The Franklin Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Blair Latta

  As the explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, noted in his Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic, “Suicide was the official verdict. The popular view from the start, or soon thereafter, was either that the manner of death was unknown or that Thomas Simpson had been murdered.”6

  THE THEORIES

  In a striking parallel to the lackadaisical Franklin search, the Simpson mystery extended to the strangely non-existent investigation itself. One writer commenting at the time found, “No properly constituted authority ever investigated the charges, nor did any court ever decide upon them. It was possible to have made a thorough and exhaustive examination into all circumstances, but this was never done.”7 Of the two witnesses, only Bruce was asked to give a deposition. Inexplicably, Legros, Jr. was not. The same writer further argued, “There were very apparent ways of settling whether Simpson had shot himself, but we are not told that any of these were adopted.”

  Two theories eventually developed to explain the case. The first was constructed largely on the unsteady foundation of Douglas MacKay’s conclusion that Thomas Simpson was insane and suicidal. MacKay worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company and wrote a history of the Honourable Company. His proof of Simpson’s insanity relied entirely on Simpson’s tendency toward outspoken criticism and self-aggrandizement. Stefansson, however, demonstrated that there was no proof to support MacKay’s theory. “Thomas had a low opinion of George [Simpson],” observed Stefansson, “and expressed it in some of his letters. This has been called a sign of mental unbalance. We can make at least the rebuttal that if disapproval of Governor George was proof of unsound mind, then there must have been an epidemic of this mental affliction in the Fur Empire during his reign.”8

  The second theory, to which most historians are inclined, supposed that Simpson’s known animosity toward “mixed-bloods” somehow precipitated the twin murder at Turtle River, with Simpson then being killed in revenge by the other members of his party (or else killing himself when he realized what would happen when the others returned).

  Yet this too was a theory based on flimsy evidence indeed. There was no denying Simpson was racist. He once stated, “To the extravagant and profligate habits of the half-breed families I have an insuperable aversion.”9 But, racism was epidemic at the time, especially amongst the members of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The fact that Simpson had been travelling with “half-breeds” as his only companions when he died hardly supported the theory that his “aversion” alone was excuse enough for murder. (Besides which, Simpson had called Dease “indolent” and George Simpson “repulsive” — by comparison his comment about “profligate” seems about on par.)

  Apart from the madness theory and the racism theory, one other explanation was advanced, but it was soundly rejected and remains so to this day. This was the theory put forward by Thomas’ brother Alexander. During his winters spent on Great Bear Lake between treks to the Arctic sea, Thomas kept in contact with his brother through letters. It was Alexander’s belief that his brother had been murdered for papers held in his possession — papers which revealed the secret of the Northwest Passage.

  THE SECRET

  About this theory, Stefansson wrote, “We have admitted that his [Alexander’s] opinions were somewhat prejudiced; so we ignore him and pass on to what others have to say.”10 Pierre Berton’s comments were similarly expressed. “What secret?” Berton asked doubtfully. “The passage was not a gold mine to be pounced upon in the dark of the night and looted.”11 “In any case,” Berton added, “[Thomas] Simpson’s theories were wrong.” Wrong, if we assume the “secret” was the supposed strait through Boothia; not so wrong, if we suppose the “secret” related to Victory Point and what was to be found there.

  Certainly, something was stolen from Simpson’s papers. Simpson had written a narrative of his explorations, which he had with him before he died. This narrative, along with other papers, was handed over to an American officer after Simpson’s death but did not reach England until October, 1841, the next year. Even stranger, the papers were not given over to Alexander until 1844, four years after his brother’s death. On receiving those papers, Alexander wrote to George Simpson in a red rage. “I hesitate not to assert,” he fumed, “that the depositories of my brother were rifled of valuable papers.”12 More alarming still, Thomas’ diary had also unaccountably vanished.

