Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  Three days after Torrington succumbed, death struck again. The expedition lost John Hartnell, a twenty-five-year-old able seaman aboard Erebus. His death was so sudden that it called for an autopsy aboard Erebus. The surgeon made a long, Y-shaped incision in Hartnell’s chest and abdomen to remove the sailor’s heart and part of his windpipe and also examined the lungs. There was evidence of tuberculosis and pneumonia. He had been injured at some point, suffering what appeared to be a compression fracture in his lower neck. A small bone in his left foot showed signs of infection. Wrapped in a shroud, Hartnell was buried dressed only from the waist up, with a wool cap and a pullover shirt woven with blue-and-white stripes, tied shut where buttons had fallen off. Underneath, he wore a wool jumper and a cotton undershirt. Carved in his wooden headboard was the biblical admonition: “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways.”

  Then, on April 3, William Braine, thirty-two, a Royal Marine private serving aboard Erebus, passed away. Years earlier, a sharp blow had left a scar across his forehead. He was developing arthritis in his hands and feet. Sores on the front of his shoulders, right where thick ropes would cut into the skin as a man hauled something heavy, suggested in an autopsy decades later that Braine died on a sledge trip. He also had signs of pneumonia. As Braine lay in the chill darkness below deck, perhaps because a storm delayed his funeral, rats gnawed at his bone-thin corpse, leaving tiny bite marks on his groin, chest, and shoulders. Before he was finally laid to rest, with his undershirt on backward and other hints of a hurried burial, someone placed a bright red kerchief over Braine’s decomposing face.

  “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve,” the inscription on his headboard read, quoting Joshua.

  All three of the men had suffered more than one illness, but without any records showing cause of death, modern experts were left to wonder exactly what killed them. Generations after the Franklin Expedition vanished, it is still a virtual blank slate for theorists to argue all sorts of possibilities. Some point to botulism, perhaps a strain endemic in the Arctic or one that bred in improperly tinned food. Other research suggested that pneumonia, possibly made worse by tuberculosis and lead poisoning, likely killed the men and others who succumbed to the Arctic. But like many of the explanations offered for the loss of every man, monkey, dog, and cat that sailed with Franklin on Erebus and Terror, lead poisoning hasn’t held up under scientific scrutiny. The corpses exhumed from Beechey Island 138 years after the men died did show elevated lead levels. The solder used to seal the expedition’s canned food may have contributed some of the neurotoxin in the mariners’ bodies. But lead from many sources contaminated Europeans in the nineteenth century. In the twenty-first century, scientists ruled out the suggestion that any of the metal ingested during the sailors’ Arctic voyage had a significant impact. That means it is very unlikely Franklin and his crews suddenly became addled by lead poisoning just when they needed to think their way clearly out of a lethal bind.

  That winter of 1845–46, while he waited for the Arctic to free his ships, Sir John had a lot of time to think, reread the Admiralty’s instructions, and chart his next course. The lengthy orders told him “it will be a matter of your mature deliberation whether in the ensuing season” to proceed westward, as Parry had, or “persevere to the southwestward.” Franklin apparently headed south through Peel Sound. Some historians believe he got farther west and made the turn into McClintock Channel. No physical evidence was found to prove either route. But the ultimate end isn’t in dispute: Sea ice, likely driven by one or more storms that always mark the High Arctic’s sudden turn from summer to winter, trapped Erebus and Terror again on September 12, 1846. Like a noose cinched tight, pack ice quickly closed around Erebus and Terror at the northern end of Victoria Strait, some twelve miles off the northwest shore of King William Island.

  WHILE THE ROYAL NAVY expedition waited for the sun to return and begin melting the ice, change was marching steadily ahead in the rest of the world. British East India Company troops advanced in their brutal war to crush Sikh opposition. In the US, Mormons started their trek to the west. Then the Mexican-American War broke out on the southern border. Kerosene was invented. The planet Neptune was discovered. Far from any headlines, Franklin continued to send out parties to explore uncharted territory in anticipation of the next season’s breakup.

