Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Taking his cue from Lady Franklin, Dickens wrote a ferocious two-part denunciation entitled “The Lost Arctic Voyagers.” He published Part One as the lead article on December 2, and Part Two the following week. Acknowledging that Rae had a duty to report what he had heard, and so seeming to demonstrate his even-handedness, Dickens castigated the Admiralty for publishing his account without considering its effects. While exonerating Rae personally, he attacked that explorer’s conclusions, contending that there was no reason whatsoever to believe “that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence.”
Given that he could present no new evidence, and had never got anywhere near the Arctic, Dickens argued by analogy and according to probabilities. He suggested that the remnants of “Franklin’s gallant band” might well have been murdered by the Inuit: “It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages, from their deferential behaviour to the white man while he is strong . . . We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man—lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race; plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying—has of the gentleness of the Esquimaux nature.”
Dickens offered much more along these lines. He criticized Rae for having taken “the word of a savage,” and, confusing the Inuit with the Victorian stereotype of the African, argued, “Even the sight of cooked and dissevered human bodies among this or that tatoo’d tribe, is not proof. Such appropriate offerings to their barbarous, wide-mouthed, goggle-eyed gods, savages have been often seen and known to make.”
With all the literary skill at his command, Dickens presented an argument that, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, can only be judged distressingly racist. In this instance, at least, the author failed to transcend the attitudes of his age. Time has proven his two-part essay to be a tour de force of self-deception and wilful blindness. But late in 1854, it engulfed John Rae like an avalanche. The explorer responded as best he could, but he had only truth on his side, and few writers in any time or place could have contended with Charles Dickens in full rhetorical flight. When Dickens was done, in the realm of Victorian public opinion, John Rae was deader than Franklin.
Early in 1855, Lady Franklin began clamouring for more search expeditions. Sir Edward Belcher, having sailed with five ships on what was supposed to be “The Last of the Arctic Voyages,” had arrived back in London. Despite the protests of his senior officers, he had abandoned four of his ships in the Arctic, revealing himself to be both indecisive and cowardly. His outraged subordinate officers saw that he faced a court martial, but he escaped censure, narrowly, because he could point to equivocal orders. Belcher had rescued Robert McClure, but brought no further news of the Franklin expedition.
As for John Rae, Lady Franklin contended that he had left the search area prematurely. Never mind that the winter ice was turning to water and he had no boat on the west coast of Boothia or anywhere near King William Island. Surely the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had sponsored his revelatory expedition, would undertake to complete the task Rae had begun. And what of the British Admiralty? Now that the correct search area had been precisely identified—she accepted the Inuit testimony that suited her—they had a moral obligation to search for more complete answers.
Rae’s evidence that her husband had died in the Arctic intensified Lady Franklin’s sense of urgency. The same was true of the claim, now being advanced even by certain “Arctic people” she counted as friends, that Robert McClure had discovered the Northwest Passage. No sooner had McClure arrived in England than he began asserting that sledging across the ice to a rescue ship constituted a “completion” of the Northwest Passage—and that this accomplishment entitled him to the £10,000 reward for the discovery of a navigable waterway.
Together with Rae’s proof that Franklin had died in the Arctic, McClure’s claim served to clarify Jane Franklin’s course of action. Most of her contemporaries believed—and she encouraged them in this—that she had driven the search for her absent husband because she loved him more than life itself. But for her, determining “the fate of Franklin” was intertwined with the quest for the Northwest Passage—and with establishing that her husband had somehow “discovered” that elusive channel.
On July 20, 1855, the British House of Commons responded to the claim of Robert McClure by striking a parliamentary committee to enquire into Northwest Passage awards. It received several claims, but only those of two Royal Navy men—McClure and, in absentia, John Franklin—received serious consideration. McClure was claiming that he had succeeded by walking across that ice-choked channel, and so should receive the £10,000 award—a sum that, by conservative measure, is today worth more than US$1.3 million.
Lady Franklin faced a complex situation. She could advance a claim on behalf of her late husband only because of the testimony of John Rae. While rejecting his statements regarding cannibalism, she embraced his declarations that Franklin had sailed as far south as King William Island, and that some of his men had reached the North American continent.
To make her case, Lady Franklin realized that she needed to abandon the original criterion of navigability. She could not argue that McClure had failed to discover a passage because he had walked across the frozen sea to a rescue ship. Judging from Rae’s testimony, Franklin had at best achieved something similar, though without the happy ending. The final survivors from his expedition had died, apparently of starvation, while trekking south from their ships to the coast of the continent.
Compelled to accept McClure’s “walk a Passage” argument, Jane Franklin countered with characteristic ingenuity. She introduced the idea that there existed several northwest passages, not just one. She argued that Franklin had discovered his “more navigable” passage first—even though his ships had never emerged at the far end, but had got trapped in an ice-choked channel that would remain impassable for the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. To advance this claim, as British author Francis Spufford observed in I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, success in discovering the Northwest Passage had to be “carefully redefined as an impalpable goal that did not require one to return alive, or to pass on the news to the world.”
