Ice Ghosts
Page 34
He waved for Park to come take a look, and Stenton followed. He knelt down and picked up an iron object, which was lying against a lichen-covered rock, on the side facing away from the shore. The archaeologist looked for the telltale broad arrow.
“Shame,” he thought. There wasn’t one.
Until Stenton moved the heel of his hand and saw two broad arrows that marked the artifact as Royal Navy property. In between them was the number 12, stamped by a metalworker’s hand generations earlier. A little farther along the shoreline, Stirling found two semicircular pieces of wood, grayed, covered in lichen and weathered by time and the elements. Once back on the icebreaker, Stenton took the artifacts to the forward lab for the marine archaeologists to check them against the ship plans for Erebus and Terror. Jonathan Moore quickly identified the iron piece—about the length of a man’s forearm and shaped like a hairpin—as a davit pintle. Corroded from more than a century and a half in the Arctic, but still solid, it was part of the device sailors used to lower and raise boats along the side of the ship.
The wooden objects, which had square wrought-iron nails protruding, were two halves of a plug for a deck hawsehole, an iron pipe where the ship’s anchor chain ran down into a locker below. The davit piece was too heavy to blow in the wind, even an Arctic gale. The archaeologists suspected that ice deposited the iron on shore when it severed the sunken ship’s masts. Archaeologists later concluded that a tangle of shrouds, the rigging that once held up Erebus’s three masts, probably caught on the lee-side davits and ripped them off. The searchers had a good feeling they were about to find a Franklin wreck. Pumped on adrenaline, eager to show their finds to colleagues on the Laurier, Stirling thundered back to the icebreaker and set the helicopter down gently on its skids. As the rotor wash stirred up a windstorm on the ship’s stern deck, Bill Noon waited on the small hangar’s edge. He always came down from the bridge to wait when Stirling radioed that he was on his approach to land with Stenton and Park. The icebreaker’s skipper, a fervent lover of old ships and seafaring lore, wanted first look at anything the archaeologists found. From the smirks on their faces, Noon knew something big was up.
“I’ve got something cool to show you,” Stenton whispered to the captain as they headed inside, the Royal Navy relics still stashed, like a wary prospector’s gold nuggets, in the chopper.
Within half an hour, Noon was on the bridge looking at the iron piece of a Royal Navy ship whose sailors had sacrificed their lives to open navigation through the Arctic Archipelago. The weight of the moment wasn’t lost on the icebreaker commander who was living their legacy. He knew the importance of the broad arrows right away and rushed down a narrow stairwell to his cabin on the next deck to study ships’ plans for Erebus and Terror. Within minutes of Moore’s identification of the relic as a davit piece in the archaeologists’ forward lab, Noon reached the same conclusion. The pace quickened as Harris and Youngblut planned the move into uncharted waters, agreeing on long search lanes in what was still a big, poorly known part of the Arctic seas. The archaeologist and the hydrographer always attempted to draw search patterns that followed the undersea geology in seas where shoals and submerged drumlins molded by ancient glaciers can easily tear a hole in the hull of the divers’ boat, Investigator. The aim was to follow search lanes running parallel to likely hazards that could suddenly come out of nowhere in poorly charted areas like this. But after years of endless hunting for the Franklin wrecks, Harris also had a good feel for the nuances of the Arctic, how she moved things around, where she might likely hide a very important secret. If nothing else, the detailed planning improved efficiency.
“If you run against the grain, you’re always having to stop and start, stop and start,” Moore explained.
The icebreaker’s crew lowered Investigator over the side the next morning, September 2, shortly after seven. The archaeologists had little reason to think this wasn’t just another day. The latest artifacts were exciting, the most important Franklin Expedition relics discovered since US Army Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka searched in the late 1870s. But they weren’t exactly arrows pointing to a wreck hidden somewhere underwater in a vast area full of possibilities. Inuit, ice, or some other force could have moved the objects a significant distance from the ship where they belonged. The ship in the Inuit accounts that told of several men living aboard, apparently with a dog, may have described a location long before the vessel actually sank, perhaps after drifting with the sea ice, or under the control of sailors. Her wreck could literally be anywhere.
