Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  The US Navy ordered De Haven to sail through Lancaster Sound to Wellington Channel and then west to Cape Walker. Franklin had been told to follow the same course. If De Haven reached the cape without finding the missing British seamen, and the route farther west was blocked, he was to make his way to Jones and Smith Sounds. They lie far to the northeast, in the opposite direction of where Erebus and Terror were abandoned. The US government wasn’t taking such a big financial and political risk just to do a worried wife’s bidding. Commanders were curious about the possibility of navigable waters closer to the North Pole, and the Franklin search allowed them to put a humanitarian spin on a much more important mission: a belated quest for the mythical Open Polar Sea. The Americans, like the British, were convinced the sea would be warmer at the top of the world.

  “This opinion seems to be sustained by the fact that beasts and fowls are seen migrating over the ice from the mouth of Mackenzie River and its neighboring shores to the north,” Secretary of the Navy William Ballard Preston explained in De Haven’s instructions. “These dumb creatures are probably by their wise instincts to seek a more genial climate in that direction, and upon the borders of the supposed more open sea.”

  Preston was explicit that De Haven not try looking farther south for Sir John and his men, along the North American coast, where survivors had headed under Francis Crozier’s command.

  “Nearly the entire Arctic front of the continent has been scoured without finding any traces of the missing ships,” the navy secretary wrote. “It is useless for you to go there, or to re-examine any other place where search has already been made. You will, therefore, confine your attention to the routes already indicated.”

  The stretch of cold summers didn’t break as hoped, and heavy sea ice stymied the expeditions at several turns. But in mid-August, word reached William Penny that men aboard Assistance, commanded by Royal Navy Captain Erasmus Ommanney, had found traces of the Franklin Expedition at Cape Riley, on the southwest tip of Devon Island. The site overlooks the southern entrance of Wellington Channel, and Penny assumed crewmen from Erebus and Terror must have stopped there in retreat. Searchers walking the shoreline found a bottle, scraps of newspaper, rifle shot, and other items several miles north of Cape Riley, at Bowden Point. They read those as evidence that some of Franklin’s men, perhaps a hunting party, had camped there. Restricted by sea ice, Penny joined up with the American ships Advance and Rescue, and Ross aboard the Felix. Ross loathed Penny. Austin, the most senior Royal Navy commander there, didn’t have much time for either man, nor they for him.

  Suspicious, and at times openly hostile to one another, expedition leaders brought their ships together in a bight on the northwest side of Beechey Island. There they agreed that the Americans under De Haven would try to pick up the Franklin men’s trail by continuing northward along the east coast of Wellington Channel. Penny headed eastward. Leading a party of his officers, the whaler found the first solid evidence that the Franklin Expedition had run into serious problems. They discovered the weathered wooden markers, pounded into the permafrost, above the Beechey Island graves of John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine. Austin concluded that the expedition must have spent its first winter nearby and “that there was circumstantial evidence sufficient to prove that its departure was somewhat sudden.” Penny and his group searched for any kind of written record, but they found none. It was a bad sign, but still a major break, yet the whaler would soon be fighting to defend himself in front of an Admiralty board of inquiry, with all the tension and insinuation of a criminal trial.

  Snow reluctantly headed home that same August, boiling with resentment of his own. Once the Prince Albert neared the area where his vision told him to look for Erebus or Terror, Snow summoned the courage to ask Forsyth to pause. Snow asked permission to borrow a boat to check the Boothia Peninsula. He also wanted a small group of men from the ship’s crew. They had eagerly volunteered in a meeting on the ship’s deck, despite the obvious risks. The captain waffled, then flatly refused, and suddenly set sail for England.

  TROUBLE AWAITED the British commanders of the first full-scale Franklin search when they reached home port in 1851. After resisting a mass hunt for as long as it could, the Admiralty had spent stacks of the public’s money. To quiet skeptics, they needed something equally big to show for it. The discovery of three graves, but no rescued sailors, ships, or written records of their whereabouts, was not the news the Lords wanted to hear. Wild rumors of a massacre didn’t help. Someone had to suffer, but the Royal Navy would deflect as much blame as possible. As a whaler, William Penny had a target on his back anyway, so the Admiralty took aim at him first.

