The Arctic Grail Read online

  Parry once conducted an experiment by offering a young Eskimo, Tooloak, as much food and drink as he could consume overnight. In just twenty-one hours, eight of which were passed in sleep, Tooloak tucked away ten and a quarter pounds of bread and meat and drank almost two gallons of liquids, including soup and raw spirits. This native gourmandizing was turned into a contest by the irrepressible Lyon, who decided to pit his man, Kangara, against Tooloak. Kangara managed to devour in nineteen hours just under ten pounds of meat, bread, and candles and six quarts of soup and water. Lyon insisted that if Kangara had been given Tooloak’s extra two hours, he would have “beaten him hollow.”

  Parry found the Eskimo diet “horrible and disgusting.” The odor of blubber, which the natives crammed into their mouths raw, “was to us almost insufferable.” Some of his crew who first encountered the spectacle in Hudson Strait turned away from the sight in order to avoid being sick, whereupon the mischievous Eskimos ran after them, gleefully holding up pieces of raw blubber, inviting them to eat. Lyon, who had nibbled on sheep’s eyes with the bedouin of the Western desert, was less fastidious. He found the nerooka “acid and rather pungent, resembling as near as I could judge a mixture of sorrel and radish leaves.” Apparently, he concluded, “the acidity recommends it to these people,” but he didn’t ask why nor did he seem to connect the half-digested vegetable diet with the Eskimos’ remarkable freedom from scurvy.

  The natives were just as repelled by British food. They couldn’t abide sugar; even the smallest children disliked it. They spat out rum. When one was offered a cup of coffee and a plate of gingerbread, he made a wry face and acted as if he were taking medicine. One miserable woman who had been left to starve after her husband’s death was brought aboard the Hecla and offered bread, jelly, and biscuit. Lyon noticed that she threw the food away after pretending to eat it.

  If the Eskimos mystified the British with their customs and attitudes, they, in turn, were confused and baffled by the strange men aboard the big ships. They couldn’t understand, for instance, why these strangers hadn’t brought their wives with them, and when told that some had no wives, they were astonished. Surely every man in the world had at least one wife! Nor could they comprehend a community whose members were not related. In their tight-knit society, everybody was related by blood or adoption. To solve the problem, Lyon told them that he was father to the whole crew. That did not satisfy some of the women, who noted that certain of his “sons” seemed older than he. Nor could they understand the British caste system. It was clear that Parry and Lyon were important men; the Eskimos were convinced they owned their ships. But the gradations of rank confused them; in their society, everyone was equal.

  In spite of the clash of cultures, the two peoples got along famously. As Parry put it, “If … they are deficient in some of the higher virtues, as they are called, of savage life, they are certainly free, also, of some of its blackest vices.…” They were immensely helpful to Parry and his men, who, in turn, were generous with them. If the Britons thought of themselves as the Eskimos’ superiors, there is evidence that the Eskimos thought the opposite. Parry noted that “they certainly looked on us in many respects with profound contempt; maintaining the idea of self sufficiency which has induced them … to call themselves, by way of distinction Innuee, or mankind.” There is a telling little anecdote in Parry’s published account of an Eskimo, Okotook, trying to tie some gear onto a sledge by means of a white navy cord. It broke in his hand, whereupon he gave a contemptuous sneer and spat out the word for white man: “Kabloona!” To him, the material was clearly inferior, but then, what could one expect from a kabloona?

  To the British, the Eskimos were like children – untutored savages who could only benefit from the white man’s ways. This paternalism was quite unjustified. In the decades that followed, the real children in the Arctic would be the white explorers. Without the Eskimos to care for them, hunt for them, and guide them through that chill, inhospitable realm, scores more would have died of starvation, scurvy, exhaustion, or exposure. Without the Eskimos, the journeys to seek out the Pole and the Passage would not have been possible. Yet their contribution has been noted only obliquely. It was the British Navy’s loss that it learned so little from the natives. Had it paid attention, the tragedies that followed might have been averted.

