Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  In an 1849 letter from Spring Gardens, Lady Franklin lobbied the Lords on the Admiralty’s board to launch a search expedition in Wellington Channel and Prince Regent Inlet on the Gulf of Boothia. Both were far from where Erebus and Terror had been abandoned the previous year, but nobody outside the Arctic knew that yet, and Lady Franklin was repeating the consensus among veteran explorers. Change was coming. Sir John Barrow, who had pushed so hard to restart the Northwest Passage mission, died suddenly just six months after Franklin’s men gave up their ships. The Admiralty must have hoped the Franklin headache would quickly pass with him. But no. Jane did everything she could to make sure the Arctic, and the plight of the men who had followed their orders, stayed front and center in the corridors of the naval high command.

  She was, her lengthy letter made clear, well informed of the reasons for the Admiralty Lords’ opinions and suffering “intense anxiety” over their procrastination. Embarrassing them with her own resolve, Jane stressed that she was sacrificing property, although not as much as she wanted to, and borrowing money to fund her own efforts. She asked the Royal Navy to lend her a couple of ships: two dockyard lighters, which normally transported provisions and stores from large ships anchored offshore. After what the Arctic had done to some of the navy’s strongest vessels, a woman’s suggestion that smaller, workaday transport ships could find Erebus and Terror must have sounded impertinent to some. But Lady Franklin had been convening with pros in The Battery and made her case like one.

  “With some alterations in the rigging,” she insisted with a sailor’s certainty, they “would be well adapted for my purpose, and being very strong, they would soon be made ready for sea.

  “It will not be, I trust, and ought not to be a reproach to me, that I use every means & argument I can think of, that is upright and true, to move you to the consideration of my request, and if you ever have cause to look back upon any part of your administration with regret, which I hope may never be, it will not I am persuaded arise from your having extended to me the assistance I seek on the present occasion,” she concluded, signing: “Your obedient servant, Jane Franklin.”

  The Lords didn’t dismiss her suggestion out of hand. By early the next year, a Dickens publication, The Household Narrative of Current Events, was reporting that the Lords of the Admiralty, with backing from the House of Commons, had approved a new search expedition under the command of Captain Horatio T. Austin. The brief story said the mission would consist of two steamers accompanied by two dockyard lighters. When Austin set sail in 1850, steamers went with him as backup, but his main vessels were two heavy barques specially designed for polar exploration. Lady Franklin’s persistence was starting to pay off and she made sure William Penny the whaler was involved in the Royal Navy’s next search. After several cold summers, the Admiralty was counting on a break in the Arctic chill to open search routes through the ice.

  A long shot, but the Lords were now all-in.

  6

  The Arctic Committee

  Two years after the crews of Erebus and Terror emptied their ships and set off on foot, the Royal Navy surrendered to pressure for action and launched the most ambitious attempt to find the lost Franklin Expedition. By the summer of 1850, there were thirteen ships, assembled in seven British and American expeditions, traversing the Arctic Archipelago, looking for some sign of the missing men. Lady Franklin’s constant pressure and publicity campaign had not only kept alive demands for a major search but also spurred a new wave of exploration that would significantly expand the knowledge of the High Arctic. She had also ratcheted up the political risks. In just six years since Lady Franklin had offered the first reward to whalers, the mounting effort to find Sir John and his men would cost more than £760,000, or close to $70 million today. Most of that was public money that politicians had to assure taxpayers was well spent. But the first major mission mainly produced news of infighting, phony murder conspiracies, and wild-goose chases. The Franklin Expedition was a chronic headache that the Admiralty just couldn’t shake.

