They found guns in the ship, for example, “and as they had no suspicion of what they were, they knocked the steel barrels off and hammered them out for harpoons. In fact, so ignorant were they about guns that they said a quantity of percussion caps they found were ‘little thimbles,’ and they really thought that among the white men there lived a dwarf people who could use them.
“At first they dared not go down into the ship itself,” Rasmussen relates, “but soon they became bolder and even ventured into the houses that were under the deck. There they found many dead men lying in their beds. At last they also risked going down into the enormous room in the middle of the ship. It was dark there.” Now the explorer relays an anecdote that has sometimes been ascribed to the other ship, Erebus. Rasmussen writes that the Inuit “found tools and would make a hole in order to let light in. And the foolish people, not understanding white man’s things, hewed a hole just on the water-line so the water poured in and the ship sank. And it went to the bottom with all the valuable things, of which they barely rescued any.”
According to Rasmussen, Qaqortingneq also described Inuit finding human remains, citing three men who “were on their way from King William’s Land to Adelaide Peninsula to hunt for caribou calves. There they found a boat with the bodies of six men. In the boat were guns, knives and some provisions, showing that they had perished of sickness.”
Rasmussen also describes visiting the mainland that looks out on Wilmot and Crampton Bay, where searchers found Erebus in 2014:
One day in the late autumn,” he writes, “just before the ice formed, I sailed with Peter Norberg and Qaqortingneq up to Qavdlunârsiorfik on the east coast of Adelaide Peninsula. There, exactly where the Eskimos had indicated, we found a number of human bones that undoubtedly were the mortal remains of members of the Franklin Expedition; some pieces of cloth and stumps of leather we found at the same place showed that they were of white men. Now, almost eighty years after, wild beasts had scattered the white, sun-bleached bones out over the peninsula and thus removed the sinister traces from the spot where the last struggle had once been fought.
“We had been the first friends that ever visited the place. Now we gathered their bones together, built a cairn over them and hoisted two flags at half mast, the English and the Danish. Thus without many words we did them the last honours. The deep footprints of tired men had once ended in the soft snow here by the low, sandy spit, far from home, from countrymen. But the footprints were not effaced. Others came and carried them on. So does the work of these Franklin men live on to this day wherever the struggle goes on for the exploration and conquest of our globe.
In 1931, after shuttling between Greenland and Denmark for seven years, lecturing and writing, Knud Rasmussen undertook a Sixth Thule Expedition. It aimed to repudiate the claim of a contingent of Norwegians who had occupied an area on the coast of eastern Greenland, calling it Erik the Red’s Land. It also demonstrated that Greenland’s east coast, long inaccessible, had become reachable between early July and mid-September. In 1933, the Permanent Court of International Justice vindicated Rasmussen and the Danes, and the Norwegians withdrew their claim.
That same year, continuing his work, Rasmussen launched a Seventh Thule Expedition—an ambitious undertaking involving sixty-two members, twenty-five of them Greenlanders in kayaks. Late in 1933, in eastern Greenland, Rasmussen got food poisoning from eating improperly fermented meat. This evolved into a virulent flu and pneumonia. A Danish ship made a special detour to collect Rasmussen and bring him to Copenhagen. Diagnosed as having a rare form of botulism, combined with pneumonia, he rallied for several weeks. But then, in December, at age fifty-four, he succumbed. Denmark accorded him a state funeral, and tributes came from around the world.
32.
Erebus and Terror Validate Inuit Testimony
During the summer of 2014, while flying home from Yellowknife to Gjoa Haven, Louie Kamookak noticed that the young man sitting beside him was reading about Sir John Franklin. He introduced himself and ended up chatting with Ryan Harris, a senior archaeologist-diver with Parks Canada. Harris and his team were flying north to embark on yet another Franklin-search expedition, commencing off the northwest coast of King William Island. Before going his separate way, Kamookak suggested that they search an area farther south.
When ice prevented the Victoria Strait Expedition, as it was called, from reaching its intended area, the Parks Canada team turned its attention to what had originally been a secondary area—the one Kamookak mentioned. And that southern area, roughly speaking, is where in September 2014 the searchers found the Erebus, hidden just eleven metres beneath the surface.
