The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  The disasters that awaited him were not entirely his fault. Barrow had picked him because of his experience on the North Pole journey the previous year, and also, no doubt, because he came from a well-placed family: a niece would later marry the poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson. But it was an odd choice. There was very little about the earlier polar trip that could prepare Franklin for the swift rivers of the tundra. He had no canoeing experience, no hunting experience, no back-packing experience. But then, neither did any other naval officer of the time. The hard muscles and stamina required of Canadian voyageurs and traders were disdained by those who trod the quarterdeck of a ship of the line. The Navy simply assumed that its officers were capable of any demand, and it sent Franklin and his companions off to the wilds with little preparation and a minimum of equipment, expecting them to cover five thousand miles by foot and canoe and to pick up what they needed from fur-trading posts along the way. The Navy, in short, was pinching pennies.

  At the outset Franklin learned that he would not be able to engage Orkney boatmen at York Factory; he would have to hire them on their own ground. The islanders showed a marked reluctance to go off on what they clearly considered a wild-goose chase. Franklin was both nettled and amused by their caution, which “forms a singular contrast with the ready and thoughtless manner in which an English seaman enters upon any enterprise, however hazardous, without inquiring or desiring to know where he is going, or what he is going about” – an assessment that says more for the Orkneymen than it does for the others. Franklin, indeed, might easily have been speaking of himself.

  In the end, four Orkneymen signed on but only to go as far as Fort Chipewyan on the rocky shore of Lake Athabasca, which Franklin did not reach until the end of March 1820, after wintering at Cumberland House in the Saskatchewan country. (Parry, at the time, was still frozen in at Winter Harbour.)

  He could not have arrived at a worse time. The Hudson’s Bay Company and its Montreal rival, the North West Company, were locked in a mercantile contest that had four years before even erupted into bloody warfare. As a result, Franklin could buy only a fraction of the food supplies on which he had counted because the beleaguered traders had eaten the rest. He was forced to pitch his tent in a no man’s land between two opposing posts, bargain for goods, and pay a premium for the voyageurs he needed; so much for the Navy’s cheese-paring.

  The Franklin party, deserted by the Orkneymen but supported by voyageurs, left Fort Chipewyan in July 1820. Franklin was undoubtedly glad to get away. He had arrived in considerable pain brought on by his inability to master snowshoeing, but he was equally pained by being forced to witness “the wanton and unnecessary cruelty of the men to their dogs, especially of those Canadians who … vent on them the most dreadful and disgusting imprecations.”

  Franklin had scarcely enough provisions to feed his party of sixteen for one day. By the time he headed out of Fort Providence, the last outpost of civilization on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, and into unexplored country, he was depending entirely on a group of newly hired Copper Indians under their leader, Akaitcho, to feed the party. The voyageurs were soon in open revolt; they couldn’t handle loads of 120 to 180 pounds on short rations. The Indians saved the situation by bringing in seventeen deer.

  In spite of all this, Franklin insisted on trying that fall to reach the mouth of the Coppermine, which no white man had seen since Samuel Hearne’s day. Akaitcho wisely refused to go so late in the season, and after a long argument Franklin finally gave in. On August 19 the party went into winter quarters on a small lake 250 miles north of Fort Providence and named their camp Fort Enterprise. It was their home for ten months. Most of the winter was spent shuttling goods by sledge from posts as far away as Fort Chipewyan to build up a cache for the following year’s journey.

  No doubt the hard-nosed traders were baffled and even amused by the spectacle of four young British naval officers – green amateurs – setting off by canoe, sledge, and foot for the unknown shores of the Arctic Ocean. They themselves had little interest in the quest for a Passage that had no mercantile value. A skit produced a few years later at York Factory appeared to satirize Franklin’s published journal. Certainly George Simpson, the head of the Athabasca district and the future “Little Emperor” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had no faith in the expedition’s success. He later confided his scepticism to his journal:

  “… it appears to me that the mission was projected and entered into without mature consideration and the necessary previous arrangements totally neglected; moreover, Lieut. Franklin, the Officer who commands the party has not the physical powers required for the labor of moderate Voyaging in this country; he must have three meals p diem, Tea is indispensible [sic], and with the utmost exertion he cannot walk Eight miles in one day.…”

  It was a harsh and unjust assessment, influenced in part by his conversations with young George Back, who travelled twelve hundred miles that winter seeking supplies for the party, but who appears to have been out of sympathy with his leader, for Simpson also wrote of “a want of unanimity amongst themselves,” to which Back had referred.

