Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  When the Admiralty’s Victualling Department was provisioning the Franklin Expedition, its main contractor for canned meat was Stephen Goldner, a Hungarian immigrant who ran a canning factory in Moldavia, now part of Romania. The cheaper labor, and lower-cost supplies of cattle and pork, allowed him to turn a profit as the navy’s demand for more tinned meat grew. That was despite the great distance between his factory and Britain’s dockyards. His process was far from perfect, and it exposed Royal Navy crews to lethal toxins, such as botulism. Making matters worse, Goldner’s employees were constantly bickering about the low wages, and frequent beatings from the boss, which didn’t improve the poor quality control. After separating meat from fat, they scalded or boiled the meat in vats, packed as much as possible into each can, and filled in the spaces with soup from the vats. Then they soldered on lids, punctured with small holes to let steam escape as the cans were dipped in calcium chloride heated to around 260 degrees Fahrenheit. After the steam hole was patted with a wet sponge, a drop of solder sealed it. The finished cans were then stored for three weeks at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Any that burst were removed. The rest went to the Royal Navy. Dockworkers loaded many cases of Goldner’s canned meat, 33,289 pounds of it, deep into the holds of Erebus and Terror.

  Goldner won the Royal Navy supply contract in 1844. Franklin’s expedition was among the first to get his cans of meat, but others had eaten it before his crews did, without catastrophic consequences. It was long after he sailed for the Arctic that politicians and the press took serious notice of waves of complaints rolling in from Royal Navy seamen who found bits of bone, offal, and other nonmeat items in their tins. Worse, the cans were often bent out of shape by pressure from gassy microbes breeding inside. A Parliamentary Select Committee investigated and concluded, among other things, that Goldner’s workers were probably stealing meat and substituting bits banned under a strict contract, either out of revenge or to make up for the terrible pay.

  It also found that Goldner was more focused on producing tallow and hides, which provided a better profit and in turn subsidized his canning operation, allowing him to undercut other bidders for the Royal Navy contract. Investigators discovered cans that were supposed to contain only meat actually had such things as putrefying “pieces of heart, roots of tongues, pieces of palates, pieces of tongues, coagulated blood, pieces of liver, ligaments of the throat, pieces of intestines.” The Admiralty’s comptroller reported that improper substances appeared very infrequently in checked cans, but rotting meat was a widespread problem. Blame fell on Goldner’s shoddy canning and the navy’s poor handling of the tins in its warehouses and aboard ships.

  Sir John Ross’s accusation that bad food helped doom Franklin and his men was at best a guess, based on the broader Goldner scandal. But the explorer’s charge that the Admiralty didn’t pay careful attention to weather warnings has survived closer scrutiny. After studying forty years of weather records from Archangel, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg, Ross believed that severe winter in northern Europe predicted the same in Baffin Bay. He warned Franklin that he wouldn’t get past Cornwallis Island in his first season in the Arctic Archipelago. Among the evidence Ross offered was personal experience during the winter before Franklin left for the Arctic. Ross had traveled in a carriage drawn by four horses from Helsingborg, Sweden, where he was British consul, to Elsinore in Denmark, and “when I passed Hamburg they were roasting an ox on the Elbe.” That winter was so extreme that he had to detour and make his way home via Rotterdam.

  Wisdom and instinct honed during four years trapped in sea ice made Ross’s concerns about the timing of the Franklin Expedition all the more grave. But other naval officers, the overwhelming majority of polar experts, disagreed. Franklin chose to believe them. He had too much on the line to listen to a doubter, no matter how close a friend he was. Ross later claimed “that neither the Government nor those consulted ever took into consideration the mildness or the severity of the preceding winters, which is absolutely necessary in order to judge of the navigation and state of the sea and ice during the succeeding summer.” Certain he was right, Ross had several conversations with Franklin about how he should plan to minimize the risk and what Ross would do to back him up if things went as badly as that voice in the wilderness predicted.

