by Owen Beattie
Captain Robert Martin of the Enterprise noted that Franklin said he had provisions for five years, and if it were necessary he could “make them spin out seven years.” Martin added that Franklin told him he would “lose no opportunity of killing birds and whatever else was useful that came in the way, to keep up their stock, and that he had plenty of powder and shot for the purpose.”
Martin was invited to dine aboard the Erebus, but shifting winds sent the ships apart, and so it was that in early August 1845, Franklin and his crews lost contact with their world. The Erebus and Terror were last seen making for Lancaster Sound, the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage, where they would enter the desert of silence beyond.
4. Puny Efforts
There was no anxiety at first. Unease about the status of the Franklin expedition only crept into the minds of the Admiralty’s London officials at the end of 1847. In March 1848, the need for a relief expedition was first raised in the House of Commons, where a confidant of Jane, Lady Franklin asked what, if any, steps the government might take regarding a search. The response confirmed that there was cause for concern, because the expedition had enough food only for three years, meaning its supplies would shortly be exhausted. None could have guessed that their worst nightmares were already about to play themselves out on the desolation of King William Island.
In 1848, the Admiralty dispatched three expeditions to relieve Sir John Franklin. Captain Henry Kellet was instructed to sail to the Bering Strait, where Franklin was to break free of the Arctic ice; a second expedition, under the command of Sir James Clark Ross, was sent into Lancaster Sound, following Franklin’s original route, and an overland party led by Dr. John Rae and Sir John Richardson was sent down the Mackenzie River. It was the failure of all three of these relief expeditions to find a trace of Franklin that finally sparked the fear that something might have gone terribly wrong. Ross’s experiences especially contributed to the growing sense of foreboding.
With Franklin’s disappearance, Ross’s wife’s entreaties—now coloured by the knowledge that it might have been her husband for whom they sought—were overridden by the Admiralty’s orders for Ross to command one of the relief expeditions. Rather than relieve Franklin, however, Ross very nearly replicated the disaster.
Ross, with his wealth of Arctic experience, well understood the need to defend against scurvy. When the Enterprise and Investigator, two barque-rigged sailing vessels, departed the Thames in tow of two steam tugs on 12 May 1848, the ships had been provisioned for three years, with an additional year’s stores for Franklin’s crews. The ships carried plenty of preserved meats as well as canned potatoes, carrots and mixed vegetables such as beets and cabbage; while the expedition still carried salt beef and salt pork, tinned foods constituted the bulk of the provisions. In consequence, Ross remarked that his Franklin relief voyage was exceptionally outfitted by the navy. “Long experience and liberal means gave us many comforts that no other expedition had enjoyed,” Ross would later write, “yet it is remarkable that the health of the crew suffered more during this winter than on any former occasion.”
As winter quarters for the Enterprise and Investigator (the latter commanded by Captain Edward Henry Bird), Ross chose Port Leopold, on the northeast coast of Somerset Island. Here, on the eastern shore of the harbour, a narrow beach stretches out in a series of ridges below a bluff. The western side is steep and very high; its headland named Cape Seppings. On arrival, the two ships sent rockets up every evening and morning in the event that Franklin’s men were in the vicinity. But the ships, moored some 200 yards (183 metres) apart, were soon frozen fast, and the crew immediately set to work in preparation for winter. A wall of snow 7 feet (2.1 metres) high was built linking one ship to the other, to aid with crossings during blizzards. In mid-October, winter awnings of “stout wool” were erected over the decks of each ship to afford protection from the wind and snow.
Men of the search expedition commanded by James Clark Ross construct their winter quarters.
A concise account of the expedition was kept by James D. Gilpin, clerk-in-charge on the Investigator, and he recorded the news of the first death on 27 October 1848. “William Coombes, of the carpenter’s crew, died: he had been long wasting away and expired at noon this day. The disease I understood was in the brain, and contracted previous to his servitude in the Investigator.” Coombes was buried three days later, during the gloom of a heavy snowfall. Wrote Gilpin:
All hands attended the funeral, a mournful duty at all times, but particularly so here where the wild prospect around us contributed so much to the melancholy of the occasion. A more affecting spectacle cannot be than to behold a number of men in mournful procession, walking through deep snow, and drawing after them a sledge bearing a coffin shrouded with the bright colours of Old England.
