Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  “He was always my hero,” Lady Franklin said of Scoresby, a whaler-turned-scientist-turned-reverend.

  By early 1849, Lady Franklin was “much out of health and in deep despondency,” Sophy confided. Yet the women packed up some food and other provisions and went to meet whalers back home for the summer in Scottish ports to see if they knew anything useful and to spread word about the reward. Hoping to pass unnoticed, Lady Franklin and Sophy traveled north by sea with luggage tagged only by Sophy’s last name, Cracroft. Although a tentative search effort was under way, experts were still engaged in a frustrating argument about where Erebus and Terror might be. Most were confident that Wellington Channel was the best place to look. They were wrong. Tired of the bureaucratic song and dance, Lady Franklin wanted to get a reality check and talk with seamen who had actually been in the Arctic recently. The Franklin Expedition’s three years of provisions had either run out by now, or, as King had warned, survivors were starving and succumbing to scurvy.

  The mass-circulation press was catching on in Britain. With well over a dozen newspapers competing for readers in London alone, and publishers defying regulations in a rush to print more, reporters were on the lookout for scandalous news to feed the public’s growing appetite. A distraught Lady Franklin conspiring with scruffy whalers against the fusty Admiralty would make a good headline. She and Sophy had to keep a low profile in Edinburgh, so they stayed in squalid lodgings and dined with as much privacy as possible. The women slipped out to meet with Scoresby, who escorted them to Hull, a prosperous whaling port in northern England that was in the early years of steady decline. Her offer of more money for help in the Franklin search was welcome. A deal to get a whaling ship involved quickly made news in London, where editors of the highbrow Athenaeum put it at the top of its “Our Weekly Gossip” column.

  “The whaler Abram is now being strengthened and equipped at Hull with the view of searching Jones Sound and vicinity. Lady Franklin offers a special reward for this service. The Abram will sail in a few days with a very effective crew. It is affecting to observe the restless energy with which Lady Franklin devotes herself to the task of soliciting aid in all directions for the effectual search of those seas to which her busy hopes and fears are unceasingly directed. The knight-errantry of the world is summoned by her on this path of adventure.”

  The Abram didn’t have any better luck hunting by sea than Richardson and Rae had on land. Scoresby thought the Admiralty had blown its best chance of an early, exhaustive search effort. At Skaill, on the Atlantic coast of Orkney, Scotland, a returning sailor from the whaler Truelove tantalized the ladies with a tale of an Inuit sighting of Sir John and his ships in March 1849. There was even a hand-drawn map locating the expedition in Prince Regent Inlet. Sea ice prevented the Truelove getting close enough to check out the story, but the crew left a cache of food and coal that Lady Franklin had provided. Sophy was skeptical.

  “My dearest Aunt bore the surprise almost better than I expected and was very able to cross question the sailor. I try to instill doubts into her mind of the truth of the whole details, tho’ I think some must be true, and she receives very readily what I say.”

  Sir John was long dead by that spring. Erebus and Terror had been abandoned a year earlier. But confirmation of those sad truths wouldn’t come for another decade, which left Lady Franklin and the British public vulnerable to all sorts of false leads and cruel hoaxes.

  Scoresby aimed his disdain at the Admiralty. When it followed Lady Franklin’s incentive and offered a reward to spur a private search effort, the Lords were a day late and a dollar short once again. In 1848, Lady Franklin had offered £2,000, which she raised to £3,000 (or more than $270,000 today) in the spring of 1849. The government put up £20,000 ($1.8 million today) as an inducement on March 23, 1849. That would have been an impressive sum if the naval command had put it on the table much earlier. Instead, they offered the reward “after most of the whalers had sailed, and were therefore without orders or authority for departing from the usual fishing grounds,” Scoresby complained. “And, secondly, the reward was only claimable on the absolute condition of a successful search—a contingency so great as by no means to justify, in a commercial venture, the sacrificing of the interests of a voyage undertaken at so much cost and risk.” If the Admiralty had done things Lady Franklin’s way, and offered to reward extraordinary efforts or special searches remote from regular fishing grounds, “something effective would, no doubt, have been attempted,” Scoresby concluded. Public sympathy, common humanity, and justice also demanded a better effort, he insisted, “to the most liberal extent possible consistent with reasonable practicability, remaining hope, and the fair prospect of safety to new adventurers.”

