Meanwhile, two of Kellett’s sledging parties had returned with interesting news. They had found a note from Collinson, McClure’s senior, at the depot McClure had established on Princess Royal Island on August 16, 1851. It revealed that Collinson had reached that spot just fourteen days after McClure departed. His note said that he intended to take the Enterprise east. Obviously he was still somewhere to the south.
The second piece of news was disturbing – or should have been. There were no journals to be found aboard McClure’s abandoned ship. Armstrong had managed somehow to squirrel his away (Miertsching’s narrative would be written from memory), but what had happened to the others? The only plausible explanation is that McClure had made away with them because he didn’t want any other version of his journey published that might conflict or compete with his own.
On June 15, Kellett reluctantly abandoned the Resolute and the Intrepid and, following Belcher’s instructions, started for Beechey Island with his crews. A month later Belcher arrived at Beechey, sitting on his boat atop a sledge dragged by his men. His own ships had been abandoned in the Wellington Channel. At the last moment two more supply ships arrived to help take the men home, saving them from terrible overcrowding.
This, “the last of the Arctic voyages,” as Belcher was to call it, was also, apart from the Franklin loss, the most disastrous. The mystery had not been solved; Collinson had been callously forsaken; four big ships, all in perfect condition, had been abandoned, or so it was thought. But the following year the whaling fleet found Kellett’s Resolute floating about in the pack in Davis Strait. Without a captain, without a crew, without steam or sail, she had made her way miraculously from Viscount Melville Sound into the Atlantic. No human agency had propelled her. The ice – the inexorable, maddening, fickle ice – had done the job and in the process turned the unspeakable Sir Edward Belcher into the laughing stock of the Royal Navy.
5 Relics of the lost
The year 1854 was not a good one for Jane Franklin, but then none had been since her husband’s disappearance. At the very outset, on January 12, with seven ships still known to be searching the Arctic, she got the first of several shocks. The Admiralty, without waiting for Belcher, Collinson, or Kane to return, announced that as of March 31 the names of all the officers and crew members of the Erebus and the Terror would be struck from its books.
She was stunned. The previous October, Lieutenant Cresswell had brought back the first news of McClure’s discovery of the North West Passage. Was that all that counted? Her husband’s fate was still unknown. There were a few who held out the hope that he or some of his crew were still alive among the Eskimos. She was certainly one of these. Now it seemed to her as if the long quest for the Arctic hero had been a sham – an excuse to seek not human beings but the nebulous Passage.
It took her a week to compose herself. Then she dispatched to the Admiralty one of those exquisitely composed and fervently indignant letters that had become her hallmark. The Navy’s decision was “presumptuous in the sight of God, as it will be felt to be indecorous, not to say indecent … in the eyes of men.” In a bold act of defiance, as ludicrous as it was symbolic, she scorned Victorian convention by throwing off her widow’s black mourning, “the habiliments of despair,” and appeared in brilliant pink and green. “It would be acting falsehood, & a gross hypocrisy on my part,” she declared, “to put on mourning when I have not yet given up all hope.” Her stepdaughter, Eleanor, from whom she was partially estranged, donned black. She had surrendered any expectation that her father was alive and was opposed to the spending of her mother’s dwindling fortune on further searches.
But Lady Franklin would not give up. The discovery of the Passage and the apparent abandonment of the Franklin quest were suspiciously coincident. “My Lords,” she wrote, “I cannot but feel that there will be a stain on the page of the Naval Annals of England when these two events … are recorded in indissoluble association.” Then, four days before her husband was officially declared dead, the Crimean War broke out. The Navy could no longer afford the luxury of an Arctic search for an expedition that had been missing for almost a decade. Every ship, every man would be needed in the struggle against the Russians.
