by Paul Watson
For musical distraction, or spiritual inspiration, each ship had its own hand organ capable of playing fifty tunes, ten of which were psalms or hymns. Franklin also asked for a daguerreotype camera, which French inventor Louis Daguerre had made available to the world just six years earlier. Sir John hoped to use it to document an arduous voyage, perhaps even a historic breakthrough, but that would take a lot of effort in itself. The world’s first widely used photographic process was a time-consuming prospect when far from any city and its workshops. First, the photographer had to buff silvered copper sheets to a mirror polish. Clamped to a table, that was then scoured with powdered rottenstone, a finely ground limestone, using a square of flannel moistened with alcohol. Then it was buffed again to get the photographic plate as smooth, and as clean, as possible. In a darkroom, iodine and bromine created a surface ready to capture images with exposure to light.
Lady Franklin sent along some animal companionship. Erebus already had two four-legged passengers: a Newfoundland dog called Neptune and a cat that didn’t seem to have a name. Likely a working feline; mousers don’t need to be known by anything but their skill. The commander’s wife made a gift of a third pet, a female monkey the sailors named Jacko, which Lady Franklin got from eminent zoologist John Gould. The Franklins knew Gould from their time in Van Diemen’s Land, when he was working on the seven-volume ornithological study The Birds of Australia. Jacko was playful, at times mischievous. She knew how to take bored or miserable seamen’s minds off their troubles, as she did on June 23, 1845, when the expedition’s ships passed through the highest seas Fitzjames had ever seen. Waves pounded Erebus so hard that seawater spilled down on the commander’s table, where his officers had trouble holding on and eating at the same time. The gale was one sign, the increasing cold another. The Arctic Archipelago was getting closer.
“The air is still 41°, but to-day it felt delightfully cold,” Fitzjames wrote in his journal. “The monkey has, however, just put on a blanket, frock, and trowsers, which the sailors have made him (or rather her), so I suppose it is getting cold.”
Reviewing the meticulous preparations, checking presumptions against long experience, Sir John thought he was ready for what was to come. But he couldn’t shake every doubt. He kept probing, testing for any flaws he had overlooked. Several times in the weeks before setting sail, the commander spoke with his friend Sir John Ross to learn as much as possible from the ordeals he had endured to survive several Arctic winters beset by ice. Ross also understood what motivated a great man wronged by lesser critics.
What once looked like Ross’s own sure course to a national pedestal as a hero of war and polar exploration suddenly went south on August 31, 1818, when Ross was leading Britain’s high-risk return to Arctic exploration aboard the flagship HMS Isabella, a chartered whaler. After a night of clear sailing, under a yellow sky, the weather was thick, the temperature dropping, and the water near freezing. Banks of fog blotted out parts of the horizon. Men crowded the masthead and the crow’s nest, craning to see any sign of an opening. At half past two, Ross gave orders that he be called if anyone spotted land or ice ahead. Then he went below for dinner. Half an hour later, Benjamin Lewis, the ship’s master and a Greenland pilot, entered Ross’s cabin with news that the fog seemed to be clearing.
“I immediately, therefore, went on deck, and soon after it completely cleared for about ten minutes, and I distinctly saw the land, round the bottom of the bay, forming a connected chain of mountains with those which extended along the north and south sides.”
Ross named them the Croker Mountains, confident he was doing a great honor to the Admiralty’s first secretary, John W. Croker, an Irish politician and writer. Instead, Ross ruined his own career. A later expedition proved he had mapped a mirage, a common problem in the Arctic, where airborne ice crystals, too tiny to see without a microscope, mingle with layers of cold, dense air at the surface to bend light and sound waves. Sir John Barrow was livid. His Arctic gambit had opened with a Royal Navy explorer seeing obstacles that weren’t there. He made sure Ross never got a polar command again, even when the life of his friend, Sir John Franklin, hung in the balance.