  That spring, Lady Franklin had raised establishment eyebrows by writing directly to US President Zachary Taylor. The son of a wealthy Virginia tobacco-plantation owner, Taylor was a career military officer who had fought in frontier wars against Native Americans. Known as “Old Rough and Ready,” he was a hero of the Mexican War, which vaulted him into the Oval Office. Taylor also held scores of slaves, on two plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi, yet he butted heads with Congress over his insistence that new states in the West be slave-free. With anger boiling in the southern states, Taylor was still new in office and the threat of secession was only one of the urgent problems he had to juggle. That made it all the more audacious for Jane to insist on forcing onto his agenda a British expedition in the High Arctic.

  Lady Franklin knew a few things about politics and persuasion, which took particular skill when trying to persuade an American leader with little schooling who had never voted in a presidential election until the one that put him in power. She played to the president’s patriotism in a long letter she wrote in April 1849.

  “I address myself to you as the head of a great nation,” Jane began her appeal to him in the spring of 1849. To soften Taylor up a bit, she recalled her visit to the United States three years earlier and related how touched she was by Americans’ appreciation for her husband’s exploration. She provided the president a fairly detailed history of the expedition that was now causing so much worry. The Admiralty was trying to help and at great cost, she acknowledged. Yet valuable time had been lost, critical opportunities wasted. She now had more hope in American whalers “and the bold spirit of adventure which animates their crews. But I venture to look even beyond these. I am not without hope that you will deem it not unworthy of a great and kindred nation to take up the cause of humanity which I plead in a national spirit, and thus generously make it your own.”

  Tweaking American pride, she let drop that the Imperial Russian government had offered to help, through its ambassador in London, by sending out exploring parties from the Western Arctic. Why not, Lady Franklin suggested, get the British, Americans, and Russians to cooperate together on such an important humanitarian mission?

  “It would be a noble spectacle to the world,” she tried to persuade the president, “if these three great nations, possessed of the widest empires on the face of the globe, were thus to unite their efforts in the truly Christian work of saving their perishing fellow men from destruction.” Of course, if “American seamen had the good fortune to wrest from us the glory (as might be the case) of solving the problem of the unfound passage, or the still greater glory of saving our adventurous navigators from a lingering fate which the mind sickens to dwell on,” then good for them. The Admiralty’s critics suspected the Royal Navy and its chosen rescuers might be more interested in finding the Northwest Passage than dying men. Jane, with the skills of an adroit diplomat, was betting a strong dose of American competition could solve that problem.

  Lady Franklin ended with an apology. She was, after all, a Victorian woman who was straining the boundaries of decorum and diplomacy with a personal appeal to an American president. She was also desperate, and she feared the tortured death of her husband and his men far more than being rebuked for trampling on official toes.


  “The intense anxieties of a wife and of a daughter may have led me to press too earnestly on your notice . . . and to presume too much on the sympathy which we are assured is felt beyond the limits of our own land. Yet if you deem this to be the case, you will still find I am sure, even in that personal intensity of feeling, an excuse for the fearlessness with which I have thrown myself on your generosity, and will pardon the homage I thus pay to your own high character, and to that of the people over whom you have the distinction to preside.”

  The letter got Taylor’s attention, which unfortunately didn’t get Lady Franklin far. No fault of her own. The following year, after celebrating a sweltering Independence Day with a meal of cherries, raw vegetables, and milk at the unfinished Washington Monument, the president fell sick with acute gastroenteritis and died. But before Taylor’s untimely demise, the president passed Jane’s letter to his recently appointed Secretary of State, John M. Clayton, a Yale graduate, lawyer, and former senator from Delaware. He praised Jane’s cri de coeur as one that “would strongly enlist the sympathy of the rulers and people of any portion of the civilized world.”

