Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  This same story turns up again in 1879, when with the help of Ebierbing, Frederick Schwatka interviewed Puhtoorak, one of the Inuit who had ventured aboard the Erebus. Puhtoorak said that he found a dead white man in a large ship eight miles (thirteen kilometres) off Grant Point (near where Erebus was found). He reported that the Inuit found a small boat on the mainland, and many empty casks on the ship. “He also saw books on board the ship but did not take them.”

  Puhtoorak also said that before discovering the ship, while hunting along the shore with friends, he came across the tracks of four white men and “judged they were hunting for deer.” Later, he found the tracks of three men, and suggested “that the white men lived in this ship until the fall and then moved onto the mainland.” In so saying, he affirmed the earlier account by Koo-nik, who told Hall that Inuit had seen “the tracks of 3 men Kob-loo-nas & those of a dog with them.” Hall added that “there is no such thing as their being mistaken when they come across strange tracks & pronounce them not to be Innuits.”

  These accounts and others, taken together, suggest that four men were living aboard the Erebus when the ice carried it—some suggest they guided it—into Wilmot and Crampton Bay. One of them—a large man?—probably died on board. The other three left the ship in a bid to survive, and were never seen again. Inuit hunters boarded the ship. They made off with a few “treasures” but left a great many more.

  Over the next few years, Parks Canada archaeologists will almost certainly produce artifacts and possibly papers that will further clarify what happened to the Franklin expedition. Inuit testimony suggests that they will come across at least one body in Erebus, and perhaps several in Terror. If the past is any guide, these findings will generate conflicting interpretations. This much is certain: as experts thrash out an all-encompassing revision, they will draw heavily on Inuit testimony.

  EPILOGUE

  Dead Reckoning in the Northwest Passage

  A couple of experienced Arctic hands worried aloud that we might not be able to find the memorial plaque. But I knew that locating it would be no problem: we had precise coordinates and we were sailing in Rae Strait off the west coast of Boothia Peninsula. This was one of those Adventure Canada voyages I mentioned in the prologue. August 2012. Having entered the twenty-two-kilometre-wide strait from the north, as so often before, our captain augmented the electronic instruments of the Clipper Adventurer—later renamed the Sea Adventurer—by sending out two men in a Zodiac to take soundings by hand. He had then followed a zigzag course to take us within two kilometres of the coast.

  Now, as we roared towards shore in the scout-Zodiac, three men and one woman, I kept my worries to myself. What if boulders or a heavy swell prevented us from landing? What if a blizzard or a polar bear had destroyed the plaque? What if some destructive know-nothing had carried it off? Any of these contingencies would upset my plans. I wanted to establish the John Rae memorial as a viable destination.

  Louie Kamookak in 1999 at the remains of the cairn John Rae built in 1854.

  Courtesy of Cameron Treleaven.

  Also 1999: three adventurers—Cameron Treleaven, Louie Kamookak and Ken McGoogan—drink a toast to John Rae, William Ouligbuck and Thomas Mistegan.

  Courtesy of Cameron Treleaven.

  For years I had been urging people to stop obsessing over Sir John Franklin, that unfortunate Englishman, and instead to celebrate John Rae, intrepid champion of native peoples. In 1999, I had erected a plaque at this location with two fellow adventurers: antiquarian Cameron Treleaven and Inuk historian Louie Kamookak. After crossing Rae Strait in Kamookak’s twenty-foot boat, we had camped overnight in a dirt-floor tent. Next day, we had hiked for hours across bog and tundra before we found it: the remains of the cairn John Rae built in 1854.

  The day after we did so, we lugged the awkward plaque back to that rough circle of rocks. We planted the metal base nearby and heaped stones around it. We drank a toast to Rae and the two men who had reached this point with him, the Inuk William Ouligbuck and the Ojibway Thomas Mistegan. All this I described in the epilogue to my book Fatal Passage. Now, as we arrived by Zodiac thirteen years later, with four of us scanning the horizon, our sharp-eyed ornithologist said: “I see it. Twelve o’clock.” Sure enough, there it stood on the horizon: the Rae Strait memorial plaque. We drove the Zodiac onto the sand and swung onto the beach.

