by Paul Watson
“I do not know whether you consider that the mouth of the Great Fish River should be examined,” she wrote to Rae, dropping an obvious hint. But on matters of the Franklin search, the Hudson’s Bay Company took instructions from the Admiralty and required Rae to do the same.
“Lady Franklin also says that a growing opinion prevails in England that the long-missing expedition is icebound somewhere in the direction of the magnetic pole, or towards Back’s River, and to search in the neighbourhood of these places was the principal object of the small expedition under Captain Forsyth,” Rae wrote to fellow physician and Franklin friend Richardson in April 1851.
“It is very proper that those parts should be examined, but I have very little expectation that any traces of those looked for will be found in that quarter.”
Rae was convinced that if Erebus and Terror weren’t way to the northwest, between Cape Walker and Cape Bathurst, they were likely at Melville Island. That is a very broad region, one that Franklin and his crewmen could have passed through only if the Arctic had allowed them to take the route the Admiralty specified in its orders. Rae would have to eat his words. But before finding proof he was wrong, he discovered evidence that suggested he was right. The fur trader was far to the east of where Jane had hoped he would go when, in the late summer of 1851, he stumbled across two pieces of wood in Parker Bay, about fifty miles east of Cambridge Bay, on Victoria Island. The shore where he found the debris overlooks the western end of Queen Maud Gulf, near the bottom of Victoria Strait. Currents and sea ice could have carried broken pieces of Erebus or Terror there. Less than three years earlier, Franklin’s men had abandoned the ships roughly 150 miles to the northeast, at the top of Victoria Strait.
The pieces Rae picked up must have come from at least one Royal Navy ship. The first was round with a square base, five feet, nine inches long, and appeared to be the butt end of a small flagstaff. It was marked with what seemed to be the initials S.C. The proof that the object was Royal Navy property came from a looped piece of white line, which was nailed onto the wood with two copper tacks. A broad arrow stamped on the tacks, and a red worsted thread running through the attached line, marked them as government property. Half a mile away, Rae discovered the second piece of wood, which was lying in the water but touching the beach. It was three feet, eight inches long, and made of oak. Rae thought it was likely the remains of a stanchion that had been turned in a lathe, and once fit into a clasp or band of iron. The Admiralty consulted various experts, including polar mariners, who couldn’t conclusively say what ship they came from.
The most experienced and successful qalunaaq traveler in the Arctic, John Rae won the highest praise from the Royal Geographical Society for that 1851 journey. In awarding him the Founder’s Gold Medal, it noted that “he set out accompanied by two men only, and, trusting solely for shelter to snow houses, which he taught his men to build, accomplished a distance of 1,060 miles in 39 days or 27 miles per day including stoppages—a feat which has never been equaled in Arctic travelling.” Rae had learned well from Inuit how to travel long distances in the Arctic and come back alive. But he had loved the outdoors since he was a boy, exploring the moors of Scotland, sailing small boats, and learning how to handle a rifle. A crack shot by the time he reached the Canadian wilderness, he once winged a wolf in a circling pack preparing to eat him. They hightailed it instead.
At age forty, the acknowledged master of Arctic exploration, Rae still wanted more. He was eager for a fourth and final expedition to map what he believed were the last three to four hundred unexplored miles of North America’s Arctic coast. But the Admiralty no longer had any need for the peacetime mission that John Barrow, and Arctic exploration, had provided following the Royal Navy’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars. Almost four decades of peace in Europe ended in October 1853 with the outbreak of the Crimean War between allied powers and Russia. Weeks earlier, Rae had set off from Chesterfield Inlet, on Hudson Bay’s western shore, on a mapping mission that the Hudson’s Bay Company bankrolled at his request. It would take Rae to precisely the area that Franklin Expedition survivors had set out to reach five years earlier. It was the same place where dissident voices and spectral visions had said searchers should look. Rae didn’t expect to turn up anything useful.
