The Arctic Grail Read online

  Thus equipped, the expedition was ready to sail. “Oh, how I long to be among the ice!” exclaimed Parry, with all the zest of a schoolboy. This time his route would be different. The only other known avenue leading into the Arctic was Henry Hudson’s original route. Was it possible that despite earlier disappointments a passage still might be found leading westward from Hudson Bay? The most likely opening was Repulse Bay, which had certainly repulsed Christopher Middleton in the previous century. Still, it had been only partially explored. Was it really a bay or, like Lancaster Sound, might it prove to be a strait? This was Parry’s initial goal. Perhaps he might be able to link up with John Franklin, still exploring the Arctic coast of North America to the west.

  Again, his instructions ordered him to give the Passage priority. Everything else including the mapping of the continental coastline was to be secondary. In retrospect, the Navy seems to have got its priorities backward. The Elizabethan idea that the Passage would provide a practical route to the fabled wealth of the Orient had long been discarded. But the collection of botanical and geological specimens, the recording of the folkways of the aborigines, the magnetic and environmental observations – all these made sense. So did the mapping of the islands and the charting of the coastline. Yet everybody remained obsessed by the puzzle of the Passage, even though it was the least important of the Arctic mysteries. It fired the imagination of the most hard-headed. The search was akin to other quests that whispered to Englishmen of romance, brave deeds, daring sacrifice. England was about to enter a new age – another Arthurian period, perhaps – with a new Grail to be sought and new glory to be won.

  At Deptford, crowds sought to swarm aboard the Hecla, to walk decks and touch railings that had once been encased in ice, to bask vicariously in her ordeal. So many demanded admission that Parry mounted a grand ball on the Fury, which was especially decked out for the occasion. As the band played on the upper deck, the glittering company danced on and on into the night under a rising moon, each celebrant convinced that he was in the presence of adventure.

  Ten days later – April 27, 1821 – both vessels were ready to sail. On May 8, they reached the Nore. Six weeks later they were off Hudson Strait. Here Parry sent one final letter home, invoking the Deity and recording his own humility in the presence of his Maker. “I never felt so strongly the vanity, uncertainty, and comparative unimportance of everything this world can give,” he wrote, “and the paramount necessity of preparation for another and a better life than this.”

  The only known route to Repulse Bay was to circle round the western shores of Southampton Island at the top of Hudson Bay. But Parry decided to gamble by taking a short cut through the mysterious Frozen Strait, which lay to the northeast. This was unknown territory. Some, indeed, believed the strait didn’t exist; half the available maps didn’t show it. Parry wasn’t even sure that he had reached the entrance and so pushed blindly on in a thick fog and a fierce blizzard to find, to his surprise, that he had come through the strait, which wasn’t frozen, and entered Repulse Bay without knowing it. Alas, a quick survey disclosed that the bay was land locked. This was not the route to the Passage. If one was to be found it must be farther north.

  Parry’s second voyage, 1821-22

  For the next six weeks he searched for a promising inlet but found nothing. At last, on October 8, he gave up, found an anchorage off the east coast of the Melville Peninsula (the name of the First Lord was becoming ubiquitous), and anchored at a point he called Winter Island. This would be his resting place until the following July.

  It was a long winter, but it passed more comfortably than the one Parry had endured on his earlier voyage. The new Sylvester stove kept the ships warm and dry, and scurvy was not a problem, thanks partly to the hundred pounds of mustard and cress that Parry managed to grow. Nor was the crew affected by the melancholy brought on by the long night, for in these southern latitudes the sun did not completely vanish.

  Lyon, who was used to the garish hues of the Mediterranean, was charmed by the pastels of the northern skies. The delicacy and the pureness of the tinting, he thought, excelled anything he’d seen in Italy, while the pink blush that accompanied a hard frost was “far more pleasing than the glittering borders which are so profusely seen on the clouds of warmer climates.”

