The Arctic Grail Read online

  Then, on November 7, a gunshot was heard. The Indians had been found! George Back had sent a small advance party speeding toward the dying men. At the first sight of the emaciated figures, the usually stoic natives burst into tears. Over the next several days, they nursed the starving white men, in Richardson’s words, “with the same tenderness they would have bestowed on their own infants.” Akaitcho, who had never stooped to cook for himself, prepared venison soup with his own hands and personally nursed Franklin back to life.

  All of the Englishmen except Hood lived. But one Eskimo and nine of the white men who had paddled Franklin’s canoes along the Arctic coast were dead from starvation and the exhausting travail of hauling heavy sledges and crushing weights and paddling frail, overloaded craft through rapids and ocean while the officers sat at their ease. As Douglas Clavering asked, in a letter to a friend, “Was the undertaking worth the suffering his party endured?”

  It was another year before Franklin returned home to an enthralled public who gobbled up his Gothic tale of adventure, starvation, cannibalism, and murder in a harsh and brooding land. His own account brought him six hundred pounds in royalties and made an even thousand for John Murray, the Navy’s favourite publisher.

  The man who had eaten his shoes was now a glamorous hero – one who had faced death and conquered it, who had, against fearful odds, helped to unlock part of the mystery of the Passage, and who had actually navigated part of it in two flimsy canoes. By capturing the imagination of the British public, John Franklin unwittingly laid the groundwork for his future role as tragic hero, the kind the English preferred above all others. Would the great Franklin search that dominated the Arctic saga in mid-century have captured the nation’s imagination in the way it did without these preliminaries? Would the Admiralty have sent him north in his fifty-ninth year if he hadn’t, in the Navy’s view, proved his mettle on that ghastly journey in 1821?

  Franklin’s triumph was achieved on the backs of eleven dead men, but nobody cared about that. He owed his life and that of his fellow officers not to his own abilities but to those of his Indian hunters. But more than a century would pass before a different kind of explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, would, in a book that still excites controversy, question the Franklin myth.

  Why, Stefansson asked, were the Englishmen a dead weight on the party? Why was all the hunting done by voyageurs and natives? “Was it beneath their dignity to co-operate in securing food? Was helping the workers, in their minds, detrimental to discipline? Whatever the reason, there is no sign either that they tried to assist in the hunting, or that they studied the methods of the hunt so as to be able to use them later.”

  There has always been an element of mystery surrounding the climactic days of the first Franklin expedition. Tantalizing little scraps float down through the years. What really went on in the final bloody days in Richardson’s camp? All that exists is Richardson’s word and Hepburn’s silent witness to those violent events; and, as Richardson himself made clear, the evidence of cannibalism and murder on Michel’s part, though plausible and perhaps damning, was entirely circumstantial. All four men in the party were half out of their minds from hunger. Wentzel, Franklin’s erstwhile adviser and guide, called Richardson a murderer and wanted to see him tried. But Wentzel did not care for any of the Englishmen, who, he said, acted “imprudently, injudiciously and showed in one particular instance an unpardonable want of conduct.” George Back, who gossiped a lot, talked again, this time to Wentzel, of dissensions among the Franklin party and added, “To tell the truth, Wentzel, things have taken place, which must not be known.”

  Nor will they ever be known. Back’s remark was probably, though not necessarily, a guarded reference to cannibalism, which Richardson had yet to make public; and cannibalism in Franklin’s day was perhaps the most horrifying and dreadful crime of all. As for Franklin’s many follies, they were quickly glossed over and forgotten. His achievements brought him promotion to post captain. But that was not enough. Surely other glories must lie ahead. It is hard to believe that a man who had come within days of death by starvation would be willing to chance a second trip to the Arctic. But the lure of the Passage was too much. John Franklin could hardly wait to return.

  2 Miss Porden’s core of steel

  Not the least remarkable aspect of John Franklin’s career is his successive marriages to two spirited and strong-minded women who were, in many ways, his exact opposites in temperament and outlook.

