The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  As it was, he had made two errors. He thought Boothia was an island and that a strait of water led directly into Ross’s Gulf of Boothia. If that were true, there were only about a hundred miles left unexplored. Actually there was no strait. Boothia was a peninsula, and there were seven hundred miles of coastline awaiting exploration to the only gap in Boothia – the still unknown Bellot Strait. More seriously, he also made the mistake of believing that King William Land was connected to Boothia and that there was no passage leading south along its eastern coastline.

  Dease and Simpson’s explorations, 1837-39

  He didn’t want to share another expedition with Dease. “Fame I will have,” he told George Simpson that fall of 1839, “but it must be alone. My worthy colleague on the late expedition frankly acknowledges his having been a perfect supernumerary.” Then he added a sentence that takes on a significance in the light of the tragedy that was to follow. “To the extravagant and profligate habits of the half-breed families,” he wrote, “I have an insuperable aversion.”

  The attainment of all his ambitions was within his grasp. Peter Warren Dease had gracefully bowed out. Simpson proposed a daring plan to the directors of the company in London. He would take a dozen men down the treacherous Great Fish River and from its mouth sail on through the supposed water passage he thought led to the Gulf of Boothia; from there he would push on through Fury and Hecla Strait to York Factory on the western shores of Hudson Bay. He was prepared to spread the task over two seasons and finance it with five hundred pounds of his own money, a small fortune at that time. Had he done so he would almost certainly have discovered his errors, learned that King William Land was an island, and that a safe channel existed off its eastern shore – a piece of information that would have saved the doomed Franklin expedition from being caught in the great ice stream that clogs the alternate route on the western side.

  Simpson was convinced he was on the verge of conquering the Passage. “I feel an irresistible presentiment that I am destined to bear the Honourable Company’s flag fairly through and out of the Polar Sea,” he wrote to his cousin. But the Little Emperor did not reply. The impetuous young explorer fidgeted all through the long winter, waiting for some praise or gratitude. None came. By June of 1840 he could stand it no longer. That summer he decided to go to England to press his case.

  What he did not know – what he would never know – was that even as he planned that trip to London, the Governor and Committee of the company were dispatching a congratulatory letter to him approving his plan. He was to be given sole command of the new expedition and everything he needed to accomplish his goal.

  The letter never reached him. That summer, while he was riding through the country of the Dakota Sioux with four heavily armed mixed-bloods, tragedy struck. The details are murky. The two survivors swore that Simpson had been taken sick, accused two of the party of plotting to kill him, and shot them dead. The witnesses fled, returning later with a larger party to find Simpson himself dead of gunshot wounds, his rifle beside him. The authorities brought in a verdict of suicide.

  Since that day, Thomas Simpson’s death has been a matter of mystery and controversy. His brother Alexander, to whom he had poured out his soul so often by letter in those sunless days at Fort Confidence, was convinced he had been murdered. The half-breed assailants, Alexander claimed, were planning to steal the secret of the North West Passage, which was among Thomas’s papers. That is a little too melodramatic and far-fetched to hold water. What secret? The Passage was not a gold mine to be pounced upon in the dark of the night and looted. In any case, Simpson’s theories were wrong.

  Undoubtedly there was a quarrel, and that is understandable in the light of Simpson’s known dislike of mixed-bloods, whom he termed “worthless and depraved.” There is also Simpson’s own mercurial character to be considered, especially in the light of the fancied slights, the frustrations, and the long tensions of an Arctic winter. He had talked of the Métis and “the uncontrollable passions of [their] Indian blood.” He himself was subject to similar passions. Was it murder or suicide? And what was the cause? No one will ever know. The irony is that his considerable triumphs had not been ignored, as he believed. In England the gold medal of the Geographical Society as well as a pension of one hundred pounds a year awaited him. He did not live to receive either but went to his grave a victim of impossible distances, leisurely communication, and his own paranoia.

