Kane reached England in October 1856, soon after he published Arctic Explorations. Jane Franklin admired the work enormously, though it told so grim a tale that she feared it might discourage further searches for her husband. When Kane called at her home, she realized, with shock and dismay, that the heroic explorer had not recovered from his last Arctic voyage. She hoped that “the air of the old country” would restore his health and, over the next couple of weeks, plied him with cod-liver oil. Doctors advised Kane to make for more salubrious climes. Lady Franklin recommended Madeira, just off northern Africa.
With his health failing, the explorer opted instead for Cuba, nearer to home. He got that far and no farther. On February 16, 1857, Elisha Kent Kane died in Havana. Such was his fame throughout the United States that he was given an unprecedented state funeral. Possibly the detour to England had made no difference. Either way, Kane was dead. And Lady Franklin had to look elsewhere for a ship’s captain.
By now, she was embroiled in a battle to acquire a British ship called the Resolute. In 1854, to his everlasting disgrace, expedition leader Edward Belcher had abandoned that ship and three others in the Arctic ice. The following September, an American whaler, James Buddington, had chanced upon the Resolute, by then floating freely off Baffin Island, some 1,900 kilometres east of where she started. With a skeleton crew of thirteen men, Buddington sailed the ship home to Connecticut, arriving on Christmas Eve. The American navy, encouraged by Henry Grinnell, bought and refurbished the salvaged vessel, and proposed to return it to Britain as a goodwill gesture. In conjunction with Grinnell, and having learned that her Isabel was in dubious condition, Lady Franklin launched a vigorous campaign to acquire the Resolute for yet another “final” search expedition.
Over the years, however, she had made enemies. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Charles Wood, and the First Sea Lord, Sir Maurice Berkeley—tired of being bullied and browbeaten, sick unto death of communications from Jane, Lady Franklin—argued that the expense of another expedition could not be justified and that the Royal Navy had lost quite enough men searching for Franklin. In the end, they succeeded in denying her the Resolute.
By the time she heard the official response, Lady Franklin had devised a contingency plan. Within one week of the Admiralty rejection, she had arranged to purchase—for a special low price of £2,000—a newly available sailing ship of 177 tons. The vessel had belonged to Sir Richard Hutton, who had died after using it for a single cruise. Considerably smaller than the Resolute, the Fox was 124 feet long, 24 feet wide and 13 feet deep. Refitted for Arctic service, it would suit perfectly.
The former question remained: Who would command this search expedition?
22.
Leopold McClintock Retrieves a Record
After sounding out friends and naval officers, Lady Franklin offered the Fox to Captain Francis Leopold McClintock. Born in Dundalk, Ireland, in 1818, McClintock had joined the Royal Navy as a gentleman volunteer at the ripe old age of seventeen. In 1848, as a second lieutenant, he had sailed in search of Franklin with James Clark Ross. Their two ships had got repeatedly locked in the ice, and after eleven months, the expedition returned to England.
Five years later, serving with Henry Kellett, McClintock conducted a notable sledging journey, travelling 2,250 kilometres in 105 days and charting 1,235 kilometres of previously unmapped coast. He was a capable, deliberate officer who knew enough to write to James Clark Ross about serving Lady Franklin, wondering “how far the Admiralty sanction ought to be obtained, as I do not wish to be so impolitic as to act counter to their wishes.”
In April 1857, from Dublin, McClintock sent the Lady a conditional acceptance. He enclosed, for forwarding, his application for a leave of absence from the Royal Navy. Jane wrote to Prince Albert’s private secretary, asking that the prince intercede on McClintock’s behalf so that he would not have to resign his commission—and so making the result a foregone conclusion. On April 23 she wired McClintock, “Your leave is granted; the Fox is mine; the refit will commence immediately.”
