Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  Evidence of a baffling disaster, which may have included logbooks, diaries of dying men, or other written records, would be left to scavengers and the ravages of nature for several years to come. What Rae took to be conclusive answers just raised more questions, doubts, and fresh theories in what became a cottage industry of trying to solve a mystery that only became more tangled as people pulled at threads.

  Long before Rae could reach London and report that he believed the last men of Erebus and Terror were dead, Lady Franklin’s life was unraveling. The Admiralty informed her by letter on January 12, 1854, that it would strike from the Royal Navy’s books the names of all men serving in the lost Franklin Expedition. The announcement was to be made in the official gazette that carried government announcements on March 31, three weeks before Rae happened upon his crushing discovery. Jane was officially being declared a widow. She was incensed as much as heartbroken. It took her a week to recover from the shock, get her gumption back, and write a disgusted reply. She declared the navy’s death notice “presumptuous in the sight of God, as it will be felt to be indecorous, not to say indecent (you must pardon me for speaking the truth as I feel it) in the eyes of men.”

  Lady Franklin politely told the navy to stuff its widow’s pension. She wasn’t going to go easy on the Admiralty and accept money for the death of a husband without incontrovertible proof he had actually died. Jane found new strength in defiance, a transformation of spirit that her stepdaughter Eleanor described: She “changed the deep mourning she had been wearing for years for bright colours of green & pink as soon as the Admiralty notice was gazetted,” making the notice public, official, and final.

  “I made no enquiries what other officers’ wives would do, considering that I was privileged to judge for myself and if every individual belonging to me or belonging to the ships were to put on the habiliments of despair, it would make no difference to me. . . ,” Jane explained to Sir John’s anguished sister.

  “It would be acting a falsehood & a gross hypocrisy on my part to put on mourning when I have not yet given up all hope—still less would I do so in that month & day that suits the Admiralty’s financial convenience.”

  After a stormy return across the Atlantic, Rae reached London in late October 1854 and went straight to the Admiralty. He briefly filled in naval command on the bad news and filed a more complete expedition report to his employers. The Admiralty released to The Times a written account he had sent in July, including sketches of the artifacts he bought from Inuit. The newspaper broke to the British public the shocking story of cannibalism and the long, suffering deaths of dozens of men, setting off a furor that raged for months. Charles Dickens led the charge with a two-part diatribe in Household Words.

  Dickens not only condemned the cannibalism claims as an affront to his countrymen’s honor and high Christian morals but also dismissed Inuit testimony as “the wild tales of a herd of savages.” Dickens angrily pointed an accusing finger at the bearers of bad news, people who history would prove were telling the truth. Like one of the misanthropes in his novels, an armchair detective determined to make the facts serve his prejudices, the writer spun the few Inuit-reported facts that served his purpose. The mutilated bodies they described could easily be explained as the ravages of scurvy or scavenging bears, wolves, or foxes, Dickens insisted. He found more telling the body of what appeared to be an officer, the large man with the telescope slung over his shoulders, lying facedown on a double-barreled rifle. That struck Dickens as strong evidence Franklin’s men were murdered.

  “Lastly, no man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves,” he wrote in a two-part Household Words screed in December 1854. “It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages, from their deferential behaviour to the white man while he is strong. The mistake has been made again and again; and the moment the white man has appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed and sprung upon him.

  “There are pious persons who, in their practice, with a strange inconsistency, claim for every child born to civilisation all innate depravity, and for every savage born to the woods and wilds all innate virtue. We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man—lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying—has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature.”

  While Dickens was stoking public anger, Rae discovered there was a £10,000 reward, or more than $900,000 today, on the books for anyone who the Admiralty board determined was the first to ascertain the Franklin Expedition’s fate. Rae was in a salary dispute with the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was withholding judgment on his bonus for wintering over. The board wanted to see if the government would pay him its reward. Linking the two—one a matter of service to employers, the other a very big thank-you from his country—was to Rae “perfectly beyond my comprehension.” He quickly applied for the reward.

  After weighing the evidence, the Admiralty ruled that Rae should get the money in early 1856. Lady Franklin, who was seriously ill at the time, wrote a scathing letter of protest three months later, when she had partially recovered. She complained that no bodies or documents had been found to prove beyond doubt the Inuit accounts of mass death. Jane insisted that the Admiralty board’s decision was premature. She also criticized a follow-up mission sent out the previous year to check Rae’s information. Headed by James Anderson and James Green, after Rae declined to lead it, the expedition descended the Back River to Chantrey Inlet and Montreal Island. It was a rushed operation, without a proper interpreter or supplies to overwinter.

  They made it past eighty-three rapids in birch-bark canoes, which doubled as shields against the frigid wind at night, even though the bark was almost worn out. With winter approaching fast, the men could only spend nine days looking for evidence to back up Rae’s report. Ice floes made travel dodgy through the inlet. One of the voyageur paddlers claimed years later that he saw the masts of a partially submerged ship poking through the ice to the north, but he kept quiet because he wanted to get south before freeze-up trapped the men. The expedition came up blank except for some wood and metal fragments, including a chip bearing the name of Erebus crew member “Mr. Stanley.” Lady Franklin was livid. She blamed the Admiralty for putting concerns of cost before the lives of Royal Navy men when Rae’s report required a major investigation.