The scene was a harbinger of the difficult winter ahead. For the expedition’s outbreak of illness was every bit as rapacious as that experienced by George Back in 1836–37, and also attributed to scurvy—a debilitating toll aggravated by the urgency of Ross’s quest.
Several days after Coombes’s funeral, on 9 November, the sun disappeared. It would not return until 9 February 1849. The dreary winter routine aboard-ship was interrupted only by the trapping of Arctic foxes. The animals were fitted with copper collars around the neck, upon which were punched the name of the ship, their position and date “in the hopes that Sir John Franklin, or some of his people, might in the ingenious manner be apprised of assistance.”
In March, Gilpin wrote that “two men are now lying seriously ill in their cots, one of them afflicted with scurvy, the first case of that malignant disease, so much dreaded in these voyages.” A short time later, Gilpin recorded the death of a seaman on the Enterprise, noting that “for some time previous to his illness, he had been very melancholy, and from the time he was placed on the sick list never once rallied.” The seaman, a Jamaican named James Gray, had been one of the most cheerful men on the ship for the first months of the expedition, but by December 1848 he had become “gloomy, distant and solitary.” On 27 December he sought medical attention and was diagnosed as “suffering from Nostalgia.” John Robertson, surgeon on the Enterprise, described the curious affliction:
The symptoms which appeared most prominent in this unusual malady amongst British seamen was depression of spirits, a fearful foreboding of the future, an extraordinary anxiety for the welfare of his friends in England and an eternal craving to return home… [He] could not sleep for thinking of home and what a fool he was to come to a dark world like this, at Port Leopold.
Gray was placed on a diet of tinned meat and tinned vegetables, yet he continued to deteriorate, developing symptoms such as pains in the chest, exhaustion and incoherency. Bronchitis then intervened “on the pre-existing constitutional debility,” and he died on 16 April 1849. Robertson was impressed by Gray’s inconsolable longing to return to Jamaica: “This being the only mulatto we had on board, it would seem that children of the torrid zone have a greater love of home than ‘the children of the night’ of whom we had many.”
A second death followed on the Enterprise, on 30 April. The man, an able-bodied seaman named David Jenkins, had slipped while securing the ship to an iceberg nine months earlier. While no symptoms of the blow were visible for a lengthy period of time after the incident, his demise was attributed to a tumour that later developed. He suffered a “most lingering and painful illness.” Because of the unusual symptoms, an autopsy was conducted.
Then on 12 May, William Cundy, captain of the hold of the Investigator, died. Wrote Gilpin: “He was a weak, ill-made man, and his recovery despaired of soon after he was taken into the sick bay, his first illness was scurvy, but many unseen causes hastened his death.”
On 15 May, Sir James Clark Ross led the first of the sledging parties out in the search for Franklin. Ross marched west along the north coast of Somerset Island, then turned south, charting the isl
and’s west coast and travelling in the general direction of the North Magnetic Pole and King William Land, which he had first visited nearly two decades earlier. Just over two weeks out, however, Ross was confronted with the near-total breakdown in the health of one of his party. Lieutenant Francis Leopold M’Clintock, who was also accompanying Ross, described the man’s condition: “James Bonnett now complained of spasmodic pains, loss of strength, giddiness, & c. He continued ailing, and unable to labour, for the remainder of the journey.” Three days later, M’Clintock recorded that the problem had spread to others: “Bonnett continues full of pains and devoid of strength, and all the other men are greatly reduced in strength; although our sledge gets lighter, they seem to be less able to drag it.”