  4 Prison warden

  Van Diemen’s Land in 1836 was nothing more than a vast and horrible prison, and John Franklin was its warden. The colony harboured 17,592 convicts and 24,000 “free citizens,” some of them former convicts themselves. And each year another 3,000 convicts arrived.

  It was a long way from the clean, cold air of the Arctic, and the living conditions for almost half the population were far more appalling than those suffered by the Eskimos, shivering on the barren windswept islands of northern Canada. To Franklin, there were worse horrors than besetment among the floebergs. The man who would not hurt a fly was so distressed by the lot of the convicts that, according to his future son-in-law, Philip Gell, “more than once his health was shaken under the burden.” Gell added that “he found another source of hopeless sorrow in the fate of the perishing Aborigines.” There were but ninety-seven left in the colony.

  Franklin’s six years in Van Diemen’s Land were the most painful of his life. Early in his tenure he set down his impressions of the colonists, who, he found, displayed “a lack of neighbourly feelings and a deplorable deficiency in public spirit.” The Franklins, especially Lady Franklin, didn’t fit into the snobbish, ultra-conservative, and generally unsophisticated upper-class clique, whose members thought him a weakling and saw her as a meddler. To the bureaucrats who ran the government, the new governor appeared inept, inexperienced, and dangerously liberal-minded. He worked hard. He took his job seriously. But he was no match for the Byzantine manoeuvrings of a tightly knit colonial service.

  The real problem was Lady Franklin. She did not act the role of the conventional governor’s wife, whose duties had historically consisted of dressing smartly, making and receiving calls, and entertaining in public. Her contemporaries found her lofty and a trifle preachy. Jane Franklin had little use for the brittle chit-chat of the drawing-room; she wanted to discuss philosophy, art, and science. Her own room at Government House was described by one visitor as “more like a museum or a menagerie than the boudoir of a lady,” being cluttered with stuffed birds, aboriginal weapons, geological specimens, and fossils.

  She flung herself into her usual round of activity, visiting museums, prisons, and educational institutions, which brought down a hail of criticism. She formed a committee to look into the conditions endured by women convicts, but the governess she chose to run it defected after a newspaper article claimed it wasn’t suitable work for unmarried ladies. When she showed an interest in the aborigines, another paper attacked her as “unwomanly.” She tried to start a college at New Norfolk but was frustrated when the colony’s insidious colonial secretary, Captain John Montagu, insisted that public money could not be squandered on such a project. “A more troublesome interfering woman I never saw,” Montagu said privately. She hated snakes and tried to rid the island of them by offering a bounty of a shilling a head out of her own pocket. That sort of gesture prompted one critic to remark that she was “puffed up with the love of fame and the desire of acquiring a name by doing what no one else does.” The project petered out; there were just too many snakes. No doubt Lady Franklin felt that the worst ones were to be found in the Colonial Office itself.

  In her travels, which were extensive and exhausting – she was away for as long as four months at a time – she went where no woman had gone before: to the top of Mount Wellington in Australia, across the wild country to the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land, overland from Melbourne to Sydney by spring cart and horseback, careless of hardship, ever curious, always questioning, and compiling statistics in her voluminous j
ournals on everything from the price of sheep in Yass to the flight patterns of the white macaw.

  It was inevitable that she should be considered the power behind the throne in Van Diemen’s Land. One hostile newspaper went so far as to call her husband “a man in petticoats.” In the smouldering antipathy between Franklin and his colonial secretary, Montagu, she was the tinderbox. Matters came to a head in the winter of 1841-42 when Franklin, on Montagu’s advice, dismissed a popular surgeon for dereliction of duty. The doctor’s friends got up a petition charging that the dismissal was unjust. Lady Franklin evidently agreed. After much thought and no little vacillation, the governor recanted, to the fury of Montagu, who was convinced that Jane Franklin was behind the move. From then on the two were at odds.

