Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  HMS Resolute and her tender, the Intrepid, went west through Barrow Strait to Melville Island. Their main achievement was finding the stranded, starving, and stir-crazy men of HMS Investigator, a beat-up remnant of the navy’s 1850 push to find the Franklin Expedition. She had spent months sailing to the Western Arctic with HMS Enterprise, by way of Cape Horn, then northwest through the Pacific to what is now Hawaii, and northeast from there into the Bering Strait. Another costly, high-risk deployment of two Royal Navy ships, and the payoff was minimal.

  Investigator’s captain, Robert McClure, discovered Prince of Wales Strait between Banks and Victoria Islands, but he almost lost everything in the gamble. In a storm, a massive ice floe snagged Investigator and shoved her back down the strait. The pressure was so intense that it snapped nine-inch-thick hawsers (the ship’s heavy rope mooring lines) like threads and ripped off six ice anchors. The crew thought it was curtains, and, defying orders, broke into the liquor stores, hoping to dull the pain. The storm passed, and Investigator was still upright, so McClure sailed on, made it through another close call, and then decided to seek safe harbor. He chose a spot off M’Clure Strait, which he called Bay of God’s Mercy, to winter over in 1851. As ship’s surgeon Alexander Armstrong later griped: “It would have been a mercy had we never entered it.”

  Grounded on a shoal, the ship was soon trapped in ice. During three winters of torture in Mercy Bay, temperatures dropped to –65 degrees Fahrenheit, at times forcing sixty-six men surviving on two-thirds rations to go without fresh water. Their stores were frozen solid. When the air finally warmed just above freezing in late June 1852, the sailors waited and watched for the sea ice to break up. Instead, its grip only tightened, growing by three inches over the previous month to seven feet, two inches thick. As the moans of his men mixed with the equally pained groan and creak of massive timbers squeezed by ice, McClure ordered his crew to abandon Investigator more than once, only to rescind and hope again that the Arctic would show mercy and free them.

  When Belcher reached the archipelago with his five ships, he sent Henry Kellett with HMS Resolute and its steam tender, Intrepid, west to Melville Island. Belcher sailed north up Wellington Channel with HMS Assistance and the steamer Pioneer, while HMS North Star anchored off Beechey Island as a depot ship. On a twenty-two-day sledge trip across Melville Island, Lieutenant George Mecham stopped at Winter Harbor, where William Parry and his crew had struggled to survive decades earlier. There he found McClure’s cached record of proceedings, which described his expedition’s stranding at Mercy Bay. It also claimed McClure had discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage, which he had seen but not transited because ice blocked the way. Arriving too late in the year to attempt a rescue, Lieutenant Bedford Pim led a mission hauling two sledges early in the spring of 1853. The bigger one broke down, and Pim continued with two men by dogsled. After twenty-eight days covering 160 miles, in nasty cold, they managed to find Investigator just as McClure and his starving, addled, and disabled men were about to abandon the ship. The rescue left him speechless.

  “The heart was too full for the tongue to speak,” McClure recalled, thankful that he and his men had narrowly escaped the same catastrophe that befell Franklin and his crews.

  Once warmed up and fed, McClure wanted to complete the Northwest Passage. Four of his men were dead, some survivors were blind, others were unable to walk. All had scurvy. Yet McClure insisted to Kellett that there was no reason to give up. Kellett won the argument, Investigator was abandoned, and everyone aboard moved to the Belcher Expedition’s ships. Then they proceeded to get stuck in various places. Determined to keep morale as high as possible, Kellett got everyone who could stand outside and playing. On the ice, in –15 degrees Fahrenheit, the sailors batted balls and ran the bases in matches of rounders, a version of cricket considered an ancestor of baseball. The constant running kept them warm and gave them less time to think about being miserable. Kellett also put the men to work “snowing the deck,” which provided a level surface on a ship listing several degrees to port and also helped keep the interior decks warmer.

  Ship’s surgeon Dr. William T. Domville led classes, starting with chemistry. The crew chose an abridged version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for their first winter theater entertainment. Officers staged a popular one-act farce, The Two Bonnycastles. The play rollicks on from an opening scene in which a gentleman walking in the park snatches a watch from a man he thought had stolen it from him, only to find the timepiece in question was on the dressing table at home, and that the victim was in fact the perpetrator. All of which required a lot of preparation aboard Resolute: altering of dresses, rigging chandeliers, retouching drop scenes. Mr. Dean, the ship’s carpenter, spent ten days making fifes, a guitar, and a key prop: a leg of mutton fashioned from wood and canvas.