Two years and one day later, on September 3, 2016, a team from the Arctic Research Foundation found Terror off southwestern King William Island after acting on a tip from an Inuk crewmember. Sammy Kogvik, like Kamookak from Gjoa Haven, told operations director Adrian Schimnowski that a few winters ago—“six, seven, or eight years”—while out hunting on the ice of Terror Bay, he chanced upon what appeared to be a protruding mast. He kept the find secret because, after snapping photos, he lost his camera and so lacked proof.
In 2014, Parks Canada located HMS Erebus off Adelaide Peninsula. Two years later, divers found HMS Terror in Terror Bay. According to the Victory Point record, the ships had been beset since September 12, 1846. Map by Chris Brackley.
Courtesy of Canadian Geographic magazine.
The team entered Terror Bay and soon located Terror sitting on the ocean floor twenty-four metres below the surface. Schimnowski sent a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) into the ship through an open hatch. “We have successfully entered the mess hall, worked our way into a few cabins and found the food storage room with plates and one can on the shelves,” Schimnowski told the Guardian newspaper by email. “We spotted two wine bottles, tables and empty shelving. Found a desk with open drawers with something in the back corner of the drawer.”
Using the ROV, the men determined that the ship’s three masts were still standing, most hatches were closed and everything was neatly stowed. Schimnowski added that the “wreck is sitting level on the sea bed floor not at a list—which means the boat sank gently to the bottom.” The presence of a heavy rope line suggests that someone may have deployed an anchor. “This vessel looks like it was buttoned down tight for winter and it sank,” Schimnowski told the Guardian. “Everything was shut. Even the windows are still intact. If you could lift this boat out of the water, and pump the water out, it would probably float.”
Jim Balsillie, former co-leader of Research in Motion (makers of BlackBerry) and co-founder of the Arctic Research Foundation, told the Guardian: “Given the location of the find and the state of the wreck, it’s almost certain that HMS Terror was operationally closed down by the remaining crew who then re-boarded HMS Erebus and sailed south where they met their ultimate tragic fate.”
These findings speak to one of the two great mysteries of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration: What happened to John Franklin and his two ships? The discovery of these two ships demonstrate that the demise of the expedition was far more complex and protracted than first thought. And they vindicate both the Inuit and those who relayed their stories.
Let’s take it from the top. John Rae relayed Inuit testimony, as translated by William Ouligbuck, that many of Franklin’s men had starved to death while trekking south, and that some of the final survivors had been driven to cannibalism. Victorian England refused to believe this and, through Charles Dickens, suggested instead that the Inuit had murdered the weakened white sailors. Lady Franklin decreed that the final survivors had completed the Northwest Passage. Somehow, they had “forged the last link with their lives.” This assertion brings us to the second great riddle: Who discovered the Northwest Passage?
Five years after Rae’s report of cannibalism exploded in Britain like a bombshell, Leopold McClintock returned from King William Island having found skeletons and a one-page record left in a cairn by expedition offi
cers. Today, most serious analysts lean to the view that this “Victory Point record” has been accorded too much weight.
It did reveal that Franklin spent the winter of 1845–46 at Beechey Island (where he buried three men). The following spring, when Peel Sound opened unexpectedly, Franklin sailed southward. On September 12, 1846, his ships got trapped in pack ice off Cape Felix at the northwest corner of King William Island. On June 11, 1847, Franklin himself died. Over the next several months, many others died. Total reported loss: nine officers and fifteen crew. So far, no real contention.
A Parks Canada diver finds a nineteenth-century plate on HMS Erebus. The wreck is turning up a multitude of relics.
Courtesy of Parks Canada.
As noted in Chapter 23, McClintock himself, having examined the Victory Point record, launched the “standard reconstruction.” The starving crews, he wrote, abandoned the Erebus and the Terror in April 1848. “The survivors, under Crozier and Fitzjames, numbered in all 105; they proceeded with boats on sledges to the Great Fish River. One of their boats was found by us, untouched by the Esquimaux, and many relics brought from her, as also obtained from the natives of Boothia and the east shore of King William Island.”
