by Paul Watson
King kept up his battle of wills with the Royal Navy well into 1848. He pleaded for permission to proceed by March 18, the deadline he calculated for leaving in time to reach the search area he mapped out before the next winter set in. He got the same cold shoulder that John Ross repeatedly ran into.
“I am commanded by my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, to acquaint you that they have no intention of altering their present arrangements, or of making any others that will require your assistance or force you to make the sacrifices which you appear to contemplate,” came the aloof reply from an aide on March 3, 1848.
They weren’t alone in dismissing King’s advice. Lady Franklin didn’t support his plan. Neither did John Ross. Only Frederick Beechey, Franklin’s former companion in exploration, backed the physician, who was mostly barking at a brick wall. But the dissent was opening Jane’s ears to other views, some more unorthodox than others, and stiffening the resolve to get things done her way, in search areas she decided were most promising.
“I do not desire that he should be the person employed,” she wrote to James Ross, “but I cannot but wish that the Hudson’s Bay Company might receive instructions or a request from Govt. to explore those parts which you & Sir J. Richardson cannot immediately do, & which if done by you at all, can only be when other explorations have been made in vain—And then, does he not say truly, it will be too late?”
Most experts believed any hunt should focus on Wellington Channel between Devon and Cornwallis Islands. But early in the debate, Lady Franklin switched and sided with the minority view that searchers must instead concentrate their efforts farther south and east. She, like John Ross and King, was closer to the mark. Long before anyone discovered the expedition’s curt note at Victory Point, Jane suggested to supporters in the United States, in an analysis copied to the Admiralty, that the North American Arctic coastline was the best place to go. The area she mapped out included the stretch between the Coppermine and Great Fish Rivers, the latter being precisely where Captain Fitzjames, with a shaky hand, wrote that he and other survivors were heading. For Lady Franklin, some of the most persuasive voices spoke from the spirit world.
With nothing but ominous silence from Erebus or Terror, another winter came, along with prayers that the men might have found a way to survive the cold. There was still reason to hope. This winter seemed relatively warmer. To John Ross, that meant an Arctic opening, maybe a final chance, “especially as it is on record that a mild is always succeeded by a severe winter (which unfortunately took place in 1847–8).” It made no difference whether he was right or wrong about that. The Admiralty didn’t seem to care what he thought. It wasn’t until Ross’s nephew James broke his promise to his wife to stay away from the Arctic, and volunteered to go looking for the lost expedition, that the government finally decided to act. He made his offer in writing on November 8, 1847. The Admiralty accepted three weeks later, notifying Sir James that it intended to name him commander of an expedition to Baffin Bay, as part of a three-pronged rescue effort. But the expedition couldn’t be launched until the following year, and an early winter could push the search back several months more while ships waited for the sea ice to open.
“How can anyone speak of 1849?” Lady Franklin asked in despair.
The Admiralty bungled its grudging start to the hunt so badly that Jane would suffer the anguish of not knowing where her husband was, or whether he was even alive, for much longer than that. The first of three search missions headed for the Western Arctic. Commander Thomas Moore, aboard the 213-ton storeship HMS Plover, left Plymouth at the end of January 1848. He had experience in polar navigation, serving first as a mate on Ross’s Antarctic expedition, then commanding a follow-up voyage and also doing a magnetic survey in northern Canada. But the Plover was not built for speed. She made such slow headway that Moore took eight months to reach the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific. That was too late for him to attempt a voyage above the Arctic Circle that year. Along with relief supplies for the Franklin Expedition, Moore was carrying letters from Jane to her husband, and she asked others who sent messages “to say nothing whatever that can distress his mind—who can tell whether they will be in a state of body or mind to bear it.”
Moore couldn’t deliver the letters, or the supplies, and missed his assigned rendezvous with HMS Herald, commanded by Captain Henry Kellett. Another Opium War veteran, he was doing survey work in the Pacific when the order came to go looking for Franklin and his men. Neither his ship nor the crew was prepared for winter or exploring in ice. In several years of searching, Moore and Kellett got no closer to the missing sailors than chasing down false sightings reported by Inuit.
