Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  Heavily in debt, Woodman ended up in the Royal Canadian Navy instead, training as a diver, a career cut short by a leg infection. He served a dozen years on navy ships and submarines instead, reaching the rank of lieutenant. During the Cold War, he logged many dull hours in the White Sea, off Murmansk in the Soviet Arctic in a diesel submarine, going in hundred-mile circles. Running in stealth mode on battery power, the sub towed an array of hydrophones, recording the sound signatures of Soviet boomer boats, the subs armed with nuclear missiles, as they left port. After a stint as harbormaster in the northwest coast port of Prince Rupert, he became a BC Ferries captain. The whole time, Woodman read Arctic explorers’ journals, studied Inuit testimony, and plotted ways to get up to the Arctic to search for the Franklin wrecks that had been on his mind since that fateful Friday night in the university library. He was a low-budget explorer: negotiating to piggyback on other expeditions, lining up sponsors to back his own, trying to wangle freebies for equipment and supplies, or at least employee discounts when that was the best he could get, and usually hearing: “No.” Franklinologists can be an insular lot. Woodman was an untutored outsider. Instinct and a life at sea told him to heed Inuit witnesses, which accepted experts had largely dismissed.

  “Everyone kept telling me, ‘There are Inuit stories out there, but they are so confused and confusing that they are basically useless.’ So every narrative is built on the Victory Point Record. This is all they gave us: 138 words, and there are arguments about almost every word on that page.”

  Woodman headed to Washington, DC, to pore over Charles Francis Hall’s papers, a trove of diaries, journals, notebooks, scrapbooks, letters, ships’ logs, and other documents preserved at the Smithsonian Institution. Apparently the first person to request the documents in a century, Woodman worked through the jumble of notes, searching for gems among the scree. One of the many things that kept him reading was a description of the encounter at the ice crack in Washington Bay, considered one of the most credible accounts of Franklin survivors meeting Inuit. A qalunaaq carrying a rifle identified himself as Ill-kern, according to the Inuit story Hall wrote down. But Hall died before he could turn his notes into a book, so the Senate directed Joseph E. Nourse, a professor at the US Naval Observatory, to do it. In that edited version, Nourse rendered the Inuit retelling of the sailor’s name as Tierkin. Imagining Inuit trying to get their mouths around a British sailor’s name, likely one spoken by a man who was hungry, sick, or dying, Woodman checked the Franklin Expedition crew lists. To his ear, it sounded like the Inuit were saying the name of William Pilkington, one of five Royal Marines aboard Erebus. With careful study, which Woodman built up in spreadsheets and notes that filled many file folders, facts began to corroborate the Inuit oral history.

  “It convinced me that the Inuit have very good memories for detail, which should have been self-evident,” Woodman recalled. “That’s their life. If you want to get home from a hunt, you have to remember almost every black rock from you to the caribou and back. This encounter was like a UFO landing to us. It was so out of the ordinary to meet strangers, white people, that it would make a deep impression. This was something they were going to remember, and tell on the long dark nights, over and over again.”

  Woodman was a second officer, and navigator, on the navy’s oceanographic research ship HMCS Endeavour when he finished writing the book that is his biggest contribution to the Franklin search. He stashed it in his filing cabinet in 1986 and left it there, afraid the acknowledged Franklin experts would think he was an idiot if he tried to get it published. There it sat, unwanted, for two years—until his wife, Franca, got tired of listening to him bicker about how other writers had it all wrong. She sent her husband’s manuscript to publishers. To Woodman’s astonishment, his analysis of Inuit testimony passed peer review by an academic book publisher. Archaeologists were soon carrying around dog-eared copies of Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony. Scholars called it seminal and made it an essential citation in their own work. The gruff sailor’s name was now part of highbrow conversation, oft-repeated in the phrase that is music to any academic’s ears: “As Woodman has shown, . . .” He was all the more interesting for challenging Old World myths that had long outlasted the Royal Navy’s power over the world, including the almost canonical certainty that Franklin’s men had moved as one, advancing sto-ically against the Arctic despite heavy losses, as Her Majesty’s troops would do against any foe. Instead, by piecing together Inuit accounts over decades, Woodman argued that the sailors must have broken up into smaller, disorganized groups as they fought for survival, hobbled by the weaknesses all humans share against the power of nature.