Today, thanks to the discoveries of Erebus and Terror, we know that this scenario requires major revision. We know that, while some men trekked south along the coast of King William Island in 1848, some returned to the ships—both now located, neither thoroughly searched. Within the next few years, archaeologists are certain to unearth much new evidence—including, perhaps, even some written documents. This evidence will enable scholars to sift through the extensive Inuit testimony gathered by Charles Francis Hall, Frederick Schwatka and others, and to separate the wheat from the chaff. Doing so will take years.
In 1923, ethnologist-explorer Knud Rasmussen collected stories and, apprised by local Inuit, found bones and skulls at Starvation Point on the Canadian mainland. Subsequent discoveries, such as those of remains found twenty-five kilometres west of Starvation Cove in 1926 and 1936, suggested that instead of marching south in a single body, those later survivors had travelled in smaller groups. In 1931, a Hudson’s Bay Company trader, William “Paddy” Gibson, grandfather of Louie Kamookak, found the remains of four skeletons on one of the Todd Islets southwest of Gjoa Haven. Also, on an islet in Douglas Bay off the south coast of King William Island, Gibson found the remains of seven men and buried them beneath a large stone cairn.
Half a century later, a forensic anthropologist, Owen Beattie, discovered and analyzed some skeletal remains from the mainland. They showed evidence of scurvy and such high levels of lead as to suggest lead poisoning. In 1984 and 1986, Beattie excavated three early-expedition graves at Beechey Island, where bodies had been buried in permafrost. His most significant discovery, as described in Frozen in Time, which he co-authored with John Geiger, was that the three men had indeed suffered from high lead levels, although this had not killed them.
Beattie theorized that lead poisoning, contracted from the solder used to seal cans of preserved food, affected the entire expedition. Its symptoms include anorexia, weakness, fatigue, anemia, paranoia and irritability, which matched certain Inuit tales of disoriented sailors. But some researchers have grown skeptical that lead poisoning played a major role in what happened. And others argue that if it did, the lead probably came from the ships’ water pipes.
In 2016, after studying the 170-year-old thumbnail of John Hartnell—one of the three crewmen buried on Beechey Island—some Canadian scientists made a case that zinc deficiency caused by malnutrition played a greater role than lead poisoning in the early deaths. Led by TrichAnalytics Inc., scientists from the Universities of Saskatchewan, Victoria and Ottawa used cutting-edge technology to analyze nail tissue for metal exposure and diet. That tissue, provided by the Inuit Heritage Trust and the Canadian Museum of History, showed that until his final few weeks, Hartnell had normal lead levels. Significant lead exposure did not occur during the expedition. Rather, a severe zinc deficiency led to a weakened immune system and then tuberculosis, which led to a release of previously stored lead into Hartnell’s bloodstream.
Nor is that the only question that has haunted historians. Why did the deaths of nine officers and fifteen men, which happened while the ships were beset off the northwest coast of King William Island, include such a high percentage of officers: 37 percent, compared with 14 percent of crew members? Some have speculated about accident and injury. Others have suggested that the dead officers ingested something that most seamen did not. But oddly enough, nobody has publicly invoked the calamitous Jens Munk expedition of the early 1600s, which lost sixty-one men out of sixty-four, almost certainly because the sailors ate uncooked polar-bear meat infected with trichinosis. The Munk catastrophe, reprised in Chapter 2, suggests a new hypothesis. While visiting Beechey Island, contemporary voyagers have sometimes been driven off by polar bears, choosing to withdraw rather than shoot the glorious creatures. In the same situation, how would Franklin’s men have responded? Undercooked polar-bear meat, unevenly distributed among officers and crew, might well lead to lopsided fatality statistics.
In the mid-1990s, archaeologist Margaret Bertulli and physical anthropologist Anne Keenleyside investigated a grisly discovery in Erebus Bay on the west coast of King William Island. They catalogued more than two hundred identifiable artifacts—nails, buttons, combs, clay pipes, wire gauze from snow goggles—and analyzed more than four hundred bones, the remains of at least eight men. They found high lead levels, supporting Beattie’s hypothesis of lead poisoning. Also, using an electron microscope, they discovered cut marks on ninety-two bones—impressions easily distinguished from the marks of animal teeth or stone tools. They occurred “in a pattern consistent with intentional disarticulation.” In short, the survivors had dismembered bodies and carved away flesh.
