Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  Crossing Simpson Strait in kayaks. This image of Schwatka and some of his men appeared in The Illustrated London News in 1881.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  From twenty-five paces, Tulugaq fired one shot and then another, but the bear, which stood more than ten feet tall, scratched at his head, whirled and came charging at him. Tulugaq’s third shot hit the bear in the heart and brought him down. The hunter dug his first bullet from the bear’s head. Despite the close range, Klutschak writes, “it had not penetrated the bone but had been completely flattened.”

  Not long afterwards, when the expedition had finished searching Terror Bay and had travelled more than eighty kilometres south, Tulugaq took a dog team to retrieve some goods left behind at the camp. While travelling, he spotted three bears and gave chase as they fled for open water. As they reached it, Tulugaq shot and killed all three of them with five shots. To take their hides, he then led his female travelling companion in hauling the bears out of the water, each of them weighing at least eight hundred pounds. “For Tulugaq,” Klutschak writes, “nothing was impossible—except transporting the skull of an Inuk.”

  On another occasion, Tulugaq spotted a large piece of driftwood in the water. He took some dogs to help him fetch it but, unusually, left his rifle behind. Near the shore, he chanced upon a large female polar bear with a cub three or four months old. He loosed all his dogs and pelted the mother to separate her from her cub. With the dogs at her heels, she took to the water, and Tulugaq used his knife to finish the cub. “Apart from its tenderness,” Klutschak writes, “the cub’s meat had a particularly piquant taste, and we greatly regretted that the old bear had not had twins.”

  Tulugaq was also remarkable for his good humour, his willpower and his perseverance, and when Klutschak writes of sadly parting from him, he freely admits that “for a full year we had been indebted to this man for the fact that the execution of our plans had proceeded so well.” What did the expedition accomplish? For starters, on the west coast of King William Island, at a place known as Camp Crozier, Schwatka discovered the remains of Lieutenant John Irving of the Terror, identifiable by the presence of a silver medal for mathematics. He built a cairn at this location and eventually sent the remains to Edinburgh, where they were reburied at an elaborate public ceremony.

  At Terror Bay on that same island, where the Terror was coincidentally found, and at Starvation Cove on the mainland near Chantrey Bay, Schwatka found more remains and evidence of cannibalism. With Ebierbing and William Ouligbuck Jr., he interviewed a number of Inuit, eliciting first-person accounts whose crucial importance is emerging only now, in light of the 2014 discovery of the Erebus.

  Journey of the Schwatka expedition to the northern coast of King William Island.

  Courtesy of Lee Preston.

  Schwatka heard tales of Inuit entering an abandoned ship and accidentally sinking it by cutting a hole in the side, and of papers being distributed among children, buried in sand and blown away by the wind. He gathered complete accounts from several Inuit of their discoveries at Terror Bay, Starvation Cove and Ootjoolik. Gilder’s florid newspaper articles about this expedition, including one that appeared in the New York Herald of October 29, 1880, included headlines such as “Franklin’s Fate Determined”—as if, at last, this expedition had finally finished the job.

  Given the 2014 discovery of the Erebus at Ootjoolik (in Wilmot and Crampton Bay, off Grant Point and Adelaide Peninsula), we recognize the special relevance of Schwatka’s interview with Puhtoorak, who went aboard the ship before it sank. We have three accounts of that interview.

  According to Gilder, Puhtoorak—“now about sixty-five or seventy”—had only once seen white men alive. As a boy, while fishing on the Back River, “they came along in a boat and shook hands with him. There were ten men. The leader was called “Tos-ard-eroak,” which Joe [Ebierbing] says, from the sound, he thinks means Lieutenant Back. The next white man he saw was dead in a bunk of a big ship which was frozen in the ice near an island about eight kilometres due west of Grant Point, on Adelaide Peninsula. They had to walk out about three miles on smooth ice to reach the ship.”