“I do not mention the lost navigators,” he wrote in a published letter to The Times on November 27, 1852, “as there is not the slightest hope of finding any traces of them in the quarter to which I am going.”
Barrow, still devoted to his Arctic project, provided Rae with what the explorer called “a very valuable Halketts Boat for the Service of my party,” for his final expedition. But a screwup with the railway baggage trains between London and Liverpool meant the portable boat didn’t reach Rae before his steamer left the dock. That didn’t affect his plans much. He would make most of this grueling journey with a small team of men hauling heavy sledges over the snow and ice by rope. Rae’s goal was to reach the Castor and Pollux River, about fifty miles northeast of the Chantrey Inlet, where what is now called the Back River flows into the Arctic sea.
In late August 1853, Rae and seven of his men, who included Métis, a Cree hunter, and an Inuk interpreter, packed up a small boat with food and supplies and headed north for the mouth of Back River. For eleven days, they paddled through wicked currents and rapids and portaged around waterfalls, including one about twenty-five feet high, only to be blocked by terrain covered in rocks and stones for miles. It wasn’t impossible to haul a boat over the long obstacle, Rae judged, but that was too arduous a job for so late in the season. So the men headed for Repulse Bay, on Hudson Bay, to spend the winter there. To stock up, they killed 109 caribou, a musk ox, fifty-three ptarmigan, and a seal. They also netted fifty-four salmon. Rae shot the musk ox and twenty-one of the caribou himself.
That got them through a very cold, stormy winter in good shape. On the last day of March 1854, Rae took four men and the interpreter, William Ouligbuck, to journey across land for a survey of the Boothia Peninsula’s west coast. He planned to finish work that John Ross and his nephew James had begun during their hellish years stranded in sea ice a quarter-century earlier. Rae’s team had 865 pounds of provisions for a sixty-five-day expedition. Every man dragged a sledge: Rae’s weighed 110 pounds, while the others had to pull 160 pounds. The Inuk faced the same risks and hardships that Rae did, but the payoff was significantly less: an annual salary of £20, or some $380 today. To Inuit, hauling heavy sledges was dogs’ work. Ouligbuck soon tired of it and tried to bolt, which proved fortuitous to the Franklin search.
Rae was suspicious of his interpreter. He thought Ouligbuck was sulky and derided him as an “incorrigible thief” and “one of the greatest rascals unhung.” But the explorer’s preferred interpreter, William’s father, wasn’t available. Known simply as Ouligbuck, he died in 1852. It was a great loss. The elder Inuk had given many years in loyalty to the fur-trading-company explorers he assisted, dating back to Franklin’s early years in the Arctic. Franklin was a captain when he met Ouligbuck in 1824, when a Hudson’s Bay Company post assigned the Inuk to go with Franklin on his second overland expedition to the northern coast, by way of the Mackenzie River. The elder Ouligbuck couldn’t speak English then, but he accompanied the Inuk interpreter Tattannoeuk as a hunter on the journey, for wages of fifty beaver pelts per annum.
At the Mackenzie delta, the group split and Ouligbuck went east with John Richardson, the doctor and friend who would be an important ally to Lady Franklin as she pressed for rescue missions. The Inuk climbed the ranks from hunting seal and weeding the turnip garden at Hudson’s Bay Company outposts and became a skilled interpreter. His ability to win the trust of other Inuit helped the fur-trading company to open up new trade links. His son didn’t prove so reliable, or quite as valuable, to Rae. At least not directly. After William tried to flee, a chance encounter with an Inuk hunter in the middle of nowhere changed the course of the Franklin search forever.
