Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  “Once through Alexandra Strait, the ice conditions in Queen Maud Gulf to the south are fairly benign, and once any ice surrounding the ships broke up, at that point it would have been possible to regain control,” he said.

  SOON AFTER THE WORLD heard the Terror had been found, the tide of snide remarks struck social media: Why did it take so long for the geniuses to find the Terror when she was submerged in the very bay named after her? people asked. The connection can only be a coincidence, however telling it might be. Francis McClintock named Terror Bay, and numerous other spots along King William Island’s coast, when he was searching for Sir John and his men on behalf of Lady Franklin in 1859.

  “My plan for naming that previously unexplored coastline was to call the two principal Bays after the two ships & all the minor bays,—points, islands, etc. after officers of these ships; those of the Erebus being grouped about ‘Erebus Bay’, similarly those of the Terror about ‘Terror Bay.’ I regarded that coastline as sacred to their mummies, I attached no other names than theirs’ to it,” he wrote two decades later.

  When Parks Canada officials heard of the discovery, they were livid that the Bergmann team had kept it secret for a week instead of notifying marine archaeologists aboard the Wilfrid Laurier so they could steam south and take control of the site. But Schimnowski and his crew, who were operating under a Nunavut scientific research license, wanted to be sure they had found the Terror first. When they were certain, Balsillie called Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office. As word spread through the bureaucracy, an ugly turf battle broke out. In private discussions, the Parks Canada camp accused the foundation’s discovery team of damaging the wreck with their lost camera array before divers had visited the wreck to check. After more than a century and a half, the Franklin Expedition hadn’t lost its power to rile people. Like sailors priming their cannons, parties lawyered up.

  I couldn’t help but think Kamookak must be right, that peace for himself and his people, and an end to all the suffering, political manipulations, and recriminations that have followed the first Royal Navy explorers, can’t come unless Franklin’s body is found: freed from the permafrost, or wherever he may lie, to go home and be at eternal rest in the nation that he, and his courageous men, so proudly served.

  17

  An Offering to the Dead

  Not long after the discovery of Erebus in 2014, Louie Kamookak fell ill again. He was rushed to the hospital for six more hours of heart surgery. Doctors saved his life once more by repairing the heart valve they had given him during his last brush with death, after the historian thought he was closing in on Franklin’s grave.

  “I believe it’s a mystery within a mystery,” he told me later.

  Kamookak held on and recovered, and the wreck that had occupied a corner of his mind since he was a boy became real on a Saturday morning in the summer of 2015. Adrian Schimnowski asked him whether he wanted to visit Erebus’s ocean grave, and, after deliberating a bit, he opted to go. His wife, Josephine, who had been a partner in his research, wanted to go too, but there was no room.

  “Why don’t you bring something there?” she asked him the evening before the visit.

  They talked about how their elders, when they were having trouble finding game to hunt or weather was frighteningly bad, would take hunks of meat, or anything useful they could give up, as an offering to the dead. They would toss it in the air and ask their ancestors for good luck. Many believed the ritual sacrifices worked.

  “Why don’t you take some sand from the elders’ gravesites?” Josephine suggested.

  Growing up, Kamookak had seen his dad do it quite a few times. His heart told him now was the time to do the same. He went to Gjoa Haven’s graveyard with a small plastic bag and scraped in some sand. With the offering in his pocket the next morning, he went to the Martin Bergmann first to watch members of the wreck exploration team take samples of marine life that had made the shipwreck their home, such as sea cucumber, starfish, clams, anemones, worms, and kelp. Kamookak asked if he could sprinkle his sand into the water over the Erebus, and an archaeologist approved. The Bergmann’s cocaptain, Gerry Chidley, buzzed Kamookak and Jacob Keanik, who runs Gjoa Haven’s Nattilik Heritage Centre, over the edge of the wreck site in an inflatable Zodiac. The pilot shut down the outboard engine, letting the boat drift with the current, with nothing but the Arctic wind and lapping water to disturb the silence. Kamookak was expecting to be excited. It had taken a long time for him to reach a Franklin ship. The sheer size of the ship was a bit startling. But oddly, the encounter felt almost ordinary, as if this weren’t the first time.