Physicians Sir John Richardson and John Rae, then a chief factor at the Hudson’s Bay Company, headed the search’s second division. They made their hazardous journey north across wild land—first through the western Barren Lands to Great Slave Lake, then north via the Mackenzie River, Canada’s largest and longest river system. Second only in the continental stakes to the more languorous Mississippi, the Mackenzie experiences northern storms that can whip it up into a mania. It can capsize a canoe as easily as a child flipping a coin. Rae and Richardson journeyed in two canoes, with eight voyageurs as paddlers and guides. The group finally reached the Arctic coast in September, right on time for winter.
Far to the northeast of them, Franklin Expedition survivors were in their fifth month trudging south across King William Island’s snow and ice, which in late summer normally gave way to gray, sharp-edged limestone and sucking mud. When winter lingered long, snow and ice remained. Sailors who had spent lifetimes on the water, some of them starting as child cabin boys, could scurry up rigging in a storm like spiders up a wet wall or keep their balance on a tossing deck, in the foaming wash of pounding waves, as deftly as if they had tentacles on their feet. Franklin’s toughest men, the ones with the best chance of getting home, were sea creatures with limbs made for survival in oceans. Now their lives depended on walking, cursing the land for as long as they could keep going against the searing pain of frostbite, hunger, and whatever else the Arctic threw at them.
The searchers tried to reach the southwestern tip of Victoria Island (then known as Wollaston Land) in small boats, but they couldn’t penetrate the ice. A huge barrier to mariners, Victoria Island stands like a big stop sign in the middle of the Arctic Archipelago. The world’s eighth largest island, its east coast is just across Victoria Strait from King William Island, where Franklin Expedition survivors tried to make their escape. But the stretch of southern coast that Rae and Richardson had hoped to explore, near the mouth of the Coppermine River, was far from where Erebus and Terror were beset. The two explorers were able to speak with hundreds of Inuit, from several groups, but to no avail. The doctors found not a trace. Rae eventually met up with Moore, only to be disgusted by the Royal Navy officer’s ill-disciplined diversions when he had been sent to look for dying men. The Hudson’s Bay Company factor dressed the captain down for keeping an Inuit girl in his cabin, “for purposes which were all too evident,” and for “selling spirits to the natives, and cheating them as much or more than the most rascally fur trader ever heard of.”
FRUSTRATED BY the long wait for action, Lady Franklin didn’t let up when the first, tentative hunt for her husband and his men began. The government had started paying her Sir John’s “vacant good service pension.” She didn’t like it, but she accepted the gesture as an honor. She would soon need every penny she could get her hands on to fund the search the Admiralty was so reluctant to order, only to lose interest as one search expedition after another failed to find anyone alive. She tapped the family fortune to offer a substantial reward of £3,000, or more than $270,000 today, to any whalers who either found the expedition or gave it an extraordinary try. But Jane also put her faith in the third component of the navy’s plan, the most expensive and risky. Sir James Ross sailed for the Eastern Arctic with two ships, HMS Enterprise and HMS Investigator. His orders were to fo
llow the same route that the Admiralty told Franklin to navigate, as far west as Wellington Channel. Ross and his men wintered over in Somerset Island’s Leopold Harbour and searched tirelessly, with teams of men dragging their food and supplies on heavy sledges in countless directions. They even tied notes around foxes’ necks, hoping the missing seamen would find one and follow the directions to the rescue mission’s base camp. In the end, all Ross found were the provisions he had left at Fury Beach sixteen years earlier, when ice had its hold on his uncle’s ship, Victory. The younger Ross now tried sailing farther west. He was eager to deliver some important mail: a letter from Lady Franklin, written in a hurry, to her lost husband.
“My dearest love,” it read, “May it be the will of God if you are not restored to us earlier that you should open this letter & that it may give you comfort in all your trials. . . . May you have found your refuge & strength in Him whose mercies you have so often experienced when every human aid was gone. . . I try to prepare myself for every trial which may be in store for me, but dearest, if you ever open this, it will be I trust because I have been spared the greatest of all. . . .”
