The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  The greatest epic of all was the Franklin quest. Had he turned back when the ice blocked his way, he would have gone down as a minor figure in the history of Arctic exploration. If he and his men had been rescued alive and returned to England, he would be no better known than Simpson or Rae, and with less reason. If the expedition had managed to survive a winter sledge journey north to Fury Beach or to the Eskimo settlements in the south, it might have merited some of the overblown praise it received.

  Why didn’t they make it? The northern section of King William Island is a gloomy, infertile land, barren of game, shunned by the Eskimos. But as John Ross had discovered – and Franklin well knew – there were natives living directly across the water at Boothia who were to keep his own crew alive and healthy. Ross’s account was in Franklin’s shipboard library, but there is no evidence that any of his sledgers ventured over to Boothia. There were also Eskimos living on the south shore of King William Island, as M’Clintock discovered. Again there is no evidence that any sledge parties came to trade with these natives before that last fatal march south.

  Gore’s trip to the south seems to have been purely exploratory – to make sure the channel in which the ships were beset was truly the last link in the Passage. His cheery “all well” suggests that no one was worried about scurvy or starvation. After all, the ships were provisioned for another fourteen months, and that supply could easily be stretched (and almost certainly was) by careful rationing.

  There is no shred of evidence of any contact with the natives until the dying men were dropping in their tracks. Nor is there any way of knowing whether or not the members of the expedition attempted to hunt big game. The evidence points against it. Years later, one native told the explorer-scientist Knud Rasmussen that his father, who had encountered three of the dying men, reported the strangers shot only wildfowl, though there were caribou aplenty. The only weapons found by Hobson were shotguns; the sailors followed the tradition of the English sportsmen back home who made a game of knocking down grouse and snipe on their vast estates. This lack of hunting skills had wrecked Franklin’s first expedition. In nearly three decades he had learned nothing from that disaster.

  Small game birds, even taken in quantity, would not sustain a crew of 126 men or protect them from scurvy. What was needed was deer, polar bear, or fresh seal meat, which only the Eskimos had the training, the knowledge, and the patience to supply. To hunt effectively, the members of the expedition would have had to rove a considerable distance from the island’s barren northwest shore. They weren’t equipped for it. Secure in their artificial environment, John Franklin and his officers dined in Victorian splendour, the brass buttons of their dress uniforms carefully polished by their servants, their tables set with linen, their salt meat carved with silver-plated, crested knives.

  The most iconoclastic of the twentieth-century explorers, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, damned them with a bitter epitaph. They died, he wrote, because they brought their environment with them; they were not prepared and had not learned how to adapt to another.

  In this, of course, they were the creatures of their age. All over the globe in the outposts of Empire, pukka sahibs were continuing to live as if the countryside of Wordsworth was at their back door, apparently oblivious to climate and culture, secure in their conviction that the English form of civilization was the only form. If, for instance, English wool was suitable for the fog-bound streets of London, it was equally suitable for the South Seas or the chill Arctic. Yet wool, as René Bellot had discovered, could not keep out the cold blasts of Boothia, while the sweat it absorbed froze in the clammiest fashion. Kennedy, the Canadian mixed-blood, taught Bellot, the inquiring Frenchman, to wear deerskin – as John Rae did. Kane, steeped in the tradition of the American frontier, adopted the loose sealskin garb of the Eskimos, which allowed greater circulation of air and, with its fur-lined hood, prevented the disastrous heat loss from the exposed face and neck, the most vulnerable parts of the body. Few Englishmen anywhere in the world had the temerity to adopt native dress. The Royal Navy stuck to wool and flannel.

  The New York Times, of course, in its paean to the Arctic searchers for their “deeper fortitude” and “holier enthusiasm,” did not mention the natives, let alone give them credit for the part they played throughout the age of exploration in sustaining the polar heroes. In the famous painting of the so-called Arctic Council (which never met as a body), there is one face missing. Even Franklin is there, though Franklin was long dead when the faces of his contemporaries were immortalized in oils. But where is the symbolic Eskimo? Like the ghost at the banquet, he is unseen. Yet without him the painting is incomplete and the Arctic Council has no meaning.

