The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  These remarks, written to his favourite brother, Alexander (the two enjoyed “a Damon and Pythias relationship”), tell as much about Thomas Simpson as they do about George Back. The romantic young clerk, frustrated in a routine job in a backwater trading post, was burning with ambition to match the deeds of Parry and Franklin. Back must have appealed to him as a glamorous figure, right out of history. The following spring, when news arrived of Back’s discovery and successful exploration of the Great Fish River, Simpson bubbled with praise. It was “greater than any of us in the North anticipated.” Back, he felt, deserved and would get a knighthood.

  That was before Simpson himself became an explorer. A highly emotional man, unstable at times, immoderately ambitious, he would reach the point where his own craving for fame would make him jealous of Back – afraid that the older explorer might outdo him in bold deeds and discoveries. The time would also come when Back himself would fail and Simpson would rejoice, but that was in the future. In 1833, Back was a rescuing angel.

  Concern over John Ross’s long absence had reached a peak in England the previous year. His brother George, the father of James Clark Ross, worried about his relatives’ fate, had petitioned the King to launch a rescue operation. That the government declined to do; the unfortunate Ross was not the Admiralty’s favourite explorer, and the general feeling at that level was that he had blundered and died. John Barrow was convinced that the entire expedition had perished the first winter. Would Parry, in a similar case, have been regarded so carelessly – or Franklin? Certainly not Franklin, as events were to prove.

  But the government in the end could not resist public pressure. It finally pledged two thousand pounds toward a rescue operation, but only if the Hudson’s Bay Company would provide supplies and equipment. The rest of the cost – three thousand pounds – was raised by public subscription.

  Back’s party numbered only twenty. He brought three men from England, picked up four soldiers in Montreal, and recruited the others at Norway House. His only fellow officer was a medical man, Dr. Richard King, a sardonic travelling companion who was to bear the brunt of the expedition. King’s experience with Back turned him into a blunt critic of both the Royal Navy, for its exploring methods, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, for its treatment of the native population, an attitude that pitted him against two Arctic Establishments and rendered all his criticisms ineffective.

  King became an exponent of land-based travel as opposed to exploration by naval vessels. He thought it would be much easier to trace the course of the North West Passage by moving along the coastline on foot or by dogteam rather than trying to bull cumbersome ships through masses of shifting ice. He believed fervently that small parties living off the land were preferable to large ones dragging heavy equipment or heavy vessels trying to manoeuvre in ice-blocked channels.

  He had the maddening quality of being shown to be right after the fact, but at the time few were prepared to listen. He was prickly, abusive, and ungentlemanly enough to take his cause to the public rather than to pursue it quietly in the back rooms of the Admiralty. For twenty-two years he ranted on, vainly attempting to mount various expeditions to explore along the continental edge, with himself as leader. And he was a good leader; while Back headed off in a light canoe as a one-man advance guard, King was in charge of organizing the supplies and the main party.

  The fur traders were convinced that the pair were off on a wild-goose chase. On his first northern trek with Franklin in 1820, Back had heard from an old Indian warrior named Black Meat of a mysterious river, known as the Great Fish, that was supposed to wriggle through the Precambrian schists of the naked tundra northeastward to the Arctic Ocean. It was his plan to find this river, follow it to its mouth, cross over by land to Prince Regent Inlet, and look for Ross’s party.

  The company men were sceptical that any such river existed, a scepticism supported by the tension that existed between the fur trade and the Navy. The naval officers were seen as interlopers and amateurs, blundering about in a hostile land and writing romantic accounts of supposed hazards that voyageurs considered to be part of everyday life.

  As one Hudson’s Bay man, William Mactavish, wrote to his family during Back’s absence in 1834: “You’ll hear what a fine story they’ll make out of this bungle, they will you may be sure take none of the blame themselves.… They will return next summer and like all the other Expeditions will do little and speak a great deal.” Mactavish didn’t like Back. He thought him heartless and snobbish. Back, he said, despised those who helped him because of their lack of formal manners.

