The Arctic Council, having assumed day-to-day responsibility for the relief mission by 1848, had decided that the only sensible option was to conduct the search along the route laid down by Franklin’s explicit instructions. This pointed only to the Barrow Strait at the western end of Lancaster Sound or the alternative route to the north up Wellington Channel. But when Ross returned from the Barrow Strait and Peel Sound with reports of impenetrable ice to the south, the focus of the search was directed to Wellington Channel.
Some believed that the ships had sailed up Wellington Channel and were freely sailing in the ‘Open Polar Sea’, waiting for a break in the ice to complete the journey. No one considered that Peel Sound, where the ships had gone in the summer of 1847, might have occasional years of open waterways. Nor would anyone listen to the clarion calls of Dr King, who still insisted that rescue should be sent from the south towards King William Island by way of the Great Fish River.
The confusion also deepened after the first traces of the lost party were found on Beechey Island in 1850, including a heap of meat tins and the three gravestones that hinted at disaster on a far larger scale. Crucially, the discoveries at Beechey Island gave no clues as to the direction the ships had sailed.
Beechey Island lies at a crossroads in the Arctic archipelago and offered four choices of route for the search parties. From this vicinity, it is possible to sail north into Wellington Channel, south into Peel Sound or Prince Regent Inlet, east into Lancaster Sound or west into Barrow Strait.
There was one small clue to the expedition on Beechey island. A mysterious white board was found with a hand painted on it. The index finger of the hand pointed to an unknown destination. But the board had been knocked over by strong winds and it was impossible to know which way the enigmatic finger should have pointed.
More expeditions were sent north in 1850 and 1851, including a US-led foray under Edwin de Haven and a second voyage financed by Lady Franklin. In 1850, the Irish-born Robert McClure in the Investigator and Richard Collinson in Enterprise led their ships into the Bering Strait to approach the area from the west. In 1852, the cantankerous veteran, Sir Edward Belcher, took five ships into Lancaster Sound with orders to search north of Beechey Island. He returned two years later with only one vessel.
In contrast to Belcher’s misadventure, McClure’s voyage in the Investigator was truly memorable. At one point, he sailed to within 60 miles (96 kilometres) of Melville Island, first reached from the east by Parry 30 years earlier. From the crow’s-nest, open sea could be seen 20 miles (32 kilometres) away and, for the first time a passage across the roof of the Canadian mainland was feasible. But the ice in the region was relentless and Investigator was seized and later abandoned.
After an appalling three-year ordeal of starvation and scurvy, McClure’s men trudged the last miles by foot. In 1853, they became the first men to traverse the North West Passage, when they linked up with parties from Belcher’s expedition, who had travelled from the east. McClure finally returned to Britain in 1854 and was knighted for his outstanding achievements.
However, 1854 was a bad year for Lady Franklin. On 12 January, the Admiralty announced that the 129 men from Erebus and Terror were to be removed from the navy’s books unless news of their survival arrived before the end of March. It was the first official declaration that the men, now gone for almost nine years, were dead.
A devastated Jane Franklin refused to accept the inevitable. She declined a naval-widow’s pension and refused to wear the traditional black of a mourning widow. She called the Admiralty notice a ‘knell of departed hopes’ and lamented the ‘abandonment of those unhappy men to their fate’.
The Admiralty’s decision to remove the men from the navy payroll, Lady Franklin cried, was ‘presumptuous in the sight of God, as it will be felt to be indecorous, not to say indecent … in the eyes of man.’3 But she had misread the atmosphere at the Admiralty and in the country. After weary years of fruitless search, the Admiralty had consigned the men from Erebus and Terror to history and the public, too, was tired of the North West Passage saga. One newspaper proclaimed in 1854 that the ‘mania of Arctic exploration has lasted long enough’.
Besides, there were more pressing matters. On 28 March 1854, just three days before the Admiralty’s deadline for locating the lost expedition, the Crimean War between Britain and Russia broke out. The navy fleet, which had spent almost 40 years idle or deployed in sideshows like Arctic exploration, was quickly reassembled for its primary purpose of war. The Admiralty never sent another ship to the Arctic in search of the expedition.
