Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  Grinnell sent Lady Franklin a copy of Hall’s report. She found it “so devoid of order and dates as to leave much confusion and perplexity in the mind.” She wished to interview the explorer—in England, if he could be persuaded to visit at her expense, or else in America. She wrote, “If the journals of my husband’s expedition should be brought to light, nothing that reflects on the character of another should be published—nothing that would give sharp pain to any individuals living.”

  Leopold McClintock, who considered the fate of Franklin settled to his own everlasting credit, and who feared sensational revelations, wrote to Sophy Cracroft, knowing she would relay his opinion: “I do not see what Lady Franklin can want to see Hall for . . . His report has been moderate for him and I think he is better left alone.”

  Lady Franklin would not be deterred. When Hall had returned home to Cincinnati, Ohio, to write a book about his quest, she decided to make an adventure of what would probably be her final trip to North America. In January 1870, Jane Franklin and her niece, Sophy Cracroft, sailed not for New York City but San Francisco, proceeding yet once more around the bottom of South America. Besides the usual maid, they travelled with an efficient manservant named Lawrence, who made this journey—and several that followed—far easier.

  In San Francisco, the women boarded a ship sailing north to Sitka, Alaska. That seaside village, situated at latitude 58°, was closer to the Northwest Passage than Jane Franklin had ever come. She and Sophy spent two months in the village—a sojourn that would later be memorialized in Lady Franklin Visits Sitka, Alaska 1870, a 134-page book made up of quotations from Sophy’s journal and contextual articles and appendices.

  At last the women journeyed south to Salt Lake City and east to Cincinnati. There, on August 13, 1870, Lady Franklin met Charles Francis Hall. Neither she nor Sophy left any permanent record of this visit—a predictable elision. Jane had already gone on record as believing that, with regard to cannibalism among final survivors of the Franklin expedition, nobody should ever have written a word.

  Now, having interviewed the Inuit who discovered the most horrific of the campsites, Hall had recorded many detailed and irrefutable eyewitness accounts. When Lady Franklin arrived, he was compiling these into his soon-to-be published book Life with the Esquimaux: A Narrative of Arctic Experience in Search of Survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition. How much detail did the explorer share with Lady Franklin? Hall had been counselled by his sponsor, Henry Grinnell, to show sensitivity. And he needed Grinnell’s backing for a proposed expedition to the North Pole. Still, Hall would have revealed as much truth to Lady Franklin as he thought she could handle. The truth was that John Rae had been right all along. The final survivors of the Franklin expedition had resorted to eating their dead comrades.

  Later, in a letter to Lady Franklin dated January 9, 1871, Hall addressed only tangential issues. The explorer, apologetic, explained that he had lost faith in that “almost holy mission to which I have devoted about twelve years of my life . . . eight of these in the icy regions of the North. What burned with my soul like a living fire, all the time, was the full faith that I should find some survivors of Sir John’s remarkable expedition, and that I would be the instrument in the hands of Heaven, of the solution, but when I heard the sad tale from living witnesses . . . how many survivors in the fall of 1848 had been abandoned to die, my faith till then so strong, was shaken and ultimately was extinguished.”

  About this “abandonment”: Hall had interviewed and harshly judged two Inuit hunters, Teekeeta and Ow-wer, who had encountered forty starving men trekking south near Washington Bay on the west coast of King William Island. These two had slipped away instead of somehow rescuing the marchers—as if, in one of the most desolate, animal-empty areas in the Arctic, they could have miraculously produced enough food to sustain so large a party.

  As for finding written records, Hall professed hope. He believed that Franklin’s officers had buried them on King William Island before abandoning their ships: “God willing, I will make two more voyages to the North—first for the discovery of the regions about the Pole—and then to obtain the records of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to obtain other information than what I already possess in relation to it.”

  For Lady Franklin, this misfit American explorer had already delivered a revelation. At age seventy-eight, and after a lifetime of bending the world to her indomitable will, she had come up against a rock-hard reality she could not reshape. Faced with the detailed narratives of Charles Francis Hall, she could deny the truth no longer. Even the best of Christian men, in order to stay alive, would jettison any religious teaching, cross any moral boundary and resort to any horror. Such was the truth of human nature.

