by Sten Nadolny
Next postal station: Stromness, in Orkney, to send letters; Petropavlovsk, on the Kamchatka peninsula, or Hong Kong to receive them. They had seven carrier-pigeons on board, two thousand books, and two barrel organs which could play almost thirty different tunes but not Opus 111. Food supplies were sufficient for four winters. Messrs Rattler and Blazer – Franklin had been unable to allow them the female gender – took their farewell near the island of Rona. Soon they were recognisable only as two dirty little clouds in front of the coastline.
For a good month the heavily laden, copper-sheathed ships were en route across the Atlantic. During this time, John Franklin himself conducted twelve religious services, and, though the crew noticed that the sermons did not come from the books designated for this purpose, they were content. The boatswain said, ‘Our Franklin is a bishop disguised as a captain, and therefore much holier.’
At the end of July they sighted a whaler named Enterprise in Baffin Bay. The skipper came on board and conferred with Franklin. The ice was heavier this year than it had been the year before. ‘I trust we’ll get through all right,’ Franklin said in a serious tone, ‘and the crew has confidence in me.’
The captain of the whaler was a man of logic. ‘And if you die, sir?’
John bent over the railing and looked down at the water. ‘What remains of me need not always be my personal self.’ That was a sentence from one of his strange sermons.
Since the wind was favourable, they soon separated again. The Enterprise remained in her position because a whale had been sighted. Erebus and Terror sailed north-west, into the Arctic. Even before they were out of sight, it began to snow.
Sturdy vessels lavishly equipped, spirited sailors, respectable officers, all fearless and in high spirits under the command of a patient and steadfast old gentleman – that was the picture of the expedition that remained before the eyes of the world.
19
The Great Passage
Until the beginning of the winter of 1845 Franklin kept looking for a passage northward from Lancaster Sound, rather than to the south-west as he had been ordered by the Admiralty. He still hoped for an open polar sea. However, the ships only rounded a big island, Cornwallis, without finding anything except increasingly massive ice. Franklin wintered here until the spring of 1846 in a protected bay of Beechey Island, named after his first officer on the Trent. Three men died here, two of illness, one by drowning. They erected carefully chiselled tombstones for them, as if it were an English village churchyard. Then the Erebus and the Terror put to sea once more, this time in a south-westerly direction. But this year, too, did not turn out well. The stream of ice became thicker and thicker. Laboriously the ships fought their way through towering icebergs with wretched slowness. Franklin was unperturbed.
A dangerous narrows in which several fields of drift-ice were jostling one another Franklin called Peel Sound. Without question he meant it as a compliment to Sir Robert.
The crew worked well and depended on Franklin. Their tendency to crack jokes had increased slightly, but so far it was not worrisome. Franklin knew what it sounded like when a crew was no longer intact. He had many little worries but no big ones.
Jane Franklin spent the winter in Madeira with Ella and Sophia Cracroft. In the spring they visited the West Indies. Jane found Sophia’s worries about the expedition slightly exaggerated and felt that a little change would do her good. Ella returned to England; Jane and Sophia went to New York.
They saw an advertisement in the Herald: ‘Madame Leander Lent transmits information concerning love, marriage, and absent friends. Prophesies all events in life. 169 Mulberry Street, first floor, rear. Ladies 25ȼ, Gentlemen 50ȼ. Promotes marriage quickly for extra charge.’ Jane, who would never have ventured to a fortune-teller in London, decided that this milieu ought to be studied as well. They went. Madame Lent was about twenty-five years old, terribly filthy, and almost bald. In the light of a candle stuck in a beer bottle she laid out the cards for John Franklin and declared that he was in excellent condition. He was about to reach the goal of his life. He would, however, reach it not all at once but piecemeal. When she noticed that no marriage was desired she disappointedly pocketed her twenty-five cents and declared that eleven more people seeking her help were waiting outside.
No more progress with mere sail power. The drift-ice had thickened into a closed surface. The men spent half their time on watch, hauling the bow-line or chopping and sawing their way out. Despite a violent cough, Franklin was on his feet for days on end, allowing himself hardly any sleep and only now and then a game of backgammon with Fitzjames, which he won regularly.
On 15 July, Franklin was on deck with his sextant taking a sight in relation to a star when he thought he heard a scream coming from the ice-fields behind the stern of the Erebus louder than any human cry. Surprised, he lowered the instrument and stared aft. Nothing unusual in sight. Behind the Terror the gigantic egg of the sun slunk along the horizon to the east. Thousands of icebergs reared up like a city of red glass, but a movable city, gnawing its way south along with the ships and never stopping. John looked at the glaring egg on the horizon and thought, Why sun, really? What does sun mean? His legs gave way. Careful, it’s all nonsense, he thought. In falling he held on tight to the sextant, trying to protect it. The first thing he had learned from Matthew about sextants was that they must never be dropped. He lost consciousness.
