Captain Francis Crozier

by Michael Smith

  Ross turned and went back north, convinced the lost party would not be found down Peel Sound to the south.

  McClintock wrote that any attempt to force a ship down Peel Sound would lead to ‘almost inevitable destruction in consequence of it being choked up with heavy ice’. Significantly, McClintock would later change his mind about the chances of navigating Peel Sound.

  The search expedition was a shattering experience for Ross, a man more accustomed to triumphs and accolades during a glittering career. Six men died, others fell desperately ill from scurvy and by late 1849, a dejected Ross was back in England, never to return to the Arctic. He came home with the firm conviction that the search for the lost expedition should be conducted away from the ice-filled Peel Sound area. Instead, he urged the Admiralty to direct the search northwards around the region of Wellington Channel.

  It was a conviction that ignited ten years of frantic searches for the lost expedition, a massive effort involving about 50 ships and hundreds of men. Search parties combed thousands of miles of hazardous Arctic waterways and dragged sledges over countless acres of barren, frozen landscape in search of the 129 missing men from Erebus and Terror. Sometimes, rescue ships had to be sent in search of rescuers who had themselves become trapped in the ice.

  On the strength of Ross’ brief view down the ice-covered waters of Peel Sound though, they searched everywhere but in the right place.

  chapter twenty-one

  Last Man Standing?

  The ultimate fate of Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier is unknown and in all probability the precise date of his death will never be established. All that can be established for certain is that he led his party of 105 men to the shores of King William Island in April 1848 and embarked on a march towards the Great Fish River. No one survived.

  The rest of the tragic tale is a smattering of facts and a mountain of conjecture built up from a mixture of reliable and unreliable Eskimo stories and reasonable and unreasonable guesswork by an assortment of investigations in the 150 years since the disaster. The dead bodies from the expedition found scattered around the Arctic wilderness are outnumbered by the differing theories about what went wrong and how the lost men met their demise.

  It can safely be assumed that with all the crucial elements of endurance, death and mystery, the compelling saga is likely to sustain interest for many years to come. But none of the mysteries are as beguiling or puzzling as that surrounding Crozier’s final days.

  The conventional belief, based mainly on Eskimo testimonies, is that Crozier died after the terrible march to the Great Fish River in the summer of 1848. Others believe that he endured a fourth winter and lived until 1849. There is also the fascinating but farfetched legend that he survived for years, wandering the Arctic wastelands for up to a decade in search of a route out of the frozen maze.

  The Eskimos, whose oral statements are the only surviving accounts of the expedition, knew Crozier from previous expeditions and understood his rank as an esh-e-mu-tar-nar (junior officer). But in recounting events of 1848 onwards, the Eskimos correctly reported that Crozier had become esh-e-mu-ta (captain), which lends considerable credence to the native testimonies.

  However, the Eskimo accounts of events are not entirely reliable. The stories handed down were a frustrating and confusing mixture of fact and fiction, often second or third-hand accounts of events not actually witnessed by the storytellers themselves. While some accounts were undoubtedly true, other stories were exaggerations, untruths or simply muddled versions of local legend, where it was impossible to separate reality from invention. The truth remains far beyond our reach.

  Recent research by David Woodman has shed important new light on the original Eskimo stories. But even Woodman has declared it a ‘puzzle without the prospect of complete solution’. He has invoked the words of Lady Franklin, first written 150 years ago, to illustrate our helplessness in solving the mystery: ‘What secrets may be hidden within those wrecked or stranded ships we know not’, Jane Franklin wrote in the 1850s; ‘What may be buried in the graves of our unhappy countrymen or in caches not yet discovered we have yet to learn.’

  Some Eskimos told visiting white explorers, such as the American adventurer Charles Francis Hall, what they thought they wanted to hear and some may have embellished stories to gain favour. Hall, in particular, was invariably eager to accept the Eskimo stories as gospel.

  Others mixed up the dates and the different expeditions – John Ross’ 1829–33 voyage in Victory was often confused with the visit of Erebus and Terror fifteen years later – and some of the grains of truth were probably lost in translation.