  Lieutenant Graham Gore and ship’s mate Charles F. Des Voeux left the Franklin Expedition vessels with six men on a mission in May 1847. Whatever else they accomplished on that trip across the sea ice, fraught with untold dangers, they would be remembered for five fragmented, handwritten sentences. Following Royal Navy procedure, they wrote a note in ink on a printed form before concealing it in a stone cairn. A prayer would have been appropriate, in hopes that a divine hand might lead anyone looking for the expedition to find guidance in this piece of paper. The first note, very brief and hopeful, said the expedition had wintered at Beechey Island after sailing up Wellington Channel to latitude 77 degrees north and then heading back south along the west coast of Cornwallis Island.

  “Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition,” read the note, signed by Gore and Des Voeux on May 28, 1847. “All well.”

  Those sparse words masked a dire truth. It didn’t mention three men had died. One of the few sentence fragments also contained an intriguing error: It said the expedition wintered over at Beechey in 1846–47, but the correct years were 1845–46. Some would later seize on that as evidence Franklin’s men were losing their minds early in their ordeal. Des Voeux’s party also seemed slightly lost, making another mistake that might easily be explained by the endless torment of Arctic survival. But, it seems, they were also trying to follow a sensible emergency plan that Franklin had discussed before his departure.

  The men first placed the note in a soldered canister beneath what they mistakenly thought was a cairn of stacked stones that John Ross’s nephew James had built seventeen years earlier. That is when he named nearby Cape Felix after the gin maker who funded his uncle’s expedition aboard the steam-powered paddle wheeler Victory. Just as John Ross had advised Franklin in the final days before Erebus and Terror sailed, it appeared the commander’s men were now leaving a trail his friend might follow to find them.

  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 expedition commander may have known his own days were numbered and ordered his men to place the note where Ross would be most likely to look for it. Franklin died, also of unknown causes, soon after the report was deposited and his men returned to the ships. That fact was recorded in a scrawl of ink around the margins of the first record. Lieutenant John Irving went to the trouble of retrieving it from the mistaken cairn so that it could be moved four miles to the south at Victory Point, to what they decided was a real Ross cairn. Ross’s nephew James had named the point after their ship in 1830 and left, in a stone cairn, a brief account of his voyage to date. Around midnight on May 29, looking out on “the vast extent of ocean then before our eyes,” he thought his exhausted sled-dog team had brought him to the top of that stretch of the continent. The sea ice was stunning.

  “The pack of ice which had, in the autumn of the last year, been pressed against that shore, consisted of the heaviest masses that I had ever seen in such a situation.”

  Ross couldn’t believe his eyes. Like a seaborne bulldozer, the thick, multiyear ice had shoved lighter floes up the shoreline, “turning up large quantities of the shingle before them, and, in some places, having travelled as much as half a mile beyond the limits of the highest tide mark.” The floes had poured down from the northwest, through McClintock Channel, just as the sea ice had now clamped shut on Erebus and Terror. Ross named a cape to the southwest after Franklin and piled limestone slabs to make a six-foot cairn. That’s where Captain Fitzjames had now come to leave the note reporting Franklin’s death and his expedition’s de
mise. He covered the remaining edges of the Admiralty form that Des Voeux had filled out almost a year before him. The captain’s hand obviously was trembling, his handwriting a shaky scrawl.

  April 25th, 1848.—H.M. ships Erebus and Terror were deserted on the 22nd of April, five leagues N.N.W. of this; having been beset since 12th Sept., 1846.

  Then, after describing the transfer of the original note, the worst news:

  Sir John Franklin died on 11 June, 1847, and the total loss by death in the Expedition has been, to this date, nine officers and fifteen men.