With Belcher’s return to England in the late fall, the Admiralty lost all stomach for polar exploration. In the space of two years, six ships had been lost or abandoned. Why squander any more money on a wild-goose chase? As The Times put it, “Surely enough has been done in favour of a sentiment rather than of rational calculation.” Lady Franklin could argue that the fate of her husband and his crew was still unknown, but even that point was lost when that consummate Arctic traveller, John Rae, arrived in England with the first firm news.
It is one of the many ironies of the Great Search that this time Rae, the man who would eventually profit from these findings, wasn’t searching for Franklin at all. He believed that the explorer had certainly gone south and not north, as almost everybody else believed, but he was convinced that he had been well to the west of Boothia Felix, which Rae now wished to examine on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Rae wanted firm answers to two geological puzzles: Was Boothia a peninsula or an island? Was King William Land an island or a peninsula?
John Rae gets the first news of Franklin’s fate, 1854
In August 1853, Rae reached Repulse Bay by boat from Churchill on the first leg of his quest. He and his six men again wintered in snow houses and the following April trekked west across the Boothia isthmus (it was indeed a peninsula) to link up with Thomas Simpson’s farthest, thus completing on his return journey the exploration of the Arctic coastline and proving King William Land an island. Rae’s methods differed radically from M’Clintock’s. He travelled without a tent and very little bedding, keeping warm in snow houses built on the outward journey and used again on the return. When he reached his final destination – Pelly Bay – he cut off the ends of his flat sledges, used them for fuel, and headed back east with a lighter, more manoeuvrable conveyance.
At Pelly Bay, Rae met the first Eskimos he’d encountered since leaving Churchill, and there, on April 21, 1854, one of them, In-nook-poo-zhee-jook, told a fascinating tale – one that would be worth ten thousand pounds to Rae and his men. He had heard stories from other natives of thirty-five or forty whites who had starved to death some years before, west of a large river, perhaps ten or twelve days’ journey away.
Rae, who found him an intelligent man, noticed that his informant was wearing a golden cap band round his head. The Eskimo told him it had been obtained where the dead men were found. Rae bought the band and announced he would pay a good price for any other relics brought to him after he returned to Repulse Bay.
He had no idea at this point whether or not the dead men were members of the Franklin expedition, though he must have suspected it. Nor did he know exactly where the relics came from; the Eskimos had declined to lead him to the spot. That was Rae’s story; it is open to some questions and was indeed treated with scepticism when he returned to England. Thirty-five dead men! Who else could they be but Franklin’s crew members? Did Rae think the Eskimos were inventing corpses? Scarcely. He himself had championed the Eskimos as a truthful race and would do so again at some cost to his own reputation. Rae in his notes wrote that the information was “too vague to act upon, particularly at this season, when everything is covered with snow.” Since his informant was reluctant to lead him to the spot where the bodies had been seen, Rae didn’t pursue these clues. While his explanation is plausible enough, it must also be recognized that Rae’s primary purpose was not to search for Franklin. His obsession was with the equally baffling problem of the North American coastline, which he was about to solve. He wanted to get on with it and so did not push or bribe his Eskimo companion to take him farther. If a Royal Navy explorer of the calibre of M’Clintock had been given the same information, the result might have been different.
It did not really matter, for Franklin was long dead. When Rae arrived back at Re
pulse Bay in the fall of 1854, a number of natives, lured by his promise of reward, gave him more details about the dead men. Rae was now able to conclude that the bodies had been found near the estuary of Back’s Great Fish River. It was too late in the season for him to follow up that information, but there was no doubt now (if there had ever been) that the corpses the Eskimos had seen belonged to the Franklin party.
The natives brought to Repulse Bay a treasure trove of relics, easily identifiable as having belonged to Franklin and his men – silver forks and spoons marked with his officers’ crests, one of Franklin’s decorations, a small plate bearing his name, and other relics identifiable by names and initials – a gold watch, a fragment of embroidered undervest, and a quantity of smaller objects – including chains, coins, a surgeon’s knife, a silver pencil case.