  Stefansson asked, “Who abstracted the papers? Who had opportunity?” He considered the possibility that George Simpson had done the deed, but, not surprisingly, had difficulty coming up with a motive. “We have, as said, no evidence to support the idea that Sir George, in his long career, ever plotted with anyone to kill anyone,” Stefansson equivocated. “We have no evidence, either, to prove that he did not go that far in a passionate loyalty to the Company which, unless it be murder, seems to have had no limit.”13 Yet, Stefansson admitted that if Alexander Simpson was right and Thomas had been killed for the “secret to the Northwest Passage”, then Thomas’ narrative “might be supposed to contain the secret.”14

  This narrative was given to George Simpson in May 1841, while at Lake Superior. But Alexander was in England at the time. He was astonished to learn that “temporary suppression of the manuscript had been arranged.” with the vague promise that it would be included in a “compilation” at some later date. Alexander fought to have the manuscript released and published on its own, under his brother’s name. He was successful and the narrative was sent to England in October, by which time Alexander had left for Polynesia. Colonel Edward Sabine took over the job of revising Simpson’s narrative. To Alexander, Sabine reported, “On perusal, I found the work in a state of such complete preparation, that the alterations which I saw any occasion to make were very few indeed.” Continuing, he observed, “it impressed me with an additionally high respect for your brother’s memory, that he should have drawn up the narrative of the expedition on the spot, in such a complete manner that it might well have been printed verbatim.”15

  Now we must ask ourselves a question. Thomas Simpson had a big mouth. He did not hesitate to express his disapproval of those he found wanting, often in such uncompromisingly harsh language that Douglas MacKay even came to the conclusion that Simpson was insane. Does Sabine’s description of Simpson’s manuscript really sound like the unedited narrative penned by such a man? Could anything Simpson might have written really have been published “verbatim”? The suicide theory gained its support from Simpson’s vicious slurs on those he worked for and with, but the same evidence serves to prove that someone did indeed rewrite his narrative before sending it on to England.

  Thus, less than five years before the Franklin expedition passed quietly and alone into the pack ice of Lancaster Sound, we find all the same elements of conspiracy and duplicity, delay and misdirection, which would mark the Franklin search like a Shakespearean tragedy. The mystery of Thomas Simpson’s death played out like a rushed rehearsal for the grander drama waiting in the wings. Only in scale was the Franklin conspiracy different. But for both, the result was the same. Thomas Simpson’s death proved the secret of Victory Point could be kept. The loss of the Franklin expedition and the subsequent conspiracy showed just how far the Admiralty would go to keep it.

  But there is one vital difference between these two mysteries. When Franklin and his crew vanished into the Arctic, whatever incriminating records they may have left behind were recovered and suppressed by the navy searchers. The Admiralty tried to do the same to Thomas Simpson. Nevertheless, his testimony may yet have slipped through the covetous fingers of those who sought to silence it, reaching out to us from beyond the grave like the steady rapping of a ghost at the Fox sisters’ seance.

  A deposition was taken from James Bruce, one of the two witnesses to the tragedy at Turtle River. In this deposition, Bruce testified that Simpson, having shot the other two men, then turned to Bruce and Legros, Jr. “Simpson called out to [Bruce], and ask him if he was aware of any intention to kill him [Simpson], to which [Bruce] replied, that he had nev
er heard of such intention on the part of anyone. [Simpson] then told [Bruce] that his life was perfectly safe; and he further told [Bruce] that he had shot Bird and Legros [Sr.] because they had intended to murder him, on that night for his papers.”16

  EPILOGUE

  Proof

  Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.

  William Shakespeare,

  The Merchant of Venice

  This is how it always begins.

  It begins with two stout bomb-ketches, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, their decks heaped with provisions, fastened to an iceberg in Baffin Bay, awaiting the opening of a passage through the ice to the west. That was how the two whalers, Prince of Wales and Enterprise, left the Franklin expedition, as Captain Dannett continued on his way, blissfully unaware that he had just entered the history books as the last white man to see those 129 souls alive. This is how it always begins.

