On August 26, 1851, Collinson reached the southern promontory of Banks Land and took possession of it in the name of the Queen, not knowing that McClure had claimed it the year before and named it Nelson Head. At this point he gave Skead command of the Enterprise, “being in a condition which totally prevented him from attending the ship.” Skead took her into Prince of Wales Strait the following day and there, at the Princess Royal Islands, they discovered that McClure had already been there – just six weeks before.
Collinson’s frustrations continued. According to Skead, he was drunk again on September 1 and when asked for instructions replied simply, “Do what you think best.” They sailed up Prince of Wales Strait, following unwittingly far in McClure’s wake, and were stopped by the ice as McClure had been. They turned back and rounded Banks Land from the east. There, at Cape Kellett, they found that McClure had again preceded them. At this point, in fact, he was only a fortnight ahead.
Had Collinson gone forward he might easily have wintered with the Investigator at Mercy Bay and taken charge of the combined expedition. But again he turned back and on September 13, 1851, went into winter quarters on the eastern coastline of Prince of Wales Strait at Walker Bay, on what was then called Prince Albert Land, actually part of the massive Victoria Island, as Collinson was to discover. And there, once again, Collinson’s sledge crews found that others had preceded them – in this instance Lieutenant Haswell of the Investigator.
The weather remained fine. Five weeks elapsed before the ocean began to ice up. In that time, Collinson could have found a wintering harbour farther south, putting himself in a better position for a thrust to the east the following spring. His ice master was beside himself with frustration. “How much we have lost, it is painful to contemplate,” he noted. His captain’s inactivity was “a marvellous proceeding considering Franklin was perishing for food and shelter.” Relations between Skead and the captain became so strained that in April 1852, the ice master was put under permanent arrest.
That summer, the Enterprise squeezed through Dolphin and Union Strait and the island labyrinth of Coronation Gulf. This was a remarkable feat of navigation on Collinson’s part and one that would bring high praise from Roald Amundsen, who travelled in the opposite direction in a much smaller craft more than half a century later. Unfortunately, Collinson was again covering ground already explored by Richardson, Rae, Dease, and Simpson. The expedition wintered at Cambridge Bay on the southeastern shore of Victoria Island no more than 120 miles from King William Island, which no one had yet explored.
Collinson’s expedition, 1851-54
Collinson was now in a position to solve both the secret of the North West Passage and the fate of Franklin, but he muffed it. He had no way of questioning the Eskimos who visited the ship that winter of 1852-53 and almost certainly had tales to tell of foundering ships and dying men a few score miles to the east. One of his officers persuaded some of the natives to draw a chart of the coastline to the east; it seemed to him that the Eskimo artists were indicating a ship in the area, but Collinson pooh-poohed that.
In April 1853, he led a sledging party up the west coast of Victoria Strait only to discover a note in a cairn that told him John Rae had covered the same ground two years before! If he had known earlier he could have opted for the east coast of the strait where, at Victory Point on King William Island, the clues to the Franklin mystery lay hidden. Victory Point was less than forty statute miles away, directly across the strait; but Collinson was worried about the roughness of the ice and so the opportunity passed him by. The frustrated Skead thought the whole area could and should have been investigated. “Two serving officers in good health & strong were under arrest on trifling charges,” he wrote, adding that there were plenty of men available also to explore the estuary of the Great Fish River. But Collinson wasn’t listening to Skead.
In July one of Collinson’s crew came upon some wreckage not far from Cambridge Bay, including a fragment of a door frame that, in hindsight, almost certainly came from one of the Franklin ships, but Collinson saw nothing significant in that. With his fuel running low he left the area and turned west again to winter at Camden Bay on the north coast of Alaska.
When the Enterprise finally reached Port Clarence off the west coast of the Alaskan peninsula on August 24, 1854, the officers of the supply ship Rattlesnake were shocked at the state of anarchy that existed on board. At that juncture every one of Collinson’s executive officers was under arrest. Skead had been confined for two years and eight months. “Fancy that in such a climate!” exclaimed Lieutenant Philip Sharpe of the Rattlesnake, who described the ice master as “wasted to nothing.” The first, second, and third officers were also under arrest; none had been allowed off the ship for the previous fifteen months. The only officers free, Sharpe discovered, were the surgeon and assistant surgeon, “and these Captain Collinson dare not arrest.” The ship was being handled by one of the ice mates, “a nobody.”
The situation had reached the point “that all are determined to go to the utmost, lose their commissions, everything, to try Capt. Collinson by a Court Martial, for lying, drunkenness, tyranny and oppression and cowardice.… Oh! the accounts are horrible, we thought our own plight was bad enough, but it is nothing compared with theirs.… Never was there such an expedition set sail under such auspicious auspices; had such golden opportunities which were thrown away; and made such signal failures.”
The story of Collinson’s troubles with his officers spread quickly. John Rae, returning to England in 1855, was told that Lieutenant Charles Jago had threatened to knock Collinson down on his own quarterdeck. The same May the embattled captain returned home by way of Hong Kong and the Cape of Good Hope. He had one claim to fame: he had shown that the narrow passage along the North American coastline could be navigated by a large ship, which had not before been believed possible. It was this that caused Amundsen to praise him as “one of the most capable and enterprising sailors the world has ever produced.” He was scarcely that.