First, the team finished off a search block left over from a previous day. Then the archaeologists moved closer to the small island where Stirling had found the artifacts on shore. They deployed their Klein 3000 side-scan sonar, housed in the towfish, small and light enough for a diver to hold in his arms, attached to two hundred meters of armored cable. Harris, eyes fixed on a laptop computer in front of the high chair next to the pilot’s wheel, watched grainy live sonar images of the seabed slowly scroll down the screen. A thick black line ran up the middle, the shadow created by the towfish’s electronic pings bouncing off the ocean floor to either side. After technologist Chriss Ludin finished the first planned line, he handed control of the boat over to technician Joe Boucher. Investigator did a tight turn and headed back down the second line, chugging along just fast enough to keep the towfish from hitting bottom, but slow enough to get a good look at anything important that might be sitting down there, without hitting it. Except for some ice scours, the seabed was the same monotonously featureless world that had eaten up more months of the team’s lives than they cared to remember. Until suddenly the sonar pings began to reflect off something big and solid, standing tall on the ocean floor.
“That’s it!” Harris shouted when a grainy image of the wreck scrolled down the laptop computer screen mounted across from the pilot’s wheel.
The ship was firmly on her keel, proudly upright amid hard-packed flat cobblestone, gravel, and sand, in just thirty-six feet of water. With roughly nine feet of clear ocean separating the top of her deck from the surface, anyone looking down from a boat or a hole in the ice could see the wreck as clear as day. Camouflaged in a thick forest of kelp, it might have looked like a reef to anyone who may have passed over before now. The wreck was nestled in between shoals, open at the northern end and protected from heavy scraping by sea ice that could have torn her apart. Some shoals were hiding just six feet beneath the surface, waiting to rip a hole in a passing ship’s hull. Yet, apart from a large bite out of the Franklin wreck’s stern, she was in remarkably good shape. As the next step in officially confirming they had in fact found either Erebus or Terror, Harris showed sonar images to Marc-André Bernier, head of the underwater archaeology unit, on the icebreaker. They still weren’t precisely sure which wreck they were looking at, but there was no doubt the long Franklin ship hunt was finally over.
Yet they couldn’t tell anyone—the historic discovery had to stay secret. This was Stephen Harper’s political gold, and he had to be the one to reveal it to the world. The delay would also make sure the British government could be informed through proper channels that the wreck of a Royal Navy vessel had been located. Every possible step was taken to make sure the news didn’t leak. Even Bill Noon, a Coast Guard commander, couldn’t be told that an expedition headed by his icebreaker had found one of Franklin’s ships. Four days passed from the marine archaeologists’ discovery to the call over the ship’s intercom for the captain to go to his quarters on the evening of September 6. The marine archaeologists were waiting for Noon and closed the captain’s door behind him, normally not a good sign on a Coast Guard icebreaker in the Arctic. He feared the worst. But as he sat next to his bookshelf lined with volumes on nautical history, Noon heard news that astonished him. He watched a digital recording of the sonar images on a laptop, but it took a few minutes for the reality to sink in. The men hugged and cried. Then the captain realized he had to immediately unplug his ship from the world.
I went out on Investigator a few days after the find and spent a day bobbing on the ocean with Jonathan Moore and the team. I watched as they went through the motions of wreck hunting, listening to Van Morrison and Pink Floyd on a tablet speaker Boucher made out of a paper cup, never once getting a hint that they had already found a Franklin ship. I finally got confirmation from my bunkmate, Marc-André Bernier. Our cabin was at the icebreaker’s stern, just off the crew’s weight room, a couple of decks down from the helicopter pad. He kept the secret from me, under orders from the top, until he was frantically packing for a trip to Ottawa for Harper’s news conference.
