Kane gathered up seven men and set off, the crippled Ohlsen lashed to the sledge. He would have to serve as guide, since Petersen and Sonntag were now powerless. In that dreadful tangle of broken ice, the sledge was useless. After twenty miles, the party left it and struggled forward on foot, with Ohlsen half fainting, supported between two men. They found the tent containing the missing men with difficulty, half expecting the occupants to be dead, grateful to discover them barely alive. The rescue party needed sleep, but the tent was too small to hold a dozen men. They dozed in two-hour shifts, those waiting outside leaping and stamping their feet to keep from freezing to death. Then the invalids were strapped into their sledge and the party set off for the brig.
It was a nightmare journey. Again and again the sledge had to be unloaded and lifted over a barrier while the sick lay groaning on the ice. After ten miles, even the healthy men, groggy with fatigue, began dropping in their tracks until only two were left – Kane and Godfrey – to raise the tent and cover up the sleepers. Kane was determined to go another nine miles to pick up the sledge abandoned on the outward journey. Godfrey offered to go with him. He may have been a trial, but he was tougher than the others; and on this journey he proved his worth.
Long before they reached their goal, Kane was delirious, babbling and swooning as Godfrey pushed him along. He thought Godfrey was a bear and called on his imaginary crew to shoot him. After they got the sledge, Kane’s beard was so solidly frozen to his clothing that Godfrey had to hack off part of it with a jackknife before the captain could sleep.
By the time the others, rested and less weary, caught up, Kane and Godfrey had a pot of blubber heating on a fire. After a little rest they started forward again, at the rate of about a mile and a half an hour. By then all were demented, seized by a kind of frenzy, laughing frantically, gibbering, shouting oaths, mimicking the groans and screams of the invalids – a company of madmen, subject to bursts of maniacal fury at one moment, only to turn into blubbering children the next. Godfrey said later that he had never before or since felt such a strong inclination to suicide, even searching about for a chasm into which he might fling himself before the longing passed.
The safety of the ship, and of the half-crazed men who reached her at last, devolved upon young Isaac Hayes, the ship’s doctor. He was twenty-one, a green medical student just out of school when Kane took him aboard. Now he was staring at near corpses, covered from head to foot with frost, their beards lumpy with ice, their tread feeble, their eyes vacant and wild. They flung themselves, fully clothed, on their bunks and passed out. When they awoke to the fearful pain of thawing flesh, the ship, to Hayes, “presented all the appearances of a mad house.” Astonishingly, Kane, the perennial invalid, was the last to collapse and the first to recover.
His ill-planned expedition had cost two lives. Jefferson Baker, a young hunting companion of Kane’s, died of tetanus. Pierre Schubert, the cook, expired after his foot was amputated. Most of the others lost portions of their feet or toes.
As Kane sat by the bunk of the dying Baker in April, he heard a shout from the deck. A seaman had spotted eight people on the shore. These were Eskimos from the community of Etah, seventy miles away, the most northerly permanent human habitation in the world. They had never before seen white men, but their parents probably had, for these were descended from the same “Arctic Highlanders” John Ross had encountered thirty-six years earlier. They pointed at the crew and burst into peals of laughter, then cheerfully sold Kane four dogs to add to the three healthy animals left on the ship.
Kane was anxious to see for himself the massive glacier he had already named for Alexander von Humboldt, the noted natural scientist and explorer. Some of his men had reached it the previous August. On April 25, he sent off a party of six with some of the dogs and followed the next day with a smaller team. Godfrey was again his sole companion. Unruly as he was, he had saved Kane’s life on the previous outing, was the fittest man and the best dog driver on the ship.
The scenery along the Greenland coast was spectacular: red sandstone cliffs rose a thousand feet from the frozen sea, riven by bays and fissures and sculptured by the frost and the wind into misshapen pillars and columns. Ahead, the most massive glacier in the known world sprawled across Greenland, its glittering face looking down on them from four hundred feet. But they could not climb it. Three men went blind, another suffered chest pains, several were crippled by scurvy. On May 4 Kane himself fainted, and with one foot frozen was strapped into the sledge. When he reached the ship ten days later, he was in a stupor.