  “There was but one feeling in the country on this sad occasion,” she wrote on April 12, 1856, eight years after Erebus and Terror were surrendered to the sea ice. “No amount of expense would have been grudged to make a final expedition of search complete, for it was felt that after six long years of failure and disappointment, the clue which we had asked and prayed for was now in our hands, and that England’s honour and credit were concerned in holding it fast and following it up till it led to the solution of the mystery.

  “My Lords, I shrink from recalling the pain and woful [sic] disappointment I felt, and which many others felt with me, when the response to this generous excitement in the public mind, and the sole result of your deliberations, was no more than a birch bark canoe expedition down the Great Fish River, confided to the Hudson’s Bay Company, but unsustained by any naval resources.”

  She begged the Admiralty not to close the file on Sir John or his men.

  “I would entreat of you, before you place an extinguisher upon the light which has arisen in that dark corner of the earth, whither we have been directed as by the finger of God, that you will, as you have done before, call together those Arctic officers, and obtain their individual and collective judgment in this emergency.”

  If the Admiralty refused to send a final search mission, Jane concluded in her letter, it should at least assist her in mounting a private expedition to look for her husband, whom she now
accepted was dead, and his crewmen.

  “My funds, since the settlement of my late husband’s affairs, are equal to the ample equipment of the Isabel schooner, which is now lying in dock, waiting, at a considerable expense to me, her possible destination; and, unless these my independent funds should become exhausted, which I do not forsee, I shall not even ask your Lordships for the ordinary pension of a rear-admiral’s widow, to which I presume I am entitled. My request to your Lordships will be limited to such assistance as is entirely independent of money, and indeed, to such as I have been assured, on the highest authority, will not be denied.”

  Leading scientists and members of the polar pantheon, including Frederick Beechey, Collinson, and Ross, rallied to Lady Franklin’s side. Thirty-six signed a hastily prepared petition to the prime minister, Viscount Palmerston, which included the names of eighteen more dignitaries who couldn’t be in London to sign. It called on the government to launch one more search for Erebus and Terror to “clear up a mystery which has excited the sympathy of the civilized world.”

  “Although most persons have arrived at the conclusion that there can now be no survivors of Franklin’s Expedition, yet there are eminent men in our own country and in America who hold a contrary opinion,” the petition pointed out. It cited Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, the American physician and explorer who had gone the farthest north in search of Erebus and Terror. He had recently received the Royal Geographical Society’s highest honor. “By dogs—the great blessing of arctic travel—this whole area could be scoured; and we must remember that Rae had these animals at Repulse Bay, and, but for his return (to London), could, in a single month, have cleared up the mystery,” Kane suggested to his financier, Henry Grinnell, anxious to go where Rae hadn’t.

  Only a Royal Navy man-of-war would be capable of reaching the death sites the Inuit described, the petitioners insisted. The risk to that ship would be low because another had already “passed to Cambridge Bay, within 150 miles of the mouth of the Back River, and returned home unscathed—its commander having expressed his conviction that the passage in question is so constantly open that ships can navigate it without difficulty in one season.”

  In a pleading letter asking the prime minister to approve the request, Lady Franklin argued that the country owed one last effort to mariners who, quoting Sir John’s friend and physician John Richardson, had “forged the last link of the North West passage with their lives.” She suggested that the prime minister order the Resolute, kindly repaired by the Americans and ready for Arctic service, to carry out the mission.

  “Surely then, I may plead for such men, that a careful search be made for any possible survivor, that the bones of the dead be sought for and gathered together, that their buried records be unearthed, or recovered from the hands of the Esquimaux, and above all, that their last written words, so precious to their bereaved families and friends, be saved from destruction.

  “A mission so sacred is worthy of a Government which has grudged and spared nothing for its heroic soldiers and sailors in other fields of warfare, and will surely be approved by our gracious Queen, who overlooks none of Her loyal subjects suffering and dying for their country’s honour. This final and exhausting search is all I seek in behalf of the first and only martyrs to Arctic discovery in modern times, and it is all I ever intend to ask.”

  The petition failed. The Admiralty considered the matter closed. It didn’t even bother to respond to Lady Franklin’s impassioned April letter. The government said, with great regret, that there was no chance to save any lives so there was no reason to expose more men to potentially mortal danger.

  “It is not extraordinary that those who are disposed to form a low estimate of the value of scientific research, should also entertain doubts as to the propriety of hazarding human life in its behalf,” Lord Wrottesley, a disgusted signatory and president of the Royal Society that represented Britain’s best scientific minds, told members.

  Doubling down, he said: “In the late discussions on the expediency of undertaking another Polar Expedition, it seemed to be assumed by some, that the well-grounded anticipation of valuable contributions to physical and geographical science, would not alone be sufficient to justify the exposing of the lives of gallant men to peril, not even of those who were most willing and anxious to be so employed, emulous of such distinction, and regardless of the risk.”