  But Back persisted in his search and early in 1834 found the headwaters of the mysterious river. In April a dispatch caught up with him reporting that Ross had been found alive. That left him free to devote himself to the expedition’s secondary purpose: to explore the northeast corner of the continent.

  That summer, Back and King headed down the Great Fish River into unexplored territory, “a violent and tortuous course of five hundred and thirty geographical miles, running through an iron ribbed country without a single tree on the whole line of its banks.…” The river expanded into large lakes with clear horizons, then narrowed again into a frothing maelstrom “most embarrassing to the navigator.” Back counted no fewer than eighty-three falls, cascades, and rapids before it poured its waters into Chantrey Inlet.

  To the north and to the east, Back could see land in the distance – Boothia Felix, in fact. He wrongly suspected a water passage led through it, but it was too late in the season to contemplate an attempt at such a North West Passage, nor did his instructions allow it. King disagreed with his leader; he was convinced that Boothia was a peninsula, not an island; again he turned out to be right. John Ross had already learned it from the Eskimos.

  King William Land could also be seen to the north, though neither man knew what it was. King wanted Back to move out of Chantrey Inlet and explore the coastline eastward. Had he done so he would probably have discovered that King William Land was an island, separated from Boothia Felix by a channel. Years later it was discovered that this was the only practical route through the North West Passage, but that information came too late to prevent the greatest of all Arctic tragedies.

  Back did not continue beyond Chantrey Inlet. With no fuel and only a little water, the expedition retraced its steps and returned to England the following year, 1835. King was not happy. He and his leader were not on the best of terms, and he clearly felt that Back could have done better. In 1836 he proposed that he lead an expedition with no more than six men down the Great Fish River to explore Boothia Felix and settle for all time the question of whether it was a peninsula or an island. Until that was established, “I consider it would be highly impolitic to send out an expedition on a large scale.” A small expedition could be mounted for a thousand pounds; Back’s had cost five times that. There were precedents in the journeys of both Mackenzie and Hearne. But King was, as usual, undiplomatic in the proposal he made to the Geographical Society and in the book that followed: “The question has been asked, how can I anticipate success in an undertaking which has baffled a Parry, a Franklin, and a Back? … if I were to pursue the plan adopted by [them] … of fixing upon a wintering ground so situated as to oblige me to drag a boat and baggage over some two hundred miles of ice to reach the stream that is to carry me to the scene of discovery, and, when there, to embark in a vessel that I knew my whole force to be incapable of carrying … I very much question if I could effect so much.”

  George Back explores the Great Fish River, 1833-34

  This gratuitous slur on the reputations of the three naval officers who occupied the pinnacle of the pantheon of Arctic explorers was enough to doom King’s plan. Besides, Back – who had now been promoted to captain and earned the Society’s gold medal – had plans of his own. At his urging, the Navy did exactly what the waspish doctor advised against. It mounted another large and expensive expedition. George Back set off in the 340-ton Terror with orders to
winter at Repulse Bay and then to drag boats across the isthmus at the base of the Melville Peninsula to explore the far shore.

  The result was an unmitigated disaster. Back, who failed to reach his first objective, was trapped in the ice for ten months, most of them fraught with terrible dangers and hairbreadth escapes. The ice captured him and played with him, and once hurled his battered vessel forty feet up the side of a cliff. In the spring, when the pack broke up, the Terror was attacked – there is no other word for it – by a great submerged berg that set her on her beam-ends and almost destroyed her before the sea again grew calm.

  The splintered ship, leaking, waterlogged, and almost impossible to steer, had no chance of getting back to England. Back headed for the Irish coast and, with only hours to spare, managed to ground his sinking craft on an Irish beach. This was his last expedition. Knighted by the new queen, he passes from the Arctic picture. His critic, Richard King, fared no better. Vindicated by history, he was shunned by the Arctic Establishment.

