by Paul Watson
“That’s it! I think that’s it!” blurted Gary Kozak, the side-scan sonar operator.
“You’re kidding.”
“No, dammit. That’s it! Look, there’s her hull. I can’t believe this! She’s intact! Even her masts are still standing!”
Late in the winter of 1981, MacInnis tried to return with a team equipped to dive under the thick ice, but pressure ridges jutting up at all angles above the wreck site like a miniature mountain range made landing a bush plane impossible. It was even worse the following year. He finally got to explore Breadalbane three years after finding her. Robert Grenier joined the team of two dozen as the supervising archaeologist required by the federal permit. Feeling bad vibes, and suffering from a nasty bout of flu, Grenier tried to back out at the last minute. But several cultural directors pleaded with Parks Canada to participate to prevent wholesale looting.
“It was made clear that this was not to be an archaeological expedition with artifacts recovery, unless in the case of justifiable samples as judged by the permitted archaeologist—me,” Grenier told me.
Dome Petroleum helped fund the project. Explaining its support, the oil company said information that MacInnis’s team gathered would have “industrial applications.” In the 1970s and early 1980s, Dome was one of several firms that drilled 176 offshore wells in the Beaufort Sea in Canada’s Western Arctic. They weren’t developed, in part because there was growing disagreement over whether there was a safe way to get any oil and natural gas out. MacInnis’s plan for deepwater diving on the Breadalbane seemed a good showcase for technology that future undersea workers might use for tapping enormous reserves.
Two holes blasted in sea ice several feet thick gave a remotely piloted vehicle access from the bow while divers were lowered to the stern. Nuytten worked in shifts with Doug Osborne in a yellow WASP suit, a largely glass-reinforced plastic cousin of the cast-aluminum Newtsuit. With a big domed top, four thrusters, articulated arms with bulbous wrists, metal claws, and an enclosed leg area shaped like an insect’s abdomen, it floated above Breadalbane like a hovering alien shining beams of light on a newly discovered world.
A remotely piloted vehicle (RPV), not much bigger than a portable generator, descended first to assess the wreck. Its camera caught sight of the ship’s wheel, an iconic piece of any wreck. Marine archaeologists wouldn’t think of touching such a sensitive wreck without precisely mapping the vessel and the positions of its artifacts. But MacInnis wasn’t an archaeologist. He also wasn’t willing to wait. With a black watch cap pulled tightly down to his ears, Grenier sat slumped in a chair across from MacInnis, scribbling notes on a large pad and watching the monitor closely as a robotic arm reached out for a wooden relic, about the size of a dessert plate, ringed by metal and with a large pentagonal hole in the middle.
“Snap that sucker,” MacInnis said, and the claw pinched shut to lift the object from the rocky seabed, inches away from the ship. “That’s great. Oh yah! Fabulous!”
“Drop it,” said Grenier, cutting through the happy chatter with the sharp tone of a store detective stopping a shoplifter in mid-snatch.
“Drop it? Why?” MacInnis asked sternly.
“Well, I said we’ll have a discussion,” the archaeologist replied, steeled for a fight. “And we’ll have a discussion.”
“Your concern is to position this,” MacInnis replied more collegially. “Is that right?”
Grenier was feeling the legendary MacInnis squeeze. Neither man looked at the other. The archaeologist flicked at the tip of his nose a couple of times, pen squeezed between his fingers like a cigarette, and tried to assert federal authority.
“We were going to have a conversation tomorrow,” MacInnis pressed, arching his eyebrows as Bill Mason’s movie camera rolled for a documentary. “We’re about to have it now.”
The RPV operator kept a grip on the artifact while Grenier and MacInnis argued. MacInnis insisted the object didn’t “look particularly valuable.” Grenier disagreed. MacInnis was especially interested in the metal, which appeared to be copper alloy. Archaeologists had agreed the expedition would collect artifacts to study how different materials deteriorated over long periods submerged in cold water. That offered a payoff for Dome and other oil companies that needed to know how wellheads or pipelines might react over decades in Arctic seas. As Britain’s New Scientist magazine explained in an advance story on the Breadalbane dive operation, “the Northwest Passage will probably be used to carry oil to southern markets, and this kind of information could prove essential in planning, regulating and operating such trade.” The RPV had a tight hold on something MacInnis thought was the perfect size for the analysis needed. He wasn’t in the mood for a debate. Transformers had been blowing left and right. The ice might suddenly freeze and close the dive hole.
