Kane still hoped to add some lustre to his expedition. Taking Hans, he went off on a bear hunt with some of the Etah Eskimos, hoping to get beyond the Humboldt Glacier. Perhaps, after all, Henry Grinnell’s confidence in him would not be misplaced. To him, the philanthropist was a second father, and Kane longed to be able to take him by the hand and say, “I have not failed you or myself.” At the same time, a mood of fatalism crept into his journal. “It may be that I, taxed beyond all corporeal existence, give way on the brink of consummating my hopes, crying: ‘I have discovered a new land but I die.’ ”
Nothing so melodramatic took place, and Kane did indeed have the opportunity of sketching that colossal tableland broken by glittering white precipices, split by frozen water tunnels, and wrinkled by gargantuan crevices and dizzy ravines.
Hans went off towards Etah, ostensibly to get some walrus hide to make boots but actually to resume his liaison with Merkut. That was the last Kane saw of him. The two were married and went off to raise a family – a defection that was a blow to Kane, for he needed Hans’s help in moving his ailing party south. He attempted one last exploration of the western side of the basin, hoping to find some trace, he said, of the lost Franklin party. It was a useless and exhausting journey that broke Morton down. Kane on his return wasn’t much better.
The brig would have to be abandoned. She was a sorry-looking vessel that May, her upper spars, bulwarks, deck sheathing, stanchions, bulkheads, hatches, ice timbers, and railings all torn off for fuel. Every scrap of hemp, every tarred rope, everything burnable down to the last broomstick had been sacrificed to keep the crew from freezing to death. Now they would have to make their way to Upernavik by small boat. The healthier men were already fashioning runners to haul the two whaleboats and a smaller dinghy over the snows to open water.
The open water lay some eighty miles to the south at Naviliak, on the coast not far from Etah. Everything – three boats, fifteen hundred pounds of supplies, and four disabled invalids – would have to be shuttled, a mile or so between rests, by men weakened by scurvy and hunger. The sick were lodged at a halfway house at Anoatok, while the others toiled for thirty-one days to move everything to the open sea. In that time – May 17 to June 18 – the exhausted men, so weak they could pull only one boat at a time, each trudged a distance of 316 miles. Kane did more. Travelling constantly by dogsled – to Etah to get food, to Anoatok to minister to the invalids, back to the brig to help bake bread – he covered 1,100 miles.
On the final lap, as the last of the sick men were being brought forward, Christian Ohlsen came to grief. One of the runners of his boat had partially broken through the frozen surface and only his strength had kept it from swamping while the others pulled it back onto solid ice. But Ohlsen had ruptured his bladder. He lingered for a few days, then died – the third casualty of the Second Grinnell Expedition.
Without the Eskimos, as Kane himself acknowledged, they would never have made it. The entire population of Etah turned out to wave farewell as the whaleboats Faith and Hope set off on June 19, around the curling waves of Cape Alexander. The air was turbulent with kittiwakes, ivory gulls, and jaegers, screaming and diving for fish, but Kane had other things on his mind. They were perilously late leaving – so late that “hours may measure our lives.” But for the help of the natives they would have been held back another fortnight.
For the next forty-nine days they fought their way through blizzards, pack ice, and bergs, exhausted from the labour of tracking the boats and weak from lack of food. Kane insisted on a disciplined routine: the men must get their rest at night whether it meant lying under the ice-sheathed cliffs in their buffalo robes or sleeping aboard the boats. The routine extended to morning and evening prayers, a ritual he believed kept up his crew’s morale. If there was grumbling, there is no hint of it in the various accounts that followed. No longer idle, the ill-starred company now knew their only hope of survival lay in working as a team.
The scenery was often spectacular: one night they beached their boats beneath a hanging glacier, eleven hundred feet high, which Kane likened to a vast cauldron of ice boiling over. Near Netlik, a huge pillar of granite – Clarence Rock – rose into the mists like a pyramid surmounted by an obelisk. By then their provisions were almost exhausted. Kane allowed each man only six ounces of bread dust a day, plus a walnut-sized lump of tallow. He himself took the helm for sixteen hours without a break. As his men tracked the boats through veins of water between distorted ice fields, he noted the slow loss of muscular power and realized they must find food quickly or die.
