The Arctic Grail Read online

  Ross was less sure. As the two ships moved up the sound he became convinced that no passage existed. That suspicion was confirmed on a foggy afternoon at the end of August when they reached the thirty-mile point. Ross hove to, waiting for Parry to catch up and the weather to clear. The officer of the watch roused him from his cabin to announce the fog was lifting. Squinting into the ten-minute gap that appeared in the murk, Ross saw, or thought he saw, a chain of mountains blocking all access to the west. He was apparently the only man who glimpsed that mysterious range, which he charted as the Croker Mountains, named after the first secretary of the Admiralty. That was the story he told Parry and the others. Later, in his published account, he changed it and insisted that two of his crew had also seen the mountains. Few believed him.

  To the stunned surprise and anger of Parry and the others, Ross, without a word of explanation, turned about and headed for home, skimming down the sound past the Alexander “as if some mischief was behind him.”

  William Hooper, purser of the Alexander, expressed in his journal that day the frustration and disappointment felt aboard Parry’s ship: “Thus vanished our golden dreams, our brilliant hopes, our high expectations! – and without the satisfaction of proving those dreams to be visionary, these hopes to be fallacious, those expectations to be delusive! To describe our mortification and disappointment would be impossible, at thus having our increasing hopes annihilated in a moment, without the shadow of reasoning appearing.…” It wasn’t until the next day, when the expedition put in to shore near the mouth of Lancaster Sound, that Parry was given any explanation by Ross. Parry held his tongue; Ross, he indicated later, was beyond argument. (But Parry, who had other fish to fry, was also remarkably silent about the episode in his private journal.)

  Ross’s actions were nonetheless inexplicable. He seems to have misinterpreted his instructions, claiming his main task was to explore Baffin Bay. Yet his orders were quite clear: the principal object of the voyage was to see if there was a passage leading toward the Pacific. It was almost as if the doughty seaman didn’t believe in the existence of the North West Passage and had seized the first opportunity to confirm that opinion.

  But why the haste? Why this sudden scramble to return home? Parry had expected to winter on the shores of Baffin Bay; so had most of the crew. “Do not expect us back this year,” a young artilleryman named Captain Edward Sabine, the astronomer of the voyage, wrote to his brother. “… Ross will not return if he can possibly find an excuse for waiting on the northern coast of America.” But Ross had found an excuse to hightail it for home, even though the expedition was supplied with winter clothing and provisions for another season. Thus were sown the seeds of dissension that pitted Parry, Sabine, and, of course, John Barrow, against the commander.

  There were suggestions later that all had not been well on the expedition. Ross was convinced that “a serious conspiracy existed during the voyage and still existed against him.” The conspirators included Parry, Sabine, and possibly his own nephew, a young midshipman and future polar hero, James Clark Ross. No doubt Ross felt he had reason for the charge. At one point, he had managed to sneak a look at one of Sabine’s letters to his sister in which the astronomer had called Ross “a stupid fellow.” Thus, on the very first voyage of discovery, there was a hint of the terrible tensions that marked so many later forays, when men found themselves crammed together under trying conditions for long months in a forbidding climate. There was much worse to come.

  The expedition returned to England on November 11, 1818. John Wilson Croker, whose name was on a range of mountains that most of Ross’s officers believed imaginary, invited the commander to dine on the sixteenth. Ross was about to accept the invitation when he received a heartbreaking letter from his wife. Their only child was dead.

  “I am not fit to go into company,” he told Croker. “I must write to my wife.”

  To which Croker replied, “Damn the child. You’ll get more children, come and dine with me.”

  This appalling response shook Ross, who responded with anger, “Mr. Croker, you have an only child of your own. If it please God to take him from you I hope you will be better supported under the calamity than I am, but I cannot and will not dine with you.”

  Croker was “very much displeased.” Barrow was already furious at what he considered the failure of both his expeditions, in spite of the solid contributions each had made to science. The attempt at the Pole might be excused; nature had clearly conspired against Buchan and Franklin on that first abortive expedition in 1818. But Ross’s dereliction in not examining Lancaster Sound could not be forgiven. Ross had restored Baffin Bay to the map, encountered a new race of Eskimos, made a series of scientific observations, and collected new botanical specimens. But to Barrow, it was the Passage that really counted.