Expecting Sir John to be miserable, or worse, after unimaginable tribulations, Jane sent along some copies of the Illustrated London News to lighten his mind. She offered a summary to get him caught up on the wider world, mostly about upheaval in Europe as decrepit monarchies tottered. She must have thought a good shot of British pride would be a powerful elixir, writing that “almost all the kingdoms of Europe (are) in commotion, England alone steady & erect amidst the crash of thrones and dynasties.” She talked about a trip to the country, prayers from the bishop of Tasmania and his flock, and why she couldn’t be in the Arctic to help get him home. Jane sounded haunted by guilt for being so far away from the man she had urged to challenge the Arctic once more.
“It would have been a less trial to me to come after you, as I was at one time tempted to do, but I thought it my duty & my interest to remain, for might I not have missed you, & wd it have been right to leave Eleanor—yet if I had thought you to be ill, nothing should have stopped me.
“God bless you again,” she closed. “You will be welcomed back with joy & honor by your friends & family & country—most of all by your affect & devoted wife.”
Eleanor, who would soon be married without a father at her side, assured Sir John in a separate note, carried by another relief expedition: “Mama has been very active in stirring up people to consider the necessity of searching every where at once.”
Sir James Ross never found anyone to receive Lady Franklin’s letter. He didn’t even get close. His ships couldn’t get through a barrier of sea ice. Rather than risk more good men’s lives, he gave up and headed back to London, where he returned the letter to Jane. Wherever her husband was, entombed in the permafrost, refrigerated in the dark cold of his cabin-cum-morgue at Erebus’s stern, or buried at sea, he could only communicate now if the dead could talk. Jane believed they very well might and would try hard to reach him on the other side.
THE EXPEDITIONS’ dwindling survivors were still fighting the Arctic winter when they set out on their final journey in April 1848. In the first leg, they hauled boats, at least one a lifeboat twenty-eight feet long, modified for shallow water and lashed to a heavy sledge. Crewmen dragged it, loaded down with supplies and equipment, some fifteen miles across the ice-covered Victoria Strait. Then they left it near the site of the sailors’ first landfall, just above the high-tide mark, on King William Island. When it was discovered more than a decade later, two partial skeletons lay inside the boat, which was pointing toward the spot where Erebus and Terror were surrendered to the sea ice. Eight pairs of boots were left behind, along with numerous abandoned items that included soap, towels, tobacco, and silk handkerchiefs. Near them were two double-barreled rifles, a barrel in each weapon loaded and cocked, standing muzzle-up against the side of the lifeboat.
Slipping and sliding on ice and hard snow in thin-soled leather seaboots, the survivors had lowered their shoulders against howling, whirling winds and blizzards. Or, if the sky was clear, they squinted against the blinding, disorienting sunlight that reflected off the never-ending white stretched out all around them. Climbing up and over pressure ridges that might as well have been mountains, they limped deeper into the unknown, praying for a way home. Sometimes they sang for strength against the pain. Among the boatloads of things the seamen had brought from Erebus and Terror were pocket-size Christian books, including a Holy Bible, the New Testament in French, a prayer book with a black leather cover and a gold-tooled spine, the Book of Common Prayer, and hymnbooks.
Along with those comforts for the soul, the men carried countless personal necessities, such as pocket watches, a toothbrush, a clay pipe, an ivory-handled table knife, and other silverware engraved with family crests, including a silver fiddle-patterned tablespoon bearing the Franklin family crest. The sailors also packed seaboots, seventy kilos of chocolate, a lacquered tea canister, a clothes brush with an ivory veneer wooden handle, a cobbler’s awl, several packets of F. Barnes and Co. sewing needles, a polished flint with an elegantly curved steel handle for sparking fires, a pair of tweezers for collecting specimens, and a brass instrument used to measure magnetic dip.