  Even the names given to the white men have added to the confusion. Although Crozier was known as Aglooka, it has emerged that Aglooka was a common Eskimo name given to white explorers. Loosely translated, it means ‘one who takes long strides’ and among those known as Aglooka to the Eskimo were Parry, James Ross and Rae. Woodman’s book on the early Eskimo stories, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery, carries the interesting dedication: ‘For Aglooka, whoever he was.’

  One story picked up by Hall told how Crozier had fought a running battle with Indians on King William Island. While out hunting, Crozier was supposedly attacked by an Indian and suffered an ugly gash across his forehead from a lance. Crozier shot and killed the Indian and had to fight off another attack the following day. ‘It was after this fight that so many kobloonas [white men] froze and starved to death’, Hall recorded.1 There were, however, no known Indians on King William Island, and the incident may refer to a different band of Eskimos or simply involve an entirely different expedition to the region.

  Another theory, pieced together by Woodman, is that Crozier - survived the horrors of the 1848 march towards the mouth of the Great Fish River and somehow scrambled back to the abandoned hulks of Erebus and Terror with a handful of men. They were helped by visiting Eskimos and some of the men – including perhaps Crozier– survived until some time in 1849. According to these Eskimo accounts, Crozier died on board one of the trapped ships in 1849 and was buried ashore in Erebus Bay, about 30 miles (48 kilometres) south of Victory Point, where the main party had first landed in 1848. If true, Crozier was only 53 years old.

  Other anecdotes report that Crozier’s men were trying to reach Repulse Bay to the southeast, an area Crozier knew well from his days with Parry. But this contradicts the brief note Crozier left at Victory Point, which cited the Great Fish River as the party’s destination – unless Crozier had dispatched a splinter group to Repulse Bay in search of food.

  Another more fanciful theory is that Crozier and three others survived for years, wandering through the wilderness in search of food and rescue. The enticing possibility that Crozier had managed to live for years only emerged from Hall’s travels in the late 1860s, two decades after the ships vanished. McClintock, however, had returned from the King William Island area in 1859 convinced there were no survivors.

  Following McClintock’s visit, Hall spent years searching the high Arctic for clues to the fate of the expedition and interviewed some Eskimos with first-hand knowledge of events. In 1865, he met a group of Eskimos who told him an astonishing tale that four white men – among them Crozier – had survived for years and might still be alive. Hall’s diary recorded: ‘Four souls of Sir John Franklin’s expedition heard from – one of these F.R.M. Crozier! Three of these may yet be alive.’2

  Piles of bones from the expedition located on King William Island in the 1930s.

  According to the Eskimos, Crozier was the weakest of the four men because, as Hall noted, ‘Crozier was the only man that would not eat any of the meat of the koblunas (white men), as the others all did.’ The kindly Eskimos fed the men seal meat, though one died shortly after.

  After recovering, the three survivors used their guns to shoot birds and later departed for the estuary of the Great Fish River and what the Eskimos called Big Bay (Hudson’s Bay). They carried a small boat, which may have been one of the inflatable craft car
ried on Erebus and Terror. Aglooka (Crozier), the Eskimos said, ‘knew how to keep himself warm, how to live.’ The men were never seen again.

  In September 1869, Hall returned from the Arctic with his Eskimo stories and the improbable suggestion that a few men might still be alive an incredible 24 years after Erebus and Terror had departed from England. One of them, according to Hall’s account, was Crozier. Senior Arctic officers in London were consulted, and the faint prospect of finding survivors was flatly rejected.

  Sophy Cracroft, by now a worldly-wise spinster in her mid-fifties, dismissed the unlikely story as ‘a fearful working up of the slumbering past’.3

  Another story retrieved from Eskimo folklore tells of Crozier and another man being seen alive in the years between 1852 and 1858, apparently the last survivors of the 129 men who entered the Arctic in 1845. The intriguing aspect of this tale, recounted 100 years later by the explorer Farley Mowat, is that Crozier and his companion were reportedly seen in the vicinity of Baker Lake.

