Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  After Franklin left Cumberland House, two naval men remained there to transport anticipated supplies. But shortages throughout the North Country meant they arrived at Fort Chipewyan with ten bags of rotting pemmican. The party spent eleven days canoeing north to Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake.

  Akaitcho grew impatient with the expedition’s “slow mode of travelling.” Artist Robert Hood, rival to George Back in many ways, drew this likeness of the Yellowknife leader.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  Here Franklin met Willard Ferdinand Wentzel. This North West Company veteran had been hired to recruit guides, hunters and interpreters from among the Yellowknife or “Copper Indians,” and to accompany the expedition to the coast. Here, too, on July 30, 1820, Franklin met Akaitcho, from whom, the following July, he would part angrily near the mouth of the Coppermine. Akaitcho was known as a man “of great penetration and shrewdness,” Franklin wrote now, and his older brother, Keskarrah, had travelled with Matonabbee. Akaitcho’s immediate followers included forty warriors (men and boys) known for their ferocity. For the past decade, while working as hunters out of Fort Providence, Akaitcho and his men had ravaged nearby tribes of Dogrib and Hare Indians, stealing furs and women with impunity.

  At their first meeting in the wilderness, to assert British superiority, Franklin and his officers donned full-dress uniforms, complete with medals, and placed a silk Union Jack atop their tent. Akaitcho was not impressed. Accompanied by two lieutenants, the Yellowknife leader arrived wearing a blanket over a white cloak. He smoked a peace pipe, downed some spirits and informed the visitors that they would not be travelling much farther this season.

  Franklin said that he hoped to reach the Arctic coast, and that he was bent on discovering a northwest passage that would accommodate sailing ships. He promised that if Akaitcho and the Yellowknife would accompany his expedition as guides and hunters, he would give them cloth, ammunition, tobacco and iron tools, and also settle their outstanding debts with the North West Company. Akaitcho agreed, though he warned that, because of the history of hostilities, he would not enter Inuit-controlled territory.

  After setting out from Fort Providence, Akaitcho reiterated that the expedition could not even try to approach the Arctic coast this season. He had not realized, he explained, that Franklin and his men would adopt such a “slow mode of travelling.”

  The native leader and his men pressed on ahead, and waited for Franklin 320 kilometres farther north, at Winter Lake. While they were catching up, according to Back, “a mutinous spirit displayed itself amongst the men. They refused to carry the goods any farther, alleging a scarcity of provisions as the reason for their conduct.” In truth, they weren’t eating nearly enough. Franklin responded by observing they were “too far removed from justice to treat them as they merited. But if such a thing occurred again, he would not hesitate to make an example of the first person who should come forward by ‘blowing out his brains.’”

  This speech had the desired effect, though the overworked voyageurs would later reiterate their distress with increasing urgency. At Winter Lake, roughly halfway to the coast from present-day Yellowknife, Franklin’s men built Fort Enterprise. The expedition now comprised six Europeans, including Wentzel, and also two Métis interpreters and seventeen voyageurs, plus three wives and three children.

  The four Orcadian Scots, who had studied the fine print before signing on in Stromness, had exercised an option clause at Fort Chipewyan, and turned around and headed for home. Franklin noted that they had “minutely scanned our intentions, weighed every circumstance, looked narrowly into the plan of our route, and still more circumspectly to the prospect of return.”

  At Fort Enterprise, Akaitcho again warned Franklin against descending the Coppermine with winter approaching: “I will go in spring, but not now, for it is certain destruction. But if you are determined to go and die, some of my young men shall also go [to the coast] because it shall not be said that you were abandoned by your hunters.” As for proceeding along the coast for any distance, he declared that madness. Finally, Akaitcho convinced Franklin to settle for a couple of scouting forays to the headwaters of the Coppermine River—difficult sorties that vindicated his opinion.

  Back at Enterprise, where Wentzel had supervised the building of three log houses, the two midshipmen, George Back and Robert Hood, got into a jealous competition over a young Yellowknife woman they called Greenstockings. John Hepburn prevented a duel by surreptitiously removing ammunition from their guns. Franklin decided this was a good time to separate the two young men. With game proving scarce, and the party running low on ammunition, he sent the rugged George Back to Fort Chipewyan for supplies, a snowshoe journey of 885 kilometres.