Determined to reclaim his good name, Ross turned to a private sponsor: Sir Felix Booth, who had made a fortune distilling the country’s best-selling dry gin. Booth put up £20,000, worth roughly $1.8 million today, to buy and outfit an eighty-five-ton paddle-wheel steamer out of Liverpool. She was called the Victory, a name that would loom large decades later as the Franklin Expedition mystery unfolded. Ross, his nephew James Clark Ross, and their crew of twenty-one officers and men sailed her to the Arctic from Scotland in June 1829, towing a small launch named the Krusenstern. The expedition, funded by liquor profits, explored roughly 620 miles of unmapped coastline and pinpointed the North Magnetic Pole. It has been called one of the most remarkable Arctic voyages of the nineteenth century. Sea ice trapped the Victory in Lord Mayor Bay, on the Boothia Peninsula’s east coast, in September 30, 1829.
Inuit oral history tells of a seal hunter named Aviluktoq spotting Ross’s ship in a small bay. Seeing the tall masts, he thought it was a great spirit and ran back to his camp, where the men, fearing the strange giant of the sea might destroy them, spent the night discussing what to do. They decided to attack first with harpoons and bows. Hiding behind a block of ice, they realized human figures were walking around the vessel on the sea ice. The sailors spotted the Inuit and approached with their rifles, but both sides laid down their weapons on the sea ice. The sailors invited the Inuit to the ship, where they received gifts of nails, knives, and sewing needles. With countless bodies of fresh water, including Lake Netsilik, there was no shortage of fish, along with a bounty of caribou and seals. As thanks for the food that the Inuit brought the British sailors, the ship’s carpenter carved a prosthetic leg for one of the hunters who had lost his to a polar bear. For his kindness, the Inuit named Ross “Toolooark,” or Raven. It was a high compliment, likely an attempt to bond with Tulluhiu, the man who now walked on the wooden leg. With a borrowed pencil, two Inuit dressed in furs by a crackling fire drew a chart in the stranded steamer’s cabin to show Ross he had sailed into a dead end.
By the summer of 1833, in their fourth year in the Arctic, Ross and his men were so wretched that felt patches barely held together the clothes that Inuit had provided. The commander guessed “no beggar that wanders in Ireland could have outdone us in exciting the repugnance of those who have known what poverty can be. Unshaven since I know not when, (we were) dirty, dressed in rags of wild beasts instead of the tatters of civilization, and starved to the very bones. . . .” Ross and his crewmen had another stroke of incredibly good luck on August 26. Spotting a sail in the distance, his sailors launched boats and, after chasing the ship for a morning, they finally got close to two vessels. One suddenly turned and came to their rescue.
“She was soon alongside, when the mate in command addressed us, by presuming that we had met with some misfortune and lost our ship,” Ross recalled. “This being answered in the affirmative, I requested to know the name of his vessel, and expressed our wish to be taken on board. I was answered that it was ‘the Isabella of Hull, once commanded by Captain Ross’ on which I stated that I was the identical man in question, and my people the crew of the Victory.”
With “the usual blunderheadedness of men of such occasions, he assured me that I had been dead two years.”
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IN HIS FINAL HOURS with Franklin, Ross urged him to take practical steps as insurance in case Erebus and Terror were ever frozen in. He should leave a depot of provisions and, if possible, a boat or two en route to give survivors a chance at escape, Ross recommended. Franklin replied that he wouldn’t have enough boats to spare. Two days before the expedition departed, Ross spoke to his friend again and heard Franklin’s orders from the Admiralty. Ross told him the ships would surely get stuck in ice near Cornwallis Island and asked whether anyone, including Ross’s nephew James, would serve as backu
p.
“Has anyone volunteered to follow you?” Ross asked.
“No, none,” Franklin replied.
“Has not my nephew volunteered?”
“No, he has promised his wife’s relations that he will not go to sea anymore—Back is unwell—and Parry has a good appointment.”
“Then,” Ross assured him, “I shall volunteer to look for you, if you are not heard of in February, 1847; but pray put a notice in the cairn where you winter, if you do not proceed, which of the routes you take.”