  Around this time, which Gilder estimated to be 1851 or 1852, Puhtoorak saw the tracks of white men on the mainland. Gilder writes that when he first saw them there were four, and afterward only three:

  This was when the spring snows were falling. When his people saw the ship so long without any one around, they used to go on board and steal pieces of wood and iron. They did not know how to get inside by the doors, and cut a hole in the side of the ship, on a level with the ice, so that when the ice broke up during the following summer the ship filled and sunk. No tracks were seen in the salt-water ice or on the ship, which also was covered with snow, but they saw scrapings and sweepings alongside, which seemed to have been brushed off by people who had been living on board. They found some red cans of fresh meat, with plenty of what looked like tallow mixed with it. A great many had been opened, and four were still unopened. They saw no bread. They found plenty of knives, forks, spoons, pans, cups, and plates on board, and afterward found a few such things on shore after the vessel had gone down. They also saw books on board, and left them there. They only took knives, forks, spoons, and pans; the other things they had no use for.

  Klutschak reprised the story. He wrote that Puhtoorak “was one of the first people to visit a ship which, beset in ice, drifted with wind and current to a spot west of Grant Point on Adelaide Peninsula, where some islands halted its drift.” According to Puhtoorak, then, the ship did not sail to its final location, but was carried there while frozen in the ice. Klutschak notes that “on their first visit [in the autumn] the people thought they saw whites on board; from the tracks in the snow they concluded there were four of them.”

  He reiterates how, the following spring, when the whites were gone, the Inuit “found a corpse in one of the bunks and they found meat in cans in the cabin.” He added that “the body was in a bunk inside the ship in the back part.” The Inuit also found “a small boat in Wilmot Bay which, however, might have drifted to that spot after the ship sank.” That boat might also have been left by sailors making a final bid to escape overland.

  In Schwatka’s rendition, the Inuit found the tracks first of four white men, and later of only three. Puhtoorak “never saw the white men. He thinks that the white men lived in the ship until the fall and then moved onto the mainland.” When he went on board the ship, Puhtoorak “saw a pile of dirt on one side of the cabin door showing that some white man had recently swept out the cabin. He found on board the ship four red tin cans filled with meat and many that had been opened. The meat was full of fat. The natives went all over and through the ship and found also many empty casks. They found iron chains and anchors on deck, and spoons, knives, forks, tin plates, china plates, etc.” According to Schwatka, Puhtoorak “also saw books on board the ship but the natives did not take them. He afterwards saw some that had washed ashore.”

  This Inuit testimony takes on special resonance, obviously, in light of the discovery of Erebus. That was the ship Puhtoorak visited, and these were the stories to which it gave rise. Frederick Schwatka could gather this oral history because he established a rapport with his Inuit informants. Without Ebierbing, who did most of the translating with Puhtoorak, neither Schwatka nor Gilder nor Klutschak would ever have gleaned a word about the Erebus. And without the accounts they relayed, which identified a general location, that ship might never have been found. To the work of Tulugaq, then, must be added that of Ebierbing. Together, those two remarkable Inuit enabled Schwatka to etch his name in the annals of those who elaborated the fate of the Franklin expedition.

  28.

  Lady Franklin Attains Westminster Abbey

  By 1878, when Frederick Schwatka and Ebierbing sailed north to gather still more Inuit testimony, Jane Franklin had been dead for three years. Of her unprecedented travels, which she astutely downplayed, she had remained fiercely proud. And yet,
after the vanishment of her sailor-husband, one passion gripped her more strongly even than the desire to travel the world, and that was her yearning to create, out of the tragic tale of Sir John Franklin, an Arctic legend.

  Writing in the 1940s, Australian Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggested that even before Franklin disappeared, he “had become a legend in his own lifetime, both for courage and for sheer beauty of character.” Well, not quite. By the time he arrived home in England from Van Diemen’s Land, Franklin stood nearer to disgrace than to canonization, and only the fear of an enduring ignominy, exacerbated by the urgings of his importunate wife, drove him to undertake that final expedition.