When he came to, he was lying in his cabin on a blanket spread out on the floor; he looked up at the faces of Fitzjames and Lieutenant Gore, who were bending over him. They were joined by the face of Goodsir, the medical assistant. But he recognised those faces only when he put his head in a certain position. The optical axis of his face, to which he had so long been accustomed, had now to lead past the object so he could grasp it. Like a chicken, he thought, dumbfounded, or rather, that’s what he wanted to think, for he couldn’t assemble the words. He also wanted to say something to relieve the three men of their worries. What came out of his mouth was not especially clear, it seemed, because their expressions became even more anxious. But he could laugh and get up, couldn’t he? He tried it. Nothing doing with his right leg. Time and again he continued to see that red thing in the sky and the city of glass. Had that got mixed into every picture before? And what was this thing, this bright thing, called? Now he knew: something had happened.
Something should have happened long ago. If it hurt anyone, it had best be himself.
London in the summer of 1846 churned up so many new events that news from the Arctic would have hardly made an impression. In Parliament the debate about the Corn Laws went back and forth, a debate which had in fact been obsolete for a long time. Since there was famine in Ireland and a catastrophe at the door, a decision against protectionism became more and more urgent. The price of bread had to be reduced, even if a handful of influential landowners cried murder. Robert Peel, who had long been a defender of the Corn Laws, as befitted a leader of the Conservative Party, changed his position publicly, showing both independence and courage. He abolished the laws and earned the fury of his aristocratic colleagues. Although he lost his office, he gained the gratitude of the hungry.
On 15 July 1846, Lady Jane and Sophia were on their way home from New York to London in a beautiful clipper. They rounded the Irish coast in bright sunshine, hoping for the first news from the Erebus and the Terror when they returned to London.
On the same day a terrible storm raged over Spilsby. Many old trees were uprooted, two people were struck by lightning on the open road, and a few cottages in the settlement of the poor were blown down. The grain lay in the fields flattened by the rain. If anyone had told the people of Spilsby what had happened that same day in the polar sea, they would have stopped to listen. But only a few minutes later they would have turned back to their own fate – rightly so.
On 12 September off the coast of King William Land the ships were utterly locked and enmeshed in ice. Several drifts of pack-ice moving south had confla
ted and pushed on top of each other as they squeezed between two coasts which acted like a funnel. Gigantic ice-floes tilted and for one or two days reared up high like a lateen sail, brightly lit by the sun, until they collapsed towards the other side. Towers and cones grew high, then sank again; the massive ice was caught in a rotating motion as though being ploughed. Day after day the sailors fought for the life of their ships, sawing, blowing up ice-bergs and dragging ice-floes unceasingly. The risk increased that the hulls would be crushed to pieces by the uncertain movements of the ice-field, until the ships were lifted up through mere pressure and finally rested on top of the ice as if it were a pedestal. Now care had to be taken that this support did not give way. Drawings were made with architectural precision; statistical calculations were attempted; anchors were dropped. Franklin knew the ships were drifting south, although of course extremely slowly; they would reach the coast of the continent only in many years. But he still wanted to sluice his men and ships through this mill.
Franklin sat on deck and glanced into the sun whose name he no longer knew, and appeared in high spirits and full of hope. He could neither speak nor write, and he needed help every time he stirred. The cook fed him; sometimes Fitzjames did. But he could still read charts and calculations with some effort and give orders by shaking his head, nodding and pointing. He even continued to play backgammon, won, and with his twisted mouth he laughed happily. No one doubted his mental soundness. Nothing was lost so long as he was alive. It had always been the dying for whose sake everything occurred: Simmonds, 1805; Lieutenant Hood, 1821; in her way, Eleanor, 1825; Sherard Lound, 1843. Now it would be his turn: John Franklin, 1846 or 1847.
Half the supplies were still there; one or two winters could still be afforded if they kept their nerve, and that was, after all, John Franklin’s strength.
As late as the spring of 1847 the ships could not break free. Scurvy took its first victims. Franklin watched his crew closely, and his narrowed field of vision helped more than it hindered. Their morale did not drop; it rose. And, as Franklin knew from all catastrophes that came on slowly, when the first few perished the insouciance of the survivors was greater than their understanding. But long before the majority were endangered, knowledge would come to them. Only towards the very end would it be lost again. They hadn’t reached that point yet. Franklin lived. He was slower than death; that might be their salvation.
On a reconnaissance march in May 1847, a group of officers and sailors of the Erebus pushed through King William’s Land to the estuary of the Great Fish river. From that point on, the course of the coast westwards was known. George Back had drawn the map several years ago. When the group returned to the ship and reported the results, he laughed with one half of his face and wept with the other. The North-West Passage had been found, but it was completely useless because of the ice, something everyone had suspected. Franklin signified that he wanted a celebration, and so it happened. It was a great feast, though three men died on that day alone.
Franklin pointed at the maps and with great effort lolled a few single words he had painfully relearned. His neck stretched forward, those wide-open eyes – he looked like a child trying to climb into a carriage that was about to drive off. But no one giving the right answer had to look good; he was simply allowed to take his time.
