Certainly he had found circumstantial evidence of the fate of some of the Franklin party, but not of all. There was no evidence that her husband had been among the sorry crew the Eskimos had described to Rae. As for the tale of cannibalism, she did not believe that for an instant. That January (1856) she had a letter from James Anderson, the Hudson’s Bay man, who had found some further relics, including part of a backgammon board she remembered putting aboard the Erebus. Anderson confirmed her belief in the need for another expedition when he told her he had done as much as he could. What was needed now was a ship with sledges to probe the unknown coasts of King William Island.
The Crimean War had ended in March. Why wouldn’t the Navy now continue the search? Surely Rae’s revelations were enough to goad it into a final solution of the mystery! But if not the government, then Jane Franklin was prepared once again to supply the means and the men to do the job.
“I am about to make a last effort to solve this mystery,” she told Sherard Osborn in a spirited letter. Relics had been found, but no documents. And who was to say that Franklin himself or his men had not discovered the Passage well before McClure, forging, in John Richardson’s loyal phrase, “the last link with their lives”?
She attacked the Admiralty once again with all the eloquence at her command: “Though it is my humble hope and fervent prayer that the Government of my country will themselves complete the work they have done and not leave it to a weak and helpless woman to attempt the doing that imperfectly which they themselves can do so easily and well, yet, if need be, such is my painful resolve, God helping me.”
Of course she was anything but weak and helpless. She was iron willed and she had the support of some of the most powerful figures in the country, not the least of whom was the Queen’s consort. For the best part of a decade she had cajoled and threatened, pleaded and exhorted until the government and the Navy had undertaken a series of expeditions to the Arctic. She was herself a formidable public figure, having captured the imagination and appealed to the chivalry of the ordinary Briton who saw her, indeed, as “a weak and helpless woman” battling for her husband’s life and her husband’s honour. Almost singlehanded she had created a myth, turning John Franklin, a likeable but quite ordinary naval officer, into the Arctic hero.
He was scarcely that. His first command had been a human disaster; his second was worthy but uninspiring; his third ended in a dreadful tragedy, the worst the Arctic has ever seen. None of this mattered to the Victorians, who were captivated by noble failure, as Tennyson’s paean to an extraordinary piece of military bungling had demonstrated. It didn’t matter whether you won or lost, it was how you played the game; and Franklin, his memory kept alive and sanctified by his widow, was seen to have played it out according to the rules, dashing forward into the Arctic labyrinth, like the doomed cavaliers of the Light Brigade, an enthusiastic amateur to the last.
There is much that is admirable in nineteenth-century polar exploration and much that is misguided, but there is also a great deal that is obsessive. Yet no explorer – not Parry, not John Ross, not Kane – was as obsessed as Jane Franklin. She could not let go; her obsession sustained her, giving her life a meaning and a focal point. Her Pall Mall residence was nicknamed The Battery because she had battered the Admiralty with so many letters and memorials. And when she was not battering against the walls of officialdom, or writing to foreign powers, or penning letters to The Times thinly disguised under pseudonyms, she was manipulating events from behind the scenes.
It requires no special prescience to see Lady Franklin’s hand behind the memorial that thirty-six of London’s leading men of science, including all the major Arctic explorers, were persuaded to send to the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, in June. It urged another expedition “to satisfy the honor of our country, and clear up a mystery which has excited the sympathy of the civilized world.” There was still a chance, the memorial insisted, that some of Franklin’s men were still alive, existing among the Eskimos.
It quoted Elisha Kane: “I well know how glad I would have been, had my duties to others permitted me, to have taken refuge among the Esquimaux of Smith Strait and Etah Bay. Strange as it seems to you, we regarded the coarse life of these people with eyes of envy and did not doubt but that we could have lived in comfort upon their resources. It required all my powers, moral and physical, to prevent my men from deserting to the Walrus Settlements, and it was my final intention to have taken to Esquimaux life had Providence not carried us through in our hazardous escapade.”