  Americans had watched “with the deepest interest that hazardous enterprise” that Sir John and his men had undertaken and were, he assured her, united in wanting their government to make every proper effort for a rescue. American navigators, especially whalers, would be called to action. Clayton promised that “all that the executive government of the United States, in the exercise of its constitutional powers, can effect to meet this requisition on American enterprise, skill and bravery, will be promptly undertaken.” American and British newspapers gave it great play. Jane was thrilled that her gambit had worked. Yet more months passed. And nothing happened.

  THE BUREAUCRATIC SHUFFLE was infuriating. The temporal world simply refused to cooperate. Desperate for something that would break her string of bad luck, Lady Franklin turned to the spiritual realm. The paranormal had a powerful attraction in the Victorian era, when science and religion were both swept up in rapid social, economic, and technological change. To the scientific establishment, superstition clashed with the effort to uncover and apply natural laws based on empirical evidence. But others eager to challenge orthodoxy, and explore any horizon they could imagine, insisted that talk of ghosts, seers, and astral travelers should be examined like any other unexplained occurrence. Among them were respectable writers and thinkers who argued that paranormal phenomena should not be dismissed unless investigated with the same rigor as anything else in the natural world.

  If there was anything credible to it, sorting out good from bad was messy work. Scam artists and showmen used séances and levitations to profit from the gullible. The Franklin mystery was too popular for swindlers and sincere devotees of the occult to resist. Well over a dozen clairvoyants and seers in Britain, the United States, and Australia—at least ten of them known by name—claimed to have gleaned information about the lost Franklin Expedition through paranormal contacts. Skeptics abounded, but so did believers. Lady Franklin was on both sides of the fence, depending on how she judged the information and who was delivering it. That wasn’t unusual among the Victorian upper classes, where publicly sniffing at the notion of communicating with the dead did not preclude a discreet night of table tapping at a séance. Even Jane’s hero, the quiet and cerebral Scoresby, dabbled in experiments with animal magnetism, which he preferred to call “zoistic magnetism.”

  Spectral beings. Clairvoyants in trances leaving their bodies and flying like birds over great distances. The healing properties of animal magnetism. The whole supernatural world was the stuff of lively, entertaining debate in the salons of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. It filled many column inches in the popular press, and seats in theaters, which prospered from pseudoscientific spectacles, such as mesmerists claiming to treat patients on stage by manipulating invisible energy fields. The word scientist was less than two decades old when Jane attended séances in the hope of making contact with her husband. It couldn’t have been an easy choice for the highly regarded wife of a devout evangelical Christian who was willing to sacrifice his life to advance scientific discovery. But to many of the era, there was no contradiction in that. Those who believed in communicating with ghosts just as strongly as they did praying to God found elements of the miraculous in the paranormal. Some thinkers attacked spiritualists with science while others used science to defend them. Whole journals were devoted to exploring the science of the supernatural. Others went into just as much depth debunking them.

  The notion that energy could be naturally transferred from inanimate objects to animals, so-called animal magnetism, was born of medicine. German physician Franz Mesmer tried to cure serious illnesses in late-eighteenth-century Paris by unblocking this mysterious universal flow of energy that he believed was coursing through, and around, his patients. With a theatrical flair, he moved his hand about the body of a sufferer sitting in a large vat, holding iron rods. That was the basis of mesmerism, whose followers believed spiritualists could tap into invisible magnetic fluids that carried disembodied intelligence, the forerunner of hypnotism in Western medicine. Dr. James Esdaile, former assistant surgeon to the East India Company, swore by the healing powers of clairvoyant mesmerism, which he had studied in India. The physician published monthly newspaper reports defending spiritualism in his London practice and rallied popular support against attackers by denouncing what he called “the orthodox medical howl raised against me.”

