by Paul Watson
Things didn’t start out well for McClintock’s expedition. The Arctic cycle had turned extremely cold again. No one could remember the sea ice being so bad in late summer at the eastern entrance to the archipelago. Whalers had left without even trying to penetrate the pack ice. McClintock threw the Fox into it, hoping the steam-powered propeller would get her through, but sea ice quickly locked her up. The ship was stuck for 250 days, drifting with the heavy ice across Baffin Bay and into Davis Strait, an agonizing journey in frozen shackles of more than 1,190 miles. He sent a letter to Lady Franklin with the bad news, and the bright side of it:
“It is true that a year, an unfortunate year, has been lost, but it is a great consolation to know that we have more reason to hope for success now, in as much as we are very early in the field and are ready to follow up this advantage.”
The Arctic finally freed the Fox on Easter Sunday in 1858. Emotionally and physically drained by their winter of torment, the men were anxious to get to work looking for whatever remained of the Franklin Expedition. The good news was that McClintock had picked up dogs in Greenland to haul sleds, which would allow the searchers to split up, cover more ground, and speak to as many Inuit as they could find for leads. McClintock had another advantage: To be sure he had a highly skilled interpreter, the commander telegraphed Copenhagen to engage the services of Carl Petersen, the Danish official who had done the job so well for Penny and Kane.
McClintock dogsledded along King William Island’s southern end, making magnetic observations as he went, while his second-in-command, Lieutenant William Hobson, took the northern end. Soon after crossing to the eastern shore of King William Island from Matty Island, next to the Boothia Peninsula, McClintock met thirty or forty Netsilingmiut Inuit living in what he called a “snow village.”
“I do not think any of them had ever seen white people alive before, but they evidently knew us as friends,” he wrote. “We halted at a little distance, pitched our tent, the better to secure small articles from being stolen whilst we bartered with them.”
The captain traded for items the Inuit told him were from a shipwreck, five days’ journey away: one up the inlet and four overland to the western coast of King William Island, where “they added that but little now remained of the wreck which was accessible, their countrymen having carried almost everything away.” The ship had no masts, the Inuit assured him, laughing at the question and talking to each other about fire. “There had been many books they said, but all have long ago been destroyed by the weather; the ship was forced on shore in the fall of the year by the ice.”
Although McClintock was eager “to get away from these good-humoured, noisy thieves,” they repeatedly tapped him gently on his chest and assured him in Inuktitut: “We are friends.” They also sold him six pieces of silver plate, bearing the crests or initials of Franklin, Crozier, Lieutenant James Fairholme (a veteran of the Syrian War in 1840 who was also briefly captured by the Moors while serving aboard a captured slave ship), and Dr. Alexander McDonald, an assistant surgeon aboard the Terror. The Inuit also traded bows and arrows they had crafted from what McClintock called “English woods,” along with buttons from uniforms and other clothing, and silver spoons and forks, which cost him four sewing needles each. When he had all the relics, McClintock swapped some of his sled-dog puppies for food: seal meat, blubber, frozen venison, and some dried and frozen salmon.
The Inuit told McClintock they had not visited the shipwreck he sought during the past winter and pointed out a boy and an old woman who were the last to see her. “Petersen questioned the woman closely, and she seemed anxious to give all the information in her power.” They had last seen the wreck in the winter of 1857–58, she told Petersen, which would have been a decade after Erebus and Terror were given up to the ice.
“She said many of the white men dropped by the way as they went to the Great River; that some were buried and some were not; they did not themselves witness this, but discovered their bodies during the winter following.”
McClintock would soon discover why, when he picked up Hobson’s trail and saw the stunning notes the lieutenant had found at Victory Point, in which survivors, including Crozier and Fitzjames, briefly detailed Franklin’s death, their ships’ long imprisonment in sea ice, and the decision to abandon them to try to make it to Back’s Great Fish River. McClintock and Hobson studied the large, heavy boat attached to a sledge, which was pointing back toward sea, on the northern coast of King William Island where crewmen from Erebus and Terror made landfall.