  The men had known each other since Sir John Barrow and the Royal Navy launched Britain’s return to polar exploration in 1818. Ross was a captain and Franklin a young lieutenant on a failed, four-vessel attempt to sail to the North Pole. As members of the tight brotherhood of polar explorers, they grew close over the years. Ross was sixty-eight by the time he promised Franklin to personally come looking for him in the High Arctic. More than a year later, he wasn’t about to let advancing age scuttle a solemn commitment. Ross watched the weather closely after Sir John headed out to sea. Friends in Sweden, Denmark, and Russia, as well as returning whalers, told Ross that the following winter of 1845–46 was particularly bad. In Baffin Bay, the “‘land-ice’ extended from the west coast further than they had seen it,” he reported.

  “I had a fair prospect,” Ross thought, “of being able to complete the relief or rescue (in the case of accident) of my gallant friend, to whom I had pledged my word, especially as it was now evident that he had not found or accomplished the north-west passage.”

  Ross wrote his first, brief letter to the Admiralty offering to lead a relief mission in 1847 “to proceed to certain positions we had agreed upon in search of him and his brave companions.” The letter was dated September 28, 1846, just over two weeks after Erebus and Terror were beset. Of course, Ross and the rest of the world didn’t know that yet. Still, the discredited explorer thought the Admiralty would jump at his offer. After all, he was the only volunteer to step forward. But the naval command insisted there was no cause for alarm because the expedition had only been in the Arctic roughly a year, which meant they would have used up, at most, only two-thirds of their provisions. That assumed at least some of the canned meat was still edible, and nothing else had gone wrong with the crews’ health and supplies.

  Ross’s anger with the Admiralty’s stubborn refusal to back him went from simmer to boil as he watched the next northern winter arrive. It was milder, offering the perfect opportunity to go looking for Franklin’s ships. Other vessels had left Stockholm at the start of January 1847 and made it through the sea ice in midmonth, which got Ross studying charts to figure out the best places to search around Cornwallis Island. His argument still had a gaping hole. Without hard evidence to prove the Admiralty and other polar experts wrong, Ross was trying to persuade one of the world’s most powerful military institutions to trust his gut feeling that Franklin and his men were in trouble. He continued to press for permission to act on it. The predictable reply came from the second secretary, Captain William A. B. Hamilton, who assured Ross “that although your gallant and humane intentions are fully appreciated by their Lordships, yet no such service is at present contemplated by my Lords. . . .”

  Ross, as he often did, took the anodyne reply personally. He was sure the Admiralty was being evasive and, by his description, puerile, “doubtless in order to induce me to accept the retirement and thereby throw me on the shelf.” As anyone who knew Ross would have expected, he only dug his heels in deeper. He rewrote his pitch to the Admiralty, this time appealing to the establishment’s obsession with the North Pole. Ross proposed he lead an expedition to the top of the world by sledge, which he said Scoresby supported. After returning from the pole, Ross suggested, he could go looking for Franklin and his men if they still hadn’t been heard from. The Admiralty still wasn’t interested.

  SO A WHALER made the first, feeble attempt to hunt for Erebus and Terror. In the mid-nineteenth century, killing whales was a very lucrative business. Fleets from Britain and America regularly lost ships and men in a relentless push deeper into Arctic waters in search of the animals whose blubber was a chief source of light and lubrication. By the 1840s, whalers had harvested so
many whales from the easiest fishing grounds that supply was getting tighter as demand steadily rose for the oil their hulking corpses provided. That sparked research into alternatives. In 1853, Canadian physician and geologist Abraham Gesner patented the process of distilling lamp oil from crude, which he had discovered in experiments the same year that sea ice had stranded Erebus and Terror. He named the new fuel “kerosene,” which gave birth to a global petroleum industry and a violent new era of geopolitics that followed. As kerosene caught on, research developed other ways of refining crude into fuel, spurring more technological change and even higher demand for a resource once shunned as dirty and virtually worthless. The first internal combustion engines made automobiles possible, and world demand for still more crude oil exploded. Whaling slid ever deeper into decline.