Thousands of miles away in the Canadian Arctic, the mystery of the missing expedition was beginning to unravel. It was typical of the confusing and perplexing affair, however, that John Rae, the man who provided the breakthrough, was not actually looking for the ships or the men when he stumbled across the clearest evidence yet of the expedition.
Rae had ventured north in 1853 to complete the mapping of the Canadian coastline on behalf of his employer, the Hudson’s Bay Company. In the course of his travels he discovered the Rae Strait on the east side of King William Island and established that King William Land was not attached to the mainland.
Rae was the most proficient voyager of the day and the key to his prolific feats was his readiness to adopt native Eskimo methods of travel and survival. He travelled light, used dog teams and built igloos for shelter. Rae was also self-sufficient, living off the land by taking expert marksmen on the trip.
The most significant moment of his journey came in 1854, when Rae and four other men headed towards Pelly Bay on the east coast of Boothia Peninsula. Rae ran into a group of wandering Eskimos and noticed something strange: one man was wearing a gold cap band. The man, called In-nook-poo-zhee-jook, told him a shocking story of 35 or 40 white men seen heading south towards a large river four years earlier. The whites were led by a stout, middle-aged officer with a telescope strapped over his shoulder, who may have been Crozier.
Some time later, the Eskimos found the bodies of many white men scattered over an area near the big river, which was identified as Ogle Point and Montreal Island in the mouth of the Great Fish River. Rae bought the gold band from In-nook-poo-zhee-jook and headed back to Repulse Bay, where he promised to pay for any other relics or information about the dead white men.
Rae’s reward was a rich cache of objects. The hoard included a gold watch, a fork and a plate inscribed ‘Sir John Franklin’. He also collected a silver tablespoon which bore Crozier’s initials, FRMC.
Over the following weeks, Rae, through an interpreter, interrogated the Eskimos about the dead men. What he learned was explosive. According to the Eskimos, the starving kabloonas (white men) had eaten the flesh of their dead comrades. In a written report summarising the oral testimonies of the Eskimos, Rae concluded:
From the mutilated state of many of the corpses, and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource – cannibalism – as a means of prolonging existence.4
He now faced the dilemma of whether to trek hundreds of miles to the Great Fish River to examine the evidence for himself or to return to London with the disturbing news. As it was too late in the season for a long overland journey, he chose to speed back to London.
Rae’s revelations unleashed a storm of controversy, despite providing the most telling evidence yet of what happened to the expedition. Far more important to Victorian London was the claim that the navy’s finest had been driven to the most heinous crime known to humans. Even worse, the only evidence of the questionable behaviour was supplied by Eskimos.
Rae’s gruesome story was a dagger to the heart of Victorian sensibilities. If true, it reduced the nation to the level of savages and undermined the whole concept of British superiority in the world. Charles Dickens, the most influential writer of the age, attacked the innocent Eskimos as ‘covetous, treacherous and cruel’ and claimed it was impossible that the ‘flower of the trained adventurous spirit
of the English navy, raised by Parry, Franklin, Richardson and Back’ could have descended to such depths. The Times simply concluded: ‘Like all savages, they are liars.’
Research in the 1990s showed that Rae and the ‘savages’ were perfectly correct in their diagnosis. An investigation around Erebus Bay on the west coast of King William Island in 1993 found nearly 400 human bones or fragments of bone, with 92 of them showing distinct cut marks, which, it appeared, could not have been made by animal teeth.
What was not generally known to disbelieving Victorians was that Sir John Richardson, a former companion of Franklin and a highly respected member of the Arctic Council, had descended to the ‘last resource’ on an earlier expedition to the Arctic.
The incident occurred in 1821 during the terrible overland expedition undertaken by Richardson and Franklin, during which Franklin earned the reputation as ‘the man who ate his boots’. Richardson, travelling near the Coppermine River with the Irish artist, Robert Hood, and a seaman, John Hepburn, was starving and exhausted.