He emerged from his long Arctic confinement a bitter man, outraged because the Admiralty refused to court-martial his officers and further affronted when the committee investigating claims to the discovery of the Passage passed him over. McClure and his crew got ten thousand pounds. Collinson got nothing more than an honourable mention. In 1858, the Geographical Society threw him a bone in the shape of its Founder’s Medal. But Richard Collinson was so miffed with the Admiralty that he never again applied for a naval command. Nor did anybody rush to offer him one.
5 The polar idol
Elisha Kent Kane returned to America in the fall of 1855 to find himself a popular hero. His journal of the First Grinnell Expedition, with its haunting descriptions of icebergs and its terrifying account of the besetment in Wellington Channel, had been published in his absence. Congress, after some vacillation and considerable debate, had finally, in March, voted $150,000 to send two ships to search for him. Some congressmen were concerned that the Franklin crusade was taking on unexpected dimensions. Kane, the searcher, was now being sought. Would a new search be required for Kane’s searchers? How long could this go on?
Luckily, Kane was found at Godhavn after the two search ships, blocked by the ice in Smith Sound, returned to southern Greenland. Kane’s younger brother, John, who accompanied the rescue expedition, didn’t recognize the gaunt, bearded creature in the strange, wild costume when the two were reunited. But by the time the combined expeditions reached New York in October, with cannons roaring and crowds cheering, Kane was looking healthier than when he had left over two years before. His body had fleshed out, his face was bronzed, and his neatly trimmed black beard showed only a touch of grey.
With reporters and well-wishers swarming around him, he went straight to the home of his sponsor, Henry Grinnell.
“I have no Advance with me,” were his first words.
“Never mind,” Grinnell told him. “You are safe; that is all we care about. Come into the parlor and tell us
the whole story.”
Kane never told the whole story. His rooted bitterness over the defection of his crew, his physical encounters with Godfrey and Blake, his exasperation with Goodfellow and the others were either omitted or toned down in the accounts that followed. There was still enough, on the day after his arrival, for the New York Times to devote its entire front page to the adventure. The book, on which he worked at a driving pace that winter, sold sixty-five thousand copies, made him a small fortune, and turned him into a national icon.
Kane’s reputation as a brilliant leader and a bold explorer rests almost entirely on his two books – a striking example of the power of the pen. The public and press, without access to his personal journal or that of his sailing master, John Wall Wilson, had no insight into his flawed leadership, his mercurial temperament, his erratic personality, or his towering ego. When Wilson set out to write a book of his own, Kane paid him $350 to suppress it. It was wasted money, for the manuscript, prepared with the help of a ghost writer, contains scarcely a word of the vituperation to be found in Wilson’s original journal.
Kane’s best-seller, though carefully sandpapered, did not sit well with some of his former associates, especially Hayes and Bonsall, who felt he had taken too much of the glory on himself and downgraded their part in the adventure. William Godfrey wrote a self-serving account of his own, again with a ghost writer’s help, but it received little attention. Kane’s literary style laid the foundation for his canonization as “the outstanding polar idol of the mid-century.” He was a far better writer than explorer, and that is his real contribution to the history of Arctic discovery. For it was Kane’s graphic tale, prominently displayed on the bookshelves of the nation, that fired the imagination of others and served as the impetus for the continuing polar quest.
If anything, the explorer’s bizarre liaison with Margaret Fox increased his stature as an exotic and compelling adventurer. On the day he landed in New York, she had waited breathlessly for him to call. Apparently she waited in vain. She was not in Pennsylvania, where he had confined her. She was in New York, living with a friend during one of the many excursions in which she indulged herself, thanks to the leniency of Henry Grinnell’s son Cornelius, whom Kane had put in charge of her educational program. She could hear the guns heralding the arrival of her lost love, but the night passed with no word from him. The following day young Grinnell arrived to explain that Kane was ill with rheumatism and also concerned about his family and friends, who disapproved of the alliance. He would come when he could.
Was this the same ardent adventurer who had showered her with love letters and confessed his undying passion before vanishing into the Arctic mists? What had happened to Kane, the creature of sudden impulse and reckless emotion, in that long polar night? There is no mention of Margaret in his private journal (and certainly none in his published work). In those sombre evenings when, in his despair and loneliness, he had poured out his innermost thoughts, writing longingly of his family in Philadelphia and his other “family,” the Henry Grinnells of New York, there was no call from the heart to the dark-eyed spirit rapper to whom he had pledged his “pure regard and love.”
But then, all his life the impetuous Kane had blown hot and blown cold. If he was having second thoughts, it is not surprising; a less suitable alliance could scarcely have been imagined. His family was in a state of alarm to the point of attempting, unsuccessfully, to retrieve his letters to Margaret – and his family had always exerted a powerful influence upon him. Now he was torn between his love and respect for them and his curious, ambivalent attachment to her.
