken family of an alcoholic. She didn’t really comprehend what she was doing. Others interpreted her spirit rappings; she herself made no claims. Kane, the educated, well-travelled, and snobbish scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, was a totally different human animal and knew it. Yet he loved her and gave every evidence that he longed to marry her. That is what gnawed at him.
His family was opposed to any such alliance, especially his father, whose approval Kane vainly sought all of his short life. His family had, apparently, picked out a well-to-do Philadelphia girl for him, but Kane was already enamoured of Margaret. There was a perverse streak in him, a kind of “I’ll show them” attitude that had taken him to the distant corners of the globe and had manifested itself again when, a semi-invalid, he went north over their objections in 1850.
Now that he was an Arctic hero, who had emerged from the frozen seas in better health than when he had left, there was less resistance to a new venture. But, with equal recklessness, he had fastened on to the most unsuitable of all potential consorts. It was not only that Margaret Fox was a notorious stage performer; there was also the matter of her upbringing. Once when Kane brought his brother to the Fox home, he took Margaret’s mother aside and urged her not to mention the possibility of marriage in front of him. “My brother,” he said, “feels like death about it.”
There was only one solution: he must change Margaret, remould her. “No right minded gentleman,” he told her, “… can regard your present life with approval.” He would go off to the Arctic, she would give up spirit rapping and, at his expense, enter a boarding-school of his choosing, somewhere in a country backwater, far from the temptations of the big cities. It was not a scheme that was welcomed by Mrs. Fox or the eldest sister, Leah, for it meant that the money from the séances would dry up. But Kane was adamant: “Your life is worse than tedious, it is sinful, and that you have so long resisted its temptations shows me that you were born for better things than to entertain strangers at a dollar a head.”
All during the winter months of this turbulent courtship Kane lived a frantic life, scribbling away against a deadline on a book about his Arctic adventures, flitting from city to city to deliver lectures, indulging in a voluminous correspondence with Arctic travellers, scientists, savants, and would-be adventurers, including Lady Franklin herself, in addition to planning every detail of his next expedition.
It is small wonder that in the middle of all this whirl he fell ill, first in February and again in April, when he was felled for a month by one of the worst attacks yet of the rheumatic fever that had weakened his heart. The planning went on without him.
Kane’s ship was to be the Advance, from the previous expedition, but this would be a private venture; the U.S. government had concluded that the Franklin search should be left to the British. The U.S. Navy would supply only the seamen. Henry Grinnell would again provide the funds, and various scientific societies would contribute the necessary instruments. Kane was intending to head for Smith Sound to seek the Open Polar Sea, which Inglefield had reported lay beyond. Now he got news that Inglefield was planning a second expedition – to steal a march on him, in Kane’s view (“Nothing is left to me but a competition with the odds against me”). What was billed as a humanitarian search for Franklin was looking more like a clash of ambitions – at least on Kane’s part. As it turned out, Inglefield had no interest in racing the Americans to the polar sea; his task was more prosaic – simply to carry supplies to the Belcher expedition at Beechey Island.
Meanwhile the organization proceeded: boats and sledges, pemmican and pickles, books and biscuits were all ordered, the latter being “meat biscuits,” perfected by the enterprising food processor Gail Borden, whose next experiments in the field of concentrated food would make his name a household word.
Kane arranged for a more personal item. He commissioned an Italian painter to prepare a portrait of Margaret to take with him on the voyage, which was set for May. That done, she was spirited away to a tiny village eighteen miles out of Philadelphia where she was to receive an education from the wife of the local miller, a situation that reduced her to tears until Kane, at the last moment, dashed by for a final hour of
consolation.
He sent her one last letter: “The day will come – bright as sunshine on the waters – when I claim your hand and unrestrained by the trammels of our mutual dread, live with you in peace, tranquility and affection.
“Be good and pure. Restrain every thought which interferes with a guileless life, and live to prove your improvement, your love for
Ky.…”
Kane’s main purpose, he insisted, was to search for Franklin. He had become convinced that somewhere beyond Smith Sound, walled off from the world by a barrier of ice, lay the famous Open Polar Sea, where the air was milder and the skies free of icy blasts, a kind of northern “mediterranean,” to use Kane’s own analogy. This curious piece of wishful thinking, which had persisted since John Barrow’s time, had been reinforced by Inglefield’s report. But unlike Inglefield, Kane affected to believe that Franklin and his lost crew were somewhere on the shores of that Elysian paradise, subsisting on its animal life, “unable to leave their hunting ground and cross the frozen Sahara which intervened between them and the world from which they are shut out.” After entering Smith Sound, Kane proposed to advance into the unknown by dogsled until he reached the open sea, at which time, “if such reward awaits us, we launch our little boats, and bidding God speed us, embark upon its waters.”