“The total weight of boat and sledge may be taken at 1,400 lbs., which amounts to a heavy load for seven strong healthy men,” McClintock calculated.
Portions of two skeletons inside were, McClintock estimated, “of a slight young person; the other of a large, strongly made, middle-aged man.” The latter might have been an officer, the commander guessed, but it was impossible to tell because “large and powerful animals, probably wolves, had destroyed much of this skeleton.” Lying near it was a fragment of a fine pair of slippers, embroidered in a pattern of tiny diamond shapes with dots in the middle.
“The lines were white, with a black margin; the spaces white, red, and yellow. They had originally been 11 inches long, lined with calf-skin with the hair left on, and the edges bound with red silk ribbon. Besides these slippers there were a pair of small strong shooting half-boots. The other skeleton was in a somewhat more perfect state, and was enveloped with clothes and furs; it lay across the boat, under the after-thwart. Close beside it were found five watches; and there were two double-barrelled guns—one barrel in each loaded and cocked—standing muzzle upwards against the boat’s side.”
McClintock noted that neither skeleton’s skull was found, except for the lower jaw of each. The direction the boat was pointing helped convince him that it was supposed to return to the ships stranded offshore. The two dead men likely couldn’t keep up, and were left behind until others returned with fresh supplies. If McClintock was right, they apparently died waiting.
Their remains weren’t buried until twenty years after McClintock found them, when US Army Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka rediscovered the skeletons.
Other artifacts included half a dozen small books, most of which were Christian works, including Christian Melodies. The exception was The Vicar of Wakefield. The reader of a small Bible had underlined whole passages and made several notes in the margins. There were also silk handkerchiefs and “an amazing quantity of clothing” that included several pairs of boots, towels, soap, a sponge, toothbrush, and combs, along with sailmakers’ leather palms, bayonet scabbards cut down into knife sheaths, some tobacco in a tin, twine, nails, saws, and lots of silverware and plates, eight of which bore Sir John’s family crest. The only provisions were tea and roughly forty pounds of chocolate.
McClintock summed up the hodgepodge of things the escaping crewmen hauled from Erebus and Terror as, “in short, a quantity of articles of one description and another truly astonishing in variety, and such as, for the most part, modern sledge-travellers in these regions would consider a mere accumulation of dead weight, of little use, and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews.”
Farther south, where at least some of the Franklin Expedition survivors made their way southward along the west coast of King William Island, McClintock was walking along a gravel ridge shortly after midnight when he spotted a bleached skeleton, partly exposed, with a few fragments of clothing poking through the snow. Lying face down, the victim was a young man, slightly built, who seemed taller than normal, McClintock thought. The dead man was wearing a blue jacket, with slashed sleeves and braided edging beneath a pilot-cloth greatcoat with plain buttons. His neckerchief was tied in a loose bowknot, which told McClintock the young man must have been a steward or officer’s servant.
“This poor man seems to have selected the bare ridge top, as affording the least tiresome walking, and to have fallen upon his face in the position in which we found him,” McCl
intock concluded, which reminded him of what an old Inuit woman had said, “They fell down and died as they walked along.”
The searchers also met Inuit on King William Island who said they had seen two ships, “one of them was seen to sink in deep water, and nothing was obtained from her, a circumstance at which they expressed much regret; but the other was forced on shore by the ice, where they suppose she still remains, but is much broken.”
They called the area where the second ship, a great source of wood for their families, met her end Oot-loo-lik. McClintock spelled it as he heard it, but the modern version is Ugjulik, meaning “it has bearded seals.” He thought the Inuit were talking about the west coast of King William Island, but they meant the eastern end of what qalunaaq named Queen Maud Gulf.