  Lady Franklin, however, refused to concede defeat. Beaten down by years of fighting powerful men who could not abide the notion they might be wrong, she was exhausted, and her finances almost were too. At times, she was weak, her moods dark, her health failing. It must have been tempting to cut her losses and live the simpler life of a lost hero’s widow. But Jane had come too far to give up now. Once again, she picked herself up and stood tall. She seized the lead from men too timid to stomach all the things they imagined could go wrong, not least the political heat that would flare if more sailors were lost. Putting the rest of the family fortune, and her own reputation, on the line, Lady Franklin launched the expedition that found the only written record of what happened to her husband and his ships.

  “Your leave is granted,” she telegraphed Francis McClintock in Dublin on April 23, 1857, soon after he applied for leave from the Royal Navy. “The ‘Fox’ is mine; the refit will commence immediately.”

  Lady Franklin bought the ship from the estate of Sir Richard Sutton, a master of foxhounds who became undersecretary of state. Before his death in 1856, he had sailed the Fox on a single voyage to Norway. Jane bought the lightly used screw yacht for £2,000, or more than $180,000 today. The expedition, including upgrades to the ship, was expected to cost more than eight times that. She raised some of the money from donations, as small as a single shilling coin to £500, which came from the expedition’s sailing master, Allen Young. He had made a small fortune as a merchant mariner and volunteered his time to look for Sir John and his men. Lady Franklin was still some £7,000 short when McClintock was about ready to sail. Jane let him off the hook for any liabilities and future expenses by signing a deed of indemnity.

  At 177 tons, the Fox was smaller and lighter than Erebus and Terror, and right in the polar exploration sweet spot, which Scoresby had defined more than half a century earlier when he wrote: “The class of vessels best adapted for discovery in the Polar Seas, seems to be that of 100 to 200 tons burden. . . . They are stronger, more easily managed, in less danger of being stove or crushed by ice, and are less expensive.” Under the gun to get the Fox ready to sail by July 1, 1857, refit workers in Aberdeen did what they could to make her ready for harsh Arctic travel. Workmen pulled down the yacht’s velvet hangings. They reduced the skylights and roomy hallways to conserve warmth, which had to come from smaller stoves that replaced a larger furnace to make room for a crew of twenty-five.

  “Internally, she was fitted up with the strictest economy in every sense, and the officers were crammed into pigeon-holes, styled cabins, in order to make room for provisions and stores; our mess-room, for five persons, measured 8 feet square,” McClintock wrote in his journal.

  Yet he had no trouble finding men eager to join the search for anyone still alive in the Franklin Expedition or any remains, documents, or important artifacts searchers could turn up.

  “Expeditions of this nature are always popular with seamen, and innumerable were the applications sent to me; but still more abundant the offers to ‘serve in any capacity’ which poured in from all parts of the country, from people of all classes, many of whom had never seen the sea.”

  The Fox was bolstered with heavy planking, crossbeams, and “the slender brass propeller replaced by a massive iron one.” That was the expedition’s salvation several times when ice floes closed in and the Fox steamed free, as occurred on August 19, 1857, in Melville Bay: “Continued strong S.E. winds, pressing the ice closely together, dark sky and snow; everything wears a wintry and threatening aspect; we are closely hemmed in, and have our rudder and screw unshipped.” As the weather cleared,
the crew worked thirteen hours to get “the ship out of her small ice-creek into a larger space of water, and in so doing advancing a mile and a half.” Even still, McClintock noted, the expedition was making slower progress than Sir James Clark Ross had made on HMS Enterprise in 1848, when some of Franklin’s men were still alive.

  On the last day of June, Lady Franklin and Sophy boarded the Fox to see the expedition off. “Seeing how deeply agitated she was on leaving the ship,” noted McClintock, “I endeavoured to repress the enthusiasm of my crew, but without avail; it found vent in three prolonged hearty cheers.”

  At McClintock’s request, Jane sat down to write instructions to her expedition commander on the eve of departure. She couldn’t bring herself to influence his judgment, since she was certain they agreed on what should be done. But Lady Franklin did remind him: If no survivors could be found, then her greatest hope was “the recovery of the unspeakably precious documents of the expedition, public and private, and the personal relics of my dear husband and his companions.” Finally, she asked him to find any evidence that Sir John and his crewmen, not John Rae, had found the last stretch of the Northwest Passage.

  “I am sure that you will do all that man can do for the attainment of all these objects; my only fear is that you may spend yourselves too much in the effort; and you must therefore let me tell you how much dearer to me even than any of them is the preservation of the valuable lives of the little band of heroes who are your companions and followers.”

  McClintock planned to focus his search efforts on King William Island and the area along the continental coastline between the Coppermine and Back Rivers. Rae’s information from the Inuit made the latter essential. Paranormal revelations had helped put the former on the list. Rae had only recently discovered the strait, named after him, that showed what until then was called King William Land to be an island. That was some four years after William Snow claimed he saw it separated from the mainland in his waking New York dream. Had anyone asked the Inuit, there couldn’t have been any doubt. What John Ross had named King William Land, and later explorers called King William’s Land, Inuit knew as Qikiqtaq, which means “island.”