With crowds cheering, guns booming, and pleasure craft loaded with well-wishers alongside, the Advance left New York harbour on May 31 with a company of seventeen officers and men. “The object of my journey is the search for Sir John Franklin,” he wrote in a farewell note to his brother Thomas. “Neither science nor the vain glory of attaining an unreached North shall divert me from this one conscientious aim.…”
It doesn’t ring true. He knew perfectly well that Inglefield’s careful search had not turned up any Franklin clues. It may be that he convinced himself that his motives were noble and self-sacrificing; he tended to view the world and himself through a romantic veil. But the evidence suggests that Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas had another goal in mind. He was not the first explorer to use Franklin as an excuse to raise funds for geographical discovery. In pretending to look for the lost expedition, he gave every evidence of seeking something almost as illusory and even more unattainable – the North Pole itself.
2 Searching for the searchers
That same spring of 1853, while Kane pursued his liaison with Margaret Fox and prepared for his own journey to the Arctic, British sledging parties were waiting impatiently for the weather to clear in order to continue to search for Franklin and also for Robert McClure, who was then in fact icebound at Mercy Bay.
To search for the searchers – Collinson and McClure – had been as much a part of Sir Edward Belcher’s given task as finding the original lost expedition. Wellington Channel must be probed for Franklin, Viscount Melville Sound and its environs for McClure and Collinson. Once these tasks were complete, the Admiralty was convinced that “every accessible part of the Polar Sea west of Lancaster Sound will have been visited.” That done, Belcher and his five vessels might as well abandon all search attempts and come home.
In short, the Arctic Establishment in Great Britain had written off the entire area west of Somerset Island and south of Barrow Strait and Melville Sound. Peel Sound had been found to be blocked in 1851, therefore, the theory went, it must have been blocked five years before when Franklin had set off from Beechey. It apparently occurred to nobody on the so-called Arctic Council that this channel might have been clear one year and frozen the next. Parry had had experience with the shifting quality of the Arctic environment, yet he and James Ross and others concluded that the route that Franklin had actually used in 1846 was permanently impassable.
Since almost everybody believed that Franklin would be found somewhere north of the Wellington Channel, Belcher would take two of his ships to search that area. Two more of his vessels, Resolute and Intrepid, led by Henry Kellett – the same officer who had tried to hold McClure back at Cape Lisburne, Alaska – would sail west to Melville Island. The twenty-six-gun frigate North Star would remain at Beechey Island as a supply depot for both parties.
Belcher’s search for Franklin, 1852-54
Leopold M’Clintock would command Kellett’s sister ship. Even though he too was convinced that Franklin had gone north, he was delighted to have a command of his own, especially under the hearty, cheerful Kellett, a naval captain of thirty years’ experience, whom he described as “kind, generous and open hearted.” This was in striking contrast to the irritable, fifty-three-year-old Belcher. Then and later one of the most controversial and detested figures in the Royal Navy, Belcher was manifestly unsuitable for a job that would try the nerves of the best of men. But he had seniority and so, by the rigid standards of naval advancement, was given the overall command. The grandson of a Nova Scotia chief justice, he had gone to England at the age of twelve to join the Navy. Harsh, quarrelsome, hypercritical, and possessed of a towering ego, he had gained considerable notoriety in 1830 as the result of a messy and spiteful separation from his wife, who accused him of twice infecting her with venereal disease. One of his many failings was his refusal to listen to the advice of the more experienced officers who served under him, fifteen of whom had been with Austin in 1850-51. In the end this would bring disaster to his expedition and personal humiliation to its leader.
Thus it is small wonder that M’Clintock was happy to get out from under Belcher’s command and sail with Kellett to Melville Island. It was not an easy trip. These were the first ships that had attempted it since Parry’s day. Barrow Strait was clogged with ice. Kellett’s Resolute was more awkward than M’Clintock’s steam-powered Intrepid. She grounded in the shallow channel, keeled over, and almost foundered, to be tugged afloat by the Intrepid, a striking example of the advantages of steam over sail.