  One of the boldest of the Arctic whalers, who bravely fought to stave off the inevitable, was William Penny. He tried to save the shrinking whaling fleet, and get around worsening ice conditions, by exploring for new breeding grounds farther south. The son of a veteran whaler, he was twelve years old when he made his first voyage from the Scottish whaling hub of Peterhead into the Greenland Sea on his father’s ship. Thirty years later, with the help of an Inuk hunter and trader named Eenoolooapik, he explored the entrance to Cumberland Sound, which Europeans hadn’t visited for more than 250 years. To campaign for a government-backed expedition to the area, Penny brought his new friend Eenoolooapik, then around nineteen years old, to Aberdeen aboard the Neptune. The first Inuk seen there in seventy years, the man they called Bobbie was an immediate sensation. During the five-month visit, he was celebrated as bright and witty, with a knack for mimicry. He received gilded invitations to fine dinner parties, attended the theater, and was even a guest at two balls honoring the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

  A portrait shows him dressed like a gentleman, hair greased flat and neatly parted, wearing a white shirt with a neck-pinching high collar, beneath a tartan waistcoat and a wide-collared jacket. Local crowds really wanted to see him as something more exotic. They wanted an Eskimo, one of what a Victorian writer called the “fur-clad savages.” Reluctantly, Eenoolooapik obliged his hosts. Just a few days after arriving in Aberdeen, he agreed to give a kayak demonstration on the Dee River, fully wrapped in traditional furs on an especially warm November day. He would only give the performance on condition that he not be asked again to dress as if he were in the Arctic. Under the strain of it all, Eenoolooapik overheated and became so sick with a lung ailment that he had to be nursed through a lengthy illness that nearly killed him.

  And it was all for naught. Despite lots of excited press coverage, and the warm welcomes in the salons and ballrooms of Britain, Eenoolooapik and William Penny failed to persuade the Admiralty to support the whalers by launching an expedition to explore the Cumberland Sound area. Instead, they gave Penny precisely £20 to buy the hunter any equipment he might want before leaving. So the two men went off to search for whales on their own and reported promising new hunting grounds to the Admiralty that had snubbed them. But they were too late to save British whaling, Penny’s own business, or his friend Eenoolooapik. Seven years after returning to his Arctic home, Penny’s friend died from tuberculosis.

  Penny was knocked out of the whaling business for three years, but he hadn’t given up. When he returned to the helm, this time on a new owner’s ship, he went straight back to Cumberland Sound and returned to Aberdeen after killing nineteen whales in a single season, briefly boosting the industry’s prospects. By the summer of 1846, just as Ross described from his sources, whaling captains working the Eastern Arctic were reporting unusually severe cold weather and extensive sea ice. The temperature rose above freezing for only twenty days and the normal breakup didn’t come that year, leaving the pack so solid that whalers couldn’t enter Lancaster Sound. In July of the following year, Penny took a shot at the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. The first try at finding Franklin and his men accomplished nothing. Penny couldn’t have known it, but some five hundred miles southwest as the crow flies, Erebus and Terror were still stuck in summer ice, Franklin had been dead a matter of weeks, and his men were still months away from abandoning their ships. A carefully planned overland expedition might have had a better chance. The Arctic refused to let Penny through by sea.

  “The whales having disappeared, I determined to proceed to Lancaster Sound, both with a view to the capture of whales and in search of her majesty’s ships,” Penny reported to the Admiralty. “I contended for a week against an adverse wind and a strong swell down the sound.”

  Still, the whaler kept trying.

  “Being a little acquainted with the Esquimaux language, I made every enquiry of the various tribes I met at Pond’s Bay, but could procure no information respecting Sir John Franklin, who, I think, must have attained a very high longitude.”

  Several years later, the Inuit of Cumberland Sound would tell Penny of white men who starved to death while heading for Great Fish River—a story too vague, of a place too distant, for him to know if there was anything to it. For a time, he kept the gruesome possibility to himself.

