Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  A decade later, in 1782, tragedy struck both Hearne and Matonabbee. With France and England at war, two French warships arrived in Hudson Bay and set about destroying Hudson’s Bay Company posts. With Matonabbee and his warriors at work hundreds of kilometres to the west, the French razed Prince of Wales Fort. They took Hearne and his HBC men prisoner. Having become governor of the Fort, Hearne strove to minimize the impact on the native peoples who remained behind—and especially on his beloved native wife, Mary Norton.

  With winter looming, and the French lacking experience in northern waters, Hearne struck a deal: he would guide the invaders through Hudson Strait if they would release him and his men to cross the Atlantic in a small sloop they were towing. Remarkably, with thirty-two men, Hearne made this happen. He succeeded in reaching Orkney and then Portsmouth.

  Now he was a man on a mission. The following spring, having amassed materials to rebuild a trading post, he sailed from London on the first ship to Hudson Bay. He was bent on returning to Churchill and resuming life with Mary Norton. Soon after he arrived, however, he learned that, during his absence, the love of his life had starved to death. Then he received a second devastating blow: his best friend, too, was dead. As a “leading Indian,” Matonabbee had flourished with the fur trade. When he arrived back at Prince of Wales Fort and saw the destruction, he believed it to be final. Seeing no way forwards, he hanged himself.

  As for Hearne, he spiralled downwards but managed to survive. After five years, he made it back to England. He completed his classic work, which appeared in 1795, three years after he died, as A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean in the Years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772. The book showed that by reaching the Arctic coast, Hearne had fixed a first point along the southern channel of what would prove to be the only Northwest Passage navigable by ships of that century or the next.

  Northwest View of the Prince of Wales Fort in Hudson Bay, engraving from Journey to the Northern Ocean by Samuel Hearne, 1795. The explorer’s original drawing, from 1777, gave rise to this engraving.

  Courtesy of HBC Archives (24-2806).

  Early in the twentieth century, the geologist and fur-trade scholar Joseph B. Tyrrell would introduce a new edition, noting that he considered the work invaluable “not so much because of its geographical information, but because it is an accurate, sympathetic, and patently truthful record of life among the Chipewyan Indians at that time. Their habits, customs and general mode of life, however disagreeable or repulsive, are recorded in detail, and the book will consequently always remain a classic in American ethnology.”

  As a gifted natural artist, Hearne also included sketches of Prince of Wales Fort, York Fort and Great Slave Lake, and of many aboriginal artifacts—images that, because they are unique and irreplaceable, continue to turn up in new books on northern history. Hearne did groundbreaking work as a naturalist, devoting more than fifty pages to describing the animals of the Subarctic. He produced the only written record of one of the most controversial moments in Canadian history: the massacre of innocents at Bloody Falls. And with his word-portrait of his best friend, he etched the peerless Matonabbee into the story of northern exploration.

  5.

  Mackenzie Establishes a Second Location

  Like many of his fellow fur traders, rugged men who lived and worked in the North Country, Alexander Mackenzie was keenly interested in the search for the Northwest Passage. But in 1789, when he was preparing to paddle northwest out of Fort Chipewyan, a new fur-trading post at the mouth of the Athabasca River, the history of that search said nothing about Samuel Hearne, whose narrative had yet to be published. Mackenzie had heard rumours that, almost two decades before, while working for the Hudson’s Bay Company, Hearne had “gone native” as he made his way to the mouth of the Coppermine River. He found no gold or copper—nothing of interest. But none of that concerned him.

  For Mackenzie, the relevant exploration was that of Captain James Cook, who had sailed from England to seek not the eastern but the western entrance to the Northwest Passage. Someone at the British Admiralty sent him to do so after reading accounts of voyages supposedly undertaken in 1588 and 1640. In the first narrative, a Portuguese mariner named Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado claimed he had sailed through North America from Davis Strait to the Pacific Ocean. In the second, a man calling himself Bartholomew de Fonte wrote that he had completed the voyage in the opposite direction. Then there was the Greek sailor who claimed that in 1592, using the name Juan de Fuca, he had sailed from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic Ocean and back again.

