Arctic Obsession

by Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

  Much of the food stores came from cans that had been improperly sealed by the purveyors and the contents had become unfit for consumption. Canned tomatoes, rich in vitamin C, and certain cooked meats suffered particularly and large quantities had to be discarded. Technology of food preservation at the time was in an embryonic stage and the techniques of canning not fully developed. Franklin’s expedition carried tin cans the seams and seals of which had been soldered with toxic lead — some eight thousand of them containing over sixteen tons of preserved soup, vegetables, meat, and pemmican. In addition, tea, chocolate, tobacco, and other foods were stored in containers lined with lead foil.

  In their book Frozen in Time, Professors Owen Beattie and John Geiger give an account of a study they made in 1981 of lead poisoning incurred by the crews. The bodies of the three Beechey Island seamen were exhumed, X-rays taken, and autopsies performed with body samples collected for pathological examination. Samples of hair from the nape of Torrington’s head revealed that:

  [H]e had been exposed to large amounts of lead. The hair was long enough to show levels of lead ingestion throughout the first eight months of the Franklin expedition … lead levels in the hair exceeded 600 parts per million, levels indicating acute lead poisoning. Over the last few centimeters did the level of exposure drop, and then only slightly. This would have been due to a drop in the consumption of food during the last four to eight weeks of Torrington’s life, when he was seriously ill.[12]

  Lead content was found also in the bodies of Braine and Hartnell. It is clear that the toxic substance contributed to the deaths of these three men and most probably that of the others. It is unlikely that lead was the sole cause of any one death; the poisoning most probably acted in concert with starvation, scurvy, pneumonia, or typhus.

  And so it was that on that April day, Crozier and his large party set off on their forlorn trek. Teams of sailors, harnessed like pharaohic slaves, hauled the loaded sledge-mounted boats. In their weakened state, the advance was slow, particularly when they had to traverse pressure ridges or the sharp hillocks of ice pushed upwards, called “hummockies.” To proceed as they had was unrealistic; progress was so sluggish that the remaining rations would never see them to the mainland. Loads had to be lightened and at first only so much was abandoned. In the ensuing days and weeks, however, more and more was left behind, and for years to come, search parties scouring the area followed a veritable trail of discarded items, debris, and human remains.

  Francis McClintock, leading one of scores of parties sent out to search for the missing Franklin, came across the remains of a ship’s boat on King William Island within which were portions of two skeletons. Among the numerous articles scattered about were “twenty-six pieces of plate, eight of which bore Sir John Franklin’s crest.”

  In the meantime, Lady Jane continued in her unflagging efforts to locate her missing husband. As late as 1857, she purchased the 187-ton steamship Fox, and commissioned Francis McClintock, a naval officer, to carry out yet another search. McClintock was a veteran of the Canadian North, well familiar with the archipelago, and it was he who made the first substantive discoveries related to Franklin’s ill-fated crews. Having passed the winter of 1858–59 on King William Island, he set out by sledge to carry out a thorough examination of that land and parts of the mainland coast to the south. Sixty-five miles south of where Franklin’s ships had been abandoned, McClintock came across a twenty-eight-foot boat, “partially out of her cradle upon the sledge,” within which were portions of two skeletons. “One was that of a slight young person; the other of a large, strongly-made, middle-aged man.” Both were in “a disturbed state … large and powerful animals, probably wolves, had destroyed much of this skeleton, which may have been that of an officer.” Both skulls were missing, except for the lower jaws of each. McClintock continued:

  [One] skeleton was in a somewhat more perfect state and was enveloped with clothes and furs; it lay across the boat, under the after-thwart. Close by it were found five watches; and there were two double-barrelled guns — one barrel in each loaded and cocked — standing muzzle upwards against the boat’s side. It may be imagined with what deep interest these sad relics were scrutinized, and how anxiously every fragment of clothing was turned over in search of pockets and pocketbooks, journals, and even names. Five or six small books were also found, all of the scriptural or devotional works, except “Vicar of Wakefield” … besides these books, the covers of the New Testament and Prayerbook were found.[13]

  The explorer goes on to inventory a list of over thirty articles found lying about close to the boat, including winter clothing, boots, cartridges, “silk handkerchiefs — black, white and figured … [and] knives — clasp and dinner ones.” Also found were a small quantity of tea, forty pounds of chocolate, and a tiny bit of tobacco. Within the boat near the skeletons were “twenty-six pieces of plate, eight bore Sir John Franklin’s crest, the remainder had the crests or initials of nine different officers.”