  But it wasn’t all good times in the High Arctic. A ship’s mate named Sainsbury, rescued from Investigator, had been growing weaker by the day. He and everyone else knew he was going to die. Emaciated, the sailor held on until half past midnight, then slipped away without a struggle. Two days later, Kellett led a somber service in the mid-November cold and mist. Then crewmen sewed Sainsbury’s body into a rough shroud, carried him 250 yards from the ship to a hole cut in the ice, and let Arctic waters take his corpse. Sainsbury’s burial in an ice-covered sea seared itself into the memory of George McDougall, the Resolute’s master.

  “And never shall I forget the scene on the ice, as the body, sewn in canvas, with weights attached, was launched through the narrow opening, and disappeared to our view. Within an hour, Nature had placed an icy slab over the grave of our departed messmate.”

  Things only got worse. Storms pounded the vessels. The ice grew thicker. More men died.

  In the spring of 1853, the Admiralty dispatched the Breadalbane, an old merchant ship pressed into naval transport service along with the steamer HMS Phoenix. Their mission was to resupply the Belcher Expedition in the hope that they had made enough progress to keep up the Franklin search. Breadalbane, a three-masted barque, hauled clothes, coal, food, and rum and anchored to sea ice off Beechey Island. Belcher’s orders were to get the supply ship turned around quickly, before ice caught her, and to send any sick men, along with an update on his mission, back to Britain. Most of the cargo had been moved to shore when, not long after midnight on Sunday, August 21, 1853, Breadalbane’s timbers, which weren’t properly strengthened for the Arctic like Royal Navy discovery ships were, began to squeal and wail. She was crying out in pain. Setting sea ice grating against her hull was about to crush it.

  Phoenix quickly began to tow her out, as gently as possible, and by 3 a.m. the floating tandem fleeing the expanding ice sheet was halfway between Beechey Island and Devon Island’s Cape Riley. Everything seemed under control, so William Fawckner, government agent aboard the Breadalbane, retired to his quarters. He was trying to sleep when the pressure of ice squeezing the hull popped his cabin door open around ten after four in the morning.

  The lifeboats, he thought.

  At least get the lifeboats off before she goes under! Fawckner hurried to get dressed and hustled on deck, in his slippers, to find his crew trying to lift the boats off to at least keep them in one piece. But they were like dry nuts in a nutcracker. Compressing ice instantly splintered them. Fawckner headed for the bow to send an emergency signal.

  “I went forward to hail the Phoenix, for men to save the boats, and whilst doing so, the ropes by which we were secured parted, and a heavy nip took the ship, making every timber in her creak, and the ship tremble all over. I looked in the main hold and saw the beams giving away.”

  Down below, Fawckner’s men didn’t realize their ship’s end was nigh. He rushed back to his cabin and hauled out his portmanteau, a leather chest, “and roared like a bull to those in their beds to jump out and save their lives.” When Fawckner reached topside himself, the men on the ice shouted for him to jump. Breadalbane was going over. He ditched the portmante
au and leapt, losing his slippers in the descent to the broken ice. Within five minutes, the ship began “cracking up like matches would in the hand. When the destruction suddenly paused, Fawckner and a few others went aboard to salvage some belongings. He measured the water pouring into the hold. It was five feet deep.

  While “in the act of sounding, a heavier nip than before pressed out the starboard bow and the ice was forced right into the forecastle.” Everyone abandoned ship, with the few clothes they could save.

  “The ship now began to sink fast, and from the time her bowsprit touched the ice, until her mastheads were out of sight, did not occupy above one minute and a half. It was a very sad and unceremonious way of being turned out of our ship. From the time the first nip took her, until her disappearance, did not occupy more than 15 minutes.”