  Franklin was no match for the powerful and wily civil servant, who had a section of the press on his side. Montagu engaged in a campaign of obstruction that could have one ending only. After receiving a pompous note in which the colonial secretary came very close to calling him a liar and a weakling, Franklin sacked him. It was actually only a suspension; the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, Lord Stanley, would have the final word. Unfortunately for John Franklin, the same ship that carried to England his report on Montagu also carried Montagu himself, burning for revenge, armed with a thick sheaf of documents and memos, and crying out, “I’ll sweat him. I’ll persecute him as long as I live.”

  Montagu’s friends in the Tasmanian press backed him. The Cornwall Chronicle published an article entitled “The Imbecile Reign of the Polar Hero,” while the Colonial Times put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Arctic Hero’s wife: “If ladies will mix in politics they throw from themselves the mantle of protection which as females they are fully entitled to. Can any person doubt that Lady Franklin has cast away that shield – can anyone for a moment believe that she and her clique do not reign paramount here?”

  There was worse to come. Lord Stanley backed Montagu, offered him another job, and issued a stinging rebuke to Franklin – a public horsewhipping, in one observer’s words. As if that were not humiliation enough, he let Montagu have a copy of his reproof, which Montagu rushed to Tasmania by immediate post before Lord Stanley got around to sending it officially. Thus several copies were passed about in pro-Montagu circles, with many a nudge and snigger, several months before the explorer received the dispatch himself.

  Montagu went further. He also shipped out a three-hundred-page packet of the dispatches, letters, and documents he had used to shore up his case. This arrived in April 1843 and was held in a bank in Hobart, the capital, where favoured customers were allowed to peruse it in secret. Franklin was never able to see the packet, in which Montagu called him a “perfect imbecile”; but he knew it was there, as did everybody else in town, and he also knew through hearsay what it contained.

  By this time Jane Franklin was in a state of nervous prostration and Franklin himself, trying to appear outwardly cool, was inwardly in turmoil and close to a breakdown. The press was predicting his imminent recall, and on June 18, the Colonial Times announced it under the headline “GLORIOUS NEWS!” A newspaper had arrived from England reporting the gazetting of the explorer’s replacement, but so glacial was the speed of the official post that Franklin himself had no official word for another two months. In fact, his replacement arrived three days before he was formally told – in a six-month-old dispatch – that his term of duty was ended. After all this humiliation, it was a relief to be out of Government House.

  In spite of the controversy, Franklin remained personally popular. Two thousand cheered him off when, on January 12, 1844, he sailed for England. More than ten thousand signed an address of farewell. And when, a decade later, Lady Franklin appealed for funds for the search for her lost husband, the Tasmanian people contributed seventeen hundred pounds.

  But in 1844, Franklin had reached the nadir of his career. He felt that his honour had been stained and did his best to seek redress. When that was not forthcoming, he insisted, against his friends’ advice, on publishing a pamphlet outlining his side of the story. Did he really believe the British public was eager to gobble up his dry, factual account of an obscure bureaucratic squabble on an unknown island on the other side of the world? Probably not; but he had to do something – or so he thought. In truth, his name scarcely needed clearing. His closest friends and Arctic cronies had always been on his side. No pamphleteering was required to retain their loyalty. As for the general public, who never read the pamphlet, the man who ate his boots was still an Arctic hero.

  For Sir John Franklin, that was not good enough. Something more was needed, some daring public adventure that would remove the stain of Montagu’s perfidy. He would soon reach his sixtieth year; his career was almost at an end. But he could not – would not – rest until he regained what he considered his honour through some great new feat of exploration – or, more likely, some great old feat.

  Once again, the North West Passage beckoned.

  5 A matter of honour

  “They cannot help it, these Arctic fellows,” Lord Brougham, the former Lord Chancellor, remarked when he heard that John Franklin was off again to seek the North West Passage. “It is in the blood.” Yet it is improbable that Franklin would have pushed so hard to lead another expedition – or that his friends would have pushed so hard – if his reputation had not been at stake. Van Diemen’s Land was the key. “If you don’t let him go the man will die of disappointment” was the way his friend Parry put it to the Navy. It was as if Franklin was being chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with his abilities, out of sympathy for his despondency.