  Meanwhile, the Hudson’s Bay Company was bestirring itself, suddenly mindful of a clause in its original charter charging it with the task of discovering a North West Passage. Since such a Passage had no commercial value, the company had generally ignored that obligation, but now its licence to trade beyond its original territorial boundaries was about to expire. It was time to take action.

  It certainly didn’t want King. It wanted one of its own – two, in this case. Peter Warren Dease, an old company hand who had been with Franklin on his second expedition would supply the stability. Thomas Simpson, the ambitious young cousin of the governor, would supply the energy. Their first task would be to map the unexplored western section of the Arctic coastline, from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska – Franklin’s farthest point – to Point Barrow at the very northern tip of the Alaskan peninsula.

  Young Simpson was not happy with the idea of a divided leadership. He wanted all the glory for himself. Raised in poverty, a sickly youth tending to consumption, he had managed to overcome both obstacles. He graduated from King’s College, University of Aberdeen, with honours and by 1836 was as tough as any of the Canadian voyageurs. But he also suffered from an intellectual pride that came close to snobbery and from a suspicious nature that bordered on paranoia.

  Simpson was one of those men who believe themselves to be surrounded by dark forces conspiring against them. Although he owed his position to his cousin George Simpson, the “Little Emperor” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, he was convinced his powerful relative was inhibiting his advancement. He had been brought to Canada seven years before as Simpson’s personal secretary. By accompanying the governor on his journeys he had himself become a seasoned northern traveller. But he described the Little Emperor as “a severe and most repulsive master” who, he was convinced, was leaning over backward in his treatment of him to frustrate any charges of nepotism. Young Simpson tended to be hot-headed and intolerant. In 1834, at Red River, he had managed to provoke the Métis population, which he held in contempt, even going to the point of engaging in fisticuffs with one young mixed-blood, touching off a fracas that was calmed only by the diplomacy of the governor himself. He did not like mixed-bloods, a failing that would one day destroy him.

  In spite of his youth, Thomas Simpson was convinced that he should be the sole leader of the party exploring the northern coast of Alaska. He blamed the jealousy of senior company officers and the intransigence of his cousin for failing to get what he felt was his due. In fact, George Simpson had a high opinion of his young relative, who, he had noted, “promises [to be] one of the most complete men of business in the country.” But the governor was also aware of Thomas’s deficiencies. Peter Dease may have been “rather indolent [and] wanting in ambition,” but “his judgement is sound, his manners are more pleasing and easy than many of his colleagues,” and he was also steady in business and “a man of very correct character and conduct” – in short, just the man to act as a steadying influence on the impetuous and mercurial Thomas.

  Thomas Simpson was undeniably industrious. A stubby, burly figure, he was bursting with energy. To prepare himself for the expedition, he spent the late fall of 1836 at Fort Garry, toughening his body and studying astronomy, surveying, and mathematics. He even worked on his literary style (since he would be required to keep a journal) by reading the works of Sir Walter Scott. He left Fort Garry on December 1, 1836, and joined Dease, a chief factor of the company in the Athabasca region, sixty-two days later after a journey of 1,277 miles. He had now reached the zenith of his ambitions, for he was about to realize “some, at least, of the romantic aspirations which first led me to the New World.”

  A lesser man – or a less ambitious one – would never have reached Point Barrow that summer. By July 31, 1837, the party was only halfway between Franklin’s Farthest West and its objective. The men were played out. Dease wanted to turn back. But Simpson persuaded him to stay behind while he and five others made a dash to the point.

  They plunged off into the fog, travelling light and fording their way through a tangle of icy rivulets until, to Simpson’s “inexpressible joy,” they met a group of Eskimos. Without their help they would never have made it. In the natives’ skin boats, which would float in half a foot of water, they battled ice and tides until, early on the morning of August 4, Simpson, with “indescribable emotions,” saw in the distance the long spit of gravel hummocks that was Point Barrow.