  Simpson did not much care for Back, who was blunt and overbearing in his repeated calls for supplies. “That Gentleman seems to think that every thing must give way to his demands,” Simpson wrote, in upbraiding one of his traders for letting Back have too much, thus sacrificing the primary interest of the Company. Simpson had more important issues on his mind – the struggle with the rival Nor’westers – and was clearly irritated by Back’s incessant nagging and his “impertinent interference in our affairs.”

  Back’s long trek that year was as opportune as it was remarkable, for it kept him from clashing with his fellow midshipman and artist, the delicate and romantic Robert Hood. Hood, who fathered one child during his months at Fort Enterprise, had fallen in love with a second native woman – a remarkably attractive fifteen-year-old Copper Indian girl known as Greenstockings. Back, who was a bit of a dandy and was later to gain a reputation as an inveterate womanizer, was equally smitten. The two men were prepared to fight a duel at dawn over Greenstockings, but Hepburn, the Scottish seaman, forestalled it by removing the charges from their pistols. Franklin was undoubtedly relieved to be able to send Back away for most of the winter.

  Nominally, Franklin was leader of the party. Actually, he was a prisoner of the voyageurs. Without them he could not move, and they knew it. Franklin was unable to maintain discipline. When some got drunk on rum and others pilfered meat, he could do no more than urge them to mend their ways. He suspected that one of his interpreters, Pierre St. Germain, was doing his best to dampen the Indians’ enthusiasm in order to abort the spring journey. But he could only threaten the man with a trial in England at some future date. St. Germain didn’t give a hoot. “It is immaterial to me,” he said, “where I lose my life.” He was convinced the whole party would perish after reaching the sea.

  Then there were the Indians, irked because the presents they expected were in short supply. Thinking he could get all he needed from the trading companies, Franklin hadn’t brought enough from England. As the packers shuttled back and forth from Fort Providence, the Hudson’s Bay post on Great Slave Lake, the trader there told their leader, Akaitcho, that the naval men were “merely a set of dependent wretches” who wouldn’t bother to reward them once they’d reached their goal.

  The Indians were also in deadly fear of the Eskimos, whose forefathers their forefathers had murdered in a famous encounter at Bloody Falls on the Coppermine during Hearne’s journey down the river. Franklin’s expedition set off on June 14, 1821, but as soon as it entered Eskimo country, the Crees departed in a body. That left only two hunters, the recalcitrant interpreters Pierre St. Germain and Jean Baptiste Adam. Franklin, in effect, made the pair captives. They pleaded to be allowed to leave; he refused. They planned an escape; he put a watch on their movements. After all, the safety of the entire party depended on their hunting skills. The naval men wouldn’t stoop to
hunt and didn’t know how, anyway. But Franklin realized that once the Indians were at a distance, fear of the Eskimos would keep the two Métis clinging to the expedition.

  The fifteen voyageurs who had come this far weren’t afraid of the Eskimos, but they dreaded the sea voyage in fragile birchbark canoes. Well they might; these cockleshells, already battered by the raging rapids and frequent portages along the Coppermine, were totally unfit for Arctic navigation. Franklin sent four voyageurs back with his guide, the North West Company trader Willard-Ferdinand Wentzel. Somebody, he realized, would be needed to look to the provisions at Fort Enterprise and to keep an eye on the Indians.

