Some commentators have misinterpreted Rae’s reference to “unexplored miles.” They confuse Arctic coastline with the open waterway (comprising Peel Sound and Franklin Strait) that extends south from Parry Channel (the extension of Lancaster Sound), and forms part of the first-sailed Northwest Passage. By 1891, when Rae wrote that review, everyone knew that John Franklin had sailed directly past this unmapped bit of coastline, so establishing that a navigable channel existed as far south as King William Island, where he got blocked by ice. His voyage rendered that short stretch of uncharted coastline irrelevant to any discussion of the Passage.
In May 1854, when John Rae stood on the coast of Boothia Peninsula, looking west across a frozen strait towards what he now perceived was an island, King William Island, he could not help but wonder: Was this channel the long-sought missing link? The ever-practical Rae put William Ouligbuck to work building a snow hut. Taking out his instruments and charts, he sent Mistegan north across the ice beyond Point de la Guiche. The hunter hiked eight or nine kilometres and climbed a hill of rough ice to gain a farther vantage point. The land was still trending northward, while to the northwest, at a considerable distance across the ice—perhaps nineteen or twenty kilometres—more land appeared: “This land, if it was such,” Rae wrote, “is probably part of Matty Island or King William Land, which latter is also clearly an island.”
Rae had reached a point where, except for the unknown strait before him, his survey matched that made by Sir James Clark Ross in 1830, providing “a very singular agreement . . . considering the circumstances under which our surveys have been taken.” In snowy weather, as noted in Chapter 11, James Clark Ross had missed the strait John Rae could clearly see, and charted an enclosed bay—albeit with a dotted line and a question mark. His uncle Sir John Ross, who had discovered the non-existent Croker Mountains, closed the line while preparing the final copy of the expedition map and applied the name “Poctes Bay”—possibly intending Poet’s Bay. Either way, this supposedly enclosed bay was in fact an open strait.
Rae contemplated the frozen passage before him. It contained what he called “young ice,” radically unlike the much rougher ice he had encountered three years before on the western side of King William Island. Clearly, that island protected this channel from the impenetrable pack ice that flowed from the north. This passage would be navigable when Victoria Strait was not.
Rae looked north towards where James Clark Ross had traversed the ice by dogsled. Ross had surmised, though with some hesitation, that no passage existed in this vicinity. Rae looked south down the strait. In 1835, George Back had looked north, wondering about this waterway, before reluctantly retreating to the mainland. Four years later, Thomas Simpson had sailed past south of this channel, believing that, somewhere in this vicinity, lay the secret of the Northwest Passage. Bent on returning to investigate further, Simpson had died the following summer.
Now, although he could not prove it, John Rae realized that here, running between Boothia Peninsula and King William Island, he had discovered the hidden gateway in the Northwest Passage. Together with Ouligbuck and Mistegan, he had solved the first great mystery of nineteenth-century exploration. Half a century would elapse before Roald Amundsen would prove him correct. That night, after building a cairn just south of the tip of Point de la Guiche, a satisfied Rae and his two hardiest men, the Inuk and the Ojibway, began the long journey back to Repulse Bay.
On reaching the two men he had left waiting in a snow hut, Rae felt confirmed in his decision to turn back. Both were worn down, and Jacob Beads was losing one of his big toes at the joint. On other occasions, farther south, Rae had treated frostbite with great success by applying a poultice made of the inner bark of the larch fir. Now, under more difficult conditions, he could do little. Beads insisted on limping along, stoutly refusing to be hauled. The weather had cleared, the snow was hard-packed and the men made better time than coming out. They reached their Pelly Bay snow hut on May 17, shortly after midnight, with the bright sun low on the horizon.
