by Paul Watson
This one was especially timely. Zagon was looking at Victoria Strait.
“What happened here?” Zagon asked himself, staring at an image from space of the spot where the Arctic closed her fist on the Franklin Expedition. “I can take some historical evidence and use satellite imagery to either support it or refute it.
“And if I can do that for one piece of evidence, why can’t you do it for other pieces of evidence? Why can’t I do that for all the evidence?”
After a timely transfer to the Ice Service’s research department, Zagon pitched his new bosses on a plan to study every relevant satellite image from the first one Radarsat-1 made in 1995. They eventually greenlighted Zagon to spend 10 percent of his time scrutinizing thousands of satellite images. He meticulously mapped areas of pressure, shear lines, patterns of breakup and freeze-up, and other sea-ice characteristics, gradually building a case to explain what the Arctic did with Erebus and Terror. The more Zagon saw in the patterns of sea ice spread over decades, the more he believed in a theory of what doomed the Franklin Expedition. Some years, the area where they were stranded is completely covered in ice; in others, it is wide-open water. Those conditions often remain the same, even after a storm.
“But in just a few years, and this is obviously the condition that Franklin’s ships would have had to be in, it’s light enough for them to enter—so there’s some open water—but obviously something caused that open water to close, to become compacted pack ice,” Zagon said. “In those cases, storms are the reason. They actually start around mid-September, which is when the ships became beset.”
Franklin became an obsession. He seeped into Zagon’s dreams. The ice analyst would find himself bolt upright in the middle of the night, compelled to go check a fact on his computer about some element of Arctic weather or ice. He went into work on weekends to look at more satellite images, often flicking back and forth to see ice movement, with the concentration of a conspiracy theorist moving through frames of the Zapruder film. As he got traction on his study, he read David Woodman’s books on Inuit accounts, and the picture grew steadily clearer. In the summer of 2010, another newsbreak drew him even deeper into the Franklin mystery.
Parks Canada’s marine archaeologists found the wreck of HMS Investigator, the ship McClure reluctantly abandoned during his failed Franklin search in 1853. Months of planning gave archaeologists a clear starting place in Mercy Bay, which was clear of ice a week before tents went up on the shoreline in late July. Then a gale drove ice floes into the search zone, where the divers planned to draw their towfish, the torpedo-shaped sonar device. Two days after divers arrived, Ryan Harris, a rangy, dry-witted scientist with an encyclopedic knowledge of his prey, set out with longtime field partner Jonathan Moore in their small boat. The towfish was only in the water three minutes before Harris saw something on his laptop computer screen that looked out of place. He spent the next two hours making passes over the unidentified feature some twenty-five feet down, checking the sonar data over and over, to be certain they had a shipwreck. When it was confirmed, Zagon e-mailed the archaeologists to suggest his ice study could help them locate the real deal, Erebus and Terror. Silence. The archaeologists got a lot of unsolicited tips from armchair experts, in various parts of the world, certain they know the right place to find Franklin’s ships. Zagon took the nonreply as a hint. But after a few months, something told him to try again. This time, Harris set up a briefing.
After watching Zagon’s PowerPoint slides, the team quickly brought him on board. It was well known that sea ice flows south through Victoria Strait, but Zagon’s report showed it moves faster on the western side. Islands slow it down on the eastern side, which Zagon thinks blocked any early escape for Erebus and Terror and slowed their drift southward with the sea ice. That could explain why one of the ships abandoned in 1848 wasn’t spotted well to the south until as much as two years later, according to various Inuit accounts. The ice analyst concluded from shear lines that if either of the ships remained afloat long enough, the natural flow would have flushed her southward with the ice floes into Alexandra Strait, which runs past the southwest corner of King William Island into eastern Queen Maud Gulf, where Inuit said they saw men and a dog living aboard a big ship. Using his study, the search team calculated “a most probable vector,” from the area where Franklin’s men abandoned their ships to eastern Queen Maud Gulf, where Inuit say one ended up.