  Franklin’s first North American Expedition with Back and Richardson, 1819-22

  Rugged though they were, the Canadians were exhausted. Every one had made at least one winter journey back to Fort Providence (near the modern town of Yellowknife), 150 miles from the winter camp. Most had gone on for supplies as far as Fort Resolution – another 75 miles. One had gone as far as Fort Chipewyan, a further 200 miles, making a total return journey of 850 miles. Before reaching the navigable waters of the Coppermine they had been forced by fatigue to abandon one of their canoes. They had successfully manoeuvred the other two, each loaded with two tons of baggage and supplies, down the white water of the river to its mouth, the first white men since Samuel Hearne to achieve that goal. Now they were played out and hungry. The naval officers didn’t paddle, of course; nor did they drag sledges or carry packs – only their personal belongings.

  The party of twenty, including eleven voyageurs, that now set out to explore the coastline was far too large for the hunters to feed. Yet Franklin, who had only fifteen days’ supplies left, still pushed on. By August 8 he was down to two bags of pemmican and a meal of dried meat. The Indians saved him temporarily by bringing in three deer and a bear.

  The unexplored Arctic coastline, 1821

  By this time the paddlers were close to panic. As Richardson said later, it was madness to continue. Shipwreck and starvation faced them. But Franklin, eager to go on, ignored common sense. At last, on August 18, he reached a point where the coastline, which had been trending almost due north, turned eastward. Here, at Point Turnagain (a goal of sorts), he gave up. There was not a moment to lose. A more incisive leader would have turned back immediately; but Franklin dallied, and that dalliance doomed his party. Winter was coming on, the winds were rising, the canoes were falling apart, the sea was a maelstrom. But Franklin, in his zeal to complete the Passage, wasted five days on the Kent Peninsula vainly seeking an Eskimo settlement where he hoped the expedition could winter.

  At last, early in the morning of August 23 the party took to the canoes to head back. After battling mountainous waves for twenty-five miles they abandoned the water route. To get back to their base at Fort Enterprise they would have to travel overland for three hundred and twenty miles.

  The trip that followed was a horror. Franklin, who had exerted himself least, was the first to faint from lack of food; a few swallows of precious soup brought him round. But by September 15, the men were reduced to eating singed hide and a few lichens scraped from the rocks. Five days later Franklin found he couldn’t keep up. The starving voyageurs were in open revolt, threatening to throw away their baggage and quit. Luckily, they didn’t know which way to go. One canoe had already been jettisoned. Now they insisted on abandoning the remaining one. That put the leader in a frenzy of anguish. The Coppermine blocked their way; how would they be able to cross it? They were surviving on old shoes and scraps of untanned leather, fortified by the occasional meal of deer meat. The voyageurs stole some of the officers’ portions, but there was nothing Franklin could do.

  They reached the Coppermine and tried vainly to cross it on a raft of willows. Richardson attempted to swim over with a line and failed – emerging paralysed and speechless. After an agonizing week, they managed to get across in a makeshift canoe fashioned from bits of painted canvas in which the bedding had been wrapped. At this point one of the Eskimo interpreters wandered off and was never seen again.

  The party split into three groups. George Back was dispatched with the three strongest voyageurs to try to locate the Indians. He reached Fort Enterprise to find it deserted. Akaitcho was convinced the crazy white men had already been lost. He and his nomads were off somewhere, following the caribou; Back and his men set off to find them. One of his party, Gabriel Beauparlant, died during this journey.

  The second split occurred on October 6, two days after the Back group left. By then the party was in a bad way. Two of Franklin’s voyageurs died, weakened by diarrhea. Hood by this time was too fragile to continue and urged the others to go on without him. Dr. Richardson and Hepburn offered to stay with him, an act of considerable sacrifice. Franklin and the others stumbled on toward Fort Enterprise, but this attempt was too much for four of the remaining voyageurs. Unable to continue, they gave up one by one and tried to make it back to the Richardson camp.

