Killigrew and the North-West Passage
Page 55
Afterword
The Truth about Polar bears, and Other Matters
In the years after the defeat of Napoleon, the Royal Navy searched for alternative spheres of endeavour and found one in exploration: not only of the Arctic, but also of the Antarctic and the interior of Africa. One only has to glance at maps of the polar regions to see the names of the leaders of these expeditions commemorated for all time: the Ross Ice Shelf, Cape Parry, Franklin Bay, McClure Strait and McClintock Channel. Not that they were so egotistical as to name geographical features after themselves, but they did have a tendency to name them after one another, which served the purpose equally well. To be fair, they were more inclined to name things after patrons: hence Victoria Island, Prince Albert Peninsula, Boothia Peninsula, Barrow Strait and Viscount Melville Sound; although I’m not entirely sure how the lovely young Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind came to have an island named after her.
The most famous of these was Franklin, perhaps because of the mystique of his disappearance and the subsequent search. We shall never know for certain what happened on his third, final and fatal expedition, but Francis McClintock’s expedition of 1857–59 revealed the most clues, including a message in a cairn on King William Island that told how Franklin himself, along with twenty-three other members of the expedition, had already died. What they died of is not specified, but an autopsy carried out on the bodies of Braine, Hartnell and Torrington, frozen in the permafrost off Beechey Island, found excessive levels of lead in bone and hair samples, suggesting that lead poisoning from the solder on the tin canisters might have contributed to their deaths. Not that they had any idea there was such a thing as lead poisoning in the 1850s – they used the damned stuff to make pipes for supplying drinking water. In those days, lead was perfectly harmless, to the best of scientific knowledge (just as genetically modified food is today).
According to the message McClintock found, one of Franklin’s ships was sunk, and the other was thrust on shore by the moving ice. The next senior officer of the expedition, Captain Crozier, decided they should try to strike out for the mainland. Further on, McClintock found a boat that the survivors of the Franklin expedition had dragged there, with two corpses in it. It was this discovery that must have inspired Julius von Payer’s splendidly gothic painting of the final episode of the Franklin expedition: a ship’s boat half-buried in snow, while bearded figures lie all around, dead or dying; one man, still alert, clutches a shotgun and watches with condensation billowing from his mouth as a particularly savage-looking polar bear stalks towards him. It’s a long way from Raymond Briggs’ cartoons of cuddly animals but, one suspects, slightly closer to the truth about polar bears.
To be fair to that noble animal Ursus maritimus, contrary to Thomas Pennant’s claim, polar bears do not have an unquenchable thirst for human blood. Humans are not their staple food, and it is very rare for a polar bear to attack a human; two of the most well-documented attacks by bears in the last century, which resulted in fatalities, were a hobo who attracted the bear’s attention by carrying meat in his pocket, and one of a gang of teenagers in Churchill, Manitoba, who thought it would be fun to aggravate one of Bruin’s descendants. How wrong they were.
Most male polar bears measure between 8 feet 2 inches and 9 feet 8 inches feet in length, and weigh between 772 and 1,433 pounds, although a specimen measuring 12 feet and weighing 2,209 pounds has been recorded. Polar bears are extremely curious, and know little fear – I’ve seen footage of a polar bear in the wild that ran towards a landing helicopter, and have even read of a mother bear trying to attack a hovering helicopter that she thought was threatening her cubs – but on the whole they prefer to avoid the company of humans. On the other hand, there is no reason to doubt the hellish accounts of the polar bear attacks on Barents’ expeditions. That a polar bear can easily run off with a man’s body clamped between its jaws is attested to by two bear attacks at oil-drilling installations in the Beaufort Sea in 1983. Pennant’s account suggests that polar bears were more savage in the days before they learned to fear mankind. If one should cross your path, try not to aggravate it. Remember: if you’re in the Arctic, you’re on Bruin’s territory, so treat your host with respect.
If the Erebus and Terror were never seen again, then the crews of the Enterprise and the Investigator were more fortunate. They had already become separated by the time they reached the Bering Strait, Captain Robert McClure racing ahead in the Investigator, determined to be the first to find the North-West Passage. She became trapped in the ice where McClure proved to be indifferent to the sufferings of his men, ordering the rations cut to two-thirds, and later to half, contrary to the advice of his surgeon. After three winters in the Arctic, many members of the crew had to be confined to their beds suffering from physical or mental illness, and while McClure clung on to his sanity Mate Robert Wyniatt became so crazed and despondent at one stage that he often howled all night long in his cabin. He threatened to kill McClure three times, and on one occasion had to be lowered to the ice, screaming, in an attempt to calm him down. So much for the British stiff upper lip.