  On August 13, 1850, an alien clamor disturbed timeless silence as at least seven vessels—from magnificent three-masters to a humble single-sparred cutter—converged in the Arctic wilderness, on the northeast shores of Baffin Bay. The High Arctic hadn’t seen anything like it before, and hasn’t since. Sailors shouted from the decks and rigging as they hauled in sails, sounded the depths, and brought their mammoth vessels to rest. The resounding splash of anchors plunging into the sea followed a long whine of heavy rope anchor cables running through iron hawsepipes. The brassy clang of ships’ bells marked the hours of the watch. This was an unplanned convergence of naval might far from any human settlement. The ships were supposed to be split up, navigating hundreds of miles apart and hunting for Franklin leads in different areas of the Arctic Archipelago, but pack ice squeezed them closer and into a more collaborative effort. As several expeditions dodged ice floes on the desolate northwest coast of Greenland, things got dicey in the dense fog and shifting floes. At one point, sailors landed on the ice, planted a hefty charge of gunpowder, and, on a signal, ignited a slow match. William Parker Snow watched from the smaller, eighty-nine-ton yacht Prince Albert.

  Lady Franklin chose Snow for her first private expedition, under the command of Captain Charles Forsyth, who served with the Royal Navy’s permission. Snow came aboard as surgeon, purser, and first mate. He brought his own paranormal revelation to the search. Born into a navy family, Snow suffered a serious head injury as a boy when he missed a crossbar in gym and cut his head open. The boy quickly developed what he believed were clairvoyant powers, and a Victorian-era magazine profile later called him “naturally psychic, living near the edge of the Fourth Dimension.” He also had a visceral understanding of how cruel life could be at sea. Snow was severely abused as a child apprentice under a vicious captain who regularly had the boy flogged and tied to the mast. Snow was colted, or beaten with a knotted cord, three or four times a week until his back was a grotesque palette of bruises and suppurating sores.

  “Day after day I was knocked about, rope’s ended, thrown down and then kicked, mast-headed in bad weather, kept up from my watch below, and so brutally used that I was always sore in my body, and broken in my mind. My head at last got so affected and my old maladies so increased, that I often lay down all night writhing in agony.”

  The captain took twisted pleasure in watching the child sailor tormented and humiliated. Sometimes he ordered Snow roused from sleep and forced to sit on the highest yard, a horizontal spar attached to a mast, for two or three hours at a stretch. When that failed to break the boy’s spirit, the trauma escalated to the bizarre.

  “I was called up, stripped, and sent forward to be tarred, then stand in a tub while water was poured over me as a further punishment, and then, thus tarred, sent out to straddle the jibboom, to represent, as he said, a new figurehead.”

  Years later, when Snow volunteered to join the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the Royal Navy rejected him as unfit. He had bad eyesight, stammered incessantly, and his memory or consciousness would all of a sudden fail him. So he moved to New York to write for a newspaper. It was there, at 3 o’clock in the morning on January 7, 1850, that he had a vision, a sort of waking dream, when “the curtains of my sleeping-room were drawn aside from the bottom and a picture appeared before my eye.”

  Snow saw a flat, ice-covered triangle that included what he took to be King William Island and an area to the northeast around the North Magnetic Pole. At the bottom was the continental coast around the estuary of the Great Fish River, and the Boothia Isthmus. Crossing King William Island, and along its shores, Snow spotted “a few men, while several bodies lay seemingly lifeless on the ground.” More white men were farther south at the mouth of the Great Fish River, and near the Salmon Lakes, Boothia Isthmus, and the gulf. To the west, there were other parties of white men in the apparition.

  “It seemed to me in my waking dream that they were calling aloud to me for aid, an
d their call appeared to be strongly sounding in my ears. This so thoroughly startled me, that, as my wife well remembers, and often expresses how it woke her, I sprang out of bed shivering with fright, horror and pity, towards the sitting-room. I found the curtains closed as we had left them, but I promptly threw on my attire, and with the candle I had lit, proceeded to my desk. The early morning was cold, yet I did not appear to want a fire; I was like as though heated enough by what my dream or vision had pictured me. Thus I commenced writing and copied what I wrote.”

  Those elements of the image conjured in Snow’s rattled mind might simply have been a good guess for a seaman obsessed by the Arctic and possessed of an active imagination. But there were other details in the manifestation that were far more prescient—and much more difficult to explain away.

  “Two apparently deserted ships were to be seen, one embedded in the ice south west of the magnetic pole and north west of Point Victory,” which James Ross had named, on the northwest tip of King William Island. “The other ship was away down in a bay—MacLoughlin Bay—or close to O’Reilly Island.”