  The following January, in response to her request, the explorer sent Lady Franklin two of the original notebooks he had used in preparing his book. Long before those notebooks arrived—indeed, virtually as soon as she spoke with Hall—Jane would have known what they confirmed. And yet, undaunted, she urged the explorer to travel north again and to resume the search for written records.

  26.

  Inuit Hunters Keep Castaways Alive

  “It was blowing a terrific gale from the northwest,” the Inuk Hans Hendrik tells us in a dramatized narrative, “and about six o’clock in the evening we were nipped in the ice. The ice crushed down on us with tremendous pressure, and if the Polaris had not been surprisingly strong she would have sunk at once.” This happened on October 15, 1872, during an expedition that had set out under the command of Charles Francis Hall, bent now on becoming the first explorer to reach the North Pole.

  Most of the men on board the Polaris, we learn, were gathered in the waist of the vessel, looking over the rail at the floe to which we were made fast. The ship was rising somewhat to the pressure. Now the engineer came running up from below, and shouted that the vessel had started a leak aft and that the water was gaining on the pumps.”

  The ship had sprung no leak, Hendrik adds in Hans the Eskimo by Edwin Gile Rich, which is based on Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, the Arctic Traveller. But the engineer “was too scared to know exactly what was happening.” When Captain Sidney Budington (also spelled Buddington) heard of the supposed leak, he “threw up his hands in excitement, and shouted, ‘Throw everything on the ice.’ He must have thought the Polaris was sinking with all hands.”

  In the memoir, published in 1878, Hans Hendrik—who had first sailed far north twenty-five years earlier with Elisha Kent Kane—declares simply that “the movement of the frozen mass in a heavy gale caused the ship’s crew to land boats and provisions on the ice, to be prepared for the worst. In the following night the accident occurred which separated the ship’s company.” He then lists the nineteen persons “left upon the ice,” and the fourteen who “were drifted off with the ship.”

  In the dramatized version quoted above, which surfaced in 1934, the ice commenced cracking and “exploded under our very feet and broke in many places. The ship broke away in the darkness and we lost all sight of her in a moment.” Snow was falling and a stiff gale was blowing from the southeast: “So bad were the snow and sleet, that one could not even look to windward.”

  In addition to Hans Hendrick and his family, three more Inuit—Tookoolito, Ebierbing and their adopted daughter, Punna—were among the nineteen people stranded on the ice floe. Without that Inuit presence, all of the castaways would almost certainly have died.

  In June 1871, Tookoolito and Ebierbing had accompanied Hall in sailing from New York for the North Pole on the Polaris, intent on extending the route discovered by Kane. At Proven on the west coast of Greenland, just south of Upernavik, Hall met Hans Hendrik. That resourceful Inuk had spent the past decade working in this area for the Greenland Trading Company. At Hall’s invitation, Hans joined the expedition aboard the Polaris, bringing his wife, Mersuk—whom he had met while voyaging with Kane—and their three children.

  The ship was not a happy one. Two men accustomed to captaincy—G
eorge Tyson and Sidney O. Budington—soon came to detest each other. And Hall and the chief scientist, Dr. Emil Bessels, fell out over who controlled the scientific staff. A large contingent on the ship, resenting Hall’s micro-managing, sided with Bessels. Amidst acrimonious exchanges, the Polaris proceeded north into Smith Sound. By September, it had reached a latitude (82°29´ north) some distance beyond that attained by Kane—a new “farthest north by ship.” Tensions flared over whether to go still farther, so risking the ship to reduce the length of the projected dogsled journey. But on September 10, 1871, the ship settled where it was, in “Thank God Harbour” in northern Greenland.

  Charles Francis Hall in his grave. In 1968, almost one hundred years after the explorer died, biographer Chauncey C. Loomis exhumed the body and determined that Hall had died of arsenic poisoning.

  Courtesy of Lee Preston.

