With his last pieces of gold and silver, which he had concealed in a money belt, he bought an ass and crossed the Atlas Mountains into Morocco. Still he was not safe, for the southern reaches of Morocco were as lawless as the Sahara, and even in the north a Christian ventured at his peril. He bluffed his way forward as a healer, dispensing magic charms wherever he stopped. (Prudently, he warned the recipients that his tokens would not become effective for 20 days, which he guessed would give him time to get out of range.) He reached Fez on 12 August and, on being informed that the French consul was in Tangiers, trudged the extra 100 miles to the Mediterranean.
On 7 September, penniless, filthy, bedraggled and sunburned, he knocked on the consul’s door. ‘I am a Frenchman,’ he said. ‘I have been to Timbuctoo.’ He was told that the consul was dead. So limited at that time was France’s influence in the Maghreb (it would become greater very shortly) that it took three days of sleeping in doorways, skulking outside the consulate and being hounded as a beggar before Caillié was finally permitted access. He slunk in under cover of darkness, and for two weeks luxuriated in comforts he had not seen for three years: sheets, pillows and a mattress. ‘After returning thanks to Almighty God,’ he wrote, ‘I lay down upon a good bed, rejoicing in my escape from the society of men debased by ignorance and fanaticism.’ (An ungrateful return for those he had duped into helping him.) ‘It would be difficult to describe my sensations on casting off for ever my Arab costume.’ On 27 September he donned a new disguise, that of a sailor, and was collected by a French sloop from Cadiz. Ten days later he was at Toulon, from where a short train journey took him to the capital.
The Geographical Society of Paris honoured its commitment to the cent. Caillée was awarded the promised 10,000 francs for finding Timbuctoo and was given a 6,000-franc pension as well. King Charles X of France, soon to be deposed, made him a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. With these awards, Caillié looked forward to many years of prosperity, fame and comfort. His retirement, however, was marred by virulent attacks from the British, who didn’t believe he had been to Timbuctoo and that even if he had, had done so in an undignified manner with possibly fraudulent intent. How demeaning to go dressed as an Arab! How dishonourable to pretend to be a Muslim! How were they to know that he hadn’t somehow acquired Laing’s journal and used it to fabricate his own? Sir John Barrow said his report was ‘an obvious imposture ... unworthy of notice’ and that ‘the ostentatious display which the French attach to the most trifling things is strongly manifested’. On thinking about it, he added that their self-congratulation displayed ‘a constantly recurring consciousness of the intellectual and physical superiority of our countrymen over theirs’. And even if Timbuctoo had been found, what did it matter, a Briton having got there first? ‘The French have contributed so little, of late years, to the improvement of geography,’ he wrote, ‘that when the mountain has brought forth the mouse, the tiny animal is so fondled and dandled, and crammed, that it swells out to the unwieldy size of an elephant.’ In a final blast of rudeness, he remarked that Caillié had done nothing to trace the course of the Niger, and for all the geographical information he had gathered he might as well have stayed at home.
It was overstepping the mark to attack Caillée for not tracing the Niger, since it had never been his goal. Moreover, he had produced considerably more information on the region than Laing, and had, indeed, made a number of inquiries from which it appeared that the Niger flowed, as it did, into the Gulf of Benin. ‘I must confess,’ wrote the poor man, ‘that these unjust attacks have affected me more deeply than all the hardships, fatigues and privations which I have encountered in the interior of Africa.’ On the proceeds of his fame he married, bought a farm in his hometown of Mauze – from where he was able to give his disabled sister the attention she needed – and was elected mayor. He still hankered after Africa, and was promised the consulship of Bambara, a gold-mining area near Timbuctoo, should the position by some miracle become available. He never got his wish: the area lay undisturbed by Europeans for almost a quarter of a century, the next white man to visit it being the German explorer Heinrich Barth who, between 1850 and 1855, made an epic 10,000-mile return journey across the Sahara from Tripoli to Timbuctoo. By that time, however, Caillié had long been a stranger to news from Africa. On 17 May 1838 he had died of tuberculosis.
