Arctic Obsession

by Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

  Franklin’s route within the interior of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago from autumn 1845 to its tragic conclusion three years later on King William Island.

  Map by Cameron McLeod Jones.

  From Greenland weeks earlier Franklin had sent his wife a final note, one which brimmed with hope and pride:

  Let me now assure you, my dearest Jane, that I am amply provided for with every requisite for my passage, and that I am entering on my voyage comforted with every hope of God’s merciful guidance and protection, and that He will bless, comfort and protect you, my dearest … and all my other relatives. Oh, how much I wish I could write to each of them to assure them of my happiness I feel in my officers, my crew, and my ship![6]

  What came of the tossed bottles and copper cylinders is anyone’s guess, for there is no record of any having been found. What little we do know of the fateful passage is pieced together from documents and other relics unearthed by subsequent search parties. From Baffin Island the two ships moved on in excellent weather and favourable winds, permitting Franklin to pass quickly through Lancaster Sound without incident. At the entrance to Barrow Strait, however, heavy ice brought it all to a halt and a sail west to Melville Island was made impossible. In his search for an open channel, Franklin boldly ordered a course north, up Wellington Strait, where he was again stymied by ice buildup. He turned back and, sailing south, Cornwallis Island was circumnavigated. With the developing winter bringing on freeze and ice buildup, he searched for a safe haven, which he found at Beechey. This tiny island six hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle lies just off Devon Island, which to this day holds its status as the world’s largest uninhabited island. Here, the crews of the two ships passed their first winter locked in ice for ten months, attending to the requisite “magnetical and meteorological observations” … and the burial of three of their shipmates.

  By the end of October, the long polar night had taken root, the sun having disappeared beneath the horizon, not to be seen again until the end of January. Snow covered the iced decks and the eerie silence enveloping the ships was broken only by the hum of incessant winds. The sense of isolation is offered by Robert McClure, one of the many subsequent searchers for signs of Franklin: “No pen can tell of the unredeemed loneliness of an October evening in this polar world; the monotonous, rounded outline of the adjacent hills and the flat, meandering valleys were deadly white with snow.”[7]

  New Year’s celebrations were dampened by the death of Petty Officer John Torrington, a twenty-year-old stoker on board the Terror. The young man had been confined to his bunk for weeks with lung complications thought to be tuberculosis. A wooden coffin was fabricated by the ship’s carpenters and the body was lowered into a shallow grave within the permafrost. Under flickering lamps, the burial service was read by Franklin himself and the grave was closed and covered with a limestone slab carrying the chiselled name of the deceased.

  Four days later, another death — that of Able Seaman John Hartnell, a twenty-five-year-old from the Erebus. Unlike Torrington’s death, this one was sudden and unexpected for all as the sailor had appeared the picture of good health. An immediate autopsy was performed to determine the cause of death, but it proved inconclusive — pneumonia, perhaps. The body was wrapped, placed in a coffin, and laid side by side with Torrington. Hartnell’s shipmates had nailed a small plaque on the coffin’s lid, identifying the deceased and carrying the inscription: “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways” (Haggai, I, 7).

  Then, within three months, a third death occurred, that of Marine Private William Braine, a thirty-two-year-old from the Erebus. Like Hartnell’s death, this one also was sudden and unexpected. He was struck while on a hunting excursion at some distance from the ship. By the time the body was transported back it had begun to decompose, making an autopsy difficult, but since it bore signs of nascent scurvy it was presumed that the fearful disease was the cause of death — despite carefully taken dietary precautions. Hartnell was laid to rest near the other two deceased.