  The following month, as the dark winter took hold, Charles Francis Hall became ill. Emil Bessels maintained a vigil by his bedside, ostensibly to treat him. Hall accused the doctor of poisoning him and refused further treatment. On November 8, 1871, he died, possibly the victim of deliberate poisoning. An official investigation would rule that Hall had died of apoplexy. In 1968, the scholar Chauncey C. Loomis, while writing a biography of Hall, travelled to Greenland and exhumed the explorer’s body, which was well preserved by permafrost. Forensic testing showed that Hall had indeed died of arsenic poisoning. This might have been accidental, although Loomis doubted it. No charges were ever laid. Tookoolito strongly suspected that Hall had been poisoned, and spoke of coffee provided to him by Bessels: “He [Hall] said the coffee made him sick. Too sweet for him.” She quoted the explorer’s words: “It made me sick and [want] to vomit.” The inquest discounted her evidence. Some pointed to Bessels, while George Tyson was convinced that Budington was the guilty party. In a 2001 book called Trial by Ice, surgeon-author Richard Parry suggests that Budington was an accomplice who “knew or suspected more than he let on.” In the present work, we must content ourselves with noting the controversy.

  Now, in June 1872, with Hall dead and buried, Budington dispatched a party to try for the North Pole in a whaleboat. A few kilometres out, ice crushed this craft. Budington tried again, sending out both a collapsible boat and a second whaleboat. But then the Polaris floated free, and he sent Ebierbing north to summon the men. When they arrived, determined to avoid another Arctic winter, Budington turned the ship around and started south.

  On October 15, while opposite Humboldt Glacier, Polaris ran up onto a shallow iceberg and got stuck. When a second iceberg threatened to demolish the ship, men began throwing cargo overboard to lighten and free the vessel. This was when those nineteen people, having been ordered off the ship, found themselves out on the ice when the pack began to break up. The two Inuit families were among them. As the castaways watched the ship drift farther away, and then disappear into the distance, the hunters turned to building igloos on what they now determined was a massive ice floe.

  Those fourteen men still on the damaged Polaris would run ashore near Etah, Greenland, within a couple of weeks of the accident. They would survive a harsh winter thanks to the Inuit who lived nearby, and after starting south in two rough-built boats, would be rescued the following July by the whaler Ravenscraig.

  The more dramatic struggle for survival played out on the ice floe. The jettisoned supplies included 1,900 pounds of food. For the rest, those stranded looked to the Inuit hunters, Ebierbing and Hendrik. They kept everyone alive as, during the next six months, the ice floe shrank in diameter from a few kilometres to not more than one hundred metres. The ice carried them, drifting, more than 2,900 kilometres south. George Tyson, the ranking officer on the floe, wrote: “We survive through God’s mercy and Joe’s [Ebierbing’s] ability as a hunter.”

  Finally, on April 30, 1873, off the coast of Newfoundland, sealers aboard a ship called the Tigress spotted and rescued the castaways. They had survived thanks to the survival skills of Ebierbing, Hendrik and Tookoolito, though official reports and newspaper scarcely mentioned this. Hans Hendrik did undertake a modest speaking tour of several American cities. Then, back at Upernavik, he resumed working for the Greenland Trading Company.

  In 1875, Hendrik joined a British expedition led by George Nares and sailed on the Discovery to the northeast coast of Ellesmere Island. Nares wrote later that “all speak in the highest terms of Hans . . . who was untiring in his exertions with the dog-sledge, and in procuring game.”

  After the debacle of the Polaris expedition, Tookoolito and Ebierbing returned to Groton, Connecticut, where with the help of Hall and Budington, they had established a home. Ebierbing revisited the Arctic several times as a guide, while Tookoolito stayed in Groton, working as a seamstress and caring for their daughter, who had not been well since those months on the ice floe. When Punna died at age nine, Tookoolito fell into declining health. Ebierbing was with her when, at thirty-eight, she died on December 31, 1876. She was buried in Groton.

  Her death meant that Ebierbing was alone two years later when Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka invited him to travel north to renew the search for records from the lost Franklin expedition. Over the next two years, as the guide and main interpreter on the longest sledge journey recorded to that date—4,360 kilometres—he would play a crucial role in unearthing still more Inuit testimony. And in 1880, when Schwatka sailed home, Ebierbing would remain in the Arctic.