  These faceless natives are kin to those other dark menials who served their white masters in counterfeit English cottages in the Indian hill country or in classical colonial headquarters that might have been plucked brick by brick out of Whitehall. The English could not believe that any of these inferior people did not love to serve them and were bewildered by the dreadful realization of their misconception when the fires of rebellion exploded. The Sepoy Mutiny broke out just before M’Clintock left on his last voyage. The nation was still reeling from it when he sailed home.

  In the same year that M’Clintock returned with the solution to the Franklin mystery, Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke came back from another quest, as tantalizing in its own way as that for the key to the Passage. Their grail was the mysterious source of the Nile, and for the next thirty years, the nation would be caught up in the excitement and romance of the African discoveries. The engravings in the popular illustrated journals told the story: drawings of half-naked native bearers, each carrying white men’s goods on his head; drawings of black men bearing white men on litters; drawings of yellow men pulling white women in rickshaws. Kipling would later write of the white man’s burden, but the heaviest burdens in the Age of Exploration were borne by men of different colours who had mastered their environment and to whom the explorers turned time and again for protection and sustenance.

  The picture of the last days of the Franklin expedition pieced together by M’Clintock and later investigators was bitterly ironic. It is a picture of inadequately clothed, badly nourished men, dragging unmanageable loads down the bleak coast of an Arctic island. As they stumble and drop in their tracks, other eyes watch them curiously. The Eskimos of King William Island were also hungry, and there were times when they too suffered from scurvy and even froze to death. But they were never wiped out. Meagre though their diet had been that winter, it kept them alive and warded off the disease.

  Cold they certainly were, even in their superior sealskin, but they were hardened to cold and knew how to prepare for it. The Eskimos survived; the whites died to the last man. “They perished gloriously,” to quote one of the letters to The Times after M’Clintock’s revelations. That was the prevailing attitude. But if they and their contemporaries had paid more attention to the indigenous way of life, they need not have perished at all.

  5 The ultimate accolade

  Lady Franklin had waited restlessly for M’Clintock’s return. The peripatetic widow could not stay still. Off she went with her niece Sophia on another of those exhaustive journeys that marked her career. She did it, she said, to strengthen herself for the possible dénouement of the long drama, which she hoped and prayed M’Clintock would unveil.

  What if he failed? How much longer could she continue the struggle to reclaim her husband’s honour? How many more expeditions might be needed? And how many more could she afford to underwrite? There was so little time. On her sixtieth birthday she had scribbled: “I cannot write down all the feelings that press upon me now as I think how fast the sands of life are ebbing away.”

  Her forebodings were premature. In 1858, six years after she wrote those words, while her captain was enduring the freeze-up in Bellot Strait, she was determined to set off again – not on foot this time, for she was suffering from phlebitis, but by boat an
d train – through France, Greece, the Crimean battlefields, and North Africa. Everybody knew her; everybody met her. In Athens she had an audience with the Queen of Greece, in Tunis with the Bey himself and his prime minister in the privacy of his harem, which out of feminine curiosity she had asked to see.

  She had not returned to London when M’Clintock arrived. She was on a mountain top in the Pyrenees, having been sent there ostensibly for her health and carried to the peak by porters. The news reached her in a terse telegram from Collinson relayed by the British consul at Bayonne, who had also received an equally terse letter from the taciturn M’Clintock, giving her details of his findings and adding, almost as an afterthought, that her husband could not have suffered long and had died with success in sight.

  She hurried back to London to find herself the most admired woman in the realm. She had triumphed where the Navy had failed. Persistently, year after year, she had pointed in the right direction, secure in the belief that her husband, a stickler for orders, would follow his instructions to the letter, even at the risk of his life. He had been told to go south, and south he had gone; all along she had known he would. The relics of the expedition, sent to the Admiralty, went on display at the United Services Institution where the crowds were so thick it was necessary to issue tickets.

