The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  By 1854, nine years had passed since Franklin and his crew had set sail and common sense decreed that all 129 of them were surely dead, but yet another expedition went looking for Franklin, led by the explorer John Rae. When he returned home on 29 July, he had some grisly news to report: “During my journey over ice and snow this spring . . . I met with Esquimaux in Pelly Bay, from one of whom I learned that a party of ‘white men’ (kabloonas) had perished from want of food some distance to the westward . . . 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.”

  Rae’s sensational report, published in The Times, caused a furore in Britain. The suggestion that British explorers had resorted to eating each other in their final days was simply too shocking to be believed (we can only assume that they had very short memories when it came to Franklin’s first expedition). Charles Dickens, editor of Household Words, asserted, without a shred of supporting evidence, that the dying party had obviously been eaten by the local Inuit. Lady Franklin, meanwhile, was simply furious with Rae for turning back without finding her husband, especially when she found out that Rae had pocketed the £10,000 reward.

  In 1857, Lady Franklin sought the advice of a couple of mystics, whose “visions” inspired her to launch yet another search party, this time funded partly by the sale of her jewels and partly by public subscription, despite the fact that the Government had officially pronounced her husband dead three years earlier.

  In 1859, Francis McClintock succeeded in reaching King William Island and found the skeleton of a sailor with two letters in his pocket, the only surviving records of what happened to the expedition. The first letter – dated 28 May 1847 – reported that the Franklin expedition had become trapped in ice on 12 September 1846, but on a more cheery note concluded with the words “all well”. The second letter – dated 28 April 1848 – confirmed, however, that things had taken a turn for the worse: Franklin had died on board ship on 11 June 1847 while icebound off King William Island. His crews had abandoned their vessels in a futile attempt to trek south to safety.

  Over the next four decades, approximately twenty-five more searches helped uncover bits of the story but questions remained unanswered. Why did so many men die in a place where previous expeditions had survived and where Inuit populations would trade goods for supplies? Why didn’t they exchange their supplies for food and shelter from the Inuit? The most likely explanation is that a combination of lead poisoning, cold, starvation and disease – including scurvy, pneumonia and tuberculosis – killed the entire expedition. It is likely that the men waited for their colleagues to die before eating them.

  Despite the fact that his 1845 expedition had resulted in an impressive 100 per cent fatality rate, the Victorian media portrayed Franklin as a great national hero, thanks largely to Lady Franklin and her many powerful contacts in the government of the day and because the British public preferred the myth that she represented to the horrible reality of cannibalism and failure.

  Franklin was rewarded with a memorial in Westminster Abbey which credits him with “The Discovery of the North West Passage”. In fact, it was the men who went looking for Franklin who discovered more about the Northwest Passage than Franklin ever did and it was the great Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen who finally proved the uselessness of the Northwest Passage as a major trade route because it is blocked by ice for most of the year.

  In all, over forty search missions were launched in the search for Franklin and more men and ships were lost looking for him than on the original expedition itself. It remains to this day the greatest disaster in the annals of exploration.

  Least Successful Transatlantic Crossing by Aeroplane

  In the mid-1920s, a New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered a prize of $25,000 to the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris.

  René Fonck, a French aviator and First World War ace,7 was confident that the prize was his. He persuaded aviation pioneer Igor Sikorksy to build him a new $105,000 S-35 triple-engine aeroplane, at the time the most advanced and most expensive aircraft in the world.

  For his epic flight, Fonck didn’t stint on expense. He asked an interior designer to decorate the inside of the plane with panels of Spanish leather and mahogany walls so that it resembled “a beautifully furnished dining room”. With the extra fuel required to cross the Atlantic, the plane was already carrying 4,000 lbs over its maximum weight, but Fonck brushed aside Sikorsky’s warnings that the plane should be thoroughly stress-tested. To make matters even worse, the plane was loaded with various gifts from well-wishers, including a bouquet of flowers for the French President’s wife and a four-course celebration dinner for six people.

  The plane never got off the ground. The landing gear collapsed during take-off and the plane plunged down the runway into a gully where it burst into flames, killing two of the three crew members.

  Fonck vowed to try again, but the following spring, on 20 May 1927, twenty-five-year-old Charles Lindbergh flew solo from New York to Paris in a stripped-down, lightweight single-engine plane and won fame and fortune. As for the Frenchman, no one gave much of a Fonck.

  “I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”

  Editor in charge of business books for publisher Prentice Hall, 1957

  Worst Attempt to Found a Colonial Empire

  In the late seventeenth century, everyone who was anyone was busily colonizing the world. France owned most of northern America, from Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico; New Spain was governed by a viceroy in central America; England was busily building an empire that would become the envy of the world. There was one country, however, missing out on the trade game – Scotland.

  It was a desperately unhappy time for the Scots. Years of famine had driven people from their homesteads and choked the cities with homeless vagrants. The country’s home-grown industries were dying. Scotland had lost the few overseas colonies that it had, such as Nova Scotia in Canada, and was desperate for new overseas trading partners. A Scot called William Paterson thought he had the answer to his country’s problems.