  “It seemed like it was not new,” he told me, his voice subdued, choosing his words carefully. “I’d been thinking about it for a long time.”

  He took a deep breath and let out a long sigh.

  “It was quite a feeling of my ancestors being there, and of my elders not being there to witness what they’d been passing on for a long time. The stories about it.”

  The boat made a slow pass over the Royal Navy behemoth, and, peering down through seawater as clear as the lens in his rectangular eyeglasses, Kamookak could see divers carefully moving about her. Marine archaeologists had spent days gently plucking thick kelp from Erebus to reveal more of her hull and deck and give the divers a better look at a treasure trove of artifacts. Using a plastic measuring tape as a datum line, they measured and recorded the objects’ locations in relation to each other. An underwater laser mounted on a tripod fired fans of blue light through the sea to create 3-D images for further study.

  After a complete pass over the wreck, Chidley fired up the outboard and headed back to the ship’s stern, where Franklin once slept and worked at his chart table in the commander’s cabin. There they came alongside a second Zodiac and waited for each dripping diver to climb back in. Everyone except Kamookak sat on the bobbing boats. Those wearing hats removed them as he began to speak in a quiet ceremony. He asked for calm weather and a safe research expedition. After a minute of silence, Kamookak spread the sand onto the ocean that had protected Erebus from the ravages of time and Arctic ice. A gentle puff of warm wind blew from the southeast. He felt that Hummahuk and his other ancestors were there with him. That they were part of him.

  A wave of sadness rolled over Kamookak. He thought again of all the elders he had interviewed, especially the ones who had passed on, and of Sir John Franklin and his men, the suffering they shared with Inuit, and the peace he sought for all, the dead and the living. Then the Zodiac drifted for a second time along the length of Erebus. For some five minutes, Kamookak watched her broad wooden deck pass beneath him, no faster than if he were a sailor making his way up to the mighty bow that had tried to break free from a prison of ice. Remnants of the forest of kelp fronds that divers had been trimming from the wreck undulated on the current, like wings on the breeze.

  “It was a relief,” Kamookak told me, not because he wanted or needed any vindication for himself or his people. He was just glad no one could doubt anymore that “what my ancestors were saying about the ship being in that area was true and strong.”

  He had faithfully followed the path of his great-grandmother Hummahuk, who had taught him to revere the stories and the power they hold. Yet Kamookak’s quest was not over. He still longed to see what she saw: the gravesite with the headstone that seemed it must hold the remains of a great man.

  “A lot of elders I interviewed, I knew, had seen more than they could say. They kept it to themselves. Inuit believe that you stay away from dead people. You leave them alone. Elders told me, ‘Stay away from them.’ They worried about spirits.

  “About three elders told me about word that was passed down through the years: ‘If you are travelling on King William Island, you don’t travel alone. Because there’s bad spirits.’ I think there is a lot of them because people have experienced many mysterious things happening there.”

  After visiting the wreck site, Kamookak cleared up the question of the place’s name
for me. In 1869, when In-nook-poo-zhee-jook marked the spot where the ship went down on his sketch map for Charles Francis Hall, he drew an islet nearby.

  “Kivevok,” the Inuk must have said, meaning: “Where it sank.”

  Hall named the islet that instead, Kamookak told me. Over time, that toponym must have stuck. Inuit guides working at that site where divers explored the wreck from an ice camp in 2015 told me, with broad smiles, that an island hidden by the thick sea ice not far from our feet was called Kivevok. They wondered why it took the qalunaaq so long to figure out that the ship they sought was sitting right there. Where it sank.

