by Paul Watson
“And do you still entertain the same opinion as to that story?” Bowles asked.
“I do, precisely,” Austin replied. “I consider that everything was gone into, and that every one who was present agreed that the conduct of Adam Beck was most discreditable.”
“To what circumstances do you allude that have not been detailed in reference to Adam Beck?”
“Everything has since been borne out by the conduct of Adam Beck.”
“What do you allude to?”
“I allude to his stopping back, and to what passed when he was landed, which Captain Ommanney can speak of better than I can—to his conduct when with Sir John Ross. He was a man in whom no faith could be placed from his irregular conduct and I believe drunkenness. I think he was about the worst description of a civilized savage I ever saw.”
Dismissing Inuit testimony didn’t require a lot of argument. Racial prejudice toward indigenous people made disregard for what they said and thought almost automatic for many Europeans certain of their superior moral fiber and intellect. They also regarded as suspect the Inuit tradition of recalling history through telling stories instead of books. For people who put great faith in the written word, indigenous people recalling the past from memory were only spinning legends, entertaining perhaps, but unworthy of an educated expert’s time. Mistakes, misunderstandings, and contradictions, the unavoidable flaws of any account told and retold over years, even generations, made Inuit stories all the more suspect to listeners who either weren’t willing, or didn’t know how, to distill truth from the fog of memory or embellishment.
Besides, compared to a lot of what passed for news of the Franklin Expedition in Europe, Inuit stories were quite cautious. The mystery bred false leads, paranormal tips, and cruel hoaxes like mushrooms on moist manure. Hunters in Spitsbergen noticed reindeer with notched ears. A German expert contacted the Admiralty to suggest it might be Franklin sending a message by way of wild caribou, since other explorers had tried sending notes in collars attached to Arctic foxes. Mysterious bottles floating in the Russian Arctic were thought to be carrying reports from Erebus and Terror, but they turned up empty. About the size of soda bottles, these were round, made of dark glass, and, after Admiralty analysis, found to be of foreign origin. They looked exactly like Norwegian fishing-net floats, the experts decided. Which is exactly what they were.
Mistakes born of hope were understandable. But the Franklin frenzy went far beyond that. A letter to the Dundee Advertiser described how a whaling captain named J. Robb wintered over on the Flora in Lancaster Sound. Acting on an Inuit lead, a dozen crewmen found the bodies of four men, “frozen like icicles.” One had “H. Carr” tattooed on his arm. The shocking news made it into several newspapers, and all the way to the House of Commons, where members of Parliament shouted, “Hear, hear!” to assurances of a full investigation. The result: “Customs reports that upon enquiry, the whole has proved to be a fiction,—no such vessel as the ‘Flora’ of Hull being in existence.”
Arctic hallucinations abounded. The crew of the English ship Renovation reported to the Admiralty a sighting of two three-masted, square-rigged ships on an iceberg on the Grand Banks, off Newfoundland. One ship was upright, the other on her beams. The captain, Edward Coward, was sick in his cabin at the time, but the crew watched the trapped vessels through a telescope for close to three-quarters of an hour. Seeing no life, they didn’t go in for a closer look, apparently fearing phantoms were aboard. A headline in Canada’s Kingston Whig Standard declared: “Captain Coward—how appropriate the name!” The Admiralty investigated again, in a three-month probe that included the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the Coast Guard, consular officials in Venice, shipping firms in Britain and Newfoundland, and customs collectors in England, Ireland, and Canada. It all came up blank. The apparition of the ghost ships was never explained.