  In 1778, after voyaging in the South Seas, James Cook gave the lie to these tales by charting the west coast of North America from northern Oregon to Alaska. Before heavy ice precluded further progress, he had sailed through Bering Strait to a latitude just above 70°, where on the northwest coast of Alaska he named Icy Cape. Earlier, north of 60°, Cook had explored an inlet with two branches, or arms, which effectively embrace present-day Anchorage. He and his men had determined that a river flowed into each arm of “Cook Inlet,” as it came to be called. Today, we identify those rivers as the Susitna flowing from the north, and the Matanuska from the east.

  And when, on June 3, 1789, Alexander Mackenzie paddled northwest out of Fort Chipewyan, he believed he was already on the latter river. If he could reach Cook Inlet by canoe, he could claim discovery of the Northwest Passage—not a waterway navigable by sailing ships, perhaps, but one accessible to brigades of large canoes. He would establish that a continental network of rivers and lakes extended westward from the east to the Pacific Ocean.

  Such a discovery would transform the fur trade. Instead of transporting goods thousands of kilometres to and from Montreal, Mackenzie’s business concern, the North West Company, would be able to trade directly with China and Russia, exploiting the Pacific inlet as a fur-trading base the same way its archrival, the Hudson’s Bay Company, used Hudson Bay.

  Now twenty-five, Mackenzie had been working in the Montreal-based fur trade for a decade. Five years before, he had taken “a small adventure of goods” west by river to Detroit. These goods he had traded so successfully that his employer had offered him a share in the firm’s profits, on condition that he serve in a post still farther west at Grand Portage, sixty kilometres southwest of present-day Thunder Bay.

  The following year, as the company expanded to meet competition, Mackenzie had taken charge of the English River (Churchill) department, based in northern Saskatchewan at Lac Île-à-la-Crosse. In 1787, after his employer joined forces with the North West Company, Mackenzie had ventured still farther north and west to an old fur-trading post on Lake Athabasca.

  This portrait of Alexander Mackenzie was painted around 1800 by Thomas Lawrence.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  At this cluster of rough log cabins in the wilderness, before assuming responsibility for the surrounding area, Mackenzie spent a winter as second-in-command to veteran fur trader Peter Pond, who was soon to retire. Pond believed that at Great Slave Lake, some distance to the north, he had identified the source of a river that flowed to the Pacific coast of the continent. It would culminate, he believed, in one of the two arms of an inlet charted, at latitude 60°, by Captain Cook.

  In 1789, after helping to build the splendid Fort Chipewyan, Mackenzie set out to investigate the broad river that flowed northwest out of Great Slave Lake. The optimistic Pond had estimated that from this post, situated at a latitude above 58°, paddlers could reach the Pacific in six or seven days. Each degree of latitude represented about 110 kilometres. But the distance westward might be considerable, and Mackenzie suspected that the journey might take more than a few days. Still, on June 3, when he left Fort Chipewyan with four birch-bark canoes, he felt confident that, within a couple of weeks, he would reach the Pacific coast, and so transform the fur trade while making exploration history.

  By this time, three decades after francophone Quebec had become a British colony, Scotti
sh immigrants had gained control of the Montreal-based fur trade. They hired and authorized voyageurs to replace coureurs de bois, who had worked as independent merchants. The vast majority of voyageurs were French Canadians expert in long-distance canoe transportation, and crucial in the rugged northwest. While travelling, they would rise as early as two o’clock in the morning and set off without eating. At around eight, they would stop for breakfast. Then they would paddle, eating pemmican for lunch as they worked, until eight or ten o’clock at night. During a portage, voyageurs would carry two bundles of ninety pounds each, although certain legendary figures were said to have staggered half a mile lugging as many as seven—a total of 630 pounds.

  To avoid such arduous trials, and though few of them could swim, voyageurs would often try to run dangerous rapids. The geographer David Thompson (1770–1857) would describe one such occasion, when voyageurs tackled the Dalles des Morts, or Death Rapids, on the Columbia River near present-day Revelstoke, British Columbia. “They had not gone far,” he wrote, soon losing his way in a complex sentence, “when to avoid the ridge of waves, which they ought to have kept, they took the apparent smooth water, were drawn into a whirlpool, which wheeled them around into its Vortex, the Canoe with Men clinging to it, went down end foremost, and all were drowned.” The incident is clear enough.