  Along the way, the plain-speaking Back berated fur-trade managers to see that expedition goods sent from York Factory were brought forward. He, too, traded sharp letters with George Simpson, who noted in his journal that Back had visited him at Fort Wedderburn, not far from Fort Chipewyan. “From his remarks I infer,” Simpson wrote, “there is little probability of the objects of the expedition being accomplished . . . It appears to me that the mission was projected and entered into without mature consideration and the necessary previous arrangements totally neglected.”

  Early in the winter of 1821, two Inuit interpreters arrived at Fort Enterprise from York Factory: Tattannoeuck and Hoeootoerock. Among the English, they were known respectively as Augustus and Junius. Tattannoeuck would one day play a crucial role in keeping Franklin alive. Born in the late 1700s, and raised in a settlement over three hundred kilometres north of Fort Churchill, he had by now worked as a Hudson’s Bay Company interpreter for four years. In 1820, having married and begun a family, he had signed on to travel with this overland expedition. Tattannoeuck was a proud man, according to editor C. Stuart Houston, “who asked from the voyageurs the same deference and respect that they showed the officers.”

  Pierre St. Germain, the “mixed-blood” hunter and interpreter who had fetched the two Inuit, interviewed some of Akaitcho’s followers and learned of the dangers the expedition would face at the coast. Franklin got wind of this and threatened to take St. Germain to England and put him on trial. The voyageur replied, all too presciently, that he didn’t care where he lost his life, “whether in England or accompanying you to the sea, for the whole party will perish.”

  On June 14, 1821, after an endless winter, the expedition—together with a number of Yellowknife hunters—set out for the headwaters of the Coppermine River. The men hauled sledges over rough and melting ice until early July. Then they took to the Yellowknife River, though shallows and rapids necessitated frequent portages. By July 12, with the hunters having only sporadic luck, the expedition retained enough food for fourteen days at what Franklin would describe as “the ordinary allowance of three pounds of meat to each man per day.” The fur-trade standard, as noted elsewhere by John Richardson, Franklin’s second-in-command, was in fact eight pounds of fresh meat per day. Not surprisingly, the voyageurs complained of hunger and exhaustion.

  As the large party made its way down the Coppermine, Franklin sent Tattannoeuck ahead. The Inuk knew full well that at Bloody Falls, fifty years before, explorer Samuel Hearne had seen a great number of Chipewyan-Dene massacre two dozen Inuit. Accompanied by Hoeootoerock, he approached those rapids with caution. The two newcomers began making friends with the people they met. But when the locals saw Franklin approaching with a great many Yellowknife, they feared another massacre and melted into the surrounding countryside, never to be seen again.

  One old man, Terreganoeuck, had been unable to flee. He assured Franklin through Tattannoeuck that he would find a few Inuit to the east—a suggestion that discounted any advance warnings from those who had fled, and which probably encouraged Franklin to forge ahead when he had no business doing so.

  The expedition spent a few days camped at Bloody Falls, where a scattering of whitened skulls testified to the truth of Samuel Hearne’s journ
al. As John Richardson put it, “The ground is still strewed with human skulls and as it is overgrown with rank grass, appears to be avoided as a place of encampment.” George Back wrote: “The havoc that was there made was but too clearly verified—from the fractured skulls—and whitened bones of those poor sufferers—which yet remained visible.” He later produced a painting that makes plain what he witnessed.

  At the mouth of the Coppermine River, on July 18, 1821, Franklin established a camp on the eastern bluff overlooking the river. Coronation Gulf lay to the north, sprinkled with round islands, just as Samuel Hearne had reported. Like that earlier traveller, John Richardson noted the presence of many seals, and added: “The islands are high and numerous and shut the horizon in, on many points of the compass.” Franklin took a series of observations and corrected Hearne’s latitude. That first explorer had placed this location too far north.

