Arctic Obsession

by Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

  Until then, the men had deliberately avoided having anything to do with bears, but now that they were armed they set out to hunt one down. And this they did successfully, as the Frenchman explained without mincing words, “after a most dangerous encounter, they killed the formidable creature, and thereby made a new supply of provisions.” David Roberts in Four Against the Arctic imagines the scene:

  To thrust their spears home, the sailors must have danced within a foot or two of the beast’s ferocious paw swipes. And if the spears failed, breaking on impact, at least one of the sailors would have paid with his life. I tried to hear the bear’s outraged roaring, I saw torrents of blood matting its white fur, I envisioned the Pomori feinting and retreating, the two men without the weapons trying to distract the animal from the two who hoped to slay it.[13]

  The larder, as it were, had been replenished and “the flesh of the animal they relished exceedingly, as they thought it much resembled beef in taste and flavour.” The skin was scraped and later fashioned into clothing. But of equal interest to the hide were the animal’s sinews and tendons. In an earlier foray to the shoreline, they had come upon a relatively fresh “root of a fir tree, which nearly approached to the figure of a bow.” By dividing the tendons into several thick twinelike filaments, they were able to fashion a string for the bow. Nails were shaped on the anvil into darts, which then were attached to with bear sinew to shoots of fir tree. By securing “feathers of sea-fowl” at the appropriate place, credible arrows were formed.

  First a hammer, then a couple of spears, and now a bow and arrows. Little wonder that when the Pomori’s amazing tale surfaced in Russia it was initially received with skepticism. The resourcefulness and skills the four men demonstrated in beating all the odds were astounding. Le Roy wrote:

  Their ingenuity, in this respect, was crowned with success far beyond their expectations; for, during their time of their continuance upon the island, with these arrows they killed no less than two hundred and fifty reindeer, besides a great number of blue and white foxes.. The flesh of these animals served them also for food, and their skins for clothing, and other necessary preservatives against the intense coldness of a climate so near the Pole.

  Remains of a hut on Spitzbergen from an 1871 illustration by a British yachtsman. Such eight-point Orthodox crosses were frequently erected by the Pomori in the Arctic in thanks for a safe arrival and escape from dangers at sea. The crosses also served as navigational points for ships at sea.

  As the days shortened and temperatures fell, concern focused on maintaining the cabin’s heat. Supply of accessible driftwood had diminished rapidly and there was no telling whether sea storms would throw up fresh quantities sufficient to last the winter. Fuel economy therefore became the order of the day. Fundamental to all was the question of fire, “if it should unfortunately go out, they had no means of lighting it again; for though they had steel and flints, yet they wanted match and tinder.” Flint would do little without having the sparks fall on dry, combustible material such as birch bark, but such was unavailable on Edgeøya. The bow-and-drill method used by the natives of Kamtchatka and North America would undoubtedly have served them well, but this depended on dry wood, and fresh driftwood was never fully free of waterlog.

  The Pomori were well aware of what Arctic winter brings — its freeze and darkness, its isolation, deprivation, and dangers. A loss of heat is a death sentence. Whatever the cost, whatever the means, under no circumstance could they permit the fire to extinguish, and there should always be another by way of backup. On one of their explorations inland “they had met with a slimy loam, or a kind of clay in the middle of it.” They gathered a mass of this material and worked it into a lamp-like vessel. Reindeer fat was placed into it and a narrow strip of twisted linen served as a wick. For a brief period, flames flickered brightly, but when the fat melted, it permeated the clay and their handicraft collapsed. A second try was had at lamp-making, but this time they allowed the moulded piece to dry in the outside air. After it had hardened, they cooked it in boiling water together with a quantity of flour, following which the exterior was coated with a flour paste. Thus came to be a lamp, which held melted fat and one that worked well enough to serve as a model for fabricating others. Such was their success that the men resolved to save the remaining flour exclusively for lamp-making and to be sparing in the use of shirts, trousers, and drawers, essential for future wicks.