  Letters forwarded from the ships still at sea provided ample ammunition. A specially convened Arctic Committee led the investigation, headed by Rear-Admiral William Bowles. A career Royal Navy man with white nimbus eyebrows and muttonchop sideburns that framed pinched lips like a pair of hatchets, Bowles had an unremarkable war record. That didn’t matter. His Conservative Party connections were impeccable, which ensured he was well on his way to becoming Admiral of the Fleet. His five-man board of inquiry was dominated by three former Arctic expedition commanders, luminaries of the Royal Navy’s polar pantheon: George Back, Frederick Beechey, and William Parry. The main issue in front of the august panel stemmed from an argument in the High Arctic on August 11, 1851, when Penny and Austin were aboard their ships in Cornwallis Island’s Assistance Bay. But Lady Franklin suspected the Admiralty was really looking for payback. She didn’t trust Back, for one, and thought the committee was stacked against Penny, the most vulnerable member of her team.

  Penny and Sir John Ross had wintered at Assistance Bay, beset by sea ice. It got so cold that on February 24, 1851, a sunny day with little wind, the thermometer’s mercury froze solid at –41 degrees Fahrenheit. By late summer, leads opened in the ice, allowing a rendezvous with Austin. They debated whether to head up Wellington Channel and try to find Franklin’s trail on one of the optional routes the Admiralty had given in his written instructions. Sir John had gone that way with Erebus and Terror in his circumnavigation of Cornwallis Island, before wintering at Beechey Island. But the ships were far to the south, if not already on the seabed, by the time Austin and Penny butted heads over where to go looking for them. An officer of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy normally wouldn’t stoop to debate a whaling captain. But this was already far from a normal naval operation.

  “It was sort of a rambling conversation of which I could make nothing,” Austin huffed after one exchange with Penny and Ross.

  While the naval commander insisted he was trying to be polite and attentive, “I was pained to the extreme. How I was able to maintain myself as an officer and a gentleman under the circumstances I cannot tell.”

  The dispute stayed on a steady boil through the day, carried out in letters between ships, heated discussions face-to-face, even with a shout from the stern as Austin told Penny, when the whaler passed beneath him in a small boat: “Go up into the Wellington Channel, and you will do good to the cause.” In one letter, Penny was worried about the risk of sailing into sea ice drifting fast and hard in stiff currents farther north. Winter was about to slam the search window shut, and Penny wasn’t eager to get his neck caught by sticking it out too far. He warned of “the fearful rate at which the tide runs (not less than six knots) through the sounds that divide the channel, dangerous even for a boat, much more to a ship, unless clear of ice, which from its present appearance would not be so that season.”

  Austin thought his expedition teams’ searches to the west and the south proved there was no point going farther north. Of course, unknown to him, the Franklin Expedition survivors already had gone south. If a search there had failed to find anyone alive, at least it might have found evidence of what happened. Later, under fire from all sides back home, Penny insisted he was eager to proceed north into Wellington Channel, and he asked Austin for a steamer, only to be refused. The Arctic Committee co
ncluded that Penny had changed his story after “he found everybody disappointed” on his return to England and faulted him for not staying a couple of weeks longer to at least gauge ice conditions in the channel. The panel agreed that both Penny and Austin were fully justified under their orders from the Admiralty to avoid the risk of getting stuck for another winter. But the investigation’s final report, and its lavish praise for “the zeal, energy, intrepidity, and perseverance” of individual searchers, did not placate growing public frustration with one of the country’s most revered institutions. To a highbrow Athenaeum commentator, Austin’s slight against Penny, who deserved to be celebrated for finding the Franklin crewmen’s graves on Beechey Island, was a disgraceful example of British naval snobbery.