FOUR WINTERS IN THE ARCTIC
John Ross (1829–33)
The cantankerous John Ross was not a man to forgive and forget. Foremost on his list of unforgettables was the embarrassing fiasco of 1818 when he had failed to identify Lancaster Sound as the door to the North-West Passage. In the same position on his list of unforgivables was the state of Barrow-inspired pariahdom into which he had been thrown. Throughout the 1820s he waited and plotted for a chance to reestablish his name. With his knowledge of Arctic conditions, and having examined the journals of subsequent expeditions, he came to two conclusions: first, that the ice was always weakest near the coast and that explorers should therefore be equipped with ships of shallow draft; secondly, that the ships most capable of exploiting cracks in the Arctic’s natural defences were those powered by steam. As a corollary, it was pointless sending heavily manned expeditions in large vessels when the job could be done more effectively by a small but sturdy steamer whose reduced crew could live off the region’s resources without recourse to the endless barrels of salt beef carried by ships hitherto.
He said all this to the Admiralty, but was dismissed as a crackpot. Steamships had already been experimented with and had proved useless. Besides, the very idea of steam ran counter to everything the Royal Navy prided itself upon, and in the opinion of one Admiralty lord ‘was calculated to strike a fatal blow to the naval supremacy of the Empire’. As for taking small ships instead of large, the proposition was ridiculous: it had been proved that large crews were indispensable in the Arctic because they had sometimes to drag ships through the ice and always to saw them into a harbour; these men had to be fed somehow, and only the hold of a large ship could contain the provisions they needed. With this circular argument, the Admiralty invited Ross to take his ideas elsewhere.
Ross did so. Approaching a number of would-be sponsors, he found satisfaction in Felix Booth, a gin magnate who opened his wallet in 1829 for an expedition to the North-West Passage. Eighteen thousand pounds later – Booth had contemplated something in the order of ten – Ross owned the Victory, a 150-ton, paddle-driven steam packet that had once delivered mail between Liverpool and the Isle of Man but was now strengthened for Arctic service and given an experimental engine by the firm of Braithwaite and Erickson, amongst whose novelties was a set of bellows to replace the conventional funnel. He had, too, an ex-whaler, the John, that was to follow the Victory to Baffin Bay carrying coal and food, plus a tender, the Kreusenstern, donated by a reluctant Admiralty. He had a crew of nine – one of them being his nephew, James Clark Ross – and food and fuel to keep them alive for 1,000 days. He also had a small library of reference books, plus an arsenal of scientific instruments that would have put a larger ship to shame – 12 thermometers, six chronometers, five sextants, four barometers, two dipping needles and numerous telescopes, theodolites and compasses.
So colourful was Ross’s publicity that a visit to Deptford became a part of the London season. Among the tourists was Ross’s old second-in-command, W. E. Parry, who was impressed by what he called ‘a bold, public-spirited undertaking’. He had doubts, though, about the gadgetry: ‘There is, in the whole thing, rather too much that is new and untried; and this is certainly not the kind of service on which novelties of that sort first ought to be tried.’
When the Victory left on 23 May 1829 it immediately broke down: the boilers leaked, Braithwaite and Erickson’s patented bellows did not work, nuts and bolts flew off in all directions. Cursing his ‘wretched and discreditable machinery’, Ross steamed north at the pitiful rate of three knots to Galloway, where they took aboard a bullock, a man fell into the cogs – Ross ha
d to amputate his arm – and the crew of the John mutinied. The Victory limped westward, with the Kreusenstern in tow and the steam apparatus proving so useless that they crossed the Atlantic mostly under sail.