  Three deaths within three months were confounding and an intimidating portent of things possibly to come. The winter proved long, but it was passed in reasonable comfort with hunting excursions, theatricals, and diversions of one sort or another, plus attention to scientific observations. The Terror, for example, carried a variety of musical instruments, including a hand organ and had a well-stocked library of 1,200 volumes. In the 120-square-foot wardroom situated on the upper deck, the ship’s eleven officers gathered in the style to which they were accustomed. The dining table was laid with a linen tablecloth and silverware at each place, including initialled napkin rings. Food and drink was entirely satisfactory, particularly with the private reserves of upscale stocks brought aboard by individual officers. Dozens of punched metal discs were available for the organ to play music at any time and the games locker was stocked with chess sets, checker boards, and playing cards. Every officer, of course, had his own private cabin.

  Below deck it was somewhat different. A thousand-square-foot space was allocated to forty-four men, not only for passing leisure hours, but as a place to eat and sling hammocks at night — privacy was non-existent. To the modern eye, the startling contrast in the living arrangements of officers and men is dramatic, but those were Victorian times when officers were considered gentlemen of the upper class, and soldiers and sailors were commoners drawn from the masses. One description of the overcrowded conditions of the lower deck is given by the surgeon accompanying an Antarctic expedition in 1840 who fretted over contagion of diseases:

  … if it was raining, snowing, the ship hemmed in by ice, there would be forty to sixty individuals in the orlop deck, spitting, drinking, eating, while all openings were tightly shut … The smells from the hold, from the storeroom, the smoke, steam, and smells from the kitchen, the exhalation from lungs and skin were not dispersed by the faintest breath of fresh air; daylight was hardly encountered …[8]

  When summer came and the sea at last opened, everyone was delighted to quit Beechey, to leave behind the dreariness and monotony of “the isle of death.” It was the beginning of the short Arctic season — summers last four to twelve weeks — and that particular summer was the warmest recorded by any previous expedition. Quick time was made in reaching the northern end of Somerset Island where Franklin was delighted to find the straits open, the same waters that were closed to him in the previous year. They were now free to follow Admiralty’s instruction and the course was set south to King William Island, lying 280 miles away “as the crow flies.” Their exact route is unclear and academics continue to fret over the question: did they sail past Prince of Wales Island on its west side through McClintock Strait or through Peel Sound on the east? (Majority opinion favours the latter.)

  Within weeks of departure from Beechey their destination came into distant view with the mast-top lookouts reporting ice floes west of the island and clear waters to the east. In determining which direction they would take to sail around King William, the open eastern path would have been self-evident. The cartographers producing Franklin’s flawed charts, however, had falsely indicated that an isthmus connected the island with nearby Boothia Peninsula, in other words, a blocked passageway. It wasn’t therefore a matter of choice — only one route was viable, and as Jeannette Mirsky observes poignantly in To the Arctic, “his only choice — by reason of that mortal flaw in the map — lay in following to the west. To the west he sailed, right into the fatal spiderweb the Arctic had spun to trap the unwary … never were they to get free.”[9]

  Initially, the Erebus and Terror sailed through new ice that was thin and sludgy, but in time they met thicker material. This too proved no hindrance to the heavy vessels with their iron-clad bows and reinforced keels. But the picture quickly changed when the ships began to encounter large blocks of the stuff being battered to and fro by angry currents. Some of the ice chunks were immense, floebergs as high as fifteen feet, but more worrisome still were their increasing numbers. The
ships continued to bully their way through, but as the bergs began to knit together, progress was appreciably retarded. Sails had long given way to steam power, and now the stokers shovelled coal for all they were worth in order to build up a full head of steam for the engines, the struggle growing ever more challenging. On the night of September 15, 1846, the obdurate ice won and the expedition was decisively arrested. Twelve miles from shore, clamped in a vicelike grip, the “state of the art” Erebus and the Terror became prisoners of the floe … and there would they remain for over a year and a half. Nature triumphed.

  The opening of the cairn by Franklin’s searchers in which a note had been deposited, dated April 25, 1848, recording the deaths of Franklin and those of twenty-three others.