By New Year 1853, everyone on board the Investigator had scurvy, and twenty men were on the sick list, two of them close to death. In April, when conditions on board were looking increasingly desperate, McClure spotted a figure moving over the ice. At first he thought it must be a musk-ox, then an Inuk. But in fact it turned out to be Lieutenant Bedford Pim of HMS Resolute, one of the ships of Sir Edward Belcher’s squadron. Pim had sledged over from Dealy Island where the Resolute and the Intrepid were wintering and discovered a cairn left by McClure the previous autumn, detailing the Investigator’s predicament and location.
McClure reluctantly agreed for himself and his crew to abandon the Investigator – he thought he could still sail through the North-West Passage, although when he asked his crew for volunteers to stay behind with him to make the attempt, only four men stepped forward – and they made the journey across the ice to the Resolute, in time becoming the first men to complete the North-West Passage.
While the men of the Investigator joined the crews of the Resolute and the Intrepid, however, they found it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Before they could escape from the Arctic the seas froze around them again. Belcher’s flagship Assistance, meanwhile, was ice-bound in Wellington Channel with the Pioneer. Sir Edward Belcher was a martinet who quarrelled constantly with his subordinates and ended up falling out with all of them. The only ship he had that was free was the North Star, and he abandoned his other ships – unnecessarily, in the opinion of many of his subordinates – and sailed back to Britain in 1854.
HMS Enterprise, meanwhile, returned to Britain in 1855, Captain Richard Collinson having spent most of his command drunk and falling out with his officers. He placed his first, second and third officers under arrest, as well as his second ice-master. When they got back to Britain he called for them all to be court-martialled, while they were, unsurprisingly, keen for him to be brought to trial, calling him a liar, a tyrant, a bully, a coward and a drunkard.
All in all, the exploration of the Arctic in the early 1850s was far from being the most glorious episode in the history of the Royal Navy. By 1854, however, the Admiralty had other fish to fry: war had broken out with Russia, and further Arctic exploration was put on the back burner. The Royal Navy resumed Arctic exploration after the war, but the first ship to sail through the North-West Passage did so over a number of seasons, from 1903 to 1906, captained by a certain Norwegian named Roald Amundsen.
A postscript: in 1855 the abandoned HMS Resolute broke free from the ice and floated, unmanned, down Lancaster Sound. The crew of an American whaler salvaged her and, when the British waived all claim to her, she was purchased by the United States Congress for $40,000 and returned, fully restored, to Queen Victoria as a gesture of goodwill. In 1880 the Resolute was broken up at Chatham, and a desk was made from her timbers that Victoria had shipped to Washington as a gift for President R
utherford B. Hayes. John F. Kennedy is supposed to have discovered this same desk in the cellars of the White House and had it moved to the Oval Office. It was under this same desk that Monica Lewinsky made a name for herself, and yet while George ‘Dubya’ Bush had every other piece of furniture in the Oval Office removed when he took over from Bill Clinton, the desk was kept; and for all I know remains there to this day.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due once again to the usual crew for support, encouragement, and assistance: James Hale, Sarah Keen, Yvonne Holland, and last but by no means least Alastair Wilson for invaluable advice, both technical and literary! As usual, any errors or inaccuracies remain the responsibility of the author.
Particular thanks are also due to M. Jean Verney-Carron, Directeur Général of Verney-Carron SA, for his kind and helpful advice on breech-loading shotguns of the mid-nineteenth century.
I should also like to thank the following for providing inspiration: Hans Christian Andersen, Peter Benchley, John Carpenter, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James P. Delgado, Fergus Fleming, William Goldman, Jerry Goldsmith, Carl Gottlieb, Stephen Hopkins, Bill Lancaster, Barry Lopez, John McTiernan, Herman Melville, Dan O’Bannon, Ann Savours, Ridley Scott, Mary Shelley, Alan Silvestri, Steven Spielberg, Francis Spufford, Jim Thomas and John Thomas, John Williams, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the anonymous author of Beowulf.
Killigrew R.N.
The Guinea Coast, 1847
Killigrew and the Golden Dragon
South China Sea, 1849
Killigrew and the Incorrigibles
The South Seas, 1850
Killigrew and the North-West Passage
The Arctic, 1852–3
Killigrew’s Run
The Baltic, 1854
Killigrew and the Sea Devil
The Gulf of Finland, 1855
First published in the United Kingdom in 2003 by Headline
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
57 Shepherds Lane
Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Jonathan Lunn, 2003
The moral right of Jonathan Lunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911591894
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Look for more great books at www.canelo.co