Zagon continued to play with pieces of the puzzle, especially the map that In-nook-poo-zhee-jook drew for Charles Francis Hall in 1869. For generations, southerners who looked at the sketch assumed the line drawn around the land beneath King William Island was all coastline. Zagon was at work on a routine day when a fresh image of eastern Queen Maud Gulf rolled out of the machine. It was upside-down because of the satellite’s orientation orbiting over the North Pole. Over the years of getting to know ice through images from space, Zagon had come to see the Arctic the way Inuit do on the ground. Staring at the fresh satellite image, it hit him: The Inuk had drawn an island edged with land-fast ice, which formed a similar shape each year. Zagon was seeing it now in a view from some five hundred miles above the planet. In-nook-poo-zhee-jook had marked the wreck site just north of land that he drew large, roughly like a left-handed thumbs-up. It appeared to be south of King William Island, but in a sketch so out of proportion that it was hard to judge distance or precise location. Unless you understood the peculiar habits of ice.
“Oh, my God!” Zagon gasped.
It was O’Reilly Island. In-nook-poo-zhee-jook had been trying to tell Hall he could find a Franklin shipwreck just northeast of it.
LINES OF FATE were converging fast. Martin Bergmann’s Mansbridge plan had worked perfectly. Broadcasting live from the Northwest Passage got the news anchor so jazzed about the North again that he couldn’t stop talking about it. Through Tim MacDonald, a friend who was doing well in the auto parts and electrical supply business, Mansbridge got in touch with Jim Balsillie, the billionaire cofounder of Research In Motion (RIM), the firm that invented the BlackBerry smartphone. The newscaster told the businessman he should get up to the Arctic, a challenge Balsillie couldn’t resist.
Bergmann connected Balsillie to the Arctic and its people in three trips together. In 2010, when the government-led hunt for the Franklin wrecks was in its third year, Balsillie and MacDonald joined the Philosopher Cruise through the Northwest Passage aboard the icebreaker CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent. At Cape Felix, they choppered over with Steve MacLean, an astronaut who was then head of the Canadian Space Agency. At another stop, they paid their respects at the Franklin sailors’ gravesites on Beechey Island. From the air, flying low over the Northwest Passage in the oscillating shadows of the thumping rotor blades, Balsillie spotted a Russian-flagged icebreaker. The helicopter pilot circled the ship, about five miles off Victory Point, in the same area where Erebus and Terror were sacrificed to the ice in 1848. A crewmember was standing at the bow, seemingly like an officer keeping watch.
“He’s looking for Franklin,” someone said.
“Why isn’t Canada doing this?” Balsillie wondered. “These are Canada’s waters. This is our Arctic.”
Back on the icebreaker, he was still steaming.
“So what are those guys doing out there?” Balsillie asked Bergmann and others. “Why haven’t they found it yet? What’s the problem? That’s really important. Why haven’t they found it yet? Let’s go look for it. Let’s start a proper search.”
The more he heard about Stephen Harper’s search project, the more Balsillie realized: “There is no plan.”
He got to work organizing one, and he committed to spend at least $10 million of his own money to find at least one Franklin wreck—at the same time that he was fighting to keep the multibillion-dollar company he helped build from falling apart. The partnerships Harper’s government had boasted about were largely just on paper. Some internal resistance was just run-of-the-mill bureaucratic inertia. But there was also pushback from age
ncies squeezed by budget tightening. If science and other projects were being shut down, and thousands of workers were losing their jobs in the civil service and industries hit by the recession, skeptics demanded to know why there was money to look for nineteenth-century British shipwrecks.
“All these departments didn’t want to work together,” Balsillie said. “We were trying to get them to cooperate because they were all playing games with each other.”
Balsillie decided to knock heads, gently, at a wooded acreage in the southern Ontario countryside, then part of a think tank he funds, the Center for International Governance Innovation. David Woodman’s phone rang. It was Bergmann.
“Listen, there’s a big meeting going on and everyone I talk to says there’s no reason to have it unless you’re there. There’s a bunch of specialists, but nobody has background. We need you to come and give us some.”