THE SEARCH FOR the Franklin Expedition could have ended with the Arctic Committee’s cross-examinations and conclusions drawn from the comfort and safety of naval headquarters. It had been six years now since Erebus and Terror departed, with roughly three years’ worth of food in their stores. Large sums of money, public and private, had been expended, ships and sled parties had crisscrossed thousands of miles in the Arctic Archipelago and found few helpful traces. All that the latest hunt had turned up were graves and a piece of English elm thought to be from one of Franklin’s vessels, which only produced more grief and argument. But the committee served an important purpose by looking to the future. It asked its witnesses and other experts for written opinions on whether any of Franklin’s men might be alive, and if so, how best to continue looking for them. William Scoresby’s coldly rational view was persuasive:
“That Sir John Franklin or some portion of his associates may still survive is a position which cannot be controverted. It follows, therefore, that some degree of probability, whatever that degree may be, does exist. Such probability, it appears to me is involved in or supported by a variety of considerations.
“Sir John Ross was absent and unheard from for four years and some months (though never at a greater distance from positions often visited by the whalers than 250 miles), and returned with nearly all his crew in health.”
Since Erebus and Terror carried “incomparably superior equipment and resources,” Scoresby continued, they “might yet survive.” Then reason failed him, defeated by mere hope and pride. Inuit lived in similarly cold and desolate areas for their whole lives: “Why then may not hardy enterprizing Britons, sustained, over and above, by the moral courage and Christian hope which preserved the same Franklin, a Richardson, a Back, and others, when the ordinary powers of life in men experienced in like hardships, Canadian voyages, failed. Why may they not be yet surviving amid the desolateness of Arctic solitudes, and the wreck of the hopes of the timid and doubting?” The only rational possibility of a catastrophe wiping out every man in the expedition was a gale so powerful that both ships overturned near the seaward edge of ice, Scoresby argued. Two ships had never gone down, taking all men aboard, during decades of Arctic voyages by tens of thousands of whalers, he added. It made no sense to him that Franklin’s ships, “among the strongest ever sent out to the Arctic seas, should be so completely annihilated as to leave not a wreck behind.”
Austin and Ommanney thought it impossible that anyone in the Franklin Expedition was still alive. But the consensus among other polar veterans gave enough hope, however faint, that someone might need rescue. The Arctic Committee recommended another mission, with some caveats. The Admiralty couldn’t have been pleased. The cost to its budget, and its prestige, was mounting. Now some of the country’s most revered explorers were insisting on another major effort, including significant improvements to mariners’ clothing, before the Royal Navy sent any more men into the extreme cold.
Francis McClintock, who served under Austin, wrote extensively on the clothing and equipment issue, with detailed drawings of improved tents, lists of gear with calculated weights, and daily rations of food, including a quarter pint of rum to get each man ready for the cold each morning. An Irishman described as “short, slender, but wiry and (with a) muscular frame well fitted for the endurance of long-continued exertion and hardships,” he had spent more time than most with Inuit and helped pioneer explorers’ long-distance travel over land. He developed the system of half a dozen seamen, led by an officer, dragging sledges, with help from sails in favorable winds. Out of twenty sledge parties deployed in the spring of 1851, McClintock’s covered the most ground, some 760 miles in seven weeks. His polar experience and extraordinary stamina, and the equal determination of an officer under McClintock’s command, would be the key to finding the first solid evidence of what happened to Sir John and his men.
McClintock suggested searchers should be outfitted with fur in place of woolen seamen’s sweaters, called jumpers, which would be tailored on board after purchasing cured sealskin in bulk from Inuit. A firm believer in traveling light, McClintock felt the i
deal Arctic kit should consist of: “1 flannel shirt or Guernsey frock, 1 pair drawers, 1 blue serge or knitted frock, 1 pair breeches, waistbelt, 1 pair worsted stockings, 1 pair cloth boots, comforter, Welsh wig [a woolen cap that covered ears and neck], southwester, mitts, veil, jacket or sealskin jumper—the latter is much preferable, being longer, less bulky and cumbrous, much lighter and impervious to wind, snow, or wet.”
