The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  This stocky red-haired Scot, around whom so much controversy was to swirl, seemed the best choice for an Arctic adventure. Not yet forty-one, he had three decades of sea experience. He was undeniably brave, having been wounded no fewer than thirteen times in battle – “scarred from head to foot,” in the words of a future polar explorer, Elisha Kane. Ross boasted of his injuries, claiming that few other naval officers in his condition “could perform those services which require strength and manual labour.” Modesty was never Ross’s strong suit. But Parry, his second-in-command, liked him on sight and found him breezy, good tempered, affable, and clever at surveys. It was an assessment that Parry would later revise.

  Ross was good at surveys. He was also inventive. He had an inquiring mind and shared with his fellow Britons the growing preoccupation with science that was to distinguish the century. He had several ingenious inventions to his credit, including a new sextant known as the Royal William. He was also a firm disciple of phrenology, which had invaded England from the continent in 1814 and captivated the literati. Belief in this curious pseudo-science did not make John Ross an eccentric. Many leading figures of the day, including Jane Griffin, the future Lady Franklin, were convinced that character and ability could be determined by examining the shape of a person’s skull. Using drawings of the cranium, subdivided by dotted lines like those on butchers’ charts, the phrenologists identified bumps of knowledge, passion, and greed. Ross, in fact, called himself a phrenologist and would later write a paper on the subject, analysing the bumps on the heads of various acquaintances from Lady Elizabeth Yorke to the Countess of Hardwicke.

  Ross was the choice of Sir George Hope, one of the Lords of the Admiralty, and there was nothing Barrow could do about that. The second secretary, who was ambitious for recognition, would have preferred the polished and more pliant Parry to the rough-hewn and independent Scotsman. He was never Ross’s friend; he would soon become his enemy.

  Like Barrow, Ross was of relatively humble stock, a son of the manse; Parry ranked higher on the social scale. His father was a fashionable doctor in Bath, a governor of the Bath hospital, and a fellow of the Royal Society. He had influential friends: his practice included members of the nobility. Young Parry was enrolled in one of the best grammar schools in England before going off to sea at thirteen. (Ross had gone to sea at eleven.) His cultured family had wide interests in art, music, and literature, and he got into the Navy through the influence of Admiral Cornwallis, the commander of the Channel fleet, whose niece was one of Dr. Parry’s patients. In the nineteenth-century navy, as Parry well understood, connections counted.

  He believed in “the incalculable advantage of being on the spot.” When he returned from the West Indies in 1817, he wangled an introduction to the venerable Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society – a man to whom the Navy listened. He cultivated both Banks and Barrow, presenting each with a slim volume he’d written on nautical astronomy, carefully dedicated to the admiral under whom he’d served in the West Indies. He wrote gleefully to his parents about these important contacts. “Independently of the immediate advantages to be derived from such introductions I feel that it must be the means of future advantage in every possible way,” he exclaimed. “I feel already that I begin to stand upon higher ground than before.…”

  Barrow, the farmer’s son who liked to hobnob with members of the upper classes, took to him at once, for he saw him as an ally. He became Parry’s patron; Parry became his loyal disciple. Parry would be the means by which Barrow achieved recognition for launching an era of Arctic exploration; Barrow would be the instrument that would give Parry an Arctic command of his own.

  But in 1818 Parry was no better qualified for Arctic exploration than Ross, whose Baltic stint had scarcely prepared him for the rigours of the white world. There was one man who was qualified – the most experienced sea captain in England at that time. William Scoresby was quite prepared to go. But neither the Admiralty nor John Barrow had any intention of sending him. For William Scoresby wasn’t Navy. He was a member of that despised commercial band of Greenland whalers who had been pushing farther and farther north without recognition for decades. A whaling captain in charge of one of His Majesty’s ships? The prospect was unthinkable.