  “They didn’t march heroically, with Queen Victoria’s flag in front of them, and the weakest one dropped, the next one and the next one,” he said. “That’s the narrative that had been carried for more than 100 years.”

  About a year after leaving the military, Woodman decided it was time to go Franklin wreck-hunting in the Arctic. It wasn’t as though he suddenly had nothing to do or extra money to blow. What he did have was potentially more valuable: a few good friends in the right places. He knew he had to pitch them before they moved on, or rose too high in the ranks to bother answering his calls. He was selling a shot in the dark. The best place to look for Erebus or Terror, the area of eastern Queen Maud Gulf that Inuit call Ugjulik, is almost fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. That is roughly a thousand square miles, or three times the size of New York City, covered by thick ice most of the year. From his submarine days, Woodman had an idea how to cover a lot of distance fast. The Royal Canadian Air Force hunted subs with the Lockheed CP-140 Aurora maritime patrol aircraft, a Canadian version of the US P-3 Orion. The aircraft carried a magnetometer as an airborne metal detector. Woodman called an old friend to ask whether the same device could detect the iron cladding on a smaller wooden ship sitting underwater.

  He was soon talking to Brad Nelson, the expert at Defense Research Establishment Pacific, who did the math. An Aurora equipped with a magnetometer, flying two hundred feet above the surface at an airspeed of just 100 knots would have about a 60 percent chance of success, he estimated. Not the best odds, but Woodman got to work persuading commanders that trying to find Erebus or Terror with an airplane would be an excellent project to hone aircrew skills. He needed what in military jargon is known as a “corollary benefit.” The 1978 Canadian Arctic crash of Kosmos 954, a Soviet reconnaissance satellite powered by a nuclear reactor, was a compelling one. To find the wreckage, the United States and Canadian militaries launched a joint mission, called Operation Morning Light. Searching for months on foot and in the air, troops covered forty-eight thousand square miles before finding a dozen pieces of the downed satellite, most of which were radioactive. The thought that it was bound to happen again, likely more than once, made Woodman’s idea of practicing on a lost Franklin ship attractive. He also highlighted the risk of an airliner crashing on its way over the pole. Very thinly spread search-and-rescue teams would have to find the wreckage quickly for any hope of saving lives. Wreck hunting would also give the Canadian military a friendly way to show the flag in the Northwest Passage. Canada considers the route internal waters, whereas several other maritime nations, led by the United States, insist it is an international strait.

  The air force only committed to one flight, lasting no more than half a day in 1992, which meant Woodman would have to be very lucky to find anything. He put his chips down on the area around Grant Point because that’s where the most specific Inuit testimony pointed. Wood and other ship debris found farther south on O’Reilly Island could be explained by the natural drift of ocean currents and sea ice. After finishing only half of the planned search lanes in the allotted time, members of the aircrew were chatting on the way back to base at Yellowknife. Woodman, in the back, was oblivious. The crew decided to return the next day, a rest day, to finish the job. In the end, they covered 155 square miles, identified sixty-one “magnetic anoma
lies,” and marked five of those High Priority. That was nothing to get too excited about. That part of the Arctic is very magnetic by nature.

  “That’s what all of our hits turned out to be—geological features,” Woodman said.

  He refused to give up. Over a dozen years, Woodman either led or took part in nine search expeditions, including a brutal hike of some twelve days through knee-deep sucking mud and banks of melting snow on the high ground. He drained some $200,000 from his savings account, with little to show for it except some marvelous stories. In 1997, the 150th anniversary of Franklin’s death inspired an ambitious, privately led attempt to find the wrecks of his ships for ten days. Woodman joined with Eco-Nova Productions Ltd., a film company out of Halifax, to work with a team that included several federal agencies, based on the icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Robert Grenier was there too, reliving the dark days of the Breadalbane documentary shoot. Woodman was given the honorary title of Search Coordinator, which was really just a bit part in the movie.