“You almost think this ship wanted us to find it,” Bernier told me in our cabin. He teared up describing the moment the marine archaeologists knew they were looking at one of the most sought-after wrecks on the planet, one that had for so long eluded the biggest, most costly hunt in maritime history. As I watched Bernier stuff his things into a duffel bag, I could see the gates slowly starting to swing open on years of pent-up pressure to produce.
“I cried. We all did,” he confided.
“You really have to trust in yourself and in your colleagues. There’s constant pressure and scrutiny because we’re government. And it’s this quest: Some people love it, some people think we shouldn’t be doing this. There are also people saying, ‘You’re not looking in the right place.’ And the more you look, and the more you don’t find, the more criticism you can have.”
When the wreck was found, the Vavilov was still stranded in the northern search area, at times meandering through the minefield of ice floes at less than one knot. John Geiger, who wasn’t told about the discovery of the crucial artifacts, was steaming. Just after 11 p.m. local time on September 1, hours before the next morning’s discovery, he tried again to get Andrew Campbell, the Parks Canada vice president, to tell the Laurier to head north to escort the Russian cruise ship into prime search territory.
“We are in a very frustrating situation as you can imagine,” Geiger wrote. “There is open water as you can see on the satellite image, but we have no way of getting there without [an icebreaker] escort.”
Campbell wouldn’t budge. The parks executive had already told Geiger he would leave deployment decisions up to the expedition’s lead experts.
“As all logistics and planning for the operation has been managed effectively by the professional teams, I trust they are still doing so with the full knowledge of the situation,” Campbell wrote on August 30.
Geiger insisted his vessel was in a good position to make a find and implied that the Laurier was wasting time running search patterns in the south, in lanes as monotonous as cutting grass.
“I still think we have a shot,” Geiger pleaded, “but not if the Laurier is mowing the lawn down in the southern search area.”
STILL WORKING UNDER a shroud of secrecy, the marine archaeologists prepared to explore the wreck before the looming winter entombed Wilmot and Crampton Bay in sea ice. They loaded scuba gear, underwater cameras, and a remotely operated vehicle, bright yellow and the size of a portable generator, aboard Investigator. The icebreaker’s crew worked davit winches to gently lower the survey boat into rolling seas. Before the divers set off, unauthorized witnesses were ordered off the icebreaker’s decks. Keeping the precise location of the shipwreck under wraps was essential for protecting her from treasure hunters. Bill Noon even alerted his sailors that he wanted to know if anyone spotted or heard aircraft flying over, in case someone was running surveillance. Only later, when the Canadian government declared an exclusion to the area around the wreck site, was it clear where she lay on the seabed. The final resting place of Sir John Franklin’s flagship, HMS Erebus, is ten miles southeast of the tip of Grant Point. She was found, not far below the surface, right where Inuit had been saying for generations that a large ship sank after several men, and perhaps a dog, had been living aboard.
In the archaeologists’ first dive, lasting just forty minutes, they were overwhelmed by the trove of artifacts littering the ship and the surrounding seabed. They quickly identified two brass cannon off the wreck’s stern. The ship’s cast-bronze bell, a powerful symbol of any vessel, was easier to raise. When the divers brought it up, and the bell was cleaned, it gave new life to the spirits of 129 courageous men who gave their lives to expand the horizons of human knowledge. Dated 1845, the year they said good-bye to home and country for the last time, it was embossed with the British government’s broad arrow. The archaeologists later found the handle of a sword, a gilded hilt, minus the blade. It is easy to imagine someone like Sir John Franklin closing his hand on the sharkskin grip. The wreck was confirmed to be Erebus, Sir John Franklin’s 104-foot-long flagship, where he lived and worked in the commander’s cabin at the stern.
Over several dives, including some through triangular holes in thick sea ice the following winter, the archaeologists retrieved numerous other objects, including part of the ship’s wood-and-metal wheel, a patent medicine bottle, and a round piece of frosted glass encircled by brass. It was one of Preston’s patented illuminators that brought light down to the men crowded into the Franklin ships’ dank lower decks. Even better, it could be switched out with a ventilation fan.