  Here was a nation obsessed by science, whose explorers were charged with collecting everything from skins of the Arctic tern to the shells that lay on the beaches. Here were men of intelligence with a mania for figures, charts, and statistics, recording everything from the water temperatures to the magnetic forces that surround the Pole. Yet few thought it necessary to inquire into the reasons why another set of fellow humans could survive, year after year, winter after winter, in an environment that taxed and often broke the white man’s spirit.

  The British felt for the Eskimos, lamented their wretched condition, and couldn’t understand why, on being offered a trip to civilization – as Tooloak was by Parry – they flatly and vociferously refused the proposal. (Parry, to his credit, was relieved. “Not the smallest public advantage could be derived from it,” he declared.) Actually, in most instances, the white men were far worse off and much more wretched than the natives who were the objects of their sympathy. The Eskimos were clothed more practically and housed more efficiently in winter, and enjoyed much better health than the white explorers who were to attempt arduous overland expeditions that brought exhaustion and even death.

  The Eskimos wore loose parkas of fur or sealskin, but the British Navy stuck to the more confining wool, flannel, and broadcloth uniforms, with no protective hoods. The Eskimos kept their feet warm in sealskin mukluks; even Parry rejected Navy leather. The Eskimo sleds were light and flexible, the Navy’s heavy and cumbersome – and hauled by men, not dogs. No naval man ever learned the difficult technique of dog driving or the art of building a snow house on the trail. Fifty years after Parry’s experiences, naval ratings were still dragging impossible loads and carrying extra weight in the form of tents that were generally either sodden or frozen.

  Most puzzling of all, and most damning, is that in an age of science Europeans were unable to understand how the Eskimos escaped the great Arctic scourge that struck almost every white expedition to the North. The seeds of scurvy were already in Parry’s men, in spite of the lemon juice and marmalade, but no one connected the Eskimos’ diet with the state of their health. Though the effects of vitamins were unknown, the explorers sensed that scurvy was linked to diet and that fresh meat and vegetables helped ward it off. Nobody caught on to the truth that raw meat and blubber are effective antiscorbutics. For another half century, the Navy sent ship after ship into the North loaded down with barrels of salt meat while Navy cooks boiled or roasted away all the vitamins from the fresh provisions that were sometimes available.

  Why this apparent blindness? Part of it, no doubt, was the conservatism of the senior service and part the arrogance of the nineteenth-century English upper classes, who considered themselves superior to most other peoples, whether they were Americans, Hottentots, or Eskimos. But another part of it, surely, was fear: the fear of going native. Could any proper Englishman traipse about in ragged seal fur, eating raw blubber and living in hovels built of snow? Those who had done such things in some of the world’s distant corners had been despised as misfits who had thrown away the standards of civilization to become wild animals. Besides, it was considered rather like cheating to do things the easy way. The real triumph consisted of pressing forward against all odds without ever stooping to adopt the native style. To the very proper officers who still donned formal jackets and polished buttons for mess dinners in the Arctic wastes, that idea was unthinkable. They enjoyed these strange, childlike, wayward people, but they didn’t want to copy them.

  And yet, when the Eskimos began to leave in the spring in April of 1823, the English missed their company and perhaps even envied their flexibility. The natives were on the move; the white men were sti
ll closeted in ships caught fast in the ice.

  Parry was determined to send one ship home and carry on alone and had already shifted the Hecla’s stores to the Fury for that purpose. But the winter had been appallingly cold, the ice showed no signs of budging, and the tell-tale signs of scurvy – blackened gums, loose teeth, sore joints – were making their appearance. Parry believed that cleanliness and exercise would help forestall the disease. Of course, he was wrong.

  August came; no release. Once again the crews toiled to saw a channel through the pack towards open water. Weakened by illness, debilitated in mind and body by eleven months of being cooped up, they could not apply themselves with the same vigour. When Parry climbed the masthead of the Fury and gazed off to the westward, his heart sank. As far as he could see, the ice stretched off unbroken. There was no help for it. He would have to return home.