  As he wrote to his brother that fall in immodest triumph, “I and I alone, have the well-earned honour of uniting the Arctic to the great Western Ocean.…” He wanted a promotion and wrote to the governor asking for a chief tradership, pointing out that he had “the exclusive honour of unfurling the Company’s flag on Point Barrow” and begging his cousin not to “reject my just claims, although I am one of your own relatives.”

  The absence of any reply confirmed Simpson in his dark suspicions. “Had I been in His Majesty’s Service,” he wrote to a friend, “I should have expected some brilliant reward, but the poor fur trade has none such to bestow.” After his return, he spent the winter at Fort Confidence on Great Bear Lake on what he called “the happiest terms” with the good-natured Dease and his family. But, he added, “it is no vanity to say that everything which requires either planning or execution devolves upon me.” Dease, he told his brother, was “a worthy, indolent, illiterate soul and moves just as I give the impulse.”

  He occupied those long, dark days reading Plutarch, Hume, Gibbon, Shakespeare, Smollett, and “dear Sir Walter.” A rumour reached him that William IV was dead and the Empire had a new young queen, but nothing official came from the company’s council, which appeared to ignore him. “They do not deserve such servants as we are, as they do not know how to treat us,” he wrote to his friend Donald Ross. “Have we been sent to the Arctic regions that our means & lives should be the sport of a tyrrannical [sic] Council?”

  Their task the following summer was to try to fill in some of the unexplored territory to the east, beyond Point Turnagain, the farthest spot that Franklin had been able to reach in 1820. In this they were not successful. Once again, the energetic Simpson persuaded the easy-going Dease to let him go a little farther on foot beyond the point where the boats gave up. Again he travelled light, with a handful of companions, but this time it didn’t work out. His men grew lame, and there were no Eskimos to help out. Simpson saw a vast bulk of land across the sea to the north, which he named Victoria Land after the new queen. He also saw open water farther to the east but had no idea where it led. Again he blamed Dease for not pushing forward with sufficient vigour to complete the job. “All that has been done is the fruit of my own personal exertions,” he told his cousin. He liked Dease for his upright character but considered him and his followers a dead weight. “My excellent senior is so much engrossed with family affairs,” he wrote, “that he is disposed to risk nothing; and is, therefore, the last man in the world for a discoverer.”

  What Thomas Simpson wanted, and what he neve
r achieved, was to risk everything – but only as sole commander of an expedition. If he could only go a little farther and explore the rest of that unknown section of coastline; if he could only link it with the explorations that had been made from the east! Then, he was certain, he would win the accolade. He knew he must be patient. If he could accomplish something more the following summer, then, surely, Dease would be recalled and he would be put in sole charge.

  When the two set off again in 1839, Simpson found, to his surprise and delight, that Coronation Gulf, which had been a solid sheet of ice the year before, was partially open. So was the grand strait between the continent and Victoria Land, soon to be named for Dease. On they went across Queen Maud Gulf, expecting the coastline to lead them north along King William Land to its northernmost point at Cape Felix, named by James Clark Ross nine years before. But now a narrow strait, soon to be named for Simpson, beckoned to the east. They followed it and, to Simpson’s joy and excitement, found that it led to Chantrey Inlet and on to the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River. Three days later they arrived at Montreal Island in the estuary and discovered Back’s cache of pemmican, chocolate, and gunpowder.

  Now Simpson indulged in an orgy of exploration. He pushed eastward another forty miles to the mouth of the Castor and Pollux River, then doubled back to explore the south shores of both King William and Victoria lands. In just three years he had filled in most of the blank spaces on the coastal map. He had closed the western gap, connected Franklin’s explorations with Back’s, and come within an ace of discovering the whole of the North West Passage, though he did not recognize it. He had actually come in sight of Rae Strait (yet unnamed), which separates King William Island from Boothia Peninsula. Who knows what he might have accomplished if he had made a fourth foray into that unknown realm?