  The press was urging that parliament reimburse her for the funds she had committed to the search. The spirited widow responded that she wouldn’t accept a penny. But she did want to do something for M’Clintock and his crew, and she also wanted something more for her husband. She was determined that he and not McClure should be recognized as the man who first solved the puzzle of the Passage.

  There were honours aplenty for the crew of the Fox. Those who had not previously received the Arctic Medal were granted it. Hobson was promoted to commander for his discovery of the cairn at Victory Point, a discovery made possible by M’Clintock’s generosity. M’Clintock himself was toasted and feted – with the freedom of the city of London, with honorary degrees from the three leading universities in Britain, with a fellowship and a medal from the Royal Geographical Society and a knighthood from the Queen.

  In March 1860, Lady Franklin, working behind the scenes as usual, prompted a debate in parliament that resulted in an award of five thousand pounds to the crew of the Fox. Of that, M’Clintock received fifteen hundred. She herself was awarded the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, becoming the first woman ever to receive that honour. It was no more than her due.

  With this went the accolade she had sought for her husband – a memorial from the RGS testifying to the fact that his expedition had indeed been the first to discover a North West Passage. The indefinite article made it clear that there was no single channel through the Arctic labyrinth but several. Whether Franklin had actually seen the last link in the Passage before he died so mysteriously was never argued. Obviously, he hadn’t. He must have been aware, of course, that Victoria Strait – the channel in which his ships were trapped – led inevitably to Queen Maud Gulf and then west to the Pacific. But to call him the discoverer of the Passage was stretching the known facts.

  This sentimental decision downgraded McClure’s later discovery of a Passage farther north. Unlike Franklin, McClure had actually traversed the Passage from west to east, though not entirely by water. But Franklin was the popular favourite. McClure’s naked ambition had given him a brief moment of glory, but in the end it conspired to reduce him to the second rank of polar explorers.

  For Franklin there would be other memorials: a tablet at Greenwich and a bust in Westminster Abbey, complete with a breathless couplet from Tennyson, exclaiming that “the white North has thy bones … Heroic sailor soul.…” But perhaps the greatest memorial of all was M’Clintock’s own account of his search. His book, which went into seven editions, lacks the colour and introspection of a Kane or a Bellot narrative and the sensational disasters and hairbreadth escapes found in Sherard Osborn’s overheated account of McClure. But it has something none of the other narratives of the Franklin search can equal, for it unfolds like a detective story, unravelling, bit by bit, in plain, unvarnished prose, the greatest mystery of its time.

  Chapter Nine

  1

  The obsession of Charles Francis Hall

  2

  The Open Polar Sea

  3

  Frobisher Bay

  4

  Execution

  5

  Death by arsenic

  6

  George Tyson’s remarkable drift

  Rescue of the Polaris party by the Ravenscraig (illustration credit 9.1)

  1 The obsession of Charles Francis Hall

  In mid-July 1859, as the world waited for the return of Leopold M’Clintock in the Fox, an obscure, half-educated printer in Cincinnati, Ohio, suddenly tossed aside his career, sold his business, left his wife and two children, and made plans to launch still another attempt to seek and rescue the survivors of the Franklin expedition.

  It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely polar explorer than Charles Francis Hall, the proprietor of the little Cincinnati News. A former blacksmith and engraver, he was a high-school drop-out with no scientific background, no knowledge of navigation, and no training in any related skills. He was, however, obsessed with the Arctic, a quality that more and more seemed to be the prime requisite for would-be northern adventurers. He had read every available tome and article describing earlier explorations. He had studied the problems inherent in Arctic survival, including various theories about the relationship between diet and scurvy. The Eskimos fascinated him, though his attitude toward them was naïve in the extreme. When he visited New York City, he encountered on a crowded street the first Chinese he had ever seen. He stopped the stranger and asked if he was an Eskimo.