  We would not have been there at all if critics of adventure tourism had their way. They forget that for many who take an Adventure Canada–style voyage into the Arctic, the highlight is not history, archaeology or wildlife, but meeting the people. The Inuit are incredibly warm and welcoming, though they are clearly far from wealthy. A quick ramble through any Northern store reveals that they need the money tourism brings. How else could they afford those prices? The Inuit want and need visiting Qallunaat (white people) to buy their arts and crafts. In this respect, by making the Arctic more accessible, climate change is proving positive: it has increased adventure tourism, much of which is history-oriented.

  This development has given rise to serious reflection, but also to over-the-top commentary. In The Nation, after taking a single Arctic voyage in 2015, Roy Scranton wrote: “What the Franklin Expedition glorified was the war of Man—white men—against Nature. Franklin was indeed a tragic figure, and the tragic flaw he embodied was a will to power that knew no bounds. He was doomed because ‘nature’ proved, finally, unconquerable, but in honoring his memory, we were celebrating and carrying on the war he’d waged.”

  Ah, yes, the war of those awful white men against nature. That would be the same war that gave rise to the steam engine, airplanes, submarines, icebreakers, central heating, air-conditioning, smart phones and the Internet. Having shown no qualms about accepting a free northern experience, complete with airfare, Scranton declared such voyaging “an ethically dubious proposition.” He continued: “Built on and often glorifying a tradition of brutal, racialized colonial domination, adventure tourism restages the white-supremacist conquest of ‘nature’ and ‘natives’ as a carefully controlled consumer encounter with ‘pristine wilderness’ and ‘indigenous cultures.’”

  From nature we have moved to natives. But when Scranton writes of “brutal, racialized colonial domination,” surely he is thinking of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec, Mayan and Incan civilizations. He confuses poor old John Franklin, who had a terrible time finding indigenous folk when he needed them, with such conquistadors as Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, who did indeed wage “brutal, racialized” wars—though some of their victims were not themselves without sin. Still, let us admit that Franklin was no John Rae, who made a constant practice of learning from the native peoples, and who championed the Inuit against some of the most powerful people of his times.

  I would argue that adventure tourism, far from being part of the problem, can be part of the solution. Whether we like it or not, climate change is demanding adjustment and adaptation. In the Canadian Arctic, where an oil spill would wreak environmental havoc, the greatest threat is that of oil tankers sailing willy-nilly through the Passage. Better, I think, to have adventure tourism clogging those waters with small ships and friendly passengers (maximum, say, two hundred per vessel). Such an adaptation would not only help local economies flourish but strengthen Canada’s case for establishing environmental controls—and might teach neophytes that John Franklin was not the only explorer to venture north.

  In August 2012, at the John Rae site overlooking Rae Strait, we gathered eighty or ninety passengers around the plaque. We snapped photos and I said a few words about Rae and his travelling companions. Their discovery of this strait changed exploration history, ending a centuries-long search for a way through the Northwest Passage. From home I had brought three small flags, and these I wedged into the stones around the base of the plaque—one each representing Nunavut, Canada and Scotland.

  In Scotland, meanwhile, and in Britain generally, the struggle to gain recognition for Rae—and, by extension, the F
irst Peoples he championed—had been gaining momentum for years. In July 2004, Alistair Carmichael, the Scottish member of Parliament for Orkney, had introduced a motion urging the British Parliament to declare that the House “regrets that Dr. Rae was never awarded the public recognition that was his due.” The motion failed.

  Five years later, Carmichael tried again, urging Parliament to state formally that it “regrets that memorials to Sir John Franklin outside the Admiralty headquarters and inside Westminster Abbey still inaccurately describe Franklin as the first to discover the [Northwest] passage, and calls on the Ministry of Defence and the Abbey authorities to take the necessary steps to clarify the true position.” Again, no success.