  In-nook-poo-zhee-jook likely drew the map in the snow. That’s what Inuit usually did for each other in those days, from the perspective of the hunting grounds where they camped, Kamookak said. From his research into Inuit family trees, the historian believes Hall’s source was likely part of a group that lived on islands west of King William Island. The top of the map he drew wasn’t north, as Hall and many other outsiders had assumed over the years.

  “The Inuit never think of north, east, south, and west,” he explained. “It’s always where you’re originally from, their own hunting grounds and areas, even though they were nomadic.”

  That basic cultural misunderstanding meant that Hall, and most of those over the generations who studied the map he brought home, couldn’t see the precise location the Inuk had pointed out because they didn’t see the Arctic as Inuit did.

  THE STORMS stayed away after Kamookak’s ceremony, allowing divers to look again for the numerous artifacts that had moved and disappeared from sight. The brief Arctic calm did not mean, however, that there was peace in Inuit hearts or those of others who had virtually given their lives over the Franklin mystery. Answers only breed new questions. The hauntings have not stopped. Kamookak’s theory that Inuit encounters with white men suffering slow agonizing ends, the walking dead of Netsilingmiut territory, might explain some of the stories of spirits wandering the Arctic, made sense to me at first. But then, after we got to know each other better, he told me more about his recurring nightmare, and the night his parents said something was pulling him from their tent.

  I thought I saw a tremble, maybe a faint shiver, in his large hands, weathered and worn by a long, hard life in the High Arctic. The fingertips on his left hand were bent and slightly twisted, as if years earlier, they had been caught in a machine and wrenched. Kamookak had told me why on a cold winter’s day, after he took me to meet his eighty-three-year-old father, George, who was living in a neatly kept house overlooking the frozen, blinding white expanse of the Rasmussen Basin. The diesel furnace was blowing heat like a desert breeze. A picture of Jesus at the Last Supper hung on the wall behind him.

  Later, as he was leaving me at my hotel, Kamookak shared an intimate secret. He held up his left hand to show me those gnarled fingertips. The fingernails had fallen off when he was a child. It never occurred to him that he was different until he got older, Kamookak told me, so he asked his parents what had happened. His mom said his hand changed when he was a boy, right after the night his parents stopped the dark being, whether spectral or real, from pulling him away into the Arctic night.

  Saying nothing more, leaving me to find meaning in the gesture, Kamookak pulled on his down-filled mitt, drew the fur-lined hood of his heavy parka up over his head, and stepped out into the Arctic. A wispy, ethereal vapor cloud swirled around him, like a blast of steam.

  Shivering in the doorway, watching through frosted glass as he left, I wondered whether a ghost had come off the ice to grab Louie that day, and whether it might still be restless, angry enough to come again.

  AFTERWORD

  From the start, the epic hunt for the lost Franklin Expedition was a tug-of-war between establishment experts sure of their knowledge and outsiders following an inexplicable compulsion, an inner voice, or an educated guess. Whalers working from generations of Arctic experience were pitted against revered Royal Navy men who looked down their noses at merchant mariners. Staid bureaucrats chafed at the distraction of clairvoyant visions. Lady Franklin had to fight the Admiralty tooth and nail before the private 1859 expedition that she organized discovered the first written proof of what happened to Sir John and his men. Too often, Inuit were dismissed as untrustworthy savages.

  The establishment’s endless politics, posturing and bickering condemned brave sailors to death in the mid-19th century. It threatens their legacy early in the 21st century.

  In the end, laymen won the day. Helicopter pilot Andrew Stirling found the breakthrough clue, the rusting iron davit piece that led Parks Canada’s underwater archeologists to HMS Erebus in 2014. Inuk Sammy Kogvik and his ghostly encounter with what seemed a ship’s wooden mast poking through ice guided the Martin Bergmann crew to Terror Bay, and a propitious autopilot setting delivered the hunters to the wreck of HMS Terror in 2016. To the discovery team’s leader Adrian Schimnowski, finding the Terror was not only surreal. It was another hint from the Arctic to search deeper.