  Today’s charts show it as McLoughlin Bay, and it lies just southeast of O’Reilly Island, in eastern Queen Maud Gulf. It’s the general area where Inuit oral history told of a three-masted ship, where men had lived with a dog, until they went off one day, leaving footprints in the snow, never to return. Later searchers reported those details in their journals from interviews with Inuit, long after Snow claims he saw it all in New York as it was unfolding high in the Arctic in 1850. That was nine years before the discovery of the Victory Point note that described where and when Erebus and Terror were abandoned to sea ice northwest of King William Island. The experience was so powerful that Snow sat down at his desk the same cold January morning and wrote a letter to Lady Franklin. According to the Saturday Review, a respected London weekly of the era that reported arts, literature, science, and politics, Snow’s letter was “printed in the Parliamentary papers respecting the Arctic expedition for that year.”

  He told Lady Franklin that the search needed to shift farther south, without mentioning that his information came from a clairvoyant vision. He was afraid that would sound crazy. Now Snow was in the hunt aboard the Prince Albert, biding his time, waiting for the right moment and place to ask Forsyth for permission to check the eastern Queen Maud Gulf.

  Standing on the Prince Albert’s deck, watching the ice explode, he didn’t have the buffer of the big ships’ reinforced hulls to cushion the shock. The water suddenly roiled with ice exploding “in convulsive movement, as though shaken by a volcanic eruption, until piece upon piece was sent in the air, and the larger bodies were completely rent into innumerable fragments.” The blast barely nicked the Arctic’s armor of ice, but it opened enough water for the ships to advance.

  Once safely through the obstacle course of ice, the ships anchored off Cape York. Most impressive were the Royal Navy’s barque-rigged exploration vessels specially outfitted for another run at the Northwest Passage. HMS Resolute was the flagship of Captain Horatio T. Austin, commander of an expedition that totaled four vessels. Her sister ship was HMS Assistance. Two steam-powered tenders, Intrepid and Pioneer, were along to tow the sailing vessels when necessary and to penetrate deeper into the archipelago if sea ice or weather conditions made that too risky for the others. William Penny would also rendezvous there with HMS Lady Franklin and HMS Sophia, whaling brigs brought into Royal Navy service under the whaling master’s command. Gold-braided naval officers normally sniffed at such unpedigreed merchant seamen. Now they had no choice but to work with Penny because Lady Jane Franklin wanted it so. Her campaign of newspaper editorials, supported by sympathetic readers’ letters to the editor, had shamed the Admiralty into financing his ships and his crew.

  Sir John Ross added another fuse to the powder keg. He was back in the Arctic, finally getting his shot at a rescue attempt, spending some of his own money with backing from the Hudson’s Bay Company. It helped fund his voyage on a private schooner, the 120-ton Felix, which led the way for Ross’s own yacht, the 12-ton Mary. She came along as an unmanned tender in case the explorers had to abandon the main vessel. Neither ship was strong enough for an aggressive hunt, yet Ross would still end up in the middle of another ugly fight over his lost friend Franklin.

  The morning started off calm and quiet. Snow had been up in the crow’s nest, scanning a coast that struck him as endlessly dreary, looking for any hint of people or wrecks. He craved conversation. After breakfast, he boarded the Assistance with a parcel of newspapers sent by the proprietors of the Morning Herald. He thought Austin’s officers might like a chance to catch up on the headlines. Crewmen spotted Inuit in the distance, standing on snow beneath cliffs, and Snow returned to the Prince Albert, where Forsyth was eager to launch a shore party to ask if anyone had seen Erebus or Terror.

  Several men from different ships headed for the ice that formed a sort of beachhead offshore. As they approached, Snow marveled at massive glaciers, many miles long, with “solid streams of frozen snow, rushing occasionally with the force of an avalanche into open water.” Curious, mostly smiling Inuit dressed in sealskin came closer to greet the visitors. Snow took a shine to the last to arrive, a chubby-faced boy, and pulled out a blue cotton pocket handkerchief, spotted white, to tie it around the child’s neck. Snow thought of taking the boy, named Aladoongà, home with him to England.

