The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  If this were not enough, he soon learned that the delectable Miss Browne, Sabine’s niece, with whom he had an understanding, had lost interest in him. One can scarcely blame her; after all, she hadn’t seen him since that spring two and a half years before when he had flirtatiously fiddled with her life preserver. But now her mother was going about claiming that he had jilted her in the most dishonourable fashion. Parry was miserable, but his dejection turned to wounded pride when he learned from friends that Miss Browne had not been constant during his absence. All that meant, in those strait-laced days, was that she had been seen in the company of other men. But Miss Browne went one step further in breaking the social taboos of the time: she actually got engaged to somebody else. Her mother was trying to nudge her back into the embrace of the Arctic hero, but Parry was having none of that. The knowledge of Miss Browne’s shocking conduct cured his melancholia and helped him shake off “the more bitter and less remediable feelings by which I had first been agitated.” Parry’s prose style was as serpentine as some of the Arctic inlets.

  The incident came close to estranging him from his friend and shipmate Edward Sabine, the fickle Miss Browne’s uncle. There was a painful meeting at the Royal Society – they were both Fellows – in which they pointedly avoided mentioning “the subject.” But even though Sabine “behaved very well,” there was a distance between them, doubtless aggravated by a new jingle making the rounds of London and Bath:

  Parry, why this dejected air?

  Why are your looks so much cast down?

  None but the Brave deserve the Fair

  Any one may have the Brown!

  That, of course, was the price of fame. But if Parry was taunted by catty whispers, he was also being lionized by the best and brightest in the realm, from Sir Humphrey Davy, Britain’s leading scientist, and Sir Thomas Lawrence, the society portraitist, to Robert Peel, home secretary and future prime minister. Peers of the realm – the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquis of Chandos – entertained him, not to mention those Parry rather boastfully referred to as “numerous other individuals of high respectability.” It was all dreadfully expensive, of course, for Parry, who was not yet a wealthy man, had “worked hard to return their civilities.” But, he said, “I believe it is worth the money” (his emphasis). He had long since learned the value of friends in high places. Now he needed them again.

  He had been plagued during these gloomy months by uncertainties about his future. He had been forced to admit, if only to his mother, that he had not been very successful, “indeed rather to the contrary.” The Navy had offered him a sinecure as a hydrographer, and he worried that those duties might prevent him from following his main obsession. To his elation, Lord Melville, whose name Parry had made sure to immortalize during his explorations, indicated that one job need not interfere with the other. “I know I stand on very high ground indeed,” a jubilant Parry told his brother, pledging him to silence.

  The decision was made in the first week of January 1824. Once again Hecla and Fury would sail north under Parry’s command. He thought at first of quitting his post as hydrographer, but John Barrow, who had plainly been working for him behind the scenes, persuaded him not to. “It is,” Barrow pointed out, “your sheet anchor.”

  He saw Franklin daily. Both men were busy that winter planning their respective expeditions, though Franklin’s wasn’t yet officially set and wouldn’t be for another year. But Franklin was dogged; “… the steadiness with which [he] pursues his object is very admirable,” Parry noted. The more he saw of Franklin, the more he liked him. Franklin presented him with his portrait, which Parry had framed and placed in his ship’s cabin opposite a likeness of the King.

  Meanwhile, he had fallen in love again, with the nearest available candidate, a young woman named Jemima Symes, who was conveniently living at his mother’s house in Bath. She was very ill with one of those unspecified nineteenth-century ailments that no one seemed able to name. Her condition was not helped by the fact that Parry was anxious to be off once more for the frozen ocean. But for the moment, at least, she fitted the role of future partner for whom the explorer clearly longed.

  At Deptford, the Hecla again drew crowds. She was now the most famous ship in the Navy; in the three months before Parry sailed some three thousand persons signed the visitors’ register. They came from all over the British Isles and as far away as Vienna, and they included Prince Leopold of Saxe Cobourg, the uncle of the future Prince Consort, two royal duchesses, and on the last day the family of Sir John Stanley of Alderley, whose daughter, Isabella, would one day be Lady Parry.

