Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  Thomas Blanky, ice master aboard Terror, was a veteran of the Ross Expedition’s four arduous years in the Arctic aboard the steam-powered paddle wheeler Victory. Making it through that agony apparently made him an incurable optimist. In his last letter home, Blanky tried to prepare his loved ones for a long wait, telling them they should never give up hope of seeing him again, no matter how long and troubling the delay.

  “We are all in good spirits, one and all appearing to be of the same determination, that is, to persevere in making a passage to the north-west. Should we not be at home in the fall of 1848, or early in the spring of 1849, you may anticipate that we have made the passage, or are likely to do so; and if so, it may be from five to six years—it might be into the seventh—ere we return; and should it be so, do not allow any person to dishearten you on the length of our absence, but look forward with hope, that Providence will at length of time restore us safely to you.”

  Erebus sailed steadily closer to the Arctic, putting Franklin back in his element. It was getting colder, but her crew warmed to their commander. The bracing sea-tang drifting on Arctic air was doing him good.

  “Sir John is in much better health than when we left England, and really looks ten years younger,” Lieutenant J. W. Fairholme, a junior officer, wrote home from Greenland. “He takes an active part in everything that goes on, and his long experience in such services as this makes him a most valuable adviser.” Like the lieutenant, Captain Fitzjames thought everyone was pleased with Sir John’s steady hand under intense pressure. He was, it seemed, at peace with himself, in a fight he knew well, with everything riding on the outcome.

  “We are very happy, and very fond of Sir John Franklin, who improves very much as we come to know more of him,” Fitzjames told his journal. “He is anything but nervous or fidgety; in fact I should say remarkable for energetic decision in sudden emergencies; but I should think he might be easily persuaded where he has not already formed a strong opinion.”

  Franklin could also deliver a rousing sermon, which must have helped when the ice closed in and frightened men with much less experience could only wonder, and worry, what came next. On a Sabbath at sea, when Erebus’s deck was rolling in heavy swells and the commander had to raise his voice against a stiff breeze, he led his crew in solemn prayer. Franklin, who knew his Bible well, felt God at his side and wanted his men to share the comfort and confidence.

  He “read the church service to-day and a sermon so very beautifully, that I defy any man not to feel the force of what he would convey,” Fitzjames reported home. “The first Sunday he read was a day or two before we sailed, when Lady Franklin, his daughter, and niece attended. Everyone was struck with his extreme earnestness of manner, evidently proceeding from his real conviction.”

  Fitzjames described his shipmates as “fine, hearty fellows, mostly north-countrymen, with a few man-of-war’s men,” by which he meant a small contingent of armed troops. There were fourteen Royal Marines assigned to the expedition, in equal units posted to each ship, made up of a sergeant, a corporal, and five privates. The armed forces were aboard more to keep sailors in line, ready to deal harshly with any mutiny attempts, than to fight foreign enemies. Franklin’s orders from the Admiralty included a clause that instructed, in the event that war broke out while they were at sea, that he and his men must remain neutral. A captain on Parry’s second Arctic voyage reported Inuit actually found the Marines entertaining: “The gay appearance of the marines, such, even in this climate, is the attractive influence of a red coat, so delighted the ladies, that they all danced and shouted in an ecstasy of pleasure as each soldier passed before them on church parade.”

  Fitzjames called in the Marines early in the mission, to handle booze control in a crackdown that followed his decision to grant shore leave when the ships docked at Stromness, in Orkney, Scotland. Two sailors headed off for Kirkwall, fourteen miles away: one, “a little old man” to be with the wife he hadn’t seen in four years, the other to visit his mother, after seventeen years apart. Fitzjames also sent one man from each ship’s mess ashore for fresh provisions. Somewhat to his surprise, they all came back. But when the men discovered the ships weren’t sailing until the next morning, several took a small boat without permission, including the old sailor, now drunk on whiskey. He pined for his wife. They were all rounded up and brought back aboard Erebus by 3 a.m.

  Possible punishments for going AWOL included losing their pay to the constables who apprehended the sailors. Fitzjames thought that would be unnecessarily cruel, especially since the crew wouldn’t have any chance to jump ship again until Erebus and Terror were through the Arctic and in port at Valparaiso, Chile, or the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii, far off in the Pacific. It must have occurred to the young captain as he emerged, bleary-eyed, from his small cabin that night: The errant sailors would soon be in the High Arctic with no escape. Surely that would be punishment enough for everyone’s sins.

