by Lionel
Both ships, therefore, had been powerfully reinforced with these transverse timbers, first to withstand the recoil of their own deadly mortars in time of war, and now, in peace, to defend them against the anaconda-like dangers of the crushing, encircling polar ice. Having just returned from James Clark Ross’s expedition to the Antarctic, where they had ventured only with sail, the two ships were now fitted with massive twenty-horsepower steam engines. These had been acquired from London Railways and modified to drive propellers. It was felt that propellers, rather than paddle wheels, would be much more useful when forcing the ship’s passage through the encircling ice that so frequently blocked the way through the elusive Northwest Passage. This was the vital route for which Sir John and his men were now so diligently searching.
Without realizing that it might be construed as a sinister omen of impending death by a superstitious sailor, Sir John’s devoted wife, Lady Jane, had draped a Union Jack over him for warmth as he lay asleep a few days before the expedition sailed. In view of his worries over the portentous Union Jack, Sir John was particularly happy when a London pigeon alighted in the rigging of the Erebus shortly before they weighed anchor. The dove, or pigeon, the bird of peace, always meant good luck to a seafaring man when it landed on his ship.
Sir John Franklin and his men sailed from the Thames in London on May 19, 1845. Erebus and Terror, identified by their black and yellow paintwork, carried provisions for at least three years, and those provisions could be augmented by hunting and fishing in the traditional manner. As becomes evident later, it may have been Sir John’s provisions that doomed him and his men. They headed up to the Orkneys first, then on to the Whalefish Islands west of Greenland. It was here that the Barretto Junior, a small but efficient supply ship, brought fresh meat for them. This encounter with the Barretto also provided an opportunity for officers and crew to send letters home. One of these contained a glowing tribute to Franklin from Lieutenant Fairholme. He wrote: “He has such experience and judgement that we all look on his decisions with the greatest respect.” The lieutenant went on to praise Franklin’s great human qualities as a shipmate and companion. In view of Lieutenant Fairholme’s richly deserved praise for Franklin, there is an undercurrent of mystery as to why a number of crewmen left the expedition at this point and sailed home on board the Barretto. Could it have been anything to do with the food, even at that early stage? Had they become ill because of something ominously wrong with the vast stores of provisions aboard the Erebus and Terror? For whatever reason, they were on board the Barretto when Franklin’s two vessels sailed away towards Baffin Bay on July 12, 1845.
On July 26, 1845, barely two months after Franklin’s expedition had left London, two whalers, the Prince of Wales and the Enterprise, sighted the Erebus and Terror in Baffin Bay, not far from the entrance to Lancaster Sound. The weather was reasonable, and Captain Dannet, in command of the Prince of Wales, invited Franklin on board. Captain Robert Martin, who was in charge of the Enterprise, was also there, and he made several significant notes about their meeting that were of great importance to later investigators. In Martin’s opinion, Sir John was confident and optimistic. Referring to his expedition’s provisions, Franklin was sure that they had enough for as much as seven years — if it was sensibly augmented with good hunting and fishing. It was much in Sir John’s mind to invite both whaling captains back to the Erebus to return their hospitality, but the weather took a sudden severe turn and the ships were driven away from one another. Apart from their later controversial “ghostly” appearances, neither the Erebus nor the Terror — nor any of their ill-starred crews (over 130 men altogether) — was ever seen alive again.
By the standards of their day, the men of Franklin’s expedition were exceptionally well provided for, which makes their subsequent failure all the more mysterious. Knowing that boredom was almost as big a threat as the ice to expeditions of this kind, Franklin had arranged for more than three thousand books to be carried on board his two ships, and there were teaching sessions for crewmen who had not had the same educational advantages as their officers. There were practical physical comforts in addition to the mental ones provided by the lessons and the ships’ libraries: an ingenious system of pipes below the floors carried water to warm the berths — it was as well thought out and as effective as the Roman hypocausts had been eighteen hundred years earlier.