  On April 27, 1824, another future Arctic wife, Jane Griffin, and her sister Fanny were invited to dine at the home of the Franklins to meet Parry. Eleanor Franklin was pregnant and her health was failing, otherwise the meeting might have taken place earlier, for Parry was about to sail. Now she was forced to curtail her guest list to those to whom she most wanted to pay respect. There were sixteen at dinner, an imposing assemblage that included Parry’s old Arctic colleague Lyon, Sir John Barrow (who sat at the top of the table), Captain Beechey, who had been with Franklin on the abortive North Pole expedition, and Isaac Disraeli, the father of a future prime minister. The perceptive Jane Griffin was accustomed to painting word pictures of everybody in her journal. Lyon had “heavy eyelids & good teeth & is altogether very pleasing.” Barrow “is said to be humorous & obstinate & exhibited both propensities.” Beechey was a “prim looking little man and was very silent.”

  But it was Parry who interested her most, “a fine looking man of commanding appearance, but possessing nothing of the fine gentleman … his figure is rather slouching, his face full & round, his hair dark & rather curling.” To her he seemed “far from light hearted & exhibits traces of heartfelt & recent suffering, in spite of which he occasionally bursts into hearty laughs & seems to enjoy a joke.”

  Miss Griffin thought Parry was returning north rather against his inclination, complaining to her that he’d seen nothing of the rest of the world. But this peculiar English reluctance was a mask for Parry’s inner eagerness. He was raring to go but wasn’t going to show it publicly. One mustn’t appear too keen; it just wasn’t done.

  His priorities were clear. He was to sail down Prince Regent Inlet, which he had briefly and only partially explored on his first voyage, and look for a channel west that would connect with the coastline examined by Franklin in 1821. If that could be done, the Passage was as good as conquered.

  The Passage, as always, was the chief goal. He was not to stop to examine or chart the coastline. He wasn’t to make scientific observations or collect specimens unless he was blocked by ice. With his ships fully provisioned and the lemon juice ration increased by one third, he set off on May 8, optimistic as always, certain that this time he would achieve his purpose.

  Again he reckoned without the perversity of the Arctic weather. To his astonishment and chagrin he found that the belt of ice in Baffin Bay was twice as broad as it had been on his earlier voyage. He was faced with an additional hundred and fifty miles of jostling bergs, all jammed together, holding both his vessels in thrall and threatening at times to crush them like eggshells. He had confidently expected to work his way through in a month, as he had in 1819. It took him more than two.

  When at last he reached Lancaster Sound on September 10, he was a month behind schedule. Three days later, only twenty-one miles from the entrance to Prince Regent Inlet, his ships were again beset. The season was almost over. Should he try to make an ignominious retreat to England? The commander of the Fury, Lieutenant Henry Parkyns Hoppner, agreed that this was unthinkable. They should try to push on west as far as possible and attempt the Passage the following year.

  It seemed, however, that the Arctic was making Parry’s decisions for him. A gale blew up that drove him back down the sound and into Baffin Bay. The wind changed and another gale blew him back again. At last he was able to find a wintering place on the northwestern shore of Baffin Island, in
a small bay off Prince Regent Inlet. For the next ten months this forbidding shore would be their home.

  Parry had never encountered a bleaker landscape. No cheerful Eskimos arrived to while away the dreary hours. No animal was seen. The gulls and dovekies that had fluttered around the ship were gone. The white plain was as devoid of life as it was of colour. In his journal Parry wrote of “the inanimate stillness” and “the motionless torpor” of his surroundings.

  He had, of course, prepared for it. There would be costume parties and grand balls, in which men and officers frolicked together in fancy dress. Discipline was relaxed but never abandoned: “masquerades without licentiousness,” in Parry’s words, “carnivals without excess!”

  Everyone waited breathlessly to see what the captain would wear during the Grand Venetian Carnival that Lieutenant Hoppner had proposed for November 1, aboard the Fury. Parry kept them guessing, climbing down the Hecla’s side enveloped in a large cloak that he did not throw off until all were assembled on the Fury’s deck. To the delight of the company, he stood revealed as an old marine with a wooden leg whom the sailors recognized as a man who played the fiddle for ha’pennies on a road near Chatham. Parry, the amateur thespian, maintained the role, scraping on his fiddle and crying out, “Give a copper to poor Joe, your honour, who’s lost his timbers in defence of his King and country!”