  Now, in 1789, Alexander Mackenzie led a disparate party, but followed no unusual practice. From Fort Chipewyan he embarked with four French-Canadian voyageurs, two of their wives, a German who had been a soldier, a renowned Chipewyan guide known as the “English Chief,” two more wives and two hunters. The women would handle cooking, moccasin sewing, fire building and campsite maintenance, while the men would paddle, hunt, fish and erect tents.

  Despite bad weather, Mackenzie set a rapid pace. By rising before dawn and paddling until late afternoon, the travellers reached Great Slave Lake in a week. Here they encountered whirling ice floes, and for two weeks, socked in by rain and thick fog, they sheltered in an abandoned trading post. As the ice slowly cleared, they searched for the outlet of the great river, tormented by swarms of black flies and mosquitoes. Finally, after twenty days on the lake, they discovered the channel they sought. Travelling now with the current, they found paddling easier. Jubilant, they raised their rough sails.

  But soon, with a mountain range looming to the west, Mackenzie grew concerned. The river changed direction. Instead of flowing west towards the coastal inlet, it veered north. Mackenzie and his men began coming upon villages of Dogrib people. Several times the explorer hired local guides, but none proved able to point the way westward. Invariably, they slipped away home.

  After passing 61°, some distance north of the latitude of Cook Inlet, Mackenzie wrote in his journal that going farther seemed pointless, “as it is evident that these waters must empty themselves into the Northern Ocean.” His fellow travellers urged him to turn back. Curious and obstinate, determined to learn the truth of this waterway, Mackenzie persevered. After a few more days, rolling hills gave way to flat land and the river split into channels.

  At last, while encamped on a large island, and after seeing whales, Mackenzie realized that a salt tide washed the shoreline. He had reached the Arctic coast of the continent. From Great Slave Lake, in fourteen days, he had travelled 1,650 kilometres at a rate of more than 110 kilometres per day. Among overland explorers, only Hearne had attained a similar latitude, when he had reached the mouth of the Coppermine River.

  By paddling down this greater river—which now bears his name, but which he called River Disappointment—Alexander Mackenzie located a second point along the southern channel of what would prove to be the Northwest Passage. On July 14, 1789, at just above 69° north, he erected a wooden post to mark his achievement.

  The return trip, because it was upriver, proved an endurance test. But on September 12, after 102 days on the water, the explorer reached Fort Chipewyan. He was exhausted, but in addition to having discovered the second longest river in North America after the Mississippi, Mackenzie had honed his skills as both traveller and leader.

  Four years later, in July 1793, Mackenzie would become the first explorer to reach the Pacific Coast from the east. But the route he followed through the Rockies would prove so dangerous, and feature so many arduous portages, that nobody could ever mistake it for a northwest passage.

  In 1801, when Alexander Mackenzie published the journals of his two voyages, he vindicated Samuel Hearne and put paid to any notion that there might be a continent-spanning waterway south of 69°. Any northwest passage would have to be discovered not in the latitudes of Hudson Bay, but in the Arctic waters north of continental North America. And that revelation would interest the British Admiralty.

  Part Two

  AN ARRIVAL OF STRANGERS

  6.

  An Inuit Artist Sails with John Ross

  By the early 1800s, British merchants had lost interest in searching for the Northwest Passage. Since the 1570s, they had sponsored expeditions by such adventurers as Martin Frobisher, John Davis, Henry Hudson and William Baffin. Fur-trading concerns had supported the overland searches of Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie. The Admiralty itself had underwritten the third voyage (1776–1778) of Captain James Cook, who sought the Passage from the Pacific and, in Bering Strait, encountered an impassable wall of ice which, he wrote, “seemed to be ten or twelve feet high at least.”