  On August 12, he bade good-bye to Igloolik. For thirteen months he had hovered off the mouth of the narrow strait to the north, tantalized by the conviction that this was the entrance to the Passage – that the open sea lay less than a hundred miles to the west. Once more he had to admit defeat; the ice master of the Hecla was already dying of scurvy; others would follow unless he could get back to civilization.

  It was not easy. Even when he escaped from the ice-locked harbour and fought his way through the pack, there were hold-ups. In one period of twenty-six days, he was beset for twenty-four. The scurvy patient died before he could get home. Finally, on October 10, he anchored off Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, to the ringing of bells and the cheers of the inhabitants, who rushed to the wharfside to greet the ships, “the first race of civilized men we had seen in seven and twenty months.” That night the little town was illuminated as tar barrels blazed in every street.

  Parry must have faced this enthusiasm with mixed feelings. His discoveries had been negative: there was no route to the Passage by Hudson Bay, for he was convinced that no ship could squeeze through the ice that clogged Fury and Hecla Strait. On the earlier expedition he had ventured briefly down the long fiord he had named for the Prince Regent – perhaps that would point the way! John Franklin had returned from his survey of the continental coastline to report the discovery of a navigable channel running west. Did the bottom of Prince Regent Inlet connect with that passage? Parry was convinced that it did. All that was left was to mount another expedition to explore it. With his usual optimism he declared that he “had never felt more sanguine of ultimate success.” He was confident that England might yet be destined “to succeed in an attempt which has for centuries engaged her attention, and interested the whole civilized world.”

  Parry, in short, had not given up. He was scarcely home before he was lobbying for a third chance to seize the prize. The mystery of the Passage obsessed him, as it obsessed all literate England. No hardship was too unbearable, no years of isolation too stifling, no experience too horrifying to deter the naval explorers from trying again. The most ghastly horrors of all – death by starvation, marked by one act of cannibalism – had been visited on Parry’s friend and colleague John Franklin, in his overland journey to the Arctic. One might expect both men to have shaken the snows of the Arctic from their boots forever to enjoy a more comfortable existence. But even as Parry pushed for another try at the Passage so Franklin pleaded for a second chance to invade the dark interior that had claimed the lives of eleven of his men.

  Chapter Two

  1

  Franklin’s folly

  2

  Miss Porden’s core of steel

  3

  Fury Beach

  4

  The silken flag

  5

  Treadmill to the Pole

  Franklin’s second overland expedition off the Alaskan Coast (illustration credit 2.1)

  1 Franklin’s folly

  John Franklin got back to England in October 1822, just as Parry was settling down for his long winter at Igloolik. Franklin had managed to map 550 miles of the North American coast east of the mouth of the Coppermine, a remarkable accomplishment in the circumstances, for in every other respect the expedition had been a disaster – probably the most harrowing overland journey in Arctic history.

  When Parry returned, Franklin was still being pointed out as “the man who ate his shoes,” a jocular yet Gothic phrase that masked the horror of an Odyssey riven by disputes, starvation, cannibalism, and murder. Franklin himself was only days, perhaps hours, from death when he was saved by a band of Indians. Eleven of his party were not so fortunate.

  Yet within two years he was desperate to be off again on a second expedition, so eager, in fact, that he was prepared to leave his bride of seventeen months, even though he knew she was dying of tuberculosis. It was this reckless ambition, this hunger for fame and promotion that had been Franklin’s undoing in that first expedition when, with little preparation and no experience, he had set off blindly across the Barren Ground of British North America. It would be his undoing again a quarter of a century in the future, when he and 129 men vanished forever into an unexplored corner of the Arctic.

