Throughout June and July Parry waited impatiently for the ice to melt. The ships were floating on water by mid-July, but still the bay was blocked by a barrier of ice that stretched across its mouth. On the last day of the month a wind blew the ice apart, and the Hecla and Griper sailed to freedom. They had been trapped for 11 months, there were only a few weeks left of the navigable season and neither ship had coal or provisions to last a second winter. In these circumstances most captains would have fled for home, but Parry was so certain of success that he continued where he had left off. At the western end of Melville Island he sent an officer to climb one of its hills and see what he could see. The report was encouraging: there was land to the south-west, which might be the north coast of Canada – it was in fact an island, Banks Island – and the intervening seaway was a potential North-West Passage but one so crammed with bergs that no ship had a chance this late in the season and it would probably be unnavigable at any time of the year. Still Parry did not give up. He went south, to examine the inlets he had passed on his way to Melville Island, but they were blocked by ice. It was too late to explore further. With the sea coagulating behind him, he fled down Lancaster Sound, reached Baffin Bay in mid-August and was back home by 31 October.
For his record-breaking voyage Parry was promoted to commander and showered with honours. The adulation was justified: no Arctic captain in recent years had done half as well or shown a smidgen of his resource, let alone brought off the feat of wintering at such cold latitudes. Above all, he had brought every single one of his men home alive.
As a reward, Parry was put in charge of two further expeditions in search of the North-West Passage. Bearing in mind the difficulties he had faced at Melville Island, he thought it prudent to try a different avenue. Thus, his first voyage, between 1821 and 1823, was to Foxe Basin, north of Hudson Bay. For his command ship Parry chose the Fury, while his old vessel, the Hecla, was given to a boisterous young lieutenant named George Lyon. Having proved how easy it was to winter in the Arctic, Parry had no qualms about spending two years in the ice: it was just a matter of taking extra food and fuel, piping the heat more efficiently round the ships and taking care not to become trapped in the ice – which would be far less of a hazard in the warmer, more southerly waters of Foxe Basin.
Their first winter passed uneventfully, and in the summer of 1822 they found what they were looking for almost immediately. That August they discovered a strait leading from the north-west corner of Foxe Basin. Unfortunately it was frozen, but beyond lay an expanse of open sea from which came a strong, eastward-flowing current. Parry waited optimistically for the ice to clear, but it remained solid. As they settled in for a second winter, he became despondent. ‘Whatever the last summer’s navigation had added to our geographical knowledge of the eastern coast of America, and its adjacent lands, very little had in reality been effected in furtherance of the North-West Passage. Even the actual discovery of the desired outlet into the Polar Sea, had been of no practical benefit in the prosecution of our enterprise; for we had only discovered this channel to find it impassable, and to see the barriers of nature closed against us, to the utmost limit of the navigable season.’ Nevertheless, it was possible that next season might be better; and if it was, the newly named Fury and Hecla Strait was certainly worth investigating.
The summer of 1823, however, was no better than the previous one. Fury and Hecla Strait was still iced up and, worryingly, some of the crew were beginning to show signs of scurvy despite being fed the hothouse salads of mustard-and-cress. Parry did not understand how this could be, but when the first man died on 9 August 1823 he gave up trying to understand and sailed home before there were any more casualties.
As far as the North-West Passage went, the voyage was, in Parry’s words, ‘a matter of extreme disappointment’. In other ways, however, it had been a success. A group of local Inuit had camped by the ships for several months, enabling the officers to learn much about their lifestyle. Parry was slightly standoffish, appreciating their mapmaking skills, disliking their dog sledges, and remarking that on a basic level they were almost as good as white folk. Lyon, on the other hand, was an enthusiastic researcher. He ate their unfamiliar food – the half-digested contents of a deer’s stomach, he recorded manfully, tasted ‘as near as I could judge a mixture of sorrel and radish leaves’ – he played with their children, slept in their huts, allowed himself to be tattooed, witnessed a shaman’s festival, attended their parties and participated diligently in their day-to-day activities. When the Hecla raised anchor, two pregnant women waved him goodbye.