  They fashioned clothing from animal hides. For undergarments, certain skins were left to soak for several days in fresh water until the hair loosened sufficiently to be plucked out. The hide was then rubbed thoroughly by hand and allowed to dry, and then reindeer fat was rubbed into it to give softness and pliability. The hair on hides destined for outerwear and boots was retained for maximum warmth and waterproofing. “Though there was neither tailor nor shoemaker among them, they contrived to cut out their leather and furs well enough for their purpose.” All was sewn with thread made of filaments of bear sinew and with ingenuously fabricated needles forged from odd bits of iron. Le Roy noted:

  [T]he eyes gave them indeed no little trouble; but this they also performed with the assistance of their knife; for having ground it to a very sharp point, and heated red hot a kind of wire forged for that purpose, they pierced a hole through one end, and by whetting and smoothing it on stones, brought the other to a point, and this gave the whole needle a tolerable form.

  Other than moss, lichen, and certain grasses, virtually no vegetation is had on Edgeøya, and so for the six years of their forced captivity, the men became involuntary carnivores, with reindeer, fox, and bear forming the diet. Apart from their first bear kill the others, ten in all, were taken in self-defence in warding off attacks on their hut. “Some of these creatures even ventured to enter the outer room of the hut, in order to devour them.” Since their kettle served as a repository for fresh water drawn either from nearby springs or made by melting snow or ice, meat had to be cooked over the open fire. Morning, noon, and night: the same diet — “reindeer, and blue and white foxes, and the white bears were their only food these wretched mariners tasted during their continuance in this dreary abode.” To break the dietary monotony, they suspended certain cuts from the high ceiling for exposure to the ever-present smoke within the hut. The smoked pieces were then taken outdoors and placed on the roof to allow them to dry hard, and then slices of the stuff were chewed as “bread,” no doubt a welcomed garnish to roasted meat.

  Krisanf was well aware of the dangers of scurvy and he urged his companions to drink warm reindeer blood “as it flowed from the veins immediately after [the kill].” In addition he instructed them to consume raw scurvy-grass, which grew in parts of the island, and lastly he recommended “to use as much exercise as possible,” whatever the weather. Three of the four lived by these recommendations and survived to tell their tale. Peter Verigin, however, “who was naturally indolent and averse to drinking reindeer blood,” stubbornly avoided leaving the hut unnecessarily and wanted nothing to do with blood. Within weeks of arrival on the island, he took sick and became bedridden. “He passed almost six years under greatest sufferings,” and finally he died. Le Roy tells of the effect this death had on the others:

  Though they were thus freed from the trouble of attending him, and the grief of being witness to his misery, without being able to afford him any relief, yet his death affected them not a little. They saw their numbers lessened and everyone wished to be the first that should follow him. As he died in winter, they dug a grave in the snow as deep as they could, in which they laid the corpse, and then covered it the best of their power, that the white bears might not get at it.

  In such form, Le Roy tells of how the four Pomori lived out the first year on the island, and from this we have an impression of how the ensuing five years passed. We hear of their hut and weapons and we learn how food, heat, and clothing were secured. Primitive as all this may have been, it was sufficient for the survival of the stranded — at least three of them.
What our chronicler fails to offer us, however, is a sense of the men’s psychological condition. How did they deal with the monotony of seemingly interminable dark winters with snows so deep that at times it “wholly covered their hut, and left them no way of getting out of it, but through a hole they had made in the upper part of the roof”? What of their mental strength in coping with the cold and primitive condition of their bleak smoke-filled hut, where no doubt cabin fever prevailed? Above all, the loneliness and sense of abandonment and uncertainty— most of this is left to our imaginations. The closest the Frenchman comes to touching on these matters is one paragraph:

  Excepting the uneasiness which generally accompanies an involuntary solitude, these people, having thus by their ingenuity so far overcome their wants, might have had reason to be contented with what Providence had done for them in their dreadful situation. But that melancholy reflection, to which each of these forlorn persons could not help giving way, that perhaps he might survive his companions, and then perish for want of substance, or become a prey to the wild beasts, increasingly disturbed their minds. The mate, Alexsei Inkov, more particularly suffered, who having left his wife and three children behind, sorely repined at his being separated from them; they were, as he told me, constantly in his mind, and the thought of never more seeing them made him very unhappy.