The last time they spoke, at Franklin’s lodgings in London, Ross repeated the request, shook hands, and heard the final words from his friend: “Ross, you are the only one who has volunteered to look for me: God bless you.” Ross made his sacred promise one last time. As two old friends, both disgraced by smaller men, they shared a visceral understanding of just how unfair life can be. With a final handshake, they bade each other farewell. Friends thought Franklin looked haggard and nervous in those last sobering days before he departed. He was, after all, recovering from a bout of flu. But he was also touchy about bad omens. When Franklin lay down on the sofa in the lodgings that he had taken with Jane in Lower Brook Street, she was sitting beside him, sewing a flag that he would take to the Arctic. Lest he get cold feet, she draped it over them, startling Franklin awake.
“Why, there’s a flag thrown over me,” he protested. “Don’t you know that they lay the Union Jack over a corpse!”
SIR JOHN FRANKLIN spent his final days before the expedition sailed in a tempest of writing. Franklin, hero that he was, hungered for vindication. With Jane’s help, he produced an impassioned pamphlet that laid out his defense against his colonial attackers, who had already won the political contest. It’s the sort of priority a man has when, in a much darker corner of his mind, he wonders how long he will live, and wants history to treat him well when he is gone. For Sir John, political scores in this world had to be settled. If he made it home alive, as the first to complete the Northwest Passage, who would remember the petty dustup in Van Diemen’s Land? Yet he was determined to finish his account of the colonial ambush and wrote the last word on May 15, 1845, just four days before he departed on Erebus for the Arctic. It hurt that he had to leave before his defense was published. But as the clock ticked down, Sir John conceded that more pressing matters demanded his attention.
“And thus it has happened that, to my extreme vexation and regret, I find the day of my departure at hand without the satisfaction of seeing my pamphlet out of the press.” Wary that whispers of nasty rumors would follow him to sea, Franklin took a copy of the pamphlet aboard Erebus as ammunition.
The sloop HMS Rattler, the first Royal Navy warship converted to steam power, towed Erebus and Terror down the Thames from the Woolwich dockyard to the village of Greenhithe. Sir John’s daughter Eleanor made the trip with her father aboard Erebus. To her, the aging explorer had seemed in much better shape after giving up snuff. As Erebus glided down the river, ever closer to the sea, she watched a dove settle on one of his flagship’s three masts and rest there for a while.
“Every one was pleased with the good omen,” Eleanor told her aunt, “and if it be an omen of peace and harmony, I think there is every reason of it being true.”
Franklin waved his white handkerchief as Jane, Eleanor, and his niece Sophia (Sophy) Cracroft watched the expedition pull away from the pier at 10:30 on the morning of May 19, 1845, to begin their voyage to the North. If Francis Crozier, Franklin’s second-in-command, had had the strength to turn and watch the well-wishers recede from Terror, it would have been with a broken heart and a sense of foreboding. Crozier had fallen madly in love with Sophy when Erebus and Terror stopped at Hobart Town, the once-swampy capital of Van Diemen’s Land, while serving with James Ross’s Antarctic expeditions. But Sophy seemed infatuated with Ross, who was already betrothed to another woman. Crozier did not depart in an optimistic mood.
“What I fear is that from our being so late we shall have no time to look round and judge for ourselves, but blunder into the Ice and make a 1824 of it,” he wrote to Ross, referring to the ill-timed Parry Expedition, when sea ice forced HMS Fury aground and the explorers had to abandon ship. “James, I wish you were here, I would then have no doubt as to our pursuing the proper course. . . .”
When the ships reached the Orkneys, Franklin received a final letter from his wife. She sent him almost nothing but news from that vexing place, Van Diemen’s Land, except for one parting, impossible desire: “I wish we could see you in a glass as they do in the fairy-tales.” That wouldn’t be the last time Jane longed for a vision of her husband, even if it came second-hand through the eyes of a clairvoyant or from the voice of a ghost.
3
Frozen In
The man at the helm of Franklin’s flagship was new to polar exploration. Born in Rio de Janeiro just five years before Ross’s first, failed Arctic expedition, Captain James Fitzjames was a bright veteran with hooded eyes, a large, hooked nose, and cumulus curls fronting wisps of thinning hair. In his early thirties, he would have the added responsibility for the all-important magnetic observations. Fitzjames was a good choice for a job that required meticulous observations. He reveled in the detail of the world around him, especially the people with whom he shared Erebus.