Before sailing at the behest of Lady Franklin, Leopold McClintock had shown himself to be a capable, deliberate naval officer.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Six days later, under the heading “Lady Franklin’s Final Search,” the Times carried an advertisement for subscribers to finance the expedition. Private companies contributed boats, food, stoves and tents, and the Admiralty came through with arms, ammunition and three tons of pemmican. Later, a newspaper report published by “friends of Lady Franklin” would indicate that the expedition cost £10,434. Subscribers included not only relatives of those lost with Franklin but the novelist William Thackeray and Peter Mark Roget, originator of the famous thesaurus and an old flame of Jane Franklin’s. Allen Young, a wealthy captain in the merchant marine, contributed £500 and volunteered to serve as sailing master without pay.
McClintock proceeded to Aberdeen to sift through applications and oversee the refitting of the Fox. This involved replacing velvet furnishings, stowing provisions and making the pleasure craft an ice-worthy vessel. He was there when Jane Franklin, mindful always of appearances, summoned him to London to meet Queen Victoria at a public ceremony. With that accomplished, McClintock returned to Aberdeen.
Lady Franklin followed a few days later, travelling to that city by train. On the last day of June 1857, she and Sophy Cracroft, her niece and amanuensis, went aboard the Fox for a farewell luncheon. Later McClintock would write of Lady Franklin: “Seeing how deeply agitated she was on leaving the ship, I endeavoured to repress the enthusiasm of my crew, but without avail; it found vent in three prolonged, hearty cheers. The strong feeling which prompted them was truly sincere, and this unbidden exhibition of it can hardly have gratified her for whom it was intended more than it did myself.”
On July 2, 1857, with a complement of twenty-five men, including seventeen Arctic veterans, Leopold McClintock sailed out of Aberdeen. He went to gather evidence of what had happened to the Franklin expedition. That was his primary objective. But in the weeks before sailing, he found time to consult with John Rae, to discuss whether he might sail the Fox through Rae Strait, which separated Boothia Peninsula and King William Island. If he could make his way through there, he could almost certainly proceed to the Pacific Ocean, and so become the first explorer to navigate the Northwest Passage.
In the mid-Atlantic, as ordered, McClintock opened a letter of instructions from Jane Franklin. In it, she laid out three priorities: he should rescue any survivors, recover any written records and seek confirmation that Franklin’s men had travelled over water to the northern coast of the North American continent. This last affirmation would enable Jane to argue that her husband had preceded McClure as first discoverer of a northwest passage, even though he had got nowhere near the Pacific Ocean, and this alleged passage, the ice-choked Victoria Strait, was just as fictional as the one McClure discovered, and would remain impassable until the 1960s.
Confident that McClintock would strive to attain her stated objectives, and mindful always of posterity, Jane Franklin had added, “My only fear is that you may spend yourselves too much in the effort; and you must therefore let me tell you how much dearer to me even than any of them is the preservation of the valuable lives of the little band of heroes who are your companions and followers.” In western Greenland, McClintock bought two dozen sled dogs and added an Inuk interpreter called “Christian” to assist Carl Petersen, who had sailed with William Penny and Elisha Kent Kane.
McClintock proceeded north along the west coast of Greenland to Melville Bay, a crescent-shaped indentation extending along the coast, south to north, for 240 kilometres. Like Kane before him, McClintock swung directly west into Baffin Bay and the Middle Ice—that floating mass of ice fields dotted with giant icebergs, scores of them larger than the Fox. The Middle Ice was almost always impenetrable, although a few ships had managed to get through. Six years before, Kane had done so while driving north in
to Smith Sound. He had hitched his ship to a massive iceberg and had it drag him along against the wind and the waves. He had discerned that the iceberg extended so far underwater that it was driven by a deeper current.
McClintock proved less lucky. He got trapped in the Middle Ice and spent eighteen months drifting south. Released on April 25, 1858, McClintock returned to Godhavn (Disko Bay), off present-day Ilulissat, and resupplied the ship. In mid-June, he sailed north again. This time, he got into Lancaster Sound and, without mishap, sailed west to Beechey Island. There, just above Northumberland House, he erected a splendid memorial tablet provided by Lady Franklin.
