To the Ends of the Earth
Page 3
In this molding of the public hero, the man and his image often became separated. The explorer's flaws and shortcomings were overlooked. When the British government was searching for an experienced officer to head an expedition tasked with completing the mapping of the Northwest Passage in 1845, Sir John Franklin lobbied hard for this assignment: he considered it practically his birthright to take on this mission since he had already served with distinction on two previous Arctic expeditions. (Franklin was drawn back to the Far North as much by the tantalizing prize of twenty thousand guineas promised the first ship to reach the storied Polar Sea as by a desire to restore his reputation after having been fired as British governor of Van Diemen's Land—present-day Tasmania.) However, he had several glaring deficiencies. For one thing, Franklin was fifty-nine years old and had been in the Royal Navy for some forty-six years, putting him way above the normal retirement age. For another, he hadn't commanded a ship at sea in over a quarter century. Physically, Franklin did not make a reassuring impression: he was short, portly, nearly bald, and weighed over 210 pounds. His fleshy jowls sagged, and his bald pate made him look more like a retired vicar than a naval commander. His soulful gaze suggested an almost feminine sensitivity: he was wont to react squeamishly when dogs or other animals were mistreated due to the “wanton and unnecessary cruelty” of their masters.18
In fact, while representing the Crown in Van Diemen's Land, Franklin had passed the first law prohibiting such abuse there and had tried to reform the island's barbaric penal colony.19 When, a few years earlier in the Arctic, his party had been attacked by a group of Inuit, Franklin had told his men not to harm them, lest that only make matters worse.20 He would not tolerate cursing. He was so kind-hearted he could literally not kill a fly. During an ill-fated 5500-mile trek through the Canadian wilderness, when his men were nearly driven mad by swarms of sand flies biting them so fiercely that their faces had streamed with blood, the deeply religious Franklin had been observed gently blowing the “half-gorged” offending insects from his hands so he could continue taking observations, declaring with Buddhist equanimity that “the world is wide enough for both.”21 Yet he was a man who had left his first wife on her deathbed—albeit at her urging—rather than miss out on a chance to lead another overland expedition, this time to Baffin Bay. Franklin was certainly not a Lord Nelson, even if he had once served on a ship next to Victory at Trafalgar. (The only thing he had lost during that epic battle was some of his hearing.) Although still in reasonably good health for a man of his age, Franklin had never fully recovered from his harrowing misadventures while mapping the northern Canadian coastline some two decades before: he had fallen into an icy river and nearly drowned; his party had endured exceptionally cold weather; and they had so little to eat that they had to dig deer carcasses out of the snow and scrape putrid marrow from inside the antlers.22 Franklin had lost eleven of his nineteen men on that trip, most as a result of starvation.23 But none of these factors led the Admiralty to conclude he wasn't really the right man for the job. He had had Arctic experience—even it was mainly experience of disaster—and that was what counted the most. In the eyes of the public, Franklin was famous for being “the man who ate his boots”—along with lichens and rotten deerskin—and this sobriquet had earned him a great deal of admiration. When he finally returned to England from that inland expedition, he was embraced as a celebrity, promoted to captain, and elected to the Royal Society.24 The lengthy journal Franklin had kept, detailing his travails and close calls with death, was—like William Parry's—turned into a bestselling book. Some called it “the greatest epic of all.”25 Thanks to it and detailed newspaper accounts, the British public became swept up in a “blind enthusiasm” for dramatic Arctic adventures.26 After successfully completing a third trip to the Arctic, in September 1827, Franklin was knighted by William IV and hailed as the foremost explorer of his day. His name was on everyone's lips.
