The Fox managed to get three quarters of the way across before M’Clintock was faced with the “dreadful reality” of a winter in the pack. Fortunately he did not have Kane’s excitability, McClure’s bravado, or Collinson’s excessive caution. In Sophia Cracroft’s observation, he “never lost that equanimity which is his most remarkable characteristic.” As the ice closed in, M’Clintock grew philosophical. To him, the great glacier that sprawled unbroken for fifty miles along the margin of the bay “serves to remind one at once of Time and of Eternity.” If the Fox was beset, so be it. “I shall repeat the trial next year, and in the end, with God’s aid, perform my sacred duty.…”
Yet the slow drift caused him some distress. The crew had, as yet, no suspicion of what was coming. But M’Clintock knew. Eight lonely winter months trapped in the pack would be bad enough for morale, but the danger of being crushed was worse. The Fox’s steam power wasn’t enough to force the floes apart; all attempts to blast it free failed. By September, M’Clintock had lost control of his ship. He decided to make the best of it since his crew was healthy, well fed, “cheerful, willing and quiet – thoughtless, of course, as true sailors are.”
A school was organized, an organ was unpacked, the men learned to build snow houses on the ice, and the two Eskimo hunters in the party brought in seals and the occasional bear as the ship drifted south, month after month, back toward the civilized world. By April 26, they had been beset for 250 days and had travelled 1,385 miles, most of it in the wrong direction.
A scene of terrifying confusion followed as the ice began to break up. Rolling wickedly in the heavy seas, bruised and buffeted by the rampaging floes, the Fox forced its way through the heaving pack. Outwardly stoical but inwardly trembling, M’Clintock realized that a single blow by one of the monstrous ice blocks could crush his ship in an instant. At times the vessel shuddered so violently that ship’s bells rang and crewmen were almost knocked off their feet. What an ignominious end it would be if, after this long winter entrapment, the expedition was lost before it really began! “Such a battering … I hope not to see again,” M’Clintock wrote, describing one eighteen-hour period of unrelenting torment. He knew then, he said, why a man’s hair could turn grey in a few hours.
Suddenly it was over; the ice was gone; they were free. Sea birds wheeled around them and scudded over the waves. Whales and seals disported themselves in the open water. “All nature seemed alive,” one officer recalled, “and we felt as if we had risen from the dead!”
M’Clintock might now, with honour, have gone south into the harbour at St. John’s, Newfoundland, to repair his battered ship, take on extra provisions, and restore the spirits of his crew. He did no such thing. Back he went up the coast of Greenland and across Melville Bay, where after several anxious hours he found a way through the ice. At Cape York he encountered Eskimos from Etah who greeted Petersen, an old friend, and inquired after Kane. Hans Hendrik, they explained, was eking out a precarious existence with his new family in Whale Sound. Petersen sent him a message urging him to move farther south.
Early in July, 1858, M’Clintock steamed across the mouth of Smith Sound, following a hazy streak of water in the maze of ice, and reached the mouth of Lancaster Sound to find it barely open. It was July 14, exactly 242 years since Bylot and Baffin had sailed along the same coast without hindrance. Fighting its way through the floes, the Fox used up most of its coal. Happily, there was more in a depot that Belcher had left at Beechey Island. While there, M’Clintock raised a stone tablet to Franklin and his men. It had an interesting history. Made in New York at Lady Franklin’s request and under Henry Grinnell’s direction, it had been taken north on Hartstene’s relief expedition to rescue Elisha Kane. Left at Upernavik, it was picked up by M’Clintock, who bore it at last to its intended destination.
From this point the real voyage began. It was obvious to M’Clintock that Franklin must have gone down Peel Sound, in spite of what earlier explorers had said about the ice. It was the only route that had not been thoroughly investigated. In the distance he could see the dim promontory of Cape Walker, guarding the sound’s entrance on the west. Franklin had been ordered to go south of the cape. M’Clintock followed in his track “in a wild state of excitement – a mingling of anxious hopes and fears!”