He fastened his little flotilla to a great floe from whose peak he could see in the distance the red, brassy face of Dalrymple Rock. Then, as if to emphasize his helplessness, a gale hit with sledgehammer force. The floe was hurled and crushed against the base of the rock, amid a clamour like “the braying of a thousand trumpets.” Somehow they survived, helplessly whirled about in the boats as the headland flashed past. They forced themselves with boat hooks into a stretch of open water and, when the tide rose, pulled their craft over an ice shelf and into a sheltering gorge where, too weak to unload their supplies, they simply dropped in their tracks and slept.
Here was game aplenty. As they waited for the storm to subside, they gathered ducks’ eggs – twelve hundred in a single day – and shot sea fowl. By the time they quit their crystal retreat they had two hundred pounds of dried meat to sustain them on the next leg of the voyage. At Cape Dudley Diggs, the tongue of a great glacier barred their way. Kane, climbing a berg, saw to his dismay that here the season was late. The ice was still impassable; they would have to wait for the tardy summer to open a lane. He could not bear to tell the others. They waited another week, crept forward in their battered craft to Cape York, and waited again. It was July 21. There was game but no fuel. To cook the meat, they were forced to burn oars, sledge runners, and, finally, the little dinghy, Red Eric. They set off again and found, after an exhausting journey, that they had mistakenly entered a cul-de-sac. The prospect of repairing the sledges and retracing their steps with the boats again on runners was so horrifying that even McGary, the toughest of the crew, was reduced to tears. It took three days of backbreaking toil.
Kane’s retreat from Rensselaer Harbor, 1855
By the time they crossed Melville Bay their food was gone. Only the fortuitous capture of a seal saved them from starving to death.
Then, at last, on August 1 they sighted the famous landmark known as the Devil’s Thumb, a huge bulbous pinnacle that told them they’d entered the whaling grounds of Baffin Bay.
Two days later, Petersen came upon the first native they’d seen since leaving Etah. To his joy, he recognized an old friend, paddling his kayak on the search for eider among the islands.
“Paul Zacharias,” Petersen cried. “Don’t you know me? I’m Carl Petersen.”
The man stared at him in fright. “No,” he said, “his wife says he’s dead,” and he paddled off as fast as he could.
Another two days, and a new sound was heard as the men rowed along. It wasn’t the gulls; it wasn’t the cry of a fox; it was the soft slapping of oars accompanied by a low “halloo!”
“What is it?” Kane asked.
Petersen listened for a moment and then in a trembling half-whisper exclaimed: “Dannemarkers!”
The cry echoed again from a nearby cape, then died. Both boats pulled toward it, scanning the shore. Had it all been a dream?
Half an hour passed. Then the single mast of a small shallop showed itself. Petersen began to sob and to cry out, half in English, half in Danish. It was, he said, an Upernavik oil boat. He knew it well: the Fraulein Flairscher. “Carlie Mossyn the assistant cooper must be on his road to Kingatok for blubber!”
Petersen was right; in a moment Carlie Mossyn himself appeared. Kane’s crew was hungry for news of the outside world, which they had left two years before, and pleaded with Petersen to translate their questions.
“What of America? Eh, Petersen?”
“We don’t know much of that country here, for they have no whalers on the coast,” said Carlie, “but a steamer and a barque passed up a fortnight ago, and have gone out into the ice to seek your party.”
And then he added, as if an afterthought, “Sebastopol ain’t taken.” That was gibberish to the men who hadn’t heard of the Crimean War.