Noticing tracks in the snow, Rae sent Mistegan and Ouligbuck, after they had rested, to follow those tracks. Eight hours later, the two returned with a dozen Inuit men, women and children. One of the Inuit produced a silver fork and spoon, which Rae promptly bought: “The initials F.R.M.C., not engraved but scratched with a sharp instrument on the spoon, puzzled me much, as I knew not at the time the Christian names of the officers of Sir John Franklin’s expedition.” Still convinced that Franklin had got lost far to the north, Rae speculated about Captain Robert McClure, who had sailed with a search expedition in 1850, and wondered whether the initials might be his, with the small “c” omitted—perhaps F. Robert McClure?
Two of the Inuit, one of whom Rae had met in 1847, offered for a price to accompany the party for two days with a sledge and dogs. Always anxious to spare his men, Rae accepted the offer. When the two visitors left them, he bought one of the dogs. He used it to help him to carefully chart the coastline of Pelly Bay, so settling once and for all the geographical questions—Was Boothia really a peninsula? Did no hidden channel lead west?—raised after his 1847 expedition. Then he continued south.
John Rae arrived at Repulse Bay at five o’clock in the morning on May 26, having covered in twenty days the distance (minus fifty or sixty kilometres) that, going out in rougher weather, had taken thirty-six days. He found the three men he had left behind living on friendly terms with several newly arrived Inuit families who had pitched tents nearby. “The natives had behaved in the most exemplary manner,” wrote Rae, “and many of them who were short of food had been supplied with venison from our stores, in compliance with my orders to that effect.”
These Inuit had arrived from Pelly Bay with relics to trade and stories to tell. At last, Rae had an opportunity to glean answers about the white men who had died of starvation. Only now did Rae begin to realize and understand, with growing horror, that the visitors were almost certainly talking about men from the lost Franklin expedition, which had sailed nine years before.
While trading for relics, and then more thoroughly afterwards, Rae asked questions with William Ouligbuck as his interpreter. The Inuit visitors told him that all of the Qallunaat had died several years before, and the explorer had no reason to doubt this. No survivors had ever reached any HBC trading post, where Yellowknife-Dene had been sent to seek them with ammunition, clear instructions and promises of reward.
The Inuit newcomers explained that four winters earlier, in 1850, some Inuit families killing seals near the northern shore of a large island (which Rae now understood to be King William Island) had encountered at least forty Qallunaat dragging a boat and some sledges southward. None of these white men could speak Inuktitut, but they communicated through gestures that their ships had been crushed by ice and that they were travelling to where they hoped to hunt deer.
The men looked thin and hungry, and all except the leader were hauling on the drag ropes of sledges. The leader was a tall, stout, middle-aged man who wore a telescope strapped over his shoulder. The party, obviously short of provisions, bought seal meat from the Inuit, then pitched tents and rested. These Qallunaat then headed east across the ice towards the mouth of a large river—a river that, Rae now recognized by its description, could only be Back’s Great Fish River.
The following spring, when the Inuit visited that river to fish, they discovered about thirty corpses. They found graves on the main part of the continent (noon-nah) and five dead bodies on an island (kai-ik-tak), a long day’s journey northwest of the river. Rae surmised that these references were to Ogle Point and Montreal Island. The Inuit discovered some dead bodies in tents and others under the boat, which had been overturned to form a shelter. A few other bodies lay scattered about.
None of the Inuit he questioned had seen the Qallunaat alive or dead, but Rae had worked long enough in the North to appreciate the power and reliability of the Inuit grapevine. This was an oral culture. Sitting in his tent, he conducted repea
ted interviews through William Ouligbuck, checking the veracity of his informants against information he recalled from the narratives of George Back and Thomas Simpson.
The Inuit viewed it as strange that no sledges had been found among the dead, although the boat remained. Rae pointed out that the Qallunaat, having reached the mouth of the Great Fish River, would need their boat to proceed farther, but might have burned the sledges for fuel. “A look of intelligence immediately lit up their faces,” he wrote, “and they said that may have been so, for there had been fires.”