  The logical choice to lead a new expedition, if there was one, was not Franklin but that most seasoned of all explorers, James Clark Ross. Nonetheless Ross, who had just married, bowed out on the grounds that he had promised his wife’s parents not to go to sea again. It seems a thin excuse. Parry and Franklin, his two heroes, had thought nothing of deserting their brides in favour of Arctic exploration; that was Navy tradition.

  It is more likely that Ross also felt sorry for Franklin, possibly nudged by the indomitable Jane, who wrote to him: “… if you … do not go, I should wish Sir John to have it … and not to be put aside for his age.… I think he will be deeply sensitive if his own department should neglect him.… I dread exceedingly the effect on his mind.…”

  Others rallied to the cause. John Richardson told Franklin that he would be happy to sign a certificate stating that his constitution was perfectly sound and that his strength was sufficient for any journey through the frozen seas. There were objections, of course. Both Back and Sabine felt Franklin was too old, pointing out that he had suffered greatly from cold on previous expeditions. Lord Haddington, the new First Lord, also worried about the explorer’s age and constitution. “You’re fifty-nine,” he pointed out.

  “Not quite,” said Franklin stoutly. He was still two months short of a birthday.

  Haddington remained doubtful, realizing that he’d be blamed if Franklin succumbed during the voyage; but the eager explorer brought him round. Although he agreed he was too plump for another overland expedition, he pointed out that life on shipboard would not tax him. Lord Haddington sympathized. He was, the explorer told his wife, exceedingly kind, almost to the point of tenderness. In short, the most ambitious Arctic expedition yet mounted by the British was to be led by a man who got the job because everybody felt sorry for him.

  All this took place in February 1845. By that time events were moving at high speed – the expedition was expected to leave in three months – and England was again caught up in North West Passage fever.

  The pot had begun to simmer in the fall of 1843 with the return of James Clark Ross and Lieutenant Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier after four years in Antarctic waters. This had been a highly successful expedition. Ross, who was knighted for his work, had got farther south than any man. He had actually seen the edge of the Antarctic coast, until then unknown, and had added to the knowle
dge of terrestrial magnetism. As Admiral Beechey pointed out, Ross’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, had already been fitted for the ice and could easily be equipped with engines and the new screw propellers the Navy had finally adopted.

  This was all John Barrow needed. By December 1844, he was ready with a detailed proposal for a new attempt to discover the Passage. He was convinced that this time it would be successful. Barrow sounded the proper note: English pride demanded it. If some other power seized the opportunity, then England, “after having opened the East and West doors, would be laughed at by all the world for having hesitated to cross the threshold.”

  He saw few problems. “It is remarkable,” he wrote, “that neither sickness nor death occurred in most of the voyages made into the Arctic regions.” What he didn’t say, for he didn’t realize it, was that in the second year of almost every voyage, and sometimes in the first (John Ross’s was an exception), the seeds of scurvy had been sown, and only a swift return to civilization had prevented mass tragedy. Nor, of course, did he point out that every previous naval attempt to seek the Passage had met with failure because of the unpredictable ice conditions.

  Barrow was sure he knew where the Passage could be found. Dease and Simpson had explored the narrow channel that ran along the North American coastline between the Beaufort Sea and King William Land. Parry had navigated a parallel channel, three hundred and fifty miles to the north, that led from Baffin Bay to Viscount Melville Sound. In between lay an unknown labyrinth of land and water. Barrow, with his usual optimism, believed that a connection could be made between the two channels and the Passage conquered in a single two-month season. At the age of eighty-two, he was ready to retire; the successful voyage would be his crowning achievement. Franklin was more cautious. He thought it might be necessary to spend two winters in the Arctic and use the three summer seasons to get through the Passage.