  Everyone got onto the ice before Breadalbane went down. No one died, but other crews suffered fatalities, and little trace of Sir John Franklin and his men had been found. Belcher finally decided to cut his own losses. He ordered all the ships abandoned in the summer of 1854. Everyone would have to go home on North Star, still waiting at Beechey Island. This time Kellett, among others, was the one arguing to stay the course. McClintock, who was in charge of Kellett’s tender, Intrepid, traveled six days by dogsled to argue with Belcher. They went back and forth for two days until, Belcher thought, “it can hardly be imagined that the case was not thoroughly sifted in all its bearings.” The bullheaded commander wouldn’t budge and delivered his final order in writing:

  “This abandonment goes mightily against the grain. If we could save even ‘Intrepid,’ it would be something; but your distance off-shore precludes any movement before the 22nd of August, and that is too late for operations at Beechey Island. No! All must come; no volunteering will satisfy me!”

  A final sledge party sent to move provisions from Investigator ashore to a cache reported in April 1854 that she was still beset, heeling slightly to starboard at an angle of 10 degrees. She eventually sank.

  Early in the month after Investigator went down, Kellett and his crew made careful preparations to give up on Resolute and abandon her, too. It was a routine spelled out in Royal Navy training, one the men of Erebus and Terror likely followed almost six years earlier before heading ashore. Sailors coiled cables, hoisted boats and secured them, stowed booms, tied up the topsails, raised the rudder, and either stored below anything else that moved or lashed it down on deck. After each group completed its tasks, the men embarked on the roughly five-day trek to Beechey Island, until, after several days, only the commander and a few men were left. Anyone too sick to walk was carried—one lying on a cot, another in a makeshift palanquin. Kellett ordered that seamen could only carry thirty pounds of clothes and necessities. He allowed officers to carry forty-five pounds. After witnessing Kellett burn Resolute’s secret signals, McDougall had to decide himself what personal effects he should pack and what he would leave to the Arctic.

  “There were a thousand and one things we would have desired to save, such as souvenirs from those we loved and respected, had our weights permitted; forty-five pounds is, however, too low a figure to indulge in luxuries. With a sigh, therefore, we were obliged to set aside the ornamental, and choose something more useful, but less romantic, in the shape of shirts, flannels, drawers, and such.”

  Down to the last compulsory steps of abandoning a Royal Navy ship, Resolute’s men hoisted the pilot jack, with a letter D, at the foretopmasthead and displayed the red ensign and pendant. That was to ensure, as the ship’s master put it, “in the event of her being obliged to ‘knock under’ to her icy antagonist, she might sink beneath the wave, as many a gallant predecessor had done, with colours flying.” In the final countdown, the mournful ring of the ship’s bell sounded across the ice to mark each hour. Smoke billowed from the galley stove’s chimney as signal books turned to ashes in the fire.

  Carpenters caulked down the gunroom skylight and after-companion, leaving the main hatchway the last entry and exit between the lower deck and the outside world. Only half of that remained open. After the captain and a few men dined in the darkened gunroom, Kellett inspected the lower decks and holds. Then he toasted his ship and the men who sailed her with a glass of wine. The last aboard drained their glasses and the commander ordered everyone topside. A carpenter sealed the main hatchway and at 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 13, 1854, the last men of the Resolute bid her a final good-bye and left on four sledges.

  Embedded in a huge ice floe, Resolute slowly drifted while Kellett and others made their way to the rendezvous with North Star. When Belcher brought his expedition home, the Admiralty was displeased with his decisions. The Royal Navy court-martialed him. Belcher tried to intimidate witnesses, but respected voices lined up against him. They not only questioned his judgment as a Royal Navy commander but also accused him of frequently being drunk at sea, unable to make sound decisions if he wanted to. In a rambling defense, Belcher cited the Admiralty’s own instructions, insisting he ordered the four ships abandoned within the leeway the naval command had granted him. Refusing to be the Lords’ fall guy, Belcher effectively spit their charges back at them.

  “I have now been nearly 43 years in the Naval service of my country, 36 years a commissioned officer and for periods of nearly 20 years, I have been entrusted with more important commands and exercised greater powers than, I believe, few of my rank have ever held,” he told the court-martial.

  “Next to the approbation of my Sovereign, and of my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, I value the honourable approval of my professional brethren. Jealous of my honour, and sensitively alive to the remotest shadow of blame, I confidently repose in your hands that character which during a long and trying service in every clime, and in the remotest regions of the Earth, has, I trust, not now been tarnished by obedience to the wishes, as well as the commands of my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.”