  Parry certainly believed a passage existed and undoubtedly said so to Barrow. But publicly he kept quiet, as he had on board the Alexander. There would certainly be a new expedition in the spring, and Parry badly wanted to lead it. So did Ross, who had been promoted to post captain and who applied for the command on December 29.

  Parry was ahead of him by almost a fortnight. He had nothing to gain by a controversy with his old commander. It certainly wouldn’t help his naval career. Besides, what if Ross was right about the Croker Mountains? Parry would look a fool if he disputed that discovery. He whispered his opinions to his family but swore them to silence. “Every future prospect of mine depends on it being kept secret,” he explained. Let the “blundering Ross,” as Parry called him, blunder further.

  Ross did. In January 1819, he published his account of the voyage. This contained not only the author’s own engraving of the mysterious mountains but also a further explanation of his reasons for turning back. The sound, he declared, had been blocked by ice. That was news to Parry and Sabine.

  Ross’s work was scarcely off the presses of John Murray’s publishing house before Barrow pounced. In a savage article in the Quarterly Review, he tore Ross’s book to shreds. The article ran to fifty pages and was unsigned, but everybody knew who had written it.

  In his review Barrow came close to calling Ross a coward. He talked of his “indifference and want of perseverance.” He hammered away at what he called Ross’s “habitual inaccuracy and looseness of description.” He sneered at his chapter on the new-found band of Greenland Eskimos and made fun of the term “Arctic Highlanders.” (“He has transferred half of Scotland to the shores of this bay.”) He attacked the “absurdity and inconsistency of the plates,” especially those dealing with the Croker Mountains. No paragraph, however minor, escaped his scrutiny – even Ross’s description of the icebergs at night. “Icebergs display no colour at night,” Barrow scoffed.

  There was worse to come. Young Edward Sabine now entered the lists. He had been hired, on Joseph Banks’s recommendation, to make scientific observations during the voyage. He’d had little scientific training but spent several months diligently studying the variations of the compass and the vibrations of the pendulum. He was outraged that Ross in his book downgraded his efforts, gave another officer credit for certain observations, and criticized Sabine’s qualities as a naturalist, which he’d never claimed to be.

  Sabine fought back with a pamphlet, accusing Ross of plagiarism. He said that the commander had stolen material from one of his papers on the Eskimos and made extensive use of other material without giving him credit. Ross replied with another pamphlet claiming he hadn’t trusted Sabine’s work and so had made his own observations.

  The Navy could not ignore this unseemly sniping. The Admiralty Board held a court of inquiry and decided that John Ross’s actions were not becoming to an officer and a gentleman. He was retired on half pay and never again given a naval command. Ross would be heard from again, but in the meantime, Edward Parry would lead the next expedition to seek the North West Passage.

  3 Winter Harbour

  Even the most cursory study of the annals of Arctic explorati
on makes one thing clear: many a reputation rests on luck as much as skill. The shifting Arctic climate doomed some men to frustration and even to death while it made heroes out of others. Parry was luckier than most. He sailed north at the right moment, when the Arctic channels were clearer of ice than they had been in a decade. In fact, he almost got through the North West Passage. More than thirty years would go by before any other vessel got as far; and no other sailing ship entering from the east ever got farther.

  If Parry had tried in the previous year or if in 1819 he had met with the violent winds and ice conditions encountered by later explorers, he would not have achieved his place in history. In his day the shifting nature of the polar winds and currents and the implacable movements of the great ice streams were not understood. Parry himself was never able to repeat his triumph. Everything after 1819 was anticlimax. His real achievement lies not in his passage through the Arctic archipelago; other experienced officers in the British Navy could have made it through to Melville Island in that salubrious summer. His greater accomplishment was his understanding of his crew and his determination to keep them healthy in mind as well as body.