  “The Royal Navy captain scorned to take information or advice from the captain of a ‘mercantile’ Expedition, though sailing like himself under Admiralty orders, and engaged, with him, at great national cost, on a common work of humanity. Sir John Franklin and his gallant companions might lie and rot in ‘thick-ribbed ice’—and the yearnings of a generous country after its long lost sons be spurned and disregarded—rather than the former commander of a whaler should show the way to the rescue.”

  The committee also probed Adam Beck’s chilling claim that Inuit had murdered the crews of Erebus and Terror. The provenance of the story wasn’t great to begin with, and searchers had wasted good time just trying to get the basics straight. Now the experts wanted their kick at the can. Despite initial doubts, John Ross testified, he was convinced that Beck was being completely honest. He had been “raised up to Christianity by missionaries,” Ross told the committee, and understood the severe consequences of lying under oath.

  “I should add that the class of persons to whom he belongs are perfectly insane when drunk.”

  Ross didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. What were savages if not crazily drunk liars? Yet Ross remained defiant under sharp questioning of Beck’s actions and his own. As the panel dug deeper into the Franklin “murder mystery,” Admiral Bowles wanted to be sure Ross and the other searchers hadn’t missed something, perhaps a note that would provide a more promising account of the Franklin Expedition’s fate. In one line of questioning, the chairman zeroed in on a Beechey Island cairn built from tin cans. It seemed the perfect place to stash one or more notes about the expedition’s status. But the cans were all empty. Bowles suspected the searchers had slipped up and missed important clues. Ross, now a rear admiral himself, assured the inquiry that the whole area was checked very carefully. It was possible, but not probable, that something was overlooked, he conceded under questioning. His own experience confirmed that.

  “There is a tin containing some lines of poetry that I left on the top of the hill above Leopold Harbour, and although a hundred men have been there since it has never been found, and it is there yet. Almost all the ships companies of the Investigator and Enterprise have been there, and have never found it.”

  Ross saw an important clue in the dearth of them, which he “considered a proof that Sir John Franklin had given up all hope of proceeding further, had determined on proceeding home, and was lost.” For the many desperate to see something good come from the search, Ross fanned a flicker of hope.

  “I think he was lost by getting into packed ice as Sir James Ross got into. That is one reason why I think Adam Beck’s story probable. I agreed with Sir John Franklin before he went away that if he advanced he was to leave notices where he was going, and to make deposits [of food and supplies]. I did not require that the Government should make these deposits, but that Sir John Franklin should make them out of his own resources, as I did.

  “I said to him, ‘I shall most likely be the person to come out for you if you are missed, so that we will understand that you are to leave deposits at Cornwallis Island and Melville Island. State what your intentions are. If you do not leave anything I shall conclude that you are returning home, and that you consider it would be of no use to leave notices.”

  But there was an elephant sitting in the staid hearing room. False leads plagued the investigation into the missing expedition. Plenty of them. Every time expectations of a rescue were raised, only to be dashed, the missing men’s distraught families suffered more. Ross’s name was attached to a recent, especially crushing disappointment that went unmentioned at the hearing, even though, or perhaps because, it had made headlines. Aboard the schooner Felix, he had two homing pigeons donated by a Miss Dunlop of Annanhill, near Ayr, Scotland. In the fall of 1851, when sea ice caught Ross’s ship in Assistance Bay, he cupped the pigeons in his hands and slipped them from their cage to attach a message and send them aloft.

  The birds were supposed to fly off and find people—with any luck, sailors on a whaling ship far to the east, or at a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost deeper south. Instead, the pigeons circled over a desolate expanse of snow and ice and returned to the Felix. Several attempts failed to persuade the birds to fly toward one of the whaling ships in Davis Strait. When scaring the pigeons with rifle fire didn’t work, Ross improvised. He floated the birds skyward in a small paper box, dangling from two big, gas-filled balloons, measuring six feet by eight. A slow match mechanism was designed to open a trap door and release the airborne messengers twenty-four hours later. The contraption floated southward until it disappeared from telescope view.

