Ice Ghosts
Page 25
“Talk to Louie Kamookak,” the Mountie told him. “He’s the local Franklin expert.”
They met at the housing coop’s maintenance building, where Kamookak worked at the time, and hit it off immediately. Treleaven became Kamookak’s houseguest for the rest of some six days in the hamlet. When Treleaven got back to his bookstore, he thought: “I have one of the greatest Arctic libraries in the world. And Louie doesn’t have anything, really. Just a few modern, junky paperbacks.”
“So I brought up a whole whack of books for him,” Treleaven told me. “He didn’t care that they were collectible copies, but he got first editions. I built up a ‘Franklin search library’ for him.”
The bond between the two men, forged by a mutual love of the Arctic, respect for Inuit culture, and a fascination with things Franklin, was quick, strong, and lasting. Treleaven would undertake a total of five expeditions with Kamookak over the years. Soon after their first meeting, they made a date for the following year to explore the island on all-terrain vehicles. As a team, they were the first to cross the island in four-wheelers in summer, when the risks of flipping or getting stuck are high. A couple of times, they did the journey on snow machines. They even lived in an igloo through a snowstorm in April 1998 in order to place a plaque honoring the dead of the Franklin Expedition, on the 150th anniversary of Crozier’s landing south of Victory Point.
But Treleaven’s most important contribution to advancing the Franklin search turned out to be his gift of books. The first few arrived by mail. As Kamookak read, the packages kept coming with more volumes of Franklin history. They were like stones in a bridge connecting past and present. In their pages, Louie found the missing links among Inuit oral history, their family trees, and traditional place names. The nineteenth-century Franklin searchers wrote phoneticized versions of the names of Inuit they interviewed. From his own research into family trees, Kamookak knew the hunting grounds of each clan, which gave him a better sense of places they were describing or sketching out in rough maps, which outside experts had debated for decades. That led him to hidden nuggets, which proved the Inuit oral history he was gathering had been consistent on key points from the beginning. Something else revealed itself, a deeper arc between then and now: Just as chance had made the crucial connection between John Rae and In-nook-poo-zhee-jook, serendipity helped Kamookak tell an important truth about why Rae’s interpreter ran off that day in 1854.
Reading the books Treleaven provided, Kamookak saw a serious flaw in Rae’s account of why his interpreter, William Ouligbuck, was so reluctant, along with other Inuit, to help him check the stories of many dead white men to the west. Rae believed the Inuk’s claim that he was sick. A later explanation suggested Ouligbuck was afraid the Inuit to the west would kill the men if they went there. Kamookak saw the basic elements of the same story elders had recalled when he was researching Inuit oral history. With a significant twist, and in the context of Inuit culture, it seems to fit the Inuk interpreter’s rash behavior better. Elders told Kamookak it was fear of the dead, and the revenge their angry spectres might wreak, that sent Ouligbuck running. The historian concluded that Rae’s interpreter, and the Inuit who were so reluctant to head west with the qalunaaq, were afraid of the ghosts of Franklin’s men wandering the icy landscape. They didn’t dare let on to Rae about spirits. They were a deadly serious matter that Inuit only trusted their shamans to deal with. Speaking of evil tunngaq to the wrong person could be enough to summon them.
The problem played out in the pages of one of the books Treleaven sent, Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition made by Charles F. Hall, published in 1879. Hall was an eccentric, small-time American publisher, a man with little formal education who made a passable living in the seal-engraving trade and by publishing the unremarkable Cincinnati Occasional and Daily Press. Hall heard the voice of God telling him to go to the Arctic, where, the Almighty assured him, he could find the men of the Franklin Expedition still alive. Now obsessed with the Arctic, Hall read all he could find about its geography and history. Rae’s and McClintock’s revelations couldn’t shake Hall’s conviction that some of Franklin’s men were living somewhere with Inuit. After persuading Henry Grinnell to back him, he sailed for the Arctic in 1860, expecting to reach King William Island with the help of whalers. Despite the benefit of an unusually warm summer, his boat was destroyed before he could reach his destination. Hall’s salvation was an Inuit couple—a woman named Tookoolito, or Hannah, and her husband Ebierbing, whom whalers called “Eskimo Joe.” He was the younger brother of Eenoolooapik, who had died of tuberculosis after William Penny took him to England, hoping to win government support for exploring new whaling grounds.