  The greatest peril of wintering in the Arctic was not the cold; it was boredom. For eight, sometimes ten months nothing moved. Ships became prisons. Masts and superstructure were taken down, hatches hermetically sealed, the ships smothered in blankets of insulating snow. Hived together in these wooden cockleshells with little to do, the best-disciplined seamen could break down. Small irritations could be magnified into raging quarrels. Fancied insults could lead to mutinous talk and even mutiny, as Bligh in the South Seas and Hudson in the North had discovered.

  Parry was determined to cope with the monotony of the Arctic winter, and it is a tribute to his careful planning, which the more intelligent of his successors copied, that the British Navy was comparatively free of the friction that marred many of the later private Arctic expeditions from the United States.

  Parry’s background fitted him for the role. Since childhood he had loved music; he had a good ear and at the age of four could repeat any tune after hearing it once. At school he threw himself into competitive sport and amateur theatricals. As a young naval officer he practised the violin three or four hours a day (though never, of course, on Sundays). He would, he said, sacrifice almost anything to become a tolerable player – anything, that is, except his duties. There would be plenty of music aboard Parry’s ships (he even brought a barrel organ along) and there would be sports, amateur theatricals, and a newspaper, all designed to maintain a happy ship.

  Parry belonged to a new generation of explorers as Ross had belonged to the old. He was the model by which those who followed would be judged, the touchstone for the British in the Arctic. He personified those public school values for which Thomas Arnold was soon to make Rugby famous. He had an unquestioning faith in the British ability to surmount any obstacle. In his observations of the Eskimos his measures were invariably Anglo-Saxon; their failings, strengths, and morals were judged by British standards. Devout, steadfast, and loyal, he believed in hard work and team spirit, was meticulous in collecting every kind of specimen and recording every scintilla of data, and saw the absolute necessity of keeping the lower orders occupied. A beau ideal, indeed.

  A handsome officer, tall, slightly stooped, with curly chestnut hair and soft grey eyes, he was amiable, well spoken, and eager to please, but never too eager – just the sort of man to appeal to John Barrow. There was that certain studied diffidence about Parry that would become a hallmark of the Victorian Englishman. His journals are rarely exclamatory; he doesn’t go overboard with excitement, nor does he make too much of hardship. That would be indecent, although, of course, it would be equally indecent if you did anything less than your best.

  He worried about scurvy, the nemesis of every Arctic traveller, and urged that the Navy’s favourite antiscorbutic, lemon juice (wrongly referred to as lime juice), should be prepared from fresh fruit. Along with this he carried pickles, spices, herbs, and sauerkraut. The new era of Arctic exploration coincided with the invention of tinned food. Parry was convinced that canned soups, vegetables, and meats would help stave off the disease and at least vary the traditional diet of salt meat. He ordered quantities of tinned food, which was so new that nobody had yet invented the can opener. Parry’s cooks used an axe.

  He could scarcely believe his good fortune at having been given such a senior command. He was only twenty-eight, but at that he was the oldest officer on the expedition. Sabine, who had again signed on as supernumerary, was thirty, but all the others, including Lieutenant Matthew Liddon, commander of Parry’s second ship, Griper, and John Ross’s nephew, James, were under twenty-three. Parry’s ship, Hecla, was a bomb vessel built at the close of the Napoleonic Wars and therefore of exceptionally sturdy construction, “a charming ship” in contrast to Liddon’s Griper, one of “these paltry Gunbrigs … utterly unfit for this service!”

  By April 1819 the ships – resplendent in a fresh coating of black and yellow paint – were ready to go. The British public was agog, its appetite whetted by the controversy over the Croker Mountains, its imagination fired by the prospect of a solution to the perennial puzzle of the Passage. The Navy had never stood higher in public esteem. A companion voyage to Parry’s, led by another officer, John Franklin, newly returned from his failed attempt to reach the Pole, would trek overland to explore the Arctic coastline of North America. (Few questioned the incongruity of a naval man leading a land exploration.) Together, Franklin and Parry would conquer the Arctic for the glory of England and Empire!