The work was onerous, at times desperate, as the crew struggled southward over the hummocks and heavy crushed ice that served to fringe the “impregnable and forbidding” western coastline of Somerset Island. They travelled 250 miles (400 km) before Ross finally called an end to the search. At this point, a large cairn was constructed on a headland and a note deposited in a copper cylinder:
The cylinder which contains this paper was left here by a party detached from Her Majesty’s ships Enterprise and Investigator under the command of Captain Sir James C. Ross, Royal Navy in search of the expedition of Sir John Franklin; and to inform any of his party that might find it that these ships, having wintered at Port Leopold in long. 90˚W, lat 73˚ 52′ N have formed there a depot with provisions for the use of Sir John Franklin’s party sufficient for six months; also two very small depots about fifteen miles south of Cape Clarence and twelve miles south of Cape Seppings. The party are now about to return to the ships, which, as early as possible in the spring, will push forward to Melville Strait, and search the north coast of Barrow Strait; and, failing to meet the party they are seeking, will touch at Port Leopold on their way back, and then return to England before the winter shall set in.
7th June 1849. James C. Ross. Captain.
Ross’s party then began the return journey. He had sought to relieve Franklin, but concern for the health of his own men seriously hindered the efficacy of his search. Despite carrying with them lime juice as an antiscorbutic and the provision of a preferred diet of preserved beef and pea soup, several of his party were now “useless from lameness and debility,” so ill in fact that they had to be hauled on the sledges by the remaining men. M’Clintock recorded that five of the twelve men had “quite broken down.” Upon reaching Port Leopold thirty-nine days after setting out, Ross described his party as “so completely worn out by fatigue that every man was, from some cause or other, in the doctor’s hands for two or three weeks, and I am sorry to say that two of them are not yet recovered.” Gilpin remarked upon the “haggard looks and the attenuated forms of all of them.”
Unknowingly, at the furthest point of this sledge trek, Ross’s party came within 200 miles (320 km) of where Franklin’s ships had been deserted the previous summer. Ross had travelled south along Peel Sound, the very route that Franklin had taken in 1846. Later, M’Clintock lamented this failure, “because we were marching in the right direction, as [subsequent] discoveries… have proved.”
Other sledging parties were also dispatched from the two ships, though as Ross later discovered, “The labours of these parties were of comparatively short durations; still they, like ourselves, all suffered from snow blindness, sprained ankles, and debility.” One of the search parties travelled down the west shore of Prince Regent Inlet to Fury Beach, but the rigours of the journey also resulted in breakdowns in the health of some in the party. They did locate Somerset House, the structure occupied by the men under old Sir John Ross in 1832–33, and found it still standing. A tent was erected inside, fires were lit for warmth and two men—who were “too much fatigued to go any further”—were left as temporary occupants. The remainder of the party travelled only 25 miles (40 km) farther before erecting a cairn and returning to collect the invalids. The stores of the Fury were then examined and the contents tested. The tinned soup was declared “as good as when manufactured… most delicious, and in flavour and consistency, superior to any of our preserves of the same kind.”
Sailors’ dinner at Cape Seppings, Somerset Island, during James Clark Ross’s voyage of 1848–49 in search of Franklin. By Lieutenant William Browne
While the physical demands of these sledge searches doubtless contributed to the outbreak of illness, those left aboard also fell sick. On 15 June 1849, Henry Mathias, assistant surgeon on the Enterprise, died. The death was blamed on consumption, which, “imperceptibly gaining on his strength, brought him to the grave.” John Robertson wrote that Mathias was “greatly beloved and respected by all in the expedition,” but that there was no hope of “getting him alive out of Port Leopold the grave of so many.” Ross observed: “Several others of the crews of both ships were in a declining state, and the general report of health was by no means cheering.” Even the Enterprise’s surgeon fell seriously ill. Robertson wrote that he suffered from scurvy and only “narrowly escaped destruction,” though he would continue to suffer active symptoms of “this abominable scourge” seven months later, even after his return to England.
There was another death on 8 July.
Before the ships departed from Port Leopold, Ross ordered that a depot be established. In it, he left behind a steam launch (with fuel), a shelter with carpenter’s tools, blankets, sleeping bags, stoves, provisions and other essential supplies, and an account of the expedition and its future plans. Gilpin: “Here then should any of Sir John Franklin’s people reach, they would find the means of subsistence and escape.”