Usually when an Arctic expedition published its scientific appendices people could expect long and tedious tables of temperatures, tides, the motion of a pendulum and the appearance of the sky. In this case, unintentionally, Parry and Lyon had compiled a small gem of anthropological research. The manner in which the material had been gathered left a lot to be desired – and a lot more to the imagination; the words ‘misbehaviour’ and ‘disgrace’ were bruited in public – but it remained a genuine, first-hand account of the Inuit that would not be bettered for 40 years. John Barrow, however, was not concerned with the Inuit: his business was the North-West Passage. This time he welcomed Parry with palpable coolness.
Following his failure at Foxe Basin, Parry returned with the Fury and the Hecla to Lancaster Sound in 1824. After his first voyage he had warned Barrow that the chances of success in this direction were slim: ‘I knew the difficulties of the whole accomplishment of the North-West Passage too well to make light of them ... The success we met with is to be attributed, under Providence, to the concurrence of many favourable circumstances.’ But, not wishing to disappoint his employer, he made a half-hearted stab at Prince Regent Inlet, one of the southern channels he had passed en route to Melville Island. It was a failure. After a few score miles the Fury was caught by the ice and very nearly sank. Parry had to abandon the ship and most of its stores at a spot he named Fury Beach before limping home in the Hecla. ‘The only real cause for wonder is our long exemption from such a catastrophe,’ he wrote. Barrow’s welcome was frostier than the last time. He let Parry stew for three years before calling on his services again. This time a less delicate task was to hand: Parry was to reach the North Pole.
TOP Richard and John Lander travel in rare style down the Niger, 1830.
ABOVE Timbuctoo, as drawn by René Caillié, 1828.
TOP An Inuit settlement: John Ross’s Arctic voyage of 1829–33.
ABOVE James Clark Ross claims Antarctica’s Possession Island for Britain, 1841.
OPPOSITE The note found at Victory Point by Franklin searchers in 1859.
ABOVE Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills after their 1860–1 crossing of Australia.
OPPOSITE Samuel Baker, big-game hunter and explorer of the Nile. (1864–5).
OPPOSITE The apparition that greeted Edward Whymper following the Matterhorn disaster, 1865.
TOP Charles Francis Hall’s winter funeral, 1872.
ABOVE George Tyson’s separation from the Polaris, 1872.
TOP The wreck of the Hansa, 1869.
ABOVE David Livingstone surprised by a lion. (1858–64).
The idea was Parry’s, but the more Barrow thought about it the more attractive it seemed. The Arctic pack was as flat as a billiard table, if one was to go by the 1773 report of Lieutenant Constantine Phipps, who had sailed to its edge and seen ‘one continued plain of smooth unbroken ice, broken only by the horizon’. Compared to the North-West Passage, the Pole was a relatively simple affair, well within Parry’s capabilities. All he had to do was reach the pack and walk north. Just in case the North Pole should be water instead of ice, he was instructed to take a couple of boats with him.
Parry reached Spitsbergen aboard the Hecla on 14 May, and ten days later the ship was nudging the pack. The boats were offloaded, along with Parry’s secret weapon: eight reindeer that he had collected from Norway on the way north. The two boats were equipped with a remov
able framework of wheels, four reindeers were harnessed to each, and the order was given to go. Axledeep in snow, the boats went nowhere. ‘Picturesque in the extreme,’ chortled one officer. Parry slid east to Spitsbergen, charted a bit of unknown coast, then came back to the pack, this time with heavy sledges from whose prows hung leather traces. By these means his boats would be man-hauled to the Pole.