  In the annals of Arctic exploration, Scoresby has rarely been given his due. John Barrow, among others, saw to that. Barrow took most of the kudos for persuading the Admiralty, through Banks, to seek out the Passage on Scoresby’s evidence that a miraculous change in the Arctic climate had increased the possibility of channels open to the west. In fact, Scoresby had been making meticulous observations in this area and communicating them to Sir Joseph Banks long before Barrow entered the fray.

  Scoresby was an extraordinary man, perhaps the most remarkable Arctic expert of his era. A whaler like his father, he had been eighteen years at sea, seven of them as a master. He had been given his first command at the age of twenty-one and was soon known as the most courageous and skilful of the Greenland whalers. But he was more than that. In the winters, when the whaling season ended, he had taken classes in philosophy and science at Edinburgh. Like Ross, he was inventive. He had devised a new “marine diver” to take the temperature of deep-sea waters (and discovered that the water on the ocean floor was warmer than that at the surface). He had invented a pair of “ice shoes” for walking more easily across the pack. He had produced a paper on polar ice conditions and in 1818 was completing his monumental work, which has since been called “one of the most remarkable books in the English language” as well as “the foundation stone of Arctic science.”

  This was the man the British Navy snubbed when it planned its first expedition. Scoresby did not have Ross’s bulldog stubbornness or Parry’s natural charm and good looks. His face was weathered by the elements, and his nose and cheekbones were a little too prominent. He was unassuming, even shy, and a devout Christian who forbade his crews to go after whales on the Lord’s Day. Years later he would be ordained a minister.

  For the past decade, Scoresby had been in regular communication with the ailing Joseph Banks, describing his scientific investigations in the chemical composition of sea water and polar ice, in the movements of the Arctic currents, in the infinitely diverse forms of snowflakes, and in the new botanical species he had discovered on the Greenland shore. In 1817, he found the coast of Greenland clear of ice for the first time in anyone’s memory. At Banks’s request he sent him details; the sea, he said, was “perfectly devoid of ice” as far north as the 80th parallel. Conditions were perfect for a voyage of discovery, and he, William Scoresby, was eager to command it.

  Scoresby was no romantic. He had no illusions about the Passage. In a prescient letter to Banks, he forecast that it would “be found only at intervals of some years” because the Arctic climate and the Arctic ice were ever shifting and changing, a fact that the British naval explorers never fully comprehended. Even if someone accomplished a voyage through the unknown Arctic fastness to the Pacific “it might not again be practical in ten or twenty years.” That was an assessment that holds true today.

  Scoresby in 1817 knew what the Navy took decades to learn. He scorned the proponents of the Open Polar Sea theory, a fantasy that Barrow for one would never relinquish. (Another delusion was that land extended all the way to the Pole, joining the continents of Asia and America.) The idea that beyond an intervening wall of ice lay a warmer ocean, free of impediment, was one no Greenland whaler could accept. The barrier was there; all could see it. Why should it suddenly vanish in a colder clime? To believe that required an excess of optimism and wishful thinking. But in post-war Britain there was no lack of those.

  Banks would have liked to see Scoresby in charge, if not of the expedition itself, at least of one of the pair of ships being fitted out for Arctic service. In December 1817, he urged the whaler to come to London to meet Barrow. The encounter that followed was, to put it mildly, not propitious. Barrow was more than evasive; he was alarmingly rude when th
e two met for the first time in Banks’s drawing room. When Scoresby tried to approach him, Barrow edged away. Scoresby persisted, finally managed to corner him, and asked, bluntly, what his expectations were. Barrow responded coldly that if he really wanted to go he should call next day at the Navy Board and make his proposals. With that he turned sharply and left the room.