One of Penny’s English competitors in Cumberland Sound, John Bowlby, had bought the Lady Franklin and the Sophia from the Admiralty and turned the exploration ships into whalers. After a good hunting season, he took Tookoolito and Ebierbing to England, where they enjoyed a meal with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The queen was amused:
“They are my subjects, very curious, & quite different to any of the southern or African tribes, having very flat round faces, with a Mongolian shape of eye, a fair skin, & jet black hair . . . ,” she wrote in her diary.
During twenty months in England, Tookoolito developed a taste for tea, took up knitting, and became fluent in English. They sailed back to Cumberland Sound in the summer of 1855 with Penny, aboard the Lady Franklin, which he now owned. From then on, Tookoolito and Ebierbing were an unbeatable team: she the interpreter, he the guide and hunter. Five years later, Hall was writing in his cabin on an early November morning when he heard a soft, refined voice say, “Good morning, sir.”
“As Tookoolito continued speaking, I could not help admiring the exceeding gracefulness and modesty of her demeanor. Simple and gentle in her way, there was a degree of calm intellectual power about her that more and more astonished me. I felt delighted beyond measure, because of the opportunity it gave me for becoming better acquainted with these people through her means, and I hope to improve it toward the furtherance of the great object I had in view.”
Hall spent two years in Frobisher Bay, getting nowhere in his godly quest to find Franklin survivors. But he learned enough from the Inuit to write a book about life with the Arctic’s indigenous people, and he grew close to Ebierbing and Tookoolito. Hall took them to the United States, where he was determined to find a way back to the Arctic to pick up the search. But he had to raise money to do it. The Inuit couple, their son Tukerlikto, and their two dogs Ratty and Barbekark were valuable assets in Hall’s fundraising effort. As exotic human and canine curiosities, they were a big draw at the gate. Hall had the Inuit dress up in their sealskin clothes and display hunting tools like trident-tipped spears used to catch fish and the bows and arrows the hunters used to bring down bigger prey. Hall showed them off at a lecture, after which Tookoolito graciously answered questions. Then he exhibited the Inuit family at Barnum’s American Museum in New York, where they were held over for a two-week run due to popular demand. In a later visit, President Ulysses S. Grant eventually met with the Inuit couple and was so impressed he supported Hall’s effort to get backing from Congress for a new expedition, this one to the North Pole.
Tookoolito proved very good at helping Hall interview Inuit by gaining their confidence and avoiding the trap of all translation: influencing interviewees’ thoughts or massaging their answers. During a second mission to reach King William Island, the Inuit couple introduced Hall to In-nook-poo-zhee-jook, who retold stories Rae had heard about cannibalism and sunken ships, but with more details. No doubt, Tookoolito deserved credit for that. The Inuk leader also drew a map of the island where the second ship went down, south of King William Island. The spot was roughly a hundred miles from where the Victory Point Record, the name historians gave to the notes that Lieutenant William Hobson found in 1859, had said Franklin’s men abandoned their ships.
A witness told Hall of seeing the survivors with a small boa
t they carried wrapped up in a pack, carried on one of the men’s shoulders. By the Inuit description, it had places on the sides that held air. It sounded exactly like Halkett’s portable boat that the Royal Navy issued and Franklin had brought to test in the Arctic. Other Inuit whom Hall interviewed described four larger boats hanging from the sides of the ship that had come south and said a plank extended from it down to the ice. The first to visit the ship found it locked up tight and had to break a hole in the hull to get in. The vessel soon sank, but sections of the tall masts poked above the surface. Various Inuit estimates put the location from five to eight miles off Grant Point, on the Adelaide Peninsula’s west coast.