He had failed again. With two of his crew dead and most of the rest shattered, he had only three men healthy enough for duty. Of the officers, four, in Kane’s phrase, were “knocked up.” Almost a year had gone by with little to show. Kane had not found Franklin – indeed, had not made much effort to find him – and had seen no evidence of an Open Polar Sea. His only hope was to explore the Kane Basin to see whether there was an opening in that ravelled coastline. On May 20 he sent off Hayes and Godfrey in a light sledge with ten days’ provisions. They returned on June 1, both completely snowblind, Hayes so badly afflicted he couldn’t complete his report for another six weeks. The pair had managed to chart two hundred miles of the winding western coastline north of Inglefield’s farthest. They hadn’t found a passage west, nor had they been able to get far enough north to glimpse any open water. What Hayes didn’t report was that Godfrey had gone half mad, tried to desert, and threatened Hayes with a gun, which the young doctor was able to wrest from him after a struggle.
In these conditions, Kane asked himself, could Franklin have survived? In the gloom of winter he would have said no, but after the arrival of the Eskimos, he was less certain. Here was “a savage people … destitute of any but the rudest appliances of the chase, who were fattening on the most wholesome diet of the region, only forty miles from our anchorage.…” It was quite possible, he thought, that the missing explorer or some of his men, divided into small parties, could be still living among the natives.
The hundred-mile blank on his crude map of the Kane Basin must be filled if he was to salvage anything from the expedition. He had but a handful of men healthy enough to do the job. He sent five off to explore the Humboldt Glacier and two more – William Morton, his steward, and Hans Hendrik, the Greenland Eskimo – to sledge north to the top of the basin. This time they must succeed. As Kane remarked, “… it is my last throw.”
The glacier party returned with one man snowblind to report it could not scale the face of the ice sheet. Morton and Hans staggered back on July 10, their dogs limping – one animal, in fact, in such bad shape that he had to be carried on the sledge. Nonetheless, they had sensational news. They had found a new channel, thirty miles wide, leading north out of the basin (Kane named it Kennedy Channel after a friend) and followed it until they reached a massive cliff – Cape Constitution – jutting into the water. At that point they had come eighty miles farther north than had Inglefield.
Morton clawed his way for five hundred feet up the rocky promontory and there he beheld a marvellous sight: open water as far as he could see, lapping at the ridges of coastline that marched off in rows toward the horizon. The cliffs were aflutter with sea fowl and swallows, the glittering sea was free of ice. Morton and Kane were convinced that what he had seen was the Open Polar Sea. “The Polynya has been reached,” he exulted. He was wrong, of course. The magical waters Morton saw in the distance were another mirage, the product of wind, waves, and wishful thinking. Kane, however, believed that Morton’s discovery more than justified the trials he had gone through. “I can say that I have led an expedition whose results will be remembered for all time.”
His elation was mixed with foreboding over the growing shortage of food and fuel and the unreliability of his officers and crew. Hans’s absence with Morton had deprived them of the daily seal the Eskimo was used to bringing in. Everybody was sick and out of sorts. Kane’s journal entries began to turn petulant. “Pet
ersen mopes still. He has no native morale.…” “William Godfrey continues on the sick list. Malingering! [He] is a bad fellow.” Henry Goodfellow, his brother Tom’s young protégé, was “utterly ineffective.” Brooks, the powerfully built first officer, was “not a reliable man.” The two had words, whereupon Kane relieved Brooks of his duties, putting Ohlsen, the carpenter, in his place. “I have spoiled this man by kindness,” Kane wrote, and then added a self-pitying sentence: “… it is very hard for a man like myself of a kindly, trusting nature to find that neither kindness nor trust will accord with the position of command.”
He knew he must make further attempts to justify the expedition, especially to his family. On July 8 he spent most of the day on shore observing the action of the ice upon the land. “I hope, if I have the health to fill up my notes that I may advance myself in my father’s eyes by a book on glaciers and glacial geology.”