Franklin's primary purpose in 1844 was to fill in the contours of the last stretch of uncharted Canadian coastline by navigating all the way through the Northwest Passage to the Pacific. To carry out this task he was given two polar-seasoned and newly outfitted sailing vessels—Erebus (named, somewhat ominously, for a dark region in the Greek underworld) and Terror (which had fired its cannon at Fort McHenry, thus helping to inspire Francis Scott Key to write the “Star-Spangled Banner”). The two ships sailed from Greenwich on May 19, 1845, and reached Baffin Bay without incident in August. Early the next month they were spotted southwest of Greenland, sailing in warm weather, surrounded by hundreds of icebergs.27 Other sightings were reported much further north.28 But afterward there was no more news of Erebus and Terror. For two years there was an unsettling silence. None of the two hundred tin cylinders crew members were supposed to have thrown overboard with papers marking the ships’ route were found.29 Some observers worried, but others said there was no cause for concern: Franklin had planned to remain out of touch through the fall of 1847.30
But by November fears were mounting. The Admiralty announced that it was sending three parties across the Atlantic to look for the missing Franklin and his men—one, by sea, up the Bering Strait, another into Baffin Bay, and a third overland to the mouth of the Mackenzie River. But these expeditions turned up nothing. It was if Erebus and Terror and all 129 officers and men on board had vanished into the mists. The lack of any communication from Franklin, or news about his fate, grew increasingly troubling. Franklin's formidable second wife, Lady Jane, now took up his cause with the tenacity of a female bulldog. She wrote hundreds of letters—to kings, presidents, and other heads of state—begging them to help in the search for her husband. She scolded the Admiralty for dragging its feet. She pressed her case in public, displaying a panache that few women of her day possessed. With great adroitness and emotional force, she reminded political and naval leaders of their duty to the missing men, appealing to their sense of chivalry.
Touched by her plight and persistence, the American and British governments dispatched more ships to the Arctic to continue the search. Parliament announced a reward of £10 thousand for any word of the Franklin ships (and another ten thousand for discovering the Northwest Passage). The retired New York shipping magnate Henry Grinnell was so moved by her impassioned letter to President Zachary Taylor that he donated most of his fortune to finance further rescue missions. Lady Franklin herself used up almost all of her own money to finance seven voyages (and was disinherited by her father for doing so).31 She put up a reward to whaling ships for any news of her husband. And still the search parties found no traces of Erebus and Terror. Over the ensuing dozen years, more than thirty rescue expeditions set out, from England and the United States, to find out what had happened to the missing men, in the most extensive and prolonged operation of this kind ever mounted. Governments spent some $4 million on rescue efforts (equivalent to $80 million today) between 1848 and 1854 alone.32 At times the Arctic waters were so crowded with rescue ships that they could signal to each other with flares or balloons, and their officers exchange courtesy visits.33
Many people back in England—like the resolute Lady Franklin—held out hope that at least some of the officers and crew were still alive, perhaps being taken care of by local Inuit on some remote island. Unfortunately, the would-be rescuers had only a few clues and theories about where the ships might have gone and thus where to look, and the Arctic was a vast, little-charted, and unpredictable region. Like eager Good Samaritans leaping into the surf to save a drowning person, the rescue ships themselves often became trapped in the ice and had to be rescued. All too often their quests ended in disaster. Some ships were crushed and sank. Sailors succumbed to diseases, starved, froze, and fell to their deaths at the bottom of yawning crevasses. And yet the ships kept coming, all to no avail. It wasn't until 1850—some six years after Erebus and Terror had disappeared over the horizon heading toward North America—that some traces of the lost expedition turned up. A massive mound of six hundred empty food cans
, along with some sledge tracks, and three graves, was discovered on Beechey Island, west of Baffin Bay. But only in 1857, after the two crews and officers had been missing for thirteen years, did a party funded by Lady Franklin come upon more remains and a document stating that Sir John had perished in 1847, also providing more hints at the fate of the surviving members of his party. It was not the complete story, but it was enough for the British government, the British public, and even Franklin's long-suffering wife to accept there could no longer be any hope. The Franklin expedition—every last man—was dead. It was time to move on.