He continued: “A few of the unfortunate men must have survived until the arrival of the wild fowl (say until the end of May) as shots were heard and fresh bones and feathers of geese were noticed near the scene of the sad event. There appears to have been an abundant store of ammunition, as the gunpowder was emptied by the natives in a heap on the ground out of the kegs or cases containing it, and a quantity of shot and ball was found below highwater mark, having probably been left on the ice close to the beach before the spring thaw commenced.”
One night, having gleaned all the information he could, Rae sorted through the relics he had acquired. Among them were pieces of telescopes and guns, and broken watches and compasses. Again he counted the identifiable items, those bearing the crests and initials of officers on Franklin’s two ships. These totalled fifteen. They included a gold watch, a surgeon’s knife, several silver spoons and forks bearing the Franklin crest, an order of merit in the form of a star and a small silver plate engraved “Sir John Franklin, K.C.B.”
Rae studied the engraved plate by lantern light and marvelled: Franklin himself had eaten from it. The presence of this silver dish, together with the other relics, verified the Inuit story beyond doubt. He knew the answer to the second great mystery of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration: What had happened to the lost Franklin expedition?
But now Rae faced a difficult decision—probably the most important he would ever confront. He returned the silver plate to his leather bag, then stepped out the door of the tent. It was almost midnight, but here in the Arctic, the sky was merely grey and streaked with clouds. Beside the tent, Rae paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. Should he return immediately to England to report what he had learned? Or should he wait here until next spring and then travel overland to see whether he could find the bodies?
With summer imminent, he could not hope to begin that prodigious trek for another eight or ten months. The ice would soon begin to melt, rendering distance travel impossible. Nor did he have a boat waiting at the far end of his journey that he could then use to reach King William Island and Back’s Great Fish River. And he couldn’t hope to haul the boat he did have several hundred kilometres.
On the other hand, he had enough pemmican to last three months. If he so decided, he could conceivably wait until winter. Should he do it? Staring up at the scudding clouds, John Rae decided not. At least half a dozen ships, and maybe more, were seeking John Franklin in all the wrong places. Their captains had orders to continue searching. Under the circumstances, Rae had a duty to communicate what he had learned as soon as possible, and so to reduce the risk of more lives being needlessly lost.
After countless difficult hours of interviewing Inuit and sifting through artifacts, John Rae had gleaned the essential truth about the Arctic tragedy of the century. Of course he felt driven to share it. On August 4, 1854, when at last the pack ice cleared, Rae sailed south out of Repulse Bay to begin his journey back to England. The explorer could not know it, but having made a career of testing himself, he was about to face the most difficult ordeal of his life.
Part Five
THE VICTORIAN RESPONSE
20.
Lady Franklin Enlists Charles Dickens
On October 23, 1854, the London Times published a front-page report quoting explorer John Rae, who had just arrived back from the Arctic. Rae related how, while crossing Boothia Peninsula with a few men, he had chanced to meet some Inuit hunters. From one of them, he learned that a party of white men had starved to death some distance to the west. Subsequently, he had gleaned details and purchased a variety of articles that placed “the fate of a portion (if not all) of the then survivors of Sir John Franklin’s long-lost party beyond a doubt; a fate as terrible as the imagination can conceive.”
Rae explained that, to secure information, he had offered substantial rewards. At his camp at Repulse Bay, with spring sunshine melting the Arctic ice, he had sat with William Ouligbuck and conducted interviews with visiting Inuit. From them, he collected spoons and broken watches, gold braid, cap bands, a cook’s knife. And he determined that a large party of Franklin’s men had abandoned their ships off King William Island in Victoria Strait. Contrary to all expectations, they had trekked south towards mainland North America, many of them dying as they went.
Some of the Franklin-expedition relics John Rae brought to England, as depicted in The Illustrated London News. When Lady Franklin saw them, she knew that her husband was dead.
Courtesy of Cameron Treleaven.
