Franklin stocked Erebus and its companion coastal bombardment (or “bomb”) vessel Terror sumptuously, cramming “every hole and corner” below decks with provisions at their last port of call on the western coast of Greenland before the two ships steered north, into the ice, where no additional food or fuel would be available.2 Onboard supplies included an estimated thirty tons of flour, eight tons of beef, two tons of chocolate, and the same amount of lemon juice. He had several other reasons for providing so amply for his officers and men. On his first trip into the subfreezing Canadian wild a quarter century before, Franklin had nearly starved to death. The “man who ate his boots” was not about to repeat that ordeal. Nor did he want to see any of his men waste away to skin and bones on spoonfuls of pemmican, dying slowly and horribly before his eyes as had happened back then. His party had been caught out in the open by an early, punishing winter, and then not found the dried meat promised by local French voyageurs waiting for them at Fort Enterprise. Despite these near disasters, Franklin still trusted in his luck—something they had badly needed on that misbegotten, underfunded, and inept expedition, when he and a few companions had unwisely set out into the snow-covered forest even though not one of them had ever hiked, hunted, or camped before. (They were, after all, navy officers.) Brushing aside warnings from local Inuit, Franklin had relied solely on his (unreliable) compass and chronometer to guide them to the Great Slave Lake, and that and other poor decisions (along with some bad luck and unreliable indigenous peoples) had cost them dearly: eleven of his nineteen men never made it back to England.
When he was planning this 1845 voyage to find the missing link in the fabled Northwest Passage, Franklin still had overweening confidence that he—as a seasoned commander—possessed the character, judgment, and Arctic experience needed to make this expedition successful. Having retrofitted his two sailing vessels with auxiliary, 20-horsepower steam engines (from railroad locomotives), covered the sturdy, double-planked oak hulls with iron sheathing, installed a warm-air heating system, recruited a complement of highly regarded officers, and stocked the ships with at least three-years-worth of food gave Franklin more reason to believe all would go well. (He anticipated having to spend only one winter in the ice.) His were the best outfitted ships in the Royal Navy. He also had faith in his God to sustain him. As his contemporary William Parry once observed, Franklin displayed a “Christian confidence in the Almighty, of the superiority of moral and religious energy over mere brute strength of body.”3
There were also important psychological benefits from making life on Erebus and Terror as comfortable as possible. Remaining so far north for years put the crew under great mental and emotional stress. Feeling bored, isolated, lonely, and forgotten would eat away at their resolve. With nothing to do for months at a time they would become introspective and depressed. The men would miss their wives, families, and friends dearly as the months turned into years, and their separation grew from being one of great geographical distance to an existential divide: the explorers’ world was so different and inconceivable to loved ones in England that they would become deeply estranged. Letters—handed over to a passing ship headed home—were a tenuous lifeline, not much to count on. (On at least one voyage, carrier pigeons had been brought along to carry notes across the Atlantic, but the birds had refused to leave the ship.4) To ward off loneliness, many men had talismans from home—a wife's likeness, a child's lock of hair—and put these precious relics on display in their cramped and spartan quarters below decks. Lavish celebrations, replete with multicourse banquets, abundant alcohol, raucous toasts, bawdy songs, and crossdressing dances—aimed to break the monotony and remind the marooned mariners that life could still be fun. Usually Christmas was the high point of the year. At midcentury, the commander of HMS Investigator, Captain Robert McClure, marked this holiday, as well as his recent discovery of the Northwest Passage, with a feast of musk ox and mincemeat, accompanied by “many a dainty dish” from his ancestral Scotland. The men conjured up their families by guessing when they would be attending church services and having dinner. A year later, still stuck in the ice, McClure used the occasion of their second Christmas celebration on the ship to heap praise upon his long-suffering crew, who had remained in good spirits notwithstanding. Several of his petty officers—perhaps emboldened by rum—declared they had never spent a happier holiday, with “a feeling of more perfect unanimity and good-will.”5 A few years later, some of Elisha Kane's party, sequestered for their second winter on the Advance—riddled with scurvy, surviving on chunks of frozen seal and walrus meat given them by Inuit fishermen, their morale at a low point after an accidental fire had destroyed their store room—somehow pulled themselves together for Christmas dinner, meager as it was (pork and beans) and, as Kane would recall, “forgot our discomforts in the blessings which adhered to us still; and when we thought of the long road ahead of us, we thought of it hopefully.”6 The men clinked glasses and toasted their absent friends and laughed uproariously at stale jokes, although Kane had to admit they might have just been putting on a good face, in order to temporarily stop thinking about their bleak situation. Making a navy ship feel like a home helped dull the crew's awareness of being cut off and forgotten. Furthermore, keeping up “civilized” appearances on board kept crews mindful of the superior moral principles these expeditions exemplified.