At last, forty-eight hours after his triumphant arrival, he came to her, and a vacillating relationship continued all that winter. On that initial visit, she was so distraught she wouldn’t see him at first; then she was in his arms as he showered her with kisses. To her dismay he followed this moment of ardour with the declaration that any thought of marriage must be postponed because of his family’s opposition – they would be as brother and sister, nothing more. He forced her to sign a document to that effect – for his mother, he claimed. She did so, in tears. Later he sent it back and she tore it up.
He feared she would return to the embarrassing séances; her mother and her sister Leah feared she would not. After all, Margaret had been their main source of income. When both families appeared to be against the marriage, Kane rebelled. He told Margaret his love was stronger than ever. But in the weeks that followed he gave little evidence that it was. He still indicated he could not entertain any idea of marriage because he was dependent on his family for support until his book was finished. That was too much. “I have seen you for the last time,” she wrote. “I have been deceived.”
Unpredictable as ever, Kane rushed to the weeping woman and acknowledged that he had betrayed her hopes. “The world shall not say that you, Maggie, are the discarded one!” he cried. “No! No – it is you who reject me! Dr. Kane is the discarded lover!” And with that, he threw himself on his knees, pleading, “Speak, Maggie! my destiny is in your hands!”
This scene and others come from Margaret’s own account. It is probable that she or her editor exaggerated both the passion of those moments and the rift that followed. But the outline is undeniably true. The press was on to the story, asking questions, publishing rumours and details, and speculating about the possibility of a broken engagement. And certainly Margaret Fox’s account of her turbulent relationship coincides with Kane’s emotional character.
They continued to see each other during Kane’s trips to New York until, in February, Mrs. Fox forbade him to visit or write to Maggie again – another ultimatum that had little effect. Meanwhile, the explorer was working furiously on his book, three hundred pages of which he had finished by Christmas.
In May 1856, with his two-volume tome almost complete – it would run to nine hundred pages with appendices – Kane received by proxy the coveted gold medal of the Geographical Society in Great Britain. He was also in correspondence with Lady Franklin, who was still stubbornly pursuing her crusade to find her missing husband. She appealed to Kane to take command of a ship to search for relics of her husband’s lost expedition on King William Island. But Kane by this time was too ill to consider returning to the North.
The determined widow would not be put off. She needed Kane. If he couldn’t command a ship at least he could bolster the campaign she was orchestrating behind the scenes to persuade the British Admiralty to send one last expedition to search for the lost party. Kane demurred. “This dream must be over,” he confessed in a letter to his father, “– my health is gone.” And yet he was tempted: his prestige was such that he was certain he could convince the Admiralty to support Lady Franklin’s cause. He was also certain that his withdrawal from the project would be “both a loss and a misfortune.” She was prepared, she had said, to cross the Atlantic to persuade him. It wasn’t necessary. He decided to go to her.
He would have been less than human if other considerations hadn’t also tempted him. He was now an international figure; an effusive welcome awaited him on the other side. His book was about to be published. After basking briefly in the plaudits of the English he could go off to Switzerland to regain his health.
For Kane was indeed very ill. Grinnell told Lady Franklin that “he is but a skeleton or a shadow of one.” He made plans to sail on the Baltic in October with his valet and servant, the faithful William Morton. Both explorers were given free passage.
He was still seeing Margaret Fox, squiring her about to the opera and the homes of friends in New York. At least that was her story. If she is to be believed, there was one last, final ceremony, a singular affair in which the pair entered into a sort of common-law marriage. Kane, she said, had spent an evening with her discussing his precarious health and the possibility that he might die. He feared she might not come to him if he called and asked if they might not plight their troth formally, in front of witnesses.
“Such a declaration,” she quot
ed him as saying, “is sufficient to constitute a legal and binding marriage.” She agreed. Four persons, including her mother, were present. Kane took her hand: “Maggie is my wife, and I am her husband. Wherever we are, she is mine, and I am hers. Do you understand and consent to this, Maggie?” She agreed that she did – or so she wrote years later. From that moment she called herself Mrs. Kane. It was, of course, in her interest to do so; when he died she claimed a widow’s dower. The litigation lasted ten years.
Describing their one last evening together, she quoted him as crying, “Maggie, what if I should die away from you! Oh, my own Maggie, could I but die in your arms, I would ask no more.”
It was a wish he could not be granted. He sailed for England on October 11. She never saw him again.
Chapter Eight
1
A “weak and helpless woman”
2
The cruise of the Fox
3
The document at Victory Point
4
Failed heroes
5
The ultimate accolade
The death of Franklin as envisioned by a contemporary artist (illustration credit 8.1)
1 A “weak and helpless woman”
When Lady Franklin learned, in the spring of 1856, that John Rae had succeeded in his claim for the ten-thousand-pound reward offered for finding some clues to her husband’s fate, she was irked and dismayed. She opposed the award; it was far too early, she insisted, to come to any conclusions as to what had happened. Rae’s prize confirmed the government’s belief that her husband was dead. She could not bring herself to accept that finality.
The Arctic Grail Page 35