Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  Decades later, hunting for what was left along the Franklin Expedition’s escape route, Kamookak turned over a rock and found the shaman’s amulet belt. Notched pieces of bone, carved into slivers, were strung together. They looked like tiny knives, or animal claws, and hung next to a pair of rusty, blunt-tipped pocket scissors. The scissors looked like they came out of the nineteenth century, maybe something from a navy seaman’s sewing kit or a surgeon’s case. By stringing them with animal sinew next to more traditional amulets, the shaman may have sought protection from spirits that had come from an unknown world. They had conjured a powerful curse, recalled in elders’ stories that told of exceptionally cold years on King William Island, when game were scarce, after the dying white men came ashore.

  Sometimes Kamookak unwittingly retraced the steps of those who had come looking for the Franklin Expedition long before him. Judas Aqilriaq, an elder from the Back River area, told the historian a story he heard from his grandfather, who was living in a hunting camp when a group of four or five qalunaaq arrived, looking for white men who had survived a shipwreck. They gave him a metal tube that, by his description, sounded like one of the canisters Royal Navy ships carried to seal location reports, just as Erebus and Terror had. They were tossed overboard at regular intervals to help map ocean currents, or in the hope of leaving a trail in case they went missing.

  “They told him to guard it and keep it. If they didn’t return, it was something that would speak for them. Then they went. From time to time, his grandfather would wonder: ‘How’s it gonna speak? If it opened, would it speak out that way?’ Once in a while, the old man would open it and his wife would say, ‘You are not told to tamper with that.’ When the white men came back, they gave gifts to people. But they never gave this old man nothing.”

  Louie followed the lead as far as he could and concluded that Aqilriaq’s grandfather must have met Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, the US Army officer who led a private hunt for the Franklin Expedition in the late 1870s. An Inuk elder getting the cold shoulder for his curiosity from a huffy American soldier was an amusing anecdote but only a small, peripheral piece of a very complex puzzle. Kamookak was no closer to solving it. Yet the bond he formed with Aqilriaq proved crucial to a more important search. In 2002, the elder went missing himself during a late-September day trip out on the land, when the looming night would easily be cold enough to kill. His wife, Mary, went on local radio to spread the word that he hadn’t come home, and a search-and-rescue team quickly jumped into action. Ten ATVs fanned out and looked for Aqilriaq all night. The next day, around noon, Kamookak found the old man, twenty-five hours after he had left home.

  “He wasn’t doing too good,” Kamookak said at the time. “He was really thirsty and his boots were really wet because he had been falling all over trying to walk.”

  Aqilriaq got stranded on the tundra while driving his ATV slowly over the slushy snow. The rear wheels lost traction and he was stuck. The elder waited there for a time, moving around to keep warm, hoping someone would find him. Then he gave up and tried to save himself, walking with his rifle as a kind of crutch. Aqilriaq was a mile away from his ATV, and some seven miles outside Gjoa Haven, when he saw Kamookak’s four-wheeler humming toward him on the horizon. The missing hunter’s legs and feet were badly swollen, but his faith in salvation was unbowed.

  “I wasn’t too worried. . . . I knew that the people who were searching for me were being guided,” he told a reporter. The news report said he was talking about God. Tornait might have been more to the point.

  A common thread through some of the elders’ stories of encounters with explorers was the kindness of “a great leader of the ship” toward the Inuit he met. They recalled the gifts he gave—cherished, useful items made of metal, such as needles and scissors. Kamookak believes that leader was Franklin. After all, his instructions from the Admiralty were precise on the need for benevolence toward any natives his expedition encountered: You are to endeavor by every means in your power to cultivate a friendship with them, by making them presents of such articles as you may be supplied with, and which may be useful or agreeable to them.