  “So I got up at 4 o’clock, had everybody on deck, sent Gore and the Sergeant of marines below, and searched the whole deck for spirits, which were thrown overboard. This took two good hours; soon after which we up anchor, and made sail out. I said nothing to any of them. They evidently expected a rowing, and the old man with the wife looked very sheepish, and would not look me in the face; but nothing more was said, and the men have behaved not a bit the worse ever since.”

  Fitzjames seemed to get the biggest charge out of another Scottish seaman named James Reid, a whaler from Aberdeen with a sailor’s salty wit. Erebus’s ice master, Reid manned the crow’s nest when sea ice was in sight. Apparently wary of Reid’s skills, his captain qualified the description, adding “so-called” in parentheses after “ice master.” Reid’s job was to perch high up Erebus’s main-top-gallant masthead, watching for channels through the shifting floes or pack ice. A crow’s nest could be as basic as a cask lined with canvas, but Reid called his “a very expensive one,” which consisted of a hooped canvas cylinder. It couldn’t have been comfortable in an Arctic wind, with ice all around, and the lives of 128 men, as well as his own, riding on Reid’s judgment of any risks. Unlike the scorned Scoresby, Reid knew ice only from hard experience, not scientific study. So his call on whether to stop at the pack edge, try to go around, or sail forward, was based more on what his gut rather than his mind told him.

  To Fitzjames, Reid was “the most original character of all—rough, intelligent unpolished, with a broad north-country accent, but not vulgar, good humoured, and honest hearted.” When Erebus’s crew had all sails set and well trimmed in a following sea, she was a beautiful thing. The taut canvas and network of lines running to scores of wooden belaying pins pegged along the bulwarks hummed and whistled and twanged, like the wind’s vocal chords. If a mariner kept a close ear, he could hear the Arctic speak. When she and Terror were approaching Cape Farewell, on Greenland’s coast, Fitzjames asked Reid whether he expected a gale. The ice master’s reply sounds like buccaneer dialogue that Robert Louis Stevenson might have written, but with more sea air blowing through it.

  “Ah! now, Mister Jems, we’ll be having the weather fine, sir! fine! No ice at arl about it, sir, unless it be the bergs—arl, the ice’ll be gone, sir, only the bergs, which I like to see. Let it come on to blow, look out for a big ’un. Get under his lee, and hold on to him fast, sir, fast. If he drifts near the land, why, he grounds afore you do.”

  Reid had learned the mercurial ways of sea ice during his years harpooning whales. He knew as well as any man on the expedition that he might not come home. But Reid assured his wife in a letter he wrote during a stop in Greenland that he was glad to be going to the Arctic, even if it took four years to see her again. The promised payoff was too good to turn down, even though, Reid griped to his wife days before the expedition departed, he had to spend £100 on life insurance and, as an officer must, buy his own silver fork and spoon for the voyage.

  “Sir John told me that if I went the voyage with him, and landed safely in England
again, I would be looked after all my life.”

  “A number of people think it strange of me going,” he conceded in the letter dated May 13, 1845, “but they would go if they knew as much about ice as I know.”

  And then Reid wrote this portentous postscript: “No doubt there will be a great talk about me going this voyage. It will show that I am not frightened for my life like some men. It is for you and the family. Why should a man stop at home?”

  The Arctic, as well as the ice that flowed through her veins, was harder to fathom than even Reid knew. Franklin and his men were sailing for the Arctic near the end of the Little Ice Age, which lasted until about 1850. For some five hundred years, following a warmer Middle Ages in Europe, glaciers were growing and mean annual temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere dropped by more than one degree Fahrenheit. But some years were warmer than others, and in any given one, extremes of regional weather could vary. Two relatively ice-free years that Scoresby noted before the Admiralty launched the mission to find the Northwest Passage quickly gave way to much colder, more severe Arctic winters. Reid couldn’t have known it, but he was about to face one of the worst winters Inuit could recall. It’s anyone’s guess what the ice master advised Franklin before he gave the order for Erebus and Terror to make a run through the floes that bore down and finally trapped them.

  Neither could have been so popular anymore as the sea ice gripped tight and shipmates slowly began to die.

