Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  Thumping his Bible, shouting to the heavens, the former mariner the sailors called Father Taylor declared: “And where are you going? Where are you going? Aloft! Aloft! Aloft! That’s where you are going—with the fair wind—all taut and trim, steering direct for heaven in its glory, where there are no storms or foul weather, and where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. That’s where you are going too, my friends. That’s it. That’s the place. That’s the port. That’s the haven. It’s a blessed harbor. . . . Peace—Peace—Peace—all peace!”

  When it was time for Lady Franklin to leave in August, Mayor Quincy was more comforting. He encouraged her with this wry thought: If her husband had made it through the Bering Strait, “it might be said he was the first man who ever got around Americans.”

  She craved any news, no matter how sketchy, of the expedition’s progress. Back in London, a cryptic paragraph in the Morning Herald in early November caught Eleanor’s eye. It claimed Eskimos had heard gunfire in the autumn of 1845. If it was in celebration of Erebus and Terror completing the passage, Eleanor wondered in a letter to her aunt, then “they all ought to have been home long ago. . . . We have now given up all expectation of hearing from Papa this year; in October or November next I trust we shall either see or hear from him.”

  As time ran out on 1846, the expedition was about to finish its first full year in the Arctic. There still was no word on its whereabouts, and Lady Franklin was bracing for bad news. She began to plan for the worst and asked Sir James Clark Ross if he was prepared to go searching for her husband and crewmen as he once had for lost Arctic whalers, in a heroic voyage aboard HMS Cove a decade earlier. She was just thinking that he might help if called on. The thought alone was sometimes comforting, she told him. “In your energy and friendship I have at all times the most unbounded reliance.”

  For the moment, she had stopped wishing for a vision.

  “I sometimes think it is better perhaps that we should thus be in happy ignorance of any disaster that may have happened to them, or of any dreadful difficulty they may have yet to overcome than to be viewing as in a magic mirror in a fairy tale, their daily vicissitudes.”

  FOR MUCH OF 1847, when most of Franklin’s officers and crew were still alive, there was little the men could do but try to stay warm and dry in the damp, cramped confines of Erebus and Terror. Franklin knew the lessons of wintering over, beset in sea ice, that Parry and Ross had passed on. So he likely kept his sailors busy cleaning, fixing, and attending the literacy classes he was so eager to hold. Small groups went out exploring and making magnetic observations that were an essential part of the mission. As long as Sir John’s health held up in the weeks before he died that summer, he could have encouraged Fitzjames to dig into the library to find plays for the officers and crewmen to perform. And on Sundays, the most frightened among them might have found strength, even hope, in the commander’s stirring sermons. Against the winter wind beating at the ships’ heavy hulls, whistling through any cracks, they could sing hymns as a mate cranked the handle on one of the hand organs.

  While the stranded mariners waited for the Arctic to release them, veteran polar explorers back in England quibbled over what, if anything, should be done to help. Ross was still pestering the Admiralty for permission to go searching for his friend. He took the silence from Franklin by mid-January of that year as proof that he hadn’t made it through the Western Arctic and the Bering Strait. And, “in the second place, the probability is, that his ships have been carried by drift ice into a place from which they cannot be extricated,” Ross told the Admiralty’s Lords Commissioners. He was still bucking the institution that had humiliated him for his Croker Mountains mistake. The establishment was still dismissing his views. Ross turned to an influential intermediary.

  “I have been induced to renew my application to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty mainly from the fact of my having promised to Sir John Franklin that I would volunteer to rescue him and his brave companions if not heard of in the spring of 1847,” he protested to the Marquis of Northampton, head of the powerful Royal Society, on February 15.

  The whalers were all back from Baffin Bay, without any sign of the Franklin Expedition. To Ross, that was yet another bad sign. It was likely “that the ships are either frozen up or that some misfortune has befallen them,” Ross insisted. He wanted to start preparations immediately so that if nothing were heard by July 1, his expedition could set sail for Lancaster Sound. The marquis agreed to meet Ross and hear him out, only to dismiss him as he had earlier.

  “It will be of no use sending you by sea to search for Franklin; you will be frozen in as he is, and we should have to send after you, and then perhaps for them that went to look for you!”

  “Surely your Lordship does not mean to say that no steps should be taken to rescue Franklin?” Ross demanded.

  No one wanted to be accused of abandoning a knighted hero and all of his men. Imagine the rabid press attacks. So the marquis relented and agreed to put Ross’s letter in front of the Admiralty board. It had now been a year and a half since Erebus and Terror were last seen preparing to sail into the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. But when their chances of hearing good news were shrinking, the Lords were patient men. They also knew the wisdom of cutting one’s losses. If Franklin and his men were trapped deep in the archipelago, there was little to gain with a rushed effort to try to find them, and much to lose if another costly mission failed. They were happy to wait on the diminishing prospect that Sir John would soon emerge from the Western Arctic to announce to an astonished world that he had made history.