Squeezing through a lane of water between land and frozen sea, the two vessels reached Melville Island on September 1, 1852, the second expedition in history to get that far. A few days later they were off Winter Harbour, but though they could see Parry’s sandstone block looming up on shore, six miles of solid ice barred their way. They could not know that McClure’s note was there, waiting for them. With winter approaching, they made haste to retreat to winter quarters off Dealy Island, thirty-five miles east on the Melville coast.
Six land expeditions fanned out over Melville Island that fall, setting up depots for the real test that would come the following spring. One party turned aside on its return journey, curious to examine Parry’s sandstone monument. There it discovered McClure’s letter written the previous April and giving the news of his discovery of a North West Passage.
It was too late in the season to rescue the McClure expedition, frozen in and starving at Mercy Bay. Midwinter conditions made sledging impossible. Kellett could only mark time until the following spring, hoping that McClure and his men would somehow survive. His own ships were well provisioned. Fresh venison, bear, and musk-ox were available in abundance while soirées, vaudeville shows, and plays broke the monotony. M’Clintock had brought along a set of conjuring tricks to amuse his men, and the gregarious Kellett himself chaired the theatrical committee. On Christmas Day, while McClure’s sailors eked out the Yuletide with a few scraps of salt meat, enhanced by a rare ration of raisins and cocoa, Kellett’s people sat down to a feast of stuffed roast pig.
Meanwhile, M’Clintock was preparing for the greatest sledging journey of his life, one that the naval historian Clements Markham, with his usual hyperbole, was to call “the greatest Arctic effort that has ever been made or ever will be made.” Convinced that Franklin had entered the open sea beyond Wellington Channel, M’Clintock decided to search for the lost crews by striking northwest across Melville Island to the unknown waters beyond.
But Kellett, since his sledges had found McClure’s message at Winter Harbour, knew he must send relief to Mercy Bay as soon as possible. His party left on March 10, earlier than any spring journey yet made by the Navy in the Arctic and only
a fortnight later than the 1852 spring departure of Kennedy and Bellot.
The man who volunteered to find McClure was a remarkable young naval lieutenant named Bedford Pim. He had served with Kellett aboard the Herald in 1850 and had been one of the last to see McClure before that expedition vanished into the western Arctic. He was not cut from regular Navy cloth but belonged to that small band of individualists who preferred to travel alone – a band that included John Rae and Richard King. Pim, too, was convinced that Franklin had gone up Wellington Channel and across the polar sea, perhaps to be beset in Bering Strait and cast up on the shores of Russian Siberia. Pim himself had visited Siberia, met the Russians, and lived with the natives on the Asiatic coast.
When he returned to England, Pim conceived a grandiose plan to cross Siberia in search of Franklin. He even went to Leningrad to ask for Russian aid. The Russians were enthusiastic but no more forthcoming with money than the English (save for Lady Franklin), and so the plan died. When Pim learned that Kellett was going north again he volunteered to join him. Now, in March of 1853, he was sledging west across the frozen expanse of Melville Sound on a rescue mission.
It was typical of Bedford Pim that he took a small party of ten men, with one manhauled sledge and one small dogsled. The manhauled sledge broke down. Pim sent all but two of his party back and, ever the loner, mushed on with his dogs in the –50° weather. It was slow going; twenty-eight days elapsed before he reached the cliffs of Mercy Bay.
Pim moved along the sullen coastline, seeking a cairn, unaware of the ship hidden from view by the hummocky ice. At last one of his men pointed to a black spot in the bay. Pim identified it through his telescope, left the sled behind, and pushed forward ahead of his men, throwing his hat in the air and screeching into the wind. All agreed that the scene that followed could not be properly described. When McClure finally identified his rescuer as the man he had last seen near Bering Strait – his face “black as Erebus” from the smoke of the coal-oil lamp – the news that he sent back to his ship was at first treated as a joke. Then came pandemonium. The sick sprang from their beds. The artificers laid down their tools. All the men who could crawl poured from the hatchway. Some could not trust their eyes and began to touch and paw their rescuers. Pim was shocked by their wretched appearance and even more distressed to learn that their next meal consisted of a tiny piece of bread and a cup of weak cocoa. He sent immediately to his sledge for a package of bacon. His own men were so affected that tears rolled down their cheeks.