The two ships headed north until the presence of the Grinnell Peninsula, as yet unnamed and unexplored, forced them to the northwest. At the very tip of the peninsula, Franklin once again found his way barred by a wall of ice that (as later explorations would reveal) extended from the head of Wellington Channel for hundreds of miles to the west.
Forced to retreat south through a different channel, he realized that he had rounded Cornwallis Land, now seen to be an island. He re-entered Barrow Strait north of Cape Walker and was again frustrated in his attempt to push west. But directly to the south lay another channel. Somewhere beyond that, in the vicinity of King William Land, he knew from his earlier explorations and those of Back and Simpson that the way was clear to the western seas. More than once he had pointed out that area on the map and declared: “If I can get down there my work is done; thence it’s plain sailing to the Westward.”
It was obviously too late in the year to make the attempt. With the floes increasing in the strait, he would have to find a safe anchorage before the moving ice drove him out of Lancaster Sound. He had probably examined the harbour at Beechey before entering Wellington Channel. In the autumn of 1845 he made for it and spent the winter there, undoubtedly satisfied with his first year’s accomplishments. Three of his men died of natural causes – not an unusual number – and were buried on the spot.
He was now within striking distance of his goal. King William Land was just 350 miles to the south. Once that gap was closed he would be near familiar waters leading to the west. Whether he could have completed the voyage through the narrow channels and treacherous shoals in his cumbersome ships is questionable. As Dr. King had tried to point out, in his irritating but sensible fashion, naval vessels such as the Erebus and the Terror were designed for the open ocean, not for coastal manoeuvring.
But why did he leave no record at Beechey Island? He spent the winter there, equipped for the usual activities – amateur theatricals, target practice, scientific observations, the collection of specimens. Yet no one, apparently, thought to leave a single scrap of paper outlining the expedition’s plans for the following summer. This is the abiding mystery surrounding the tragedy, and the questions it raises cannot be answered. Was it because the optimistic explorer was so certain of getting through that year he didn’t think it necessary? Was it because the two ships were driven involuntarily away from Beechey along with the ice in a sudden spring gale, before Franklin had time to prepare a record? Or was there a message left that has never been found? Each question is plausible, but each assumption has its own queries. Optimistic or not, Franklin always obeyed orders; why didn’t he follow standard naval procedure this time? And again, why would this plodding but meticulous naval veteran, who had all winter to prepare a careful record, decide to wait until the last moment to build a cairn and leave a message? If he did leave a record, the place to leave it was on Beechey, for there were no natives in the vicinity (then or later) to loot its contents. No one knows the answer to this puzzle; no one will ever know.
What is known is that Franklin, following orders, would have set his course that spring for Cape Walker. He did not realize that he was sailing directly toward the great ice stream that pours down from the Beaufort Sea in an inexorable movement south. M’Clintock had seen the genesis of this slow-moving river of ice when he discovered Prince Patrick Island, seeing the great chunks breaking off the face of the permanent pack. Driven by the prevailing winds from the northwest, this ponderous frozen stream, awesome in its power, squeezes its way between the bleak islands, as it seeks warmer waters. Like a floating glacier up to one hundred feet thick, unbroken by any lane or channel, the moving pack is impenetrable.
The same ice stream that stopped Parry in 1819 and would halt McClure in 1851 was, in the summer of 1846, moving into a collision with Franklin’s two vessels. Flowing down between Melville and Banks islands and through Melville Sound, it forced itself against the western shores of Prince of Wales Island, curved down the unexplored channel (later to be named for M’Clintock) on the eastern side of Victoria Island to block the narrows at King William Island. Here its southern edge encountered the warmer waters flowing from the continental rivers and began to break apart, leaving the channels to the south relatively clear.
Faced with the presence of this vast, slow-moving frozen mass, Franklin had to retreat. Another unknown channel, Peel Sound, lay to the south, beckoning in the direction of King William Land, and so he turned his ships south into untested waters. This course would have seemed unimpeded to him because he was sheltered from the inexorable ice stream by the bulk of Prince of Wales Island.
When he emerged from Peel Sound, he must have seen the northern tip of King William dead ahead, just one hundred miles away. But once he emerged from the shield of Prince of Wales Island, he would again have encountered the ice stream. To stay clear of it, he would have had to cling to the west coast of Boothia, but that would have given him only temporary respite. Sooner or later he knew he would be forced to face the ice, for the only route to the known Passage shown in his charts led directly down the west coast of King William Land.
He had no way of knowing, in 1846, that King William Land was insular, unless he believed the theories of the eccentric Dr. King. He could have escaped the ice stream by cutting around the island’s eastern side and slipping down the narrow strait that separates it from the mainland. But Franklin must have believed that route led to a dead end. Instead, he turned his ships into the ice stream just as King William Island was at hand. Winter closed in; on September 12, 1846, the Erebus and the Terror were beset – imprisoned in that frozen river that moved south at the frustratingly slow speed of one and a half miles a month.