This forensic examination, as British author Roland Huntford observed in The New York Times Book Review, proved beyond doubt that starvation reduced the Franklin expedition to cannibalism and “vindicates Dr. John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who, through contact with the Eskimos in 1854, uncovered the first traces of the expedition, including reports of cannibalism. He has been reviled, or ignored, for his pains by apologists for Franklin ever since.”
Today’s Royal Navy, represented by historian Andrew Lambert, has finally acknowledged the overwhelming evidence of cannibalism. Lambert begins his 2009 biography of Franklin with a prologue vividly describing how sailors from the Erebus and Terror “began butchering and eating their comrades.”
But pass on. The Erebus turned up some distance to the south of where, supposedly, Franklin’s men abandoned the ship. And that brings us to David C. Woodman, who in 1991 challenged the standard reconstruction with Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony. Woodman created an alternative scenario, which now stands corroborated in many particulars, by sifting through Inuit accounts as gathered by explorers.
Woodman drew mainly on the work of five of them. John Rae interviewed numerous Inuit, among them In-nook-poo-zhe-jook, in 1854. He reported what he had learned, including the cannibalism, and indicated where the disaster unfolded. Later that decade, dispatched to King William Island by Lady Franklin, Leopold McClintock found skeletons, relics and the Victory Point record.
In the late 1860s, with the help of Ebierbing and Tookoolito, those outstanding Inuit translators, Charles Francis Hall gathered detailed accounts, including reports that a ship had sunk near an island off the west coast of Adelaide Peninsula. (This was Erebus.) In 1878–1880, on that same peninsula, Frederick Schwatka conducted interviews and found skeletons in an area he named “Starvation Cove.” While traversing the Northwest Passage by dogsled in 1921–1924, Rasmussen was able to add more detail because he spoke fluent Kalaallisut, which is closely related to Inuktitut.
Without the papers, journals and published books of these explorers, crucial accounts would never have survived in the detail that makes them so vivid a
nd utterly convincing. After analyzing the Inuit testimony, Woodman argued that the Victoria Point document found during McClintock’s expedition indicated only what the surviving sailors intended to do, not what they did.
Thanks to the finding of Erebus and Terror, we can see that Woodman was essentially correct. He suggested that in 1848, with Franklin dead, Captain Francis Crozier set out with the bulk of the remaining men to hunt near the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River, almost 1,500 kilometres away. Virtually all these men returned to the ice-locked ships, however. One vessel—it could only have been the Terror—may have sunk quickly with many sailors on board, trapped, unable to escape. About this we will know more soon enough.
The other ship (Erebus) was carried south by ice to Wilmot and Crampton Bay, an area known to the Inuit as Ootjoolik. Woodman suggested that a large group of sailors abandoned that vessel in 1851, while it drifted south in the ice. Some Inuit hunters met this party of men, weak and starving, slogging south along the west coast of King William Island. These were the men In-nook-poo-zhe-jook described to John Rae. A few sailors—probably four, according to Puhtoorak—remained aboard the ice-locked ship, probably until early 1852.
This is not the place for a forty-page analysis of Inuit oral history. But the discoveries of the ships do suggest turning a spotlight on a few key passages that explain why most Franklin aficionados believe archaeologists will discover at least one body aboard the Erebus. Not far from where Canadian searchers found the ship, Charles Francis Hall and Tookoolito interviewed a local woman named Koo-nik. She was the one who spoke of finding “a very large white man” dead on the floor inside a ship. In a letter to his sponsor, Henry Grinnell, Hall added details: “The party on getting aboard tried to find out if any one was there, and not seeing or hearing any one, began ransacking the ship. To get into the igloo (cabin), they knocked a hole through because it was locked. They found there a dead man, whose body was very large and heavy, his teeth very long. It took five men to lift this giant Kabloona [Qallunaat or white man]. He was left where they found him. One place in the ship, where a great many things were found, was very dark; they had to find things there by feeling around. Guns were there and a great many very good buckets and boxes. On my asking if they saw anything to eat on board, the reply was there was meat and tood-noo [caribou fat] in cans, the meat fat and like pemmican. The sails, rigging, and boats—everything about the ship—was in complete order.”
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Page 31