But what had kept the public's attention so riveted on this one lost party for so long—beyond the point where could be a realistic hope of the crew and officers still being alive? Clearly, the mystery surrounding their disappearance exercised a powerful tug on the public's imagination. Much like the fate of the aviatrix Amelia Earhart or, more recently, the Malaysian airliner that plunged without explanation into the Indian Ocean in 2015 have engrossed millions in recent times, so were people in the 1850s captivated by the puzzle of how so many men could disappear from the face of the earth. The British Empire had not suffered the loss of so many sailors since the Battle of New Orleans, in 1815. Like all who served in uniform, the Franklin party embodied the nation's pride and eminence: they had been fully expected to succeed in their quest to complete the Northwest Passage and add to their country's glorious maritime tradition. This expedition—amply supplied with food and other amenities, utilizing state-of-the-art ships sheathed in iron to protect their hulls, and equipped, for the first time, with coal-powered steam engines to barrel through the ice—was the most advanced ever to head to the Far North. Franklin and his men also had a thirty-year history of British exploration in the Arctic to draw upon. So their apparent loss came as a great shock. Instead of achieving one of the greatest feats of navigation, “the romantic and heroic idea of the British Navy in all its power overcoming Nature at her harshest had suddenly been reduced to the pathetic image of Francis Crozier [Franklin's second-in-command] leading the gaunt and diminishing remnants of a great expedition along the barren shores of an Arctic island.”34
Furthermore, those who die so inexplicably affect us deeply because their fate touches upon our worst fears of what our own demise might be like—expiring all alone, without anyone at our side or ever knowing what has happened. Anxiety about the Franklin party's fate was intensified by the fact that their ships had literally gone off the grid, into a forbidding and unexplored part of the world, as alien in the nineteenth century as the surface of Jupiter is today. What the Arctic was actually like was one of the last great, unsolved questions about the earth's geography. This empty space on maps had been filled with wild conjecture: perhaps some “lost tribe” of humans lived there, basking on idyllic tropical isles; perhaps there were mountains filled with mineral riches; perhaps the pole was surrounded by a gigantic hole, plunging into the bowels of the earth and coming out at the other side—a theory that more than half the members of the US Senate and President John Quincy Adams had deemed worth investigating.35 If they had reached the Open Polar Sea, the Franklin party might well have gone on to the heart of this mysterious Ultima Thule and wrested away its long-kept secrets. If so, then the missing sailors likely possessed information that would change forever how human beings thought about their planet—like the first photographs of the earth taken on the surface of the moon. Just having the courage to venture so far made the Franklin party heroic, even if they had failed to reach their goal.
Vicariously, the rest of the Western world traveled with them. One of the salient traits of this Second Age of Exploration was public curiosity about the Other—the bizarre, wild, exotic, dangerous, and unimaginable lands (and peoples) lying outside the pale of civilization that were then being visited for the first time. Because of the wide availability of newspapers and affordable books in the nineteenth century, ordinary people could closely follow what these explorers had seen and experienced. A prominent instance was James Riley's Sufferings in Africa—a grim tale about American merchant sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of western Africa in 1815 and then enslaved by Arabs. This book became the first “bestseller” in America, making a lasting impression on readers such as the young Abraham Lincoln.36 Such riveting, true-life narratives responded to a longing for adventure and escape from mundane life in the United States and Europe.
The ordinariness of the heroes did not diminish their popularity. If anything, this made them even more admirable. If Franklin had to resort to chewing on his boots, this act revealed not his desperation but his plucky resourcefulness. In fact, the term “pluck” came to signify the most admired quality of the polar explorers—especially for those who were English. It compensated for their shortcomings and mistakes. “Pluck” was also a character trait that many readers could relate to—unlike great courage or stamina. The Everyman aspect of figures like Franklin endeared them to their audiences by making them seem more plausible and abundantly human. After his exhausted party finally pitched their tents on an island in the Beaufort Sea, in far northern Canada, in mid-August of 1826, becoming only the second band of Europeans to traverse the rapids of the Mackenzie River, Franklin took out the silk Union Jack sewn for him by his recently deceased wife, the poet Eleanor Anne Porden, placed it on top of the protruding pole, and then watched silently as the wind set it aflutter. Franklin, whose brief first marriage had been something of a mismatch, wrote later in his journal that he had been nearly overcome with emotion at that moment but checked himself from letting these “natural” and “irresistible” feelings show: “I felt it was my duty to suppress them, and that I had no right, by an indulgence of my own sorrows, to cloud the animated countenances of my companions.”37 This extraordinary self-restraint, the uxorious lament for a lost wife, lying in her grave on the other side of the Atlantic, certainly must have touched the hearts of his readers. The image of Franklin as a kindly and considerate commander who always put the welfare of his men first, who read Dante's descriptions of hell for consolation around a crackling campfire, and who exemplified what Parry described as “Christian confidence in the Almighty, of the superiority of moral and religious energy over mere brute strength of body,” struck a resonating chord in the minds and hearts of his countrymen.38 He was their kind of hero.