  In the clear nights, devoid of haze, the moon and the stars shone with such lustre that Lyon was almost persuaded the surrounding desolation was pleasing. As for the aurora, he, like every other newcomer to the North, was dazzled and awed. When it first appeared, he noted a shower of falling rays “like those thrown from a rocket,” trickling and pulsating down the great well of the sky. This was followed by a series of massive illuminations, some as faint as the glow of the Milky Way and others like “wondrous showers of fire,” streaming and shooting in all directions. He could almost fancy that he heard a rushing sound because of the sudden glare and the rapid bursts of light, but that, he was convinced, was an illusion: the aurora was as silent as the land itself.

  There were diversions. The officers shaved off their whiskers to play female roles in the theatre. (Parry played Sir Anthony Absolute in Sheridan’s The Rivals.) The school was a success; by year’s end, every man had learned to read. But the greatest event was the arrival on February 1 of a band of sixty Eskimos “as desirous of pleasing us as we were ready to be pleased.” Soon there was fiddling and dancing on the decks as the newcomers made repeated visits to the ships.

  As Parry noted, in his restrained way, the natives “served in no small degree to enliven us at this season.” There were undoubtedly other pleasures. The Eskimo women were remarkably accommodating, as later explorers discovered. (Both Peary and Stefansson took native mistresses.) It is hard to believe, though there is little supporting evidence, that fleeting alliances were not formed by the officers and men of the Parry expedition. That, after all, had been the pattern in the South Seas since the days of the Bounty. The only recorded hint comes from a private diary kept by the American explorer Charles Francis Hall, who visited the area more than forty years later. An old Eskimo woman named Erktua told Hall that Parry was her first lover and Lyon her second and that Parry had been jealous of Lyon. She added that Lyon, after abandoning her, had left two Eskimo sisters pregnant. Hall believed her story but later questioned it when he learned that Erktua was claiming that he had tried to seduce her. Parry noted that the Eskimo men were accustomed to exchanging wives and that it was not uncommon for the men to offer their spouses freely for sale. The women, he noted, were modest enough when their husbands were with them, but in their absence “evinced … their utter disregard of connubial fidelity.” The departure of the men was usually a signal for throwing aside restraint. Lyon, who noticed many young Eskimo couples showing affection by the traditional method of rubbing noses, also noted that “they have no scruples on the score of mutual infidelity.… It is considered extremely friendly for two men to exchange wives for a day or two, and the request is sometimes made by the women themselves. These extraordinary civilities, although known, are never talked of, and are contrived as secretly as possible.” Small wonder then that Parry wrote of the natives’ presence enlivening the season.

  Were these winters in Foxe Basin as placid and as pleasant as the official journals of the two commanders indicate? The British were notoriously tight lipped in these matters, but here and there a hint of darker passions emerges. In the light of what is now known about the tensions and dissensions that existed on so many later voyages, it is not reasonable to believe that even under Parry everything was congenial. Two months after Parry returned to England, Douglas Clavering, an old naval hand who had just returned from a scientific voyage to Greenland and Spitzbergen on the Griper, wrote to a friend that Parry, who was already planning a third expedition, had declined to take any of his former officers (with one exception, James Clark Ross) on the voyage, “in consequence of quarrels, misbehaviour and insubordination.” Besides the expedition to Foxe Basin being a complete failur
e, Clavering wrote, “from one acquainted with the facts … I know enough to say … it is also thought most disgraceful.” Clavering’s gossip seems to have come from James Ross himself, through his friend Edward Sabine.

  In the official journals, of course, there is no suspicion of discord. In May, Parry sent Lyon off on a fortnight’s sledge trip up the Melville Peninsula to seek an opening to the west – a journey that left the travellers badly frostbitten. Lyon did not find a passage but thought there might be a route around the peninsula to the north, and Parry, desperate to get his ships free of the ice, kept his crews toiling for three weeks to saw a channel out to open water. Although two men died, perhaps from the effects of the work, Parry was able on July 2 to set his course north.

  At Igloolik, the native village at the top of Foxe Basin, he again encountered an impenetrable barrier. But thanks to the Eskimos, who turned out to be astonishingly expert map makers, he was pretty sure a passage existed to the west between the head of the peninsula and the west coast of Baffin Island.