  Inuit believed that such a generous leader, who came to them afloat a mighty vessel that rode wind and waves through ice, must have been a strong shaman. Their stories, which became legend, recounted his burial. They described a very great and powerful leader who, on his death, when his people laid him on the ground, this shaman turned to stone. To Kamookak’s ear, that was a crucial clue. Inuit ancestors were intrigued that this qalunaaq was not wrapped in animal hide and left on the surface, as Inuit custom dictated. They must have gone for a closer look, he supposes, and seen the outline of a stone tomb, perhaps sealed with rudimentary cement. Once Kamookak knew that, he knew what he must find, neither Erebus nor Terror. Even if he were inclined to go poking around underwater, which he definitely wasn’t, Kamookak saw no reason to go looking for sunken wrecks when Inuit stories told generally where they went down. Kamookak was determined to find something much more important: Sir John Franklin’s grave.

  Another lead came from a story he heard of a man and his uncle taking away part of a large wooden structure to make a sled. The nephew described “big, flat stones in that spot and one of the stones had kind of lifted in one corner,” Kamookak recalled. “And he could see that it was hollow, and dark, inside. The theory now is that was a (burial) vault and they used flat stones to cover it.” Later, according to yet another story, Inuit came to remove the remaining, largest piece of wood. They had a hard time knocking it down. An elder told Kamookak in the 1980s that he was hunting caribou in the same area of King William Island and thought he spotted some in the distance. He put his binoculars down on the sled and started walking until stumbling onto what he described as “a big, old copper rod sticking out of the ground, bent. At that time I asked him, ‘Was there flat stones there?

  “He said, ‘Yeah.’

  “He asked me if I’d seen it and I said, ‘Only up here,’” Kamookak told me, gently tapping his large head.

  The historian, it seemed, had seen in a vision what he thought was Sir John Franklin’s burial place. Kamookak tempted fate, and the spirits, trying to find proof of it. He thinks the rod in the elder’s account was an anchor for the largest piece of wood, which once stood in a prominent spot, on high ground, along the island’s northern shore. Whoever went to so much trouble wanted the structure to be seen clearly from the sea. The wooden base stood straight up in the rocky, frozen ground. The smaller attachment was secured horizontally, held so firmly in the frozen ground that the hunter who saw the copper rod couldn’t pry it loose from the permafrost.

  “So it’s out there. Bent,” Kamookak assured me. “The flat stones are there. Franklin’s body is in there. And the documents.”

  It couldn’t be clearer in his mind: The Inuit stories were describing a large cross, anchored firmly into the permafrost, marking a tomb made of stone that ancestors believed was the transformed corpse of a great white shaman who came to them on a ship bearing gifts. His lifelong quest for the spot Hummahuk told him about in the tent on the tundra as a boy now had a companion compulsion.

  “My first wish is to see the spot my great-grandmother found,” Kamookak told me. “The second is to bring Franklin home. I think that’s going to bring a lot of peace—in life and spiritually.”

  LOUIE KAMOOKAK’S catalogue of Inuit oral history was growing steadily thicker, but he wasn’t filling most of his notebooks with detective work on the Franklin mystery. Trying to find Sir John’s remains had become a sideline. The Inuk historian’s primary mission was to preserve as much of his people’s traditional knowledge as one man’s life, the Arctic, and her spirits allowed. Arctic geography had become a tangled knot of names that was making it difficult, at times impossible, for Inuit and qalunaaq to understand one another’s history and learn from each other. The first thing foreign explorers did when they came to the archipelago was rename the places they saw to honor thems
elves, their backers, or some dignitary in line to be enshrined on a map. Those toponyms gradually obliterated the names Inuit had used for centuries to identify places important to them for completely different reasons. By the early 1980s, official bulldozing of Inuit geography and its crucial links to ancestors and oral history was virtually complete. Kamookak was determined to rebuild at least a solid foundation from the linguistic rubble. Traveling around Netsilingmiut lands, he spent hours sitting with elders, listening to the original names of places and the Inuit legends behind them, and writing it all down in his notebooks.