Some have argued that how Franklin's ships were outfitted and how their crews behaved in the frozen Arctic expressed his “cultural arrogance.”7 It is true that he considered his expedition to be representative of a British civilization that towered above all others. His vessels and their men were expected to illustrate this superiority by how well they managed under extraordinarily demanding conditions. The men on board Erebus and Terror carried out the same time-honored protocols and daily routines on the high seas that they observed while tied up at the Portsmouth Dockyard. Therefore, Franklin wanted his voyage into the Arctic to honor this decorum. The dress dinners, player-piano concerts, evening lectures, Sunday scriptural readings, and elaborately staged festivities proved that sailing beyond the civilized world did not mean they had to leave its trappings behind. No matter what the circumstances, English gentlemen, military or civilian, were expected to dress and behave in accordance with their station in life. Most celebrated for upholding his upper-class standards while traveling was the young Lord Byron, who, when he departed for the Continent with his good friend John Hobhouse and his personal valet in 1809, brought along four large and three small trunks, three beds with bedding, two bedsteads, four English saddles, and a large quantity of linen. (“We could not have done well with less,” Hobhouse protested.8)
The British military was as class conscious as any other social institution, if not more so: the distinctions between officers and enlisted men or sailors paralleled those separating aristocratic “gentlemen” from lesser males. They were, in effect, two categories of men—each with strictly defined standards for breeding, education, manners, cultivation, and social behavior, as well as character.9 On ships of the Royal Navy, this translated into two spheres of living. Officers and ordinary seamen had separate and different responsibilities, slept in separate quarters, ate in separate rooms, and enjoyed separate social activities. (In 1819, a starchy William Parry had made these class divisions seem self-evident: “It is scarcely necessary to add, that the evening occupations of the officers were of a more rational kind than those which engaged the attention of the men.”10) Segregation was deemed essential for efficient functioning, but also for upholding the social hierarchy. However, under certain circumstances, sticking to such rules could seem ridiculous and detrimental to overall well-being. For example, because naval officers were exempt from performing physical labor, this left the exhausting work of hauling boats across the ice to enlisted men, impeding their progress. Even more bizarre was the isolation of ranks maintained when primitive living conditions seemed to call for more informality. In 1912, Scott's so-called Northern Party, consistin
g of three officers and three enlisted men, was forced to seek refuge for half a year inside a tiny snow cave, near a granite outcropping they whimsically dubbed “Inexpressible Island.” After they had finished digging it out, the officer in charge, Lieutenant Victor Campbell, drew a line with the sole of his boot to demarcate the sailors’ underground quarters from those of the three officers (the “quarterdeck”). Although each section was within earshot of the other, the two groups agreed that what was said on one side of the line would not be “heard” on the other. But the sordid realities of their confinement made a farce out of such artificial partitioning. Said the party's surgeon, George Levick, “You cannot watch one of your naval officers vomiting, shitting on himself, and wetting his sleeping bag and hold him in quite the same awe and esteem.”11
Such class hierarchies were part and parcel of a broader notion of human inequality. