Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  Franklin’s own published story of that second ghastly journey had caught the imagination of the English public. Yes, he had lost eleven men through starvation and in one case murder—a record in Arctic exploration—because of his dalliance and his reluctance to turn back when starvation faced him. He had done that without producing any tangible result. But of these dead men only one was an Englishman. Nine were French Canadian voyageurs while another was an Inuit, and they didn’t really count. By this time he was the embodiment of the tragic hero that the English doted on: the man who had eaten his own boots, who had faced death with resolution and conquered it. On his third expedition, the one from which he had recently returned, he and his party explored and mapped more than a thousand miles of Arctic coast. For that he received the inevitable knighthood.

  The Franklin search stands at the core of the age of exploration that marks the Victorian period. Without his wife’s twelve-year campaign to seek out his fate and memorialize his achievements, would he now be a familiar name in the history books, outclassing such half-forgotten but more eminent fellow explorers as Parry, Rae, and Ross?

  As Francis Spufford has written in his analysis of the effects of polar exploration on the English imagination, “… in her hands the network of sympathy and sentiment she inspired became a tool of redoubtable influence … she could blight or accelerate careers, bestow or withhold the sanction of her reputation.… When the Admiralty seemed torpid, or reluctant to act, she pushed; when search ships were dispatched on directions she disapproved of, she launched whispering campaigns against their commanders, and when, critically, the news from the Arctic threatened the moral image of Franklin’s party, she fought to preserve the ground on which the ideals of womanhood and those of polar exploration coincided.”

  They were married in England and spent most of their honeymoon in Paris—a period she later deplored as a “career of vanity, trifling, and idleness”—while they waited for John to get his next command. Jane Griffin was “Mrs. Franklin” for a few short months. After her husband was knighted in 1829 she would be Lady Franklin. She gave herself to him, heart, soul, and pocketbook. There would be no marriage settlement; she had decided, with her usual firmness, that everything she had (it came to about £10,000) would be at her husband’s disposal.

  Before they married she had gone off to Russia on one of her many peregrinations with her father and two friends, and Franklin had wanted to accompany her. Her Victorian sensibilities, however, caused her to refuse “from a strong sense of impropriety in the arrangement, as well as from a conviction that we should all be placed in a number of awkward and disagreeable situations during long and rough voyages and journeys.” Instead, she arranged to meet him in St. Petersburg. Had she been a little too assertive for a wife-to-be? She hastened to assure him in writing that she would always be a submissive spouse and suggested that he “put this letter by and turn it to account at some future time when I am in a rebellious mood; and upon this consideration I think you ought to feel infinitely obliged to me for furnishing you with so valuable a document.”

  Franklin turned down a commercial offer in Australia and stuck with the navy even if it meant languishing at half pay. At last, in the autumn of 1830, he was appointed commander of the twenty-eight-gun frigate Rainbow bound for Malta in the Mediterranean. It was a minor post, Jane thought, but it might be one he could use for his advancement. She urged him to use his new position “to resume your chieftainship in your own peculiar department.” If he stuck with it, she suggested, and came back with an increase in credit and fame, “surely a ship when you liked to ask for it would be the least, and a natural reward for your services.”

  As the captain’s wife she could not travel with him on his own ship, but she intended to follow him to the Mediterranean and eventually meet him in Malta. There she would be able to see him as much as possible even if war came. “I had much rather be in the midst of it, than sit brooding over disaster and bloodshed at home.” She wouldn’t be in anybody’s way, she assured him, and “you will never find me any hindrance to the most strenuous, and energetic exertions you can make in your country’s cause.”

  En route to Malta, she indulged her passion for visiting the odd corners of the foreign world, “doing what no European lady had done within living memory,” Ms. Woodward wrote, penetrating North Africa as far as “the snow-white city of Tetuan” and living in a small, windowless Moorish house. This wanderlust never left her, and she pursued it during Sir John’s many absences.