And only now did they learn that they had been searching for Franklin a thousand miles from the spot where Rae had discovered the first clues to his fate. Now Kane knew that his searches had been futile, that all his trials and sacrifices had been for nothing. Yet he could take heart in his discoveries. He had moved his ship farther north in the western Arctic than any other white man. He had explored much of the basin that immortalizes his name; he had discovered the largest glacier in the known world; and, he believed, he had “proved” the existence of an Open Polar Sea. More important than all of these satisfactions he had, through an exercise of will power, careful planning, and discipline, managed to bring all but one of his bickering and insubordinate crew through some of the most treacherous waters in the world to a safe haven in a friendly Greenland port. The following night, August 6, 1855, he and his men slept under a civilized roof for the first time since leaving the Advance. Their rest was understandably fitful. After eighty-four days in the open air, they all were oppressed by a suffocating sense of claustrophobia.
4 The high cost of dawdling
In May 1855, while Elisha Kane was preparing to make his escape from Rensselaer Harbor, Captain Richard Collinson returned to England with the Enterprise after an absence of five years and four months. He had spent five winters away from home; he had been out of touch with the civilized world for three years; he had circumnavigated the globe, returning home by way of the Cape of Good Hope. He had visited and explored all the mysterious “lands” that might or might not be islands – Banks, Baring, Wollaston, and Victoria. He had sailed up Prince of Wales Strait and had got as far east as Victoria Strait, directly across from King William Island. Yet his remarkable voyage was a failure because he had discovered nothing new. Wherever he went, he found that some other explorer had been there before him: the bold McClure, the indefatigable Rae, the ambitious Simpson.
It was maddening. Each time he thought he had made a new and significant discovery he came upon evidence that somebody else had preceded him. Had he been a year or two earlier he might have emerged as one of the greatest of the Arctic explorers. As it was, he returned to England with a reputation as a man who had simply covered old ground.
His reception was chilly, not because of these failures, which could be understandable, but because he was at odds with his officers. At one time or another all had been under arrest. Two were still confined – one, Francis Skead, for the past three years. Collinson, “a lean, spare, withered looking man with a vinegar countenance,” in the description of Lieutenant Sharpe of the Rattlesnake, demanded that they be court-martialled. The Lords of the Admiralty declined. They were used to this sort of problem. It was understandable that after more than four years cooped up on a crowded ship, even disciplined naval men would feel the tension.
History has excused Collinson on these grounds. As his brother Thomas, an army general who edited his journal, put it, “there appears to be something in that particular service … [Arctic exploration] that stirs up the bile and promotes bitter feelings comparatively unknown under the ordinary conditions of sea service.” He suggested that “it might be supposed to be some form of that insidious Arctic enemy, the scurvy, which is known to affect the mind as well as the body of its victims.”
This brotherly assessment scarcely absolves Collinson. For one thing, his bitterness did not dissipate on the return journey round Africa’s southern tip, as might be expected, but lingered on after the completion of the voyage. For another, too many of his officers were at loggerheads with their commander. In fact, the trouble aboard the Enterprise began long before the Arctic night closed in, as the journal of the second ice master, Skead, makes clear. Through Skead’s admittedly biased eyes, Collinson emerges as a super-cautious commander, hesitant to take the slightest chance, always prepared to retreat when he might have gone forward in triumph, lackadaisical in pressing the Franklin search, and sometimes too drunk to handle the ship. Skead felt so strongly that when Collinson’s journal was published, he scribbled angry marginal notes throughout his copy: “Bosh” … “not true” … “lies” … “absurd statement” … “what an excuse!” … “drunk.”
Undoubtedly Skead overstated the case. From the outset he had been critical of his commander, who tried to post him to the supply ship Plover when they reached the Bering Sea. Nonetheless, Collinson was no McClure; indeed, the two commanders represented opposite sides of the same coin. Where McClure was impetuous, Collinson was prudent. Where McClure took a gamble, Collinson hung back. Had he possessed some of McClure’s boldness, he might have reached King William Island and discovered the fate of Franklin. He might even have got through the North West Passage. It has been said that he was unlucky, but it was not just luck that dealt him an indifferent hand; it was also his own refusal to take chances.
He had another problem: he could not speak with the Eskimos because he had no interpreter. Johann Miertsching, the Moravian missionary, was supposed to have transferred to his ship at Honolulu, but Collinson had left before he arrived. As a result, if he had encountered natives who had some clue to Franklin’s fate, he would not have been able to communicate with them.