Franklin’s death the following June also remains an insoluble mystery. His burial place has never been found. Almost certainly he was buried at sea, but we do not know what caused his sudden death. All was well when Gore scribbled the first message in the cairn. A month later, as the second message made clear, Franklin was gone and Crozier was in command. All we know is that Franklin was infirm and in his sixtieth year – obviously too old to undertake such a quest – the victim of his friends’ sentimentality, the Navy’s rigidity, and his own dogged optimism.
The fate of his men is less mysterious. Over the years more skeletons or fragments of skeletons have been discovered. Modern research has shown evidence of cannibalism, scurvy, and lead poisoning from the poorly soldered tins of meat. The Eskimos’ descriptions of the crews’ final stages suggest that most of them succumbed to scurvy – the disease that haunted almost every Arctic expedition. Neither John Franklin nor the Royal Navy had learned much in spite of previous experience with the disease. Erebus and Terror were heavily stocked with salt meat. John Ross had been kept alive by fresh meat supplied by Eskimo hunters, but John Ross was not held in high repute by Franklin’s generation of Arctic explorers. M’Clintock encountered no Eskimo who could remember that any native had been aboard the two ships while they were caught in the ice stream. Nor were Franklin and his men equipped to capture seals or walruses or to hunt big game.
Pieced together, the messages at Victory Point told a familiar story. All was well one year; twenty-four men were dead the next. It is probable that Gore and his shore party moved far enough down the coast to discover for the first time the last link of the North West Passage. It is certain that with men dying daily the following winter, Franklin’s successor, Crozier, knew his only hope lay in abandoning the ships before the entire company perished.
For the Erebus and the Terror, there was no way out of the floating trap. It had been the coldest winter in living memory. The ice had not melted; its progress was too slow. Crozier’s mistake was to head south to the Great Fish River. Perhaps he thought that a relief party might have been sent there. If so, he underestimated the sluggishness of the Admiralty and the foolish optimism of the so-called Arctic Council of polar experts who exhibited little concern about Franklin and did not bestir themselves until the
spring of 1848, when Franklin’s surviving crews were already sledging to their deaths.
The Great Fish River with its myriad cataracts was trial enough for strong, healthy, well-fed voyageurs, as George Back had discovered. For Crozier’s men, it would have been an impossibility to navigate, even if they had reached it. Ironically, a mountain of stores, not to mention several boats, lay at Fury Beach to the northeast, but again it is not easy to believe that in their debilitated condition they could have reached that Arctic oasis. They had neither dogs nor dog drivers, and the Navy sledges were unnecessarily heavy and cumbersome.
M’Clintock, moving along the shingle ridges of King William Island’s ghostly northwest coast, came suddenly upon one of these sledges not far beyond the rugged cape he named for Captain Crozier. Hobson, it turned out, had been on the scene a few days before. What M’Clintock saw shocked him. The sledge itself was a monstrous contraption of iron and oak, weighing at least 650 pounds. On top of it was a twenty-eight-foot boat, rigged for river travel, weighing another 700 or 800 pounds. To M’Clintock, with his own sledging experience, this was madness. Seven healthy men would have had trouble hauling it any distance, even if it had not been loaded. But it was loaded, with an incredible accumulation of unnecessary articles: books (The Vicar of Wakefield was one), every kind of footgear from sea boots to strong shoes, towels and toothbrushes, gun covers and twine, soap and sheet lead, dinner knives, crested silver plate, pocket watches and tools, a bead purse, a cigar case – everything, in short, that civilized nineteenth-century travellers considered necessary for their comfort and well-being. In M’Clintock’s guarded phrase, it was, for a sledge traveller of those times, “a mere accumulation of dead weight, but slightly useful, and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews.”
Inside the boat he found eerie evidence of this truth. Here were sprawled two skeletons, one of a slight young man, perhaps an officer, the other of an older and sturdier seaman. This far they had stumbled and no farther, while their comrades, abandoning most of their chattels, had struggled on. M’Clintock was convinced that the party had underestimated its needs as far as food went (and overestimated its other requirements) and was returning to the ship for more provisions. But the ships were at least sixty-five miles to the north. Unable to drag their boat farther, they had left the two weakest of their number with a little food (some tea and chocolate were all that remained), expecting perhaps to return with fresh stock. As M’Clintock put it, “they appear to have greatly overrated their strength and the distance they could travel in a given time.” Scurvy, which debilitates the muscles, also clouds the mind, making its victims believe they can accomplish more than they are able.
Did they ever reach the ships? Certainly they never returned. The Eskimos reported they had searched the one ship that had foundered near the shore and found one body but no living man.
When M’Clintock reached the cairn that Hobson had found at Victory Point, he was faced with another extraordinary spectacle – further evidence that the men who abandoned the ships weren’t aware of the extent to which they had been weakened. They had piled their sledges with ten tons of gear and abandoned most of it three days later when they reached Victory Point. The huge heap of discarded woollen clothing was four feet high. But by what weird caprice had they been persuaded to bring along button polish, heavy cookstoves, brass curtain rods, a lightning conductor, and a library of religious books? It had taken them three days to haul this ponderosity of non-essentials fifteen miles before they realized they were not equal to the task. Then, after Fitzjames had thawed out some ink and scribbled the second note, they lightened their sledges and headed south down the desolate western coastline of the island to their deaths.
