by Owen Beattie
Parry’s expedition had become the first to overwinter in the Arctic archipelago. He also came closer to completing the Northwest Passage than any other person would come for the next three decades. He was tempted to push on to the Pacific. But, facing an impermeable barrier of multiyear ice, with depleted stores and the very real risk of being forced to spend a second winter in the region, he relented.
The expedition had encountered no Inuit during its long winter at Melville Island, but on its homeward journey, the crew finally met some natives on Baffin Island; one of those meetings would be laden with irony. One of the Inuit elders was, Parry noted, “extremely inquisitive” and observed gravely as a tin of preserved meat was opened for dinner: “The old man was sitting on the rock, attentively watching the operation, which was performed with an axe struck by a mallet.” When the tin had been opened, the man “begged very hard for the mallet which had performed so useful an office, without expressing the least wish to partake of the meat, even when he saw us eating it with good appetites.” Parry, however, insisted the man try some: “[He] did not seem at all to relish it, but ate a small quantity, from an evident desire not to offend us.”
Unfortunately, the elder’s distaste for tinned foods was not shared by British authorities. After Parry’s return, expedition surgeon John Edwards praised such supplies as “acquisitions of the highest value.” C.I. Beverley, the assistant surgeon on Parry’s expedition, also produced a glowing endorsement of the expedition’s tinned provisions, ascribing to them both the preservation of the general health of the officers and crew and the eventual recovery of one man who had been “attacked by the scurvy.” This assessment ended with a statement that encouraged ever-greater reliance on tinned goods: “I have every reason to believe that the anti-scorbutic quality of the vegetable is not injured in its preparation.” Yet this notion—that tinned foods retained powerful antiscorbutic properties—was entirely anecdotal. The comparative immunity enjoyed by Parry’s men might, with hindsight, have been more accurately attributed to other factors, not the least of which was the amount of game shot and wild sorrel collected. Unfortunately, no mention of these measures was made. The British were enamoured of technology, and, after Parry’s successful overwintering in the Arctic, the antiscorbutic benefits of tinned foods became accepted wisdom in the Royal Navy, a premise that would go untested and unchallenged for much of the next century. Indeed, starting with William Edward Parry’s voyage of 1819–20, British Arctic expeditions used tinned foods first as a supplement, then, by the time of George Back’s 1836–37 voyage, as a critical component of their food stores.
Still, not every ship captain shared the navy’s enthusiasm for tinned provisions. In fact, the privately financed 1829–33 expedition of Captain John Ross was a feat of physical endurance and survival precisely because Ross sought to avoid reliance on preserved foods.
Following his 1818 maritime blunder, when Barrow rained such derision upon him that he never again received a Royal Navy command, Ross had been forced into semi-retirement at half-pay. He watched from the sidelines as his rival, Parry, undertook two further polar expeditions (in 1821–23 and 1824–25), at the end of which, Barrow conceded that knowledge about the Northwest Passage was “precisely where it was at the conclusion of his [Parry’s] first voyage.” Parry had even managed to lose one of His Majesty’s ships, the Fury, which was nipped by an iceberg in Prince Regent Inlet. Ross seized on the opening. He raised a private expedition and found a wealthy gin merchant, Felix Booth, to underwrite a voyage to complete the Northwest Passage aboard the Victory, a second-hand steamer that Ross refitted with state-of-the-art technology and manned with 23 officers and men.
It appeared at first that Ross would succeed. In Greenland, he received reports that it was an unusually warm summer. On 6 August 1829, the expedition entered Lancaster Sound, the site of his 1818 humiliation. Believing Prince Regent Inlet would eventually reveal an opening to the west, Ross tacked south, calculating correctly that the land mass, which had been named Somerset by Parry, was an island. He pressed further into these waters than any European before him, but missed Bellot Strait, the only opening to the west, and with time concluded that the western shore of Prince Regent Inlet was not an island but a peninsula, which he named Boothia, for his sponsor. By then it was too late to continue. With conditions deteriorating, the expedition established winter quarters at a place Ross called Felix Harbour. From here, the expedition embarked on the first of four winters in the Arctic, a harrowing saga that is remarkable—in equal measure—for the courage and endurance needed to survive it.