The Inuit had spoken with McClintock weeks earlier and didn’t mention any ship wrecking on shore. He thought they were holding out on him and only started talking, under anxious questions, after a young man let the tantalizing information slip. He “also told us that the body of a man was found on board the ship; that he must have been a very large man, and had long teeth: this is all he recollected having been told, for he was quite a child at the time.” The Inuit “told us it was in the fall of the year—that is, August or September—when the ships were destroyed; that all the white people went away to the ‘large river,’ taking a boat or boats with them, and that in the following winter their bones were found there.”
McClintock bought both of the two families’ dogs and a hunter’s knife, and moved on. After two and a half months of sledding, he returned to the Fox to find Hobson very sick with scurvy. The expedition had already lost three men in the course of making the biggest breakthrough yet in the long, fruitless hunt for Erebus and Terror or any survivors, so the commander decided it was time to head home to inform his sponsor and the nation. When the Fox reached England, Lady Franklin was in the Pyrenees under doctor’s orders, decompressing from the stress of waiting for word of her husband. An urgent telegram, sent through the British consul at Bayonne, informed her: “Succes full return of fox important letters for Lady Franclin,” which were waiting for her at the riverside spa town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre. In the most important one, McClintock matter-of-factly informed her that Sir John was without question dead. He tried to soften the blow with a postscript that said Franklin would not have suffered long and had died with reason to hope his mission would succeed. “I cannot help remarking to you what instantly occurred to me on reading the records [left at Victory Point],” he wrote. “That Sir John Franklin was not harassed by either want of success or forebodings of evil.”
Jane hurried home, where the newspapers trumpeted her as a heroine. Under the headline “The Good Wife’s Expedition,” the News of the World declared:
“Since the beginning of the world, it has been considered that a good woman is the best thing to be found in the world. . . . This is not a frothy compliment, for the world has before it at the present moment the living woman who deserves it, to contemplate, to admire, and to bow down with all the homage and devotion that a human being may bestow. There is a Lady Franklin to extol. . . .”
Other papers attacked the government, blaming it for bungling years of search efforts. The Royal Geographical Society awarded Jane’s tireless campaign with the Founder’s Gold Medal, making her the first woman to receive it. But what she enjoyed most was the vindication of her husband by the people who really mattered in the world of exploration. The society’s commemoration said it was “testifying to the fact that his Expedition was the first to discover a North-West Passage.”
The world soon turned its attention to war again, this time in the United States, where the horrors of civil war reached new heights.
The smoke barely settled, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, and his towering legacy met, at least for a moment, the Franklin lore. In April, a hearse drawn by six horses carried Lincoln’s coffin to New York’s City Hall, where it was placed beneath the rotunda on a bier covered in black velvet. Thousands of people, from dignitaries to newsboys, filed by to pay their respects. Just before the coffin was closed for the president’s burial, Captain William Parker Snow handed General John A. Dix, commander of the New York military district, what the Franklin searcher claimed were expedition artifacts to inter alongside Lincoln. They included a tattered page of a prayer book. The first legible word was “Martyr.”
THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION gradually faded into history, but never from Lady Franklin’s mind. Still searching for answers, she finally made her own voyage to the Arctic.
A brief report in The Times rekindled Lady Franklin’s determination to make the journey north, even though McClintock’s expedition had proved Sir John was long dead.
“Dr. Hall, the Arctic Explorer, arrived at New Bedford [Massachusetts] yesterday from Repulse bay, after an absence of five years,” read a paragraph in The Times. “He discovered the skeletons of several of Sir John Franklin’s party at King William’s Land, and he brings numerous relics of the Franklin expedition.”
The brief news story played to Jane’s deepest anxiety: Even if everyone in the Franklin Expedition was dead, they might still speak, and answer the many lingering questions, through their writing. She fired off a telegram to Charles Hall’s sponsor, Henry Grinnell, asking if the American explorer had recovered any documents, whether journals, letters, or even manuscripts for books.