  “Whenever I said, ‘Alright, this is where I want to go,’ they’d say: ‘No, no. That’s out in the middle. We can’t get good film there. Let’s go closer to the land so we can at least get the boats going past the land.’”

  But Inuit oral history said the wreck was a three-mile walk across the sea ice, Woodman pointed out. He was overruled. The best-equipped search expedition yet focused on waters off O’Reilly Island, where army divers had come up dry thirty years earlier in eastern Queen Maud Gulf. Federal hydrographers, who normally suffer the unheralded slog of surveying the bottoms of rivers, lakes, and oceans to produce navigation charts, searched with side-scan sonar. Single-beam echo sounders and a magnetometer put more electronic eyes on the ocean bottom. Just like the military divers in 1967, the only useful things the team found were on land, this time on a string of islets north of O’Reilly. At first, the most exciting were fragments of copper-alloy sheathing. Copper sheets covered the Franklin ships’ hulls to prevent fouling by marine life, such as barnacles or seaweed that created drag or warm-water borers such as shipworm and the teredo, which sailors called gribbles.

  The metal debris, which still had oakum sealant on the back, was found on an island Inuit call Puvittuq, which means “Copper Sheet Island.” The Canadian army had found similar bits in the same area. The Eco-Nova expedition also found a small copper-alloy disk. Grenier took it south for analysis and tests seemed to show it was the bottom of a Britannia coffeepot. The Royal Navy issued them for roughly a decade, which included the year Erebus and Terror sailed on their final voyage. But several years after what seemed a promising find, Woodman was told the coffeepot theory had been ruled out.

  On the growing list of Franklin Expedition artifacts, these latest weren’t much. Years later, senior underwater archaeologists Ryan Harris and Jonathan Moore studied the metal sheeting and other objects in detail, carefully examining the nailing patterns and the composition of the metal, and poring over historical records in England. They confirmed that copper sheeting, installed on Royal Navy hulls since the 1780s to ward off shipworm, a warm-water mollusk, and other organisms that fouled hulls in tropical waters, had been removed from Franklin’s ships before they sailed for the Arctic.

  “We know for a fact they didn’t come from Erebus and Terror,” Moore told me.

  The objects weren’t Franklin relics, but they still served a crucial purpose. They spurred a closer study of the Inuit oral history. Before the artifacts’ provenance was proven, the federal government hired Kamookak and Darren Keith, another expert in Inuit traditions, to show examples and photographs of them to elders and ask where the items might have come from. The team’s lengthy report added a new wrinkle to qalunaaq confusion over Inuit accounts. In the nineteenth century, Inuit used the wind and the sun’s movement to reckon direction. What they called north referred to where the wind blew from, which is actually northwest. South to them was the origin of the southeast wind. That left a lot of room to get lost in translation for early expeditions trying to find Franklin and his men, using compasses that pointed unreliably to the North Magnetic Pole. Kamookak and Keith wanted to give any who followed a heads-up to course-correct instead of going astray with more assumptions based on fundamental cultural misunderstandings.

  “If searchers were given information in oral testimonies as to the location of the shipwreck, it would be important to realize that the Inuktitut north is actually northwest,” the report stressed. “Their south is to the southeast and their west is to the southwest.”

  The report also cited Woodman’s belief that the seabed close to Kirkwall Island might be prime hunting ground for Erebus or Terror. He pinpointed it as the island Inuit knew as Umiaqtalik. Woodman turned out to be wrong, but not far off. Kirkwall is actually Haturuaq to Inuit, or “Big Flat One,” and lies at the top of a string of tiny islands gently arcing down toward the Adelaide Peninsula, like rough-cut gemstones on a necklace. The Kamookak–Keith study identified First Island as Umiaqtalik. It is roughly five miles southeast of Kirkwall. Not a significant difference as the crow flies. But at that point in the epic hunt for Erebus and Terror, after 150 years of failure, much depended on who was right about this because of that Inuktitut name.

  Kamookak translated it as: “There is a boat there.”

  “An umiaq was a large boat in the Inuit world of the 1800s but it was usually used for a boat the size of whaleboat or dory,” the report pointed out. “A ship was and still is referred to as umiarjuaq or ‘big boat.’”