To the awards judges, Jane Franklin wrote that she did not wish “to question the claims of Captain M’Clure to every honour his country may think proper to award him.” She continued: “That enterprising officer is not less the discoverer of a North-West Passage, or, in other words, of one of the links which was wanted to connect the main channels of navigation already ascertained by previous explorers, because the Erebus and Terror under my husband had previously, though unknown to Captain M’Clure, discovered another and more navigable passage. That passage, in fact, which, if ships ever attempt to push their way from one ocean to the other, will assuredly be the one adopted.”
Lady Franklin as she looked in middle age, according to artist Thomas Bock, who drew this portrait in Tasmania using chalk on paper. A third portrait of Jane Franklin does exist, and depicts her sitting in a chair, but it has disappeared into a private collection in Australia.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Never mind that Franklin, too, had got trapped in an ice-choked channel, Victoria Strait, that would remain impassable until well into the twentieth century. The parliamentary committee, however, faced a dilemma. The only logical response would have been to admit that none of the “discovered passages” satisfied the original condition of being navigable. Logic decreed that nobody had yet proven successful in this quest.
Admitting that, however, implied renewing the adventure at considerable cost. At present, such spending was unthinkable: Britain was embroiled in an expensive war against Russia. Instead, the committee declared it “beyond doubt that to Captain McClure belongs the distinguished honou
r of having been the first to perform the actual passage over water—between the two great oceans that encircle the globe.” One of McClure’s junior officers, Samuel Cresswell, had been the first to reach England, but by Royal Navy convention, he didn’t count. The government awarded McClure a knighthood and £10,000. By returning alive to England, he and his men had provided “a living evidence of the existence of a Northwest Passage.”
Lady Franklin did not concede defeat. She had lost a skirmish, not a war. And she had recognized the wisdom of abandoning navigability as a criterion for discovery of the Passage. Indeed, this latest wrangle had introduced two useful concepts, notable amendments to the original challenge. First, McClure had established that one could “perform” or “accomplish” the Passage without sailing through it. True, by walking across the ice, he had at least completed a transit from one ocean to another—something nobody would ever be able to say of the Franklin expedition. Never mind. Lady Franklin herself had introduced the second corollary notion: several Passages existed, not just one. She would exploit both ideas—and, almost 170 years later, after the discovery of Erebus and Terror, avid apologists would revive both.
Initially, Lady Franklin and her allies held fast to the logic of “walk a Passage.” Sir John Richardson, who had twice travelled with Franklin and later married one of his nieces, coined a poetic phrase to encapsulate the achievement of the expedition’s men: “They forged the last link with their lives.” But the clearest summation came from John Rae. In August 1855, he wrote to Richardson from Stromness, agreeing with his old travelling companion that McClure had been lucky. As for what was said of the matter in the House, Rae declared “it was all balderdash and could only go down with those who knew nothing of the subject.”
Meanwhile, during the summer of 1855, in response to Lady Franklin’s importunities, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent fur trader James Anderson down the Great Fish River to Chantrey Inlet on the Arctic Coast. Acting on a plan devised by John Rae, Anderson travelled the only way he could on such short notice: by canoe. He encountered several Inuit and acquired a few more relics—part of a snowshoe, the leather lining of a backgammon board—but, having failed to acquire a requested Inuit interpreter, he elicited no new detail.
Given Britain’s engagement in the above-mentioned Crimean War, the Admiralty grew increasingly desperate to cease spending on Arctic exploration. To staunch the financial bleeding, the Lords opened a second monetary-awards front. On January 22, 1856, they announced that, within three months, they would decide whether to award the £10,000 prize offered for determining the fate of Franklin. To do so would mean further expeditions were unnecessary. Once again, several claimants stepped forward, among them the whaling captain William Penny, present at the discovery of the Beechey Island graves, and the irrepressible Richard King, who had long ago travelled on one overland journey with George Back: “I alone have for many years pointed out the banks of the Great Fish River as the place where Franklin’s claim could be found.”
Soon after the Admiralty announcement, unaware that Lady Franklin had animated Charles Dickens to write his two-part repudiation of his championing of the Inuit, John Rae called on her once more. Here was a woman who, as Francis Spufford would later observe, “could blight or accelerate careers, bestow or withhold the sanction of her reputation. No other nineteenth-century woman raised the cash for three polar expeditions, or had her say over the appointment of captains and lieutenants.”
John Rae informed Lady Franklin that in Upper Canada, with the help of two expatriate brothers, he had ordered a schooner built. He intended to use any reward money he received to mount yet another Arctic expedition, during which he would seek to acquire more evidence to confirm his report. Although he probably did not mention it, clearly the veteran explorer hoped during that same projected voyage to sail the entire Northwest Passage, using the strait he had discovered to the east of King William Island—the twenty-two-kilometre-wide channel, already known as Rae Strait, through which the Norwegian Roald Amundsen would sail in 1903–1906 while becoming the first to navigate the Passage.