Farther along the survivors’ route south, among the many more castoffs from the Franklin Expedition was a seaboot with a square toe and rounded at the top to fit a man’s calf. Slightly torn at the back, top edge, where a sailor might have yanked on damp leather to pull the boot onto a swollen foot, it was also split along the stitching from the ankle about midway to the toe. The sole had almost peeled off. The boot was among shoes, pieces of Royal Navy uniforms, buttons, and other things discarded far to the south of the abandoned ships on the Adelaide Peninsula. At least some of Franklin’s men had made it to the mainland, but they were stopped dead in their tracks. But by what? And when?
They were the strongest of strong men, the ones who had made it into at least one last summer, trudging ahead through the muck and the torture of frostbitten toes, patching tattered clothes while resting, sometimes dying, at campsites along the western shoreline, which was strewn with knife-edged limestone rocks, gravel, and sand. The dangers were many—whether from hunger, disease, polar madness, or polar bears able to pick up a tiny whiff of human scent from miles away and stalk their plodding prey for days before lunging to kill. The unseen, the ghostly sounds or fleeting, fractured visions, could have been the most frightening of the Arctic’s threats. Inuit elders tell of spirits that wander King William Island and inhabit the seas that surround it. They must be respected and, if necessary, appeased. Their wrath is severe.
The most stubborn sailors may have decided they’d had enough and returned to Erebus. By then, she could have been drifting free, as Terror finally had done under Sir George Back a dozen years earlier, buffered against colliding floes by a rock-solid apron of sea ice. One way or another, she and the Terror were heading south just like the men who had forsaken her. There were signs that Neptune, the loyal Newfoundland dog, might have been among the last to die, with natural skills for survival if humans weren’t able to provide. A pet built like a small long-haired bear before food became scarce, or maybe a newly found canine companion passed along from an Inuit team, apparently came with the qalunaaq to reboard Erebus, far from where the seamen first surrendered her to the ice. As they approached their once-invincible vessel, silent but for the incessant creaking of her timbers and the wind whistling through her masts, she must have towered over them like a ghost ship.
5
Lady Franklin’s Mission
No one who knew ice expected Erebus and Terror to stay where their crews abandoned them. Even sea ice that looks solid as far as the eye can see, a frozen prison for two Royal Navy bomb ships closing in on two years, is almost continually moving. The exception is “fast ice,” which grows out from the shore and remains attached to land. The Franklin Expedition vessels were far from the coast when they were aba
ndoned, where wind, ocean currents, the shifting water surface beneath the ice, and internal stresses within the ice itself all caused the stranded ships to creep. Erebus and Terror not only moved, they separated from each other. The dynamics of sea ice, following unique habits and rules of a world modern scientists know as the cryosphere, made it all the more complicated to track them down.
Ice is an obstacle few outsiders even try to understand in its confounding, immaculate complexity. Knowing that it’s cold, hard, and slippery, and chills food and drinks nicely, is good enough for most of us. Lady Franklin was different. Ice was on her list of things to figure out while recognized polar experts rattled on and stalled. She refused to wait around and worry about what might have happened to Sir John and his crewmen. Ross and Richardson tried to calm her, as Sir John had asked. The Admiralty mailed its own anodyne reassurances. But attempts to tamp down the fire in her heart, the counsel for patience over impetuousness, only infuriated her. If others refused to act, she herself would.
Jane set out to learn as much as she could, and to use that knowledge as power to shape decisions that might determine the missing men’s fate. She ended up making some of the most important choices herself. Still, of all the places a Victorian woman didn’t belong, the Arctic and the Admiralty were two of the toughest male bastions to penetrate. At the start of her own Arctic odyssey, the confounding realities of how seawater behaves when it cools to around 28 degrees Fahrenheit and freezes into crystals were the least of Lady Franklin’s problems. Yet her first stop was to consult the man who was probably Britain’s leading specialist in the arcane study of sea ice: William Scoresby Jr., for whom she had the deepest respect. His scientific knowledge and experience of the Arctic, his uncanny ability to read her capricious moods and understand the intricacies of sea ice, made Charles Darwin a fan. Even the fictional sailor Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick quotes Scoresby on the complexities of cetology.