  Fitzjames and Crozier, Franklin’s second-in-command, signed. Then Crozier wrote a final line, as if it were an afterthought from a drained mind. The desperate expression of a high-risk decision, to give up their shelter and try to walk out of the Arctic, was without a hint of explanation. It had to be curt. There was too little space left to say anything more. Squeezed into the upper right corner of the document, scrawled upside down, the terse conclusion said:

  And start on tomorrow 26th for Back’s Fish River.

  Strict Royal Navy protocol had required the sailors to follow prescribed steps in those final hours aboard Erebus and Terror. Anything loose, like boats, booms, and sails, had to be lashed down or stowed. As the final moment of abandonment approached, the commander ordered codebooks to be burned. Carpenters used tarry oakum to caulk shut any entryways to the ship that hadn’t already been sealed against the long winter cold. Crewmen were allowed to pack some personal things, the necessary clothes and gear, any family mementos, with limitations on weight. Officers could take more, ordinary seamen less. As they worked, spirits lifted with the hope of getting home after the long, painful months trapped in the High Arctic wilderness. Counting down the hours until it was time to start walking, the crewman on watch struck the clapper against Erebus’s bronze bell at least once at the top of each hour, tolling a solemn clang that resonated across the vacant sea ice. Carpenters sealed entryways, leaving one open for their commander to make his final inspection, climb out on deck, and order the final hatchway secured.

  If Crozier and his closest officers were still well enough, the commander would have led them in a toast, maybe even a prayer. The expedition was not over. Honor was due to the men—those already lost and the others still fighting for their lives—and to the great vessels they were now abandoning to fend against the Arctic on their own. The requisite flags were raised, to ensure their Royal Navy colors were flying if Erebus and Terror went down, and the bell was tied off to prevent its sounding on an empty ship, trembling in the wind. Much more than a device to mark time, or sound the alarm, the bell was symbolic of a ship’s very heart. Crewmen even had their newborns christened in their ship’s upturned bell. The new baby’s name could be engraved in its metal to welcome the child into the navy fold. If the sea eventually took their ship, sailors believed, the bell would ring once more as she slipped beneath the waves into her watery grave.

  When all the required steps were complete, and it was time to cede Erebus and Terror to the Arctic, the last man aboard climbed down to the sea ice.

  For weeks before the day of abandonment, crewmen had gathered a massive amount of equipment, supplies, and unusual extras to be cached ashore. They collected utilitarian items, like heavy iron stoves to cook for more than a hundred camped men, plus canned food, blankets, and medicine. But the weary men also carried more puzzling things, like novels, brass curtain rods, button polish, silk handkerchiefs, and a mahogany writing desk. In stages, they packed as much as ten tons of stuff into thirty-foot whaleboats, which the sailors dragged on ropes across some twenty-five miles of sea ice that separated the ships from shore. It took them up to five days, slipping and falling on the ice, fighting off the searing pain of frostbite, maneuvering around pressure ridges as tall as small buildings, to make one delivery ashore. When that exhausting work was done, there was no way survivors could carry most of what they had moved as they continued south toward the continent. So they abandoned most of their cache, just as they had their ships.

  The Franklin Expedition’s survivors, now down to 105 haggard men, would try to reach safety in the same place that starving remnants of Ukjulingmiut Inuit had sought salvation decades earlier, only to suffer mass death. They quickly split into groups. Inuit watched some men break away, never to return, while those who remained died of starvation. At a place Inuit call Teekeenu, roughly halfway down the west coast of King William Island at present-day Washington Bay, hunters were sealing when they spotted what they thought was a polar bear on smooth ice in the distance. It was likely the sail flapping above a boat the escaping sailors hauled on a sledge full of supplies. As they rose from the horizon, the Inuit realized they were looking at men not a bear. The group made a turn with the bay. Now the hunters feared they might become the prey. Two Inuit men, Ow-wer and Too-shoo-art-thar-u, walked out on the ice to meet the qalunaaq. Two of the white men, one carrying a gun, approached and stopped at a large crack in the ice, the armed one staying slightly back, weapon in his arms.

