The Arctic Grail Read online

  But the lookout, high in the crow’s-nest – a barrel tied to the top mast – could see no hint of any barrier. Here, the sound, clear of ice, was eighty miles wide. Two days went by and all hands began to feel a sense of relief. The optimists who had figured the distance and bearing to the west began to believe that the Passage could be mastered.

  Then, at six on the evening of August 4, hopes were dashed when the lookout reported land ahead. “Vexation and anxiety” were seen on every countenance until it turned out to be a small island. At last the question was answered: the channel ahead was clear. Ross’s failing eyesight had played him false, or perhaps he was deceived by one of the mirages caused by the refraction of light that were to become familiar to future explorers. Parry was careful not to gloat, but the ship’s surgeon, Alexander Fisher, confided to his diary that none could “avoid feeling a secret satisfaction that their opinions have turned out to be true.…”

  The Griper joined Parry’s ship, passing under her stern and raising a shout of congratulation at what Hooper called “our escape from Croker’s Mountains.” The purser was ecstatic: “There was something peculiarly animating in the joy which lighted every countenance.… We had arrived in a sea which had never before been navigated, we were gazing on land that European eyes had never before beheld … and before us was the prospect of realizing all our wishes, and of exalting the honor of our country.…”

  The Croker Mountains vanished from the map. Where Ross had insisted he had seen land there was only water ahead – a broad strait that Parry named, not for Croker, but for his patron, John Barrow. The first secretary would have to be content to have his name on a small bay on the north shore of Lancaster Sound.

  The water highway stretched straight as a bowsprit directly into the heart of the unknown Arctic archipelago. Parry was like a man travelling through a long tunnel, able only to guess at the mysteries that lay to the north and south. On the north shore of the sound he could see precipices, cut by chasms and fiords, rising sheer for five hundred feet above the rubbled beach; to the south, the tableland was interrupted by broad channels, one of them (which he named Prince Regent Inlet) more than forty miles wide. Was this the route to the Bering Sea?

  Blocked by ice ahead, Parry, joined now by the Griper, turned into the inlet and sailed southwest for more than one hundred miles past the snow-choked ravines and vertical rock walls of the great island (Somerset) on his starboard. More ice barred his way, facing him with a new dilemma. Perhaps this was only a bay after all! Back he went into Lancaster Sound, finding open water along the north shore. Snow, sleet, and rain held him up, but then, on August 12, the weather cleared and he headed west into the very heart of the archipelago.

  Island masses loomed up, bisected by more broad channels to which he gave names. He left the Precambrian cliffs and glacially ravaged peaks that rose above the notched coastline of Devon Island, crossed the thirty-mile mouth of the broad channel that led into the northern mists and which he named for the Duke of Wellington, and swept on – past the terraced rock hills of Cornwallis Island, past the tattered fringes and wriggling fiords of Bathurst Island, and finally into the immense inland sea that he named Viscount Melville Sound after the First Lord of the Admiralty.

  Parry’s first voyage, 1819-20

  On September 4 the two ships crossed the meridian of 110 degrees west and the following day, after divine service, Parry broke the news to his ecstatic crew that they had gained the five-thousand-pound parliamentary bounty. His own portion would be one thousand pounds, a small fortune at that time. It was well earned; in one remarkable five-week sweep, he had explored some eight hundred miles of new coastline.

  To the north of the sound Parry could see the twelve-hundred-foot cliffs and the rugged highlands of another great island, which he also named for Viscount Melville. Eighteen days later, with the weather worsening and more ice forming, he gave up the struggle and went into winter quarters in a small bay on the island’s south shore. It was an exacting task. The crew worked for nineteen hours without a break in the ghostly light of the aurora sawing a channel, square by square, in the bay ice, which seemed to reform before their eyes. After three days, a channel 2⅓ miles long had been cut and the ships safely warped through. They would remain here for more than eight months, protected from the fury of the sea by a reef of rocks. Parry named it Winter Harbour.