  At this point Le Roy concluded his narrative by describing the dramatic rescue of the sailors. On August 15, 1749, “they unexpectedly got sight of a Russian ship,” a trading vessel out of Archangel on its way to Novaya Zemlya, which had been blown off course and found itself off Edgeøyn. It is difficult to imagine the excitement of the moment as the men scurried about to collect driftwood for two massive fires on the shoreline heights. A reindeer’s hide was fastened to a pole to serve as a flag, which then was energetically waved. Fire, smoke, and the flag served them well and the marooned were spotted. “The people on board seeing these signals,” Le Roy wrote sententiously, “concluded that there were men on the island who implored their assistance, and therefore came to an anchor near the shore.”

  The title page of the English edition of Le Roy’s book describing “the singular adventures of the four Russian sailors who were cast adrift.”

  On September 28, the three men were at last returned home. Word of their miraculous survival had preceded them and a small welcoming committee had gathered on the shore, and here Le Roy gives us a touching vignette:

  The moment of the landing was nearly proving fatal to the loving and beloved wife of Alexsei Inkov, who, being present when the vessel came into port, immediately knew her husband, and ran with so much eagerness to his embraces, that they flipped into the water, and very narrowly escaped being drowned.

  And finally, the author shows himself a son of his country by commenting on the effect bread and wine, two basic staples of a Frenchman’s table, had on the returnees:

  All three on their arrival were strong and healthy; but having lived so long without bread, they could not reconcile themselves to the use of it, and complained that it filled them with wind. Nor could they bear any spirituous liquors, and therefore drank nothing but water.

  At the meeting the Pomori had with Count Shuvalov, they carried with them some of their artifact mementos — a spear, bow and arrows, the hammer, the axe, and needles and thread.

  One can only stand in awe of these singular individuals. What manner of men were they, to have achieved what they did? David Roberts offers an appropriate illation: “What the Pomori had accomplished on Svalbard was not some instructive lesson in the virtues of faith, perseverance, or ingenuity. It was a work of art.”[14]

  Notes

  1. L.H. Neatby, Discovery in Russian and Siberian Waters (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1973), 56.

  2. F.A. Golder, Bering’s Voyages (American Geographical Society: New York, 1922), 13.

  3. The peninsula has 160 volcanoes, the highest one reaching 15,600 feet. Today, twenty-nine of these are active, some spewing mile-high columns of ashes. The cluster of volcanoes is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (Kamchatka, incidentally, averages an annual precipitation of 110 inches.)

  4. Bruce Lincoln, W., The Conquest of a Continent (New York: Random House, 1994), 104.

  5. Yuri Semyonov, Siberia: Its Conquest and Development (Montreal: International Publishers, 1968), 173.

  6. Ibid., 170.

  7. Raymond Fisher, The Voyage of Semen Dezhnev (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1981), 1.

  8. David Roberts, Four Against the Arctic (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 122.

  9. Ibid., 93.

  10. Adolf Nordenskiöld, Voyage of the Vega Round Asia and Europe.Vol. I (London: Macmillian & Co., 1885), 428.

  11. F.A. Golder, Russian Expansion of the Pacific, 1641–1850 (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1960), 282.

  12. Pierre Le Roy, “A Narrative of the Singular Adventures of Four Russian Sailors,” in An Account of the New Northern Archipelago Lately Discovered by the Russians in the Seas of Kamtschatka and Anadir by J. von Staehlin (London: C. Heydinger, 1774), 12.