  Paterson was a financier and hustler born in Tynwald, Dumfriesshire, in 1658. As a young man, he moved to England and, in 1694, became one of the founding directors of the Bank of England, but he quit his job after a year over a row with his fellow bankers and began organizing a rival bank. When this fell through a year later, he started on an even grander plan. In London, he met a ship’s surgeon called Lionel Wafer, who had told him about a wonderful paradise called Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, a thin strip of land between north and south America. It had a sheltered bay, rich, fertile land and a huge forest of hardwood trees.

  Paterson immediately saw the potential of Darien as a location for a trading colony. Trade with the lucrative Pacific markets was a hugely expensive business because ships had to make the hazardous trip round Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America. If a Scottish trading post could be established at Darien, goods could be ferried from the Pacific across Panama and loaded on to ships in the Atlantic from there, speeding up Pacific trade and making it much more reliable.

  In 1698, Paterson set about selling his dream of building a “New Caledonia” to the Scottish Government. He was a very persuasive salesman. Darien, Paterson promised, would be Scotland’s “door of the seas and the key of the universe . . . trade will increase trade and money will beget money”. To the Scots, who had watched with envy as their more prosperous neighbour to the south piled up wealth and status from overseas acquisitions, this was very beguiling talk.

  On 26 February 1696, the Company of Scotland was set up in Edinburgh to raise capital for Paterson’s ambitious venture. The project hit problems from the start when the English Government, who saw it as a threat to the monopoly
held by their own East India Company, warned potential English, Dutch and German investors to back off. This left no source of finance but from within Scotland itself. The Scots however were only too eager to invest and they flocked in their thousands, rich and poor, to subscribe to Paterson’s plan. It was a massive financial gamble and many were investing their life savings, but within six months £400,000 had been raised to fit out five ships for the expedition.

  The next problem was acquiring the ships and, again, the English were unhelpful. The King’s Government forbade their shipyards to take commissions from Scottish customers, so the Scots were forced to look abroad to Sweden and Holland. On 4 July 1698, five ships – the Caledonia, the Unicorn, the Saint Andrew, the Dolphin and the Endeavour – set sail from Leith harbour from the east to avoid detection by British warships, under the command of Captain Robert Pennycook. Of the 1,200 hopeful Scottish colonists, only Pennycook and William Paterson knew their destination, which was outlined in sealed packages to be opened only once the ships were on the open sea. No one, not even Paterson, had ever actually been to Darien to see it for themselves.

  Lionel Wafer, who had been promised a huge reward for his information about Darien but had yet to receive a single penny was hugely put out when he found that he wasn’t even being offered a place on the expedition. A couple of years later, when he read about the fate of the Scottish settlers, he was very thankful that he hadn’t gone with them.

  After an arduous and stormy voyage, with many passengers falling ill and dying on the way, the ships made landfall off the coast of Darien on 2 November 1698. Having been fed on stories of long-haired Indians living a life of luxury in a land of milk and honey, the settlers were hopelessly unprepared for the shock which lay ahead. Wafer had neglected to mention that the area was one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, a disease-ridden swathe of impenetrable tropical jungle, swamp and mosquitos.

  The new colony was also beset from the start by terrible organization. First they constructed a fort in a place with no fresh water supply; then they tried to grow crops of maize and yams, although none of them knew how. As well as boxes of wigs, heavy Scottish serge cloth and other useless items that the colonists expected to use in their new life, they took with them thousands of combs and mirrors, which they expected to sell to the Indians. But the local Cuna Indians didn’t have any money or much in the way of valuables to trade for the Scottish wares. Not that the naked Indians had much use for heavy serge in the heat of the tropics, even if they could afford it. The settlers weren’t even able to sell anything to any passing traders, which had been the whole point of the exercise. They had no idea how to store food in the heat and humidity of Panama and most of their provisions spoiled. Discipline began to break down among the settlers and thefts and drunkenness were routine. The following spring brought torrential rain and, with it, rampant disease, then slow starvation.

  Within a year, all but 300 of the settlers were dead. A sick and broken Paterson returned to Scotland in 1699 to try to stop a second expedition leaving, but by this time it was too late and several more ships and several thousand more settlers had already left for Darien. This time they brought with them a cargo of little blue Scots’ bonnets. Unsurprisingly, they couldn’t find a market in the jungle for these either. It didn’t help matters when three Scottish ministers accompanying the original expedition went mad in the tropical heat and began wandering around the jungle wailing, “We’re all doomed!”

  There was one other detail Wafer had overlooked. Spain was under the impression that Darien already belonged to them. The settlers faced the constant threat of attack from the Spanish on whose land they were squatting. They couldn’t even ask any of the English colonies in the area for help because the English Government had forbidden them to aid the Scots. New Caledonia truly was doomed.