Woodman gave the opening presentation at the meeting where Balsillie kicked the Franklin search into high gear. Nudged on by Bergmann, Balsillie and MacDonald cofounded the Arctic Research Foundation in early 2011 to support a more coordinated search. In the warm glow of chandeliers and old leather at Ottawa’s Rideau Club, where the rich and powerful have been doing deals in wingback armchairs since 1865, Balsillie asked Parks Canada Vice President Andrew Campbell and other agency officials what was essential to success.
“We need a dedicated vessel,” Campbell replied.
Balsillie decided then and there to buy one. He asked for guidance from Bergmann, who thought his friend was joking. If a boat is a hole in the water that sucks up money, an Arctic boat is one that gobbles gold. Voraciously. Without care for anyone who might get hurt. To improve the chances of getting a vessel that would survive long enough to find a Franklin wreck, Bergmann let his assistant, Oksana Schimnowski, take leave to run the new foundation and find it a seaworthy vessel. As Balsillie waited to launch, friend and history buff Scott Burk suggested he brush up on Franklin history with first editions of the explorer’s journals. Balsillie bought a thick volume bound in brown leather, with a richly aged luster, only slightly worn at the edges. It was Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819, 20, 21, and 22, published in London in 1823, when he was an up-and-coming Royal Navy captain who won fame as “the man who ate his boots.”
Sitting at his dining-room table in Waterloo, with logs burning in the fireplace on a winter weekend, Balsillie read Franklin’s low opinion of the local Cree, whose blood the billionaire shared. Balsillie has Métis ancestry, with indigenous and Scottish roots inherited from his father. Criticizing the indigenous men for swapping women with traders like chattel, Franklin also faulted French voyageurs and Scottish factors, the sales reps of their day. They tricked Cree trappers into giving up their winter’s haul of fur pelts, mainly beaver, fox, lynx, and marten in imbalanced barter for imported goods such as butcher’s knives, coarse blankets, and ammunition. Still in debt from the previous season, and hoping to leverage competition between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the rival North West Company, the trappers were often reluctant to show all they had to offer before agreeing on a good price. The factors cracked open a barrel of rum, a cynical ploy to drown any Cree bargaining power in alcohol.
“However firm he may be in his denials at first,” Franklin wrote, “his resolutions are enfeebled by the sight of a little rum, and when he has tasted the intoxicating beverage, they vanish like smoke, and he brings forth his store of furs, which he has carefully concealed from the scrutinizing eyes of his visitors.”
The routine of getting Cree drunk, and keeping them in debt, was stoking violent resentment and “will, probably, ultimately prove destructive to the fur trade itself,” Franklin predicted. “Indeed the evil has already, in part, recoiled upon the traders; for the Indians, long deceived, have become deceivers in their turn, and not unfrequently after having incurred a heavy debt at one post, move off to another, to play the same game.”
A few pages later, Balsillie reached Franklin’s account of preparing to leave Cumberland House. Opened in 1774, the trading post sat on a wild frontier in what is now the eastern border of central Saskatchewan. A network of rivers, lakes, and mountain passes created natural highways for furs and goods moving to and from Montreal and Hudson Bay in the east and the disputed Oregon Country to the west, by way of the Rocky Mountains. In January 1820, Franklin strapped on snowshoes and headed west with George Back and John Richardson. Their group followed dogsleds packed with fifteen days’ provisions to the next shelter at Carlton House, on the South Saskatchewan River, en route to the Arctic coast. At 8 a.m., they set out from the fort. Two days later, a fur trader from Cumberland House caught up with them to deliver some pemmican that the expedition had left behind, an extraordinarily kind gesture for a party of men who would end up starving. The fur trader was on his way to look for native trappers who hadn’t been heard from since the previous October. A few weeks earlier, he had gone four days without food for himself or his dogs, until he picked up the trappers’ trail. Balsillie was stunned when his eyes fell on the selfless trader’s name, which Franklin wrote as Isbester, a Scot from the Orkneys.
Balsillie recognized him as a blood relative, the same Isbister that his cousins had told him about some eight years earlier. Until that moment, Balsillie knew his roots ran back to the fur trade, but he had no idea there was a Franklin connection. The dots connecting, like electrons firing down a wire, sent a jolt to Balsillie’s soul. Now he wasn’t just another Franklin-mystery voyeur. This was personal.