After twenty-five miles a dike of ice barred his way. There wasn’t a moment to lose. He turned about and chose another route. He would go down Prince Regent Inlet as far as Bellot Strait, then try to slip through that narrow passage back into Peel Sound. Steaming close under the imposing castellated cliffs of Cape Clarence, he entered the harbour of Port Leopold, where, ten years before, James Clark Ross had wintered and where William Kennedy had more recently been trapped. Ross’s steam launch, badly damaged but reparable, was on the beach. The provisions he’d left, which had sustained Kennedy, were still in good condition. M’Clintock, who now had a secure fall-back position, didn’t linger. On August 20, 1858, he was off to another historic stopping place: Fury Beach. He did not stop but kept on down the inlet and into Brentford Bay, whose northern margin masks the entrance to Bellot Strait. M’Clintock pushed the Fox westward until he realized he was actually halfway through the mysterious strait whose existence, ironically, young Bellot, the man for whom it was named, had questioned. William Kennedy had been right: here between lofty bluffs was a clear channel with only a few miles of heavy pack to bar his progress. M’Clintock was elated. He was sure the ice would quickly disperse and he could steam back into Peel Sound.
“A feeling of tranquility – of earnest, hearty satisfaction – has come over us. There is no appearance amongst us of anything boastful. We have all experienced too keenly the vicissitudes of Arctic voyaging to admit of such a feeling.” All they had to do was wait at the mouth of the strait. They had no choice, as it turned out, for a stiff, seven-knot current drove them helplessly back, almost capsizing the yacht.
Bellot Strait, M’Clintock was convinced, was the link to the North West Passage. A slender channel, twenty miles long and scarcely a mile wide at its narrowest point, it was the aperture that separated the towering hills of Boothia Peninsula from the cliffs of Somerset Island. Once they were through, they would be within easy reach of King William Island, which held the answer to the Franklin mystery.
They waited. On August 25 they tried again and were driven back by the ice. They tried a total of six times without success. On September 6, in a final dash, they actually reached the strait’s western outlet. Once again a belt of ice at the mouth blocked their way. They anchored for the winter in a sheltering inlet at the eastern end. M’Clintock named it for William Kennedy.
The fall and early winter were spent laying out depots for the three major sledge expeditions that M’Clintock was planning. Allen Young would take Prince of Wales Island. M’Clintock would scour the delta of the Great Fish and then move up the west coast of Boothia. Lieutenant William Hobson would search the north coast of King William Island. This last was a generous assignment on M’Clintock’s part, for it was there, most probably, that the mystery would be solved. If so, Hobson would get the credit and a promotion.
M’Clintock’s expedition to King William Island, 1857-59
By now M’Clintock had been partially converted to the advantages of using dogs. Twenty-two had survived the trip from Greenland. But dogs are of no use without a trained driver, and he had brought only three – Petersen and two Eskimos. Each sledging party would therefore be mixed: four men hauling an eight-hundred-pound sledge accompanied by seven dogs hauling a seven-hundred-pound sledge. The advantages of a dogteam were demonstrated in March by Allen Young, who made a two-hundred-mile dash to Fury Beach to bring back eight hundred pounds of sugar. He took two dogsleds, two Eskimo drivers, and one seaman and, travelling light and running all the way, managed the return trip in just eight days.
M’Clintock was also prepared to save the extra weight of tents by building snow houses. Like dog driving, that required considerable skill. He set off on
a scouting trip down the west coast of Boothia in February, taking only Petersen and one other man. They laboured two hours trying to build their nightly shelters until they encountered a group of four Eskimos who, in return for a needle, did the job in half the time.
These were the first natives that the expedition had encountered. M’Clintock noticed that one was wearing a naval button. It had come, the Eskimos said, from some white men who had starved on an island in a river. One of the Eskimos had been to the island and brought back some wood and iron, but he had seen no white men. M’Clintock offered to trade presents for information and relics. A day or so later, an entire village of forty-five arrived – men, women, and children. M’Clintock was able to bring back to the Fox a quantity of silver cutlery, a medal, part of a gold chain, several buttons, and knives fashioned by the natives out of wood and iron obviously from a wrecked ship.