  But four years later still, when Orcadians mounted a 2013 international conference to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Rae, they would also unveil a new statue of the explorer in Stromness. Its inscription, coined by man-of-letters Tom Muir, rightly hailed Rae as “Discoverer of the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage.” At the unveiling, Carmichael expressed confidence that similar wording would appear on a plaque soon to be installed at Westminster Abbey.

  But this was not to be. In a book called Finding Franklin, American scholar Russell Potter details how a retired geographer contrived to sabotage Carmichael’s campaign to gain proper recognition for Rae in the Abbey. In the past, William Barr has done valuable work as an editor and translator. But recently he had developed a fatuous argument to preclude properly recognizing John Rae. Barr suggested that when the explorer found the strait that bears his name, “there was still a substantial section of that particular route [north of Rae Strait] which was yet uncharted and unsailed”—and Rae had not after all found the final, final, final link. In fact, John Franklin himself had sailed directly past that particular stretch of coastline before getting trapped off King William Island. I demolished Barr’s argument in the Polar Record, in a rejoinder entitled “Defenders of Arctic Orthodoxy Turn Their Backs on Sir John Franklin.” In brief, they were suggesting that by sailing as far south as he did, Franklin had accomplished nothing.

  At Westminster Abbey, the author “reflected” on how John Rae had completed the work of John Franklin.

  Courtesy of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

  The ledger stone: John Rae / 1813–1893 / Arctic Explorer.

  Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

  But Barr remained fixated. That’s understandable: he had nothing else to offer. And his allies in England, staunch defenders to a person of Victorian orthodoxy, scurried around London to subvert Carmichael’s initiative. This was a particularly shameful episode in a tedious tradition of repudiation that dates back to the days of Dickens. As a result of these machinations, the Orcadian campaign failed to garner for John Rae the eight-foot-tall statue that he deserves, or even the promised plaque proclaiming his singular achievement. Instead, on September 30, 2014, a modest ledger stone was unveiled at Westminster Abbey at the base of the grandiose memorial to John Franklin. It reads simply: “John Rae, Arctic explorer.”

  Dozens of Orcadians came to London to attend the unveiling, and a few Canadians also turned up. Accorded the privilege of offering “a reflection” on the occasion, I spoke of how Rae had completed the work of Franklin and others. Orcadian musician Jennifer Wrigley then performed a dazzling original fiddle tune called “Air for Dr. John Rae,” and two Canadian cousins who share an ancestor with the explorer laid a wreath and flowers beside the new ledger stone.

  After the ceremony came Evensong in the Abbey, and then a reception at the Scottish Office in nearby Dover House—London-home base for Alistair Carmichael. As one woman put it, looking around at the reception, “This is an occasion we will never forget.” For me, it brought back our modest Arctic tribute of two years before, when in 2012 voyagers had gathered around the plaque overlooking Rae Strait. One of my Adventure Canada colleagues, Inuk culturalist Miqqusaaq Bernadette Dean, led two young Inuit women from Baffin Island in a song of celebration, and then stood aside while they marked the occasion with throat-singing. Another Inuk staffer, Jenna Anderson of Labrador, celebrated by doing a first-ever handstand at this location.

  Jenna Anderson, an Inuk from Labrador, celebrated our 2012 visit to the John Rae memorial site. The ruined cairn Rae built in 1854 is to the right of the plaque in this photo.

  Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

  After the photo-taking, I wedged the three flags, and also a small tin canister containing a note, into the stones at the base. And why wouldn’t we mark the occasion? We had demonstrated that this site is readily accessible to adventure travellers. We had honoured Rae and his companions at the location of their epochal achievement. While passengers drifted back to the Zodiacs, I remained at the memorial, not wanting to leave, gazing out over Rae Strait. A magic moment.

