The discovery of a skull on Boothia Peninsula across from Cape Felix is itself odd. How did it get there? All evidence clearly indicates that Crozier’s crewmen, after abandoning the ships and reaching land at Victory Point, headed south. Eventually, their path turned east, headed — we have surmised — for the nonexistent strait said to run through Boothia. The skull discovered by MacInnis and Beedell was found across the water on the Boothia coast and slightly north of the northern tip of King William Island. We could hypothesize that some survivors managed to cross the water to Boothia Peninsula. After discovering that a strait did not exist to the east but a water passage did reach up the coast to the north, they could have worked their way up through Rae Strait. But there is another possibility.
McClintock was puzzled when he realized the boat he had discovered was pointing north instead of south. From this, he (and many later historians) concluded that a party of men had tried to return to the ships. On the other hand, everything about that last trek — the useless items carried along, the too-brief note left at Victory Point, the departure made so early in the year — all point to a frantic abandonment of the vessels. The Inuit even told Hall that they found food on board the stranded ship near Adelaide Peninsula. Would Crozier have left food behind aboard ships that might have been crushed in his absence? Further, the crew continued to carry the useless items on their final march, indicating that they remained in a hurry, too concerned about other things to discard what wasn’t needed. So much seems to suggest that the crew was not just abandoning their ships, but fleeing from them.
We have already noted another interpretation of the northward pointing boat: the possibility that some of the crewmen were headed back because their path had been cut off to the south — that they were now in retreat. In this case, they would not have returned to the ships; this was where their flight had begun. Instead, they would have tried again to reach Fury Beach, this time by travelling to the north tip of King William Island and across to the Boothia Peninsula [see map 26].
Remarkably, an Inuk named Seepunger had told Hall that three skeletons were to be found at Cape Felix. This, of course, did not fit in with any reconstruction, including a return to the ships. No bodies should have been left at Cape Felix, since it was far north of Victory Point, the starting place for the final march. But then in 1949, Inspector H. Larsen of the RCMP discovered “a human skull embedded in moss between some rocks on a ridge about a half mile from the sea” at Cape Felix.13 Because Crozier’s men should not have passed that way, it was presumed the skull had come from an earlier burial made from the ships before their abandonment. Yet, in conjunction with the skull-with-the-hole discovered on the Boothia coast, the skull at Cape Felix suggests that some men did indeed retreat that way. Perhaps Crozier was in charge of this party and encountered Too-shoo-art-thariu sometime after reaching the Boothia coast. If so, then the skull-with-the-hole would indicate that whatever danger dogged them in their flight followed them even after they had reached the opposite shore.
Map 26
Crozier’s retreat to Cape Felix and Boothia Peninsula
THE GIANT WITH LONG TEETH
Apart from the stories of skulls with holes, Hall also heard details about the ship said to have been stranded somewhere near the Adelaide Peninsula, to the southwest of King William Island. It was McClintock who had first learned about this stranded ship, when he encountered the Inuit on the west coast of Boothia. He had been convinced that the Inuit had only revealed the wreck’s existence by accident. Why they should have wanted to keep it a secret he couldn’t know. But, once the cat was out of the bag, more details emerged and he heard about the body said to have been found aboard the vessel.
At that time, McClintock had only learned that the body was of a man, “that he must have been a very large man, and had long teeth.”14 Now, ten years later, Hall also heard about the ship and the dead body. He was told: “A native of the island first saw the ship when sealing; it was far off seaward, beset in the ice. He concluded to make his way to it, though at first he felt afraid; got aboard, but saw no-one, although from every appearance somebody had been living there.”15 Though we don’t know what was meant by “from every appearance”, this comment would likewise seem to suggest that the ship had been hastily abandoned when the crew deserted and headed for Victory Point; they had left so quickly that it still looked as if “somebody had been living there.”