  Not to be outdone, Hoppner appeared as a lady of rank, fashionably dressed, with a black footman in livery, who was revealed to be Francis Crozier, a midshipman aboard the Hecla, then starting out on a career that would end tragically a quarter-century later with the lost Franklin expedition.

  And so they capered to the music of their captain’s fiddle – monks in cowls, Turkish dancers, chimney sweeps, ribbon girls and ragmen, Highland warriors, dandies, Jews and infidels, bricklayers and farmers, tropical princesses and match girls, whirling about in quadrilles, waltzes, and country dances, a bright pinpoint of revelry in the sullen Arctic night.

  On July 20, 1825, they were freed at last from their winter harbour and set sail for the western shore of Prince Regent Inlet. Parry felt that the real voyage had only now commenced. They were passing land that had never been explored, and the prospect of a speedy passage seemed bright.

  Once more the Arctic would thwart them. Hugging the shore of Somerset Island, whose crumbling, perpendicular cliffs sent masses of limestone tumbling onto a mounting pile of rubble at their base, they ran into a stiff gale, which on July 30 grounded the Fury on an exposed and narrow beach. She was scarcely hauled free when both ships were trapped. A huge berg forced the Fury against a mass of grounded ice, threatening to tear her to pieces. She trembled violently. Beams and timbers cracked. A crash like a gunshot was heard on the larboard quarter. Her rudder was half torn away; she began to leak badly, yet there was no landing place safe enough to make repairs. All her crew could do was to fight to keep her from grounding again and to work the four pumps in shifts until their hands were raw and bleeding.

  For a fortnight, the officer and crews of both ships sought to save her. They tried to fasten her to an iceberg; but the icebergs were wasted by weather, and the cables snapped. They tried to raise her to examine her battered keel, but a blizzard frustrated them. Both ships were in peril of being smashed against the rubbled headland. Nothing seemed to work. The crews had reached the breaking point, so exhausted that some fell into a stupor, unable to comprehend an order. On August 21, Parry was forced to cast off the Hecla to save her from being driven aground. The same gale drove the Fury onto the beach and blocked her exit with huge bergs. It quickly became obvious that she would have to be abandoned.

  The decision gave Parry great pain. Everything about this expedition had been fraught with failure. He hadn’t found the Passage – hadn’t got near it – and had explored no more than a few miles of new land. Worse, he had lost a ship, the one catastrophe the Navy would find it hard to forgive.

  Off he sailed, the Hecla crammed to suffocation with the double complement of officers and men. He left her sister ship and most of its stores on the beach – Fury Beach, it would be called; perhaps these provisions might succour some future expedition. Parry himself was home on October 16, 1825, with nothing to show for sixteen months of cold and exertion.

  A court martial followed – nominally Hoppner’s, but, as Parry said, “virtually mine as he acted … under my immediate inspection and orders.” Hoppner was acquitted and all the officers praised and flattered for their exertions. Parry was relieved, but the fact remained that he had lost a ship.

  Jemima Symes was happy to see him back safe. She was still sick but had written him a cheerful letter. “Everybody tells me that she will now get well,” Parry informed his brother. “My sisters are of the opinion that my absence and her extreme and constant anxiety respecting me have done much towards keeping her ill.”

  But his relationship with Miss Symes soon languished for reasons that can only be guessed at – her frail health, or her own diminishing ardour for a suitor wedded to the Arctic and to his religion, or possibly his own desire for a wife with a hardier constitution and higher social standing. The day after he wrote to his brother about her continuing illness, Parry was bemoaning his susceptibility to attachments of the kind that had foundered so grievously in the case of Miss Browne. “I have always felt a desire to be attached somewhere,” he confided. “I have never been easy without it, and with less disposition I will venture to say, than 99 in 100 of my own profession, to vicious propensities, either in this or in other ways. I have always contrived to fancy myself in love with some virtuous woman. There is some romance in this, but I have it still in full force within me, and never, till I am married, shall I, I believe, cease to entertain it.”

