The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  Next morning McClure mustered his crew to remind them that he had urged them to trust the mysterious workings of the Almighty. He could not resist adding a moral homily: he urged them when they returned home to remember that “there are churches in England as well as public houses.”

  Thus was averted a second grievous Arctic tragedy, one that could have matched that of John Franklin. But the miseries of the Investigator party were not yet ended, for now the disagreeable side of McClure’s character showed itself. Kellett’s man, Pim, had saved McClure. It followed that Kellett and his crew were eligible for part of the prize of £10,000 that parliament had voted for the discovery of the North West Passage. But McClure did not intend to share either the prize or the glory. He was determined to keep up the pretence that his men were all healthy enough to sail the Investigator out of the Arctic and home to England, unassisted by Kellett or anybody else. To achieve this, he rushed off immediately to persuade Kellett that he was perfectly able to continue his voyage.

  To this end he left two instructions. The twenty-four members of the crew who were desperately ill were to leave on April 15 by sledge and make their way to Kellett’s two vessels off Melville Island. The remainder were to stay with the ship and continue on the same rations that had brought them to a state of near starvation. This callous order was designed to show that the expedition could get along without help.

  By the time the party of sick set off, three more of the ship’s company were dead. It was a ghastly journey – half the men were so miserable and lame from scurvy they couldn’t stand upright. Their stronger comrades had to tend their needs by day and even put them to bed at night. It was the spectacle of this scarecrow party of shrunken creatures, tottering forward, hollow-eyed, staring blankly ahead, that convinced Kellett that McClure could not carry on as he wished.

  When Kellett suggested that McClure abandon his ship, he heard an echo of that previous encounter at Cape Lisburne three years before. Once again, the wily McClure was insisting he must obey his orders; he could not abandon the Investigator on his own responsibility. Kellett thought he was being noble, but McClure was looking forward to the future when he would be able to swear with a straight face before the inevitable inquiry that he had been quite prepared to go on without any help – in short, that he, and he alone, was the conqueror of the Passage.

  Kellett suggested a compromise. If McClure would go back to the ship with Dr. Armstrong and if the men were fit and willing, he could carry on. McClure did not want his severest critic to force any decision and so insisted that Kellett’s surgeon, Domville, accompany him. They reached the Investigator on May 19. To McClure’s surprise and mortification, only four men out of twenty would volunteer to go on with him. Both doctors agreed that they should not. That was it. Kellett’s order to McClure to abandon his ship was now in effect, and the Investigator was left to her fate.

  Meanwhile, on April 4, M’Clintock’s other sledging parties had gone off to explore the western Arctic and search for Franklin in the unlikely event that he’d managed to get that far. Struggling in harness like so many beasts of burden, dragging back-breaking loads as heavy as 280 pounds a man, sometimes trudging knee-deep in slush, they performed superhuman feats at enormous personal cost. M’Clintock’s own crew actually walked and hauled more than a ton of supplies 1,328 miles in 106 days, a new record that established him, at least in the eyes of the Navy, as the acknowledged master of the craft. (Kennedy’s and Bellot’s similar journey – 1,265 miles in 95 days – was ignored, perhaps because they had used dogs.)

  M’Clintock discovered a new island, which he named Prince Patrick Island, on the rim of the Beaufort Sea – empty of either vegetation or animal life on its bleak west coast – but he did it at the expense of most of his crew. One man, John Coombes, dropped dead in harness. Two more were deathly ill. The rest took a year to recover. As late as July 1854, two of the sledgers, George Green, ice master, and Henry Giddy, bosun’s mate, were still badly shaken and weakened, while two others, Hiccles, a marine, and able seaman Richard Warne, were invalids. In spite of this, the Royal Navy continued to follow the gospel of manhauling according to M’Clintock, perhaps because it had so many available and idle seamen. But was it really necessary to send out big ten-man sledges loaded down with supplies when two or three dog drivers could cover the same ground? Nobody, apparently, bothered to consider the alternative.