The Eskimos had no knowledge of the fate of either of Franklin’s ships, nor was Rae able to tell from their accounts what route the lost explorer had taken when he left his winter quarters at Beechey Island. But he had learned enough to abandon his plans for another winter at Repulse Bay and get back to England as fast as possible with the news. He wanted, he said, to prevent further expense and possible loss of life in the now fruitless search for the explorer. Did he also want to be in a position to claim the parliamentary reward of ten thousand pounds? Certainly he was castigated for that in a spirited exchange of letters in The Times. Rae, however, insisted he’d never heard of the reward. That is hard to swallow. The original reward of twenty thousand pounds was posted in March 1848, just before Rae and Richardson set off to find Franklin. It is inconceivable that they hadn’t known about it or discussed it. The later reward of ten thousand pounds for finding evidence of Franklin’s fate was made in 1850. Rae had spent an entire year in England, from the spring of 1852 to the spring of 1853, at a time when Franklin fever was at its height. The news of the Beechey Island discovery was still fresh. Rae himself talked to some of the explorers assigned to the Belcher expedition. He visited the Admiralty and pointed out on a map what he considered to be the likeliest spot (southward and westward of Cape Walker) for discovering Franklin’s fate. Although his biographer and others have accepted Rae’s story, it passes all comprehension that he didn’t know that whoever found the first Franklin relics would be rich for life.
But Rae had a more serious charge to defend. In his report to the Admiralty he had passed along, as required, stories told him by the Eskimos of acts of cannibalism among Franklin’s starving men. Rae was still at sea when the Admiralty gave the report to The Times, which published it on October 23, 1854. Other publications picked it up. The British public was both horrified and sceptical. Englishmen eating Englishmen? It was beyond belief. The popular opinion was that the uncivilized natives had murdered Franklin’s men.
Charles Dickens caught the public mood in Household Words when he described the Eskimos as “covetous, treacherous and cruel … with a domesticity of blood and blubber.” It was impossible, he wrote, that “the flower of the trained adventurous spirit of the English Navy, raised by Parry, Franklin, Richardson and Back,” could have descended to this, the most dreadful of crimes to the Victorian mind. “… it is in the highest degree improbable that such men would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.”
Rae was excoriated, not because he had published the account in The Times – the Admiralty had done that – but because he stuck up for the Eskimos. He held his ground and insisted that their story was to be believed. At the same time, the combative Dr. King entered the lists to cast doubt not only on Rae’s geographical discoveries but also on the means by which he had obtained the Franklin relics. Fortunately for Rae, no one paid much attention to King.
His reputation was not helped, however, by his long battle to claim the ten-thousand-pound reward. Lady Franklin was cool when he called on her, offended that anyone should be allowed the prize until a more detailed search was made. The Admiralty dallied, waiting for Collinson and for James Anderson, a Hudson’s Bay factor who was sent down the Great Fish River to search for more evidence. Anderson found a few relics but no graves or skeletons. For Lady Franklin that was not enough.
In spite of her protests, Rae finally got his ten thousand pounds, two thousand of which were awarded to the men of his party. But there continued to be a feeling that there was something not quite gentlemanly about Rae, the man who lived like a native and insisted on taking the natives’ part. His only accolade had been the Founder’s Medal of the Geographical Society. Almost every other Arctic explorer – Parry, Back, Sabine, Richardson, Franklin, both Rosses, McClure, and M’Clintock – was knighted for his work. John Rae alone stood outside that charmed circle, a commoner to the end.
The Royal Navy’s vain search for Franklin ended in a series of anticlimaxes. Belcher faced a court-martial for the loss of his ships and was grudgingly acquitted: his orders had allowed a latitude of decision. The court handed him back his sword in chilly silence. Two of the officers he’d arrested – Walter May and Sherard Osborn – weren’t punished; they were promoted. Belcher himself was never given another command.