Perhaps without realizing it, the memorialists, by adopting Kane’s views, were making a remarkable admission. Implicit in their petition to the British Prime Minister was acceptance of the truth that by adopting native methods, men could survive more easily in the Arctic. That was a revelation the Royal Navy was still unable to accept, then or for the remainder of the century.
The memorial ended with an appeal to honour. Were these men to be “abandoned at the very moment when an explanation … seems to be within our grasp?” Was another nation (the United States) going to be allowed to make the endeavour? Was the whole burden to fall upon the slender shoulders of “the noble minded widow of our lamented friend?”
It was. The noble-minded widow still had the steam yacht Isabel that Edward Inglefield had taken to Baffin Bay four years before. Goaded by no less a figure than the Prince Consort, the Admiralty agreed to put it into shape for another expedition. Now Lady Franklin searched about for a captain. There was no shortage of possibilities – M’Clintock, Collinson, and Osborn, to name three – but not Rae, that harbinger of unsavoury news whom Jane Franklin found equally unsavoury in appearance (“he has got off his odious beard but looks still hairy & disagreeable”). Osborn, whose health wouldn’t allow him to go, recommended Kane, who refused for the same reason. Like the two ailing Arctic veterans, the little Isabel, too, was finally deemed unfit for further northern service.
Jane Franklin did not give up. By a freak of chance a ship had appeared out of the ice-bound Arctic the previous September with all the right qualifications for the kind of expedition she had planned. This was the Resolute, Kellett’s old vessel, abandoned on Belcher’s orders and discovered floating about in Davis Strait by an American whaler, a thousand miles from her original anchorage. At Lady Franklin’s prompting, Kane and Henry Grinnell persuaded Congress to buy the ship and present her to Great Britain. This extraordinary gift, which cost the American taxpayer forty thousand dollars, helped to cement the ties of friendship that had been sorely tried earlier in the century.
Nudged by Jane Franklin, Henry Grinnell suggested that the Admiralty use the vessel in the most appropriate manner – for another Franklin search. Strings were pulled on both sides of the Atlantic. The commander of the Kane relief expedition, Captain Henry Hartstene, was commissioned to bring the ship to England and present her to the Navy with the unspoken assumption she would go north once again. Lady Franklin’s hand was again to be seen in the American ambassador’s speech to the Geographical Society in which he referred to the Resolute as a “consecrated ship.” This suggestion of a “sacred mission” – it was a phrase that Lady Franklin used more than once – drew a wave of applause. The Resolute was given a royal salute when she passed Cowes, and the Queen herself attended the ceremony of presentation. The events that followed – parties and gift-giving to honour the Americans – all bore Jane Franklin’s touch. The suggestion was clear: the Resolute should be sent north to accomplish its holy enterprise; Hartstene even offered to command the expedition.
Meanwhile, the ailing Elisha Kane, his rheumatic heart now seriously weakened, had arrived in London, prepared to stay for only a few days and then seek a warmer climate, which he thought might aid his recovery. Lady Franklin hoped the English country air would restore him – she needed him badly to further her cause. She visited him daily, plied him with codliver oil, brought him books to read, and on each visit, in Kane’s words, kissed “my pale forehead.” To his disma
y she continued to act as if he were in command of the search expedition. “The woman would use me, if she could, even now,” he wrote to his father. When he considered visiting Madeira for his health, she offered to go with him, only, Kane believed, to ensure his return to England where she expected to enlist him in a scheme to push her case before Prince Albert. As Kane put it, “she has been skirmishing around this for some time.” He was determined to put his foot down once and for all – to tell her that since he had withdrawn a year earlier from command, any representation he could make on her part would be an impertinence.