  In the last hour on the final day of the Eco-Nova expedition, archaeologist Margaret Bertulli was walking the shore of an islet that Inuit testimony placed in prime territory for a submerged wreck. She came across a human skull. Without a permit to collect human remains, she had no choice but to try to learn what she could from a distance, with time running out. The archaeologist took photos, from every possible angle. Then she left the skull where it lay, exposed to whatever ravages of wildlife or weather might come.

  In her report to Douglas Stenton, a veteran terrestrial archaeologist and Nunavut’s director of culture and heritage, Bertulli credited the find to Ivan Campbell, a leading seaman on the Laurier. She didn’t see any grave or other feature in the vicinity. Dr. Anne Keenleyside, a bioarchaeologist specializing in human remains, studied photographs of the cranium and identified it as Caucasian. She found several similarities, especially in the eye orbits and the shape and size of the nasal cavity, with the skulls of five Franklin Expedition crewmen found on the south shore of King William Island’s Erebus Bay. Bertulli suggested the latest skull could be confirmed by aging and possibly measuring the lead level.

  “The discovery of remains of a Franklin crew member near O’Reilly Island may point to the surrounding waters as the general location of one of Franklin’s ships, H.M.S. Erebus or Terror,” Bertulli added in her 1998 report.

  FOUR YEARS LATER, back on what he calls Skull Island, Woodman searched again with a borrowed magnetometer, a Scintrex Smartmag 4 towed on a wooden sled. Designed mainly for workers trying to locate underground pipelines, it wasn’t built to bounce on a snowmobile, along twenty-kilometer search lanes, crawling forward at about four miles an hour. Woodman and his team made it work by soldering things back together, and tightening screws, each night after a day of heavy rattling. They had to play out at least a hundred feet of rope to separate the sled from the snowmobile and isolate the magnetometer from metal that would throw off its readings. Sapped by the severe cold, the batteries lasted no longer than two and half hours. When searchers failed to notice the point where the device went dead, they tried to calculate the missed distance, pop in a fresh battery, and retrace their tracks. A computer processed about fifteen pulses per second, sniffing along the magnetic field for any anomaly that hinted Erebus or Terror might be lurking beneath the thick sea ice. Bundled up in metal-free caribou parkas and sealskin boots, the team managed to cover 120 dreary square miles in those two short seasons. Still, no joy. One day during th
e 2002 expedition, while the rest of the team members were eating lunch, Inuk head guide Saul Aksoolak, from Gjoa Haven, did a quick circuit along the sea ice on his snow machine and returned to the tent to soberly announce:

  “I found the head.”

  Everyone rushed to follow him back to the skull. This time, only the bleached white crown was sticking out of the snow, about the size of a man’s palm and perfectly camouflaged, white against white. Yet a skilled hunter’s eyes had seen it from afar while moving at a good clip. Animals, wind, waves, ice, or some other force had moved it about ten yards since Bertulli’s discovery. But as the snow slowly melted over the next week, more and more of the skull was exposed, leaving no doubt that it was the same one she photographed. Woodman was seething. If Bertulli had her hands-off assessment right, a critical clue was staring him in the face and he couldn’t pick it up for experts to analyze in a lab. The skull had already moved, and it was only a matter of time before Arctic waters crept up and snatched it for the rest of time.

  “If it turns out to be a 25-year-old white man, from 100 years ago,” he thought, “then forget what the Inuit stories say about the ship being manned. What’s he doing here?”

  Within ten yards of the skull, Woodman found a hint at a possible answer. It was a piece of glass sitting on a rock. Sandblasted by decades of wind-blown sand, it appeared to be a prism, perhaps part of a scientific or navigational instrument. There were also remnants of old rectangular campsites on the islet, which suggested several qalunaaq had stopped there for some time. The glass Woodman saw, but could only photograph, seemed to be a lens. Maybe it was a remnant of a sextant that a lost mariner pointed toward the stars, hoping they would lead him out of the Arctic. Or it could have come from a telescope that an officer might have held up to his eye, searching for a way home. Only expert analysis could say. Since Woodman wasn’t allowed to move the object, he marked the spot with small piles of stones in the hope that an archaeologist could get there before the glass artifact vanished forever.