The Fox got trapped in the Middle Ice and spent an agonizing eighteen months being driven south. Leopold McClintock resupplied the ship at Disko Bay and resumed his westward voyage.
From Beechey, McClintock started due south down Peel Sound. But after travelling forty kilometres, he found himself blocked by ice. He retreated north and east and then swung south down Prince Regent Inlet. He hoped to sail west through Bellot Strait to King William Island. But when he reached the western end of that narrow channel, he encountered a wall of ice blocking Victoria Strait. He withdrew and, late in 1858, established winter quarters within easy viewing distance of a ridge overlooking present-day Fort Ross (so named by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1937, when it built a trading post there).
Today, at the highest point on that ridge, visitors can stand beside “McClintock’s Cairn” while gazing out over Bellot Strait, Prince Regent Inlet and the Fox Islands. In the winter of 1858–59, anyone scrambling to that spot would have been able to see the Fox locked in the ice and battened down for the winter; and also a magnetic observatory nearly two hundred metres from the ship, “built of ice sawed into blocks,” as McClintock wrote, “there not being any suitable snow.”
Prevented by ice from sailing farther, McClintock took to sledges. On February 17, 1859, he set out with two dog teams on a reconnaissance mission to Cape Victoria, on the west coast of Boothia Peninsula, near where James Clark Ross had located the north magnetic pole. There, McClintock encountered some Inuit who had acquired and were happy to trade Franklin relics, among them forks, spoons, a medal and a gold chain. None of them had seen any white men, but one older man, Oo-na-lee, said the relics came from a place where some white men had starved on an island in a river containing salmon. Others spoke of a ship, McClintock wrote, that had been “crushed by ice out in the sea to the west of King William’s Island.”
Bad weather prevented further investigation until April. But then, after returning to Cape Victoria, McClintock met another group of Inuit, including a young man who sold him a knife. “After much anxious inquiry,” McClintock wrote, “we learned that two ships had been seen by the natives of King William’s Island; one of them was seen to sink in deep water, and nothing was obtained from her, a circumstance at which they expressed much regret; but the other was forced on shore by the ice, where they suppose she still remains, but is much broken. From this ship they have obtained most of their wood, etc.; and Oot-loo-lik is the name of the place where she grounded.”
Most of this McClintock learned from the young man who sold him the knife. “Old Oo-na-lee, who drew the rough chart for me in March, to show where the ship sank, now answered our questions respecting the one forced on shore; not a syllable about her did he mention on the former occasion, although we asked whether they knew of only one ship? I think he would willingly have kept us in ignorance of the wreck being upon their coasts, and that the young man unwittingly made it known to us.” The savvy Oo-na-lee was probably thinking of acquiring valuable trade goods.
Here the story grows more dramatic. The young man “also told us that the body of a man was found on board the ship,” McClintock wrote; “that he must have been a very large man, and had long teeth; this is all he recollected having been told, for he was quite a child at the time.” Both men said that the ships were destroyed in August or September; “that all the white people went away to the large river, taking a boat or boats with them, and that in the following winter their bones were found there.”
Which of Franklin’s two ships housed the body? Today, the best guess is probably Erebus, found in September 2014 at Oot-loo-lik, off the northwest coast of Adelaide Peninsula in Wilmot and Crampton Bay. What year was that ship grounded? Best guess, 1851—eight years before McClintock began asking questions. But most of this Inuit oral history would be set aside in light of what came next: a written document.
In April 1859, on Boothia Peninsula at Cape Victoria, McClintock divided his expeditionary team. He sent William Hobson, his second-in-command, to trace the northern and western coasts of King William Island. He himself headed south through Rae Strait. He crossed Simpson Strait to Montreal Island and the estuary of the Great Fish River (now called the Back River). Finding nothing but a few relics in an Inuit cairn, he recrossed Simpson Strait and travelled west along the south coast of King William Island. He came across an unburied skeleton and a number of Franklin expedition relics, and at Cape Herschel, he dismantled the cairn Thomas Simpson had built twenty years before, but found it empty.