  Invigorated by “the amazing tonic power of great excitement,” she set off for Egypt and the Holy Land, riding on a donkey to Rosetta, and later to Nazareth. In all the time her husband was at the Mediterranean post, she never seemed to stand still save for her months on Malta with him: up the Nile from Alexandria to Cairo (where she visited a harem); by Austrian brigantine to the Holy Land; on a mule’s back from Smyrna (Izmir) to Constantinople; on a mattress on the deck of a converted yacht out of Smyrna, where she lost her binoculars and handbags to the sea. She toured the Greek islands, climbed Mount Olympus, experienced an earthquake in Zante, picked a branch on the Mount of Olives, made a private expedition to the island of Cephalonia—ignoring the smallpox raging there after surviving the plague raging in Constantinople, walking the streets with vinegar up her nose and a parasol across her waist “to keep off all contact with stragglers.”

  “You have completely eclipsed me,” her husband wrote admiringly at one point, “and almost every other traveller—females certainly.”

  His ships were always known as happy ships, and this one became famous throughout the navy as “the Celestial Rainbow” and also, with envy, as “Franklin’s Paradise.” That was not enough for Jane. In her many and detailed letters to her mate she continued to urge him to make more effort to achieve an Arctic command.

  When his term of service ended in 1834, Franklin returned to England without her. He had no sooner landed than he put in an application for another ship. “Will you not give me credit for this premature application?” he asked in a letter to his wife, who did not join him for another year. He told her proudly about his audience with the King to report on Greek affairs. He also waited upon the First Lord of the Admiralty and the President of the Royal Society. “On reading all these details,” he wrote to her a little proudly, “you will fancy my dearest, that your shy timid husband must have gathered some brass on his way home, or you will be at a loss to account for his extraordinary courage. What will you say on learning that I have done all but the truly official part principally because I knew you would have wished me to do so.…”

  But then, in a later letter, he added a few soft words of reproach. Yes, of course he would rejoice to be sent north again, but there was also the matter of honour to be considered. With war against Russia on the distant horizon, this was not a time to leave his homeland on a mere adventure that would put him out of the Admiralty’s reach. He did not want to go, he told her, “for the mere desire of travelling and still less for the mere empty shadow of increasing my fame.”

  He was eager for a command, but no command was offered. In March 1836, the Colonial Secretary dangled the prospect of a new post before him: lieutenant-governor of Antigua, a speck of an island in the Caribbean. He was flattered but insisted on consulting his wife, who was not flattered at all. To her, it was an unworthy assignment: close, indeed, to an insult. At her insistence he turned it down and, to the surprise and delight of both, received an immediate offer at twice the salary to become governor of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, a large island off the southeast coast of Australia.

  They embarked in August with high hopes. How could they foresee that the next six years would be the most painful they had known? On shipboard, Lady Franklin bustled about, running a Sunday School class for children, organizing evening lessons on natural history, practising shark fishing with a harpoon in hand. During a three-week stopover at the Cape of Good Hope, she climbed Table Mountain—four thousand feet,
in a five-hour ascent—went off with a wagonload of tourists to investigate the South African interior, and studied everything from Hottentot burial customs to the Kaffir method of constructing the assegai.

  After a “brisk but rather stormy passage” from the cape, they reached Van Diemen’s Land on January 6, 1837. Their arrival was greeted with enthusiasm—a triumphal entry with three hundred horsemen and seventy carriages. But behind all this pomp and ceremony lay trouble. Van Diemen’s Land was a prison, and John Franklin now found that he was its reluctant warden. Some 40 percent of the population consisted of convicts, while large numbers of “free citizens” were former convicts. Under the transportation system, three thousand more arrived every year. The previous administration had gone along with this procedure, under which convicts worked out their sentences by being assigned to one of the colonists for a period of time under penalty of having to return to prison if they broke the rules. That was a form of slavery, but it had suited the previous governor, George Arthur, very well as it had his powerful colonial secretary, Captain John Montagu, who had married Arthur’s niece. In this cozy, hidebound Tory establishment, Sir John and Lady Franklin stood out as disturbers of convention.