The pack was nothing like Phipps had described it. Five men to a boat, dragging 260 pounds per person, they traversed ridges, hummocks and pans of water, Parry and two other officers leading the way. Sometimes the snow was so deep that they sank to their knees, and often the sun was so bright that they became snowblind. Usually it was hot – so much so that the tar oozed from their boats – but frequently it rained. At night they turned the boats upside down and sheltered beneath them, smoking heavily to raise the temperature. When the rain fell, they waded hip-deep through basins of water; when it did not, they hopped uncomfortably over dried lakes covered in sharp, green shards that they nicknamed ‘penknives’ for the ease with which they cut through their boots. Worst of all were the leads, strips of open water that necessitated unloading the sledges, launching the boats, rowing a few strokes, then reassembling everything for a haul that might last only a few minutes before they reached another lead and had to repeat the performance all over again.
All this they might have withstood, believing that the North Pole was within their grasp, were it not for Parry’s chronometer and sextant. These two instruments were their bane and downfall: on 20 July they showed that they were five miles further north than they had been on the 17th. Yet the men had travelled a good 12 miles over the last three days. On 26 July the instruments told a worse tale: they were only one mile further north than on the 21st and had lost three miles in the last four days. The pack was drifting south and, no matter how hard they tried, Parry’s men could not beat it. That day they came to a halt. Parry ordered a 24-hour rest, then took them back to the Hecla.
When Parry presented his journal to the Admiralty, Barrow’s disappointment could not have been more complete. His favourite son had failed to find the Pole and had produced an appendix so meagre that it had to be bulked out with a section labelled ‘INSECT’ (one fly, dead when found). Parry’s reputation was too great for him to be sacked, but he was never sent on another Arctic voyage. Instead he was shunted sideways to the position of Hydrographer to the Royal Navy, a post for which he had no qualifications whatsoever.
He left behind him an exemplary record of Arctic exploration. No other man of his generation had done as much. His furthest west in 1819 via Melville Island would not be beaten for decades, and it was 1875 before George Nares outstripped his furthest north. What he had done was outstanding, given the equipment available to him. When he died on 8 July 1855, The Times lauded him in heroic terms: ‘No successor on the path of Arctic exploration has yet snatched the chaplet from the brow of this great navigator. Parry is still the champion of the North!’
ACROSS CANADA’S BADLANDS
John Franklin (1818–25)
When Edward Parry sailed in 1821 on his second attempt at the North-West Passage, he was not the only Briton in the field. Determined to crack this irritating geographical nut, Sir John Barrow had sent another expedition, under Lieutenant John Franklin, to investigate Canada’s northern coastline. The region was virtually terra incognita: Western explorers had visited the mouths of the Mackenzie River and the Coppermine River, 500 miles to the east, but everything between these two points was a mystery. What was known, however, was that both the Mackenzie and the Coppermine flowed into open seas. It was reasonable to suppose that these seas were connected; and if that was the case, they might well extend on either side to form a channel running from Bering Strait in the west to an as yet undiscovered point in the east. Here, in other words, was the underbelly of the North-West Passage. Franklin’s orders were to drag a couple of sturdy boats overland to the Coppermine and thence sail west from its mouth to the Mackenzie or – should he so desire – sail east. If he went west, he could chart the coast for unexpected promontories and peninsulas; if he went east, and if Parry’s voyage to Foxe Basin was as successful as Barrow expected it to be, there was a good chance that the two expeditions might meet. Either way, Franklin would provide vital information as to the Passage’s viability.
Barrow’s plan could not be faulted in geographical terms. When it came to personnel and organization, however, it left a lot to be desired. Franklin was a brave, extremely charming officer with much naval experience: he had circumnavigated Australia with Matthew Flinders in 1800, had fought in the battles of Trafalgar and New Orleans and had, when Ross and Parry went into Baffin Bay, been second-in-command of a failed, ancillary expedition to the North Pole, from whose gale-ridden pack he had returned with tales of his ship being heeled over so hard that its bell rang. He was religious, carrying a 12-point checklist whose first catechism was, ‘Have I this day walked with God?’ Against this, he was overweight and unfit, with a weak heart and poor circulation. He could not hunt, canoe or trek, nor did he know anything about overland travel. Three meals a day were a must; he could not move without tea; and, in the words of one contemporary, he could not cover more than eight miles a day without being carried. By the standards of his time and calling he was peculiarly sensitive: he trembled whenever a man had to be flogged, and disliked bloodshed to the point of not killing mosquitoes – he waved them away, saying that there was room enough in the world for him and them. In short, a very pleasant man but a puzzling choice of leader for what would undoubtedly be a long and tiring journey. Accompanying him were two midshipmen, George Back and Robert Hood, who had sailed on the abortive 1818 North Pole expedition; a Royal Marine surgeon, Dr John Richardson, who came as second-in-command and naturalist despite never having been on an expedition before and having, as he confessed, very little knowledge of natural history; and, finally, an ordinary seaman named John Hepburn.