  Baker Lake lies about 250 miles (400 kilometres) due south of King William Island, hundreds of miles away from the Great Fish River, where, it was generally assumed, Crozier led his party in 1848. If correct, the assumption must be that the two men were heading in the direction of the trading posts along the western shores of Hudson’s Bay and not as generally assumed up the Great Fish River towards the Great Slave Lake. This in turn supports the story Hall brought back from the Arctic in the 1860s that Crozier was heading for the Big Bay (Hudson’s Bay).

  The mystery deepened further in the twentieth century. In 1948, a cairn was discovered by Mowat on the nearby Kazan River. The cairn, said Mowat, was not typically Eskimo and contained fragments of a wooden box that could not have been made by the Eskimos. Subsequent research has failed to establish who built the mysterious cairn, but it did not prevent Mowat from concluding that ‘the possibility remains that this mute monument was built by Crozier, before he vanished utterly.’4

  The answer to many of the puzzles may still exist somewhere in the frozen Arctic wastes. Apart from Crozier’s note found by Hobson at Victory Point in 1859, no official documents or records of the expedition have been discovered in 150 years of searching. In all probability, the ships’ records were scattered to the winds by scavenging animals or by Eskimo communities to whom paper was worthless.

  But Francis Crozier was a conventional, methodical and thoroughly professional naval officer with almost 40 years of seafaring experience behind him – a man who did things by the book. It is unthinkable that a meticulous character like Crozier did not maintain formal records of the expedition right up the last minute, or that the logs and journals were not stored somewhere for safekeeping.

  Perhaps he meant to retrieve them at a later date. Perhaps the records are still waiting to be unearthed.

  chapter twenty-two

  The Unsolved Mystery Endures

  What think you of the whaler now?

  What of the Esquimaux?

  A sled were better than a ship,

  To cruise through ice and snow

  Popular ballad, c.1850

  The hunt to locate the lost 129 souls from Erebus and Terror accelerated after the return of James Ross in 1849. In 1850 alone, no less than twelve ships were dispatched to the ice, including a private yacht and a schooner commanded by the redoubtable Sir John Ross, then in his seventy-third year. Over the following decade, dozens of ships and hundreds of men were sent to the Arctic in search of the missing men, including numerous private ventures.

  Initially, the search was conducted by the Admiralty, but before long, Jane Franklin became the driving force in the frantic hunt to find the lost party. She embarked on a feverish ten-year personal quest to find traces of the expedition and refused to give up the search for information even when the fate of the men was finally established. It became an obsessive crusade that captured the public imagination and created a perfect Victorian melodrama.

  Lady Franklin, a distraught figure who generated huge public sympathy, lobbied ministers, the Admiralty, influential men on the Arctic Council such as Ross and just about anyone who would listen. She took her pleas to Zachary Taylor, the new US president, and appealed to the Tsar of Russia to send search parties to the Siberian coast in case the ships had been wrecked in the Bering Strait.

  At her side, always, was the faithful Sophy Cracroft and among those offering sympathy and support was the now famous young poet, Jean Ingelow. Jane Franklin and Sophy took premises in Pall Mall, near to the Admiralty offices, to be close to the epicentre of events. Friends called it ‘The Battery’, on account of the bombardment of letters that emanated from Lady Franklin’s study.

  Lady Franklin raised thousands of pounds from private sources and helped persuade Henry Grinnell, the wealthy American philanthropist, to finance two expeditions. The family of Frederick Hornby, the mate from Terror, donated £130 to the quest.

  Jane Franklin also poured her own modest wealth into the venture, helping to outfit four different vessels from her own pocket. In the process, she further alienated her stepdaughter, Eleanor Franklin.

  Jane Franklin relentlessly pursued every faint possibility in the hope of finding clues to the disappearance. She manipulated public opinion by showering the press with emotional letters about the fate of the lost explorers and even made long trips to the distant ports of Hull and the Shetlands to urge whaling captains to keep a sharp look-out for the ships. On the Orkneys, Jane Franklin and Sophy sipped cherry brandy with Margaret, the elderly mother of John Rae.