A. R. Bradford, surgeon on the Resolute and second-in-command of the western search parties, gave the most detailed analysis of the standard clothing and equipment’s flaws. It is easy to feel the pain and discomfort Franklin’s men must have suffered—getting worse the longer they lived as their clothes and boots fell apart—through the doctor’s response to the committee. The outdoor “clothing was not in the least adapted to the exigencies of an Arctic travelling party,” he wrote, “more particularly so in the colder season, when the cold winds, loaded with a fine drift, penetrated through every garment that was in the most minute degree open in its texture, such as woollen and cloth fabrics.” Bradford switched to sealskin pants but preferred the leather trousers and frock coats from the Hudson Bay territory because fine, drifting snow didn’t collect on the smooth surface. Second best was Inuit sealskin, in Bradford’s view, which he said was too tight on British crews when purchased readymade.
“Clothing should never be tight fitting in an Arctic climate, as any impediment to a free circulation in a limb leads to its readily becoming frozen. The only objection to the sealskin is that the very fine drift lodges under the hair, which the most careful brushing will never entirely remove. The consequence is, when the man has turned into his bag, and becomes sufficiently warm to melt this fine snow, a great accumulation of damp takes place, and the bags become saturated with wet when the men are in them, or frozen hard a few minutes after they get out, no opportunity offering to dry damp or wet articles until the season is well advanced.”
Bradford wanted the Royal Navy to toss its canvas boots, which were supplemented with “blanket feet wrappers” and said they should be replaced with Inuit sealskin boots. He found them well suited to both dry and wet weather. The navy’s canvas boots only got wet and froze, all the way through to the blistered, perhaps frostbitten skin of the poor man trying to walk on what must have felt like sharp needles.
“The canvas boots occupied a long time in clearing the inside of ice, which had to be scraped out with a knife. They were occasionally frozen so hard and stiff that the men had to take them into their sleeping-bags for one or two hours between their legs to thaw them, before they could be got on.”
John Richardson, Franklin’s close friend and surgeon on his earlier expeditions, suggested replacing winter shoes made of canvas with ones of soft tanned leather. “They should be made in shape of the Canadian moccasin, and roomy enough to hold three socks of white fearnought [thick wool],” he recommended. Scoresby added another, more radical thought to improve travel on the snow and ice: Do as the local people do and make more use of sled dogs, as Penny had done to great advantage.
In its final report, the committee didn’t completely bury Beck’s murder claim. But it advised that if the Admiralty’s Lords decided further inquiry were necessary, they should keep it separate from any renewed search. Enough valuable time had been lost on that wild-goose chase. The experts recommended a renewed hunt for Erebus and Terror in the summer of 1852, which should include an effort to find the tin sign that Ross said he saw Beck drop in the snow. But the next expeditions to go looking for Franklin and his men should focus on the upper part of Wellington Channel, “as far beyond Mr. Penny’s north-western advance as possible,” the committee’s final report suggested.
After all the arguments and finger pointing, the sober study and considered advice, the explorer establishment was determined to keep looking in the wrong place.
7
Ghost Ships
Polar explorers who knew what Franklin and his men were up against assumed they had gotten stuck somewhere around midway through the Northwest Passage. But the Royal Navy hadn’t given up on the chance they had reached the Western Arctic, where Sir John had hoped to start making his way home by way of Russia. HMS Enterprise and HMS Investigator were assigned that search area and had to take the long way, sailing around Cape Horn at the tip of South America and up the coast through the Bering Strait. Lady Jane Franklin kept the hunt alive in areas farther east, where survivors were most likely to be found. This time she chose a Métis, William Kennedy, to lead. Kennedy was just five years old when he met Franklin as the novice explorer prepared for his first overland expedition to the Arctic at Cumberland House, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur-trading post on Pine Island in the Saskatchewan River. Kennedy’s father, Alexander, was chief factor. During long winter nights, Franklin taught the boy, the fifth child of a Cree mother and a Scottish father, how to read and write. Inspired to learn, William went off to school in northern Scotland’s Orkney Islands. He followed his father into the fur trade but quit the Hudson’s Bay Company the same year that Franklin sailed with Erebus and Terror for the Northwest Passage. Kennedy refused to sell liquor to indigenous people, knowing it ruined and frequently ended their lives.