They were immortalized as colorful characters in a journal the captain kept. Those accounts of expedition life before all contact was lost are portholes on what, by his description, was a fine group of mariners who got along well, no matter how bad the weather or how rough the waves. He especially enjoyed Franklin’s anecdotes during evenings at the captain’s table over dinner and drinks, even when storm-thrashed seas poured over Erebus’s deck. Spirits were so high heading into the mission that even a raging storm couldn’t dampen them.
“I dined at our mess to-day, Sir John finding his guests could not hold on and eat too. We are packed close, and can’t move very far. But the good humour of everyone is perfect; and we do dance before it so finely—I mean before the wind.”
Erebus and Terror were well on their way, nearing Iceland, when Fitzjames reveled in the sight of porpoises, bounding out of the waves at the ships’ bows, and a sea bird similar to a petrel. That signaled the Arctic was drawing closer. June 10, 1845, with more than a month to go before the expedition would reach the Arctic Archipelago, was a clear day with little wind when the northern sun set at a quarter to ten. Franklin invited Dr. Harry Goodsir, Erebus’s assistant surgeon and naturalist, to use a table in the commander’s cabin, at the ship’s stern, for his study of crustaceae. As soon as more molluscs, fish, or tiny, butterfly-shaped creatures were dredged up from the sea, the doctor hurried to Franklin’s cabin to draw and describe them. A Scot, he struck Fitzjames as canny, with a low, hesitant, monotonous tone of voice that wasn’t always easy to understand.
“He is long and straight, and walks upright on his toes,” Fitzjames observed, “with his hands tucked up in each jacket pocket.”
In his late twenties, Goodsir was conservator at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and “draws the insides of microscopic animals with an imaginary-pointed pencil, catches phenomena in a bucket, looks at the thermometer and every other meter.” Fitzjames also liked the man’s laugh. The surgeon’s large lower lip, protruding above a deep groove in his receding chin, would later prove important to forensic archaeologists. Franklin thought the doctor diffident and said so in a letter he sent from Greenland to Richardson, Sir John’s friend and physician.
At the commander’s urging, Fitzjames decided to pass the day with a slow read, which Franklin kindly provided in galleys. It was Sir John’s rushed, unpublished pamphlet about how he got roughed up in Van Diemen’s Land. It wasn’t the best material in Erebus’s extensive library, but likely the most politic under the circumstances. Goodsir, by the captain’s description, was having a decidedly more interesting time “examining ‘mollusca,’ in a meecroscope.” He was “in ecstacies about a bag full of
blubber-like stuff, which he has just hauled up in a net, and which turns out to be whales’ food and other animals,” Fitzjames wrote playfully in his journal. “I have been reading Sir John Franklin’s vindication of his government of Van Diemen’s Land, which was to come out a week or two after we sailed. He had ready all the sheets, and cuts up Lord Stanley a few, and says he is haughty and imperious.”
Franklin entrusted Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Sabine, on the rise to become head of the Royal Society, to offer a strong, experienced shoulder to Jane and Eleanor if Sir John took longer than expected to return. An Irish veteran of the War of 1812 who, six years later, served as the astronomer in the renewed search for the Northwest Passage, Sabine was also a leading expert on magnetism, an ornithologist, and an explorer. He had the knowledge, wisdom, and respect to offer rational assurances, even in the vacuum of rumor, speculation, and occult murmuring, that one would need to calm someone as strong willed as the woman Franklin loved.
“I hope my dear wife and daughter will not be over anxious if we should not return by the time they have fixed upon,” Franklin wrote to Sabine on July 12, 1845, just before heading northwest from the Whale Fish Islands into Baffin Bay. “And I must beg of you to give them the benefit of your advice and experience when that time arrives, for you know well that, without success in our object, even after the second winter, we should wish to try some other channel if the state of our provisions and the health of the crews justify it.”