Barrow’s idea was that Franklin’s party would sail to the Orkney Islands, where they would collect a group of hardy boatmen before proceeding to Hudson Bay. From there they would row and carry two boats (to be acquired in Canada) many hundreds of miles to the mouth of the Coppermine, travelling via Cumberland House (a depot on the Saskatchewan River), Fort Chipewayan on Lake Athabasca, and the Great Slave Lake. It would be a strong party but a small one, capable of living off the area’s resources. Whatever food they needed could be supplied by either the Hudson’s Bay Company or the North-West Company – two fur-trading concerns whose reach extended across northern Canada – and to assist them in the long haul they could hire local voyageurs, the mixed-race guides-cum-porters who were the backbone of all journeys into the hinterland. The flaws in the plan soon became apparent. When Franklin reached the Orkneys only four men were willing to enlist, and then for only as far as Fort Chipewayan. On landing at York Factory in Hudson’s Bay, he found the two fur companies in a state of such mutual antipathy – they had recently been at war – that he had great difficulty obtaining the boats and provisions he needed even for the first stages of the journey. The best voyageurs did not want to join the expedition – they didn’t know the country, were frightened of the Indians, didn’t like the sea, and thought the prospect too hazardous – so he had to hire whatever left-overs were available, along with their wives and dependants. The lean group of fast-moving men that Barrow had envisaged was soon a cumbersome rabble of more than 20. Even in a good year it would have been difficult to feed such a swollen party without prior arrangement, but 1820 was a lean one. The deer on which the region’s inhabitants depended had been scarce, and there was insufficient game to keep the Britons alive, let alone to make the pemmican (a mixture of ground meat and fat) that they required. The best Franklin could elicit was the promise of Indian hunters to shoot whatever wildlife was foolish enough to show itself.
For the British tenderfoots, the journey through Canada’s pine forests from York Factory to Cumberland House and then to
Fort Chipewayan was a nightmare. Their one supply-laden boat (a second had been promised) was too heavy and half of its contents had to be dumped. The weather was so cold that mercury in their thermometers froze, as did their tea seconds after it had been poured. They had no tents, so slept in the open, counting themselves lucky if an insulating layer of snow covered their fur blankets. When they donned snowshoes Midshipman Hood – a shy, romantic type, who painted their surroundings with near-photographic clarity – found the journey agonizing: ‘The sufferer feels his frame crushed by unaccountable pressure; he drags a galling and stubborn weight at his feet, and his track is marked with blood ... When he arises from sleep, half his body seems dead, till quickened into feeling by the irritation of his sores.’
They left Fort Chipewayan on 18 July 1820 and were at Fort Providence on the Great Slave Lake ten days later. Here they met an Indian chief named Akaitcho, who understood perfectly the idea of the North-West Passage (perspicaciously he asked why, if it was so important, it had not already been discovered) and promised to supply Franklin for as long as he could. However, his men would not venture into Inuit territory because they had recently fought a battle on the Coppermine at a place called Bloody Falls, an experience so horrible to both sides that neither wished to revisit the spot. Franklin tried to charm his way through the impasse, but Akaitcho was adamant: his men would see them to within a few miles of Bloody Falls, but thereafter they would be on their own; he would wait at Fort Providence until they returned.
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