As Rae’s sledging
party moved northward, they were pounded by winter gales from the west and had to slog through ankle-deep snow, advancing a little over one mile each hour. Exhausted, they built a small snow house, had some tea and frozen pemmican, and got a few hours of rest. When they started moving again, a bigger storm hit, dumping another thick layer of snow that made walking even more difficult. By the time they reached Pelly Belly (now the hamlet of Kugaaruk), in the Gulf of Boothia, Rae was so far behind schedule that he gave up trying to reach the Castor and Pollux River. Instead, he set a course for the magnetic pole, but soon he had to give up on that too, after seeing rocky, mountainous terrain to the north. So the group headed south, and, after a couple of days’ slogging, Rae spotted fresh footprints in the snow. Assuming they must be Inuit, he sent William Ouligbuck and another man to track down the people who made them. Eleven hours later, they returned with seventeen Inuit, five of them women. Rae remembered several in the group from his stay at Repulse Bay five years earlier.
“Most of the others had never before seen ‘Whites,’ and were extremely forward and troublesome, they would give us no information on which any reliance could be placed, and none of them would consent to accompany us for a day or two, although I promised to reward them liberally. Apparently, there was great objection to our travelling across the Country in a westerly direction.
“Finding that it was their object to puzzle the Interpreter and mislead us, I declined purchasing more than a small piece of Seal from them, and sent them away, not however, without some difficulty, as they lingered about with the hope of stealing something, and notwithstanding our vigilance, succeeded in abstracting from one of the sledges a few pounds of Biscuit and Grease.”
The next morning was clear. With such good weather, Rae got the men up and sledging at 3 a.m. While they were caching the seal meat Rae had bought, Ouligbuck made a run for it. He tried to rejoin the Inuit the explorer had shunned, but he “was overtaken after a sharp race of four or five miles.”
“He was in a great fright when we came up to him, and was crying like a child, but expressed his readiness to return, and pleaded sickness as an excuse for his conduct. I believe he was really unwell, probably from having eaten too much boiled Seals flesh, with which he had been regaled in the snowhuts of the Natives.”
The Inuk interpreter’s excuse didn’t seem to explain his suddenly erratic behavior. He was frightened, not sick, so afraid of the place Rae wanted to visit that a grown man was reduced to tears. The reason was too sensitive to discuss with qalunaaq. The spirits must be respected. It would take a long time, and the probing work of an Inuk historian, to reveal what Ouligbuck was really thinking that day, and why. Rae was satisfied with what he heard and had his men unload some of Ouligbuck’s sledge, hoping to make the arduous journey easier on him.
The group had barely started moving again when they bumped into an Inuk hunter. He was more relaxed, even eager to answer Rae’s questions. Their conversation revealed other dark truths of horrible suffering and death that soon shocked a waiting nation.
Rae recorded the man’s name with a different spelling, likely a phonetic version, but history has settled on In-nook-poo-zhee-jook. He was driving a dogsled, piled with musk-ox or caribou meat, when Rae and his men appeared early on the morning of April 21, 1854. The hunter struck the explorer as intelligent and willing to speak freely with outsiders, even though he had never met qalunaaq before. The Inuk also had a remarkable memory for precise details, which would remain the same in follow-up interviews with visitors who came looking for him years later. Rae noticed he was wearing a gold cap-band around his head, which obviously wasn’t traditional clothing. It was part of a Royal Navy uniform, likely worn by an officer. Rae asked where the hunter got it, and he replied that it came from “where the dead white men were, but that he himself had never been there, that he did not know the place, and could not go so far, giving me the idea that it was a great way off.” In his rough notes, Rae said the Inuk guessed it was ten or twelve days’ journey to the west, beyond two large rivers, but he did not know the place.
Then began a gruesome story: In the spring of 1850, two years after the sailors of Erebus and Terror gave up their ships, Inuit families hunting seals on the north coast of King William Island saw about forty qalunaaq men walking south over the ice. The travelers were thin and all but one were dragging a boat and sledges by ropes. The Inuit described the man in charge as tall, stout, and middle-aged. None could speak Inuktitut, but, using hand gestures, they managed to get across that a ship, or ships, had been crushed by ice. Short of provisions, they bought either a small seal, or a piece of seal, and then pitched tents to rest.