  In the weeks that followed, the pack drifted slowly westward, no doubt raising hopes in the optimistically minded that the Northwest Passage might thus be completed. Eight months later, the warming rays of Arctic Spring provided no signs of thaw, and captivity continued. The fear was that should summer prove inordinately short they might well find themselves facing another winter locked up. Supplies were dwindling, especially coal, and food remained for just under a year. On May 26, Franklin sent out a sledging party to King William Island to scout out any sign of break in the surrounding waters. As they made landfall, the men deposited a message into the six-foot cairn erected and charted by William Parry[10] seventeen years earlier. The message gave particulars of the expedition’s progress, including date, ships’ names, route taken, and Sir John Franklin’s name. It ended with the words, “all well.” (The note was subsequently found in 1859 by one of the parties searching for evidence of the expedition.) When the sailors reached the island’s east coast, they were no doubt startled to discover that the channel separating the island from Boothia Peninsula was free of ice. Not only that, but there was no evidence of an isthmus joining the two lands … oh, had they but taken this eastern route around the island! The party returned to the Erebus to make its report, but upon arrival the sailors were startled to find their sixty-one-year-old commander laying incapacitated in his cabin.

  On June 11, 1847, Sir John Franklin died. He had taken to his bunk only days before and the decline had been rapid. The cause of death was uncertain. Fate, however, had been kind to the noble and ever-hopeful officer, for he went quietly to his death and was spared the agonies suffered by his shipmates in the calamitous events that followed.

  Ten months later, a second note was deposited in the cairn on King William Island. Dated April 25, 1848, and signed by the captains of the Erebus and the Terror, it explained that they had “been beset” since September 12, 1846, and telling of Sir John’s death, it went on to report that “the total loss of deaths in the Expedition had been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.”

  Franklin’s one-time fear of yet another ice-locked year came to be and it was passed in abject misery, as the cairn’s message partially evidences. Food had become dangerously short in supply; coal was severely rationed, causing even colder living quarters; the spectre of scurvy hung heavy; an additional, unidentified sickness had infected the ship, and boredom and ennui had given way to lassitude and despair. The dark angel of death was a familiar figure.

  Francis Crozier, the Terror’s captain and Franklin’s second-in-command, had by then taken charge of the expedition. Faced with the grim realities, it was clear that the possibility of forcing a Northwest Passage was out of the question. Furthermore, there was no way that the group could survive a third winter of imprisonment. The only option appearing open was to abandon the vessels and make an 850-mile overland trek to Great Slave Lake where salvation would be had at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s outpost. Crozier, a veteran of four previous Arctic expeditions and well familiar with the Canadian North, no doubt realized that the intimidating march was a wholly uncertain risk.

  In mid-April, preparations were launched for quitting the two ships. Since their departure from England two years earlier, twenty-eight men had perished and now the remaining 105 set to the tasks as hand. They realized that once they reached the limits of the ice floes, a traverse to the mainland would have to be made by boat and therefore four substantial ones were made ready and hauled onto the ice at some distance from the vessels. Up to thirty feet long and mounted on heavy oak sledges, they made for onerous dragging across rough, sometimes precipitous, ice. Each boat carried a complete repair kit, including such items as saw, hammer, nails, sheet metal, and canvas. Goggles and sharp cleats for boots were fabricated.

  The large party required copious quantities of food for the estimated three-month passage, even with strict rationing and successful hunting. Barrels and casks containing such items as rolled oats, dried peas, tea, and sugar were emptied into canvas bags. Flour was baked into hard biscuit and salted meat was repacked into lighter containers. What little remained of lemon juice, rum, and vinegar was drained into smaller, more portable jugs. Hundreds of cans of prepared meat were also boarded. Taken together — boats, sledges, provisions, and equipment — the total weight is incalculable, amounting to several tons … but after all, they were providing for the Arctic needs of 105 men for three months if not more.