  “There’s something else mysterious here,” he told me through the oscillating whine of a satellite phone call from the Bergmann, “something else we’re starting to touch beyond the Franklin story. Maybe it’s about human nature. How people treat each other. How things can go wrong in a place that’s so isolated. Our connection to the land is stronger in the Arctic because we’re not distracted. Maybe we can sense things we can’t normally sense in the south. There’s something pretty powerful up here.”

  Like the Inuit whose knowledge was ignored for so long, the Arctic may be trying to tell the world something as the region that helps cool Earth warms roughly twice as fast as the rest of our planet.

  “It’s about respect for one another, and respect for the environment, and working within what’s there already and not trying to fight against those elements,” Schimnowski said.

  Now that Erebus and Terror are no longer missing, experts can focus on solving the bigger mystery of how two of history’s most storied ships ended up far south of where they were abandoned, standing upright at the bottom of Arctic seas. Inuit have always known that working together is essential to survival. That same spirit of cooperation will be the key to solving the complex Franklin mystery as the world watches archaeologists, historians and armchair theorists try to sort out the many clues that will come to light as the long excavation of Erebus and Terror unfolds.

  The government of Great Britain ceded control of Franklin’s Royal Navy ships and their contents to Canada in a 1997 agreement. Canada promised to conserve any relics brought up from the site and make them available for public display and research, including in Britain. Any gold recovered, apart from privately owned coins, would be shared between the two countries, after deducting any portion due by law to a third party. But the first priority was to ensure that the archaeological sites were properly handled once discovered.

  That was enshrined in the Memorandum of Understanding’s opening clause, which declared: “Research and disclosure shall prevail over interests of financial gain and media coverage.” Critics of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s handling of the Erebus discovery questioned whether his government upheld that agreement. He seemed determined to squeeze as much good publicity as possible from the historic find in the months leading up to the 2015 election, only to lose in a defeat that forced his retirement from politics.

  Louie Kamookak made another search for Franklin clues in the summer of 2016. Traveling in late July with two young Inuit apprentices, Jamie Takkiruq and Michael Eleehetook, the historian and his team set out on all-terrain vehicles to visit sites in Hummahuk’s stories. They had enough food and fuel for a week to ten days. The rapidly warming Arctic climate complicated things: July was the world’s hottest month since records began in 1880, according to NASA. Sea ice, which so bedeviled explorers in the nineteenth century, is a lamented loss in the twenty-first. As the cooling ice cover disappears, the feedback loop of atmospheric warming speeds up, and weather pat
terns shift. Several days of heavy rain on King William Island turned the frozen tundra so muddy that the expedition couldn’t reach the intended sites. But one vexing pattern remained the same.

  Once again, Kamookak fell gravely ill after searching for clues to Sir John Franklin’s demise. And once again, surgeons had to save his life, this time at a hospital in Yellowknife, capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. What Kamookak called “the mystery within a mystery” only deepened.

  High in the stark Arctic, where there is less to interfere with human perception, Inuit do not need modern scientists to tell them of existence beyond what they can touch. Spirits are as real to them as the sea, snow, and ice. Those who still believe as their ancestors did are well aware that the souls of the dead are free to travel to the eternal hunting grounds only if they have peace. They fear Sir John Franklin’s soul is among them.

  A restless spirit trapped in the land of the living “does all it can to persecute those that are to blame for its life after death having been ruined,” Knud Rasmussen wrote. “Only very great shamans are now and then fortunate enough to kill these evil spirits.”

  Kamookak would rather appease Sir John’s spirit, by helping him get back where he belongs.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Fig. 1 Sir John Franklin, the commanding officer of the doomed Franklin Expedition, in 1840.

  Fig. 2 Lady Jane Franklin, wife and staunch supporter of Sir John Franklin, in a drawing made in 1816.

  Fig. 3 The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, departing from England in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, in 1845.