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, “advanced” Western nations believed they stood ahead of all other peoples in a Darwinian struggle to dominate the planet. London's enormous Crystal Palace (more than a third of a mile long), erected in 1851 to commemorate England's scientific and geographical progress during the Industrial Age, was a secular cathedral to the “Progress Goddess” that had brought the nation great wealth and power and made it the envy of the world. In outlining his vision for the international exhibit to be held in this palace, Prince Albert praised man's recent achievements in “approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world…to discover the laws by which the Almighty governs his creations, and…to conquer Nature to his use.”12 A major obligation of “advanced” nations like England was to bring their “enlightened” ways to “primitive” people living in distant, “backward” corners of the earth. Explorers served as the advance party, introducing Christianity along with modern technology, while gathering information about the earth's resources, climate, and geography. Contact with “natives” confirmed the Euro-American belief that their societies were far ahead of the rest. Whereas theirs were undeniably “modern,” the others remained “savage.” Innate racial differences had given the British (and other Europeans) a character and intellect that these lesser humans could not match. These other races had little to offer “modern man” other than the satisfaction of affirming his superiority. Darwin's On the Origin of Species was fittingly on many explorers’ reading lists. Fridtjof Nansen made a nightly habit of reading from it as he was readying for a trek to the North Pole in 1895. A few years later, Edward Wilson would read aloud from Darwin's ground-breaking opus to Scott and Shackleton while they were stuck in their Antarctic tent, waiting for the weather to improve before they could move further toward the South Pole. During their subsequent 1912 expedition, both Wilson and Scott found that Origin made for good bedtime reading.
By and large, early European explorers probing the Arctic frontier adopted a condescending attitude toward the native peoples they met there. They manifested the prejudices and stereotypes of their day. And they were received as higher beings. The sudden appearance of oddly dressed white men, in tall, three-masted sailing vessels laden with cannon, rifles, telescopes, buttons, brass kettles, needles, and other marvels, duly impressed and even intimidated the Inuit natives, who reasoned these newcomers must be gods. But, for their part, commanders like Parry and Sir John Ross perceived only “the savage” incarnate. Ross, the son of an Anglican priest, spent four winters living near Inuit settlements but all that time kept his distance, as if fearing some kind of contamination. The casual morals of the Inuit—who were more than eager to share their “wives” with these newcomers (in exchange for jackets or knives)—appalled him. After some of his crew members still went ahead and had sex with some of these women, he called them “disgusting brutes.”13 After Parry invited several Inuit to board his ship off the coast of Baffin Bay to trade, he was pleasantly surprised that his curious visitors evinced a “respectful decency” (they did not try to steal anything, as Inuit were wont to do) and “less of that intolerable filth by which these people are so generally distinguished.” While friendly toward the Inuit and admiring of their igloos, warm deerskin and fur clothing, intelligence, and kindness shown their children, Parry could not helping regarding them as practically subhuman: “In the situation and circumstances in which the Esquimaux [sic] of North Greenland are placed, there is much to excite compassion for the low state to which human nature appears to be there reduced; a state in few respects superior to that of the bear or the seal.”14 After returning several times to the Arctic, Parry adopted a more balanced view: although the Inuit people may have lacked some “higher virtues” of other savages, they were also free of their “blackest vices.”15
Because they were “heathens,” ignorant of Christianity, indigenous peoples of the Far North were considered hopelessly deficient in moral character. A few Danish missionaries were trying patiently to convert Inuit, but most explorers thought this a waste of time. What was more important was that their English guests not “lapse” into their primitive ways. The kindly Franklin felt pity for the Inuit and treated them like children: he showered them with trinkets in return for food or to win their good will. (Attempted thefts by some Inuit later made him change his mind about their trustworthiness.) Other explorers were simply appalled by their manners, hygiene, and appearance. George Back was dismayed that some Inuit women were willing to barter away their children for “a few needles.”16 Most came to the conclusion that these natives were unreliable and dishonest: they could not be counted on to keep their word. At best, Englishmen and Americans regarded these inhabitants of the Arctic as exotic oddities. Watching some of them dance at a Danish outpost in Greenland, William Godfrey, a member of Elisha Kane's midcentury expedition, declared them “the most extravagantly burlesqued specimens of humanity that were ever produced in Nature's workshop.”17
