Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  “I told him that so far as my experience permitted me to say, the only probable useful thing left for him to do about that sad affair would be to try to locate the O’Reilly Island vicinity under-water-wreck remains and identify them,” Learmonth reported to P. A. C. Nichols, manager of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Arctic Division.

  The best place to start, Learmonth told the captain, was at the Perry Island trading post, on the central gulf’s southern coast. There he would find Angulalik, an Inuk who had helped both the Hudson’s Bay Company and its fierce rival, the Canalaska Trading Company, set up posts in an area rich with Arctic fox. Angulalik had traveled far in the fur trade, and knew Inuit in many places, so Learmonth expected he would be an excellent source on where Inuit believed at least one of Franklin’s ships went down in eastern Queen Maud Gulf. He also recommended listening to Inuit elders of Perry River on the Adelaide Peninsula, the ancestral home of the Illuilirmiut, and on Sherman Inlet, which separates the Adelaide and Klutschak Peninsulas.

  Some of their “forefathers were the only Eskimos who actually met and spoke with the retreating crews,” Learmonth claimed.

  “They are also the only Eskimos who have any proper idea of where their traditional stories have it one of the ships positively went down and from which, before it sank, their forefathers salvaged many things. If Angulalik cannot pin point the spot he and other older members of his clan will certainly know the approximate location of what may remain of the wreck (if it has not been scattered far and wide long ago by heavy ice floes driven down from McClintock Channel and which to this day frequently go hard aground and pile up in these shallow O’Reilly Island waters after break-up each season . . .).”

  With the experience of more than thirty years living and working on and around King William Island, the retired fur trader also assured Hoffman that claims that Inuit had massacred Franklin Expedition survivors on Taylor Island, which lies west across Victoria Strait from King William Island, were unfounded. McKenzie pushed back, citing the Royal Navy’s Rear-Admiral Noel Wright, a British naval historian, who believed Inuit violence was the best way to explain why none of Franklin’s men survived. Inuit accounts to the contrary were sheer fantasy, McKenzie assured the army captain. Like others before him, the insurance executive put more faith in wild speculation and prejudice than Inuit oral history.

  “These present day tales which have been told hundreds of times are really legends and can hardly be regarded as factual,” McKenzie assured Hoffman.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, someone at the local Hudson’s Bay Company post told Hoffman that Angulalik “wasn’t able to help in this matter.” But, “as a result of the Northern equivalent of the Bamboo Telegraph,” the army captain wrote, he got a call from the Gjoa Haven post. Folks there offered to have several Inuit speak with him at the start of the operation that August. Their ancestors had also had contact with men from the Franklin Expedition, Hoffman was told. Hoffman reported everything up the chain of command, including word that a trapper had found “parts of a wrecked boat about 1,000 yards inland on Stewart Point [near Perry River] which he never reported to anyone.” The captain recommended that the information from Learmonth and the Inuit receive high-priority consideration in Operation Franklin.

  The mission’s main base was at Gladman Point, on the southwest coast of King William Island, overlooking the entrance to Simpson Strait. It was the site of a US Air Force radar station in the Distant Early Warning, or DEW Line, built during the Cold War to track Soviet bombers that might try to strike the homeland in flights over the pole. Operation Franklin search teams deployed from Gladman Point in five-person tent groups, each one armed with a shovel, a pickax, oil lamps, a naphtha-fueled cooking stove, and three plastic jerry cans of water. The searchers also had mine detectors, which turned out to be useless. Instead of uncovering artifacts, they were constantly set off by ferrous deposits. Their magnetic waves couldn’t penetrate more than two feet into the permafrost anyway. The teams’ PRC 125 radio sets weren’t much more effective, leaving some cut off from communication with the Gladman Point base for days.

  Bad weather, including heavy fog, low clouds, cold rain, freezing drizzle, and snowfall on several days, blew holes in a plan that was months in the making. Even when the weather cooperated, mechanical problems sometimes grounded the helicopters. Gravel kicked up by rotor wash in the landing zones fouled the chopper engines early in the mission. A C-130E transport plane had to fly in two replacement engines, delaying the operation still more. They were grounded again when the wind direction sent blasts straight up the helicopters’ exhaust pipes, risking what chopper pilots call a “hot start,” which could have damaged the engines.

  The soldiers survived on basic combat rations that included powdered potatoes, preserved ham, and canned meat, along with tinned juice, vegetables and fruit, assorted soups, bread, flour, tea, and sugar. The Arctic supplement consisted of two chocolate bars and a package of cocoa powder. Things hadn’t changed that much for troops slogging it out in the High Arctic since Franklin’s day, except the Canadian rations excluded an important Royal Navy comfort: alcohol. When Canadian military planners pushed food services to toss in some fresh eggs and oatmeal, the Teletype response pointed out dryly that standard RP4 ration packs “are designed for combat and they express disbelief that the ref[erenced] project requires a more concentrated effort than combat.”