  Banks then told Scoresby as gently as possible that all his efforts to get him a command had failed. The Admiralty could not or would not employ anybody but its own officers. He might, perhaps, be taken on as a pilot, but an officer of the line would be in command. Banks, who wasn’t Navy himself, knew something of naval snubs from his exploring years in the South Seas aboard British ships. He was both disappointed and sympathetic, but he did not have the energy to circumvent Barrow. He was old and sick with gout, confined to a wheelchair, and approaching his death. Scoresby decided to have nothing more to do with the expedition. He had come to London at his own expense – all for nothing. Barrow never again mentioned him by name or gave him further credit for helping to launch a new era in Arctic exploration.

  2 The Croker Mountains

  On April 21, 1818, the expedition to seek the Passage set off for Baffin Bay with Ross in the Isabella (385 tons) and Parry commanding the smaller Alexander (252 tons). These were transports. Ross didn’t think either was suitable for Arctic exploration and said so in his brusque fashion, whereupon he was told, equally brusquely, that he didn’t have to go if he didn’t like the conditions. He knuckled under. In fact, Parry’s vessel had difficulty keeping up with the Isabella, a deficiency that limited its usefulness. But the Navy had no intention of building special vessels for Arctic service. In six decades of polar exploration it never did so. After all, its main task was the defence of the realm. Exploration was no more than a peacetime diversion. The Navy’s refitters did their best to brace and strengthen the converted ships for their coming battle with the ice; but if war came they would be expected to perform a different and, to the Navy, more important service.

  By mid-June, the expedition had crossed the Atlantic and entered Davis Strait, and the officers and their crews had their first view of the icebound sea in all its splendour and all its menace. Here was a crystalline world of azure and emerald, indigo and alabaster – dazzling to the eye, disturbing to the soul. No explorer who passed through this maze of drifting, misshapen bergs ever failed to record the feelings and sensations that engulfed him when he first encountered the glittering metropolis of moving ice. To some the great frozen mountains that whirled past seemed to have been sculptured by a celestial architect, for here were cathedrals and palaces, statues and castles, all of brilliant white, coruscating in the sun’s rays, each one slightly out of focus as in a dream. Some reminded Parry of the slabs at Stonehenge; there were actually some upright pieces supporting a third resting horizontally on top. Ross was confounded by the intensity of the colours – the greens and blues and the blazing whites. “It is hardly possible,” he scribbled in his journal, “to imagine anything more exquisite … by night as well as by day they glitter with a vividness of colour beyond the power of art to represent.…”

  Both men were awed by the strangeness of the savage realm they’d invaded. Soon they would enter unknown waters. Meanwhile, it was comforting to encounter the whaling fleet – some three dozen ships flying the British red ensign – and to hear the cheers of the whalers as they passed through. It was, Parry thought, rather like coming upon a flourishing European seaport. But he also knew that this was where civilization ended.

  From the whalers Parry and Ross got their first warning of the vagaries of the Arctic climate. The warm-up, it seemed, had ended. The ice was far more formidable than expected. The previous winter had been terrible – the worst in a decade. The whaling fleet was hard put to find a clear passage north.

  The following day Parry climbed one of Greenland’s mountains to take some observations and was moved by the spectacle below. It made him shudder at his own insignificance, he said, and taught him to reflect “upon the immensity of the creator who could call these stupendous mountains and those enormous masses of ice into being.”

  No more devout explorer ever entered the Arctic. The evangelical movement, with its emphasis on prayer and Sunday observance, was then sweeping Great Britain. It did not attract the apparently godless lower classes, but it did have a marked influence on middle-class Anglicans such as Parry. The movement emphasized the need to spread the gospel among the lower orders, and these, of course, included British seamen, who by and large could scarcely be called fervent churchgoers. Almost forty years later, when Parry was an admiral, he would address these seamen in an inspirational pamphlet. “I want to see every man among you,” he wrote, “… sailing under the British flag, a religious man, having the fear of God before his eyes and the love of God glowing in his heart.”

  To Parry, a man without religion was like a clock without weights or mainspring. He himself prayed constantly, day and night. His sense of the infinite, already well developed, was certainly deepened and strengthened by the Arctic. In a later remarkable declaration Parry announced that he would give up his wife before he would give up his God.