Lady Franklin offered him command of the Prince Albert on the recommendation of a former fur trader and Métis rights activist A. K. Isbister, Kennedy’s nephew. More than a century later, the connection among Isbister, Kennedy, and Cumberland House, where both men once lived, would prove another serendipitous turning point during the modern search for the Franklin Expedition. William Kennedy interviewed and chose his crew for the ketch, most of them rugged Scots from the windswept Shetland Islands, with Lady Franklin’s approval. The expedition took along seven carrier pigeons, marked with specially developed ink, in another attempt to send airborne updates, good or bad, from the Arctic. Sophy explained the method in specific instructions:
“A Cross on the breast (either in red or black ink, according to the color of the bird) to be used only in the event of good news, not necessarily implying the safety of Sir John Franklin individually, but that the missing Expedition has been found.”
The sighting of a special pigeon, named for the purpose, would signal especially good news:
“The bird ‘Lady Ross’ to be sent off only under the joyful circumstances of Sir John’s individual rescue and safety. It must besides, as a guarantee that it has been sent off, and has not escaped, have the red or black cross upon the breast and be marked No. 7.”
Heeding guidance from the spirit world, Lady Franklin bucked the polar experts and instructed Kennedy to take the search south rather than via Wellington Channel. Her commander felt just as strongly that the supernatural messages were real. Kennedy was a friend of Captain William Coppin and had spent three days with him in Derry during the months of planning for the 1851 expedition. To be sure, Kennedy sat through three sessions to make contact with Weesy’s ghost. He heard the same four place names, including the still-undiscovered Victoria Strait, and the location of Erebus and Terror off Victory Point, revealed in the original apparition two years earlier. Coppin even saw the Prince Albert off from Aberdeen.
Kennedy declared her a dry ship, with only a small amount of rum for medicinal purposes. On their way into the Arctic, the crew bought six sled dogs, sealskin boots, and other warm clothing from Inuit. The expedition covered some 1,100 grueling miles overland, in conditions so extreme they often couldn’t build a fire, forcing them to eat ptarmigan, frozen and raw. At Peel Sound, where Kennedy should have made a turn south for the magnetic pole as Lady Franklin had instructed, he became confused. Just as an Arctic mirage had fooled John Ross years earlier in Lancaster Sound, Kennedy saw a land block between Somerset and Prince of Wales Islands that didn’t exist. Convinced there was no navigable route, he headed farther west, where heavy ice and a lashing snowstorm made the hunt for an exit impossible. During the blizzard, air, land, and sea melded into an opaque smear. So close to the magnetic pole, a compass wasn’t much help.
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“In our own case our course was guided almost entirely by the wind, the direction of which was indicated by a dog-vane carried in the hand. The weather had been exceedingly cold for the last few days, and to-day excessively so, and we were all suffering severely from snow-blindness; the pain from which, aggravated by the sharp particles of the snow-drift dashed against our eyes by a furious head-wind, was absolutely excruciating.”
They pushed on, followed for a while by a starving wolf. One of the sled dogs fainted and took twenty-five minutes to catch its breath. After several frustrating days, surviving on pemmican and snow to save water and fuel, Kennedy saw signs of scurvy and ordered a retreat. Tantalizingly close to picking up the missing men’s trail, Kennedy pulled up short.
The Admiralty stuck to its view that Wellington Channel was the place to be, far to the north of where Franklin’s men gave up their ships. For the next run at the wrong place, the Royal Navy chose Sir Edward Belcher, a tough taskmaster born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who moved with his family to England when he was a boy. He volunteered for the navy at age thirteen and later served under Frederick Beechey in the Western Arctic. After Belcher developed a reputation for being too harsh, the Admiralty didn’t give him a command for several years. But in 1852, the navy put him in charge of an expedition of five ships to look for Sir John and his crewmen. Belcher made no apologies for demanding the most of his men. At sea in the Arctic, there was far too much to lose to settle for anything less.
“Men who command must feel for the lives entrusted to their keeping,” was the way he saw it. “And good men do not follow mad-brained fools.”