The old people remembered the arrival of John Ross’s Victory in 1829 and even inquired after his newphew, James, using his Eskimo name, Agglugga. None had seen any of Franklin’s crew, but one had seen the bones of a white man who had died on an island in the river many years before – probably Montreal Island in the delta of the Great Fish. One or two recalled a ship crushed by ice to the west of King William Island; the vessel had sunk, they said, but the crew had got off safely. Thus, in bits and pieces, did the vague outlines of the Franklin tragedy emerge.
By the time M’Clintock returned to his cheerless quarters on the Fox, he had covered 420 miles and had completed the discovery of the coastline of North America. He had added 140 miles to the charts. Equally important, he had discovered the practical route by way of Rae Strait that would lead eventually to the first water navigation of a North West Passage. But it would be another forty-five years before any vessel was able to make its way through that network of islands and ice-blocked channels.
On April 2, M’Clintock and Hobson set off for the south, with Carl Petersen driving M’Clintock’s team. They encountered Eskimos who told them of two ships; one had sunk, the other had been forced ashore, badly broken. White men had been seen, they said, hauling boats south toward a large river on the mainland. At Cape Victoria on April 28, both teams separated. M’Clintock set off to the south, leaving Hobson to go west to explore the north shore of King William Island.
On a frozen channel between Boothia and King William Island, M’Clintock came upon a village whose inhabitants had more Franklin relics, including silver plate bearing the crests of the explorer, his first officer, Crozier, and other members of the expedition. There were more hints of the lost party: tales of the wreck of a ship without masts, of books strewn across the Arctic terrain, of white men who dropped in their tracks on their way to the Great Fish River, some of whom were buried and some not. M’Clintock met an old woman and a boy who had been the last to visit the wrecked ship, apparently during the winter of 1857-58. But dates were vague and much of the information second-hand.
Moving south along the island’s eastern coastline, M’Clintock encountered more Eskimos to whom, in that treeless land, wood was more precious than gold. They had made kayak paddles, snow shovels, spear handles, tent poles, and a variety of objects from wood they’d got from other Eskimos. Obviously, it had been scavenged from a ship, but none of these people knew anything about white men who had died on their shores.
M’Clintock’s task would not be an easy one. The Eskimos had plundered everything they could find, throwing away what they didn’t need – such as books, papers, and journals – and adapting the rest for their own use. And a spectral shroud of snow still covered the land, concealing the remains of the lost explorers as well as any artifacts not yet discovered by the natives.
It was all very tantalizing. Even to a man of M’Clintock’s temperament, this early peripheral evidence of tragedy must have been both exciting and frustrating. He pressed on south to Montreal Island in the Great Fish delta, haunted by the shades of men long dead. Here Petersen found a bit of a preserved meat tin and some scraps of iron and copper, but these relics, too, were second-hand. A native stone marker made it clear that this was plunder taken earlier and set aside for later retrieval. In the eerie silence of the Arctic spring, M’Clintock circled the bleak and rugged coastline of Montreal Island by dogteam and found no evidence that any of Franklin’s men had got that far.
He returned on May 24 to King William Island, the sledge travelling along the sea ice that overlapped the shore. Driving his own team, he kept a sharp lookout, frustrated again by the snow that shrouded the beach. At midnight, with the sun still bright in the sky, he trudged along a gravel ridge that had been swept clean and there, with dramatic suddenness, he came upon a human skeleton. This was a major find, the only first-hand evidence anybody had yet had of the Franklin disaster. There it lay, a grisly witness to history, the body face down as if its owner had stumbled forward and dropped, never to move again, the bones as white as chalk, a few rags clinging to the exposed limbs, which bore signs of having been gnawed at by animals.