They “were sure some white men must have lived there through the winter,” Hall wrote in his field notebook. “Heard of tracks of 4 strangers, not Innuits, being seen on land adjacent to the ship.” Others described smoke coming from a chimney and said, judging from the last tracks they saw in the snow, the men aboard had a dog. People assumed they had gone off hunting.
Wherever they went, they never came back.
11
Operation Franklin
Louie Kamookak wasn’t the only one thinking that Sir John Franklin’s body was likely entombed somewhere in the High Arctic—perhaps mummified in ice like his sailors buried in the permafrost on Beechey Island more than a year before their commander lost his life. Some experts have long assumed that Franklin would have been buried at sea—a challenge, since he died when the ice was so thick and solid that two Royal Navy bomb ships with steam engines couldn’t break free. Another theory suggests Sir John was bundled up in Erebus, his flagship, where the knight of the realm’s remains waited to be brought home for a hero’s funeral. By 1967, belief in Franklin’s Arctic tomb had spread to senior ranks of the Canadian military. For decades, that was a closely held secret, buried in a manila file the Department of National Defence marked CONFIDENTIAL. Released to me under Canada’s Access to Information and Privacy Act in digital format, the file is titled, in bold letters penned in dark ink:
DND CENTENNIAL PROJECT
SEARCH FOR SIR JOHN FRANKLIN, GRAVE
The comma and the word GRAVE, in bold writing, look like they were added later. They were written with a black felt marker, like the one used to draw a line across the cover of volume one, from the bottom left corner to the top right. The word DEAD declares the file closed. Inside are 299 documents that track preparations for a search that deployed fifty-one Canadian soldiers and civilians, including a small unit of army scuba divers, to the High Arctic in 1967.
Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, a storied regiment that fought bravely in two world wars and Korea, was tasked to lead Operation Franklin. The troops camped out in the cold, supported by two Boeing CH-113A Voyageurs, twin-rotor helicopters fitted with long-range fuel tanks to get them several hundred miles from their Edmonton base to the main camp and back. William A. McKenzie, a London, Ontario, history buff and insurance broker, came up with the project and pitched it the previous fall to the then-Liberal government’s minister of defence, Paul Hellyer.
The $140,855 mission, which would unfold over three weeks that August, was a costly political gamble worth more than a million dollars today. The government marketed it to taxpayers with high-blown rhetoric that harked back to Sir John Barrow in the nineteenth century. The centennial operation “takes on a very special significance when we are just beginning to understand what potential wealth for Canada these northern territories represent,” declared John Fisher, commissioner in charge of the celebrations for Canada’s centennial. “This project should be an epic that will stir the imagination, not only of Canadians, but of the entire world.”
Captain James M. Hoffman, an army artillery officer assigned to lead the mission, felt the pressure to deliver results that justified the cost, just as Royal Navy officers had done, generations before him.
“We’ll give her hell,” Hoffman assured McKenzie, who served as civilian project adviser.
In the great tradition of Franklin searches, the two men would soon clash over how and where to look. Others would take sides amid second-guessing that was rife. As always, people could argue all they wanted because the Arctic would have the final word. An April 1967 Teletype message announced planning for the project, under the subject line WARNING ORDER SEARCH FOR SIR JOHN FRANKLINS GRAVE AND RECORDS. At the start, there was no mention of Erebus, Terror, or shipwrecks in general. Chasing shadows over vast, inhospitable areas of the Arctic is not something the military normally warms to, and at one point in an arcane debate over theories and speculation that had been going in circles for generations, Major General Roger Rowley, a decorated World War II infantryman, reminded McKenzie that the army “dealt in facts.”
To which McKenzie responded: So does the insurance industry.
A planning memo, addressed to the Army Survey Establishment in Ottawa, noted that the search area would focus on King William Island and the Boothia Peninsula, adding: “OF PARTICULAR INTEREST IS THE LOCATION OF NORTH MAGNETIC POLE IN YEARS 1831, 1847 AND 1859. CAN YOU ASSIST?” Those were significant milestones in polar exploration: The first was when James Clark Ross discovered the North Magnetic Pole; the second marked the year that the Victory Point notes were left at the cairn that Ross built, and was also the year of Franklin’s death; the third was when Francis McClintock and William Hobson found the notes and other conclusive evidence that the expedition’s men had perished.