The following summer, the ice freed the Victory, allowing 3 miles (5 km) of hope before it closed in again and held the ship fast, trapping it for a second winter. In 1830, Ross’s young nephew, Commander James Clark Ross, led a sledge journey far to the west. He named the farthest place he reached Victory Point, and the adjoining territory was claimed in the name of King William IV. Unaware that he had crossed an ice-covered strait on his journey, Ross named the territory King William Land. In fact, it was King William Island. James Ross also noted an accumulation of pack-ice off the northwest coast, the “heaviest masses that I had ever seen in such a situation.” His sledge journey was a remarkable achievement in itself. The pièce de résistance, however, was his subsequent discovery of the North Magnetic Pole, which “Nature,” he wrote, “had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers.” With that, the expedition became a triumph. “Nothing now remained for us but to return home and be happy for the rest of our days,” the younger Ross wrote. But by the summer of 1831, the Victory had been allowed only another 4 miles (6.5 km) of passage before the impenetrable ice barrier returned.
“To us,” John Ross declared, “the sight of ice was a plague, a vexation, a torment, an evil, a matter of despair.” The depth of this despondency is further revealed in his journal, where he confided: “I confess that the chances are now much against our being ever heard of.” He was faced with a critical decision: risk sitting out the following spring in the hope that by summer the ice would finally give way and the Victory would be freed, which seemed unlikely, or abandon the Victory and undertake a 300-mile (480-km) overland trek north while snow remained on the ground, allowing for sledge travel. Ross elected for the latter. His destination would be Fury Beach on Somerset Island, where there was a store of provisions left by Parry on an earlier expedition and the greater likelihood of open water. From there, Ross believed he could use the ship’s small boats to make a dash for Baffin Bay, to rendezvous with the summer whaling fleet.
Sledges were fashioned to haul the small boats loaded with provisions, and the captain ordered advance parties to establish a string of caches en route. Then, on 29 May 1832, the expedition abandoned the Victory and, in sub-zero temperatures and on two-thirds rations, headed north. But off Fury Beach, where open water had been expected, the ice had also failed to clear and the men were forced to endure a fourth winter in the Arctic. They barricaded themselves in a house of wood and snow they hurriedly constructed. It was little better than an igloo, yet Ross gave it a pompous name—Somerset House—and enforced rigid delineations of rank. It was a snow house divided. On one side, ordinary seamen were crammed together in their rank furs, muttering obscenities; the structure’s other half was segregated quarters for the officers, where John Ross continued to be waited upon hand and foot like the country squire he aspired to be. Ross grimly speculated whether “it should be the fortune of any one to survive after another such year as the three last.” But he maintained a stiff upper lip, and not only because of the cold.
To make matters worse, the men’s provisions were inadequate. Ross ordered half-rations, but by now, these consisted mainly of preserved meat and tinned turnip and carrot soup from the stores left by Parry. The crew’s only fresh meat came from the few Arctic foxes, and fewer hares, they could snare, with roast fox served on Sundays. The expedition surgeon made note of the deteri
orating conditions: “we had scarcely any animal food… The development of severe scurvy at once served to heighten our misery, and to show how poor a defence a [tinned] vegetable regimen is… ” It was, he wrote, “during our stay at the Fury’s stores that the worst form of the disease appeared.” The ship’s carpenter died of the illness in February 1833. John Ross was also suffering the effects of the dread disease: ancient wounds long-healed began to open as scar tissue dissolved. The captain wondered whether, “I might not be ultimately able to surmount all the present circumstances.”