Later that same spring, but before the sea ice broke up, Inuit discovered the corpses of some thirty dead white men. The graves of others were on the mainland, and five more bodies were buried on an island nearby. That was “about a long day’s journey to the north-west of the mouth of a large stream, which can be no other than Back’s Great Fish River (named by the Esquimaux Oot-koo-hi-ca-lik), as its description, and that of the low shore in the neighbourhood of Point Ogle and Montreal Island, agree exactly with that of Sir George Back,” Rae reported.
The site of mass death would later be named Starvation Cove. It is near Richardson Point, which is roughly twenty miles southwest of Gjoa Haven, across the eastern end of Simpson Strait. The graveyard Inuit described to the south was on Montreal Island, which lies off the western shore of Chantrey Inlet, not far from the mouth of what is now called the Back River.
“Some of the bodies were in a tent or tents; others were under the boat which had been turned over to form a shelter, and some lay scattered about in different directions,” Rae wrote to company headquarters in London. “Of those seen on the Island, it was supposed that one was that of an Officer, (chief) as he had a telescope strapped over his shoulders, and his double barrelled gun lay underneath him.
“From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched Countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative, as a means of sustaining life. A few of the unfortunate Men must have survived until the arrival of the wild fowl, (say until the end of May,) as shots were heard, and fresh bones and feathers of geese were noticed near the scene of the sad event.”
Rae concluded that the dying Franklin Expedition survivors had more than enough weaponry to hunt for food if they had been physically, and mentally, able to do so.
“There appears to have been an abundant store of ammunition, as the Gunpowder was emptied by the Natives in a heap on the ground out of the kegs or cases containing it and a quantity of shot and ball was found below high water mark, having probably been left on the ice close to the beach before the spring thaw commenced.
“There must have been a number of telescopes, guns, (several of them double barrelled,) watches, compasses &c. all of which seem to have been broken up, as I saw pieces of these different articles with the Natives, and I purchased as many of them as possible, together with some silver spoons and forks, an order of merit in the form of a Star, and a small silver plate engraved Sir John Franklin K.O.H.”
Rae knew that the grisly story, especially the claim that mariners in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy had resorted to cannibalism, would cause a storm when it inevitably made the newspapers, so he tried to gather any solid evidence he could. He made In-nook-poo-zhee-jook an offer:
“I bought the cap-band from him, and told him that if he or his companions had any other things, to bring them to our winter quarters at Repulse Bay, where they would receive good prices for them.”
Along with the silver plate, the relics he brought back to London were Sir John Franklin’s star of the Hanoverian order of knighthood. The silver spoons and forks were engraved, or, in at least one case, scratched with a sharp instrument to show the initials of other officers from Erebus and Terror, including second-in-command Crozier, Gore, the surgeon Goodsir, and his assistants Peddie and McDonald. Also among the artifact
s were two pieces of a gold watch case etched with the name James Reid, Erebus’s ice master, plus several coins, a surgeon’s knife and scalpel, a pocket compass box, part of an optical instrument, and a small silver pencil case.
The stories and objects “prove, beyond a doubt, that a portion, if not all, of the then survivors of the long lost and unfortunate party under Sir John Franklin, had met with a fate as melancholy and dreadful as it is possible to imagine,” Rae wrote in a letter to the company secretary, dated September 1, 1854.
The place where so many of Franklin’s men were said to have met their deaths was far to the west. Rae didn’t speak to anyone who had actually been there or seen for themselves what their accounts described. The Inuit claimed to have heard from others who lived west of them and saw the men traveling across the ice. Rae had no doubt they were telling the truth, so he decided to hurry back to London to inform his bosses, who then told the Admiralty. He had been heading southeast for the top of Hudson Bay and ruled out a detour to try to find what would have been the first major discovery in the mystery of the lost Franklin Expedition.
“The information was too vague to act upon, particularly at this season, when everything is covered with snow,” he explained in his notes.