The three men met Michel, a brutal Iroquois Indian who had recently killed two French-Canadian voyageurs and who would later murder Hood. According to Richardson’s journal, Michel gave the hungry men strips of meat that he claimed had been taken from a slain wolf. But, Richardson wrote, the men became ‘convinced from circumstances … that [the meat] must have been a portion of the body of [the voyageurs].’5
Richardson’s journal of the 1820–22 expedition was not written for publication and remained unpublished in his family’s hands for over 150 years. When it was eventually published, in 1984, the journal’s editor, a Canadian academic, declared:
We shall never know whether Richardson ate the flesh of one of the voyageurs knowingly or unknowingly. But eat it he did.6
There was another peculiar twist to Rae’s uncomfortable revelations. He arrived in London from the Arctic on 22 October 1854, just three days before the greatest military blunder of the Victorian age: the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava in the Crimea.
An irresistible parallel exists between the barmy cavalry charge into the teeth of Russian gun batteries at Balaklava and the disastrous charge into the ice by the ill-fated expedition to find the North West Passage. Both were poorly conceived and disastrous imperial adventures that ended in needless deaths and yet were acclaimed as symbols of gallant national heroism.
Britain has always nursed a curious fondness for valiant losers and it was the nobility of the failure that was deemed more important than the disasters themselves.
There was another link between the two calamities. Alfred Tennyson, whose poem, the ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, glorified the blunder in Crimea, was a nephew of John Franklin. With hindsight, two lines from his famous verse have a ghastly significance for Crozier, Franklin and the unfortunate men of Erebus and Terror:
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
All such considerations were swept aside in the clamour to condemn Rae. His many critics were astonished that he chose to return instead of visiting the Great Fish River to corroborate the lurid Eskimo stories. Nor could he provide any substantial proof that the Eskimos were telling the truth.
None of the men he cross-examined at Repulse Bay in 1854 had actually seen the bodies of the dead men for themselves. The stories, it emerged, were secondhand accounts and Rae’s limp defence – quite simply, he trusted and saw no reason to disbelieve the Eskimos – was a somewhat naive argument when the country, in the words of The Times, regarded natives as ‘lying savages’.
The controversy over Rae’s intelligence added to Jane Franklin’s torment. In a matter of months, the explorers had been declared dead and now her husband’s reputation was sullied by allegations of cannibalism. Finally, McClure’s historic journey had robbed Franklin of the honour – albeit posthumously – of being the first to locate the North West Passage.
Lady Franklin refused to accept that Rae’s relics proved beyond doubt that Franklin was dead, regardless of the fact that the expedition had not been seen for nine years. Instead, she lobbied against Rae receiving the £10,000 (over £400,000 today) reward for discovering the expedition’s fate and renewed her campaign for the Admiralty to send another search party to the ice. Under renewed pressure from Lady Franklin, the Admiralty paid for the Hudson’s Bay Company to send a small party to the Great Fish River area to verify the Eskimo accounts.
James Anderson and James Stewart, two of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s most experienced fur traders, made an impressively rapid journey north in the summer of 1855 and found a few more useful remnants of the expedition, including some fragments of a boat from Terror. But, inexplicably, Anderson and Stewart did not take an Eskimo interpreter on the trip and they were unable to cross-examine the natives. Nor did they find any bodies or documents that might have answered so many unanswered questions.
Soon after, John Rae was given the £10,000 reward but denied any official recognition. Unlike most other Arctic explorers of the era – Parry, Richardson, Franklin and John and James Ross – Rae did not receive a knighthood for his prodigious efforts. In that sense, his experience matched Crozier’s.
Anderson and Stewart’s journey in 1855, which had failed to substantiate Rae’s story, instilled new energy into Jane Franklin’s crusade. At the age of 66, she launched another vigorous campaign to unearth the truth. From ‘The Battery’, the iron-willed Lady Franklin once more turned her guns on the Admiralty. She deployed her full armoury, including her own ‘last resource’ of pleading that the task of finding traces of the expedition should not be left to a ‘weak and helpless woman’.