  In A History of Australia, C. M. H. Clark argues that, because she felt guilty over the ensuing disaster, Jane Franklin spent three decades recreating the reputation of a man “she had pushed beyond his strength.” Certainly, whether driven by guilt or ambition, Jane Franklin displayed exceptional perseverance in establishing the fate of her husband’s expedition. Having created a suitable narrative, she showed an equal enthusiasm for memorializing Sir John—seeing this latter quest as an extension of the former.

  In seeking to turn her dead husband into an Arctic hero, Jane Franklin did not begin with promising material. On his first expedition, as a result of his poor decision-making, Franklin lost more than half his men; on his last, which culminated in disaster, he lost all his men and also his own life. Sir John can be credited with having charted more than 2,700 kilometres of previously unknown coastline—but only if we include the 1,600 kilometres contributed by John Richardson, his second-in-command.

  Of significant geographical features, Franklin discovered none. In The Friendly Arctic, Vilhjalmur Stefansson would observe, “It is a commonplace in the history of polar exploration that the greatest advance in our knowledge of the region to the north of Canada resulted not from the life work of Sir John Franklin, but from his mysterious disappearance and the long series of expeditions that went out in search of him.”

  Jane Franklin drove that endeavour. She not only brought pressure to bear on Parliament and the Admiralty, but financed and organized key expeditions and inspired the American Henry Grinnell to dispatch still others. But for her, the opening up of the Arctic would have required additional decades. In Victorian England, of course, that patriarchal bastion, nobody would dream of advancing such a claim. But, having identified herself with her husband, Jane Franklin could embark on a quest to create a legend, and to shape future understanding of Arctic history. Her husband had lost his life in the Arctic. She would portray him as having sacrificed that life not to escape disgrace, and much less in an effort to satisfy his insatiable wife, but in a quest far greater than himself—indeed, in a national cause.

  The myth of Franklin as Arctic hero, initiated by Lady Franklin and supported by the British naval establishment, became central to the orthodox version of exploration history.

  Nobody better understood the creative power of public memorials to shape historical perception than this adventure traveller who had spent so much of her life visiting historic sites. Jane Franklin grasped that monuments create history. So she had led the creation of statues in Waterloo Place, Lincolnshire and Tasmania. For most, these memorials would have sufficed. But her husband’s reputation was synonymous with her own, and Jane Franklin craved heroic status. She wanted Westminster Abbey—and, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, she set about getting it.

  To the dean of Westminster, she offered to supply a suitable bust of Sir John, complete with an inscription by poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, yet another relative. Initially the dean balked. He proposed a modest stained-glass window. Lady Franklin remained adamant, and with backing by friends in high places, she carried the day.

  She hired Matthew Noble, sculptor of the Waterloo Place statue, to create a suitable bust. Then, feeling that a bust was insufficiently grand, she conceived of adding first a canopy and then a base, so transforming the bust into a full-blown, stand-alone monument, complete with bas-relief, that easily exceeds six feet in height. To create the canopy and base, she enlisted Sir George Gilbert Scott, a prominent architect. And then she kept close watch.

  Late in December 1874, as the memorial neared completion, Jane Franklin realized with a shock that, in the bas-relief at the front of the base, the sculptor had placed a flag at half-mast. This contradicted the revised myth she was elaborating—that Franklin had discovered the Northwest Passage and knew it before he died. At Jane’s urgent command, Sophy “went to Mr. Noble and explained that the placing of the flag at half mast would be inconsistent with the circumstances intended to be set forth, namely, the Discovery of the North West Passage, my uncle’s death having as we judge by the date, followed the return of [Lieutenant] Graham Gore’s party which would undoubtedly ascertain the fact of the continuous channel to the coast.”

  Having realized that Franklin’s ships had got trapped on the wrong side of King William Island, Lady Franklin had made one final amendment to the official version of his supposed discovery. She now asserted, without a shred of evidence, that Franklin’s men had found the final link in the Passage—in fact, the channel John Rae discovered in 1854. Jane Franklin tacitly admitted that Rae Strait was indeed the key to the Passage. Sculptor Matthew Noble deferred and raised the flag.