“We may not be able to get back to this thing,” MacInnis said, almost pleading.
“I agreed to one thing,” Grenier countered, “which was to lift a few artifacts when they are located.” He meant in the archaeological sense: being sure where it lay in relation to the ship, the debris field, and other items to provide provenance that might prove telling in later research.
“But this has been located,” MacInnis insisted.
“No, not this one. We don’t know where it is.”
Grenier shifted in his chair and bit his lower lip.
“This may be the only thing we take off the ship,” MacInnis said. “And I can’t tell you what it’s taken to get this far, to get that. That’s a million dollar shot if you want my, ah. . . . And I don’t want to put the heat on you. But I’ll take responsibility. We gotta make a decision and I’m gonna make it.”
Grenier was overruled.
“Go ahead and pick it up,” MacInnis told the RPV operator.
With a few nudges of a black joystick, the robotic arm lifted the round piece of Breadalbane, pivoted right to a cage that had delivered the vehicle to the depths, and dropped it through a triangular hole between wooden struts. Then it grabbed a larger artifact, which looked like one of the wooden blocks used as pulleys in the ship’s heavy rigging, and did the same. After Phil Nuytten got his WASP suit assembled, he went down for a recon trip. Soon he was hovering over the ship’s wheel, floating past a tall mast, getting a better sense of the layout, currents, and anything that might snag him. That went off without a hitch, including a close look into the deckhouse, where Nuytten saw some more things he wanted to bring up.
The team convened in the mess tent, where a hand-painted sign above the door declared: RAIDERS OF THE LOST BARQUE. Grenier sat at the edge of the group, the shunned outsider, a notebook with a ringed spine and about the size of an organizer open on his lap. Nuytten said he wanted to take a compass off the wreck, another iconic piece of any ship. The atmosphere snapped taut again as Grenier explained the absolute need to ensure the safety and integrity of any artifacts. This time he was standing behind MacInnis, who spoke with his head leaning on four fingers, as a teacher might while scolding a pupil. Both men looked at the ground, spitting words like daggers.
“I can’t see how this operation can take place safely,” Grenier said, his fingers interlaced and thumbs touching, as if in prayer.
“Safely for the artifacts?” MacInnis asked.
“For the artifacts, yes.”
“Well, if I understand correctly, the objective in marine archaeology is to bring them back to the surface with the minimum of damage.” There was a long silence while both men fumed. “That correct?”
“Not only to the artifacts,” Grenier explained, “but to the surroundings.”
“They’re all artifacts,” MacInnis shot back. He repeated his question. Grenier agreed.
MacInnis turned to Doug Osborne, the next diver in line, and told him to get suited up, with instructions to discuss what he saw at the wreck site with Grenier, and then suggest what he wanted to do. Osborne navigated to a wheelhouse cabinet with several rows of large rectangular openings. A signal light and at leas
t one of Breadalbane’s compasses sat on shelves, where they held their positions during the ship’s fall through the sea ice and on her final, jolting drop to the seabed. With the WASP’s manipulator claw, Osborne tapped the object that experts on the surface were confident was a compass.
“It’s intact. It’s solid,” he said.
Then the diver warned Nuytten that the cabinet was fragile and might fall off the ship’s wall if he proceeded. The compass was allowed to remain where it was. Osborne moved over to the ship’s wheel. Grenier told MacInnis he was concerned about the mineral concretions on the wooden base. A thick layer as hard as concrete, it could break the wheel if it were moved. MacInnis wanted to make an attempt to raise it anyway.
“No, in this condition, I would stop it there, Joe,” Grenier said. “I cannot go in for this.”
“Maybe you can tell me why you don’t want it moved. That wheel,” MacInnis countered.