  On April 22, 1848, the signal was given for everyone to move ahead. Delighted as they must have been at leaving behind cloistered quarters, foul smells, shipboard sickness, attending despair, and sense of forlornness, the moment must also have been emotionally charged. The Erebus and Terror had faithfully served as their homes for two long years, and now they were bidding farewell to these dear friends. As Scott Cookman wrote so perceptively in Iceblink:

  More than almost any other bond, that between a sailor and his ship is extremely strong, and that between a captain and his ship even stronger still. There is a life-and-death dependency between them; neither can survive without the other. This affection, this love, may seem strange to those who have never gone to sea, but it is quite real, perhaps more real, as other kinds of love. No ship is a mere inanimate object; it lives in wind and water and light, and it moves, murmurs, complains, or shouts like everything living.[11]

  The men, straining at the heavy burdens, moved farther and farther from their murmuring, complaining friends, and with every painful step they drew closer to their destiny. Soon a pitiable trail of abandoned equipment and unburied dead would litter the hopeless passage.

  In England, there had been no word from Franklin for over two years, and public concern had swelled over the expedition’s well-being. The Admiralty, however, showed no anxiety — the ships after all were ultra-modern and provisioned for three years. With clamour of parliamentarians and journalists expanding, Lady Jane was spurred on in her standing efforts to persuade the government to expedite a search. In spring 1848 the Admiralty finally acquiesced — at the very time that Crozier and his men were abandoning the ships. Three expeditions were sent out, two by sea and one by land. One ship was to enter the Canadian archipelago from Lancaster Sound and the other, from the Pacific side via the Beaufort Sea. The overland search under the direction of Sir John Richardson and John Rae was to travel down the Mackenzie River to its mouth and then search out the coastline stretching east. As an incentive to private individuals, a £20,000 reward was posted to anyone successfully finding the missing men.

  As noted, within two years, fourteen ships were in the Canadian archipelago scouring the area, and by 1850, forty-two recorded searches had been carried out. No sign of the missing men, but more than one Inuit reported having sighted them at one time or another. From the broad scattering of evidence gathered by these searches and those which followed, a reasonably authentic understanding has been pieced together of what happened.

  Wreckage of boats and sledges were found as were cooking pots, hammers, tin cans, and countless personal items such as boots, buttons, eyeglasses, and toothbrushes. Searchers also came across human bones, skulls, and a complete skeleton, but perhaps the most interesting of all discoveries were the mummified remains of the three seamen interred in the per
mafrost of Beechey Island: Torrington, Hartnell, and Braine.

  Causes of the expedition’s deaths continue to captivate the imaginations of Franklinphiles. Exactly how did the desperate men of the Erebus and Terror finish their days? Of what precisely did they die? Scurvy quite naturally stands high on the list, but there’s considerably more to it than that. It must be remembered that for two years the men had been cloistered in a hostile environ within the wooden confines of their immobile ships. Lacking the physical activity normally associated with ships under sail and able to do little during the months of darkness, they were naturally weakened and out of shape. Provisions were in short supply and since they were ice-bound “in the least favoured spot in the Canadian Arctic,” game was scarce and certainly insufficient to make a difference to more than a hundred hungry men.

  Scurvy did come to the ships. Sufficient lemon juice had been boarded in England to issue one ounce daily to each man for three years. The juice, of course, is an outstanding prophylactic, but when it freezes, much of the vitamin content is killed, and it’s more than likely that this was the case by the time the two ships became icebound. The one-ounce-per-day calculation, furthermore, was made to meet the needs of men sailing in more temperate climates rather than those of the extreme Arctic cold. In short, Franklin’s men suffered from an insufficiency of vitamin C, which when combined with their overall weakened conditions made scurvy inevitable.

  Within the first year of ice-lock, living quarters on board the two ships deteriorated badly. Walls of the tightly closed cabins and messes dripped with condensation; the dwindling supply of fuel disallowed proper heating; smoke, humidity, and unhealthy fumes from the holds permeated the narrow confines. Pulmonary ailments of one sort or another struck the crew, especially pneumonia and tuberculosis.