“None,” the financier replied.
Lady Franklin needed to speak to Hall directly. She even offered to pay his travel expenses to England. Jane was bent on persuading Hall to return to King William Island to look for documents, but under the supervision of a British officer. Hall didn’t like the idea of serving under a foreigner, but he told Franklin’s widow he would consider it. He invited her to visit him in the United States while he awaited government support for his proposed journey to the North Pole.
“Having failed in my last effort to get any experienced Arctic officer to cross examine him personally we are compelled to feel we must go now to America ourselves,” Jane wrote.
She and Sophy set off in early 1870, accompanied by a maid named Chevalier and a manservant, Lawrence, destined for the West Coast by way of the Panama Canal. Dr. David Walker, an Irish surgeon aboard the Fox, had joined the US Army and was stationed in San Francisco, where he welcomed the women and their servants to a country still trying to regain its feet, less than five full years into Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War. Just under three years earlier, the Russian Empire had sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million. The physician offered to arrange passage to Sitka, Alaska, on the Newbern, a steamer around two hundred feet long that carried troops and supplies. Hoping Franklin Expedition documents might have made their way into Russian hands, and might still be found in the newly American territory, Jane jumped at the chance to visit an area of the Arctic her late husband had first seen some forty-four years earlier, before they were married. Lady Franklin was seventy-eight years old and still following her wanderlust. Despite the ship’s tendency to roll with the waves, the women and their servants reached Alaska without incident. But apart from some souvenirs they bought, including what Sophy described as “a horn spoon with an ornamental handle, and some rather handsome moccasins,” they left empty-handed.
To the end of her life, Lady Franklin kept trying to find her lost husband’s final words. Early in 1875, her health frail at age eighty-three, she reminded whalers once again that she was still offering a £2,000 reward to anyone who discovered records from Erebus or Terror. That generated good coverage in the American press, including at the New York Herald. Its publisher, James Gordon Bennett Jr., cooperated with Jane to finance an Arctic expedition by Allen Young to search for Franklin Expedition records. Young, who had served under McClintock on the Fox, sailed aboard Pandora, a former Royal Navy gunboat, but heavy sea ice in Peel Sound blocked her and forced her to turn back. By the time Young got back to England, Lady Jane Franklin was de
ad.
PART III
THE DISCOVERY
9
An Inuk Detective
Step through the doorway, out of the snug warmth and into the midday winter twilight, and whomp. The High Arctic comes at you hard. No electric space heaters and diesel furnaces to comfort you now. If the sun rises at all, it isn’t high enough in the sky to feel. The pale disk, in a halo of suspended ice crystals, only teases. Your body is your only source of heat, which is only a fragile cocoon of air trapped beneath a heavy parka, lined with the highly prized Hutterite down of white geese and a hood rim of coyote fur. The wind never stops piercing any crack or hole it can find in that flimsy defense. It constantly bites at any unprotected flesh, such as earlobes, fingertips, or a bit of nose poking through a wrapped scarf.
At –37 degrees Fahrenheit on an early February day in Gjoa Haven—a mind-numbing –68.8 degrees Fahrenheit in a moaning wind—parched Arctic air is your closest enemy. In a matter of minutes, it can turn life-threatening. The weather office has issued an Extreme Cold Warning, and cold has to be very cold to set off alarms way up here. This alert warns anyone venturing outside, even just for a few minutes, to pay attention to shortness of breath, irregular heartbeats, or chest pains, along with changing skin color and stiff, swollen, or painful muscles. In the Arctic stillness, they are alarms screeching: Get back inside. Escape the cold that can kill you.
Like a hungry predator that feeds on epidermal cells, the cold wind sniffs out any unprotected skin and bears down. The attack escalates as seconds pass from stinging to numbing to a burning sensation. At first, there’s no pain, no body distress signals to say the deep freeze is inflicting serious damage. Then suddenly your skin is so cold it feels hot.