Erebus and Terror headed north from Baffin Bay, but the ice presented so formidable an obstacle that they had to steer south again. A note in a cairn found years later by search parties reported that Sir John Franklin had died aboard the Erebus on June 11, 1847, while they were locked in the ice in Victoria Strait, which lies between Victoria Island and King William Island — and within a year, more than twenty more men had died. The hundred-plus survivors, under the command of Captain Francis Crozier from the Terror, then decided to leave Erebus and Terror to the mercy of the ice and attempt the almost impossibly difficult trek southwest to Fort Resolution — nine hundred kilometres away! Not one of them ever got there.
By 1847 — having heard no news of Franklin’s expedition — the British Admiralty decided that help was probably needed. Consequently, they sent three rescue parties under the leadership of Dr. John Rae, James Ross, and Captain Henry Kellett. These three expeditions all searched long and diligently — but found no trace of Franklin’s men, nor his ships.
Lady Jane Franklin and the British government offered huge rewards, and one search party after another ventured out by land and sea looking for Franklin’s men and his missing ships. In 1850, near the mouth of Wellington Channel on Beechey Island, the searchers found hundreds of empty and abandoned tins, the ashes of old fires, and other remains — including three graves. Franklin’s men had evidently wintered there in 1845. The full facts did not emerge, however, until 1859, when Captain Leopold McClintock, commanding one of Lady Franklin’s own rescue ships, found artifacts and records that had been left on King William Island. Lieutenant William Hobson, McClintock’s second-in-command, also made significant discoveries — including human remains. Captain Erasmus Ommanney of the Assistance found other important evidence at Cape Riley on Devon Island, close to Beechey Island. Evidence gleaned by these determined searchers from local Inuit hunters and fishermen filled out more details of the Franklin tragedy. There were eyewitness Inuit accounts of men dragging sledges over the ice, falling, and dying where they fell from starvation and exhaustion. Why starvation when they had brought so much food with them? The clues seemed to lie in the heaps of abandoned tins, and in the suggestions made by the pathologists who later examined some of the bodies from Devon Island.
Franklin’s provisions had included generous quantities of food sealed inside airtight tins: still very much an innovation in the early 1800s. Tragically, the tins supplied to the Franklin expedition seem to have been lined with lead solder, and the pathologists who investigated the tragedy much later strongly suspected lead poisoning. Its symptoms were similar to those of scurvy, and Franklin’s own marine medical experts on board the Erebus and the Terror would have been unlikely to consider lead poisoning as a possibility — until it was far too late. Lead poisoning may have been a major contributing factor, but the expedition’s failure still remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the sea.
The history of food canning begins with a gifted French inventor named Nicolas Appert. During the Napoleonic Wars, Appert found that food could be preserved if sealed and heated in an airtight glass jar. He worked on the process for a long time, then wrote a book about it in 1810. He also set up his own factory where foods were processed and preserved. The French government gave him an award of twelve thousand francs in appreciation of his achievements. His method was highly successful, although nobody at the time really knew why; it wasn’t until much later that medical science realized that it was bacteria that caused food to decompose, and that heating killed the bacteria inside Appert’s sealed glass containers.
Meanwhile, in England, John H
all, founder of Dartford Iron Works, and his friend, Bryan Donkin, took up Appert’s ideas in 1811. They used metal cylinders constructed from tinned iron to store the food. Unlike Appert’s glass containers, Hall and Donkin’s tin cans were almost unbreakable. They set up a canned food factory in Bermondsey, London, and the navy was among their biggest customers. What militates somewhat against the theory that Franklin’s expedition may have been destroyed by lead poisoning are the excellent reports that came back from officers and sailors alike, when they were asked to comment on Hall and Donkin’s canned foods. It’s interesting to note, however, that Franklin actually sailed from London, not far from the Bermondsey works of Hall and Donkin.