According to Skead, the frustrations wrought by Collinson’s caution began when he took the longer route to the Bering Strait. The winds weren’t nearly as bad in the Aleutians as he’d been told – and as the more daring McClure discovered. Even before the Bering Sea was reached in mid-August, Collinson seemed wary of wintering in the Arctic and talked of returning to Hong Kong.
In sailing around the northern coast of Russian Alaska, Collinson made a serious error. He believed the coastal waters were so shallow it was dangerous to approach within fifteen miles of the mainland. His officers tried to reason with him, but he was obdurate. “I must have fifteen miles,” he kept saying.
As it turned out, there was plenty of depth nearer the shore. It was the lurking permanent ice pack of the Arctic Ocean, fifteen miles from the coast, that posed a more serious threat to his passage. Collinson reached Point Barrow – standing twenty-five miles off the shore – and then turned back. He was convinced that an Open Polar Sea – the same fancy that had seduced Barrow and later lured Kane – lay to the northwest. “This cursed polar basin … is one of the phantoms which has led to our failure,” Skead wrote. If it hadn’t held them back, they might have found an open channel along the coastline. “We now end the season to continue to seek for what no one but the Captain believes has any existence.” They were eighteen days behind McClure.
Having turned back, the Enterprise rounded the northwest corner of Alaska and headed south to Point Hope. On August 30, Collinson found what he had missed on the northward journey – a note in a cairn from Kellett, reporting that McClure was ahead of him. He was astounded and chagrined. If only he’d found that message earlier! Instead of retreating, he would certainly have pressed on and perhaps caught McClure. Yet there was still time to catch up; at least, Collinson’s officers thought so.
“For God’s sake, go back at once, it is not now too late,” the surgeon, Robert Anderson, pleaded.
“No, no,” Collinson replied. “I must seek Kellett.”
Kellett in the Herald was farther south at Grantley Harbor; so was Thomas Moore in the Plover. Collinson reached them on September 1. According to Skead, Moore told him there was a good anchorage in a harbour off Point Barrow, and Kellett urged him to retrace his steps.
“If you make haste, Coll, you’ll be able to winter at Point Barrow.”
“No, no,” said Collinson. “I’m not going to take my ship there.”
Instead, he dawdled, deciding to seek winter quarters somewhere
on the northwest coast of Alaska. Again according to Skead, Kellett remarked that “he would rather have seen us upon the rocks than looking for winter quarters at so early a part of the summer season.”
Two weeks went by before Collinson moved north again. He got as far as Icy Cape on September 22, found no suitable harbour, and stopped. One of his officers, Lieutenant George Phayer, offered to go himself to Point Barrow to check the harbour there. Collinson, nettled, didn’t deign to reply. He turned south and spent the winter at Hong Kong.
It was a costly decision. When he returned the following July and once again rounded the Alaskan peninsula, it became painfully clear that had he persevered and wintered at Point Barrow he would almost certainly have caught up with his junior ship. Together, he and McClure might have shared the honour of discovering a North West Passage.
Ignoring the advice of his ice master, Collinson allowed himself to become beset in the pack off Point Barrow. Here, it turned out, there was a lane of open water and none of the shoals he had feared. He tried to make for it but was borne helplessly westward. Skead, scarcely on speaking terms with his captain, who treated him “with as much indifference as if I had been the purser,” noted that the so-called shoals had proved to be “nothing but bugbears.”
By August 12, the sea was calm. Skead was impatient to move ahead. But instead of putting his men to work, warping and towing the ship through the lanes in the melting ice, Collinson insisted on waiting for fair winds. At this time in the season every mile counted, but there was no sense of urgency aboard the Enterprise. An ordinary yachtsman might have taken his craft east, Skead thought – “aye & his wife and daughters to boot.” He had never seen men have it so easy aboard any ship on which he’d served. “As we make so little progress when there are so few obstacles to our advance, I am afraid to think of what we shall do if we meet with difficulty from ice. Poor Sir John! God help you – you’ll get none from us.”
The Arctic Grail Page 34