  Only one arrived, a young Iroquois, Michel Teroahauté. At this point the harrowing tale of the Franklin débâcle grows darker. Two days after his arrival, Michel brought some fresh meat into camp. The others fell on it with relief and gratitude but remarked on its strange taste. Michel claimed it was part of a wolf that had been gored by a caribou. At first Richardson believed this odd story; later he became convinced that they had eaten human flesh – part of the body of one of the voyageurs who had turned back but never arrived. Had Michel killed him, or had he simply looted one of the corpses? Richardson had no way of knowing, but he was convinced from the Indian’s evasive words and suspicious actions that his guess was correct. As the days dragged by, Michel became surly, refusing to hunt or even carry a log to the fire – which none of the others had the strength to do.

  The smell of death, and something worse, was in the air. Hood was barely breathing. The party was existing on handfuls of tripe-de-roche. On Sunday, October 20, after reading the morning service, Richardson crawled off to gather some of this lichen, leaving the dying Hood sitting before his tent, arguing with Michel. Then, to his horror, he heard a shot and an anguished shout from Hepburn, who had been trying to cut down a tree a short distance from the others. Richardson hurried back to find Hood dead with a ball in his forehead, a copy of Edward Bickersteth’s A Scripture Help in his hand. Was it suicide? Michel said it was. But Richardson concluded from the dead man’s position that it was impossible for him to have shot himself. There were no witnesses, for Hepburn’s view had been screened by a copse of willows.

  Both Hepburn and Richardson were now thoroughly alarmed. Michel became even more erratic and hostile, uttering threats, saying he hated white men, claiming they’d killed some of his relatives. He was heavily armed with a gun, two pistols, a bayonet, and a knife. Hepburn had a gun, Richardson a small pistol. Neither was in any condition to resist an open attack, which Richardson was convinced was coming.

  At thirty-three, John Richardson was on the threshold of a long and distinguished career as a surgeon and a scientist. A man of great stamina and strong resolve, he would have made a better leader for the expedition than the indecisive Franklin. Son of a prosperous Scottish brewer, the eldest of twelve children, a friend of the poet Robbie Burns, a graduate of Edinburgh, then the most distinguished medical school in Britain, he was a broad-gauge scientist whose interests included botany, natural history, and geology as well as medicine. He knew Greek and was able to read certain texts on lichens in the original Latin. On this voyage he collected everything – rocks, plants, lichens, birds, fish – a contribution to natural history that gave some meaning to an otherwise tragic mission.

  Now he proceeded to act with a resolution that contrasted sharply with Franklin’s wobbly leadership. With Hood no longer in need of them, the three men, sustained by eating part of their dead comrade’s buffalo robe, set out for Fort Enterprise on October 23. During a halt that afternoon, while Michel was out gathering tripe-de-roche, Richardson, with Hepburn’s agreement, cam
e to a terrible decision. He was certain the Iroquois was only waiting for an excuse to attack them, and so when Michel returned, Richardson shot him through the head with his pistol.

  The two survivors reached Fort Enterprise on October 29 to find Franklin and three voyageurs near death. Two others had been sent off the week before to try to find Back’s party and the missing Indians. Richardson was horrified by Franklin’s condition, as Franklin was by his. “No words can convey any idea of the filth and wretchedness that met our eyes,” Richardson wrote, “… the ghastly countenances, dilated eyeballs and sepulchral voices … were more than we could at first bear.” Tragically, the weakened men had weakened themselves further by burning most of the nourishment out of the hides and bones that were their only fare.

  On November 1, one of the voyageurs, François Semandrè, lay down, apparently to sleep. Two hours later the others heard the death rattle in his throat. His comrade, Joseph Peltier, followed a few hours later. The others were too weak to remove the bodies from the hut. The limbs of the survivors began to swell, but their bodies were so reduced in flesh that it became painful for them to turn over, as they lay stretched out on the hard floor. As their strength decreased, Franklin noticed that he and the others were overcome by fits of pettiness, fretful arguments over small matters followed by apologies, then more recriminations. “If we are spared to return to England I wonder if we shall recover our understandings,” muttered the stolid Hepburn.