The campaign worked. In June 1856, a petition signed by many eminent men of the day was presented to the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, urging the Admiralty to approve a further search.
As late as February 1857 – nearly twelve years after Erebus and Terror sailed – newspapers continued to carry reports that some of the men were still alive in the Arctic wilderness. But the Admiralty had lost its appetite for the Arctic. Too many men and ships and too much money had already been ploughed into the search and the men of Erebus and Terror were long dead.
It is estimated that the Admiralty alone ploughed close to £700,000 into its search efforts. Today, this would be the equivalent of around £28,000,000. American investors, too, had spent heavily on private expeditions and Jane Franklin had invested around £35,000 (£1,400,000 today) of her own and her supporters’ money in the quest to find her husband. It was little comfort that years of probing every seaway and inlet of the Canadian Arctic had resulted in the most comprehensive mapping of the area.
In a spirit of compromise, the Admiralty agreed to help fit out an expedition if Lady Franklin could find a ship and crew. She mustered £7,000 from her own funds and raised £3,000 from sympathisers, including a donation from Count Strzelecki, the Polish aristocrat who had courted Sophy Cracroft on Van Diemen’s Land.
In 1857, Lady Franklin purchased the Fox, a small, screw-propeller yacht of only 177 tons. She arranged for Captain Leopold McClintock, by now one of the most experienced Arctic commanders, to lead the expedition. The little ship, reinforced against the polar ice, sailed from Aberdeen on 1 July 1857, while Jane and Sophy, a middle-aged 42-year old, stood expectantly on the quayside.
For once, an expedition left British waters suitably equipped for the rigours of the Arctic. The shallow draught of Fox was a blessing in the variable depths of the icy waterways and seventeen of the hand-picked crew of 25 had Arctic experience. As further insurance, McClintock took teams of dogs and an Eskimo interpreter.
McClintock, a 38-year-old career naval officer from Dundalk, County Louth, was a sensible choice as commander of the party. He was a practical, level-headed character with an unflappable temperament and extensive experience of the Arctic. He sailed with Ross in the fruitless first search of 1848, captained Intrepid on Belcher’s unfortunate expedition in 1852 and – unusually among naval
officers – had partly adopted native Eskimo methods to improve the efficiency of sledge travel.
Sir Francis Leopold McClintock.
His mission was to search the general area around King William Island and the coastline between the mouths of the Great Fish River and Coppermine River, the very area Dr King had for ten years urged the Admiralty to search. McClintock also considered the possibility of examining Peel Sound, the strait that Ross had written off as impenetrable almost a decade earlier.
After leaving Britain, the Fox immediately ran into trouble. The ship was trapped in the ice of Baffin Bay in August 1857 and forced to spend a perilous winter in the pack, drifting aimlessly for over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) in Davis Strait. On Christmas Day, the besieged men drank a toast to Lady Franklin and ‘her adorable niece’, Sophy Cracroft.
Fox was finally released in April 1858 after 250 days of severe battering from the winds and ice and exactly ten years after Crozier had abandoned Erebus and Terror in Victoria Strait. One of Fox’s officers said he did not believe that ‘wood and iron could have stood such a pounding as we got’.
McClintock took Fox on the traditional route through Lancaster Sound, stopping at Beechey Island to inspect the 1845–46 camp of Erebus and Terror and the three gravestones. On the site, he erected a marble tablet sent by Lady Franklin and warmly dedicated to the memory of ‘Franklin, Crozier and Fitzjames and all the gallant brother officers and faithful companions’.
Fox next turned south into Prince Regent Inlet. The party spent a second winter in the Bellot Strait, the narrow, ice-filled channel between Somerset Island and Boothia Peninsula where Crozier had sailed with Parry more than 30 years earlier.
On one sledging trip, McClintock encountered a large group of Eskimos, most of whom carried relics from Erebus and Terror. Among the items were a silver medal, a few buttons and engraved cutlery. Some Eskimos told of a ship crushed in the ice, but reported that the men had escaped.
Captain Francis Crozier Page 21