  By the time the sledge crews got back, the surviving members of the Investigator’s company were lodged aboard Kellett’s two vessels. It seemed to them that their troubles were over. There was game aplenty: ten thousand pounds of muskox and caribou meat were taken that summer. With no sign of Franklin in the western Arctic, Kellett had planned to take his ships back to Beechey once the ice broke. On August 18, he was able to set sail, to the great joy of his frustrated passengers from the abandoned Investigator. Two transport ships, accompanied by the screw steamer Phoenix, were due to arrive from England with supplies and mail, and then return. Homeward bound at last! It seemed too good to be true – and it was.

  Again, they reckoned without the Arctic weather. The two vessels had moved scarcely more than a hundred miles to the east before the ice closed in again. McClure’s men, who had suffered through three dreadful Arctic winters, now faced a fourth.

  But a small party got away, for McClure was eager to get the news of his discovery to England. He had earlier dispatched Cresswell to Beechey Island by sledge with the demented Wynniatt. There they encountered Edward Inglefield, now in command of the steamer Phoenix, who arrived in August with letters and dispatches for Belcher. The Phoenix’s steam power had allowed her to break through the pack and clear a passage for the transports that brought new supplies for Belcher’s depot ship, North Star. In spite of this, one of the transports, the Breadalbane, was crushed in the ice as she lay anchored off Beechey Island. She sank in fifteen minutes, her crew rescued and crammed aboard Inglefield’s vessel. (More than a century later, in 1981, Canadian divers found her in 340 feet of water.)

  Toward the end of the month Inglefield again nosed into the pack and managed to get back to England with Cresswell and his news, “a triumph not for this age alone but for mankind,” in the declamatory words of Franklin’s old nemesis, Lord Stanley. (Lady Franklin was pointedly absent from the public reception.) Inglefield was promoted to captain for his feat, and Cresswell was reunited with his father to whom, as much as to anyone, he owed his life.

  One man did not return to England – Inglefield’s second-in-command, the French naval officer Joseph-René Bellot. This had been a last-minute posting, for Bellot had hoped to persuade the French to mount an expedition of their own. Jane Franklin had offered him command of Inglefield’s old ship, the Isabel, which was being fitted out for another voyage by William Kennedy. With his usual humility, Kennedy offered to serve under his former mate. Bellot declined because he felt the promotion of a foreigner over a Briton might weaken English enthusiasm for the cause. “I was taught unselfish devotedness ever since I saw Lady Franklin,” he said. It was just as well. Kennedy planned to take the Isabel to Bering Strait for another attempt at the western Arctic, but he got no farther than Valparaiso, where his crew mutinied, once again dashing the hopes of John Franklin’s persistent widow.

  With the French refusing to enter the picture, Bellot offered to join Inglefield. “Give me but a plank to lie on – but a corner for my clothes – and I will be content,” he wrote. Inglefield was glad to have the attractive young Frenchman who was, in Sophia Cracroft’s shrewd observation, “free from that common, almost invariable characteristic of little people – touchiness.”

  When the Phoenix reached Beechey Island, Bellot, with his usual enthusiasm, volunteered to carry the Admiralty dispatches to Belcher, whose two ships were farther north up the Wellington Channel. He set off on August 12 with four seamen, taking a gutta-percha boat and marching along the eastern shore. Two nights later, the party members were separated. Bellot and two others found the
mselves trapped on an ice floe. Drawing on Bellot’s expertise, they set about building a snow hut. On the morning of August 18 Bellot left the hut to examine the state of the ice. Without warning, a great fissure fifteen feet wide opened up under him. He was gone in an instant.

  The Eskimos wept when they heard the news. “Poor Bellot, poor Bellot,” they cried. He was just twenty-seven years old.