  Four years before McClintock’s foray, another Arctic explorer, John Rae, had also searched for Franklin. Although he found no physical traces of the Englishmen he did come in contact with Inuit who either had met or had seen them. On one occasion he spotted a native wearing a gold cap-band, and when asked where he got it, the answer was “where the dead white men were” — with no indication where that might have been. Reports were also had of “white men falling down and dying as they walked.” One native told Rae of finding boots filled with cooked human flesh. Another reported that bodies had been found with the arms sawn off and others, with large amounts of flesh removed.

  On returning home, Rae submitted a report on his findings to the Admiralty in which he spoke of the shocking and unwelcome evidence that the desperate survivors had engaged in cannibalism. He wrote, “From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource — cannibalism — as a means of prolonging existence.”[14]

  A sensational story such as this rarely finds cover and Rae’s did not take long to leak out to the press, which ran with it with fervour. The outraged Lady Jane was beside herself in indignation and rallied her friends and supporters in condemning Rae. After all, British naval officers are simply incapable of engaging in such heinous acts. Charles Dickens took up the pen against the story, but he exonerated Rae and even praised his “manly, conscientious and modest personal character.”[15] He then railed vigorously against the Inuit for telling such absurd tales, and made clear his conviction that “every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.” He praised the “noble conduct and example of [the expedition’s] men, and of their great leader himself,” and he condemned the Inuit and “the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber.” The author concluded his essay: “Therefore, teach no one to shudder without reason at the history of the [survivors’] end. Therefore, confide with their own firmness, in their fortitude, their lofty sense of duty, their courage, and their religion.” Certainly an eloquent and heart-rending outpouring by a literary genius, but a complete obfuscation.

  Rae was the first to report on evidence of cannibalism, but subsequently others did the same, investigators like Charles Hall (1864), Frederick Schwarka (1879), and more recently Owen Beattie (1981). All found human bones that clearly show signs of having been cut with steel knives in efforts to de-flesh them, marks inconsistent with the gnawing of animals such as wolves. Skulls were found with gaping holes through which the brains were removed. Beattie tells of one human remain:

  Fracture lines also indicated that the skull had been forcibly broken; the face, including both jaws and all the teeth, was missing. Evidence that the body had been intentionally dismembered was further supported by the selective parts of the skeleton found: the head, arms and legs.[16]

  Professor Anne Keenleyside of Trent University’s Osteology Laboratory in her detailed study of the Frank
lin expedition bones offers a table of “Skeletal Elements with Cut Marks.” She concludes from the examination results on 507 such bones that “the remains support 19th century Inuit accounts of cannibalism among Franklin’s crew.”[17] Horrifying as this may be to the modern reader and even more so to Dickens and the Victorians, it is not difficult to imagine the circumstances. There they were, the final remainder of the 130 — exhausted from the strain of hauling, frostbitten, feet swollen, bleeding, and sick, half wet and shivering yet blinded by ice glare; dead or dying mess-mates left behind with no sign of nearing the end of their miserable trek; crazed with hunger and too weak to hunt what little was about. The angel of death hovered. Repugnant as it may have been, those who died continued to serve their mates.

  One wonders what went on in the minds of the pitiful valiants in their final days. Thoughts of wives and family left behind? Memories of laden tables and flaming hearths? Perhaps regrets of things done and not done, of unfinished lives? Bitter maybe or at peace with themselves, fearing or welcoming the approaching step into yet another unknown. The failed expedition has been called the greatest disaster in Arctic history. The men of the Erebus and Terror, however, had not failed. For three long years the crews lived in isolation, battling sickness and starvation, amid the most horrendous Arctic conditions. Even as they moved away from the abandoned ships they continued in faith and hope while stoically attending to their duties.