So was William Parry, judging by how he presented himself in his books. After his ship Hecla had settled into its winter quarters several hundred miles to the northeast a year before, Parry had stopping keeping his diary because the days were so monotonously uneventful that there was no point in describing them. He would spare his readers a retelling of this interminable boredom—although doing so also enable him to avoid mentioning the complaints from his sailors about their inadequate winter clothing: Parry had neglected to bring along any fur-lined coats. With poor ventilation and clammy moisture inescapable below decks, the men were never able to warm up. To mollify them and enliven the long winter months, Parry mounted diversions. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Henry Parkyns Hoppner, had proposed staging monthly “masked balls,” and these entertainments—performed “without licentiousness,” in keeping with Parry's moral probity—had done the trick. So had plays where sailors in drag had extolled the virtue of their patiently waiting wives. So had the gay observance of all possible holidays, including Valentine's Day, when poems disavowing erotic love were read aloud, to howls of laughter. (“Cupid! Fond of unity / Our boreal community / Defies you with impunity / Your arrows and your bow.”39) So had classes in reading and writing, as well as regular scripture readings, designed to “improve the character of a seaman, by furnishing the highest motives for increased attention to every other duty.”40 So had daily calisthenics on deck in subfreezing temperatures and putting out a newspaper. So had regular inspection and cleaning of quarters. English readers would have approved of Parry's solicitousness about his men's well-being, his improvisation, his rectitude, his discipline, his belief that hardship bu
ilds character, his confidence that Englishmen could do whatever they put their minds to, and his piety—not to mention his scoffing at the pleasures of the flesh. His less admirable traits, such as his foolish dream of sailing all the way to China before winter set in, his lack of Arctic experience, his inadequate preparation, his bad decisions, and his prudery, were kept out of the pages of his journal. Although readers could applaud what the explorers had endured, they must have put down books like Parry's with ambivalence. Boldly going where no man had gone before, for the glory of God and country, was uplifting, exciting—and a cause for patriotic pride. But these adventures exacted a heavy toll. Unlike in war, where men died bravely amid a volley of rifles, or marched home to cheering crowds, the Arctic forced would-be conquerors to submit to slow, torturous, and essentially passive suffering. Ships were caught in the ice, stuck there for years, and their crews subjected to frightful conditions over which they had no control. The pattern of becoming surrounded by ice—rendered helpless, at the mercy of unyielding elements—was repeated over and over again. The challenge for polar explorers was, in effect, to stay alive and, by showing “pluck” in the process, reveal their good character. This was a very different sort of heroism than that which the British navy had shown in defeating the French. In the icy and lifeless North, so far from home and country, Lord Nelson's rallying cries of “First gain the victory and then make the best use of it you can” or “Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat” bore no relevance at all.
As expeditions searching for Franklin met the same fate—more men died in the effort to find his party than had been in it—public expectations of what could be accomplished in the Far North gradually diminished. People implicitly acknowledged that Nature in this extremity was not to be conquered, only survived. Victory lay in not giving in, in not being easily defeated. Courage consisted of pushing ahead against invincible forces, not necessarily in defeating them. When Sir James Ross headed south out of Cape Town in 1841, eager to locate the South Magnetic Pole and earn his nation's applause, he came a cropper when his two ships—later to be Franklin's—came upon an ice shelf one thousand feet high and seemingly as big as all of France, which “dwarfed their ships, filled their line of vision and blocked their passage to the pole.”41 Ross then had to concede he could no sooner get past this barrier than through the cliffs of Dover. So he turned back.