“Because . . .”
“Just let me finish this,” MacInnis interrupted, answering his own question before the archaeologist could. “The reason we would like the wheel, and anything else off the ship, is really for the people of Canada to appreciate this kind of history. So maybe you could tell me why you don’t want it moved.”
Grenier glanced back over his shoulder at the movie camera, removed his watch cap, and ruffled his hair in frustration.
“Reasonably concisely,” MacInnis added. “Understanding that there might be some damage. But we’re looking at, really, a one-in-a-million opportunity.”
Osborne would be gentle, MacInnis assured Grenier, who said he didn’t like the damage that was already done to the archaeological site. He expected more if the diver didn’t stop.
“In my perception, we have done enough,” Grenier said. “I don’t figure that it’s archaeologically sound to go any further than that at this point.”
On the grainy video feed, Grenier could faintly see that a steel rod seemed to still be tying the wheel to the steering mechanism. The archaeologist thought it might be a valuable specimen for lab analysis that could provide many samples to study how Arctic seawater degrades a single object. So he acquiesced in the retrieval of Breadalbane’s wheel. Then disaster struck. Grenier saw the steel rod break, and, before he could say anything, the binnacle hanging above the wheel came crashing down onto the deck below it.
“That was it; the deal I had made was off and I called off the operation,” Grenier told me. “At that point, any communication with the diver was cut off. I had lost control. The operation continued without me, illegally, in a destructive manner.”
Osborne pinched the ship’s wheel with both claws, yanked it away from Breadalbane, and brought it to the surface, hugging it with one arm. When the wheel was secured, yet still in the water, Grenier saw MacInnis step away with a filmmaker shooting for National Geographic. They had a picture in mind, something dramatic enough to make the magazine’s cover, an iconic image of the wheel framed by ocean and sea ice, at the moment the nineteenth-century world connected with the twentieth. Grenier decided to lift the wheel to the surface and slide it over a panel of plywood. MacInnis was furious when he saw the “money shot” was blown. That set off a new dispute as Grenier tried to stop him from putting the wheel back in the water for the shoot, which would have violated a basic rule of preserving artifacts moved from saltwater to air.
“No!” Grenier insisted. “Only over my dead body.”
The anger still lingering decades later, Grenier stressed that he was impressed by Nuytten’s work on the site but had to try to draw a firm line when he saw the wreck suffering: “I had conditionally acquiesced to the lifting of the wheel under clear condition of no damage: when damage occurred, I said no more and MacInnis went ahead anyway.”
The archaeologist won the argument over whether to put the wheel back in the water. Grenier built a wooden box and spent half the night gently securing the Breadalbane’s fractured wheel in it, trying to prevent further damage. He flew to Ottawa the next day and delivered the precious artifact to Parks Canada’s conservators, who had to figure out how to keep it from disintegrating into dust. They immersed the wheel in a vat of cold water bubbling with a stream of nitrogen, which cut off the oxygen for microorganisms that had been feasting since the nineteenth century on the deteriorating composite of different types of wood and metal. An X-ray revealed empty spaces where the original screws once held the wheel intact. Conservators had to tie it together with plastic bands.
More than three decades later, Breadalbane’s wheel was still locked up in a crate in Parks Canada’s Ottawa headquarters, bound together with ties and too fragile to be left in the open air for long, let alone put on display. The bill for the unfinished conservation work on it was well over $100,000 and climbing, with no end in sight. The never-ending cost of dealing with a wheel, from a merchant resupply ship, was a cautionary tale when talk inevitably returned to the real quarry, the elusive wrecks of Erebus and Terror.