  Parry and his men were now marooned at the very heart of the darkest and most desolate realm in all the northern hemisphere. The nearest permanent civilized community lay twelve hundred miles to the east at the wretched little hamlet of Godhavn on an island on Greenland’s west coast. The nearest white men were the fur traders at Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake, seven hundred miles to the south. Another twelve hundred miles to the southwest were the uninhabited shores of Russian Alaska and beyond that Siberia. To the north, a frozen world stretched stark and empty to the Pole. Thus for hundreds of miles in every direction the land was devoid of human life; the nearest Eskimos were close to five hundred miles away. Soon any surrounding wildlife would vanish, including exotic quadrupeds yet to be identified – muskoxen, caribou, lemmings – as well as new species of gulls and terns. A few guttering candles, rationed carefully to one inch a day, flickered wanly in the polar night to mark the one point of civilization that existed in a frozen realm almost as large as Europe.

  These were the first white men to winter in the Arctic archipelago. Under such conditions Parry realized men could become half crazed. His regime, foreshadowing Dr. Arnold, had one purpose: to keep his crews so busy that no man would have a moment to consider his situation. There would be plenty of daily exercise, regular inspections of men and their quarters, and afternoons crammed with make-work. The emphasis was on physical health, cleanliness, and “business.” The men were up at 5:45 scrubbing the decks with warm sand. They breakfasted at 8 a.m., were inspected right down to their fingernails at 9:15, and then set about running round the deck, or, in good weather, on the shore. They were kept occupied all afternoon, drawing, knotting yarn, making points and gaskets. After supper (“tea” for the officers) they were allowed to play games or sing and dance until bedtime at nine. The officers’ evening occupations were, to use Parry’s words, of “a more rational kind.” They read books, wrote letters, played chess or musical instruments.

  Around them in the gathering gloom, the land stretched off, desolate and dreary, deathlike in its stillness, offering no interest for the eye or amusement for the mind. Parry noted that if he spotted a stone of more than usual size on one of the short walks he took from the ship, his eyes were hypnotically drawn to it and he found himself pulled in its direction. So deceptive was the unvarying surface of the snow that objects apparently half a mile away could be reached after a minute’s stroll. In such a landscape it was easy for a man to lose his bearings. Parry found it necessary to forbid anyone to wander far from the ships. When the darkness fell their isolation was complete. In mid-season one could, with difficulty, read a newspaper by daylight only at noon.

  He had not reckoned with the intensity of the cold. The slightest touch of an unmittened hand on a metal object tore off the skin. A telescope placed against the eye burned like a red-hot brand. The men’s leather boots were totally impractical; they froze hard and brought on frostbite. Parry devised more flexible footwear of canvas and green hide. Sores refused to heal. Lemon juice and vinegar froze solid and broke their containers; so did mercury in the thermometers. When doors were opened, a thick fog poured down the hatchways, condensing on the walls and turning to ice. Damp bedding froze, forcing the men into hammocks. Steam rising from the bake ovens congealed and froze, forcing a reduction in the bread allowance. There wasn’t enough fuel to heat the ships. The crews were never warm. The officers played chess bundled up in scarves and greatcoats.

  In spite of all this, the expedition produced and printed a weekly newspaper to which Parry himself contributed and put on fortnightly theatricals (the female impersonators shivering
gamely in their thin garments). It was almost too cold, Parry admitted, for actors or audience to enjoy the shows. In his own cabin the temperature dropped in February to just seven degrees Fahrenheit.

  By mid-March, with Liddon and more than twenty men sick – half from scurvy – Parry began to look to the future. When would the thaw come? How long must they remain imprisoned? A month later it was still bitingly cold. Parry had not reckoned on that; he began to have doubts about completing the passage to the west.