King William Island, c. 1859
He had been a young man, slightly built and probably, judging by the fragments left of his dress, a steward or an officer’s servant. He had not been warmly clad; there was no evidence of any clothing other than the standard naval wool issue. A clothes brush and a pocket comb lay close by. Gazing down on his grim find, M’Clintock remembered what an old Eskimo woman had said to him: “They fell down and died as they walked along.”
The party moved north along the gloomy and desolate west coast of the island. M’Clintock was certain that Franklin’s men must have left some sort of record, but if they had, the Eskimos had long since scattered it to the winds; to them books and papers had no value or meaning. If the Navy had been quicker in its rescue operations, if the old Arctic hands had been less myopic, if Lady Franklin’s own ships had persevered – in short, if the area he was now examining had been searched earlier – the full story of John Franklin’s fate would undoubtedly have been discovered. At this late date, finding it seemed hopeless.
On the summit of Cape Herschel, 150 feet above the sea, M’Clintock came upon an old cairn left by Thomas Simpson in 1839. It had been badly broken down, undoubtedly by native looters, and it turned out to be empty. M’Clintock, who had been convinced that the dying men, retreating toward the Great Fish River, would have left some record here, was bitterly disappointed. To him, this dreary promontory was one of the most hallowed spots in the world for British seamen.
Then, twelve miles farther on, he came upon a smaller cairn, built by Hobson’s party and containing a message. Hobson had been on the spot just six days earlier. He had seen nothing of a wrecked ship and had met no natives, but he had found a document! In a cairn at Victory Point, on the northwestern coast of King William Island, he had discovered the only record ever found of the lost Franklin expedition. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to clear up the main points of the mystery.
3 The document at Victory Point
The document found at Victory Point, maddening in its terseness, provided the only first-hand information ever uncovered regarding the progress and fate of the missing crews. Actually, it contained two separate messages – two cramped scribbles, written a year apart, in the margins of a regular printed Admiralty form. Hobson found it in the cairn that James Ross had built at Victory Point on the same journey that led to his discovery of the North Magnetic Pole on Boothia almost three decades before.
The first message, dated May 28, 1847, and signed by Lieutenant G.M. Gore, was determinedly cheerful. “All well,” it read. It revealed that Franklin had certainly gone up Wellington Channel and had, in fact, circled round Cornwallis Island before settling down at Beechey Island for the winter of 1845-46. The second winter had found him beset in the ice stream just west of the northern tip of King William Island. Gore and a party of seven had left their message in Ross’s cairn, fully confident that the two ships would shortly be freed and that the Passage would be breached that summe
r.
That was wishful thinking, as the second marginal message made clear. Written in a different hand and signed by Franklin’s two deputies, Crozier and Fitzjames, it was dated April 27, 1848, and told a gloomier story. Franklin had died the previous June, only a month after Gore had scribbled his first message. At the time of the second message, the ships had been trapped in the ice for nineteen months, and no fewer than nine officers (including Gore) and fifteen men were dead. The remainder had abandoned their vessels and were trying to reach the Great Fish River.
Although no other written record has ever been found to illuminate the Franklin tragedy, there was enough here to piece together the probable story of his last expedition.
Racing to make time before the onset of autumn weather in 1845, Franklin apparently did not stop to build cairns or leave letters, as with sails full out he pressed confidently on through the open waters of Lancaster Sound. After all, the eternal optimist expected to be sailing into the North Pacific in less than a year.
Franklin’s last expedition, 1845-47
He pushed on through Barrow Strait. Somewhere ahead loomed the precipices of Cape Walker, the last known point of land. To the southwest lay the Unknown, which his instructions had ordered him to explore. But now he found that direction blocked by ice. On the western shore of Devon Island he could see a stretch of clear water sparkling in the sunlight: this was Wellington Channel. Following his instructions, he made for this alternative route and sailed north into unexplored territory. Was it a strait or merely a bay? No map could tell him.
The Arctic Grail Page 37