  Extrapolating from the Admiralty’s original instructions to Franklin, and his understanding of Arctic weather and sea currents, Ross insisted that sea ice must have driven Erebus and Terror southward until their crews were forced to abandon them. He turned out to be correct, albeit early, on that prediction. Franklin’s crews wouldn’t give up their ships for another fifteen months. Ross also guessed, based on Parry’s failed route more than a quarter century earlier, that Sir John had sailed farther west than he did. Survivors, Ross insisted, would therefore head for safety on Melville Island, so that is where he demanded to be sent. Which would have been another major mistake. Still, however impertinent, Ross’s basic point—the urgent need for a rescue mission—was sound. The Admiralty, backed by most of the polar brotherhood, continued to ignore him.

  Ross called the Admiralty’s preferred option of offering rewards to induce whalers and the Hudson’s Bay Company to search “utterly inefficient.” He cited his own escape across “300 miles of much smoother ice” as proof that Franklin and his men could not possibly travel twice that distance from the High Arctic to the mainland.

  “Unless I reach Melville Island next summer, they will have nothing,” he warned.

  Ross offered the Royal Navy a fair shot at averting catastrophe and the brass blew it. Once in the Arctic, where Ross could get a clearer sense of conditions, perhaps an opportunity to listen to Inuit witnesses, he might well have realized the errors in his assumptions. The Franklin Expedition status report written on the Admiralty form, which would have given a rescue mission a solid lead, was waiting on the same windswept coast where Ross’s nephew James had erected a stone cairn. It would have been a logical place to check, since John Ross and Franklin had talked about doing precisely that. Blocked at every turn, certain that each day wasted only pushed lost men closer to death, Ross’s promise to come looking for his friend reverberated in his vexed mind.

  The Admiralty listened instead to the advice of Sir William Parry, who had pioneered the route Franklin was ordered to follow, as long as sea ice, and weather, permitted. It was too early to worry, Parry assured the Lords. His own experience proved an expedition could survive at least two winters. In a separate letter, Ross’s nephew James sided with Parry, repeating the officers’ assurances, before departing Greenland, “that they had taken on board provisions for three years on full allowance, wh
ich they could extend to four years without any inconvenience.” He also recommended that two rescue ships should be specially prepared, as Erebus and Terror had been for his Antarctic voyage, and if none were available, two should be purpose-built for the mission. Parry disagreed and argued strongly against mounting another major attempt at the Northwest Passage by sea. He made the case for traveling overland, with expert guides, to try to pick up the Franklin Expedition’s trail.

  “I do not think that anything further can be done by ships, except at a heavy expense, and virtually involving the exposure of a second expedition to the risks inseparable from such an enterprise,” he advised the Admiralty. “The only plan which appears to me to hold out a reasonable prospect of success, is by making an effort to push supplies to the northern coast of the American Continent, and the islands adjacent thereto, with the assistance of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and by the modes of travelling in ordinary use among their servants.”

  Parry’s plan had a hidden advantage: Launched at the right time, with enough support to survive for more than a few months, it might well have followed fresh clues from Inuit and found Franklin survivors moving south as searchers headed north. Instead, the protracted debate led in the wrong direction. The longer the explorers were gone, without any hard facts, the more people speculated. That opened the dam on a torrent of unwelcome advice and criticism. The mighty Royal Navy had little patience for second-guessing, especially when it seemed to come from crackpots. Some of the best unsolicited advice came from a brilliant eccentric easily disregarded. Dr. Richard King was the Arctic Cassandra in Victorian times.

  He had a knack for annoying people who disagreed with him, which made enemies across the exploration establishment—in the Royal Geographical Society, the Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as the Royal Navy. Trouble is, King also had an uncanny ability to read the Arctic, which could have helped the lost Franklin Expedition if decision-makers hadn’t loathed the messenger so deeply. Early on, for instance, King predicted accurately that Boothia was a peninsula. He had a deep interest in indigenous culture and believed, as he heard from Inuit while exploring with Sir George Back, that the best route for a Northwest Passage was along the North American coast—not the phantom Open Polar Sea that the navy sought. The physician also had an innate sense of the Arctic’s layout. He accurately predicted the rough locations of some undiscovered landmasses without seeing them.

  Dr. King’s medical specialty was obstetrics, but he was also an accomplished explorer, ethnologist, and geographer. When the Rosses and their crew were in their fourth year stranded with Victory, the doctor served as naturalist and surgeon on the Back overland expedition that ended up surveying the northern coast after whalers reached the men first and rescued them. King, like Scoresby, thought it was smarter to travel light in the Arctic, which pitted him not only against the Admiralty but also against the expedition commander. When speculation was rife about the fate of Erebus and Terror, the doctor drew a map that foresaw Victoria Island blocking the route that the Admiralty insisted the ships should take. Before they sailed, King warned Barrow that he was sending Franklin “to form the nucleus of an iceberg.” Once he was certain they were stuck, King was no more diplomatic.

  “My Lord, one hundred and thirty-eight men at this moment are in danger of perishing from famine,” the pesky doctor told Colonial Secretary Earl Grey in a letter dated June 10, 1847, the day before Franklin died.