  As for how it ends — like the strange disappearance of Joseph-René Bellot, “all else is conjecture.”

  This book is all about conjecture, about theorizing and wondering, asking questions and seeking answers, no matter how unusual, no matter where they might lead. Those answers, at times, seemed strange and unlikely, to be sure. Some might even be said to have been horrific. Occasionally, as with our rereading of the Victory Point record, the answers seemed self-evident and clear-cut. At other points, our theorizing acted only like a gust of wind briefly thinning an obscuring fog. In the end, we may find ourselves in the same situation as John Ross during that first voyage back in 1818 when, for ten precious minutes, the mist began to clear in Lancaster Sound and, through the dancing veils and hazy Arctic light, in the distance he could just barely make out . . . what? Perhaps even he never knew. Like Ross, we can only squint and ask ourselves: is it there or not? Do we really see what we think we see or is it a fata morgana, a trick of the light — refraction?

  In telling our story, we have managed not only to suggest an ending to the fate of Franklin, but we have also steadily pushed back its beginning, back through the mysterious death of Thomas Simpson, back through James Clark Ross’ visit to Victory Point, back through the disappearance of the Fury, and finally back even to John Ross’ first voyage and that moment of half-sight and revelation in Lancaster Sound, twenty-seven years before the Erebus and Terror weighed anchor. Indeed, it could be said we have even located traces of an even earlier beginning one thousand years ago, when the natives of the Arctic fought a terrible battle with a race of giants with flying houses — traces found only in Inuit legends and stone Inukshuit and a shaman’s mask with bared teeth.

  And yet, it may still be that everything we have conjectured is false. Perhaps there was no conspiracy, only fantastic bungling. Perhaps the Franklin expedition really was seeking the Northwest Passage, became permanently beset in the ice off King William Island, and abandoned the ships when they ran out of food. Perhaps they did resort to cannibalism and perhaps it was the Inuit who looted Simpson’s cairn at Cape Herschel. Perhaps the story of four survivors was just a muddled compilation of several other events, and Crozier never got off that island alive.

  Perhaps Adam Beck was a liar.

  We might accept this “standard reconstruction”, recognizing that it has the advantage of not requiring belief in things which are unbelievable. But, by accepting it we are left with a labyrinth of unanswered and seemingly unanswerable questions. Indeed, enough questions, we might say, to fill a book.

  We might instead try to pick and choose from the story recounted here, believing some parts while rejecting others. But, if we believe in a conspiracy but not in the “shaman light”, we are hard pressed to find a motive for the duplicity and deception. If we believe Thomas Simpson was killed for the “secret to the Northwest Passage”, how do we explain what that secret was? If we believe the mutilated bodies were the result of cannibalism, how do we make sense of the evidence proving the crew still had food when they died? How to account for the boat with the two headless bodies found pointed back to the north as if in retreat, two loaded shotguns set against its side? How do we explain the weird autopsy conducted on John Hartnell, his organs replaced in a mixed mass, his ribs returned upside down? If we do not believe Franklin’s mission was to reach Victory Point, how are we to explain Captain Coppin’s inexplicable foreknowledge? Ghosts?

  In the end, if we do not believe the unbelievable, we are forced into the restless posture of Franklin historians to date: we can only make note of the questions and shrug. One thing only we know for certain: something terrible happened on barren, ice-battered King William Island when Franklin’s crew arrived there, and that something was not confined to the white men.

  In 1923, Knud Rasmussen was told by the Inuit of a “year of horror” which came to the island.1 McClintock had been told “formerly many natives lived there, now very few remain.” Substantial evidence later showed that the Inuit, while never entirely abandoning the island, had indeed largely deserted it just after Franklin’s visit. The Inuit told Hall that they had believed Franklin’s crew was to blame for the Inuit’s “trouble”. Woodman observed that the Inuit “did not elaborate on the nature of the Inuit ‘trouble’” but he surmised that the white men had brought on a famine through overhunting. “Although periodic famine was almost routine among the Inuit,” commented Woodman, “this must have been a very severe occurrence.”