  Today, Cook’s maps and logs speak to the issue of climate change. In 2016, after analyzing them, a University of Washington mathematician determined that, as a phenomenon, a lightning-fast shrinkage of Arctic pack ice began just three decades ago. Harry Stern, quoted in the Seattle Times, said that from Cook’s time until the 1990s, voyagers “could count on hitting the ice somewhere around 70 degrees north in August. Now the ice edge is hundreds of miles farther north.” In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that, since the 1980s, the total volume of Arctic ice in summer has dropped a staggering 60 to 70 percent. Global warming is no hoax.

  But pass on. The earliest searchers had demonstrated that, because of the harsh conditions, traversing any northwest passage would at best prove slow and dangerous. Even so, in 1745, the British government established a monetary award for completing the passage. It attracted little interest, and in 1775, the Board of Longitude increased its value. It offered a series of incremental rewards, starting with £5,000 to the first expedition to attain 110° west. The first to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic would receive £20,000.

  Still, nobody expressed much interest. Even whalers, who fished annually off Greenland, considered the proposition a bad risk. The quest languished. But then, in 1815, Britain won the decisive Battle of Waterloo, ending a war against Napoleonic France that had been raging sporadically for a dozen years. The Royal Navy found itself with scores of idle ships and hundreds of unemployed officers collecting half-pay. At the British Admiralty, Second Secretary John Barrow, the senior civil servant in charge of the Navy, hit upon geographical exploration as the solution to the excess of both ships and men. Barrow sent an expedition to explore the Congo in West Africa and, when that ended in a yellow-fever catastrophe, turned his attention to the Arctic.

  At this point, Great Britain boasted the most powerful navy in the world. But in recent years, the Russians had begun probing the Arctic for a navigable northeast passage. If they proved successful, what a blow to British pride and pre-eminence! What a threat to British trade! Barrow gained political approval to send two Arctic expeditions to seek a route to the Pacific: one to proceed via the North Pole (and the open sea that supposedly encircled it), and the other to sail via Baffin Bay and the Northwest Passage. Each expedition would comprise two ships.

  Early in 1818, the Royal Navy began fitting out all four vessels at Deptford, fourteen kilometres south of London. The endeavour became a cause célèbre. In Lady Franklin’s Revenge, I describe how a young London woman organized an outing to Deptford when final inspection was ju
st one week away. On Easter Monday, late in March, twenty-six-year-old Jane Griffin—who would one day be styled “Jane, Lady Franklin”—arrived with a letter of introduction to Commander John Ross, who would lead the Northwest Passage expedition in HMS Isabella.

  Now forty years old, Ross had joined the Royal Navy at age ten. Of the nine hundred commanders available to the Admiralty, he was one of only nine who, over the past four years, had remained continually employed. He was assured that leading this expedition would secure him a long-sought promotion to captain. The veteran Ross was on his way to becoming Royal Navy royalty, and young Jane Griffin was suitably excited. In her journal, she noted that while the Isabella and the Alexander would seek the Passage under Ross and Lieutenant William Edward Parry, the other two vessels, “the Dorothea, Captain Buchan, and the Trent, Lieutenant Franklin, are going directly to the Pole.”

  Passage Through the Ice, engraving based on a sketch by John Ross, 1818. Here we see the challenges that mariners faced.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  Miss Griffin poked around Ross’s ships below decks and recorded that, although she was only five foot two, she could not stand upright. She saw deal chests filled with coloured beads for trading, as well as harpoons and saws for cutting ice. And she was much taken with a sealskin kayak that belonged to the “Eskimo” who would sail with Commander Ross as interpreter. She regretted having arrived too late to see this English-speaking Inuk, John Sakeouse, demonstrate the use of his kayak.

  The kayak was not completely unknown to the British. As early as the 1680s, a well-read Orkney clergyman reported that islanders had spotted some Inuit from Greenland, whom they wrongly called “Finnmen.” James Wallace wrote that the visitors paddled their craft around off one of Scotland’s Orkney Islands (Eday), apparently fishing. They fled when Orcadians sought to approach. Had they crossed the Atlantic by kayak? Perhaps they had sailed aboard a British ship and set out after debarking.