  Belcher was acquitted but not exonerated. The Arctic had ruined another reputation. McClure and his men fared better. They picked up Parliament’s £10,000 prize for finding the Northwest Passage, although Lady Franklin would later insist that Sir John had found it. Despite the official claims of mission accomplished, however, there was still more humiliation to come for the Royal Navy. Just as Kellett and McClintock had predicted, the sea ice opened and Resolute broke free on her own. Arctic winds and currents delivered her to Baffin Bay. James Buddington, an American whaling captain who sailed out of New England on the barque George Henry, had his crew corral her in September 1855. After Resolute spent some fifteen months surviving on her own, a ghost ship making her own way to safety, the Americans found her in remarkably good shape.

  “The ropes, indeed, were hard and inflexible as chains; the rigging was stiff, and cracked at the touch,” the Illustrated London News reported. “The tanks in the hold had burst, the ironwork was rusted, the paint was discoloured with bilge-water, and the mast, and topgallantmast were shattered; but the hull had escaped unscathed, and the ship was not hurt in any vital part. There were three or four feet of water in the hold, but she had not sprung a leak.”

  Buddington towed the vessel to New London, Connecticut. The Admiralty sent its thanks and offered to waive its sovereign rights over the ship and let him keep Resolute. If Buddington preferred, he could let the British consul in Boston sell her and he and his crew could take cash. Lady Franklin asked that the ship be put at her disposal to go looking for her husband again. But the US Congress voted to fix up Resolute, and return her whole, to Britain. For their skill and bravery, Buddington and his men pocketed $40,000, or more than $1 million today, from Congress.

  The gesture made Queen Victoria so happy that she went to Cowes Harbour, on the Isle of Wight, to receive Resolute when US Navy Captain Henry Hartstene presented the vessel to her on December 16, 1856. The British were suitably impressed by the exquisite fix-up job by American workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Not only was everything on board preserved, “even to the books in th
e Captain’s library, the pictures in his cabin, and some musical instruments belonging to other officers,” but the US navy yard made new British flags to replace the ones that had rotted in the Arctic.

  “Sir, I thank you,” the queen told Hartstene after he delivered a message of goodwill from the American people.

  Years later, when Resolute was decommissioned, Queen Victoria returned the favor and presented a desk made from her oak timbers to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. With a few exceptions, every US president since then has used it, either in the study in the private residence or in the Oval Office. Only Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford eschewed a seat at a rich piece of Arctic and Royal Navy history. Franklin Roosevelt asked that the desk be remodeled to include a modesty panel, carved with the presidential seal, so people couldn’t see the leg braces of a leader disabled by polio. He died too soon to see the work done, but Harry Truman had it completed. The Resolute Desk became iconic when President John F. Kennedy’s son, John Jr., opened the kneehole panel and peeked out at a photographer while his dad was at work.

  The barque Breadalbane, on the other hand, could easily have been lost to time in the uncharted depths of the High Arctic. She was just a supply ship, a misfortunate sacrifice of the merchant marine, left to slowly decay on the seafloor. Without an HMS in front of her name, she was long forgotten. Then an explorer, doctor, and inventor—a twentieth-century swashbuckler cut from the same cloth as the men who sailed her, hoping to help save other men like them—discovered the sunken wreck.

  That unlikely moment would be the first big break in the modern hunt for Erebus and Terror.

  8

  Starvation Cove

  Two paths crossing in the winter void finally broke the Arctic’s obstinate silence surrounding the Franklin Expedition’s disappearance. That historic turning point arrived in 1854, when physician and fur trader John Rae had a serendipitous encounter, in the middle of nowhere, with an Inuk hunter. Lady Franklin had been trying for months to persuade Rae to look where dissident voices, and the paranormal, convinced her Erebus and Terror could be found. The Hudson’s Bay Company trader, a veteran Arctic explorer, was a hard man to convince. During Lady Franklin’s 1849 visit to Scotland with Sophy to speak with whalers and William Scoresby, Rae was away in the Arctic with John Richardson, looking for Lady Franklin’s husband. Jane visited Rae’s mother and sipped some cherry brandy with her, an excellent opportunity to offer some thoughts on how her Sir John might be found. Later that same year, after Rae returned empty-handed, she tried to nudge him toward the area south of King William Island.