  Within two weeks, Scottish newspapers reported that at least one of the pigeons had flown some two thousand miles across the North Atlantic and alighted near its home roost in Ayr. Others said both of the flying messengers had come back. One of the more outlandish news stories, in the Dundee Advertiser, had a rifleman with a good eye blasting off the birds’ legs. Which sent headline writers aflight: “Latest news from Sir John Ross—extraordinary flight of carrier pigeons” and “Sir John Ross’s letter-carriers.” Except that no one could produce any notes that proved any of Ross’s carrier pigeons had reached Scotland—or anywhere else beyond the lethally cold High Arctic. The birds probably froze there, either trapped in the drifting balloon box or after landing on ice or frozen tundra, where pecking around for food wouldn’t have got them far.

  No matter. Like anything to do with the increasingly bizarre circus surrounding the slowly unfolding Franklin tragedy, the public couldn’t get enough of it. People were now watching the sky, hoping for airborne messages from Erebus and Terror. Just days after the earlier sightings, when a passenger pigeon was spotted in a ship’s rigging in Dundee, people tried to catch it. The bird flew off to the railway station with an excited crowd in pursuit. Eventually, more sober voices prevailed, including an expert who wrote to the Manchester Guardian, pooh-poohing the notion that Ross’s pigeons could have flown so far as “a clumsy invention of some wag desirous of practising upon the credulity of the public.”

  In short, it was a sick prank. Not the first surrounding Franklin and his men. Not the last. Precisely the sort of public silliness the Admiralty, and its revered polar explorers, did not want associated with their good names. Instead, they went after John Ross at the inquiry in a nasty fight over a more plausible claim. William Parry, who had made it halfway through the Arctic Archipelago and shown how to survive a killer winter, asked Ross what he knew about a piece of wood and tin that Adam Beck said he had picked up on shore. The interpreter swore that he found it near the place Franklin and his men were thought to have spent their first winter.

  “The piece of wood was four feet nine inches long, and three inches by four square,” Ross replied. “On the top it had been cut with a saw, and in that was a piece of tin. I saw that piece of tin. Adam Beck was carrying it along, when the tin dropped out and sunk into the snow which was very deep at the time; it could not afterwards be found. The man has sworn that on this piece of tin was ‘September 1846.’”

  “Did I understand you to say you saw the tin?” Beechey asked.

  “Yes, I saw him bringing the tin along with my spyglass. I was about a quarter of a mile away. This was on the north-east
side of Union Bay. I considered it to be a meridian mark. There was a cairn that it had fallen from.”

  The tin sign was never found, even though several people had looked for it in the snow. Once again, Ross’s credibility was in doubt. In his career-ending error of 1819, he had seen a mirage of mountains blocking Lancaster Sound. Was he now imagining a message on metal left by the lost Franklin Expedition? If the explorer and his interpreter had in fact seen “September 1846” on a sign in the High Arctic, they had discovered a stunning clue. It marked the month that Erebus and Terror were beset, a fact that wouldn’t be known for certain until the note at Victory Point was discovered some eight years after Ross testified. True or not, that lead had slipped out of fumbling hands, only to be hidden by the Arctic, as so many others had done.

  Ross didn’t help his own damaged credibility. He seemed slightly confused himself on an important matter concerning his interpreter. At first, Ross didn’t believe Adam Beck’s murder story because Carl Petersen contradicted it. But Ross boasted of being the only officer in the Royal Navy who could understand Danish, and he thought that gave him unique insight into whether Petersen or Beck was telling the truth. He suspected Petersen was the liar and changed his view on the alleged killing in front of the very skeptical Arctic Committee. It took more pleasure in the testimony of Captain Horatio Austin, who had a very low opinion of Beck and didn’t like the Inuk making his own decisions, acting outside the chain of command. The chairman’s first question to Austin on the third day of hearings concerned his complaints about Beck and his tale of murder, which Austin lodged in writing on the same day of the Wellington Channel quarrel.