Lady Franklin remained unimpressed. The meeting over, she observed, “Dr. Rae has cut off his odious beard but looks still very hairy and disagreeable.” Nevertheless, she made use of the information she gleaned from the explorer when, in April, she dispatched a long, rigorous letter stressing that the reward had been intended to go “to any party or parties who in the judgement of the Board of the Admiralty should by virtue of his or their efforts first succeed in ascertaining the fate of the expedition.”
Jane Franklin argued first that the fate of her husband’s expedition had not been ascertained because too many questions remained unanswered. She insisted that, even if Rae had ascertained the fate—through those countless interviews and cross-questionings—he had done so not by his efforts, but by chance. By giving the award now, the Admiralty would deny it to those who would rightly earn it. This would create a check or block “to any further efforts for ascertaining the fate of the expedition, and appears to counteract the humane intention of the House of Commons in voting a large sum of money for that purpose.”
Jane Franklin brought her epistle to a stirring climax: “What secrets may be hidden within those wrecked or stranded ships we know not—what may be buried in the graves of our unhappy countrymen or in caches not yet discovered we have yet to learn. The bodies and the graves which we were told of have not been found; the books [journals] said to be in the hands of the Esquimaux have not been recovered; and thus left in ignorance and darkness with so little obtained and so much yet to learn, can it be said and is it fitting to pronounce that the fate of the expedition is ascertained?”
The Lords of the Admiralty would have none of it. They had grown tired of receiving unsolicited advice from Lady Franklin. On June 19, 1856—three months beyond the promised date—the Board notified John Rae that he would receive the award. Rae himself would get four-fifths, and his men would receive the rest.
Lady Franklin had lost another skirmish. Over her protests, and despite her relentless opposition, first Robert McClure and now John Rae had received monetary awards. First the Passage, now the fate—how all occasions informed against her. Was she finished? Had the time come to concede defeat?
21.
The Lady Won’t Be Denied
By 1856, Lady Franklin had spent £35,000 searching for her husband—the equivalent today, by conservative estimate, of US$3.7 million. Some came from her own accounts and some she raised through public subscription. She inspired Americans to contribute as well—more than US$13 million in contemporary terms, two-fifths of that from shipping magnate Henry Grinnell.
Of three dozen expeditions that had sailed in search of Franklin since 1848, Lady Franklin had organized, inspired and financed ten. As well, using both public opinion and influential friends, she had exerted relentless pressure on the Lords of the British Admiralty, compelling them to spend between £600,000 and £675,000.
Meanwhile, during the two years ending in March 1856, the British government had spent massively on the Crimean War, battling Russia—in alliance with France and the Ottoman Empire—to reduce that country’s influence around the Black Sea. Faced with increasing pressure to reduce expenditures, and as one expedition after another returned from the Arctic with nothing to report, the Lords of the Admiralty yearned to forget the long-lost Sir John. Jane Franklin was not going to let that happen.
The North-West Passage Region as Known in 1859, after the Return of Sir Leopold McClintock. From R. J. Cyriax’s Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition.
In spring 1856, she organized yet another petition. She solicited signatures from dozens of prominent figures, among them scientists, naval officers, presidents and past presidents of the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society. The signatories challenged the notion that Franklin’s fate had been ascertained. They appealed for yet another search expedition “to satisfy the honour of our country, and clear up a
mystery which has excited the sympathy of the civilized world.”
In June, Lady Franklin sought support from the House of Commons. The president of the Royal Society informed her that she would receive assistance if she provided a ship and a commanding officer. She still owned the schooner Isabel, and thought she might return that ship to Arctic service. To command the vessel, and solidify her alliance with the Americans, she looked to Elisha Kent Kane.
During his recent expedition, Kane had displayed courage, wisdom and resourcefulness. A protegé of New Yorker Henry Grinnell, Kane was a gifted writer and artist. Jane had admired his published journal of the first Grinnell expedition. She had exchanged letters with him. Since re-emerging from the Arctic, Kane had been working sixteen hours a day, turning his detailed journal and vivid sketches into a two-volume classic: Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin.
As Kane put the finishing touches on this work, Lady Franklin wrote to him requesting his services in the Arctic. If he would consent to take the Isabel in search of Franklin, she would travel to New York City to discuss her hopes for this final expedition. Kane accepted with alacrity but gallantly insisted that he would come to England to discuss the undertaking.
Despite ominous indications that his chronic heart condition was worsening—weight loss, emaciation, physical weakness, lack of energy—the explorer convinced himself that he needed only rest. By mid-July, however, he realized that he would not be able to undertake a proposed lecture tour. To Jane Franklin, Henry Grinnell wrote from New York that Kane had visited him for an hour: “I never saw him look so bad; he is but a skeleton or the shadow of one; he has worked too hard.” Kane wrote of travelling to France and Switzerland, and regaining his health among the glaciers before proceeding to England. But Grinnell noted: “He is every day attacked with the remittent fever, better known here as fever and ague.”
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Page 23