  EREBUS GROANED and creaked as Fitzjames wrote each night in flickering light at a mahogany desk. He called it a drawer table, “three feet long, or from the bed to the door,” a tight squeeze in a cabin about six feet wide. With several years of food and supplies loaded, and the weather favorable, the expedition was finally just hours away from sailing for Baffin Bay, where Franklin would prepare for a push into the archipelago and whatever awaited. The hard nib of his pen scratching across brittle paper, Fitzjames imagined great things to come. The captain could barely contain his excitement. It seemed the Arctic was ready to cooperate and, after centuries of trying, the Northwest Passage would soon be conquered. A Dane, married to an Inuit woman, had come aboard Erebus from the Lively at Greenland, “and they believe it to be one of the mildest seasons and earliest summers ever known, and that the ice is clear away from this to Lancaster Sound.”

  “Keep this to yourself,” Fitzjames instructed the Coninghams, his adoptive family, “for Sir John is naturally very anxious that people in England should not be too sanguine about the season. Besides, the papers would have all sorts of stories, not true. I do believe we have a good chance of getting through this year, if it is to be done at all; but I hope we shall not, as I want to have a winter for magnetic observations.”

  In the Arctic, it’s wise to be especially careful what you wish for. Fitzjames was tempting fate. A brave, adventurous seaman who had fought in battle and survived, he was now a little high on a whiff of maritime history in the making. In a hurry to taste it, he also hoped to savor the experience as long as possible. Maybe he would make the papers, perhaps even bow to be knighted by the queen. To explain what sounded impulsive, even devil-may-care in the face of unknown dangers, the giddy captain invoked the American spirit.

  “Don’t care is the order of the day. I mean, don’t care for difficulties or stoppages—go a-head is the wish. We hear this is a remarkable clear season, but clear or not clear we must go a-head, as the Yankees have it; and if we don’t get through, it won’t be our fault.”

  By then, Fitzjames was very familiar with his commander’s sailing habits and knew Sir John wasn’t timid. The old sea dog liked his ships moving fast, under full sail, and wasn’t quick to order sailors to reef them in when the wind was blowing hard.

  “I can scarcely manage to get Sir John to shorten sail at all,” Fitzjames remarked.

  Erebus and Terror reached Baffin Bay in July 1845, just in time for the approach of winter. Franklin paused there to wait for the weather to improve before sailing into Lancaster Sound, by now the well-charted eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. From three miles off, whalers spotted the Royal Navy vessels moored to an iceberg on the northern part of the vast bay. Franklin was waiting for an opening to make a run either around or through the “middle ice” due west in the sound. Fitzjames and six other officers from the discovery ships boarded the Prince of Wales. Like the whaler that had rescued Ross and his men fourteen years earlier, she sailed out of Hull. In high spirits, Franklin’s men invited the ship’s commander, Captain Dannett, to join Franklin for dinner the next night on Erebus. He never made it. A favorable breeze picked up, and Dannett sailed off toward the south. A chance for the explorers to send their last letters home disappeared with him. The whaling captain later reported that three weeks of fine weather followed his departure.

  The 349-ton whaling barque Enterprise came alongside the larger Erebus so that Captain Robert Martin, a respected veteran of Arctic navigation, could join Franklin for dinner. Martin chatted with Franklin and his ice master Reid and asked if the commander had a good supply of provisions. Franklin told him they had enough to last for five years and said he could “make them spin out seven years” if necessary, Martin later testified in a deposition. They had plenty of gunpowder and lead shot to shoot birds, or anything else edible, along the way. Two hunting parties, one from each ship, had already bagged enough birds to fill several casks with their salted carcasses. Sailors called them “rotges,” claiming they were as tasty as young pigeons and therefore served a fair substitute for squab. Better still, they were easy prey. A single rifle blast could bring down several at a time.

  At their dinner on July 26 or 28, Franklin and his officers said they expected their voyage to last four or five, maybe even six years, leaving them with ample supplies. A few days after the captains dined and chatted, as Erebus and Terror still lay tethered to the iceberg and the Enterprise gradually drifted off, the Franklin Expedition disappeared from sight. The Admiralty’s planners didn’t expect the men to be gone as long as Franklin and his officers seemed ready to stay at sea. Already, Sir John’s overland expeditions had helped show the way out of the Northwest Passage, by following a fairly easy route along the North American mainland. That leg of the passage was mapped more thoroughly by Peter Dease and Thomas Simpson, both of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Parry had charted the way in, along the 74th parallel to Melville Island, for which he collected Parliament’s £5,000 prize, or close to half a million dollars today. All that remained for Franklin and his men to do was close the gap between the two routes, a distance of roughly three hundred miles.