“I was a dog on a scent at that point,” he said.
By 2011, Schimnowski had reduced a shortlist of five used ships, checked out over as many months, to a sixty-two-foot trawler, built in 1979 to catch crab, shrimp, and groundfish on the Grand Banks, off Newfoundland. Balsillie bought the Ocean Alliance, which reached Cambridge Bay that summer, when he was back aboard the Louis for several days as she headed west for a another seabed mapping voyage with the US Coast Guard icebreaker USCGC Healy. When Balsillie got off at Cambridge Bay, and his BlackBerry locked onto a cell signal again, it rang with bad news. Turmoil roiling at RIM had taken another casualty in the boardroom. The $5 billion company, holder of at least 3,400 US patents, was crumbling. Just a month after Balsillie finished that third Arctic trip with Bergmann, the bureaucrat called and practically begged him to fly north again. The prime minister, Bergmann reported, was on his way to an annual Arctic photo op, this one a joint military exercise with the US and Danish navies to train for air and sea disasters.
“Really, I’ve got a lot of work to do,” Balsillie told him. “I’m up to my gills.”
This was one Arctic trip Bergmann wasn’t looking forward to, and not just because he had failed to persuade his friend to go along. He chafed at Harper’s tightening gag on scientists; he needed freedom to keep evangelizing for the Arctic. More often, he had to get permission from department flaks before he could speak to anyone outside the razor-wired walls of Harper’s government. He would buck the restraints, talk to a journalist without permission, say what he thought needed to be said, and warn his wife, Sheila McRae: “Oh-oh, I’m going to get in trouble. He tried to be very diplomatic, but a lot of it was about climate change and sovereignty concerns.” Bergmann traveled a lot to countries such as China and Russia, where competition in the warming Arctic was a growing concern. That made him even more suspect in the eyes of political operatives trying to enforce Harper’s control over experts for whom he had visceral distrust. Tired of being told to toe the line by people who didn’t know what they were talking about, Bergmann was looking forward to early retirement. He wanted to pick and choose his own projects, do only the things that mattered to him, the ones he knew were important to the cause.
The day before he left for Resolute, Bergmann spent time with his children. That night, under pressure to pack and to organize the PowerPoint presentation for the prime minister and other dignitaries, he took an hour’s break to keep a sol
emn promise. Bergmann had bought three mini horses for his family and their supply of hay came from a farm outside Winnipeg. Neil, the farmer who owned the place, enjoyed hearing Bergmann’s Arctic stories. Just as he did with anyone who showed interest in the North, Bergmann happily obliged with more. Neil returned the favor by teaching Bergmann the Zen of horse training. The farmer thought people used too many words with horses. Be quiet, he counseled Bergmann, and just look in their eyes. Let them relax. Guide them gently to what you want them to do. Bergmann promised Neil a cap with the logo of the Polar Continental Shelf Program in return. That couldn’t wait until he got back. He had to deliver them that night.
The next morning, August 20, 2011, Bergmann flew to Yellowknife and caught First Air flight 6560, a chartered Boeing 737 carrying passengers and freight. The trip northeast to Resolute was scheduled to take just over two hours. Bergmann was one of fifteen people on board, including the flight crew. In midflight, the company dispatcher warned of deteriorating weather at Resolute, a common glitch in Arctic air travel. The flight crew and the dispatcher discussed landing somewhere else, but all agreed they would press on for Resolute. At 4:23 p.m., air traffic control gave the green light to begin the descent. At seven knots, the wind at ground level was a gentle breeze. The runway was wet. The aircraft made a left turn to prepare for the final approach to Runway 35T. Then things rapidly started to go wrong.
First Officer David Hare told Captain Blair Rutherford five times within twenty seconds that the plane wasn’t lined up on the right course to the runway. They went back and forth over whether or not the navigation was accurate. Hare reminded Rutherford of a hill to the right of the runway. The first officer suggested that the pilot abort the landing and solve the navigation problem. The captain overruled him. Just over a second later, as the aircraft’s pitch increased, the worry was stark in Hare’s voice.