After departing Port Leopold, Ross attempted to travel west, but the ships were beset on 1 September and carried by ice towards Baffin Bay. After three weeks they were freed, but with the intensifying malevolence of the disease amongst his men, Ross was forced to cut his losses, abandon his search and make a run for home. The Investigator’s cook died on 16 September during the homeward passage; the last case appeared less than a week before the ships limped into the English port of Scarborough in November 1849. Some of the sailors remained ill enough to require hospitalization, and one died shortly afterwards.
On 17 November, the Illustrated London News announced the expedition’s disappointing results, reporting the “great difficulty” encountered by the sledge parties and noting the deaths: “The assistant-surgeon, a very intelligent young man, and three able seamen of the Enterprise, with three of the crew of the Investigator, have died since the vessel left Woolwich in the spring of 1848.” The Athenaeum declared the search for Franklin “very incomplete”:
… the public mind can arrive at no conclusion for its anxiety from what has been done. But the issue of such examination as Sir James Ross has been enabled to institute makes a painful addition to the melancholy suggestions arising out of the long and death-like silence which has fallen over the former Expedition.
Ross’s own health was broken. While many critics felt he should have braved a second winter, lamenting his “puny efforts,” John Robertson, the surgeon on the Enterprise, thought most of the men would not have survived another year:
There were few men in the ship who were not more or less afflicted by scurvy, and I cannot help fearing that had we remained out an other winter, few if any would have ever returned—this the more certain since our antiscorbutics proved such perfect failures.
One officer on the expedition wrote: “We have certainly had to grapple with difficulties of no ordinary nature.” Years later, M’Clintock reflected that “we underwent as much privation and fatigue as in any equal period of my subsequent travel.” Yet the truth was that Ross’s expedition was the only one with at least a theoretical chance of saving some of Franklin’s men. When his ships reached Port Leopold, some of the men may still have been alive; with Ross’s defeat, any chance of their being saved was lost.
Struggling to understan
d the severity of the sickness suffered aboard Ross’s ships, some historians have theorized that the problem might have been compounded by the crews being accepted for the expedition without medical examinations. Ross’s own officers complained that the ships’ canned provisions were not only underweight but of inferior quality, in Robertson’s words, “a disgrace to the contractor.” The same contractor—Stephan Goldner—had supplied Franklin’s expedition. Doubts about the antiscorbutic value of the lime juice carried on-ship were also raised, with subsequent chemical analysis concluding that there was no guarantee of “the initial soundness of the fruit.” This grave conclusion unfastened an exhaustive inquiry by Sir William Burnett, the navy’s medical director-general. All juice then in the victualling stores was analyzed, with the conclusion that it was all below the proper standard of acidity. It was, of course, a mistake to suppose that acidity was the vital element.
In the end, the Admiralty attributed the health problems that beset the expedition, and the unusual number of deaths, to scurvy. Ross, who had seen scurvy’s effects on some of his earlier expeditions, was unconvinced. He pointedly did not use the word “scurvy” in his official report of the expedition nor, indeed, did his men when later examined, saying that there had been “debility but no scurvy.” The ferocity of the illness was unequalled in nineteenth-century Arctic exploration. Not even Franklin’s expedition during its first year came close to experiencing the crippling losses encountered by James Clark Ross’s during its lone Arctic winter; at one point, twenty-six men were on the sick list. The mortality on Ross’s expedition was more than twice that of Franklin’s 1845–46 winter losses.
5. Isthmus of the Graves
On 4 april 1850, the Toronto Globe published an advertisement announcing a £20,000 reward to be given by “Her Majesty’s Government to any party or parties, of any country, who shall render efficient assistance to the crews of the discovery ships under the command of Sir John Franklin.” A further £10,000 was offered to anyone able to relieve any of the crews or bring information leading to their relief. Finally, another £10,000 was offered to anyone succeeding in ascertaining the fate of the expedition.