  For days, Akaitcho had been warning Franklin that the expedition did not have enough food to proceed. Animals were scarce, winter was approaching and his hunters would go no farther. Some of his men had already defected. To proceed along the coast would mean risking death. In this, not his first warning, but his first concerted effort to save the expedition, he urged Franklin to retreat to Fort Enterprise.

  Now, despite these warnings from Akaitcho and his men, and also from his most experienced voyageurs, Pierre St. Germain and Jean Baptiste Adam, John Franklin made a decision that would cost the lives of more than half his men. Dismissing all protests and objections, he insisted on adhering precisely to his original instructions as written in England. Eleven of the twenty men he led eastward would perish. But here is the most revealing statistic: four of the five Royal Navy men would survive, as opposed to only five of the fifteen voyageurs and interpreters.

  Again: of the twenty men who followed Franklin beyond the mouth of the Coppermine, ten voyageurs and one Englishman would die. The British public, on reading about this discrepancy in the death rate, would hail it as a demonstration that Royal Navy men were tough, tenacious and resourceful. Later, Canadian analysts would advance an alternative interpretation, suggesting that Franklin coddled his fellow Britishers, allowing them to conserve their energies, while driving the voyageurs to do all the heavy, debilitating work.

  Now, in 1821, John Franklin dismissed Akaitcho’s concerns as groundless. He did not care what the fellow said. A British naval officer, he had his orders and he would follow them. His career depended on it. In his view, the voyageurs lacked British grit, courage and Christian faith. Surely the expedition would encounter Inuit hunters eager to assist. Franklin was a British naval officer. In a pinch, the Lord would provide.

  The hubris of John Franklin was more cultural than personal. According to C. Stuart Houston, “Back’s journal allows us to make a better assessment of the rigidity and stubbornness of Franklin, a product of the old British ‘do or die’ school who drove his men far too hard.” Fellow Canadian scholar Richard C. Davis, editor of Franklin’s journal, suggests that the lieutenant suffered from “a well-intentioned narrowness of vision that was systemic to his dominant culture, and that crippled Franklin when he found his culture dependent on others.”

  The ethnocentric arrogance of imperial Britain, Davis writes, “made it virtually impossible for Franklin to respect the traditionally-evolved wisdom of Yellowknife Indians and Canadian voyageurs, even though their assistance was crucial to the success of the expedition.” What today we regard as insensitive, arrogant and overbearing “was viewed as the epitome of civilized enlightenment by all those who basked in its nineteenth-century glow.”

  The looming debacle derived partly from the Admiralty’s lack of preparedness (how difficult could an overland expedition be?) and partly from supply shortages linked to the spiralling fur-trade rivalry. But as Davis notes, the expedition “could have reached a far happier conclusion had Franklin been less a man of his times.”

  The naval man told Akaitcho that nothing would stop him from making his way east along the coast. He would travel to Repulse Bay, or perhaps even to Hudson Bay. The Yellowknife leader said he doubted he would see Franklin again. But he agreed to cache some supplies at Fort Enterprise, just in case. Wentzel, the veteran fur trader, having fulfilled his contract, knew better than to linger. He returned south with the last few Yellowknife hunters. And, to reduce the size of the expedition, Franklin released four voyageurs to go with him.

  The Métis interpreters, Pierre St. Germain and Jean Baptiste Adam, wanted to leave as well. They were rightly worried about starving to death, since the party had food enough for perhaps three weeks and only a thousand balls of ammunition. St. Germain noted that, with the departure of the Yellowknife, their interpretive services would no longer be required. But Franklin refused to release the two. Of those nineteen men who would remain with him, these were the two best hunters. They had signed a contract. He set a watch on them, so that, when the last Yellowknife departed, they did not slip away.

  Nor did the other voyageurs wish to continue. During the portages from Fort Enterprise, they had frequently carried packs weighing 180 pounds through melting lake water, which had caused their feet and legs to swell. The Royal Navy officers, meanwhile, as Franklin would later observe, had carried “such a portion of their own things as their strength would permit.”