Yet survive he did, and, in late summer, a lane of open water appeared into which, on 15 August 1833, the men launched their boats with a fine westerly breeze. Having “almost forgotten what it was to float at freedom on the seas,” they made 72 miles (116 km) on 17 August alone. Propelled by the wind when it blew, they rowed on amongst the icebergs when it dropped—once for a stretch of twenty hours without rest. After nine days heading east, they finally spotted a sail in the distance. The men desperately rowed towards the vessel, but after several hours a wind came up and the ship moved off to the southeast. Soon another sail was sighted, but that ship too sailed on. Wrote John Ross: “it was the most anxious moment that we had yet experienced, to find that we were near to no less than two ships, either of which would have put an end to all our fears and all our toils, and that we should probably reach neither.” But an hour later the wind dropped, and they again began to close on one of the ships. Finally, they saw it lower a boat that rowed over to meet them. Stunned, the mate in command assured Ross that he couldn’t be who he said he was, as Ross was known to have died two years earlier. That conclusion, Ross replied, had been “premature.” They were unshaven, filthy, “dressed in the rags of wild beasts,” gaunt and starved to the bone. But they were definitely alive.
That John Ross is not celebrated today as one of the epic heroes of polar exploration is remarkable. Perhaps his all-too human failings militated against such a reputation, for John Ross was the antithesis of what one might expect in a hero: corpulent, irritable and overly solicitous of class. In contrast to Parry, who did his best to provide for the comfort of his men, Ross held in contempt the entire notion of the importance of creature comforts in maintaining morale. While still aboard the Victory, for instance, Ross had reduced the heat each winter to lessen the effects of condensation. He then responded to complaints from the freezing crew by bragging loudly about his unusual capacity for generating body heat. No one ever got close enough to him to notice. There was something improbable, even absurd, about John Ross. And he paid a terrible price for his haughtiness when a disgruntled underling later helped publish an unofficial account of the expedition: a remarkable rant called The Last Voyage of Capt. John Ross—vilifying Ross’s character and mocking his physical attributes. More damaging still was the book’s inventory of his alleged shortcomings as a leader, culminating in a declaration that while “the men were conscious that they owed him obedience; they were not equally convinced that they owed him their respect and esteem.”
Such criticisms aside, the expedition’s return was a triumph of human ingenuity and survival. Its success was due to one simple measure: Ross’s emulation of the Inuit, the Earth’s hardiest survivors, who eke out a living on the margins of the habitable world and yet who do so without any trace of scurvy. The Inuit treat the contents of a caribou’s stomach and the testicles of the musk-ox as delicacies, for example, food sources that have since been proven to be powerful antiscorbutics. And whilst unwilling to consume these igloo specialities, John Ross had his men eat a diet of fresh meat and salmon, concluding that “the large use of oils and fats is the true secret of life in these frozen countries.” Where possible, therefore, he replaced supplies such as salt beef and tinned foods with fresh meat, resulting in a “very salutary change of diet to our crew.” By doing so, Ross also solved the mystery of Arctic survival. Through contact with the locals, he correctly surmised that their diet of fresh meat had antiscorbutic properties, observing that “the natives cannot subsist without it, becoming diseased and dying under a more meager diet.” As he wrote in his log, “The first salmon of the summer were a medicine which all the drugs in the ship could not replace.” The Inuit had saved John Ross’s hide and those of his crew, and he knew it, though his praise was tempered by characteristic pomposity. They were, he said, “among the most worthy of all the rude tribes yet known to our voyagers, in whatever part of the world.” It was only in his fourth winter, after he had lost contact with the Inuit and moved north to Somerset Island, where game was scarce and the expedition became dependent upon tinned foods, that scurvy had made a run at the expedition.
Unfortunately, Captain George Back, on his 1836–37 Arctic expedition, failed to learn from Ross’s example. A veteran of three expeditions across the barren lands of northern Canada, two of them under the command of John Franklin, R.N., George Back was by turns ambitious, conceited and utterly charming. An inveterate womanizer, dandy and accomplished watercolourist, Back was a knowingly Byronic figure who dabbled in poetry and possessed a certain élan, having spent five years as a prisoner of war in Revolutionary France.