The Victory entered Lancaster Sound on 6 August, and four days later was sailing down Prince Regent Inlet. At Fury Beach they plundered the mounds of food and equipment that Parry had offloaded in 1824 – wine, anchors, lime juice, bread, flour, sugar, sails, masts, coal: everything was still there and in perfect condition – and on 16 August were in uncharted waters. Ross named the mountainous land to their west Boothia Felix, after his sponsor, and its various capes and promontories were christened after members of either Ross’s or Booth’s family. By the end of September the Victory was anchored off Andrew Ross Island and its captain was feeling justifiably pleased with himself. He had travelled 300 miles further south than Parry, and it was only 280 miles to Franklin’s Point Turnagain on Canada’s northern coast. The weather had been mild, the sea had been clear, game had been plentiful, and if conditions were the same next year he was confident of success. The only thing that could stop him was Boothia Felix: if it was an island he would be able to skirt its southern tip and sail west to Point Turnagain; if it was a peninsula, however, he would be in a cul de sac. Still, if it was a cul de sac it had so far been a very profitable one in terms of geographical discovery, and if his way was blocked all he had to do was retrace his course to Lancaster Sound and thence to London, where he would receive the applause and recognition that (in his own mind) he so richly deserved.
In early October, when winter arrived, and with it the ice, Ross snugged the Victory into a bay he called Felix Harbour, prepared it for winter, and contemplated his coming glory. He did so with the satisfaction of having dumped Braithwaite and Erickson’s machinery on Andrew Ross Island. The thing took up two-thirds of the ship’s tonnage, occupied the constant attention of four men, and performed so badly – even when it worked, the Victory would have moved faster had it been towed by two rowing boats – that every one agreed it was a waste of time and space. ‘I believe there was now not one present who ever again wished to see its minutest fragment,’ Ross wrote.
He congratulated himself too soon. There would come a time when the steam engine – although he never admitted it – could have been useful. For Boothia Felix was a peninsula, and Ross’s optimism as to the conditions was misplaced. Perhaps one year in six the Arctic enjoyed a warm, relatively ice-free spell during which passages that were normally closed became open. Eighteen twenty-nine had been one of those years. Ross did not know it yet, but he had entered a meteorological trap from which he would find it hard to extricate himself without the aid of steam.
That first winter Ross followed the routines perfected by Parry, with the emphasis on constant activity. Alongside the usual tedious chores of cleaning, polishing, exercising and keeping watch, there were evening classes in reading, writing, navigation and maths. But Ross was a martial man at heart – he forswore anything so frivolous as plays – and the atmosphere, as his steward complained, was more like that of a man-of-war than a civilian expedition. The captain’s anger became increasingly evident as the months passed. He was by nature impatient and, while capable of keeping the crew alive and healthy over the winter, he did not like being trapped in Prince Regent Inlet. ‘The prison door was shut upon us,’ he wrote, as the sea froze around them. ‘It was indeed a dull prospect. Amid all its brilliancy, this land, the land of ice and snow, has been, and ever will be a dull, dreary, heart-sinking, monotonous waste, under the influence of which the very mind is paralysed, ceasing to care or think ... it is but the view of uniformity and silence and death ... where nothing moves and nothing changes, but all is for ever the same, cheerless, cold and still.’
If a relic in some ways, Ross was ahead of his time in others. Nobody knew what caused scurvy: it had been established that vegetables and lime juice kept it at bay, but the reason they did so remained a mystery. Decades before anyone else, Ross concluded that whatever magic ingredient was inside a lime must also be in a slab of fish or meat. His reasoning was that the Arctic diet was predominantly vegetable-free, yet the Inuit had existed for centuries without catching scurvy. It was his opinion that ‘the large use of oil and fats is the true secret of life in these frozen countries, and that the natives cannot subsist without it, becoming diseased and dying under a more meagre diet’. Here he was truly far-sighted: the idea that if one wished to survive in the Arctic one should eat as the Inuit did was logical (though it was not accepted for a long while); but the pinpointing of oils and fats was revolutionary. It would take more than a century for scientists to discover the three simple truths of scurvy: first, that it was caused by lack of Vitamin C; second, that while humans required a daily intake of Vitamin C to remain healthy, most other creatures produced it without need of supplement; and third, that it was stored at highest concentrations in fats and oils. By process of evolution, every Arctic fish or mammal was insulated against the cold by layers of fat or oily blubber. All one had to do, therefore, was to eat the wildlife. This Ross ordered his men to do, bidding them shoot the caribou that ranged over Boothia Felix and net the salmon that ran though Prince Regent Inlet.