M’Clintock left this gloomy scene on June 2, crossed the island, and made his way over James Ross Strait to Boothia. He reached the Fox on June 19 to find Hobson slowly recovering from scurvy and the ship’s steward, Thomas Blackwell, dead of the disease. It turned out that Blackwell hated preserved meats and vegetables and had lived almost entirely on salt pork for the winter – as indeed Franklin’s crews must have done.
Allen Young had returned to the ship on June 7. After two months of exploration, his health was so bad that the ship’s doctor ordered him in writing not to go out again. Young ignored him and was away again after only three days’ rest. M’Clintock set off at once by dogteam to find him and hustled him back to the ship on the twenty-eighth. Young and a companion recovered on a diet of venison, wild duck, homemade beer, lemon juice, and pickled whaleskin.
Young had, of course, found no trace of Franklin, but he had made some notable geographical discoveries. He had completed the exploration of Prince of Wales Island and the west coast of Somerset. He had also established the feasibility of a North West Passage through what was to be called the Franklin Strait. He had further demonstrated the impossibility of getting through the ponderous ice stream in the channel between Prince of Wales Island and Victoria Island, soon to be named for M’Clintock. Together, the three sledge expeditions under M’Clintock, Young, and Hobson had charted eight hundred miles of new coastline.
Indeed, almost all that part of the Arctic archipelago from the Parry Islands south to the continental shore had been unveiled as a result of the long, blundering search for Sir John Franklin. That was the supreme irony of the quest for the North West Passage. The Passage itself would have little commercial value even with the development of modern icebreakers in the century that followed. It had always been used as a symbol to gain public support for geographical and scientific investigation. And a symbol it remained.
If Franklin had somehow managed to make his way through it, further exploration would probably have been postponed, perhaps for decades. The continued bungling of the Navy and the other expeditions had kept the flame alive, prolonged the explorations, and furthered scientific observation in the North. The British government spent an estimated £675,000 trying to find Franklin. Lady Franklin spent an additional £35,000 – and to better effect. The United States government contributed $150,000 to the quest. Henry Grinnell, the president of the American Geographical Society, was out of pocket $100,000. The search was unnecessarily long and expensive, often magnificently inept, and at times farcical. But the money was not entirely wasted. By the time Leopold M’Clintock returned to England, near the end of September, 1859, most of the southern Arctic had been mapped.
4 Failed heroes
The eleven-year search for the lost ships elevated Sir John Franklin to the pantheon of Arctic sainthood. To the New York Times, he was “one of the ablest, oldest and bravest men who had trodden that perilous path” (the Passage). The newspaper praised the Franklin expedition and the search that followed as being “as noble an epic as that which has immortalized the fall of Troy or the conquest of Jerusalem.”
“There is hardly a man of this generation,” the Times declared, “whom the noble story of Arctic exploration has not moved to the depths of his soul.…” It wrote of “unheard of fortitude,” “religious heroism,” “courageous endeavour,” and “devotion to duty” in the face of “appalling perils” – typically Victorian phrases that were always brought out and dusted off whenever another quixotic adventurer went to his death attempting to plant his country’s flag in one of the uncharted corners of the world.
It was the impossible quest that captured the imagination; and the Franklin debacle exactly fitted that ideal. “Our age,” the Times wrote, “is the age of chivalry. The march of Christian civilization may have turned the fire which precipitates a murderous shock, but it has fed the calmer and nobler heroism, which, for duty’s sake, supports the hardest strain, and the fiercest struggle, and the sorest trial, not for an hour, or for a day, but for weeks, and months, and years.”
In its editorial, the American newspaper championed the English credo – that victory must not be achieved too easily. It was hard struggle that counted, not the final achievement. The spectacle of able seamen working like
dray-horses to drag their heavy sledges across the frozen wastes was more appealing than that of a native dogteam threading its way through hummocks of ice. The British especially had a warm spot in their hearts for gallant losers; they preferred them to easy winners, as a bewildered Roald Amundsen would discover more than sixty years later, when he beat Robert Falcon Scott to the Pole and was shunned for it by Englishmen.
The known and unknown Arctic before and after the search
Scott, before his death, put into words the English sentiment that, for almost a century, governed the Royal Navy in its attitude to sledge travel: “No journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realized when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers and difficulties with their own unaided efforts, and by days and weeks of hard physical labour succeed in solving some problem of the great unknown. Surely in this case the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.”
For forty years, since Parry’s triumphant return in 1820, the British had been fed a steady diet of published Arctic journals (seventeen dealing with the Franklin search alone), each featuring tales of appalling hardship, dreadful brushes with death, and hairbreadth encounters with wild animals. One cannot blame the writers for emphasizing this aspect of their expeditions: they were dangerous, many of the explorers’ escapes were miraculous, and without such tales the published journals would have seemed dull indeed – in fact, several of them were. As for scientific observations, these were better left to the lengthy appendices the explorers confined to the back of each volume.
The Arctic Grail Page 38