As for Robert McClure, he refused to give Kellett any credit for rescuing his crew. He stuck stubbornly to his story that he could have navigated the Passage without help and had only called it off when directly ordered to do so. To Lady Franklin’s distress, he and his crew also received ten thousand pounds for his discovery and the glory of having succeeded where Franklin, presumably, had failed.
Thus the fate of Franklin lost some of its mystery and much of its lustre. In the fall of 1854 when Rae and Belcher returned to England, the public had already turned its attention elsewhere. People were now talking about the charge of the Light Brigade, immortalized in poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a member of the extended Franklin family. Only Lady Franklin continued her uphill battle to get at the truth; apart from Collinson, only one other man was still somewhere Out There, searching for her husband, or pretending to – the most romantic if not the most expert of all the polar explorers, Elisha Kent Kane.
Chapter Seven
1
The defectors
2
Kalutunah
3
Retreat
4
The high cost of dawdling
5
The polar idol
Kane’s comrades in their cramped quarters aboard the Advance (illustration credit 7.1)
1 The defectors
August 1854. Elisha Kane had been cooped up for a year aboard the Advance, still seeking, after his fashion, a man who had been dead since 1847. Kane had no way of knowing that the Passage had been discovered and that John Rae had located the general area of the Franklin disaster almost a thousand miles to the southwest of Rensselaer Harbor. Dickens’s Bleak House had become a best-seller in his absence and Verdi’s La Traviata had had its disappointing première – not that Kane would have cared for either, since he had no ear for music and no time for novels. He would have been more interested to learn that Van Diemen’s Land, which had proved Franklin’s undoing, was now Tasmania, freed at last from any more convict ships; and that Gail Borden, who had made his biscuits and pemmican, had just invented Borden’s Condensed Milk. But there was very little left of Borden’s provender. The crew was subsisting on salt meat, the worst possible diet for those suffering from scurvy. And how were they to cook it? Only 750 pounds of coal remained. Before the winter was out, Kane knew he would have to start breaking up the ship for fuel.
He had other concerns. His relations with his crew, especially his officers, had continued to deteriorate. John Wilson, his sailing master, had felt for some time that Kane was trying to curry favour with the men while treating his officers “like a parcel of minions.” The men grew insolent, refusing to attend evening prayers. One man who quit the service swore at his captain, using language “such as I never heard used by a sailorman except in this brig,” but received no more than a tap on the wr
ist, being confined briefly to his quarters – “perfect child’s play,” in Wilson’s scornful phrase.
As a result, the crew despised their captain. Wilson claimed that Kane couldn’t go forward “without hearing his name used in the most insolent manner by the men in the forecastle.” As for the officers, there wasn’t one who would “trust one word he says or place a particle of confidence in him. He does nothing but quarrel from morning to night with those around him.”
When Kane wasn’t quarrelling he was boasting – about his narrow escapes, his exploits with women, his global adventures, his reception by foreign heads of state, and the expensive dinners at which he had been host. His table talk was embroidered with French and Latin phrases that irritated Wilson and the others: “… not one of the officers liked to be in the cabin, & all stay out as much as possible. He has not one friend in the ship left, save the lying scamp, Morton, whom he bribes, & who tells Mr. K. all he can hear us say.…”
The constant rows were too much for Ohlsen, the carpenter whom Kane had appointed to replace Henry Brooks as first mate. Ohlsen quit his post in June, shortly before Kane left on his vain attempt to reach Beechey Island for more supplies. When Kane returned on August 6, he received a cold reception from his officers – the coldest Wilson had ever seen in his life. The sailing master even felt a little sorry for him, “he seamed to take it so much to heart.”
Now Kane became aware of secret meetings in Ohlsen’s and Hayes’s quarters. Men were gathering in groups, whispering together. Finally, William Morton came to him to report that several wanted to leave the ship rather than spend another winter in the High Arctic. They intended to try to make their way to Upernavik, the northernmost of the Greenland settlements, seven hundred miles to the south.
The Arctic Grail Page 31