  Another fortnight dragged by. The sun now shone at midnight. The temperature nudged back up to the freezing point. Game began to appear – a few ptarmigan and, a month later, caribou. The fresh meat reduced the danger of scurvy but too late for one seaman, William Scott, who died at the end of June.

  That month Parry travelled north across Melville Island on a fortnight’s journey with four officers and eight men to a great indentation on the coast that he named Hecla and Griper Bay. They dragged eight hundred pounds of equipment with them on a two-wheeled cart – the first example of manhauling by naval personnel in the North. Although Parry knew the Eskimos used dogs for hauling sledges and would later make some use of them himself, the tradition he established – of men in harness, like draught animals – would continue into the new century to the days of Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic. The British Navy was never comfortable with dogs.

  July was the only really bearable month on Melville Island, but the ice still choked the harbour. As Parry’s surgeon, Fisher, whiled away the hours carving the names of the ships on a huge sandstone boulder on the beach – a famous monument in the years to follow – Parry chafed to be off, his sails in readiness for an immediate start. He knew how little time he had: nine weeks at the most, a painful truth he could not conceal from the crew.

  The delays that followed in late July and early August were maddening. The ice melted; they moved forward. The ice blocked their way; they anchored. The ice shifted; they moved again. The wind changed; the ice moved back. On August 4 they were able at last to set off into the west. Again the ice – the implacable ice! – frustrated them. The following day the floes closed in on the Griper, hoisting her two feet out of the water before retreating. Parry sent an officer ashore to climb a promontory and examine the state of the frozen sea to the west. He reported land some fifty miles distant, but the sea itself was covered with floes as far as the eye could reach, so closely joined that no gleam of water shone through. Parry named the new land Banks Land after the president of the Royal Society whose death, unknown to Parry, had occurred the previous month.

  His optimism was fading. The previous summer the Passage had seemed within his grasp. All winter he had planned to break out of Winter Harbour and sail blithely on to the Bering Sea. Now the Arctic was showing its real face. The ice held him in thrall for five days. When it cleared he veered north-northwest. Again it stopped him. He ran east looking for a southern gap and once more found himself beset. Like a rodent in a trap he was scurrying this way and that, vainly seeking escape. On August 23, his ships battered by heavy blows, he managed to reach Cape Providence after performing “six miles of the most difficult navigation I have ever known among ice.” He had no way of knowing then that he was facing the dreaded ice stream that flows down from the Beaufort Sea, where the ice is fifty feet thick, its growth unimpeded by the presence of islands. This polar pack, squeezing down past Banks Land into Melville Sound and on through the channels that lead south and east toward the North American coast, is all but impenetrable, as John Franklin would one day discover. One hundred and twenty-four years would pass before the motors of the tough little RCMP schooner St. Roch finally pushed it through the barrier on the eastern side of the present Banks Island.

  By now heartsick and disillusioned, Parry had to admit that any further attempt was fruitless. He could not know, nor would it have been much comfort to him if he had known, that no sailing vessel would ever conquer the Passage – and no other vessel, either, in his century. A decision had to be made. By careful rationing he might stretch his food and fuel for another winter, but he could not answer for his crew’s health. Reluctantly he turned his ships eastward, hoping to find an alternate passage to the south. None appeared. At the end of August he set off for England and was home by the end of October with all but one of the ninety-four men who had gone north with him.

  Parry had been bamboozled by the vagaries of Arctic weather. He hadn’t reckoned on the severity of the climate or the shortness of the summer. He was convinced, rightly, that his chosen route was impractical. If the Passage was to be conquered another way must be found. Future explorers would have to hug the continental coastline, which his colleague Franklin was charting.

  He remained an optimist. Promoted to commander, buoyed up by the applause of the politicians, the congratulations of the Navy, and the cheers of the public, he could be pardoned for believing that next time he’d make it. But almost nine decades would pass before any white explorer travelled from Atlantic to Pacific by way of the cold Arctic seas.