  There remained a few small problems. Skeptics wondered if a geographical discovery that nobody survived to report could rightly be designated a discovery? Lady Franklin asserted that, yes, it most certainly could. And if anybody thought otherwise, she would demand that a parliamentary committee be raised to investigate the matter. Could anybody doubt what such a committee would conclude?

  In June 1875, British newspapers reported that, at age eighty-three, Lady Franklin was sinking. The Prince and Princess of Wales enquired after her health. Churches throughout the English-speaking world began offering up prayers. The invalid rallied but lasted only three more weeks. On July 18, 1875, with Sophy Cracroft at her side, Jane Franklin passed away.

  The following day, the Times published a two-column obituary that situated her as “among the gifted woman of her time.” It went on to observe that, “remarkable as her life had been in many respects, she is chiefly known in having taken a prominent and distinguished part in the cause of Arctic discovery. A generation has elapsed since her gallant husband, with a small band, the flower of the British navy, under his command, sailed as the leader of a great expedition, sent to accomplish the North-West Passage.”

  On July 29, 1875, the funeral procession included ten mourning coaches and almost that many private carriages. Numerous prominent Victorians attended, and dignitaries, knights and admirals served as pallbearers. Two days later, the faithful Sophy Cracroft organized an event at Westminster Abbey. In the crowded chapel of St. John the Evangelist, immediately to the left as one enters the world-famous shrine, friends and relations gathered to witness the unveiling of Jane Franklin’s final testament. Sir George Back, Franklin’s old rival, stepped forward and, according to a family eyewitness, silently “drew off the white cloth that had covered the monument to reveal a most beautifully represented Bust in bas-relief.”

  Those who had known Franklin could not help remarking discrepancies—the marble chin looked far too strong—and George Back spoke for all when he declared it “a fine Historic Bust but not a perfect likeness.” Soon after the unveiling, the Dean of Westminster added an inscription hailing Franklin for “completing the discovery of the North-West Passage,” and noting, “This monument is erected by Jane, his widow, who, after long waiting and sending many in search of him, herself departed to find him in the realms of Life, July 18th, 1875, aged 83 years.”

  Yet even then, Lady Franklin was not finished. Decades after her death, asserting her formidable will through Sophy Cracroft, Jane Franklin made one final gesture. At Westminster Abbey, acting as if from beyond the grave—and just in case anyone should advance an unconscionable claim on behalf of John Rae—she provided through Sophy for the ad
dition to the monument of one last inscription: “Here also is commemorated Admiral Sir Leopold McClintock, 1819–1907, discoverer of the fate of Franklin in 1859.”

  With the help of her niece, Jane Franklin had put the finishing touches on an exploration legend, a fanciful narrative that would endure as “historical truth” through the twentieth century. Only now, in the twenty-first century, does the woman shine forth as a peerless mythologizer. Only now does her elaborate fable stand revealed as wishful thinking writ large.

  Part Seven

  SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

  29.

  The Last Viking in Gjoa Haven

  Located in the middle of the Northwest Passage, the hamlet of Gjoa Haven is today home to 1,300 Inuit. In September 1903, when Roald Amundsen put into the bay here in his tiny, one-masted ship, the Gjoa, he felt he had entered “the finest little harbour in the world.” The Norwegian was bent on becoming the first explorer to navigate the Passage from one ocean to another. He hoped also to pinpoint the north magnetic pole. In 1831, more than seven decades before he arrived, and roughly 160 kilometres northwest of Gjoa Haven, James Clark Ross had caught up with that ever-moving pole on the west coast of Boothia Peninsula. Amundsen wanted to determine how far the pole had shifted, and so enable geophysicists to make a comparison.

  To that end, on the high ground overlooking the bay, Amundsen set up an evolving series of stations from which to take magnetic observations. He established friendly relations with Inuit who turned up and settled nearby. And he remained through not one but two cold, dark Arctic winters, delaying his epochal voyage for the sake of the Magnetic Crusade.