  Her influence even extended into the upper reaches of the Admiralty. After years of steadfastly refusing help from the merchant fleet, she persuaded the Admiralty to drop its traditional objection and to appoint a commander from the whaling fleet to lead one of her privately financed expeditions. The captain, an old seadog called William Penny, named his ships Lady Franklin and Sophia, but they too came back empty handed.

  Jane Franklin asked all the search-expedition commanders to carry a letter to her husband and one note provided an indication of her regard for Crozier: ‘Next to you I think of dear Captain Crozier’, she wrote. ‘I trust you have never been forced to separate and that you have been a mutual comfort to each other.’1

  In 1850, Jane Franklin and Sophy Cracroft turned to the unorthodox world of spiritualism in the faint hope of uncovering clues to the lost expedition. Dabbling in the occult had become increasingly fashionable during the Victorian era and Jane and Sophy, despite firm religious beliefs, were ready to clutch at any straw. The women were approached by numerous mystics claiming to have knowledge of the expedition, including one who solemnly declared that Franklin was definitely alive. It would later be learnt that he had died at least three years earlier.

  The pair also made several visits to the well-known medium, Ellen Dawson and in 1850 held séances around the crystal ball of Lieutenant Morrison, another popular clairvoyant.

  But the most bizarre incident involved the dubious case of Louisa ‘Little Weesy’ Coppin, a dead Irish child. The daughter of Captain William Coppin, a prominent shipbuilder from Derry, ‘Weesy’ Coppin died in 1849 at the age of four. Soon after her death, the little girl reportedly ‘appeared’ to her family. In answer to questions she allegedly pointed to the precise location of Erebus and Terror in the Arctic. Ann Coppin, the seven-year-old sister of ‘Weesy’, drew a picture of the scene, and added key words such as ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’, ‘Sir John Franklin’, ‘Victory Point on King William Island’ and ‘Victoria Channel’.2

  Captain Coppin visited Lady Jane and Sophy, and gave them little Ann’s drawing of his deceased-daughter’s vision. In their desperation for news, Jane and Sophy apparently took the eerie claims seriously.

  The oddity is that the area indicated by ‘Weesy’ Coppin was precisely where the ships were initially held in the ice and Victoria Channel, now called Victoria Strait, had not been named at this stage. In addition, the principal thrust of the navy’s search at the time w
as still being directed many miles to the north in Wellington Channel.

  However, Captain Coppin had his own agenda. He was a dedicated disciple of the supernatural and had become captivated by the disappearance of the expedition. He wanted to get involved in the search in some way or other and at one point offered to finance a further relief expedition. He secured the backing of Liverpool’s mayor, Sir John Bent, to petition the Admiralty to send ships in the direction identified by the ghostly visions of his dead child. The pleas were politely ignored at the Admiralty, but the mystery of ‘Little Weesy’s’ revelations refused to go away.

  Sophy Cracroft promised to return the child’s sketch to Coppin after Lady Franklin’s death, but for some reason never did. While accounts of frequent visits of Jane and Sophy to various clairvoyants in the 1850s have survived in the archives, virtually all traces of the ‘Little Weesy’ Coppin affair have been lost.

  The episode only came to light in 1889, many years after Jane Franklin’s death. J. Henry Skewes, an eccentric vicar from Liverpool, published the strange tale in an obscure book that claimed to reveal the true secret of how Franklin’s fate was uncovered. The assumption is that Sophy Cracroft, who was more profoundly religious than Jane Franklin, destroyed the document showing the vision of ‘Little Weesy’. It appears that Sophy – loyal to the end – deliberately censored the Franklin family papers to preserve Jane’s credibility.

  John Franklin, an evangelical man, would certainly not have approved of his wife’s dalliance with the spiritual world, and Sophy Cracroft, with her finely tuned sense of public opinion, clearly felt that Lady Franklin’s saintly image would have been tarnished by the affair. However, the ‘Little Weesy’ episode merely added to the general confusion surrounding the search for Erebus and Terror.