  She was in no sense your typical governor’s wife, content to turn up at public affairs in a fashionable frock and indulge in vapid conversation. She threw herself into a whirl of activity, visiting prison hospitals, forming a ladies’ committee to reform female convicts, turning the governor’s mansion into a veritable museum full of stuffed birds, aboriginal weapons, petrified fossils, and the like, and trying to launch an agricultural settlement for bona fide immigrants in the hope that Van Diemen’s Land might eventually become a real colony and not a jail.

  In all these varied ventures she got little encouragement from the political establishment and found herself thwarted time and again by the implacable Montagu. When she tried to start a college in New Norfolk the Colonial Secretary balked, insisting that public money could not be squandered on such a project. “A more troublesome interfering woman I never saw,” he declared privately.

  She could not escape criticism. When she tried to rid the island of snakes by offering a shilling a head out of her own pocket, her opponents sniffed that she was “puffed up with the love of fame and the desire of acquiring a name by doing what no one else does.” A section of the press sneered at her as the power behind the throne. One newspaper went so far as to call her “a man in petticoats.” There was an uproar when Franklin, on Montagu’s advice, dismissed a popular surgeon for dereliction of duty. The doctor’s friends, convinced that the dismissal was unjust, lobbied to have it reversed. Franklin vacillated—the same kind of vacillation that had postponed his decision to turn back in time on that earlier Arctic journey. Finally he recanted, to the fury of Montagu, who believed, probably rightly, that Jane Franklin was behind the move.

  Lady Franklin at fifty-one. From This Errant Lady by Penny Russell, National Library of Australia, 2002

  During this period, Lady Franklin indulged her prodigious wanderlust. She became the first woman to climb the four-thousand-foot Mount Wellington and the first to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney. Her last expedition, to travel overland with a small party to McQuarrie Harbour on the island’s west coast, was far more strenuous than anything she had ever attempted. The only white men who had tried it were escaped convicts, who perished in the attempt. The party followed a narrow foot track through jungle and forest, over gullies, river torrents, swamps, and morasses. After they left the last post of civilization they were faced with the six-mile valley of the Acheron River, which they were forced to cross at least twelve times.

  She could face the natural obstacles of Van Diemen’s Land with equanimity, but she could not deal with the campaign of obstructionism that the wily Colonial Secretary was waging against her husband and herself. The matter came to a head after Montagu wrote a pompous memorandum that came close to calling Franklin a liar and a weakling. Franklin fired him—“an act of public virtue” in his wife’s view—or thought he had; but he soon realized that Van Diemen’s Land was not a self-governing state. The matter could be settled only by an appeal to Lord Stanley, the Secretary of State for the Colonies. But on the same ship that carried Franklin’s report on Montagu to England there was a special passenger—Montagu himself, armed with a sheaf of documents and memos telling his side of the story. His friends in the press backed him. One paper published an article titled “The Imbecile Reign of a Polar Hero”; another blamed the polar hero’s wife: “Can anyone for a moment believe that she and her clique do not reign paramount here?”

  In England, Montagu’s careful manoeuvring paid off. As Montagu himself made clear, his line of defence with Lord Stanley was “that he was the victim of Lady Franklin’s hatred, and she alone was the cause of his suspension.” Stanley sided with Montagu and shot off what one observer called “a public horsewhipping” to the embattled explorer. Montagu got a copy and rushed it to Van Diemen’s Land, where it was lodged in the Derwent Bank and its contents unofficially disseminated before Franklin himself saw it.

  Franklin wanted out but was subjected to a further embarrassment when a newspaper arrived from England reporting that a new lieutenant-governor had been gazetted to replace him. It was two months before an official dispatch (already six months old) arrived to inform him that his term was at an end. By then his replacement had arrived. A lackadaisical colonial office and the primitive state of the overseas postal system had put him in an impossible position.

  “GLORIOUS NEWS!” the Colonial Times exulted. That was the reaction of the establishment’s anti-Franklin press, but the people of Van Diemen’s Land did not agree. In January 1844, a crowd of two thousand well-wishers cheered the pair off when they embarked for England; more than ten thousand signed an address of farewell. A decade later, when Jane Franklin appealed for funds to help search for her lost husband, the Tasmanians contributed seventeen hundred pounds.