  Once again Lyon was dispatched across the ice with a band of Eskimos to pick up fresh fish and assess the chances of getting through. He lived with the natives and clearly enjoyed the experience. He learned to eat their food (including an Eskimo delicacy, nerooka, the contents of the entrails and stomachs of slaughtered deer) “on the principle that no man who wishes to conciliate or inquire into the manners of savages should refuse to fare as they do.” He danced with the Eskimo women, taught them to play leapfrog, even allowed himself to be tattooed in the native style. Waking one midnight in a tent from a feeling of great warmth, he discovered he was sharing a large deerskin coverlet with his Eskimo host, his two wives, and their favourite puppy, “all fast asleep and stark naked.”

  But Lyon found no open water. The ice, though decaying, was still as thick as three feet while the land was obscured by fog. Parry’s patience was wearing thin. He was convinced he was at the threshold of the Passage, yet he couldn’t move. On their maps, the Eskimos had indicated the presence of a narrow fiord. Did it actually lead to the open sea? Parry determined to find out for himself. On August 18, 1822, he stood on the north point of the Melville Peninsula overlooking the narrowest part of the inlet the Eskimos had shown. Toward the west, where the water widened, he could see no land and was certain he had discovered the polar sea. He was convinced he could force his way by this narrow strait, which he named for his ships – Fury and Hecla. Now all he could do was to wait for the ice to clear.

  But the ice did not clear. The weather grew almost balmy. An eastern breeze sprang up. But the ice refused to budge. By late September, with a bitter gale blowing in from the northwest, Parry gave up. In his later, matter-of-fact account, one can sense the bitterness of his disappointment. He had waited until the last moment, cherishing the belief that a miracle might occur, but there was no miracle. When he called his officers together, all agreed they should remain at Igloolik for another winter and try again the following summer. They could not know that it would be eleven months to the day before they could once more break free of the encircling bonds of ice.

  5 Innuee and kabloonas

  For the next ten months, Parry and his crews were in almost daily contact with the band of two hundred Eskimos who spent the winter at Igloolik. A strong case can be made, though few thought to make it at the time, that the only important results of this abortive and largely negative expedition were the accounts that Parry and Lyon brought back of the natives’ customs and society. Lyon’s work especially provided the underpinnings for later anthropological studies of the Melville Peninsula natives.

  Both officers had been privileged to observe an aboriginal society in its untouched state, before the onset of white civilization – a society that had managed to exist and even to thrive in one of the harshest environments on the globe. Parry produced a long essay on Eskimo culture in an appendix to his published journal. Lyon devoted most of his published account to describing his adventures among the natives and his observations of their habits.

  They were, of course, amateurs, not anthropologists. Anthropology, in fact, hadn’t yet become a discipline and wouldn’t do so until mid-century. But both were keen observers. They liked the Eskimos, and in that long and monotonous confinement they had the time to examine a culture that both found foreign and fascinating. If they judged the Eskimos in terms of their own moral standards it is not surprising. After all, they were English officers; it did not occur to them, nor would it have occurred to any other Englishman in that age, that differing conditions require differing codes of conduct. Parry’s attitude was similar to that expressed by naval colleagues who followed in his footsteps. The cheerful natives, he discovered, “maintain a degree of harmony among themselves which is scarcely ever disturbed.” That being the case, they could only benefit from Christian evangelism. “On a disposition thus naturally charitable what might not a Christian education and Christian principles effect!”

  Parry’s assessment here makes curious reading in the context of an earlier passage. He had seen and commented on the effect that a century of Christian civilization had produced among the Eskimos of Hudson Strait, whom he compared unfavourably with those of Igloolik. These “civilized” Eskimos were thieves, pilferers, and pickpockets, so greedy that one even offered to sell his two children for some trade goods – but only after removing their clothes, which weren’t part of the bargain! Parry couldn’t abide them, but he failed to link cause and effect.