  27.

  Ebierbing and Tulugaq Work Magic for Schwatka

  Since the mid-nineteenth century, countless investigators—fur traders, sailors, scientists, obsessive amateurs—have added detail and nuance to John Rae’s original report on the fate of the Franklin expedition. In Unravelling the Franklin Mystery, Canadian historian David C. Woodman summed up succinctly: “For one hundred and forty years the account of the tragedy given to Rae by In-nook-poo-zhe-jook and See-u-ti-chu has been accepted and endorsed. As we shall see, it was a remarkably accurate recital of events. But it was not the whole story.”

  After 1875, prompted by the death of Lady Franklin, the American Geographical Society decided to send another expedition in search of relics and documents pertaining to the Franklin expedition. Frederick Schwatka, an ambitious lieutenant with the Third United States Cavalry, volunteered to lead it. Born in 1849, Schwatka had been too young to play a role in the American Civil War. When he graduated from West Point in 1871, the military was shedding men.

  Schwatka served as a fighting officer in the west, and devoted considerable time to studying the native peoples, ranging among the Apache in the Arizona Territory to the Sioux of the northern plains. He was admitted to the Nebraska bar in 1875 and, the following year, earned his medical degree in New York City.

  He was brilliant and practical and, despite his lack of Arctic experience, he won the appointment and sailed from New York on June 19, 1878. His five-man party included “Joe” Ebierbing, the Inuk interpreter who had sailed with Charles Francis Hall and others; an experienced Arctic hand named Frank Melms; and two men who would write books about the expedition—William Henry Gilder of the New York Herald, and Heinrich (Henry) Klutschak, a German artist and surveyor who had emigrated to the United States in 1871.

  With Tookoolito dead, Ebierbing sailed north out of New York City with Frederick Schwatka.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  The party set up base camp and spent the winter near Daly Bay, north of Chesterfield Inlet on the coast of Hudson Bay. On April 1, 1879, accompanied by a dozen local Inuit, and with three sledges drawn by more than forty dogs, Schwatka and his men set out for the west coast of King William Island. Over the next year, while relying on an Inuit diet and travel methods, they reached their target destination by accomplishing the longest sledge journey on record: 4,360 kilometres.

  Schwatka spent the summer searching the area from the mouth of the Back River to Cape Felix at the northern tip of King William Island. He found bones and relics that would in winter have been covere
d by snow. William Ouligbuck Jr. had joined the party, and Gilder would verify what John Rae had asserted—that Ouligbuck spoke all the Inuktitut dialects fluently, and that he “spoke the [English] language like a native—that is to say, like an uneducated native.” He and Ebierbing enabled Schwatka to gather an extraordinary amount of crucial Inuit testimony.

  But the man who kept the party fed and flourishing was a locally hired Inuk named Tulugaq, a little-known figure who emerges in accounts of the expedition as singular and irreplaceable. As Matonabbee was to Samuel Hearne, so Tulugaq was to Frederick Schwatka: he was the man who made the journey happen. A superlative dogsled driver, he was also, above all, a peerless hunter. When the party located a herd of caribou and Ebierbing, that excellent shot, killed eight of them, Tulugaq bagged twelve.

  Eight times, during this year-long Arctic odyssey, Tulugaq killed two caribou with a single shot. At one point, according to Klutschak, he was set upon by a pack of thirty wolves. He leapt onto a high rock and, knowing that wolves will halt any attack to consume their own dead, “with his magazine rifle began providing food for the wolves from their own midst.” When they were distracted, he made his escape.

  But Tulugaq’s courage and skill register most memorably in his dealings with polar bears. At Cape Felix, at the northernmost tip of King William Island, Tulugaq used his telescope to locate a bear on the ice roughly nine kilometres away. He hitched up twelve dogs and, with Frank Melms and a youth, set off at a furious pace. When he drew within five hundred paces of the polar bear, the creature turned and fled, making for open water. But Tulugaq had already unleashed three dogs. He then freed three more, and finally the bear had to stand and fight to keep the six dogs at bay.