  His hero was Elisha Kent Kane, whose two books captivated him as they had captivated most of America. Like Kane, he was an American romantic, as far removed in style from his tight-lipped British predecessors in the Arctic as the Italians are from the Scots. Like Kane, he had an iron will, a passionate nature, and an almost inexhaustible store of energy. His writing style was equally exclamatory.

  Unlike his hero, he was robust. He was no more than five feet eight inches tall, but he weighed two hundred pounds; and little of that was fat. He was stocky and muscular, with big shoulders and a massive head. His features were masked by a brown beard, coarse and curly. His forehead was expansive, his close-set eyes a bright blue. He looked the part he had chosen for himself.

  He was a genuine eccentric, single-minded, solitary, quick to take offence, with a capacity for suspicion and a propensity for nursing old hatreds. A captive of sudden enthusiasms, he could also be both tactless and intolerant. He did not work well with others, for he was essentially a loner; and it was as a loner that he did his best work in the Arctic.

  He had learned that spring of 1859 that Dr. Isaac Hayes, Kane’s former shipmate, was planning his own expedition to the Arctic to prove the existence of the Open Polar Sea and also to attempt to reach the North Pole. Hall’s patriotism was aroused. In an enthusiastic editorial he urged the U.S. government to give liberal support to further Arctic exploration. His country, Hall declared, must be the first to plant the flag at the Pole. “Americans can do it – and will,” he exclaimed.

  Within a fortnight he had sold his paper and set out to organize an expedition of his own. It was a startling decision. What had caused this armchair explorer and romantic dreamer to throw everything aside to feed his obsession? Hall’s explanation is the only plausible one: he had, he said later, received a call from Heaven; he was destined by God to go to the Arctic and search for John Franklin.

  When M’Clintock returned with what seemed to be solid proof of the fate of Franklin’s crews, Hall brushed it aside. There were still, he believed, unanswered questions, and the people who had those answers were the Eskimos of King William Island. Hall had convinced himself that there might still be survivors. England had aban
doned the field; now, at last, here was an opportunity for a humble American to add some lustre to his country’s reputation.

  He had no real idea of what he faced, but then few newcomers to the Arctic did. His idea of hardening himself for the polar wastes was to camp out for a few days in a tent, which caused some merriment in Cincinnati. Yet such was his enthusiasm that he was able to persuade twenty-eight of the town’s civic leaders to lend their names to a circular endorsing his proposed expedition.

  In February 1860, he went to New York to meet one of Dr. Kane’s brothers, Robert, and also Isaac Hayes and the philanthropic Henry Grinnell, who was helping to raise money for Hayes’s proposed venture as well as contributing to it personally. Hall went on to the whaling port of New London, where he listened, open-mouthed, to the whalers’ tales of life in the polar seas. There he was charmed by what he felt to be a semblance of Arctic weather. “As the snow came driving into my face – into my clothes – down into my busom [sic], I said, ‘how beautiful you are. Thou wert created by the same hand that made the stars – Worlds – SYSTEMS!” Hall’s prose was heated enough to melt the ice itself.

  In New York City, Hall was closeted with Henry Grinnell, who offered him encouragement and also wrote to Lady Franklin in England about Hall’s plans. Her usual enthusiasm for any kind of search was dampened, however, by her Arctic friends, notably Leopold M’Clintock, who had no faith in the venture. But Grinnell offered the would-be explorer the use of his library and introduced him around town. To Hall, the philanthropist was the greatest man in the world, and when Grinnell actually deigned to visit him in his shabby hotel room, he was ecstatic: “Can it be possible that so poor a creature as I can be worthy [of] consideration of so worthy a man as he?” In truth, Hall must have had considerable charisma to attract Grinnell, who had already subsidized three Arctic expeditions and was now about to contribute to two more. But then, Grinnell was as obsessed with the Arctic as any explorer.