A series of dinners, ceremonies, presentations, and other honours kept him longer in England than he had planned. In the end he decided, on his doctor’s advice, that Cuba was the best place for him. He and Morton left on November 17. Three months later, with his mother and his two brothers at his side, Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas, paralysed by two successive strokes, died quietly. The funeral journey that followed was the most spectacular the United States had ever known, exceeded in that century only by that of Abraham Lincoln. It took a month from Havana to New Orleans, up the Mississippi and Ohio to Cincinnati, and then by train to Philadelphia, the levees and wharfs of the great rivers black with people, the way stations of Ohio and Pennsylvania crowded with so many mourners that the tracks were jammed and the train repeatedly held up. Bands played, dirges droned, minute guns boomed, bells tolled, and the air was purple with elegiac oratory. At every major river port and whistle stop the casket came off the train and the body of the “Great Explorer, Ripe Scholar and Noble Philanthropist” lay in state. In Philadelphia seven of Kane’s old comrades, including Hayes, Bonsall, Goodfellow, and even Godfrey, followed the bier to Independence Hall, where for three days thousands of mourners filed past. Kane’s ceremonial sword lay on the coffin encircled by a garland of flowers. Only one other tribute lay beside it – a splendid wreath with an anonymous message: “To the Memory of Dr. Kane from Two Ladies.” He was one with the spirits now; if from the dark reaches of the tomb – as frigid as the Arctic night – he rapped out a message for posterity, there was none to hear him.
2 The cruise of the Fox
It was 1857, the year of the bloody Sepoy Mutiny in India and a new book, Tom Brown’s School Days, that Victorian panegyric to British sportsmanship and the stiff upper lip. The stiffest lip of all belonged to Jane Franklin, who kept up the public barrage for another search while her allies worked for her in parliament. She had appealed to the Prime Minister the previous December, relaying Captain Hartstene’s offer. Now her lengthy epistle – it ran to more than three thousand words – was circulated in pamphlet form: if she could not sway Lord Palmerston, perhaps she could arouse the public. “This final and exhausting search is all I seek in behalf of the first and only martyrs to Arctic discovery in modern times,” she wrote, “and it is all I ever intend to ask.” She was prepared to sacrifice her entire available fortune, she announced, and underwrite the cost of a private expedition if the government didn’t budge.
At the same time she managed to arrange for a group of Americans to back her case with the Admiralty. Her methods here were byzantine. She persuaded Sir Roderick Murchison to send her a letter saying he approved of the idea of having Sir Francis Beaufort write another letter to Henry Grinnell, asking the American philanthropist to call a meeting in New York to send a proposal back to the British Admiralty pushing the idea of using the Resolute to search for her husband. She left nothing to chance, even choosing the wording for a suitable address that the gathering could use. She was a master of proper phrasing; Cobden said that she was better at it than any of the members who were pressing her case in parliament.
The New York meeting used her address almost word for word, whereupon she quoted it in another letter to Sir Charles Wood, the First Lord of the Admiralty. She sent a copy of that to the Prince Consort after persuading Murchison to write to Wood supporting her plea. All this circuitous campaigning had little effect. The Navy was adamant. Too many men had died, too many ships had been lost in the ten-year search. She could not have the Resolute.
She would not be stopped. She had her eye on a steam yacht in Aberdeen – the Fox. She bought it for two thousand pounds and persuaded Leopold M’Clintock to take it to the Arctic to King William Island, the one spot that nobody had yet searched and where she was now certain the secret of her husband’s fate would be unravelled.
Fortunately, M’Clintock needed a job and the Navy hadn’t given him one, perhaps because it was felt that he needed a rest after his harrowing sledge journeys. Lady Franklin, on James Ross’s recommendation, had, in fact, offered him a similar command two years before. He’d turned it down then, partly because he didn’t want to jeopardize his naval career if the Admiralty were opposed and also because he didn’t want Jane Franklin put to further expense. Now, however, he saw that she was determined to go on.
The Admiralty offered some help in the form of provisions, but it would be no luxury cruise. With Captain Collinson supervising on her behalf, every penny was made to count. That seemed to invigorate M’Clintock. “The less the means, the more arduous I felt was the achievement,” he declared, “the more glorious would be the success, the more honourable defeat, even if defeat awaits us.” Unconsciously, he had summed up the philosophy of Victorian derring-do: without striving against impossible odds, where was the victory?