What’s more, there was food on the ship. Hall reported, “On my asking if they saw anything to eat on board, the reply was that there was meat and tood-noo in cans, the meat fat and like pemmican.”16 It is impossible to imagine Crozier abandoning provisions aboard a vessel almost certain to be crushed in the ice, unless he had no choice — unless the abandonment had been so sudden and so unexpected that there simply wasn’t time to gather up all the food.
After the first Inuk had visited the stranded ship, he set off to bring a party of friends to see what he had discovered. They soon returned and entered the vessel, where they found a body. McClintock had been told that it was a “very large” man, with long teeth. Hall was also told about the long teeth. As for how large this man had been: “They found there a dead man, whose body was very large and heavy, his teeth very long. It took five men to lift this giant kob-lu-na [white man]. He was left where they found him.”17 Hall also recorded: “Another native at this interview told nearly the same story of the ship and of the man found on board, adding that he was found dead on the floor, his clothes all on.”18
In general, historians have simply assumed that this “giant koblu-na” who required five men to lift him was merely a figment of the Inuit imagination; there had been a body perhaps, but it had been of normal size, conceivably one of the crew hypothesized to have returned to the ship. Others, though, have found the story too specific to pass off as imagination. But what could it have been? Certainly not a member of Franklin’s crew — not if it really took five men to lift the body.
Noel Wright suggested that the Inuit had stumbled upon a ship’s figurehead. It was his theory that the ship discovered by the Inuit wasn’t one of Franklin’s, but was in fact McClure’s Investigator, having been carried by the ice stream down to Adelaide Peninsula after its abandonment in 1853. He noted that neither the Erebus nor the Terror had figureheads, but the Investigator did. As for the long teeth: “They must have been enormous for their size to have astonished the Eskimos, whose own teeth are by no means small. I have told how McClure’s famous ship was put afloat as the Resolution, and, although the builder’s records no longer exist, I suggest that any shipwright who had to produce a figure head exemplifying ‘resolution’ would have carved a face showing the teeth firmly clenched.”19
This was surely a clever theory, and one with which W.G. McKenzie agreed. On the other hand, a dissenting opinion was expressed by L.A. Learmouth who wrote, “As for the big, heavy man with long teeth . . . Mr McKenzie agrees with Admiral Noel Wright apparently that it possibly could have been the ship’s figurehead rather than a true man. This though one of the Eskimos in question, In-nook-poo-zhee-jook, an intelligent and much travelled man, ‘had seen Ross and party on the Victory, and Rae in 1854’ and would not likely mistake a ship’s wooden figurehead for a kablunak.”20 Learmouth went on to recall Hall’s report that the body had been found “his clothes all on”, further weighing against the figurehead theory. Learmouth believed the Inuit had simply found the corpse of one of Franklin’s crew.
Other theories advanced to explain the giant corpse were that it was the body of Franklin himself preserved in rock salt for the voyage back to England, or alternately, some sort of coffin. In the end, though, any explanation founders against the same treacherous shoals: surely the Inuit knew a corpse when they saw one? But, for any corpse to require five men to lift it, it must have been truly giant indeed.
Of course, it is obvious where this is headed. The Inuit told legends from the distant past involving a race of giants, the Tunnit, who inhabited the Arc
tic and, specifically, King William Island. In one way or another, the legends speak of holes being drilled into foreheads. Some of the skulls left by the doomed members of the Franklin expedition were said to have had holes in them, a claim which is supported by the Boothia skull. The Tunnit were said to be giants, while it has been proven that the Dorset were not. A giant corpse was found on board the stranded ship. Aside from being remarkable for its tremendous size, the corpse was also remembered for its long teeth. We have no direct evidence that the Tunnit had long teeth. There may, however, be indirect evidence.