  “C’hi-mo,” the unarmed one shouted in greeting. The other laid down his gun and joined him.

  The Inuit called the man who appeared to be a leader Aglooka, meaning “He Who Takes Long Strides.” The man knelt down by the crack that separated them from the Inuit and scraped the ice with an ulu, a knife with a blade shaped like a half moon, normally used by women. At the same time, he raised his other hand to his mouth and motioned down his neck to his stomach, which the Inuit took to mean he was hungry and needed food. The white men walked along the crack until they found a place to cross. This time Aglooka pantomimed his hunger again, repeating “Man-nik-too-me” over and over. The officer then got across that two ships were behind them to the north. He made the sound of whirring and buzzing, and blowing wind, apparently acting out ice crushing the vessels. The other Inuit, less afraid now, came forward to join the group. Aglooka asked the Inuit men and women to open all their packs, which they did, so he could take seal meat from each one. After paying two women with large beads, he piled the food on a dog’s back and four Inuit went with him to the other qalunaaq and their boat. Some were putting up a tent. They all raised their arms, hands open above their heads, to show they had no weapons. Aglooka spoke to one of them, a short man with a narrow face and big nose, who may have been Dr. Alexander McDonald, Terror’s assistant surgeon. He could speak some Inuktitut, learned on previous voyages with whalers.

  Another witness described Aglooka’s eyes as sunken in, his face so drawn that the Inuk’s cousin was too afraid to look. A searcher later concluded the dying man was Crozier, who gave the order to abandon Erebus and Terror and try to walk out. At some point, several of the men returned to the expedition’s flagship. Suddenly freed from the solid pack as the breaking ice shrieked, moaned, and cracked with the terrifying cries of a dying beast, Erebus and Terror stirred to life again to make a final, mysterious voyage southward.

  PART II

  THE HUNT

  4

  The Hunt Begins

  Back home, many people were getting more anxious with each day that passed without any word from Erebus or Terror. The Admiralty had raised expectations high with the publicity leading up to Sir John’s send-off, and the public’s attention span was long in an age when experiments with carrier pigeons were cutting-edge communications technology. The best hope the Franklin Expedition had of communicating beyond the Arctic was if the currents carried one of their message canisters to a far-off beach, someone found it, and the finder took the trouble to send the report it contained to British authorities. So the British public was left to wonder, and speculate, about what was going on with the best-equipped expedition ever sent in search of the Northwest Passage. Some even appealed to the paranormal, hoping for at least a hint of good news or bad.

  In the corridors of power, an argument was slowly building over what should be done to find out where the expedition was, and whether Sir John and his men were still in good shape. In the autumn
of 1846, when the sea ice first stranded Franklin’s ships, Sir John Ross was due for retirement. He refused to take it. Ross thought Franklin should have been clear of the Arctic by then. To his ear, continued silence from the expedition was a bad sign. Ross saw another fight ahead and wasn’t going to do anything that would prevent him from leading a rescue mission. He had been certain one would be necessary since the day he last saw Franklin.

  Just as Scoresby had warned decades earlier, Ross thought it was wrong to send such large ships into the Arctic Archipelago. Adding steam engines only compounded the dangers for a bomb vessel like Erebus or Terror because the engines “took up too much of her stowage, and brought the ships deeper in their draught of water.” Worst of all, Ross insisted in a scathing postmortem, canned meat in the ships’ provisions proved to be “putrid and unfit for human food.” Tinned meat was a relatively new luxury for sailors. For centuries, sailors at sea had subsisted on salted meat, hardtack, and pickles. In Napoleon’s France, Nicolas Appert had revolutionized the feeding of a military on the move. He developed an early sterilization process by which food was heated in sealed glass jars and bottles, which were then boiled in water to make them ready for packing. The British improved Appert’s method by using tin-plated cans, which were lighter and less likely to explode.