The dreadful possibility of a second winter in the Arctic faced him, for the ice in the bay showed no signs of breaking up, “For there never was, and I trust never will be, a party worse armed for the encounter.” He rejected any suggestion of abandoning the brig. Instead he decided to take Hans and six men in a whaleboat to try to reach the North Star, Belcher’s supply ship at Beechey Island. There he hoped he could get enough provisions to tide him over the winter.
It was a mad scheme. The whaleboat, aptly named Forlorn Hope, made its way through alleys of pounding ice until it was stopped dead in Baffin Bay. The previous summer Kane had come this way through open water, as had Inglefield in 1852. Now he hiked across the pack to a towering berg and from its pinnacle, 120 feet above the surface, saw for a radius of thirty miles a daunting expanse of solid white.
It was now August 1854. On his return to the brig he did his best to keep up the crew’s spirits – a difficult task; except for a little hot coffee and soup, the men were existing on cold salt pork. When they were unable to blast the Advance out of the harbour, Kane knew the worst: “It is horrible – yes, that is the word – to look forward to another year of disease and darkness to be met without fresh food and without fuel.”
Was he also to suffer the fate of Franklin? As the winter closed in, remembering the problems facing those earlier searchers, he had the name of his ship painted in huge letters on a nearby cliff. In a cairn he left an account of his discoveries, encased in glass, and sealed up with melted lead. The coffins of his two dead crew members lay buried beneath. How many more graves would there be before the winter was out?
4 Ships abandoned
It was as well that Kane failed in his attempt to reach Beechey Island, for the Belcher expedition was in disarray that August and preparing to abandon the search for Franklin. None of the five ships had spent a comfortable winter in spite of the usual theatricals and sports events. McClure’s men, crowded aboard Kellett’s two vessels off Dealy Island in Viscount Melville Sound, had only the single set of clothes they had been allowed to bring from the trapped Investigator. At night they shivered under inadequate bedclothes. Even though considerable game had been shot and frozen the previous fall, rations had to be cut by a third. Space was so cramped that McClure and Kellett, sharing a tiny cabin, found that one man had to stay in bed while the other washed and dressed; there wasn’t room for two to stand upright. And when the steward came to tidy the room, both had to go out onto the cold deck.
The previous November, McClure’s sub-lieutenant, Herbert Sainsbury, had died of tuberculosis. In January 1854, two members of M’Clintock’s sledge crews had also died, worn out from their exertions three years before. By then the sick list had reached thirty-five.
Kellett was concerned about Collinson. In April, he sent off one sledge party to search Prince of Wales Strait for the missing explorer and another to bring back all the private journals from the Investigator.
Meanwhile, news arrived from Belcher that shocked and dismayed the normally even-tempered Kellett. In a curiously ambiguous letter, Belcher seemed to be telling his subordinate to abandon both his ships and head for Beechey Island. But he also appeared to be manoeuvring Kellett to make the decision on his own responsibility. Kellett, who had twice been manipulated by McClure, realized he was again being used as a scapegoat. The loss of a ship was taken seriously by the Admiralty. The loss of two ships would be a disaster. Did Belcher really mean what he seemed to mean?
In fact, Belcher was planning to abandon four ships, all in good condition, none in any real danger of being trapped for a second winter. But this aging and cranky commander, beset in Wellington Channel, had no intention of spending another season in the Arctic. The last one had been marked by dissension, backbiting, threats, charges, and countercharges, mostly his own fault. At fifty-five, in poor health, and with no previous Arctic experience, Belcher wanted no more of it. His tedious memoir of this voyage, based on his journal, reveals him as a man of shallow, incurious mind, who never cared for high command, accepted it with a kind of sour resignation, feared trouble from the beginning, and felt himself put upon. He was so insecure that he once said he didn’t want any officers serving under him who had taken part in more than one Arctic expedition.