  By contrast, the uncivilized natives of Southampton Island and the Melville Peninsula were honest to a fault. If you dropped a handkerchief or a glove, they ran after you to return it. Sledges could be left unguarded without fear of loss. Lyon once purposely left a stock of knives, scissors, looking-glasses, and other coveted objects in an Eskimo hut, then wandered off, leaving a dozen natives behind. When he returned, he found his possessions intact and carefully covered with a skin.

  There were some minor cases of pilfering. Parry, in an act of singular insensitivity, tied up one thief and threatened to have him flogged. But, as Lyon said, where objects of iron were involved, “it is scarcely to be wondered that such a temptation should prove irresistible; had small golden bars been thrown in the streets of London, how would they have fared?”

  To Parry and Lyon, the most unusual aspect of the Eskimo character was its lack of passion. They were not a warlike or quarrelsome people. Those human emotions, so much a part of the European psychological profile, were curiously lacking or, at the very least, sublimated. Love and jealousy were apparently unknown – a fact that Lyon divined from his study of “the deplorable state of morals and common decency” among the women, who, though remarkably modest in public (even sitting apart from the men at a dance), thought nothing of bestowing their favours in private “without shame and without complaint from their husbands.”

  In Lyon’s view, the Eskimos did not possess much of the milk of human kindness. Sympathy, compassion, gratitude – these qualities did not appear on the surface. Death was so much a part of Eskimo life that they had become inured to it. In a pitiless land, there was no room for pity. Three days of lamentation were allowed after a death, and the mourners all cried real tears – but only for about a minute. They seemed indifferent to the presence of death. Nobody bothered to cover corpses. Bodies were dug up and gnawed by the dogs. Lyon once saw a plate of meat placed on the body of a dead child that lay wrapped in his cabin. The British thought the Eskimos callous, but in the Arctic, where exposure, starvation, and disease killed so many so young, no other attitude was possible if sanity were to be maintained.

  Parry remarked on what he called “the selfishness of the savage”; he thought it one of their greatest failings. The British, who showered presents on the natives and fed them when they were near starvation, were annoyed that none said thank you or showed gratitude. Obviously, it never occurred to any Eskimo to acknowledge a gift or a service. In their own world, they were forced to depend on one another. You he
lped a man out one day; he helped you out the next. That was the way the Arctic world worked; no one was expected to acknowledge kindness. The Eskimos cheerfully helped the British, hauling water on sledges, showing them how to build a snow wall around the Fury, drawing maps of the coastline, bringing in fresh fish. In return they expected presents, but to say thank you would have been redundant. Their own doors were always open and their food shared with strangers without hope or expectation of payment.

  They accepted tragedy as they accepted death, with fatalistic indifference or, on occasion, with laughter and high spirits. A man could leave his dying wife, not caring who looked after her in his absence. A sister could laugh at the sufferings of a dying brother. A sick woman could be blockaded inside a snow hut without anybody bothering to discover when she died. Old people with no dependants were simply left to eke out a living or expire. This “brutal insensitivity,” as Lyon called it, was appalling to his English readers, who could not comprehend the savage conditions faced by the people of Igloolik.

  If they discarded pity they also discarded the harsher emotions. Revenge was unknown to them, as was war. They did not quarrel among themselves; an exchange of blows was a rarity. They could not afford the luxury of high passion; they needed to husband their feelings in the daily battle with the environment. They had learned to laugh at adversity, and they laughed and grinned a great deal, even when life was hard for them, as it usually was.

  The Eskimos lived for the day – for any day might be their last. Parry thought them improvident, and so they were in his terms. Life for them was feast or famine. When food was available, they ate it all; when there was none, they went without, uncomplaining. The British thought them gluttons, but gluttony in that spare land was one of the few luxuries they knew. They were always thirsty and, when they could, drank copious quantities of water and other fluids. For thirst – raging thirst – was as common in the Arctic as in the desert. To eat snow was tabooed for whites and natives alike, for the resultant loss of body heat could kill a man. But snow could only rarely be melted because fuel was as precious a commodity as food; water was a luxury to be obtained at its expense.