  Today, the northwest coast of King William Island remains frozen in time, barely touched since that April day in 1848, when 105 men landed on the shore at Victory Point. One small community lives on the island at Gjoa Haven, pressed against the southeast coast, as far from the site of the disaster as geography allows. In the 1950s, a Distant Early Warning Station was built at Gladman Point on the south shore. It was constructed as part of the DEW line, a string of radar stations stretching across the Arctic, designed originally to detect Soviet missiles launched over the Canadian north and headed for the United States. Innumerable expeditions have scoured the island over the many years, each one finding fewer and fewer relics to take home. Some were searching for answers to medical questions: How did they die? Was there cannibalism? Was there lead poisoning? Others sought more basic treasures: Franklin’s grave, for example. But the most sought-after prize was surely the same prize which Lady Franklin had ordered McClintock to bring home if he could — the expedition’s “unspeakably precious” journals and records. Of course, for those who sought these documents, the interest was largely and simply because they were there. What could those documents tell us that we did not already know?

  But now, we may wonder if there wasn’t considerably more to be found in those records — proof of our story. Perhaps the expedition’s records contained the detailed results of a fantastically complex and bizarrely dangerous experiment not to be equalled until the coming of the Manhattan Project in another age. The Franklin expedition’s officers were chosen according to their scientific expertise, few having any experience in Arctic waters. And, from the start, the Admiralty had meant to keep the results of the mission to itself. Lieutenant James Fairholme, a junior officer aboard Erebus, wrote home to his family just before the ships set sail from Greenland. In that letter, he told how “Soon after leaving the Orkney’s, Sir John sent for us all into his cabin and read to us such portions of his orders as were not private, particularly as to observing everything, and collecting specimens, also his authority from the Admiralty for claiming all them, all our logs, journals and everything connected with the expedition.”2

  The truth is, whatever those records contained, they are almost certainly gone for good. Time was on the Admiralty’s side and time, in the end, was what it got. If records were left at Starvation Cove, the weather destroyed them — this was what the Inuit claimed. If documents were buried in Simpson’s cairn at Cape Herschel, they were looted long before McClintock arrived on the scene. It is possible, as some believed, that the expedition’s journals were buried underground somewhere along the path of that final march. But,
though the Arctic cold preserves many things, paper is not one of them. The records could still be out there, but it isn’t likely.

  Where does that leave our story? Without hope of proof, without predictive value, all our conjecture can be no more than a fairy tale, a scary story told by the lambent light of a midnight campfire. And so we offer hope in two forms. First, somewhere beneath the jostling ice in Queen Maud Gulf lies the sunken wreck of the stranded ship pillaged by the Inuit. Whether she is the Erebus or the Terror, we cannot know, but in her hold is a steam engine and in a cabin is the body of a giant. The Breadalbane was found to be almost perfectly preserved beneath the waters of Barrow Strait, two of her three masts still standing. The three bodies on Beechey Island looked almost alive. Someday, someone may find that sunken wreck, and find too the body. If our story is more than a story, then we will know.

  As for the second proof, we can’t say where it might be found, but we know what to look for. The paper records of the expedition are not likely to have survived the passage of so many years, but evidence may exist in a more durable form — specifically, silver or silver-covered copper plates. For the Franklin expedition, no expense had been spared. Among its library of 3000 books, its two steam engines, its two handorgans, its Halkett boat, its telescopes and barometers and sextants, cookstoves and cutlery, dress swords and shoe polish, tin tureens and backgammon board, two dogs, a cat and a monkey — among all the amenities and necessities, a miraculous device was also included. This device had been perfected only a few years before by a man named Daguerre, and Sir John Franklin’s expedition was the first to carry one into the Arctic. It was a large wooden box with a hole in the front, capable of creating “daguerreotypes”.