  In 1700, Spanish troops surrounded the colony and called on the Scots to surrender. They were allowed to leave with their guns and the colony was abandoned for the last time. Of the sixteen ships that had left for Panama, only one returned to Scotland with just a handful of survivors to face a resentful nation of investors who wanted their money back.

  For William Paterson, it was a personal disaster. He had lost his fortune and his wife and his child on the trip and barely escaped with his own life, and the consequences for his country were immense. At least a quarter of Scotland’s national wealth had been blown on the project; some estimates put it much higher. The great colonial adventure, instead of making Scotland a major player on the world stage, had ruined their economy and placed it totally at the mercy of its richer neighbour.

  England had been trying to push Scotland into a Union for several years and the Scottish Government had always resisted, but this time the English Government was offering compensation to everyone who had lost money on Paterson’s scheme as a bribe to accept an Act of Union. Faced with total financial collapse, Scotland had no choice but to accept. In 1707, she joined with England as the junior partner in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. As Robert Burns put it, Scotland had been “bought and sold for English gold”.

  Least Successful Arctic Rescue Mission

  The American Charles Francis Hall was a veteran of Arctic exploration, having cut his teeth on two failed rescue missions in search of John Franklin’s missing 1845 expedition. So when Hall set out for the Arctic again in June 1871, he knew that he might die on the expedition from exposure, scurvy, starvation or all three. He probably wasn’t expecting it would be from arsenic poisoning.

  Hall was a blacksmith and engraver by trade, earning a living in Cincinnati, Ohio, making seals and metal printing plates. Through his interest in the printing industry, he began a second career as a newspaper proprietor, publishing the Cincinnati News. Hall’s third career as an Arctic explorer had curious origins: around 1857, he read a newspaper report about Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage. For reasons not entirely clear, the fate of the missing English explorer became Hall’s obsession. In 1960, he sold his newspaper, abandoned his pregnant wife and daughter and went looking for the lost expedition himself, despite the fact that he had had no training in cold weather survival, sailing, navigation, hunting, or any other skills that might come in useful as an Arctic explorer. Hall simply believed that God had chosen him to succeed where experienced explorers had failed. And all this despite the fact that it had been fairly well established for at least seven years that Franklin and his crew were all long dead.

  Predictably, Hall’s first shoestring expedition didn’t get far before he was frozen in, but he was rescued by some Inuit who told him about some relics which he interpreted as proof that some members of Franklin’s expedition might still be alive.

  In 1864, Hall tried again. He got as far as King William Island where he found remains and artefacts from the Franklin expedition, but no clues as to their fate. During this expedition, Hall, who had a hair-trigger temper and was often on the verge of violence, shot dead one of his crew, a young man called Patrick Coleman. Hall claimed that it was an act of self-defence and he was quelling a mutiny, but it seems more likely that he and Coleman had simply quarrelled and Hall had snapped. When he returned home, he had some questions to answer, but the shooting had taken place beyond the borders of Canada, so neither the British nor Canadian authorities would have anything to do with it and the American authorities ignored the matter completely. Hall had killed Patrick Coleman in a legal no-man’s land and got away scot-free.

  In 1871, having mysteriously talked the US Congress into giving him a grant of $50,000 towards an expedition to the North Pole in the ship Polaris, Hall set off to try to discover the fate of Franklin’s crew yet again, although by this time even Hall was beginning to concede that they were probably dead.

  Hall’s crew of twenty-five included the ship’s captain Sydney Buddington, navigator George Tyson, and Dr Emil Bessels, German physician and naturalist as chief of the scientific staff. Hall’s leadership skills left m
uch to be desired. Despite all his supposed piety, he was a prickly, volatile character and very overbearing in manner and his crew seem to have despised and mistrusted him almost from the start. One day Hall fell ill after drinking a cup of coffee and collapsed in a fit. For the next week, he suffered from vomiting and delirium, then he appeared to make a recovery and accused several of his disgruntled travelling companions, especially the ship’s physician Dr Bessels, of having poisoned him. Shortly after that, he fell ill again and died.

  The expedition never made it to the North Pole. The ship, now commanded by Buddington, was dramatically abandoned in Greenland on the verge of being crushed by ice floes. The crew dispersed and were finally rescued two years later in what became known as one of the greatest Arctic survival stories ever. In fact, the only member of the Polaris not to survive the expedition was Hall himself.

  The official investigation that followed ruled that Hall had died from a stroke but, in 1968, tests on tissue samples of bone, fingernails and hair confirmed that Hall had died of poisoning from massive doses of arsenic in the last two weeks of his life. The question of whether or not he was murdered by one of his crew remains unanswered. It is possible that he may have dosed himself with arsenic – a common ingredient of quack medicines of the time, or he may have been overdosed by Dr Emil Bessels. Given the lack of remorse shown by Buddington and Tyson, the culprit could have been any one of three.

  Ironically, just as Hall never had to account for his murder of Patrick Coleman, no charges were ever brought.