The big event of that winter was the arrival of Inuit on 9 January. The two groups got on well, Ross presenting the Inuit with pieces of iron and ordering the ship’s carpenter to make a wooden leg for a man who had lost a limb to a polar bear. In return, the Inuit showed the white men the best fishing spots and where musk-oxen could be found. They also provided them with dog teams and sledges, and gave them instructions on their use. The Britons marvelled at the sledges, which ranged from the elaborate (lengths of bone cunningly bound with sinews) to the basic (a simple bowl of ice) to the edible (two frozen salmon wrapped in hides and joined by crosspieces of bone); but they found the dogs hard to handle. James Clark Ross picked up the theory fast enough, but frequently fell off, while the dogs disappeared over the snow, necessitating a bothersome slog of several miles to retrieve them. His uncle had no success at all, and after one occasion in which the dogs ran in separate directions, twirling him round and round like a top, he decided that man-hauled sledges were preferable.
The Inuit drew maps to aid Ross in his exploration. He was not grateful for their assistance: ‘[they] gave us no encouragement, assuring us that the land here was continuous from north to south within the whole range of their knowledge, and affirming positively that there was no passage where we fancied that one might possibly exist. But we did not think ourselves at all justified in taking this on their showing: they might not be correct.’ Unfortunately they were correct, as James Clark Ross realized that April when he took a number of sledge trips with Inuit guides and proved that Boothia Felix was most likely a peninsula. During his explorations he made a very important discovery. Crossing to the other side of Boothia, he surveyed a bleak, low-lying lump of terrain that bulged from the peninsula’s western coast and to which he gave the name King William Land. At Victory Point, his furthest west, he judged it was only 200 miles to Point Turnagain: in the distance he could see open water. The intervening channel was choked with ice – indeed, there were huge chunks of the stuff piled on the shore of King William Land, well above the high-tide mark, which puzzled him – but if a way could be found to that open water from either Prince Regent Inlet or the seas around Melville Island, then the quest for the North-West Passage was over.
By June 1830 preparations were underway for the Victory’s retreat, and in August the ship – still with the Kreusenstern – broke out of Felix Harbour. On the first day Ross sailed three miles before the ice brought him to a halt. By the end of September he had made another 300 yards, and on 2 November he was cutting his way into new winter quarters, Sheriff Harbour – which was at most two hours’ walk from Felix Harbour. That season was bad: Ross drank heavily and became more irritable and heavy-handed than usual. No Inuit appeared, and in temperatures of – 43° F they amused themselves by firi
ng balls of frozen mercury through a one-inch plank. The one bright spot came when James Clark Ross sledged over Boothia and found the North Magnetic Pole – the place, as he put it, which ‘Nature ... had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers’. At 70° 5’ 17” N, 96° 46’ 45” W, he raised the Union Jack and took possession of it and its surrounding territories ‘in the name of Great Britain and King William the Fourth’.
With the North Magnetic Pole under their belts, and the North-West Passage nearly so, the Rosses had made enormous contributions to geography. All they had to do now was sail home with their findings. But the summer of 1831 was as cold as that of 1830, and by October they were cutting a new harbour little more than four miles north of their old one. Ross cursed the monotony: ‘On no occasion, even when all was new, had there been much to interest; far less was there, now that we had been imprisoned to almost one spot.’ Again there were no Inuit, and the temperature was even colder than the previous winter – for a record 136 days the thermometer stuck below zero. They were unable to explore, to hunt or to fish. The dogs perished from licking a corrosive fluid that dribbled from the disconnected steam pipes, and the crew fell ill. One man died of tuberculosis, and Ross’s wounds, sustained in the Napoleonic Wars, opened up and began to bleed – one of the first signs of scurvy.
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