  The doctor was off on the number of men at risk but closer than most in suggesting where they could be found and “saved from the death of starvation.”

  “The position, then, that I should assign to the lost expedition is . . . midway between the Hudson Bay Company settlements on the Mackenzie (River) and the fishing grounds of the whalers in Barrow Strait.”

  More specifically, by a lucky guess or some mysterious revelation, he placed Erebus and Terror west of Somerset Island, which Parry had visited almost three decades earlier. Franklin had in fact sailed south along the western coast of Somerset, through Peel Sound, but by the time King was writing, the expedition commander was farther south, close to death off the tip of King William Island. The colonial secretary passed the obstetrician on to the Admiralty, which wasn’t interested. Had it listened, lives might well have been saved. King wanted to lead a rescue team overland to the Great Fish River, where he’d been with Back, carrying food and other supplies to cache for any Franklin Expedition survivors who might make it that far. Ten months later, they would set off for exactly where King wanted to go to help them.

  THINGS WERE ONLY getting worse in the High Arctic. As summer gave way to another winter in 1847, the captain of the 313-ton Lady Jane, one of the British whaling fleet’s most successful vessels, reported that sea ice in the approach to the Northwest Passage was unusually thick and heavy.

  “In places where it has been generally found six feet thick, this year it was ten feet; and this the natives accounted for by the wind having prevailed so much from the south-east all the winter, which pressed the ice upon the west land.”

  Those best placed to act had more to talk about. The debate among experts competing for the Admiralty’s ear droned on. They couldn’t even agree on where to look, let alone when to start and how best to do it. What remained of Lady Franklin’s forbearance finally ran out. Frustrated by the male dithering, she did her best to embarrass them with her own courage. She volunteered to make the voyage to the Arctic herself. Her idea was to join a search by land from a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost, and be ready to care for her husband if anyone managed to find him. Coming from another woman, that might have sounded like the unhinged ramblings of a distraught mind. But Lady Franklin knew what hard travel was all about.

  Years earlier, she had earned considerable respect, while raising a lot of troubled moralists’ eyebrows, with some courageous exploring of her own. Sailing the Aegean Sea on a goletta schooner, she slept atop the stores in the hold next to thirty-two sheep and goats. She joined an expedition up the Nile, dined at a harem, and, after a drenching rain, slept with rats “who, in spite of mosquito [nets] laid their claws on my head repeatedly, jumping on till beat off—the havoc and sound they were making was dreadful.” A German missionary taught her some Arabic and verses of the Koran. She rode with him on a raft of date-tree trunks, crawled into a mummy pit, and suffered through a hurricane in his arms. Three camels carried her on a litter to Mount Sinai. She even crossed the Levant to Damascus when communal tensions were running high. A married Christian woman traveling without her husband was not only rare but risky.

  Heading from Alexandria to the Holy Land, Jane carried letters of approval from Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, to his officials in Syria. Good fortune got her through alive and unharmed. At Haifa, she came “within the sight & sound of actual war” for the first time. She mounted a donkey and headed to Nazareth, her head covered by a cotton cambric handkerchief folded over a tarboosh, or fez. Her retinue consisted of a guide, an Egyptian servant, five Janissaries (elite Ottoman Turkish soldiers), and a dozen Bedouin. Between Jaffa and Jerusalem, Jane’s host was Abou-Gosh, whom she called the “Prince of Robbers.” Patting her on the back, he assured his guest the whole country was hers. She kept a close eye on her belongings just the same. When she reached Jericho, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, Jane wished she could share the experience with her sister Mary—until an especially trying night that she “will not wish on my cruelest enemy.”

  “It was not, therefore, in order to herd with us under a filthy shed, with our horses and Bedouins, obliged to cling close under the dwarf-walls of the most wretched of villages in order to be safe from robbers, devoured by mosquitos, so entirely lame in one inflamed leg in consequence that I was obliged to be carried whenever I moved or got up, and suffering much in head and stomach besides from having been eight hours on horseback under a hot and unshaded sun.”

  After a night’s sleep with a poultice on her leg, Jane’s spirit was back. Her heart raced f
rom the adrenaline rush of the mounted guards “exciting one another by wild screams; letting off their muskets and pistols, balancing and thrusting their lances at full gallop, wheeling, pursuing, receding, sweeping across our path. . . .”

  Lady Franklin knew how to travel rough and get the best out of it. She could only imagine how brutal the cold and deprivation of the High Arctic could be. Still, she longed to go where her husband was. Maybe, in her darkest thoughts, she knew he wasn’t coming home and hoped the Arctic would take her too. Experienced polar explorers talked Lady Franklin into staying home, for a time at least. So she poured all of her strength, and considerable powers of persuasion, into lobbying. In her first moves, she made an end run around her government, defying its staid protocols and the Royal Navy’s plodding bureaucracy. Jane appealed to a potential American donor, confiding that she had lost hope in bureaucrats and their political bosses, “for Governments are not so tenderhearted as you and I are.” Wary of closing any door, she assured him that “there is no trial I am not prepared to go through if it become necessary.”