SHAMAN’S TEETH
If the Tunnit really did fight the ancestors of the Inuit a thousand years ago, and if they were not the Dorset, then both the Dorset and the Thule must have come in contact with this giant race. And, while Arctic cultures tend to leave few artifacts behind, the Dorset were remarkable for the quantity and quality of the carvings they have bequeathed to later ages. Yet, many archaeologists have found the Dorset carvings strangely frightening. Barry Lopez, in Arctic Dreams, noted that “the observation that Dorset art is unsettling, while the art that preceded and followed it is not, is common among archaeologists dealing with this period.”21 In one case, Lopez related how “an archaeologist working at a Dorset site in the high Arctic uncovered a cariboo scapula that left him shaken. Both surfaces of this flat bone were incised with scores of small human faces with gaping mouths . . . ‘I was frightened out of my wits by it,’ he told me.”22
This penchant for crowding agonized faces onto the surface of a single artifact is particularly unnerving. Some wands made of antler have up to sixty faces, “human and semi-human”, twisted and deformed, all seeming to rise from the surface as if seething up out of a liquid or out of a fog.23 What were the Dorset trying to say by such nightmarish images? What was the inspiration for these carvings?
And what about teeth? According to author Robert McGee, “Sets of ivory animal teeth, designed to be held in the mouth, must have been used in other ceremonies, in which the shaman transformed himself into an animal.” But what animal? A bear? Is it possible the Dorset shamans were trying to imitate something else they had seen, something even more frightening than the polar bear? A life-size wooden Dorset mask was found at Button Point, Bylot Island, in the high Arctic. It is presumed to have been worn by a shaman during a ceremony. Yet, there is something very odd about this shaman’s mask. It is astonishingly life-like, with none of the exaggerated features found, for example, in the Iroquois false-face masks. Yet, there is no denying that this mask also seems frightening and menacing, with eyes fiercely narrowed. But the most striking feature of this mask is the teeth. They are large and clearly emphasized, being prominently displayed in a toothy, gritted snarl. Here was no depiction of a polar bear; there is no doubt this mask was meant to represent something human or semi-human. Was this the face of the Tunnit?
What was the giant corpse found on the stranded ship? Who made the holes in the skulls found on King William Island? Were these the marks of cannibalism, or something else? As a final point, we might recall that when Owen Beattie exhumed the body of Thomas Hartnell, he discovered the corpse had already been autopsied. Though Beattie reported no mysterious holes in Hartnell’s head, drilled or otherwise, X-rays were unable to penetrate Hartnell’s head for the reason that his brain had frozen solid: he had “a solid block of ice in his head.”24 It was not until it came time to X-ray William Braine that this discovery took on a more mysterious colouring. The X-rays easily penetrated Braine’s head, proving that his brain had not frozen. As one of the team remarked, “I really don’t have any explanation for that because they were both buried under similar circumstances.”25
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Last Resource
If I were a cassowary
On the plains of Timbuctoo,
I would eat a missionary,
Cassock, band, and hymn-book too.
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce
A GHOULISH FASCINATION
How did they die?
Surely, when all is said and done, this is the most basic question — the one which holds the interest of the public. We can’t get away from the fact that it is a decidedly ghoulish fascination that draws people to ponder the fate of the lost Franklin expedition. For one thing, there were so many men who died — 129 of them. That staggering body count alone raises the Franklin expedition out of the mundane realm of the commonplace tragedy and elevates it to the grim heights attained by such later disasters as the Titanic and the Halifax explosion.
Then there is the comically mythic juxtaposition of those oh-so-British members of the Royal Navy, utterly confident in their power to conquer whatever the world could throw at them, ending their lives, in Peter Newman’s words, “stumbling across frozen drifts and rocks . . . commendably correct in hauling along their swank silver tea services and crystal decanters of port.”1 And then, perhaps more than any other reason, there is the dark taint of cannibalism that lurks forever behind the scenes like the phantom of the opera peering from the flies.