  “But, poor little fellow! it was not so ordained. Away he went from me with his handkerchief round his neck as I vainly tried to call him back; and the rude hut, and the state of life, half human, half beast, was to remain his lot. I looked long and anxiously after him, and began to reflect. But, after all, said I mentally, perhaps he is really happier where he is. Increased knowledge but increases sorrow.”

  Around 8 p.m. that night, everyone was back aboard ship, catching up after a long day. A steward named John Smith, who had learned some Inuktitut during his time with the Hudson’s Bay Company, chatted with Adam Beck, Sir John Ross’s interpreter. His English struck others on the expedition as weak, which caused serious problems. Smith was so startled by what he heard that he took Snow aside: Beck was reporting a massacre of Royal Navy sailors. That’s what the friendly Inuit had told him earlier in the day, Smith relayed to Snow. Two ships had wrecked farther up the coast, and the men who made it ashore, including officers with gold bands on their caps and other naval insignia, were later killed. Snow couldn’t believe what he was hearing, took out his Inuktitut pocket phrase book, and did his best to interrogate Beck. The interpreter used a piece of chalk to write “1846,” the year of the alleged murders, “in a clear and good scholar-like hand,” on the ship’s gunwale. As alarm spread, and Beck faced more questioners, more details emerged. He insisted Inuit had told him that two ships arrived in the winter of 1846, when snow was falling, and got crushed by ice near Cape Dudley Digges. White men made for shore. Some drowned. The survivors, some armed with guns but without ammunition, camped for a time in white tents or huts, separate from the Inuit, who eventually killed the exhausted and weak sailors with darts or arrows.

  Horrified, Snow reported the gruesome details to his commander, who reported it up the chain. Sailors fired a howitzer, and hoisted the colors, to get Austin’s urgent attention. Penny went back ashore with his interpreter, a Danish official named Carl Petersen, who spoke a Greenland dialect of Inuktitut. He listened to the Inuit repeat their story and said they made no claims of any killing at all. The only confirmed dead white man was a sailor from the North Star, which had wintered at Wolstenholme Sound the previous winter. He fell off a cliff. Petersen called Beck a liar and tried to intimidate him into silence, but Ross’s interpreter pushed back, insisting he was telling the truth. Beck later swore to his account of the murder in a signed deposition, made in front of a magistrate at Godhavn, on Greenland’s Disko Island. While Austin and other senior officers made a plan to investigate what, if true, would be a major crime against the Royal Navy, Beck spent hour
s below with the lower ranks, trying to persuade the seamen with pleas that they heard only as gibberish.

  “He had been much pained by their laughing and jeering him about his miserable looks,” Snow recalled, “and when he sufficiently explained himself to let them understand ‘ships lost,’ and ‘all men speared,’ they told him that he lied, and this made him cry, saying nàà mee, nàà (not me, not me).”

  Few believed Beck from the start. But his story had to be checked out, which forced a risky, late-season delay in the expeditions’ search efforts farther west in the archipelago. Austin was angry and would make Beck, and his strongest supporter, Sir John Ross, suffer for it later. With so many ships joining the hunt, there was finally a chance to make real progress in finding either Erebus or Terror, or at least to get closer to figuring out what happened to the Franklin Expedition. Yet, once again, petty politics, bickering, and recriminations eclipsed all that really mattered: the lives of 129 lost men.

  WHILE THE BRITISH jostled and maneuvered, Americans saw an opening. Lady Franklin’s Washington gambit had run into a political wall in Congress, which New York shipping tycoon Henry Grinnell breached by offering financing and two brigantines, Advance and Rescue. President Taylor’s government endorsed the expedition and provided Navy Lieutenant Edwin De Haven to lead it. His surgeon and scientist was Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, a short, thin naval officer whose daring overcame the frailty of a rheumatic heart and the notoriety of marriage to a young woman who communicated with ghosts. She was Margaret Fox, one of the three traveling Fox Sisters from Rochester, New York, who sparked a spiritualism craze across the US by claiming to communicate with the dead by rapping on walls and tabletops. Although Kane thought the séances were some kind of unexplained parlor trick, he still couldn’t resist Margaret’s allure.