The Fox was a small schooner-rigged steam yacht of 177 tons, half the size of one of Franklin’s vessels. She had made one voyage only – to Norway. She was sheathed with stout planking, fortified by cross beams, her ladderways and skylights reduced to adapt her to the polar climate, her false keel removed, her slender brass propeller replaced by a sturdier one of iron, her boiler altered and enlarged. Her prow was encased in iron until, in M’Clintock’s description, “it resembled a ponderous chisel.”
Her quarters were incredibly cramped. The officers were “crammed into pigeon holes” to make room for provisions and stores. The room in which five persons messed was only eight feet square. A few small coal stoves replaced the standard heating apparatus.
M’Clintock wanted and got experienced men. Seventeen of the ship’s company of twenty-five had taken part in previous Franklin searches. They included Carl Petersen from the Penny and Kane expeditions, dog driver, interpreter, and Arctic expert, who agreed to sign on when he learned who the captain was. “M’Clintock I know,” he said. “With him will I serve.”
M’Clintock had been moved by the wave of public sympathy that swept the country when the new expedition was announced. This last attempt to discover the fate of Franklin and his men “and rescue from oblivion their heroic deeds” seemed, he said, “the natural promptings of every honest English heart.” It confirmed his impression that “the glorious mission intrusted to me was in reality a great national duty.” (The emphasis was his.)
The chivalry that had prompted him to treat his sledgers as Round Table knights of old, with heraldic banners rippling in the Arctic breeze, extended now to his officers. He had refused to take a single penny from Lady Franklin; all the other commissioned men followed suit. Allen Young, his sailing master, a personable young Crimean War veteran from the merchant service, not only served without pay but also donated five hundred pounds to the public subscription that was rapidly approaching the three thousand mark. Jane Franklin would still have to dip into her own funds for an additional seven thousand. She insisted on a deed of indemnity freeing M’Clintock of all liabilities and also giving him the Fox as a reward. He was equally insistent on refusing it.
She was his captain and he deferred to her. He had asked for written instructions, but it was soon obvious that he needed none: their views were identical. On the last day of June, 1857, before the Fox sailed from the Orkneys for Greenland, she came down from Aberdeen to bid him good-bye. He could see how deeply agitated she was when she left the yacht, and he tried without success to prevent the crew from giving her the usual three lusty cheers; public demonstrations of
that kind embarrassed her. They cheered anyway, and for that M’Clintock was grateful.
Once the ship was in the Atlantic he read to the crew a letter she had given him before they left, reminding him that the expedition had three purposes: first and most important was the rescue of the survivors; second, the recovery of “the unspeakably precious documents of the expedition”; and third, the confirmation of her own claims that “these martyrs in a noble cause achieved at their last extremity” the discovery of the North West Passage.
“My only fear,” she wrote, “is that you may spend yourselves too much in the effort; and you must therefore let me tell you how much dearer to me even than any of them is the preservation of the valuable lives of the little band of heroes who are your companions and followers.”
And so, twelve years after John Franklin set out to find the Passage, the final voyage of the long search to discover his fate had been dispatched. “I am doomed to trial & also struggle on to the end,” his widow had written the year before. The struggle was continuing, but the end was at last in sight. This was her triumph. With a heart-rending desperation and a truly awesome resolve, this deceptively frail and wholly untypical Victorian lady – sometimes irritating, often engaging, ever constant – had inspired a loyalty that queens might envy and, through her persistence, added a footnote to history. As one newspaper put it: “What the nation would not do, a woman did.”
The Fox reached Upernavik on August 6, 1857. It was her captain’s hope that he could push his way westward straight through the main pack in Baffin Bay by what was known as the Middle Passage. The ice was too much for him. His only chance was to get past it by heading up the Greenland coast and circling round the northern end of the pack before coming south again to enter Lancaster Sound. To do that he would have to cut directly across the shallow crescent of Melville Bay, the most feared stretch of open water on the Greenland coast. To his dismay he found that conditions here were the worst on record – and that record was appalling. In one bad year, 1830, nineteen ships had sunk in Melville Bay and twelve more had been seriously damaged.
The Arctic Grail Page 36