  Back in 1819 he had seemed an unlikely choice to lead that first expedition across the tundra north to the mouth of the Coppermine. He was then thirty-three years old – plump, unaccustomed to hard exercise, and inexperienced in land travel. As a child he had been weak and ailing, not expected to live past the age of three. For a naval officer, he was uncommonly sensitive. His nephew, who served as a midshipman under him, noticed that when a flogging was ordered, Franklin trembled from head to foot. Years later, his son-in-law wrote that “chicanery made him ill, and so paralysed him that when he had to deal with it he was scarcely himself.”

  He had little humour and not much imagination, but he was dogged and certainly brave – calm when danger threatened, courageous in battle. He’d gone to sea at twelve, joined the Navy at fifteen, and had taken part in three of the most important battles of the Napoleonic Wars – Copenhagen, Trafalgar, and New Orleans, where he was wounded. He seemed blessed by Providence. He was once shipwrecked off the Australian coast and marooned for weeks on the Great Barrier Reef. Rescued at last, he barely escaped capture and imprisonment by the French. He had seen his best friend shot to death as he chatted on the poopdeck of one of Nelson’s ships and had survived when thirty-three out of forty officers were wounded or slain. The bombardment left him partially deaf.

  He had gone with Buchan on the failed North Pole expedition because he frankly sought promotion. He would be a fool, he told a friend, to embark on such an adventure “without some grounds of sanguine expectation.”

  He had friends aplenty and virtually no enemies. What was it about this simple, plodding, run-of-the-mill naval officer that commended him to so many, including two of the least typical women in England? His writings, so tedious, so formal, give little hint of the Franklin charm, which, by all accounts, was his greatest asset. Everybody liked John Franklin – liked his humility, liked his “cheerful buoyancy of mind,” to quote his friend and trailmate John Richardson, liked his affectionate, easy disposition (a trifle too easy, perhaps, for a man destined to command an unruly pack of Canadian voyageurs).

  Franklin literally wouldn’t kill a fly. “The world is wide enough for both,” he’d say as he blew the offending insect off his hand while taking observations. Like Parry, he was excessively religious – he wouldn’t even write a letter on the Lord’s Day – but he lacked Parry’s evangelical zeal. He read his Bible daily and prayed morning and night, but his prayers, to quote his future son-in-law, Philip Gell, “were those of a child.” He was fond of small children and (Gell again) “seemed to follow their innocency.”

  After his death, a memorandum to himself containing twelve rules for self-examination and entitled “Have I this day walked with God?” was discovered among his papers. It is possible to believe that this introspection, this quest for the Infinite, derived at least partially from those ghastly days in the fall and winter of 1821 when, with all hope aband
oned, he quietly prepared himself for death.

  Franklin’s assignment in 1819 was to book passage through the Hudson’s Bay Company to York Factory on the western shore of the great inland sea. From there he was to proceed across the face of Rupert’s Land, following the fur traders’ route via Cumberland House to Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca. He was to move north to Great Slave Lake and then strike out onto the tundra to the headwaters of the Coppermine River, which Samuel Hearne had explored in 1771. The expedition would then follow the Coppermine to its mouth and proceed eastward in small boats to map the unexplored Arctic coast.

  He set off in May, the same month that saw Parry weigh anchor on his first expedition. Franklin was accompanied by John Richardson, surgeon and naturalist, and two young midshipmen, George Back and Robert Hood, map makers and artists, necessary companions in that pre-photographic era. There was also a tough Scottish seaman, John Hepburn. Later there would be a considerable party of Orkney boatmen, Indian guides and hunters, interpreters, and French-Canadian voyageurs. Although Franklin’s main task was to survey the coastline, there would also be time to collect plants and observe bird life (Richardson’s forte), and to study natural phenomena and the natives. The Navy, as usual, was too optimistic. It expected this party to travel through eight hundred miles of virtually unexplored territory either to link up with Parry’s ships (wherever they were) or to reach Repulse Bay, then the northernmost mapped site on the west coast of Hudson Bay. It is a measure of Franklin’s own naïveté that he confidently expected to get to either the goal or the rendezvous. He might as well have contemplated a voyage to the moon. His insistence on exceeding the limits of his capabilities was to cost the party dearly.