It’s also interesting to note that in 1824 — more than twenty years before the ill-fated Franklin Expedition — Captain Sir Edward Parry went in search of the Northwest Passage for the third time. He took canned foods with him on this voyage, one of which was a tin of roasted veal in gravy. Opened by scientists and subjected to stringent laboratory tests in 1939 — 115 years after it was processed — it was found to be still in good condition. If canning was as good as that in 1824, what was wrong with the canned foods that Franklin purchased for his expedition twenty years later? It would be reasonable to suppose that the science of canning had improved over those twenty years.
The other unsolved mystery associated with the tragedy of the Franklin Expedition is what really became of his two sturdy ships after their crews were forced to abandon them? How can the many mysterious supposed sightings of the Erebus and Terror be explained? Those reports shift the whole story from courageous, tragic history into the realm of unsolved mysteries and anomalous phenomena. Ever since the tragedy occurred there have been persistent reports of sightings of ships closely resembling Franklin’s missing vessels among the ice of the tantalizing Northwest Passage. The Inuit evidence suggested that the ships had vanished into the deadly ice blocking the Northwest Passage — but did they re-emerge, as the Baychimo did?
The most intriguing report of all concerning the fate of the Erebus and the Terror is as recent as 1937. A pilot flying over the area where Franklin’s expedition had come to grief was certain that he could see the remains of a large timber vessel lying on top of the ice. Being short of fuel, the aviator had to return to base to refuel before going back to make a proper search for the ship he was certain he had seen. When he got back it had totally vanished.
Researchers who are prepared to consider a psychic explanation have put forward intriguing theories about a curse. They argue that both the Erebus and the Terror were devastatingly powerful bomb ships, capable of throwing deadly mortar missiles into coastal towns being attacked by the British navy in the early years of the nineteenth century. The horror of such mortars is that they are indiscriminate: fighting men, farmers and fishermen, civilians, women and children, innocent bystanders, the frail, the sick, and the elderly are all equally likely to die, or suffer appalling injuries, when the mortar rounds fall on their homes. The psychic scenario is that a horrendously wounded witch or wizard, shaman or magician, put his, or her, dying curse on the ships that had fired their mortars into his, or her, particular little coastal town. We still understand very little of the true powers lurking deep within the human mind. Used benignly, there are many astoundingly good things that mindpower can achieve. Used negatively, it may also be able to generate dangerous evil.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Pirates, Slavers, Buccaneers, Privateers, Wreckers, and Smugglers
The unsolved mysteries of the sea are often associated with the perplexing mysteries of the human mind and the depths to which it can sink. The callous cruelty and greed of wreckers, willing to lure ships onto treacherous rocks and then murder any survivors who struggled ashore merely for the sake of stealing what survived of their cargo is almost impossible to fathom. One of the most poignant of all wrecker stories is associated with lovely old Chambercombe Manor, which nestles in a secluded valley close to Ilfracombe, Devonshire, England. Northwest of the rugged Trayne Hills and northeast of Shield Tor, ancient Chambercombe Manor is listed in the Domesday Book. Less than a mile from the manor are the sands of Hele Beach, and at one time a secret tunnel connected the ancient house to them. Sir Henry Champernon was lord of the manor of Ilfracombe in 1162, and Chambercombe was part of his estate, but there are records of a certain Robert of Chambercombe who was in possession a century or so earlier. It later went to the Duke of Suffolk.
In 1865, a tenant of Chambercombe Manor discovered a small window, high up near the roof, to which there was no corresponding room or doorway. He eventually broke down the plaster coverings of a bricked up doorway and found the missing room. In the centre was a four-poster bed, its rotting curtains still in place. The intrepid farmer pulled them down and found a skeleton lying there — in some accounts, chained there. Medical examination concluded that it was the skeleton of a teenaged girl from the seventeenth century.