  Understanding the why behind an old name was critical to seeing history more clearly, including answers Kamookak still sought to the riddles of the Franklin Expedition. European explorers ignoring indigenous geographical names and creating their own was all about ego, honor, and power, and some sense that having someone speak your name while pointing to an island or a strait was the closest one could get to everlasting life on Earth. In the relentless drive for discovery, the planet seemed to be their plaything. Inuit saw their world differently. In those days, they didn’t name any part of the land or sea after people, not even to memorialize a revered shaman or some other powerful figure. Naming landmarks was more utilitarian, usually based on descriptions that could help people find their way around, which was essential to their survival. That changed when Inuit settled and began to copy the qalunaaq. They started having competitions to name hamlet government offices, schools, and streets after Inuit, hoping to assert their own identity with as much pride as Europeans had had in trampling it.

  “The feedback we started getting from the elders was they didn’t really like that,” Kamookak told me. “They didn’t like places named after someone deceased or after any person—even if it was a building.”

  He didn’t question their doubts, but he suspects they had a superstitious fear. The spirits still commanded their respect. It was unwise to tempt their wrath. Kamookak knew that if he didn’t learn and record the old names, most would die out with the elders who knew them best. Others in his generation, and younger people coming up, didn’t seem to care. Louie’s wife, Josephine, joined the cause, and together they gathered around four hundred local names. Interest grew in reviving many that foreign explorers had overwritten by fiat.

  Inuit not only have a more practical view of naming places, they also like to have fun with it when they can. Since they were also less puritanical about human sex and the requisite body parts before Christian missionaries arrived, asking for directions can get a bit risqué. A small island with no English name, which sits in the Sherman Basin near the mouth of the Kaleet River, has two distinctive hills. So Inuit call it Igruq, which means “two testicles.” Other toponyms were more significant to history and the way Europeans rewrote it. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first European to transit the Northwest Passage early in the twentieth century, mapped The Royal Geographical Society Islands and named them after one of his expedition’s sponsors. Inuit already knew them as Hiurarjuaq, which means “the big sand.” Montreal Island, where relics and Inuit stories suggest some of the last survivors among Franklin’s men spent their final hours at the mouth of the Great Fish River, was Qaiqturaarjuit. That describes the place precisely, not for one tragedy but for the way the land has always looked to travelers. It means “many little bedrock outcrops.”

  When he chatted with elders about names and places, Kamookak also asked if they knew any stories about early qalunaaq visitors. They had many to tell, but a key detail was always missing: Inuit didn’t know the foreigners’ names. There was no Inuit calendar to pin down years or dates. Since the nicknames that elders passed down in their stories were either descriptive, or approximations of what Inuit heard in the original encounters long ago, it was hard to be sure who they were talking about. Kamookak kept digging. On his trips to the top of King William Island, he often found tantalizing clues. Sometimes they were lying in plain sight in abandoned camps. In Terror Bay, about midway up the island’s west coast, Kamookak found a piece of wood and some old rope in a circle of stones, which was an old Inuit tent ring. The wood and rope were obviously foreign. The historian’s gut told him they were Franklin relics, which teased him deeper into the search.

  As Kamookak got older, he got bolder. He was even willing to break the Inuit taboo against going near human remains, which had kept him waiting to see Hummahuk’s grave when he was a boy. Now, when he saw a human skull or other bones poking out of the permafrost, he moved in close. Any signs of burial told him they were almost certainly qalunaaq remains. Careful not to disturb a potentially significant archaeological site, he scanned the area for anything that might tell him more. Near Cape John Franklin, where Franklin’s crewmen passed on the exodus south, Kamookak saw a skull lying on the ground. Hard as he tried, the budding detective was still stuck skirting the enigma’s edges. He knew Inuit history and was filling in blanks all the time. But the accounts of foreign explorers and searchers were out of reach. In a hamlet high in the Arctic, he couldn’t get his hands on the detailed journals that they had published in the nineteenth century.