Back sailed for the Arctic on 14 June 1836, with orders to travel to Repulse Bay, beyond the northwestern reaches of Hudson Bay, then to send sledge parties across the isthmus of the Melville Peninsula (an arm of the American continent) to explore its western coast. The expedition was an appalling failure. Back’s ship, the Terror, like the Victory, was caught in the Arctic’s thrall of relentless ice. At one point it was hurled 40 feet (12 metres) up a cliff face, only to be mauled by an iceberg. Wrote Back: “To guard against the worst I ordered the provisions and preserved meats, together with various other necessaries, to be got up from below and stowed on deck, so as to be ready at a moment to be thrown on the large floe alongside.” Men slept in their clothes, ready to abandon ship at a moment’s notice. On some nights, the ice could be heard gently caressing the hull, on others it wailed and pounded against the ship’s sides. At one point the ice reached up alongside to form a cradle, then, after holding the ship tight in the air, the floe let go its grasp and the vessel plunged into the sea. Back was astonished to glimpse in those moments a mould of the ship “stamped as perfectly as in a die in the walls of ice on either side.” Next, a huge square mass of ice of many tons collapsed, throwing up a wave 30 feet (9 metres) high that rolled over the stricken Terror. George Back:
It was indeed an awful crisis rendered more frightful from the mistiness of the night and the dimness of the moon. The poor ship cracked and trembled violently and no one could say that the next minute would not be her last, and, indeed, his own too, for with her our means of safety would probably perish.
Compounding the desperate situation, there had been a sudden, serious and—to the expedition’s captain and medical officer—inexplicable onset of illness aboard the Terror within a fortnight of the last live domestic animal being slaughtered on board. Six months into the expedition, Back complained in his journal on 26 December that the crew had been inflicted by “perverseness,” “sluggishness” and “listlessness.”
As his men began complaining of debility, Back concluded they were suffering from scurvy. Yet he made no serious attempt to secure fresh meat. Instead, he increased the provision of tinned meat, soup and vegetables, as well as lime juice and other alleged antiscorbutics. But on 13 January 1837, one of the men died. As well, ten of the ship’s crew of sixty—both officers and men—were now sick, complaining of “languor” and “shooting pains or twitches betokening weakness” in the ankles and knees. One, named Donaldson, “evinced a disposition to incoherency.” Another was suddenly “seized with syncope,” or dizziness. The provision of canned meat and “anti-scorbutics of every kind” failed to help. While Back had suffered through horrific privations before—scurvy and starvation amongst them—during previous overland expeditions, he was unnerved by the disease eating away at the Terror’s crew: “Who cou
ld help feeling that his hour also might shortly come?” He felt utterly helpless, that the situation was “beyond our comprehension or control.” At one point, he wondered if the cause might not in fact have been an illness carried aboard by one of the crew, at another he mused about the influence of the dank, hothouse atmosphere inside the ship and the freezing dry cold without.
Donaldson, the man who had shown signs of incoherency and who remained in a “drowsy stupor,” died on 5 February. On 26 April, he was followed by a Royal Marine named Alexander Young who, before dying, had requested that he be autopsied. The ship’s surgeon found Young’s liver enlarged, water in the region of the heart and the quality of his blood “poor.” When Back demanded in an official letter to the surgeon, Dr. Donovan, “his opinion of the probable consequences if the ship were detained another winter in these regions,” Donovan’s answer was that “it would be fatal to many of the officers and men.” And so, when the Terror was finally released by the ice after ten months, Back ordered the ship, badly leaking, to make for home. With a hull bound round with chain cables to seal the cracks caused by the ice and “in a sinking condition,” the Terror somehow limped across the Atlantic. Even then, in July, Back watched in impotent fury as the disease continued to spread: “The whole affair, indeed, was inexplicable to the medical officers as we had the advantage of the best provisions.” As the Terror made towards Ireland, the “apprehension of sickness had induced most of the men to go without food.” Back himself remained an invalid for six months after the dreadful voyage.