  Most anywhere else, that would be a jaunt. In the High Arctic, it was an eternity.

  Soon after the whalers left Erebus and Terror in Baffin Bay, Franklin set a course due west through Lancaster Sound and into Barrow Strait. His ships were making good progress, but it was now August, and the gales of early September would soon be upon them. Vicious storms at summer’s end were, and still are, one of the Arctic’s most predictable, and lethal, traits. Franklin must have seen open water to the north, because he followed that option in the Admiralty’s instructions, the alternative that Franklin may have pushed to be added in the margins of the original. Erebus and Terror ascended Wellington Channel, following the east coast of Cornwallis Island. By autumn, they made it 150 miles north to latitude 77 degrees north. There, either sea ice or the sense that he had gone far enough in pursuit of the elusive Open Polar Sea persuaded Franklin to turn back.

  Others who followed in search of the missing expedition wouldn’t be nearly so bold. For Franklin and his crewmen to get that far north so quickly, things were going extraordinarily well. They went past Cornwallis’s northern tip, under a thousand miles from the North Pole, before turning south along the west coast of Cornwallis to complete a circumnavigation of the island. By then, Franklin had no choice but to find safe harbor. The explorers could be proud of their first months in the Arctic Archipelago. They had, as ordered, gone as far north as it was
sensible to do in search of a passage to the Pacific. On their way up, they explored a new strait, Queen’s Channel, between Bathurst and Cornwallis Islands. Then they made it safely south to an ideal spot for wintering over, near the cathedral cliffs of Beechey Island, all before the worst months of winter. Sir John had every reason to break out the hand organs and let the men celebrate as they settled in for the long darkness. He would have known Beechey well as a recommended High Arctic waypoint. His friend and confidant Parry had visited there in August 1819 and had a burst of speed that summer, feeling the rush of breaking free from the eastern archipelago’s tighter, ice-choked channels. But it came with a warning to any who came after him.

  “It is impossible to conceive any thing more animating than the quick and unobstructed run with which we were favored, from Beechey Island across to Cape Hotham,” Parry recalled. “Most men have, probably, at one time or another, experienced the elevation of spirits which is usually produced by rapid motion of any kind; and it will readily be conceived how much this feeling was heightened in us, in the few instances in which it occurred, by the slow and tedious manner in which the greater part of our navigation had been performed in these seas. Our disappointment may therefore be imagined, when, in the midst of these favorable appearances, and of the hope with which they had induced us to flatter ourselves, it was suddenly and unexpectedly reported from the crow’s nest, that a body of ice lay directly across the passage between Cornwallis Island and the land to the southward.”

  If only Beechey Island had been so gracious to Franklin and his men. During their first winter, three died and were buried in shallow graves scraped out of the island’s rocky permafrost. John Torrington, a twenty-year-old leading stoker who shoveled coal for Terror’s steam engine, passed on January 1, 1846. Torrington’s lungs, stained by the black dust and smoke he had inhaled for hours each day, were scarred by a disease that had infected him long before he boarded the Terror. He was suffering from tuberculosis. At first, the bacteria spread through his body without symptoms. Then the disease ravaged him—draining the stoker’s strength, forcing him to cough up bloody sputum, slowly wasting him away. Emphysema made breathing all the more difficult. Pneumonia then set in, which probably killed him. Below deck, surgeons cleaned his corpse, dressed him in trousers and a striped shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, and used a strip of cotton cloth to bind the dead man’s arms tightly to his body at the elbows. They tied it off with a bow at the front before Torrington was lifted into a brass-handled mahogany coffin, carefully built by the ship’s carpenters. A heart-shaped plaque nailed to the lid declared, in white hand-painted script, his name, date of death, and age. Interred in the permafrost, the sailor was mummified by ice, his eyes half open, lips drawn back, to expose rows of straight white teeth in a ghoulish rictus grin.