  BY MID-OCTOBER, Penny pulled up anchor off Baffin Island and sailed for home in Scotland. He would return to the archipelago in an onslaught of search expeditions, summoned by a force rivaling an Arctic that had stopped others before them: Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John’s second wife. His first wife, Romantic poet Eleanor Anne Porden, died aged twenty-one, when Sir John was en route to the Arctic in 1825. Her friend Jane, who had admired Sir John from afar for years, was a woman who refused to be ignored or, worse, patronized. A powerful queen sat on the United Kingdom’s throne, but Victorian social mores required other women to mind their words. Jane was supposed to occupy her troubled mind with prayer or domestic diversions, such as parlor games, drawing, or embroidering, while men handled weighty matters outside the cloistered world of the home. The male was, after all, intellectually superior; women’s minds were clouded by emotion. That was the conventional view, but Lady Franklin would have none of it. If rules had to be broken, and important people’s sensibilities offended, so be it. Her husband was missing, good men were lost with him, and she was going to do whatever it took to find them or find out what went wrong. Her relentless pressure, from any platform she could hold, with any means available, forced the longest, broadest, and most expensive search for two lost ships in maritime history.

  Probably her most potent weapon was the pen, sharpened during a lifetime of obsessive journal writing. In letters to Benjamin Disraeli, a family friend and rising political star, as well as US President Zachary Taylor, she cajoled and sweet-talked two of the era’s most powerful men to back her demands for costly and dangerous expeditions. Sometimes writing anonymously, she mobilized public opinion by deftly using newspapers, and literary allies including Charles Dickens, to stir popular outrage. Knowing that sympathy alone wouldn’t get her far, Lady Franklin studied maps, consulted experienced polar explorers, and became a compelling Arctic expert herself. When that wasn’t enough to get the quick results she wanted, Jane appealed to the paranormal for guidance. She spent most of her fortune, and made enemies of her own family members, to keep the search going. The Athenaeum, the establishment’s favorite journal of literature, science, and fine arts, was so impressed by what she pulled off that it gave “Thanks to a feminine courage which no disaster could dismay, which arose above difficulties as a bird arises above the earth—which neither dulled nor wearied even when strong men grew faint and dubious.”

  The men blocking her way, throwing up walls of false reassurances and weak excuses, almost drove her mad. At first, when Sir John was still in the early stages of his expedition, Lady Franklin dealt with her husband’s absence the same way she had done many times before: She went traveling. Starting out, Jane crossed the channel to France and then sailed the Atlantic with Eleanor to the West Indies and America, where they landed in the summer of 1846. Lady Franklin found Americans la
cking in levity, telling a bishop she thought “the term ‘Merry England’ more appropriate than ever,” because she “had never seen any social hilarity here, they had not time to get sociable at table—their hurry however had one good aspect, that of self-denial of appetite.” On her tour of factories, hospitals, and institutions for people unable to see, speak, or hear, she was often mistaken for the widow of founding father Alexander Hamilton. The fate of her husband’s Arctic expedition was never far from mind, but conversations often turned to American preoccupations: the war with Mexico, which started that April; the Oregon Treaty reached in June with the British, setting the western border at the 49th parallel, except for Vancouver Island; and the debate over whether the United States should seize California, which rebelled against the Mexican government that summer and joined the Union in 1850.

  In Boston, Lady Franklin bent the ear of Mayor Josiah Quincy Jr. for the rough reception that Dickens received from a fire-and-brimstone preacher. During the novelist’s first visit to the United States in 1842, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow showed him around town. Their long Sunday-morning walk took them along the wharves where John Adams and the Sons of Liberty had dumped British tea chests into the sea during the Boston Tea Party. Dickens had a sharp eye, and ear, for the eccentric, so Longfellow took him to a service at the Seamen’s Bethel church in North Square, where the Reverend E. T. Taylor ministered to his flock of grizzled sailors. He bellowed from the pulpit beneath theater curtains painted to show a shipwreck, with a small angel lowering a much bigger golden anchor, apparently to warn the sailors to beware moral shoals ready to ground them without warning in life. Spotting the strangers in their midst, the preacher clasped the Bible in his left hand and leveled a finger on his right at the novelist and poet. “Who are these—Who are they—who are these fellows?” he demanded to know. “Where do they come from? Where are they going to? Come from! What’s the answer? . . . From below! From below, my brethren. From under the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one. That’s where you come from!”