  3 The blue devils

  Elisha Kane had not entirely recovered from his bout of rheumatic fever when the Advance set sail from New York on May 31, 1853. Nor was his condition improved by violent bouts of seasickness as the little 144-ton brig tossed and rolled in the Atlantic. The slightest swell made him ill. Amos Bonsall, one of the crew, later remarked that no one but Kane could have persevered in such a voyage, given the same accumulation of illnesses. Scarcely any of the seventeen crew members thought he could recover.

  It was not a propitious beginning for one who had never before captained a ship, knew little of navigation, and wasn’t used to leading men. Undisciplined himself (he had hated the strictures of the American Navy), rebellious and strong-willed, he had little shipboard experience, his previous duties having been confined to the care of the sick. Now he found himself in command of an ill-starred crew who had never worked together. Several, like Bonsall, a Pennsylvania farmer, were amateurs, and at least two were troublemakers.

  During Kane’s illness, Henry Grinnell’s son, Cornelius, had taken on the job of preparing for the expedition. Unable to find enough volunteer seamen to fill his roster, he combed the New York wharfs and came up with two unruly characters: William Godfrey, a harbour boatman from the city’s turbulent East Side, and John Blake, who went under the alias of John Hussey. Within a week this pair got into a quarrel with Henry Brooks, the first mate. In the British Navy that kind of insubordination would have brought an immediate flogging. Kane, who was opposed to corporal punishment, had both men tied up and confined for a day or two in the booby hatch between decks. Less than a week later, Godfrey caused such a disturbance in the mess that the crew approached Kane and asked that he be sent home from Newfoundland. But when Godfrey promised to reform, Kane, still uncertain of command, let him stay.

  The Advance reached Upernavik, the farthest north of the West Greenland settlements, on July 20. Here Kane took on two more crew members, a plump and cheerful Eskimo youth of nineteen, Hans Christian Hendrik, and Carl Petersen, the Danish dog driver who had been with Penny in 1851. Petersen came reluctantly. He had not yet entirely recovered his health from the exhausting sledge journeys across Devon Island, and he was not impressed by the expedition itself. The ship was not well commanded, he noted. Kane would have to depend on his sailing master, John Wall Wilson, who came to loathe and despise him.

  Wilson had already told Kane that he knew nothing about ice. Kane, with that breezy insouciance that characterizes the confident amateur, told him that he personally understood it very well and would help him through it. The crew was generally untrained; only the carpenter, Christian Ohlsen, had any real experience in polar navigation. The food, too, was inadequate – again because of Kane’s confinement. There was salt meat, for example, but no fresh provisions. Petersen had a premonition that the Advance would never leave the Arctic. Nevertheless, he signed on.

  Early on, Petersen had an example of Kane’s recklessness and stubbornness. He noted that the captain didn’t agree with the English navigators, who had learned to treat the ice with great respect. Instead of docking, when necessary, against a berg – the accepted method – he plunged ahead, trying always, in Petersen’s phrase, “to bid defiance to the ice.” It wasn’t long before the Advance collided with a huge berg and lost a boat and a jib boom, an accident that caused an unpleasant argument between Kane and his first mate, Brooks, each of whom blamed the other for the encounter.

  Kane blundered on through the Middle Ice of Baffin Bay until on August 6 he saw the two sombre fifteen-hundred-foot capes – Alexander and Isabella – that form the east and west portals of Smith Sound. Following the route that Edward Inglefield had pioneered, he reached Littleton Island off the Greenland coast and buried a lifeboat and some provisions in a small cove to the north in case of an emergency – a prescient move. Meanwhile, Godfrey and Blake continued to cause trouble. On August 11, Godfrey was back in the booby hatch for assaulting the sailing master, Wilson. But Kane couldn’t keep him there for long; the two troublemakers were “bad fellows both but daring, energetic and strong”; he needed every available hand on deck.