  Down to the docks at Greenwich the well-wishers flocked. In Parry’s view, no other official expedition had ever attracted “a more hearty feeling of national interest.” The multitudes that scrambled aboard the decks included Edward Sabine’s niece, a Miss Browne, with whom, it was understood, Parry had an understanding. A flirtatious little incident followed when Parry amused his party by encircling the girl with a life preserver and making her inflate it.

  At last the wind was right, and the ships were towed down the sunlit Thames as crowds cheered and handkerchiefs fluttered. Parry’s instructions, on leaving the Nore on May 11 and crossing the Atlantic, were to head directly up Davis Strait to Lancaster Sound and attempt the passage. If the Croker Mountains should bar the way, he was to continue north to those other inlets with the plebeian names, Jones and Smith sounds, in hopes that one might lead into the heart of the Arctic. Once again the Admiralty instructions made it clear that the search for the Passage was his primary object. Scientific work was secondary. He was not to stop to examine or chart the coastline. He was to get through as quickly as possible and deliver his documents to the Russian governor at Kamchatka, sail on to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and then return home. Optimism ran high; Parry had forecast the possibility of getting through to China although that was “perhaps too much to hope for.”

  It certainly was. It was as well that Parry did not realize how slim his chances were of forcing his way through. In a bad season, when the ice was heavy, the odds were about one in a hundred, in a light season about fifty-fifty. Even in an exceptional season – and this was an exceptional season – there was a 25-per-cent chance of failure.

  Parry’s first setback came when he ran into the great river of ice that detaches itself from the polar pack and pours down the centre of Davis Strait. Boldly, he had decided to force his way directly through it to the west – a short cut that would save weeks of detours – using the Hecla as a battering ram to clear the way for the weaker Griper. But by June 25 he was trapped, and a week went by before he could extricate both ships. Unable to penetrate that chill barrier, he sailed north for three weeks, crossing the Arctic Circle into Baffin Bay before attempting once more to bull his way through by brute force.

  Now his crews experienced for the first time the exhausting drudgery that would plague Arctic exploration for all of the century. Straining at the oars in small boats, they attempte
d to tow the big vessels through the ice-choked channels. Winding and sweating at the capstans, with cables attached to anchors in the bergs, they warped their ships westward, foot by foot. Trudging along the floes, clinging to hawsers like tug-of-war teams, they manhauled them in the direction of Lancaster Sound. On one long day they toiled for eleven hours and moved no more than four miles. Once, when the Hecla was trapped, the crews worked for seven hours with ice saws to cut her free, only to find her frozen in again at day’s end. Parry urged them on with extra rations of rum and meat.

  On July 28, with his men wet and played out, Parry broke out of the eighty-mile barrier and reached open water off the western coast of Baffin Bay. Soon the ears of the exhausted seamen were assailed by the music of the great black whales – eighty-two of them counted in a single day – a shrill, ringing sound, rather like hundreds of musical glasses badly played.

  The broad entrance to Lancaster Sound lay directly ahead, the towering mountains of Bylot Island crowning its southern gatepost. Parry viewed the spectacle with mingled apprehension and excitement. The next few days would make his reputation or break it. He could not wait for the slower Griper. As soon as the wind was favourable, he signalled a rendezvous with Liddon and, on August 1, headed up the sound under full sail.

  The weather was clear; the mysterious channel lay open. As the wind increased to a gale Parry could notice the “breathless anxiety … now visible in every countenance.” Nobody had sailed up this broad lane of water since the days of the Iceland fishermen who almost certainly had explored it six centuries before. Everything was new: long inlets – or were they only bays? – leading south and north from both shores; serrated hills on the south rising one above the other to the snow-clad peaks above, contrasting with the smoother outline of the north shore, only flecked with snow. Was there land ahead? Was the route to the North West Passage blocked, as Ross believed? William Hooper, who had been Parry’s purser on the previous voyage with Ross and who was now purser of the Hecla, wrote in his journal, “I never remember to have spent a day of so much fearful anxiety.” Ever since entering the sound he had been overcome by “an agony of feeling … gradually winding itself up.”