  What did they see in him? On the face of it, no more than a plodding, earnest, and rather ordinary naval officer – a hero, certainly, in everybody’s eyes, but that wasn’t enough to dazzle either of the pair, given her own strong character. He was reserved in public; perhaps that shyness was part of his charm. No doubt they saw him as a cuddly teddy bear of a man – even-tempered, affectionate in private, and, perhaps most important, pliable.

  Franklin did not fit the nineteenth-century role of the stern, dominating husband; both Eleanor Porden, his first wife, and her friend Jane Griffin, his second, had known enough of these. One cannot imagine either one submitting to any man who would act as her lord and master, bully his wife, keep her in the background, or treat her as a chattel. When Eleanor overheard somebody at the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning remark that “the young ladies had far better stay at home and make a pudding,” she made a sharp reply. “We did that,” she said, “before we came out.”

  The contrasts between Miss Porden and Captain Franklin were striking. She was well known and respected, a poetess who had, in his absence, published a prodigious epic, Coeur de Lion, a two-volume tome in sixteen cantos. Her work is forgotten now, but in her day it moved the Bishop of Carlyle to call her “the Sappho or perhaps the Clio of her time.” She was tiny, frail, and sickly but, as Franklin was to discover, she had a core of steel. Her father was a notable architect who sprang from a long line of architects; one of his commissions had come from the future George IV. She had been brought up with a taste for poetry, literature, and art. In London, she presided over a regular salon where the conversation was bright, gossipy, and opinionated. Jane Griffin, who dined at the Pordens’ house, remarked on her “universal talents – she makes all her own clothes, preserves & pickles, dances quadrilles con amore, belongs to a poetical bookclub, pays morning visits, sees all the sights, never denies herself to any body at any hour, & lies in bed or is not dressed till 9 o’clock in the morning.”

  The lie-abed had a lively, inquiring mind, a good sense of humour, and a considerable ego where her poetry was concerned. Like other members of her class, she was a devout Anglican, but the evangelistic fervour of those times had not touched her. Unlike Parry and Franklin, she wore her religion lightly and refused to enter into ecclesiastical controversy, which, she said, was “the bane of society … almost inconsistent with Christ’s humility.” “I should be inclined to say,” she told John Franklin after they were betrothed, “that my religion like my character was of a gayer nature than yours,” and that was an understatement.

  Franklin had met her and, indeed, been attracted to her before his expedition to North America. When he returned in 1818 from his abortive voyage to the North Pole, he had been intrigued by a set of hortatory verses she had produced for the occasion:

  Sail, sail, adventurous barks! go fearless forth

  Storm on his Glacier-seat, the Misty North –

  Give to Mankind the inhospitable zone

  And Britain’s trident plant in seas unknown …

  He asked to meet her. They were clearly attracted to one another from the outset. But Franklin forbore to propose before leaving on a journey he knew would take more than two years. Nor did he believe that his feelings (which she only sensed, since he never mentioned them) would survive the journey.

  The courtship, if it can be called that, was frustrated by impossible distances. She wrote him one letter in May of 1821 and a second a year later. He did not receive either until he reached York Factory on Hu
dson Bay in August of 1822. He was not able to reply until October when he was returning home aboard the Hudson’s Bay Company ship Prince of Wales, six hundred miles off the Orkneys. The course of true love moved with a more deliberate pace in those gentler times. When Franklin reached England, the popular Miss Porden was still not spoken for.

  He called on her a few days after his arrival. Shortly after that he proposed – and botched it. The hero of the Arctic was alarmingly formal and almost as cold as the tundra itself – so distant that she found their meeting “exquisitely” painful. She wrote to him immediately in some alarm, for she found it easier to set down her feelings on paper than to express them aloud. “I looked several times in your countenance,” she wrote, “for a gleam which might encourage me to return to our former style of pleasant and familiar conversation, but in vain.”