Negative preconceptions prevented these early Western emissaries from appreciating the good sides of the Inuit, let alone learning from them. The idea that these “savages” in furs had anything to teach white Europeans was laughable—as absurd as expecting a child to teach a man how to hunt or sail a ship. So British crews kept wearing their wool naval jackets and flannel pants, even though it was obvious that the Inuit were staying comfortably warm inside their parkas. (To be fair, it should be noted that the English were not alone in refusing to adapt their military garb to different environments. When Napoleon's troops arrived in Egypt in the middle of the summer of 1798, they were wearing similarly inappropriate woolen uniforms. Ordered to march in them—and without canteens—for six days across the desert from Alexandria to Cairo, thousands of them died from heat exhaustion and dehydration.) The explorers also didn't try to harness dogs to pull their sledges or to build igloos. They disdained sleeping bags and considered snowshoes a poor substitute for sturdy leather boots. Gradually, however, these new arrivals to the Arctic came to admire how well the Inuit and other indigenous peoples coped with their harsh environment and actually adapted some of their ways. Over time, familiarity bred more than contempt. During his first excursion through northern Canada, Sir John Franklin became curious about the locals’ lore and made efforts to learn more about it. His surgeon and naturalist, Richardson, may have labeled the Cree a “vain, fickle, improvident and indolent race,” but he was willing to excuse their deficiencies as caused by their materially and spiritually impoverished circumstances: “the moral character of a hunter is acted upon by the nature of the land he inhabits, the abundance or scarcity of food, and, we may add, his means of access to spirituous liquors,” he noted.18 Richardson realized that judging the Cree by Western standards was patently unfair: “It may be proper to bear in mind also, that we are about to draw the character of a people whose only rule of conduct is public opinion, and to try them by a morality founded on divine revelation, the only standard that can be referred to by those who have been educated in a land to which the blessings of the Gospel have been extend
ed.”
As more and more expeditions came to know Inuit and other indigenous tribes better, the explorers’ opinions grew more differentiated. Condescension toward these “lower races” gave way to grudging admiration of their skills, knowledge, and personal traits. That native hunters had kept Franklin and members of his party alive during the bitter winters of 1820 and 1821 by bringing them game (even if they were not reliable in doing so), made the Englishmen realize how dependent they were on local help: they were not particular good hunters. (In a change of heart, Franklin's men took to wearing fur caps as well as leather gloves and pants during the extremely cold Canadian winter of 1825–1826.19) By midcentury British and American explorers were describing Inuit and other indigenous peoples in more favorable terms—and beginning to adapt their ways more widely. Pragmatic-minded Americans were the first to have a change of heart. In his first dealings with Inuit, on the Crown Prince Islands, Elisha Kane had been repelled by their filth and squalor.20 But his disdain did not long stop him from trying on their vastly superior footwear. After returning to Greenland in 1853, and finding himself beset on the Advance, Kane had visited a nearby Inuit settlement and been impressed by their well-insulated stone huts. Afterward, his men had protected their shipboard quarters against wintry blasts by likewise stuffing moss and turf on the inside walls of the hull.21 Wrote Kane, “My resolve was to practice on the lessons we had learned from the Eskimos. I had studied them carefully, and determined that their form of habitations and their peculiarities of diet…were the safest and best to which the necessity of our circumstances invited us.”22 While wary of becoming too much like these “savages,” he had to admit that some of their ways were worth adopting.23
To the Ends of the Earth Page 13