  “These terrorists pretend that, because persons under the mesmeric influence cease for the time to be voluntary and responsible beings, and occasionally exhibit powers and acquire knowledge beyond their reach in their ordinary state of existence, therefore Mesmerism is synonymous with Atheism, seeing that it divests man of his responsibility, and invests him with powers hitherto supposed to be the exclusive attributes of God.

  “These would-be leaders of the medical profession,” Esdaile huffed, “and dictators of public opinion, are either grossly ignorant of various medical facts bearing upon and illustrating the subject, or willfully suppress the knowledge of them, in their eagerness to destroy those who differ from them in opinion.”

  Frustrated by officials, torn by conflicting expert advice, and suffering under intense emotional pressure, Lady Franklin was vulnerable to psychic suggestion, whether from well-meaning believers or from manipulative charlatans. She had worked hard to get her aging husband the command of the expedition that was supposed to rehabilitate him. Now, she realized, it may well have killed him. She couldn’t just be the good navy wife and get on with life. Known for being high-strung in the best of circumstances, she was now becoming obsessed. For a woman determined to try anything to get her husband back, seeking contact through a clairvoyant seemed as good an option as any.

  On a May evening, Jane went with Sophy and her sister Fanny’s husband, Ashurst Majendie, to the Duke Street home of surgeon J. Hands on Grosvenor Square, where John Adams set up the late-eighteenth-century American mission to the Court of St. James. At 8 p.m., they had their first appointment with Ellen Dawson. The maid of another client described Dawson as “a young, pale sickly looking girl,” but the clairvoyant could establish her bona fides with testimonials from satisfied customers. She had helped another client find a missing husband, just the sort of assistance Lady Franklin needed.

  Another woman who attested to Dawson’s skills provided a more detailed testimonial. The wealthy matron came for paranormal aid after losing an expensive brooch. She had told the story of her lost jewelry at so many dinner parties that it came to the attention of editors at The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and Their Applications to Human Welfare. In its in-depth analysis of the bizarre case of the missing brooch, the magazine identified the owner only as Mrs. M. While convinced of “the real existence of true clairvoyant perception,” she wanted to remain anonymous because she “does not court notoriety,” the magazine explained.

  The brooch stood out i
n her mind for its topaz center surrounded by brilliants. Sure that she had locked it up as usual in August, Mrs. M. was perplexed that she couldn’t find it in November. Unfortunately, the names of likely suspects in the event of theft, the household servants, were less memorable for Mrs. M. She changed the help often and couldn’t remember who was in her employ when she had last laid eyes on the cherished ornament. Bewildered, she contacted a mesmerist, a Mr. Barth, with whom she had no previous acquaintance. Barth, who insisted Mrs. M. not reveal to him what was missing, set up an appointment with Ellen Dawson at Hands’s Grosvenor Square home, with the assurance that her powers included traveling clairvoyance, the ability to psychically visit another place.

  “The result far, very far indeed surpassed my expectations,” Mrs. M. recalled later. “Mr. Hands merely seemed to look at her, when her eyes closed and he said she was in a deep sleep, and after indulging in about ten minutes’ repose would get into the sleep-waking state.”

  Hands left the room. Barth softened up the entranced clairvoyant with kind words and high praise, which, he had explained earlier to Mrs. M., was essential because “many persons fail in obtaining satisfactory replies from clairvoyants in consequence of their own rude and intolerant behaviour to them.”

  Barth asked Dawson if she knew why Mrs. M. had come to see her.

  “About a loss—about something she has lost,” the clairvoyant replied after a few minutes. At which point she knelt beside her client, held her hands and listened to Mrs. M. explain that she had lost something of great value. Dawson assumed she meant money. Hearing that was wrong, she decided the missing item must be property. Barth suggested she go out of body to Mrs. M.’s home for further investigation. After getting some directions, Dawson soon claimed to be standing in front of the place and described it to the owner’s satisfaction. The clairvoyant entered the bedroom and gave accurate details of the furniture in “a very minute account.”