THE SUMMER AFTER Erebus was found, underwater archaeologists stationed themselves near the site on the Martin Bergmann, which gave them much more time to explore the wreck. They identified around seventy relics of interest, including a sextant. Then a gale struck, with winds pounding the sea at more than sixty miles an hour, forcing the wreck team to ride out the storm in Cambridge Bay for five days. While they were gone, waves more than a dozen feet high crashed over the wreck site. With just nine feet of water between her and the surface, the storm may have exposed Erebus to the hammering wind and waves. It was almost as though a dead ship were stirring back to life, riding out another polar storm with whatever strength she could muster, as Erebus had done so many times before the one that had trapped her.
“By the time conditions cleared, and the Martin Bergmann was able to set sail back to the site, the water went from crystal clear to zero visibility,” said Adrian Schimnowski, who had taken over from his wife as the Arctic Research Foundation’s operations chief.
“You couldn’t even see your hand in front of you underwater. Almost every artifact that had been documented had moved. Even some of the timbers had moved. Some artifacts that were just lying on the deck had disappeared. They don’t know where they went.”
Like a flailing animal, the furious storm had shoved huge timbers around, tossed invaluable relics about, and caused untold damage to clues that might have solved the mystery of how the Franklin Expedition met its end. The sextant was buried under heavy timbers. Plates and other items were washed overboard.
The archaeologists could only plan for another expedition, in another year, to see what they might be able to salvage as the search for Terror continued.
16
Terror Bay
Conflict became so ingrained in the Franklin search over the decades that even a dramatic success like the discover
y of Erebus unleashed an ugly squabble. Nunavut refused to issue archaeological permits to Parks Canada’s divers working on the site unless Canada’s government surrendered authority over any relics the archaeologists wanted to raise from the seabed. The feds relented, fearing the Mounties might arrest the archaeologists, and then reasserted authority by declaring the wreck and surrounding waters a national historic site. Invoking a land-claims agreement, Inuit pressed for negotiations to sort out ownership and control of more than fifty Franklin Expedition objects marine archaeologists had brought up from the ocean floor. Inuit argued the relics should be displayed in their communities to boost tourism.
In 2016, the Coast Guard icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Arctic Research Foundation’s R/V Martin Bergmann, and the Royal Canadian Navy’s HMCS Shawinigan went looking for the Terror’s wreck. But with only nine days set aside for the search, hopes weren’t very high. No reporters were allowed on the expedition. Experts assumed sea ice had likely torn Terror apart and scattered the remains in deep ocean, not far south of where the ships were abandoned in 1848 at the northern end of Victoria Strait.
Before making its rendezvous with the rest of the expedition, the Bergmann set off to do some science. Marine scientist Lina Rotermund, freshly graduated from Halifax’s Dalhousie University, was on board to study Chantrey Inlet, at the mouth of the Back River. The Bergmann spent two days at the same place Franklin Expedition survivors had hoped to reach 168 years earlier, expecting to free themselves from the Arctic by following the river south. Rotermund was focused on the habitat of Arctic char, armed with an array of instruments to measure ocean currents, study the seabed and its sediments, measure the ocean’s salinity, and gather other data aimed at improving the iconic fish’s chances of surviving the rapid warming of the Far North’s climate.
The first stage of a longer study was part of the Arctic Research Foundation’s broader attempt to make sure Inuit enjoyed lasting benefits from Erebus’s discovery. In Gjoa Haven and Cambridge Bay, shipping containers were transformed into artists’ studios and science labs, powered by solar panels and wind turbines. Young Inuit were recruited as trainees to offer hope of good jobs and a more promising future. A related project worked to build sustainable tourism. Parks Canada promised a new facility in Gjoa Haven, with a list of options under discussion with Inuit that included a visitor center and conservation labs for recovered Franklin artifacts.