  The entire experience had devastated them both. Franklin himself was close to a breakdown, and Jane was in a state of nervous prostration. How they must have wished they had accepted the lesser posting in Antigua! Now nothing would do but that the polar hero should tell his own side of this sorry tale in a pamphlet that few bothered to read. In England his Tasmanian troubles were small potatoes. He was still a hero to the public and to his Arctic cronies. But that wasn’t enough for him and it wasn’t enough for Lady Franklin. His honour was at stake, or so he believed. Some new feat of exploration was required to remove the stain of Montagu’s perfidy. He had reached the nadir of his career, and his sixtieth year was approaching; he could not rest until he had redeemed himself. On his return to England he would, with his wife’s exuberant support, launch a new expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.

  —TWO—

  Had Sir John Franklin accepted the original offer of a governorship in the Caribbean, the history of Arctic exploration might be remarkably different. The Great Search for his missing expedition, much of it instigated by the importunity of his persevering wife, dragged on for more than a dozen years. More than fifty ships were engaged in that search, untold funds were squandered, and lives were sacrificed in a hunt that covered the frozen world from Alaska to Baffin Bay. The Great Search also lifted the curtain over a labyrinth of islands that had been unexplored before it began.

  Franklin’s return to England in 1844 coincided with a new flurry of interest in the Northwest Passage, stimulated by John Barrow, Jr., the Admiralty bureaucrat responsible for England’s great age of naval exploration. For fifteen years, from 1818 to 1833, no fewer than nine expeditions had been mounted by the Royal Navy to seek out this will-o’-the-wisp, making Edward Parry, John Ross, and Franklin the heroes of their days. None had been successful and interest in polar exploration was fading when James Clark Ross (John’s nephew) and Francis Crozier returned in 1843 from a record-breaking voyage to Antarctica in two vessels especially built for polar travel, Erebus and Terr
or. They had penetrated farther south into the Antarctic region than any before them and were the talk of England. Barrow seized on the interest raised by this expedition to prepare detailed plans to use the same vessels to renew the search for the fabled Passage before some other nation beat the British to the prize.

  The hope for some sea route linking the Atlantic to the Pacific went back to the fifteenth century, when it was seen as a shortcut to the riches of the Orient. As new discoveries caused the search for it to be moved farther and farther north, its practical value dwindled. What Barrow was seeking was an essentially useless channel (or series of channels) blocked by formidable barriers of ice and virtually unnavigable. As Francis Spufford has pointed out, more expeditions have managed to travel safely to the moon and return than had been able to navigate the Passage from sea to sea.

  Sensible considerations did not weigh on Barrow, to whom the Passage was a symbol of all that was pure, noble, and courageous in Arctic exploration. Spufford quotes from Barrow’s digest of exploration narratives, which he published in 1846 after his retirement. In it he singled out the moral accomplishments of the explorers—the way officers “exhibited the most able and splendid examples of perseverance under difficulties, of endurance under afflictions, and resignation under every kind of distress.” That fitted the Victorian attitude toward morality. The Passage was seen as a glittering prize, but no longer for sordid commercial reasons. Discovery was venerated for its own sake. The Passage was to be conquered simply because it was there.

  Franklin pushed hard to lead the proposed new expedition to search out the Passage, and his friends pushed too. His honour was at stake; the only way to restore it would be action in the pure, clean environment of the Arctic channels. As Parry put it to the navy, Franklin would die of disappointment if he didn’t get the job. James Clark Ross was the logical choice, but he bowed out on what looked like a thin excuse: he didn’t want to be separated from his new bride. That said, Jane Franklin did not lose the opportunity to play upon Ross’s friendship for her husband and his sympathy with his situation. “If you do not go,” she wrote to him, “I would wish Sir John to have it … and not to be put aside for his age.… I think he will be deeply sensitive if his own department should neglect him.… I dread exceedingly the effect on his mind.…”