It took hours for Crozier and Fitzjames to understand what the old man wanted to say. In exactly six weeks the strongest and healthiest among them were to start a southwards trek to try to reach fur-trading posts or Eskimos or Indians to get help. Not immediately, not in the winter; above all, not as late as next spring. Franklin knew that the reindeer would not get to the Barren Grounds before late summer, and the men needed strength to hunt them. The two officers exchanged brief glances and understood each other. Under no circumstances would they leave the sick.
On 11 June 1847, Sir John Franklin, Rear-Admiral of the Royal Navy, died, in his sixty-second year, of another stroke.
The ice master blasted an opening for his grave in the pack-ice. The crew assembled and drew off their hats. Crozier said a prayer. A rifle salvo crackled under the clear, frosty sky; then they slowly lowered the coffin, weighted with an anchor. The opening filled with water. Within a few hours it froze into a flagstone of dark glass. ‘Happy voyage,’ Fitzjames spoke into the silence.
That was no empty phrase. For with the drifting ice masses the old commander had surely been on his way for some time.
In 1848, the Admiralty sent out three search expeditions, one of them under James Ross, who had recovered conspicuously fast. All three searched much too far north – Ross knew well that Franklin had believed all his life in an open polar sea. They wintered in ice and returned the next year without success.
Until 1850 a large number of ships were dispatched, which searched back and forth across the Arctic Archipelago and carefully mapped every island. They discovered only that Franklin had spent the first winter on Beechey Island. Now the admirals were going to call off the search. They would have done so already in 1849 had it not been for Lady Franklin.
Supported by the acclaim of the entire public, Jane insisted on a further search for her husband with everything at her disposal: her own fortune as well as John’s, slyness, power of conviction, rage and derision, genuine and even artificial tears whenever necessary. She took a room in a hotel across from the Admiralty in order to be as close to her adversaries as possible. Her scenes were dreaded. In vain the bureaucrats tried to pretend they were not in. Jane became an expert in Arctic navigation because she carefully studied all the reports and had an excellent memory. She corresponded with the President of the United States, with the Tsar, with a spendthrift New York millionaire, and with several hundred other influential and knowledgeable persons throughout the world. She went to Lerwick, in Shetland, to challenge the whalers to voluntary searches in the high north. Her speeches to sailors were as successful as those to ladies of the Horticultural Society. No one could resist her. The newspapers sang hymns to the heroic wife of the explorer. She bought several ships with her own money and chose the crews herself from legions of volunteers. Shortly before his death John Barrow said, ‘Jane is my successor.’
Jane was allowed what was not permitted a woman, not even the Queen, by written and unwritten law: to show energy and to prevail over men. But even the men agreed. After all, the action concerned a husband, and, in addition, one hundred and thirty men lost in the ice of the Arctic.
She found devoted friends, heroic servants. Old Dr Richardson went to the far north once more to search for his friend. John Hepburn travelled all the way from Tasmania and went along. During this time, Sophia remained with Lady Franklin. Often she seemed to be even more passionately involved in the search than Lady Franklin herself, but no one had any cause for surprise. She was her secretary, messenger, friend, puppet, spokeswoman, comforter. She did not marry, although she could have chosen among the volunteers as freely as John’s widow in naming her ships. Until 1852 these two women prevented Franklin and his crew from being declared officially dead, and when it at last happened they managed to stir up such a storm of public indignation that the lords of the Admiralty did not leave Whitehall without drawing the curtains in their carriages.
Of course, their fortune melted quickly, much to the chagrin of John’s daughter, who had not married a wealthy man and was fearful about her inheritance. But no one could prevail against the imperious posture of a hero’s wife – not even Ella, who had much of her father’s persistence.
But ‘Jane and Sophy’ became a symbol of friendship and loyalty between women. That they also exchanged tenderness fortunately escaped the notice of the zealously virtuous. Those who suspected it nonetheless were not quite so virtuous and found it simply irrelevant.
The most important task, however, remained unfulfilled: the fate of Franklin and his sailors still remained shrouded in darkness. Since, as before, a high reward was offered for clarifying his fate, voluntary search missions by whalers and rich f
riends continued even after 1852. Above all, there were Jane and Sophia, determined to sacrifice their last penny for this goal.
In 1857 Jane Franklin purchased her irrevocably last vessel. Named Fox, she was a small steamer equipped with a modern propeller. Jane entrusted her to a young captain who had already been on the Franklin search as a helmsman: Leopold McClintock, a man whom she loved like a son and who honoured her like a mother. He was among those who were interested not only in the solution of the riddle and the financial reward but also in John Franklin himself. He had heard much about him from Dr Richardson and Hepburn, Lady Jane and Sophia; he had read both his books, and had even been allowed to see the ‘Logbook of Punishments’ from the Trent, in which John had jotted down his ideas. ‘I simply want to get to know him,’ said McClintock, ‘and to that end I shall find him. It may well be that he is alive, perhaps among the Eskimos. He never lived quickly, so he won’t have stopped living quickly either.’