  She felt that he distrusted her in some way; certainly he seemed to have mistaken her character. Perhaps she herself was no longer “quite the same in feelings or dispositions that I was four years ago.” She did not accept his proposal, but she didn’t reject it, either. She left the door ajar by explaining that “no one else in all my acquaintance … could have spoken to me on the subject you have done, without meeting an instant and positive denial.” That was something, for she was much sought after; there were, it was said, no fewer than ten aspirants for her hand.

  He hastened to write a mollifying letter, explaining that his apparent coldness was only the result of his apprehension that she would decline his offer. More letters followed. She was plainly reassured. “You have unsettled all my plans and put my head in the most amiable confusion,” she told him in December. They were betrothed; but it can hardly be said that he swept her off her feet.

  In the eight months or so that lay between engagement and marriage, they saw each other only sporadically. He was in Lincolnshire, secure in the bosom of his family, preparing his book for publication. She was in London with her literary friends, preparing to write a biography of her architect father, who had died the month before Franklin’s return. Parent and daughter had been very close, and his death was for her a shattering experience. Now, at the one time when she needed the comfort of a warm and loving helpmate, she was denied it.

  Franklin seemed disinclined to tear himself away from familiar surroundings. Five months passed before he invited her to Lincolnshire to meet his relatives. By this time she was ailing with a chronic cough that often kept her confined. Though nobody dared speak the name, she was suffering from tuberculosis, the scourge of the day, as fatal then as lung cancer.

  They corresponded by post. Her letters were long and graceful; his shorter, blunter, and less frequent. They can in no sense be called love-letters, even by the less expressive standards of that day, for the word “love” was never mentioned. The closest Franklin could come in revealing his feelings was to write of his “sincere esteem” for his future bride. She addressed him as “Dear Sir” and signed herself “your sincere and affectionate Eleanor Anne Porden.” He addressed her as “my dearest friend” until late May, 1823, when she asked a little plaintively: “Why can’t you call me by my name? … With my friends I am always Eleanor.”

  After five months Franklin broke the news of his betrothal to his father and sisters and was prompted at last to tell her something about his family. Until that time she had not even known how many sisters he had. He added: “I should now be glad to hear of your relatives, if you do not find any other subject to occupy your next letter.”

  But Eleanor Porden was not short of subjects. What her correspondence lacked in intimacy it made up for in erudition. In these last months before their marriage there were no protestations of undying affection, no coquettish references to coming nuptials, no cries from the heart. But there was a long reference to a Mr. Millington who was about to give a lecture on Electro-Magnetism, the wonder of the day. Miss Porden announced that she would attend and take notes for her next letter so she might “hope to be indulged by your remarks upon the new discoveries.” Franklin, however, declined “to venture … on so intricate a subject.”

  It was not an easy engagement. It foundered more than once because John Franklin and his fiancée could not agree on matters as diverse as religious observance and a woman’s place in the society of the day. Their correspondence that spring of 1823 took on the aspect of a contest, in which Eleanor Porden won every round.

  In March she discovered suddenly that Franklin disapproved of her literary career. She had not expected this, for he had previously given no hint of it. But now he demurred when she mentioned in passing that she expected “full indulgence of my literary pursuits both as to writing or publication.” He told her at once that he had an objection almost amounting to horror to publication of anyone connected with his name – an odd statement for a man who was about to publish his own work. He might alter his feelings, he added, but could not pledge himself to anything.

  She was devastated. “I have seldom received so severe a shock,” she told him when she had composed herself sufficiently to write. It confirmed, she said, her suspicions that everything literary was anathema to him. In a three-thousand-word letter, she threw down the gauntlet: “… you must not expect me to change my nature. I am seven and twenty, an age after which woman alters little.” Nothing must be allowed to interfere with her literary career; she was asking no favours, claiming no concessions; it was hers by right. If Franklin now felt the betrothal was rash he must tell her so; it was up to him to break it off. And that was that; she heard no more objections.