Nineteen kilometres on, McClintock spotted a new cairn containing a note from his second-in-command. Hobson had made a spectacular discovery. He had found two notes scrawled on printed Royal Navy forms and deposited in metal cylinders near Victory Point. The first message, written on May 28, 1847, indicated that the Erebus and the Terror had spent the previous winter in the ice at the northwest corner of King William Island, off Cape Felix. It said Franklin had spent the winter before that (1845–46) at Beechey Island after ascending Wellington Channel to latitude 77° and circling Cornwallis Island. All was well.
As of early 2017, the Victory Point record remained the only written document recovered from the Franklin expedition. It indicated that the two ships were “deserted” on April 22, 1848. Today, most analysts are convinced that at least some men returned to one or both of the vessels.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The second message, which was added to the page eleven months later, on April 25, 1848, said that the Erebus and the Terror, trapped twenty to twenty-five kilometres northwest of Victory Point since September 1846, had been “deserted” three days before: “The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here [it gave geographical coordinates]. Sir John Franklin died on the 11 June 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.” Captain Francis Crozier had added a final few words: “And start (on) tomorrow, 26th, for Back’s Fish River.”
What had happened to reduce the expedition’s numbers so dramatically, from 129 to 105? Why had such a high percentage of officers died? The Victory Point record raised more questions than it answered. Halfway down the west coast of King William Island, at Erebus Bay, Hobson had found a twenty-four-foot-long boat-sledge containing an array of unnecessary goods, as well as two dead bodies. McClintock, following Hobson north, also puzzled over the boat, which was facing north. Were the men trying to haul the boat back to the ship off Victory Point? That would be madness . . . an idea that would fuel theories of addled brains and lead poisoning.
Rivetted by the Victory Point record—a written document, after all—searchers and armchair experts would set aside Inuit oral history. For decades, nobody gave much thought to the notion that all or at least some of the 105 men might have returned to the ships. Nobody suggested that, with men aboard, both vessels had been carried south by ice—one only as far as Terror Bay, the other to near Adelaide Peninsula. Nobody speculated that with one or both ships proceeding slowly south along the coast, the survivors would not need to drag that overloaded boat and sledge any great distance. When the ice melted, they would need only to haul it back into the water to make for the nearest ship. Who cared which way it faced?
From the boat, McClintock retrieved remnants of a blue jacket and a great coat, a clothes brush and a horn comb,
a toothbrush, a sponge, some crested silver and a prayer book called Christian Melodies, frozen hard, along with a Bible and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. Back at his Boothia camp, he talked to an old Inuit woman, who reported, “They fell down and died as they walked along.”
Having reboarded the Fox by the end of June, McClintock waited in the ice. He sailed at last on August 10 and reached London six weeks later. He had charted 1,280 kilometres of coastline and completed the mapping of the northern coast of the continent. He had found the only written record of the Franklin expedition that has yet turned up. To Lady Franklin, who was travelling in southwestern France when he arrived in London, McClintock sent a letter summarizing. He noted that Sir John had died on June 11, 1847: “I cannot help remarking to you what instantly occurred to me on reading the records. That Sir John Franklin was not harassed by either want of success or forebodings of evil.”
This was precisely what Jane Franklin needed to hear. Her late husband stood personally absolved of cannibalism. As for no “want of success,” McClintock had brought her more than enough to create an enduring mythology.
23.
Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin?
The Victorian establishment quickly decided, as William James Mills writes in Exploring Polar Frontiers, that with his voyage of 1857–1859, Leopold McClintock had confirmed “that Franklin’s men, in making the journey from Point Victory to the Great Fish River, had completed the first crossing of the Northwest Passage.”
Contemporary readers may find themselves scratching their heads. Wait, what? Say again? The Passage extends from Baffin Bay to the Beaufort Sea. Every last one of Franklin’s men died roughly in the middle. They got trapped in the ice of an impassable strait. They did not return home with any geographical news. Obviously, they completed nothing. But never mind.
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Page 24