  Notes

  1. Jeannette Mirsky, To the Arctic! (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 114.

  2. John Richardson, Arctic Ordeal: the Journal of John Richardson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 231.

  3. Ibid., 150.

  4. Scott Cookman notes in Iceblink that since the Terror participated in the attack on Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, it’s quite likely that “the bombs bursting in air” in the American national anthem were fired from its decks.

  5. “Official Report on the Franklin Expedition,” Arctic Expedition (London: House of Commons, April 13, 1848), 332.

  6. Owen Beattie and J. Geiger, Frozen in Time (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1987), 17.

  7. Scott Cookman, Ice Blink (Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 80.

  8. Ibid., 99

  9. Jeannette Mirsky, 133.

  10. In the years 1819–25 Sir William Parry lead three expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage and had passed through these waters. It will be recalled that Parry was Barrow’s first choice to command the expedition ultimately entrusted to Franklin.

  11. Scott Cookman, 161.

  12. Owen Beattie and J. Geiger, 123.

  13. F.L. McClintock, A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John J. Franklin (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1972).

  14. Kenneth McGoogan, Fatal Passage: the Untold Story of John Rae (New York: HarperCollins Publishers: 2001), 237.

  15. J. Rae, Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea, 1846–1847 (London: T. & W. Boone, 1850).

  16. Owen Beattie and J. Geiger, 59.

  17. Anne Keenleyside, “The Final Days of the Franklin Expedition: New Skeletal Evidence,” Arctic Vol. 50, No. 1 (March 1997), 36. Keenleyside also lists nine femurs and tibia having high levels of lead.

  8

  Americans of the Arctic

  IN SUMMER 1987, AN extraordinary young woman from Los Alamitos, California, lowered herself gingerly into the frigid waters of the Bering Strait and set out to swim to Russia. Lynne Cox was her name. With long, persistent strokes, the stouthearted athlete pressed forward, eventually losing sight of the United States. She wore an ordinary swimsuit and bathing cap; incredibly no wet suit — only protective grease. In those 38°F waters, hypothermia might have been expected to overwhelm her, but she appeared immune to the cold. Steadily and forcefully, Lynne propelled herself through the choppy waters dancing about her, and after what seemed an interminable time, her feet finally scraped the rocky bottom. She was in Russia; she had made it. That the thirty-year-old succeeded in her goal was an unbelievable feat. Warmly bundled psychologists who monitored the swim from the comfort of the accompanying boat were as astonished as was the admiring public in Russia and the United States after they heard the news. In May 1990, at a White House summit conference, Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev raised a toast to the indefatigable Lynn, who “proved by her courage how closely to each other our peoples live.”

  It took Lynn two hours and sixteen minutes to cover the distance from Little Diomede Island (United States) to Big Diomede Island (Russia). For her, swimming in those near-freezing waters, the passage must at times have appeared endless. In reality, however, it is the shortest distance, a mere 2.7 miles separating the United States and Russia. Canada and Mexico aside, Russia is America’s closest neighbour. Had Lynn’s swim taken place 120 years earlier, there would have been no question of neighbours; it was all Russian, the two Diomedes and Alaska. The United States at the time was simply not part of the equation.

  How Alaska came to be American is an intriguing tale and important to us inasmuch as the United States became an Arctic country. The sale caused many Americans and Russians to wonder: what on earth prompted the tsar to transfer some six hundred thousand square miles of territory so rich in furs, timber, fisheries, and mineral resources for a paltry sum? Some view the sale as a shining example of Yankee ingenuity in hoodwinking naive Russians.