  As a group, the voyageurs again complained of hunger, swollen limbs and exhaustion. They warned that the two large birch-bark canoes they had hauled to this Arctic coast were designed for river travel, not for the rough waters and ice floes they would encounter along the coast. “They were terrified,” Franklin later wrote, “at the idea of a voyage through an icy sea in bark canoes.” Their fears would prove well-founded.

  On July 21, 1821, three days after reaching the mouth of the Coppermine, Franklin set out eastward with nineteen men in two birch-bark canoes. Poling around ice floes and huddling on shore through gale-force winds, he and his men fought their way along the northern coast of the continent for 885 kilometres. They mapped Coronation Gulf, Bathurst Inlet and Kent Peninsula. Franklin wondered what lay farther east.

  But on August 15, after weeks of slogging, with the canoes battered and broken, supplies running dangerously low and additional Inuit hunters notable only for their absence, he realized he could go no farther. George Back enumerated six reasons for turning around: “The want of food—the badness of the canoes—the advanced state of the season—the impossibility of succeeding [in reaching] Hudson Bay—the long journey we must go through the barren lands and . . . the dissatisfaction of the men.”

  On Kent Peninsula, Franklin planted the Union Jack on a hill. He named the location Point Turnagain. Then, having delayed for five days after supposedly making his decision, hoping always for the divinely inspired arrival of Inuit hunters, he gave the order to retreat to Fort Enterprise. Instead of tracing the coastline of Bathurst Inlet, as they had done during their advance, the men sought to save time by cutting straight across open water. The rough seas almost swamped the canoes. On reaching the far shore, instead of paddling west to the mouth of the Coppermine, Franklin and his men started tracking up the Hood River, which looked to be a shortcut. It was not.

  While the voyageurs stumbled on, lugging ninety pounds each, including ammunition, hatchets, ice chisels, astronomical instruments, kettles, canoes and Bibles, the officers carried little. By September 4, the men had consumed the last of the pemmican. They were still more than six hundred kilometres from Fort Enterprise. They shot and shared the occasional partridge, and also a few muskox. They scoured the carcasses of caribou killed by wolves. And they choked down bitter lichen they cut from rocks, tripe de roche, which gave them diarrhea. Now winter weather arrived, as promised, bringing blizzards that forced the men to shelter in their tents.

  “There was no tripe de roche,” Franklin would write, “so we drank swamp tea and ate some of our shoes for supper.” These shoes were leather moccasins from which the men could suck sustenance. They were starving. At one po
int, after standing up suddenly, Franklin fainted. One of the voyageurs, the interpreter Pierre St. Germain, gave each of the naval officers a small piece of meat he had saved from his allowance. This act “of self-denial and kindness,” Franklin wrote later, “being totally unexpected in a Canadian voyageur, filled our eyes with tears.” Unfortunately, in his narrative, judging from the more trustworthy journal of John Richardson, Franklin attributed the gesture to the wrong man.

  Travelling grew more dangerous. While scrambling upwards on slippery rocks, the heavily loaded men fell often. They were suffering from both exhaustion and hypothermia, and George Back noted that “we became so stupid that we stumbled at almost every step.” Then a canoe overturned and dumped Franklin into fast-rushing water. He lost a box containing his journals and meteorological observations, leaving him dependent on the writings of Richardson and Back, which he would commandeer for his final report.

  Not surprisingly, the voyageurs began again to rebel. According to Back, who was the only Englishman able to speak French, “the Canadians talked seriously of starvation and became proportionally dispirited—and not without cause, for we had neither seen tracks of deer nor marks of Indians during the day.” In their weakened state, the men could no longer carry the heavy loads. They jettisoned the fishing nets. They refused to share partridges they had secretly shot. Then, in an act of folly, one of them dropped the sole remaining canoe and saw it smash onto the rocks.

  Franklin declared it beyond his power to describe the anguish he felt on hearing this news. The Hood River led to the Coppermine, which had to be crossed. John Richardson volunteered to swim to the other side with a line, but the water was so cold that his arms turned to lead and the voyageurs had to haul him back to shore. Finally, despite a scarcity of materials, St. Germain managed to improvise a makeshift raft that enabled the men to paddle across one by one. This operation, at a spot Franklin named Obstruction Rapids, wasted eight days.