  Now Kane sailed into the great basin that today bears his name. He had gone farther north by this route than any other white explorer including Inglefield, whom he thought of as his rival. But winter was closing in, and the crew, weary of warping and tracking the brig through the encroaching ice, were uneasy, homesick, and exhausted. They wanted to turn back; Kane was all for plunging on. It was still August; Penny, he pointed out, hadn’t wintered until September. Why should he let himself be outdone? (But that year, far to the west, the ice was already trapping Kellett and crushing the Breadalbane.) In Petersen’s view, Kane wanted to winter farther north than any Englishman because he believed that “the Stars and Stripes ought to wave where no Union Jack had ever fluttered in the polar gale.”

  Kane’s “search” for Franklin and the Pole, 1853-55

  In the end, his officers persuaded him to stop. He could not turn back, for the ice was closing in. He found a sheltered bay on the Greenland shore, which he named Rensselaer Harbor after his father’s country estate, and there he prepared to spend the gloomiest winter any of them had ever known.

  Except for the people of Spitzbergen, warmed by a milder current, no white man had ever wintered this far north. Even the pugnacious Godfrey felt it: they were all, he said, “terribly afflicted by blue devils.” It was impossible, Godfrey later declared, to describe the effect produced by the unchanging polar landscape. “The very soul of man seems to be suffocated by the oppressive gloom.…”

  Hans, the Eskimo, was afflicted, too. “Never had I seen the dark season like this.… I was seized with fright, and fell a-weeping.” Homesick for his native sweetheart, he packed his gear and prepared to leave for the south. Kane persuaded him to stay.

  The polar darkness, however, was not entirely to blame for the pall cast over the ship’s company. The men shivered in their quarters and subsisted on cold food because Kane had vastly underestimated the amount of fuel needed for the journey. By the end of February they were out of oil, almost out of candles, and rapidly running out of coal. It was no longer possible to melt enough water to wash in; the men had to forgo their tea; there would be no more fresh bread, only hard tack; the galley stove was abandoned and all cooking done in the smoky main cabin.

  This was serious enough. Kane’s own personality made things worse. He was snobbish, overbearing, boastful, and quite unable to keep his unruly crew in order. To Wilson, his severest critic, he was “peevish, coarse, sometimes insulting … the most self-conceited man I ever saw [who] thinks no one knows anything but himself.…” By January the officers were taking their meals in silence to prevent a disagreeable argument or a dressing down from their captain.

  If Kane abused his officers, he tried to curry favour with the men, who obeyed him only when they felt like it. Wilson observed that “Kane is not fit to take charge of men, he does not know how to treat them, and adopts his own ways in spite of all we can say.… He … is actually afraid to offend them.” Wilson was particularly contemptuous of Kane’s easy treatment of Godfrey, “a most audacious villain.” If he had his way, Wilson said, he would have flogged him “until he could not stand and keep him at hard duty but I would make a good man of him.”

  By midwinter, several of the men were suffering from scurvy while a mysterious ailment had killed off all but six of the fifty dogs. That meant the men would have to manhaul the sledges, British fashion, when they struck north toward the fabled Open Polar Sea. Kane began his preparations in February against the advice of
both Petersen and Ohlsen, who did not relish crossing that turbulent expanse of mountainous ice, jagged bergs, thick snow drifts, and howling winds so early in the season. There were other problems, too: Kane had to turn his cabin into a jail to confine the unruly Blake.

  On March 19, he sent Henry Brooks and seven men to establish a shore depot for the polar dash. Petersen was right; it was far too early. In the forty-below weather, the snow was as sharp and dry as sand and the terrain unbelievably rough. The weather was so bad that on some days the party couldn’t move their overloaded sledge. Unable to reach the shore, they turned back, Brooks and three others so frostbitten they could no longer walk. After eight miles they collapsed, realizing that unless they got relief they would freeze to death. Petersen, Ohlsen, and a young German scientific observer, August Sonntag, started for help. The brig was thirty miles away; they knew there was no time to stop for food, drink, or sleep if their comrades were to survive. They made the trip in thirteen hours, staggering aboard, delirious and haggard, their faces black, their limbs swollen, almost insensible from fatigue. Ohlsen, the only one able to speak, had his toes so badly frozen they had to be amputated.