  His general loneliness, his hunger for love and the stability of marriage, and the knowledge of his failure brought on depression. He suffered from headaches and took drugs to try to alleviate them. He had been confirmed in his post of hydrographer and was now determined never again to seek the elusive Passage. After eight years of “continual harassing both bodily and mental” he wanted to be quiet and free of complications. But he did not expect to be: “London is not quiet.”

  He produced another polar narrative, a single volume this time and thinner in comparison with the hefty and detailed tomes of earlier voyages. Reading these excerpts from his journal – so much sparser than in previous years – one gets the impression that Parry was growing weary of it all. “I am persuaded,” he wrote, “… that I shall be excused in sparing the dulness [sic] of another winter’s diary.”

  The published result did not meet with the chorus of huzzahs that had greeted Parry’s earlier works. The Gentleman’s Quarterly wrote that “the last two expeditions undertaken by Captain Parry have been peculiarly unfortunate. Literally nothing has been accomplished with the primary object of these Expeditions.…” And Barrow, in the Quarterly Review, was markedly unenthusiastic about Parry’s expedition, which he pointed out had left the question of the Passage “precisely where it was at the conclusion of his first voyage.… It has added little or nothing to our stock of geographical knowledge.” Barrow hastened to add that no blame should be attached to the gallant captain; but all the same, the truth of those words from a man who had always espoused Parry’s causes must have been galling.

  He had said he would never go north again, that he was through with the Arctic. But those were hasty sentiments, uttered at the end of a long and dispiriting battle with the ice. It began to dawn on him that there was one way to restore his bruised reputation, by another daring attempt – if not to seek the fabled Passage, then why not the North Pole itself?

  4 The silken flag

  Long before Parry returned from the North, John Franklin was ready to leave on another expedition by land and sea to explore the Arctic coastline. He was faced, however, with an agonizing decision. His wife, Eleanor, was in the final stages of tuberculosis, growing weaker by the day. She had drawn up and signed her will, set her per
sonal affairs in order, even chosen a chapter from Corinthians for her funeral service. Franklin’s departure date was set for February 16, 1825; it could scarcely be postponed without aborting the expedition for another year; in fact, seamen and stores had already been sent off to North America the previous fall to await the expedition’s arrival.

  Eleanor herself urged him not to delay. “It would be better for me,” she said, “that you were gone.” In his misery, he could only pray that her sufferings would end before he took off; but that was not to be. She rallied. He allowed himself the luxury of hope that she might recover, for the doctors “saw symptoms of amendment.” Of course, that was all wishful thinking; the disease was clearly terminal, and they both knew it. He sailed on the appointed day, carrying the silken Union Jack she had embroidered for him to raise on the Arctic shore. He continued to write to her, letter after letter, from New York City, from Albany, from the British naval station at Penetanguishene on Georgian Bay. And there, on April 22, he finally learned that his solicitude was in vain. She had succumbed just six days after his departure. Even though he must have expected the worst, it was a devastating blow.

  For him there was no ritual to numb the finality of her passing – no funeral, no graveside farewell, no memorial service. That would not come until he planted her flag on the treeless tundra by the Arctic’s rim.

  His plan was to travel overland to Great Slave Lake and on down the Mackenzie to explore the coastline westward as far as Kotzebue Sound off Russian Alaska, where a naval vessel, the Blossom, under Captain William Beechey, would pick him up. Two of the officers from his earlier expedition, John Richardson and George Back, were again with him.

  Richardson, a tireless and prodigious traveller, was Franklin’s intellectual superior as well as his greatest supporter and perhaps his closest friend, a skilled cartographer as well as a surgeon and naturalist. Franklin was delighted to have him. The same could not be said of George Back, whom Franklin had first met on the original failed attempt to reach the North Pole in 1818. Franklin’s enthusiasm for Back cooled after the first North American journey; in fact, he didn’t want him on the second. “You know I could have no desire for his company,” he told Richardson, “but do not see how I can decline it, if the Admiralty press the matter, without being of great disservice to him, and publicly making an exposure of his incapacity in many respects.…”