Some local traditions and legends recalled that there had been a smuggler and wrecker named Alexander Oatway, whose son William had been a far more pleasant man than his father. One night, hearing cries for help following a wrecking adventure along the dangerous rocky coast, young William rescued a beautiful Spanish girl, whom he subsequently married. They had a daughter, Kate, who grew up to be as lovely as her mother. In the course of time, young Kate married a dashing Irish buccaneer captain named Wallace and went off to live with him in Dublin, promising her parents that she would return to visit them whenever possible. Some time later there was another wreck and William went out to see if he could help any survivors. He found a girl battered beyond recognition by the rocks and pounding waves, still clinging to life by a thread. He carried her home where he and his wife did what they could for her, but she died during the night. The Oatways had always wanted to buy Chambercombe, but had never made enough money. Now, on the dead girl’s body they found a money belt full of gold coins and jewels — far more than the price of Chambercombe. They drew the bed curtains around the unknown dead girl and bricked up the room.
The next day, a shipping agent called to enquire about a missing passenger from the wreck whose body had not been accounted for. He showed the Oatways the passenger list: the dead girl they had just bricked up in what was to become the infamous sealed room of Chambercombe was their own daughter: Mrs. Kate Wallace. The money they had stolen from her body had been intended as a gift from her and her Irish buccaneer husband to enable them to buy Chambercombe and live there in peace and security for the rest of their lives.
There were several other versions of the legend, most of which took in the detail of the sinister chain said to have been found attached to the girl’s skeleton in 1865. According to one such variant, Alexander Oatway, the smuggler and wrecker, had also been a vicious white-slaver, procurer, and pimp. Any attractive women who struggled ashore after his wrecking activities were sent off to work in various London brothels in which Alexander had a financial interest. The notorious sealed room at Chambercombe was said to have been used by Alexander and his men to get such captives ready for clients before sending them off to London. One determined woman put up such brave and prolonged resistance that Alexander and his thugs spitefully bricked her up alive to die of thirst and starvation. Yet another grim possibility is that the victim who died in that sealed room was part of a large-scale white-slaving operation that extended from Europe — including Devonshire — down to the Barbary Coast.
The outstanding recent work of the heroic Salcombe divers and the South West Maritime Archaeological Group provides ample proof that Barbary corsairs were operating near Gara Rock off the South Devon coast in the mid-seventeenth century. Were those Barbary pirates and slave traders connected with Alexander Oatway and the hidden skeleton at Chambercombe?
Whatever the truth behind the skeleton on the bed in the sealed room of Chambercombe Manor, there is another unsolved mystery of the sea linking Chambercombe and Hele Beach — just as the subterranean passage does. Many psy
chic investigators and mediums over the years have seen the famous Grey Lady of Chambercombe — but who is she? The bravely rebellious prisoner who wouldn’t surrender to Oatway’s henchmen? Oatway’s own daughter, Mrs. Kate Wallace? Or could the phantom be connected with Lady Jane Grey, so cruelly and unjustly executed as a helpless pawn in a desperately complicated but wildly stupid and greedy bid for the Tudor throne? Certainly Lady Jane Grey once stayed at Chambercombe, and her room was adjacent to the sinister sealed room with its unidentified woman’s skeleton. In addition to many sightings of the mysterious Grey Lady, visitors have often heard strange cries and groans of pain.
At some time during the earlier part of the 1600s a ship went down near Gara Rock in the Salcombe Estuary. Almost four centuries later a group of courageous and determined divers found what was left of it — and their amazing discoveries created yet another strange and sinister unsolved mystery of the sea. The mystery centred on gold — huge quantities of it — and raised the question of the identity of the ship that had gone down. The second question concerned the gold itself: why had that mystery ship been carrying such wealth? The first thought must be that if expensive purchases had to be made in a period when there were no credit cards and no electronic banking systems, gold was the most widely accepted international medium of exchange. Someone had come to a lonely part of England’s southwest coast in order to make a major purchase with all that gold — but who had manned that ship, and what had they come to buy?