  On the evening of March 29, 1867, Secretary of State Seward was at his Washington home, happily engaged in a game of whist with his wife by the fireplace. The doorbell sounded and an exhilarated Baron Stoeckl, the Russian ambassador and a friend of the family, burst into the room. He had just received a coded dispatch via the newly laid transatlantic telegraph cable, the contents of which he was simply unprepared to delay sharing until the next morning. The tsar had at last consented to the sale of Alaska. The two men had been meeting for four arduous months, discussing and negotiating for precisely this outcome and now it came to be. Stoeckl suggested that the two men meet in the morning at Seward’s office to formalize the arrangement. But the impatient secretary would have none of that; he wanted the deed done immediately. Poor Mrs. Seward: she surrendered her winning hand, the cards were put away, apologies were made, and with that the two men parted company each to gather his staff. The assembled advisors worked hard into the night and by four o’clock in the morning the treaty lay on the desk of the secretary of state, ready for approval by congress and the president’s signature. As one historian observes, “At a strange midnight conference, the two incredible international bedfellows, Russia and the United States, became close territorial neighbors. How close, no one was to realize until the dawn of the air age.”[1]

  But what is perhaps not appreciated is that it was Russia that wished to sell, not so much the United States wanting to buy. At the time of the negotiations, the very prospect of a positive outcome was dismaying for many Americans and caused much anger. One congressman bitterly summed up what others felt when he declared “that Alaska was created for some purpose I have little doubt. But our information is so limited that conjectures can assign no use to it, unless it is to demonstrate the folly which those in authority are capable of in the acquisition of useless territory.”[2] It was only through the energy of expansionist-minded Seward that the talks on the purchase of Alaska were revived in the months before Stoeckl’s precipitous return to St. Petersburg in 1866.

  Years before becoming secretary of state, Seward openly reasoned that it was American destiny “to roll its restless waves to the icy barriers of the North, and to encounter oriental civilization on the Pacific.” He argued not only for Alaska’s annexation, but for a political union with Canada — little wonder that he has been called “the greatest of American expansionists.” And even less wonder that he wished to act instantly on the tsar’s decision.

  Five months prior to Stoeckl’s undoing of Mrs. Seward’s whist game, the ambassador had taken leave of Washington to return to St. Petersburg. No soon
er, however, did he reach home than Grand Duke Constantine, the tsar’s younger brother, persuaded the envoy to go back to America. He wanted the sale of Alaska negotiated. Russia, he argued, had to focus on becoming more effective in dealing with the developing complexities of the Japanese-Chinese-Korean orbit, and Alaska was a drain on resources. “Our interests are on the Asiatic coast and that is where we must direct our energy,” he wrote to Foreign Affairs Minister Gorchakov. “There we are in our own territory and have the possibility of exploiting a large, rich region … we must not lose the opportunity to develop on this ocean a preeminent standing worthy of Russia.” It was prudent to “gracefully yield” Alaska, thereby bringing the United States into an alliance that would provide Russia with a guardian to its Siberian back door.

  The Alaskan sale came about not exclusively due to Seward’s ambitions or through Constantine’s strategic vision; the reasons were varied. By the mid-century the Russian-American Company was in collapse. The world market for furs had substantially bottomed out, added to which the fact that the Alaskan coastline was simply overhunted and the stocks of fur-bearing animals had withered. To add to the company’s woes, the problem of defence loomed on the horizon. Historically, the company never gave much thought to the issue, for there was never any need. It had worked amicably with the Hudson’s Bay Company and its relations with Americans were businesslike and, on the whole, neighbourly. The Crimean War, furthermore, caused the company to develop a dependency on the United States for its supply and shipping needs, and this resulted in an unfavourable balance of trade, which St. Petersburg found grating. By the middle of the century, global perspectives had changed. Given Britain’s rapidly developing presence in British Columbia along Russian borders, and to the south, a mushrooming American economy, the tsar’s government felt that some future territorial conflict along the eastern Pacific coastline appeared inevitable. If Russia was to continue in Alaska as it had in the past, then defence expenditures would have to be incurred, for honour’s sake if nothing else. Under the circumstances, was it prudent to remain in Alaska? Grand Duke Constantine’s forceful views on the issue were known and they found the support of the ministries.