  The answer to that problem came from the sky, when a helicopter landed in Gjoa Haven one early summer day in 1995. It dropped off Royal Navy Lieutenant Ernest Coleman and his Canadian guide, Cameron Treleaven, owner of Aquila Books, a small antiquarian store in Calgary, Alberta. In an age when the digital revolution is strangling many bookstores, Treleaven’s is a sanctuary squeezed between a dental office and a parking lot on a six-lane boulevard. With jazz playing softly in the background, and comfy antique armchairs facing each other on a red Afghan carpet in a corner nook, it has the feel of a modern adventurer’s den. High shelves packed with books line the walls and aisles amid an eclectic mix of native art, military memorabilia, and nineteenth-century scientific instruments. Antique kayaks hang from the ceiling, suspended on filaments, as if they were gliding through air instead of sea. The rare-book specialties in Treleaven’s collection, which draws an equally eclectic mix of buyers from around the world, include polar exploration, mountaineering, hunting and fishing, the history of the oil industry (a struggling mainstay of Alberta’s economy), and Lucy Maud Montgomery, most loved for her first book, Anne of Green Gables.

  Treleaven himself is rare among Franklinophiles. While many others pore over books, antique charts, and original source material to spin various theories about what happened to the men of Erebus and Terror, the bookseller prefers looking for answers out on the land. An adventurer with an archaeology degree who keeps fit running and playing squash, Treleaven is no bookish, armchair Franklin expert. His skills and accomplishments as an explorer drew the attention of Britain’s prestigious Royal Geographical Society, where Treleaven has been a fellow for more than two decades. That is why Lieutenant Coleman wanted to team up with him. The Royal Navy recruiting officer needed a good guide who understood King William Island, and how to survive it, as well as he knew Franklin history.

  Coleman had visited Netsilingmiut territory at least once before. In 1992, he found what seemed to be two man-made burial mounds about four miles south of Cape Felix, on the island’s northwest coast. His report of that trip, which noted that the apparent graves had a rectangular depression paved with stone slabs, raised speculation that he might have discovered the burial sites of Franklin Expedition men, perhaps even of Sir John himself. Peter Wadhams, who went on to head Cambridge University’s Polar Ocean Physics Group, excavated the mounds during the Lady Franklin Memorial Expedition in 1993 and found that they were natural formations. Coleman later claimed that he told Canadian authorities where one of Franklin’s missing ships could be found underwater, but “no one would believe me.”

  Coleman contacted Treleaven with an ambitious plan. He wanted to replicate at least part of the Franklin Expedition’s doomed retreat. That meant walking from the spot on the northwest coast where 105 survivors under Francis Crozier’s command landed in 1848, all the way south to Gjoa Haven—a journey of mor
e than 140 miles, following the shore. It is an arduous journey even for physically fit, experienced Arctic trekkers like Treleaven. Sizing up the retired naval officer, the antiquarian bookseller doubted his traveling companion would make it to the end. Coleman reached his limit long before that. Treleaven was shaking mad.

  The walk started at Cape Jane Franklin, where a plane dropped off Coleman and Treleaven. After five days of hiking, they stopped at the edge of a flooded river valley. Once warm in his tent, Coleman wouldn’t get out of it. He complained of a bad back. Treleaven offered to show how they could walk through water that was just below waist high and about half a mile across. The seaman refused to budge. Treleaven had a handheld personal locator beacon, which he said he packed to ease his wife’s nerves. But Treleaven was damned if he was going to call in a rescue. He passed the device to Coleman and told him to press the button if he wasn’t going to get moving. The lieutenant quickly did, instantly beaming an emergency signal up to an orbiting satellite.

  An RCMP Twin Otter answered the call and buzzed over their campsite to confirm their location. Then a mining-camp helicopter arrived to airlift the hikers. The chopper dropped them off at Gjoa Haven just before midnight, when a very tall Mountie, who looked a good six foot six to Treleaven, came out to meet them. While Treleaven cowered in embarrassment, Coleman impressed upon the Mountie in no uncertain terms the need to get him on the earliest flight off the island. Treleaven happily let him go. With enough supplies for three weeks, the bookseller decided to pitch his tent outside the RCMP detachment. He and the tall constable became quick friends. When the Mountie heard what had brought Treleaven to the island in the first place, he offered some serendipitous advice.