There is no exhilaration in Belcher’s account of his Arctic experience as there is in Kane’s or Bellot’s, no hint of Lyon’s feeling for the land or its people. “I shall proceed with our monotonous voyage,” he wrote at the outset, “but really … I cannot flatter myself that bergs, floes, sailing ice, etc, will greatly interest anyone.…” As for the Eskimos, “our traffic with these people, who were filthy in the extreme, cannot prove interesting.” Filthy they may have been, but no more so than the members of Belcher’s own sledging parties, whose faces were black with smoke from oil lamps and who did not wash for weeks because the natural oil of their bodies helped to protect them from the cold. But none of that occurred to Belcher, who was more concerned with the dismaying responsibilities of Arctic command.
“Upon what a volcano do we stand! The sullen chief, if he be so, must chew the cud and vegetate year after year in sullenness and vexatiousness of spirit. No such purgatory could exist, better calculated for a man of narrow mind – none so dangerous to a sensible mind.… I proceed in charity to all … willing to overlook all faults in others, providing they do not, when I tell them of it, still continue to tread upon my corns.”
He was unconsciously describing himself – a man of narrow mind, sitting on a volcano. Years before he’d had an acrimonious encounter with his admiral because he objected to being sent civilian help during a skirmish in Borneo. “You may be a skilful navigator and a clever seaman,” his senior told him, “but a great officer you can never be with that narrow mind.”
Belcher was not open enough to listen to the advice of those who’d had more polar experience. He believed himself a man of common sense and “what a very difficult position a man of common sense is placed in when he accepts such a command.” Such a man, he declared, “is pestered by assertions that such was the course Captain H. pursued; and if he either doubts, opposes, or varies from these self-constituted Mentors, he must look for sulkiness, opposition, and the petty mutiny of petty minds.” Those words aptly describe conditions on Belcher’s two ships in the Wellington Channel: constant and bitter arguments between Belcher and his officers that led to more than one arrest.
He apparently expected trouble. Before leaving England he had tried to ward it off in a pompous letter to Kellett in which he urged that everyone should “strive to maintain the general happiness of our community – that they will see the necessity of avoiding any subjects which may cause irritation … and that they will use their utmost endeavours … to soften irritable remarks.” Belcher went on to say that “all must pull together.… One failure, one dark spot on the record, may not at the moment be thought important – but remember that the eyes of the whole civilised world are upon us! … Let us strive to exhibit what can be achieved by discipline, good feeling and that untiring zeal which is ever conspicuous in our noble profession.”
Belcher did not merely ignore his uncalled-for dictum. He jumped on it and stamped upon it. Kellett’s ship that winter had been a model of good deportment, in spite of bitter cold and short rations. Belcher’s was a disaster. He bullied one sensitive young officer, an artist named Walter May, to the point where May returned his profanity and was relieved of his duties. Belcher, often drunk, upbraided May for the most trifling indiscretions, such as forgetting to report that he had shot an Arctic hare. The wretched artist again felt the fury of Belcher’s disapproval when he handed in a report on the wrong sized paper, and not the larger sheets “which your rank demands of you.” Belcher insulted the family of one captain, Richards, and put another, Sherard Osborn, under arrest after a series of confrontations. When he heard that his officers were jeering at him behind his back, he threatened to cut off all communication between the ships. Now, in the summer of 1854, he wanted out.
Kellett could scarcely believe his eyes when he read Belcher’s confidential dispatch. Anybody who forsook the ships at this point, Kellett thought, “would deserve to have their jackets taken off their backs.” M’Clintock had become convinced at last that the search for Franklin – and for Collinson – should move south. But now he had to turn away from his plans because Kellett needed his best sledger to find Belcher and reason with him.
Kellett had no intention of abandoning his two ships without a direct order. He felt fairly sure that both vessels were in a position to get out. At the very worst they could let the ice stream carry them eastward to a point that would allow them to escape the following year. M’Clintock, travelling at top speed, reached Belcher in seven days (the distance was more than 250 miles). He argued for hours, but the adamant Belcher wouldn’t budge; he insisted that every member of his expedition be crowded aboard the depot ship, North Star, at Beechey Island. This time his orders were unambiguous.
The Arctic Grail Page 30