  And I found myself thinking of all those who had lost their lives while making this moment possible—of the scores who had died early in the quest with Henry Hudson and Jens Munk and James Knight, and then in the massacre of innocents at Bloody Falls. I thought of how, on his first overland expedition, John Franklin had lost more than half his party, and of still more men dying with Robert McClure and Elisha Kent Kane and then Franklin again in the ultimate Arctic catastrophe. I thought of Matonabbee hanging himself and of Mary Norton starving to death and of Albert One-Eye vanishing into a whirlpool on the Coppermine River.

  I thought, then, of those survivors who had carried on against all odds, of heroic figures like Rae, Ouligbuck and Mistegan, all written out of “official” history. I thought of Thanadelthur and Sakeouse and Tattannoeuck, neglected, virtually forgotten, and of Eenoolooapik, Tookoolito, Ebierbing and Minik, so often treated as footnotes. Looking out over the ice-free strait, I felt a need, suddenly, to write a fifth Arctic book—not a biography this time, but a wide-ranging work that would encompass the forgotten heroes, above all the First Peoples among them. In its rough contours, I envisioned an historical narrative that would steer between extremes, treating the history of exploration from a contemporary perspective, incorporating what we had learned in recent decades, and elaborating a more inclusive position than the one offered by “official history”—in short, a narrative of discovery for the twenty-first century. I wanted to tell the untold story of the Northwest Passage. Someone called my name. The last Zodiac was leaving. Was I coming? And with that, for the moment, the vision faded. Exhilarated, feeling almost high, I hurried down the sandy slope and swung into the Zodiac, eager to resume sailing through the final link in the Northwest Passage.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  At a raucous post-Christmas party some years ago, Margaret Atwood appeared out of nowhere and seized me by the shirt sleeve. “Come with me,” she said. “There’s someone I want you to meet.” She hauled me from a first crowded room into a second, where she introduced me to Matthew Swan, CEO of Adventure Canada (AC). “You two should talk,” she said, and vanished. A few weeks later, Matthew called and said that, seeing as how I had published three books about Arctic exploration, maybe I would like to sail as a resource person in the Northwest Passage. So I owe both Atwood and Swan a massive thank you. Since 2007, Sheena Fraser McGoogan and I have gone voyaging with AC at least once a year, and sometimes twice. As a result, I have met and learned from such outstanding figures as Latonia Hartery, Johnny Issaluk, John Houston, Marc St. Onge, Susie Evyagotailak, Mark Mallory, Tagak Curley, Pierre Richard and Susan Aglukark, among many others. That experience informs this work.

  Dead Reckoning is my eighth book with HarperCollins, and for that I thank my lucky stars. I can confirm that editor Patrick Crean is rightly renowned throughout the industry: he has an amazing eye and does not hesitate to put his finger on your sacred text and say: “Well, it’s your book . . . but this isn’t working.” And I owe a shout-out to the rest of the team, among them Leo MacDonald, Rob Firing, Colleen Simpson, Alan Jones, Noelle Zitzer, Michael Guy-Haddock, Cory Beatty, Stephanie Nuñez and Maria Golikova.
Copyeditor Angelika Glover did excellent work on this book (not hers but mine the occasional flouting of Chicago Manual conventions). And my agent, the legendary Beverley Slopen, has long since become a trusted friend and advisor.

  Over the past few years, while working on this book, I have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Access Copyright Foundation. For those, believe me, I am grateful. In Orkney, I have learned a great deal from historian Tom Muir, and benefitted from the kindness of Kathleen Ireland and Andrew Appleby, president of the John Rae Society. Among individuals who have contributed to this book, sometimes without knowing it, I think of John Geiger, Cameron Treleaven and Louie Kamookak, and must also single out Kenn Harper, Randall Osczevski, Andres Paredes, Dawn Huck, Fred McCoy and Lee Preston. I want to say hey to members of the Facebook group Remembering the Franklin Expedition, who frequently dazzle me with their arcane knowledge. On the home front, I owe sincere thanks to Carlin, Keriann, Sylwia, Travis, James and Veronica. Above all, I do hereby declare that without Sheena Fraser McGoogan, my life partner, first reader, sometime photographer and fellow traveller, this book would not exist—and that is the truth.