One party of Inuit hunters had discovered thirty-five or forty dead bodies. Some lay in tents or exposed on the ground, others under an overturned boat. One man, apparently an officer, had died with a telescope strapped over his shoulder and a double-barrelled shotgun beneath him. Writing for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Admiralty, rather than a public readership, and accustomed to facing realities beyond the experience of most of his audience, Rae reported the unvarnished truth in words that would resonate around the world: “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 report shook not just Britain but all of Europe. Sir John Franklin and his noble crew had been reduced in the frozen north . . . to cannibalism? Historian Hendrik Van Loon, author of The Story of Mankind, would write that his father, who lived in Holland during this period, forever remembered “the shock of horror that . . . swept across the civilized world.”
Lady Franklin took to her bed. Friends had prepared her, relaying rumours of a preliminary account that had appeared in a Montreal newspaper. That John Franklin had been personally involved in cannibalism she flatly rejected as inconceivable. Even the notion that some of his crew, the flower of the Royal Navy, could be reduced to measures so desperate—no, it exceeded credibility.
Yet, when at the Admiralty offices she examined the relics Rae had brought back from the Arctic—the ribbons, the buttons, the gold braid, the broken watch—Jane Franklin found herself confronting a terrible reality. For nearly ten years she had kept hope alive. Now, as she recognized an engraved spoon that had belonged to Sir John and felt its silver heft in her hand, she felt the truth crash over her like a dark wave. Never again would she see her husband alive.
Late in 1854, Jane Franklin rose from her bed. John Rae’s allegations of cannibalism threatened her husband’s reputation, and so her own. Those assertions could not be allowed to stand. Rae’s relics had convinced her that Franklin had died, but never would she accept the narrative that came with them. When the explorer paid her the obligatory courtesy call, still wearing his full Arctic beard, Jane told him to his face that he never should have accepted the word of “Esquimaux savages,” none of whom claimed to have seen the dead bodies. They were merely relaying the accounts of others. John Rae would not be cowed. He knew the truth when he heard it, and he had written his report not for the Times, but for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Admiralty. Jane Franklin replied that he should never have committed such allegations to paper.
Eventually, Rae would be vindicated. Down through the decades, researchers would contribute nuance and clarification. But none would repudiate the thrust of his initial report. Some of the final survivors had been driven to cannibalism. Such was the fate of the Franklin expedition.
In 1854, however, Lady Franklin refused to accep
t this reality. And she had no shortage of allies. These included the friends and relatives of men who had sailed with Franklin, and an array of officers concerned for the reputation of the Royal Navy—men like James Clark Ross, John Richardson and Francis Beaufort. But all of these, she realized, would be open to charges of special pleading.
The resourceful lady wondered about Charles Dickens. Hadn’t his father had some connection with the Royal Navy? Surely he could be induced to strike the right attitude? The forty-two-year-old author had already published such classic novels as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Bleak House. More importantly, for her purposes, he edited a twice-monthly newspaper called Household Words—potentially the perfect vehicle. Through her friend Carolina Boyle—formerly a maid of honour to Queen Adelaide, the consort of King William IV—Jane communicated her wish that Dickens should call on her as soon as possible.
The desperately busy author dropped everything and, on November 19, 1854, turned up at her front door. No eyewitness account of their meeting has survived. But Jane Franklin wanted John Rae repudiated—especially his allegations of cannibalism—and the greatest literary champion of the age undertook to accomplish that task. The very next morning, Dickens scrawled a note to one W. H. Willis, a sometime assistant. While until now he had paid scant attention to the issue, Dickens observed, “I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism, and might do an interesting little paper for the next No. of Household Words: on that part of Dr. Rae’s report, taking the arguments against its probabilities. Can you get me a newspaper cutting containing his report? If not, will you have it copied for me and sent up to Tavistock House straight away?”
After conferring with Lady Franklin, Charles Dickens decided that he was “rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism.” He proceeded to publish a shameful two-part screed repudiating John Rae’s report and libelling the Inuit as “savages.” This was probably the worst thing Dickens ever wrote.
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Page 22