13
Skull Island
To Inuit who knew elders’ stories about the two huge ships—the “strange houses” that delivered dying white men and vanished beneath the waves—there wasn’t much left to learn. The basic facts were well known, and had been for a long time. Sea ice crushed one, and some stories said that ship went down in water so deep off the north end of King William Island that no one could say precisely where she ended up. Other, often tangled, accounts suggested both ships may have moved south. Inuit had boarded at least one, had seen a dead man, and carried off countless useful items before she also went down. Oral history told of that wreck’s rough location, in a cluster of islands at the eastern end of Queen Maud Gulf. Louie Kamookak, as he told one interviewer, “wasn’t about to go out there and stick my head in the water.” He was focused on trying to find Franklin’s body. So, for a time, the frontline search for Erebus and Terror was left to southern adventurers, mostly treasure hunters, documentary film crews, or wealthy travelers who had the budgets and equipment to launch modern search expeditions.
None had the impact of David Woodman. Like Kamookak, he came to the Franklin search by following a compulsion that wouldn’t be silenced. Blunt and built like a cask, Woodman has a closely cropped gray beard and a talent for storytelling, the traits of a man shaped by the sea—first in the Royal Canadian Navy, then as a harbormaster, and finally as a captain at the helm of West Coast car ferries. Some who go on about life on the water are more wind than sail. Not Woodman. He has a restless, Type-A mind hungry for hard facts and no room for fools or phonies. More important to history, he has a subtle power to make the outrageous request seem perfectly reasonable. Listening to him talk about all the arms he gently twisted, persuading military pilots to fly low over the High Arctic with a magnetometer, or getting a loaner towed slowly over the ice by a whining snowmobile, all in the off chance of detecting the submerged metal in a Franklin wreck, you get the sense Woodman could coax leaves down from a tree if he set his mind to it.
Archaeologists dig and dive for artifacts that reveal old truths. Woodman waded deep into the weeds of Inuit oral history, as recorded by Franklin searchers in the nineteenth century. While Kamookak was listening to elders for clues, interpreting them with an innate understanding of the culture and the environment that sustains it, Woodman was focused on the written word. Both spent uncounted hours winnowing out the chaff by meticulously cross-referencing details, trying to figure out which of many accounts were the most credible. Depending on the Inuit accounts one believed, or how a historian read the often-distorted versions from explorers who wrote them down, the southern Franklin wreck must be close to O’Reilly Island or thirty miles to the west. Then again, it should be seven miles to the northwest of Grant Point, five miles due west of it, or any number of other places. Inuit knew where the wreck was. The problem was figuring out who had it right.
It didn’t take long for Woodman to see why Inuit knew Erebus or Terror ended up in eastern Queen Maud Gulf. What occupies his mind
are the Inuit stories of seamen living aboard that ship, with a dog, long after she was originally abandoned. There were anywhere from about five to seventeen men on the vessel, according to various descriptions. If proven by archaeological evidence, that would suggest some of Franklin’s crew sailed the ship there. If the vessel’s hull was encased in a huge ice pan, perhaps those same men simply went with the flow through the maze of ice and islands. If a wreck could be found far south of where the Victory Point Record said she was left ensnared in ice, as firmly as an animal in a trap, then objects, records, or even human remains might answer a crucial question: Did some of Sir John’s men sail her there? If they did, all sorts of fascinating possibilities arise. Maybe mutineers defied orders and returned to their ship. Perhaps fortunate survivors saw her passing, slowed by ice floes, and somehow managed to scramble aboard and ride the wind and currents with her to their destiny.
As a student at the University of Toronto, Woodman had spent weekends at Robarts Library, fourteen stories of sharp angles in precast concrete, considered one of the continent’s standout examples of Brutalist architecture. On a Friday night in January 1975, he was on his way out and walked past the reshelving bin. A thick volume on top of the heap practically called out to Woodman. It was The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in Arctic Seas, Sir Francis McClintock’s narrative of his historic expedition for Lady Franklin. All Woodman knew was the words voyage of sounded like a trip worth taking. He read it through twice over the weekend. He lingered on the words one of Franklin’s men wrote in the Victory Point Record on May 28, 1847. In Woodman’s mind, the longitude and latitude reported for Erebus and Terror lined up like arrows pointing to a big X on a map.
“This’ll be easy,” Woodman judged. “We’ll drill a hole there, dive down, one bounce dive, find ships, come back up and I have a bar story forever. I actually figured, if I put some effort into this, in two years I can do it.”