Hoffman later explained his interest in the ever-shifting North Magnetic Pole in a July letter to ABC television’s John Secondari, a pioneering documentary producer in New York. He came recommended by Lord Mountbatten, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, as a good source because the American journalist was researching a film on the Franklin Expedition. Since Erebus and Terror were locked in ice not far from the North Magnetic Pole, Hoffman reasoned, it might have drawn the trapped seamen “for the purpose of conducting scientific observations on terrestrial magnetism which was planned when the expedition was formed.”
Mission-planning documents included excerpts from the National Intelligence Survey’s chapter entitled “Military Geography,” which detailed the terrain that the soldiers would face on King William Island. Franklin Expedition survivors were up against the same bleak landscape as they walked southward: mostly low, flat land covered with clay and glacial debris, all dotted by numerous lakes and eskers. Those are serpentine ridges of layered sand and gravel, likely formed by rivers that flowed inside and underneath ancient glaciers. Moving inland from the low terrain that forms the continental coast, the searchers would encounter “a scarp of hills 20 feet or more high” and countless pingos, hillocks of peat and gravel, as much as forty feet high, often topped with ponds in craterlike depressions. Drainage is poor, so few streams take hold, the intelligence report advised. Vegetation is very sparse near the coast, where it seems most of the Franklin Expedition survivors walked. Farther inland, the lowlands are more alive in summer with grasses, wildflowers, heather, and dwarf willow.
Any of the Franklin Expedition sailors who made it to the southern coast, beaten down by months of extreme cold, hunger, disease, and hopelessness, wouldn’t have had anything to celebrate as they looked out across the land that stood between them and their last chance to get out alive. Once beyond the treeline in summer, the thawing tundra is wet, spongy, swampy, and “in general a serious handicap to movement,” the intelligence report warned. “Very little surface can be traversed by anything but small boats. Canoe travel is the customary—in fact, aside from the airplane, the only means of travel through this country in summertime.”
AS PLANNING PROGRESSED in the spring of 1967, Brigadier S. C. Waters, commander of 1 Canadian Infantry Brigade Group, urged in a testy, handwritten memo that his men study previous searches and consider bringing in a dozen specialists from a reconnaissance platoon.
“Will such untrained, untutored eyes recognize an artifact or object from the 18th/19th century, particularly after
weathering for over 100 years?” he asked. “Will they need some training in what to look for, what signs and indications are significant, etc.?”
The government permit authorizing the search for artifacts was issued to David Hughes, a physical anthropologist at the National Museum of Canada, who brought a trained eye to the military team. But the soldiers doing the hunting didn’t get much guidance, certainly nowhere near the knowledge and experience that local Inuit already had. A request to the Hudson’s Bay Company for any useful documents from its own searchers produced little beyond a suggestion from librarian Shirlee A. Smith that the military contact Lorenz Learmonth, the onetime fur trader who wrote about Neovitcheak’s curse, “who knows the King William area well and has his own theories on Franklin.”
“Most interesting but not very encouraging,” the brigadier wrote in blue pen in the letter’s margin. “I am more than ever convinced that our military search needs scientific members.”
Waters made no mention of turning to Inuit elders, even though they knew more than anyone about important Franklin sites, including the area of eastern Queen Maud Gulf, where their oral history recalled the sinking of a large ship. Learmonth, whom McKenzie had dismissed as “a mystic” who would be neither cooperative nor interested in the military’s efforts, was the first to suggest that the military reach out to the Inuit. Captain Hoffman went to see him at his home in Georgetown, west of Toronto, on May 27, 1967. Calling their meeting “the highlight and most valuable of the research I have conducted on Franklin,” Hoffman told Learmonth: “You are one of the most interesting men I have ever met.”
The captain had arrived that afternoon more interested in finding Franklin’s grave and any fresh expedition records that might be discovered with his body. Learmonth, who knew the frustrations and dangers of the Franklin search well, urged the artillery officer to think again and focus on locating a shipwreck instead.