  Then there was the question of the Lord’s Day. To Franklin, Sunday was a sombre day on which one read the Bible, but never “a light or trifling book,” and certainly not a novel by Walter Scott or a play by Shakespeare. He wouldn’t travel, he wouldn’t write a letter, he wouldn’t entertain on the Sabbath. He was appalled that his Eleanor should go so far as to hold her salon on the sacred day. She, in her turn, was appalled at his being appalled.

  She told him bluntly that he must not expect perfect conformity in their religious opinions. “I presume,” she wrote, “you are not bound to consider me as eternally condemned if it should turn out that we differ on some point of faith.… The simpler our Religion is, the better.” She had little use for books of Moral Instruction – the kind Franklin believed should be the Lord’s Day’s sole reading; they weren’t more than “dilutions of the Sacred Text.” The time was better spent, she thought, learning from history or the classics.

  “Still less do I agree with you in any idea of seclusion on a Sunday.… Pardon me if I say that I almost consider the wish of seclusion on that day as partaking of the same aberration of religious zeal which drove many of the early Christians to the deserts of Syria and Egypt.…”

  A month later they were still at it. The engagement was in jeopardy. She would not fix a date for the wedding. Franklin tried to bring her around by sending her some letters written by an evangelistic Anglican friend, Lady Lucy Barry, a woman of markedly narrow religious views who clearly disapproved of Miss Porden’s light-hearted attitude to religion in general and Sunday in particular. That drove Eleanor Porden into a mild fury and almost ended the engagement.

  In a spirited letter she told John Franklin, in effect, to choose between Lady Lucy and herself: “Should I find you to be really tainted with that species of fanaticism which characterizes Lady Lucy Barry’s letters, it would be the severest shock I could receive. With such a woman I could not and would not associate … whether I am ever anything to you or not, I conjure you to fly from her acquaintance and from those whose religious feelings resemble hers.”

  She was convinced that the malevolent Lady Lucy was about to convert Franklin to the dreadful conformity of Methodism. If so, she said, his greatest act of kindness would be “to bid me farewell.”

  In the face of this ultimatum, Franklin backtracked. He didn’t intend to become a Methodist, he declared, and he agreed that Eleanor was a good, practising Christian. He went to so
me lengths to insist that he hadn’t shunned her literary circle, as she had charged, and “though I cannot join in a quadrille, it would give me great pleasure to see you and your friends doing so.…” That was enough for her; a month later, on August 19, 1823, they were married. They would have less than twenty months of married life together (during which time she would present him with a daughter) before he left her on her deathbed to return to the Arctic, which was his first and perhaps his only love.

  3 Fury Beach

  The new bridegroom was eager to be off again, and so was Edward Parry, who returned to England two months after the nuptials. He had first met Franklin in 1818 when the two were outfitting their respective vessels at Deptford and had found him “the most clever man of our cloth, as far as I can judge, with whom I have conversed for some time.”

  When Parry had reached the Shetland Islands on his route home that fall of 1823, following his winter at Igloolik, he received a letter of congratulation from Franklin. “I need not be ashamed to say that I cried over it like a child,” Parry told him that October. The tears were of pride and pleasure, especially “in seeing the virtues of the Christian adding their first and highest charm to the unconquerable perseverance and splendid talents of the officer and the man.”

  Franklin came down to London the following month expressly to see Parry. There the two explorers talked of their respective plans – Parry to attempt the Passage again by way of Prince Regent Inlet, Franklin to explore the country west and east of the Mackenzie delta, perhaps with the backing of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was anxious to forestall Russian commercial interests in that area.

  But Parry himself was at a low point. On his return, he learned that his father had died the previous spring. He was inconsolable – so depressed that he would not take food or even speak. His sister rushed to his London hotel to find him delirious with a high fever. His condition was kept from his mother until the crisis passed.