  The start of the quest

  By July 2, Parry saw another manifestation of the Creator’s power. The two ships entered a dismaying labyrinth of icebergs. Parry set himself the task of counting them and gave up when he reached one thousand. For the next month the expedition moved sluggishly north along the Greenland coast, beset by ice, blinded by fog, and almost crushed by the pressure of the encroaching pack during one screeching gale. It was a close call. The sterns of the two vessels collided violently. Spars, rigging, lifeboats were torn apart. Even the hardened whalers were shaken by the near catastrophe; their own boats, they said, could not have stood such a hammering.

  A day or so later, not far from the aboriginal village of Etah, Ross and Parry came face to face with an unknown Eskimo culture – the encounter recorded in the illustration by John Sacheuse, their native interpreter from South Greenland. Even Sacheuse had never heard of, much less encountered, this strange race of polar Eskimos whom Ross dubbed “Arctic Highlanders.” He could understand their dialect only with great difficulty.

  The scene that followed was pure farce. The natives on the shore hung back, obviously terrified at the strange apparitions on the ships. It was decided that one of Parry’s officers should go forward bearing a white flag on which was painted the civilized emblem for peace – a hand holding an olive branch. The natives, of course, had no idea what an olive branch was, or what it was supposed to mean. On these bleak shores no olive trees grew – actually, no trees at all. Yet none of the white men seemed to appreciate the absurdity of the gesture. Ross made a more practical move. He put up a flag on a pole and tied a bag full of presents to it. That worked marvellously.

  These Eskimos had had no contact with the world beyond their desolate domain. They were astonished at the presence of Sacheuse, for it had not occurred to them that there might be others like themselves in the world. As for the men with sickly looking skins, they were convinced they had come from the sky. They knew nothing of boats – had never seen one; even the native word “kayak” had no meaning for them. They spoke to the ships as if they were living things. “We have seen them move their wings,” they said. When Sacheuse tried to explain that ships were floating houses, they had difficulty believing him.

  They were startled by their first glimpse of a mirror and tried to discover the monster they believed was hiding behind it. They laughed at the metal frames of the eye-glasses worn by some of the seamen, spit out in disgust the biscuit that was offered, wondered what kind of ice the window panes were made of and what kind of animal produced the strange “skins” the officers were wearing. They were shown a watch, thought it was alive, and asked if it was good to eat. The sight of a little pig terrified them; a demonstration of hammer and nails charmed them; the ships’ furniture baffled them, for the only wood they’d ever
known came from a dwarf shrub whose stem was no thicker than a finger.

  Between these naïve people and the English mariners there was a gap that would not be bridged until each learned from the other. Sacheuse made them take off their caps in the presence of the officers, a gesture that suggests how quickly he had absorbed the white way of life. It was the first small attempt – one of many that would be made in the years to come – to “civilize” the natives. They obeyed cheerfully enough but must have been as mystified by the ritual as the English were to find that human beings actually lived in this uninviting land. Yet nobody on this so-called scientific expedition thought to investigate how a band of people who couldn’t count past ten had managed to adapt to their formidable homeland – an omission, repeated through the century, that would cost many future explorers their lives.

  The expedition had now reached the top of Baffin Bay, rediscovering it after two centuries. (Baffin’s charts turned out to be surprisingly accurate.) Ross sailed west to the southern tip of what is now Ellesmere Island, then south, seeking a channel that might lead him to the North West Passage. At the end of August a possibility loomed up – a long inlet leading westward that William Baffin had named for his patron Sir James Lancaster, one of the founders of the East India Company.

  Was this the way to the Orient? Or was it simply a dead end, a bay rather than a strait? Nobody knew. Baffin himself had given up hope at this point and failed to trace it to its end. But Parry, for one, was full of optimism. Surely this was the route that could lead, if not directly to the Russian coast, at least into the heart of the Arctic to connect with other lanes of water!