  13. David Roberts, 27.

  14. Ibid., 288.

  7

  The Franklin Tragedy

  OF ALL THOSE BEGUILED by the Siren’s song, no account continuous to generate greater interest or inflames imaginations more than that of the ill-fated foray of Sir John Franklin. On May 19, 1845, he sailed down the Thames in command of the best-equipped, best-prepared expedition that had ever embarked in order to seek out the Northwest Passage. The 133 handpicked officers and men on board the Erebus and the Terror were groomed to spend up to three years on their Arctic quest. The ships moved out into the English Channel, into the North Sea, and sailed to Greenland, where they took on fresh water and discharged four invalided sailors. On July 26, the two vessels met the whaling ship Enterprise off Baffin Island. Greetings were exchanged and everyone seemed to be in good health and high spirits, as reported by the whaler’s master. That was the last sight anyone had of Sir John and his company — they continued their sail into oblivion, never to be heard from again. The greatest Arctic expedition turned into the greatest Arctic tragedy.

  The significance of Franklin’s incursion into the Arctic lies not in his achievements, but in the subsequent explorations of the multiple search parties sent to look for the man. In the thirty-year period commencing in 1848, forty-two major expeditions became involved in the hunt, peaking in 1850 when fourteen ships were simultaneously scouring the area. Franklin’s men and ships were not found, but evidence of their movements was scattered widely about the ice-strewn northern wilderness. The searches did also substantially expand knowledge of the Canadian Archipelago with islands being charted; hydrographic and meteorological finds recorded; geological and magnetic data accumulated; and a greater overall appreciation gained of the vicissitudes of northern survival. The mystery of Franklin’s fate has still to be fully unravelled as the search for the explorer’s remains and those of his ships continues.

  Franklin’s expedition might more rightly be called “Barrow’s Expedition,” for had it not been for the initiative and advocacy of Sir John Barrow, the enterprise would never have gotten off the ground. Sir John was president of the Admiralty Board and a founding member of the Royal Geographic Society. As a young man he had travelled to Greenland on a whaler and was smitten by the Arctic. As second secretary of the Admiralty, it was he who was responsible for the surge of British Arctic explorations in the thirty years that followed the Napoleonic wars. Now, in the twilight of his career, he was determined to present his country one final laurel: the penetration of the final section of the Northwest Passage, making it complete; whereas the latest western forays of Baffin and James proved inconclusive, his initiative would succeed gloriously.

  The expedition Burrow planned would be the largest and best prepared of any up to that time. Technologically it would be state-of-the-art, the space shuttle of its day as it were, and he set about the task with vigour rarely found in a seventy-one-year-old. Within
an incredible three months, Barrow had the entire enterprise in shape and ready to go: ships had been procured and refitted, equipment put into place and provisions purchased and delivered. The one vexing problem remaining was to find the right person to take charge of the venture. Sir John’s first two choices were Rear Admiral William Parry and Sir James Ross, both seasoned Arctic travellers, but they declined the invitations. Captain Francis Crozier, a five-time veteran of Arctic exploration with a brilliant naval record, was also given consideration, but at age thirty-three, objection was raised over his youth. Beside, he was Irish, and that would not do.

  All the while, Franklin continued in his anxiety to return to the Arctic, kicking his heels on the sidelines in expectation of a call from Barrow. Lady Jane Franklin, however, was busy at work lobbying friends in high places — her husband, after all, was a distinguished officer with experience in Arctic exploration. A groundswell of support soon developed and with no alternatives left Barrow reluctantly acquiesced to the urgings of colleagues and friends and made the appointment. He knew Franklin’s strengths and weaknesses, having on three previous occasions sent him out on assignments. With the command confirmed and Franklin ensconced in the captain’s cabin of the Erebus, Burrow backed off from appearing to be taking the lead in the project.