SEVERED HANDS
When John Rae first reported the Inuit stories of cannibalism in 1854, the news was received with scathing Victorian reproach. It seemed impossible to imagine “the flower of the trained adventurous spirit of the English Navy” (in Charles Dickens’ purple phrase) feeding like ghouls on their fallen comrades, no matter what the desperation of their plight.2 This blinkered response alone lends to the story a certain cruel satisfaction, a sense of just desserts. Newman, again, best exemplified this view when he observed that John Rae “had tampered with the Victorian dream; by denying Franklin his essential heroic mystery he deprived the British of a martyr.”3
And yet, as we have seen, there was reason enough to be surprised by both Rae’s and the Admiralty’s haste in making public such a damaging story, based as it was on second-hand information. Not even the Inuit ever claimed to have witnessed this cannibalism. They found the bodies and drew their own conclusions. But in more recent histories, belief in cannibalism among the Franklin survivors has taken on a sort of necessary certainty. It is the final perfect indignity, the crowning finish to a story which long ago ceased to be history and became instead a morality tale.
In contrast to the disbelief with which the cannibalism stories were originally received, modern writers have gradually grown more and more lurid in their imaginings of that terrible ordeal. Owen Beattie noted that in most recorded instances of cannibalism “The brain is either pulled through the base of the skull or eaten after the face is cut off. The need by members of Franklin’s dying crew for a portable food supply was the reason for the only exceptions to this pattern.”4 Beattie’s grisly image was quickly picked up by Peter Newman: “Beattie theorized that the skulls were carried along as a portable food supply: the panicked survivors must have supped on the brains of their fallen comrades.”5 And yet, the only eyewitness report we have — that of the encounter at Washington Bay — makes no mention of skulls carried along as a portable food supply. We may assume that the Inuit would have noted this detail, if present.
And yet, the evidence for cannibalism is not wholly confined to the Inuit stories. We have already noted the skull with the hole discovered on the west coast of Boothia Peninsula. Owen Beattie visited King William Island in 1981 and 1982, when he recovered bones left by the lost expedition. Particularly, the skeleton of one man found at Gladman Point “now began to reveal more ominous secrets.”6 The skull was in pieces and Beattie noted “fracture lines also indicated that the skull had been forcibly broken.” Grooves made by a knife were discovered on one femur, and the absence of other bones apart from the limbs and the skull was seen as further evidence “that the body had been intentionally dismembered.”
In 1992 and 1993, a Canadian expedition under Barry Ranford and Anne Keeleyside visited what was probably the second boat location, which Hall had been told about by the Inuit. Like Beattie, Keeleyside employed modern forensic science to analyze and study the 400
bones recovered. And, again, marks were discovered which indicated knives had been used on the bodies. Keeleyside concluded, “With the number of marks I see and their distribution, the evidence strongly suggests cannibalism. I can’t think what else could have caused those marks.”7 But there are reasons to doubt this interpretation.
Beattie observed, “Cannibalism seems to follow a pattern in instances of starvation: once the decision is made, the initial sections removed from the body are the meatier areas like the buttocks, thighs, lower legs, and arms. Recognizably human parts, such as hands and feet, are not eaten first.”8 And yet, Hall heard many stories about bodies with the hands missing. One woman told him: “One man’s body when found by the Innuits, flesh all on and not mutilated except the hands sawed off at the wrists.”9 Another Inuk, speaking about the bodies at Starvation Cove, related: “Inside of the boat under a ‘tent’ covering it from end to end were many dead white men in bed; that under blankets. Some with hands sawed off at wrists.”10 Barry Ranford, in an Equinox article about the 1993 expedition to King William Island, quoted Beattie’s passage about hands, then observed, “It is a telling measure of the crew’s desperate state that among [Anne Keeleyside’s] inventory are cut finger bones.”11 Of course, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that the crewmen, for some unknown reason, failed to follow the expected pattern and, in some cases, actually devoured the hands of their comrades before any other part. But it does raise questions.
The Franklin Conspiracy Page 26