  4 Fame, fortune, and frustration

  William Edward Parry was the nineteenth century’s first hero-explorer. He stood at the head of a long line of celebrated Britons that would include Franklin and M’Clintock, Burton and Speke, Livingstone and Stanley, Scott and Shackleton. These were folk figures, larger than life, their failings, flaws, and human frailties ignored by a public and a press that saw in them the personification of Imperial expansion.

  Fortune accompanied fame. Parry had one thousand pounds from parliament; now he accepted another thousand from the British publisher John Murray for the rights to his journal. He agonized briefly over whether he should take the money; but when he learned, to his annoyance, that Dr. Fisher was about to publish an account of his own, he swallowed his scruples and rushed into print without bothering to add the appendices that were planned to make up half the book.

  Letters of congratulation poured in. Parry might not have discovered the Passage, but he had, in his phrase, “made a large hole in it.” Equally important, he and his crew had “done our duty.” Surprisingly, one of the first fan letters came from the maligned John Ross. Parry had to admit that it was also among the most ardent and sincere. What a curiosity! “I propose having it framed and glazed and then to put it into the British Museum,” he wrote to his parents. What was his old adversary up to? Was Ross trying to curry favour? Parry would have none of that. He proposed in his own good time to pen a civil response but in such a way as “to prevent the possibility of his bringing on a correspondence, which is the game he now wants to play.”

  Meanwhile, his time was occupied by a round of social events that might have turned the head of a less phlegmatic officer. His portrait was painted by a member of the Royal Academy. He was given the freedom of his native city, Bath. He was presented at court; the new king, George IV, offered congratulations. London hostesses vied for his presence; exclusive clubs sought his membership, “which many noblemen would be glad to accept if they could get it” – a slight touch of snobbishness there, but one can hardly condemn Parry for revelling in his new-found glory, purchased at considerable cost and hardship. The first of the Arctic heroes was setting a pattern that others would seek to emulate. Considering the spoils, who would not dare to brave the Arctic blasts?

  Certainly Parry was eager to be off again. His main business that winter of 1820-21 was to prepare for a second voyage to conquer the Passage. Nothing less, as he told Barrow, would satisfy the British public. The quest had taken on some of the characteristics of a race. Parry’s main fear was that the Russians would beat the English to it.

  The decision was made before the year was out. Once again, as in all British naval expeditions, there would be two ships (if one foundered the other would succour the beleaguered crew), the Hecla again and the Fury, which was the Hecla’s sister, all its working parts interchangeable. Parry would command the Fury. The Hecla’s commander would be a dashing young lieutenant, George Lyon, “a
most gentlemanly clever fellow,” so Parry had been told, whose drawings “are the most beautiful I ever saw.” Lyon was used to hardship; he had barely survived a mission to the desert interior of North Africa on which a companion had died. Some of Parry’s shipmates from earlier voyages, including James Clark Ross, would also join the new expedition, whose commander was so optimistic that he urged Barrow to send a supply ship to meet him in the Bering Strait. The Navy declined.

  This time trunks of theatrical costumes were packed aboard along with the mandatory printing press, the magic lantern, and a full library of books that would be used in the schoolroom Parry intended to establish. In that long Arctic night he was determined that his unlettered crew would learn to read their Bibles.

  He expected this time to spend at least two winters in the Arctic; he was, in fact, provisioned for three. To help fend off scurvy he proposed to grow great quantities of mustard and cress and ordered stacks of hot frames for the purpose. As for the cold and the dreadful dampness, he would thwart that with the newly designed “Sylvester stove,” named for its inventor. It would carry warm air to every part of the ship (hermetically sealed this time with a cork lining) and, thanks to a more abundant supply of fuel, would burn day and night. Although the Navy was still sticking to wool, flannel, and leather, Parry improved on his improvised footgear, using flexible canvas tops and insulating cork soles and even made a small concession to aboriginal culture by supplying deerskin jackets for his men. He himself took along a fur coat to wear over his uniform.