  The late-summer weather was so bad in 1967 that Operation Franklin troops had to kill time waiting for it to clear. They organized fishing parties. They challenged the Americans employed by the Federal Electric Corporation to operate the DEW Line radar station at Gladman Point to a tug-of-war match. The Canadians won. The first air and ground searches began August 7, and conditions were far from ideal. The military called sea-ice conditions on the east and west coasts of King William Island “impossible—the ice has not broken up and still fills the straits.” Winter was coming early, the commander decided. He was ready to cancel operations at any moment.

  Two of the tent groups deployed to the northwest coast of King William Island started the walking searches between Capes Felix and Jane Franklin, a stretch of coast that had been checked many times over the decades. Since Ross had named a cape after Franklin’s wife, Hoffman reasoned in his letter to Secondari, “sentimentalists of the Franklin Expedition might have thought it suitable for the burial of Sir John.” Two other tent groups were assigned to the Boothia Peninsula, in the area where James Clark Ross discovered the North Magnetic Pole in 1831. A fifth group was ordered to check the Clarence Islands and then join the Boothia Peninsula operation. While helicopters did aerial searches along the island’s Albert Edward Bay, another land group looked for Franklin’s grave on Mount Matheson, the hill northeast of Gjoa Haven.

  McKenzie won the argument over Taylor Island, which ended up at the bottom of five targets on the Priority One list. Bad weather delayed a ground search there until too late in the operation for soldiers to do more than a cursory check. Helicopters spotted nothing untoward. They shifted their aerial hunt to Gateshead Island, farther north in McClintock Channel, and again came up empty. The ground search ended at two cairns forty miles north of Gjoa Haven. The military got expert advice on cairn spotting from Michael Marsden, a geography professor at Sir George Williams University, which later merged to form Montreal’s Concordia University. Marsden, who had had long experience in the Arctic and was also a Franklin buff, advised the searchers to keep eyes peeled for three types of stone cairns. Navy marker cairns were usually circular, around three feet across at the base and normally built tall enough for someone to see from the deck of a ship offshore. Even if a cairn had crumbled, or been dismantled, the remaining foundation circle of stones could mark the spot.

  “An item to look for here is an old spar as messages were frequently placed in a plugged hole in the base of the spar which was then placed on end in the top of the cairn,” a summary of Marsden’s tips advised. “The possibility of finding one is fairly rem
ote as the wooden spar would be very attractive to the Eskimos.”

  A second type of cairn, built to cache Royal Navy food, had a larger base, built up two or three feet and ten to twelve feet in diameter. A tall cairn rose above that storage area. Finally, Marsden described Inuit food caches as “usually just a pile of stones placed over the food they wanted to protect. The Eskimo cache will always be found where stones are available whereas the Navy cairns may be as far as two miles from the nearest stones and built on gravel or sand.”

  The professor suggested that soldiers be briefed “to think like sailors,” and focus on places such as headlands, capes, and points, where seamen would logically erect a marker cairn so that it could be seen from a passing ship. Deploying a small army assault boat to cruise offshore might help direct the land search to the best hunting grounds, Marsden suggested. Then he had some final advice, on handling Inuit guides and cutting costs, passed along in the military memo. The federal government’s Department of Northern Affairs (DNA) set an Inuit guide’s wages at $12 a day, but: “Should you give an Eskimo a lift by helicopter to the west coast of the island or any other place so that he can do some hunting, he may provide some guiding at no charge as you have then assisted him rather than him assisting you. The DNA is very firm on the wage scale though and it would not be wise to try to pay less than the scale. (They cannot work for bully beef.)” The troops ended up searching without the benefit of Inuit guides because, as Operation Franklin’s after-action report concluded: “It was felt that whatever information they could have provided would have been colored by time and legend.”

  E. F. Roots, head of the Polar Continental Shelf Program that still operates a Resolute Bay logistics base for scientists and government agencies on Cornwallis Island, had advised the military not to expect too much of Operation Franklin. Two years earlier, his survey team had searched for magnetic anomalies around O’Reilly Island, hoping the iron in Erebus or Terror’s locomotive engines, or the bow sheathing, would trigger a magnetometer. They hauled the device on a sledge and got some intriguing hits. But Roots was convinced the biggest one was “purely geological—too big to be man-made,” and was likely “iron and manganese deposits in the serpentine.”

  They did find a nail, with the telltale broad-arrow marking that identified Royal Navy property, along with some bits of wood. Roots described the place, in a letter to McKenzie, as “a low, hook-shaped island about half a mile long lying a couple of miles off the north east corner of O’Reilly island.” Roots seemed to accept Inuit testimony that the wreck of a large ship, possibly one of Franklin’s, was in the rough vicinity. He warned that heavy floes of sea ice, driven by powerful northerlies, often piled up “to tremendous heights along the island coasts and even form grounded masses of ice in mid-channel. Such action makes it quite unlikely that a foundered ship would have remained intact in this from 1847 to the present unless by some chance it had been pushed into a deep hole.” The area was well-traveled by Inuit, so the chances “of your finding any significant relics in this area above the shore-line would appear to be remote,” Roots cautioned.

  “However, we wish you good hunting!”

  _______

  BARELY A WEEK into the mission, soldiers searching the Boothia Peninsula were running out of rations and down to one meal a day. Captain Hoffman declared their situation critical and ordered them back to base.

  Five army divers from 1 Field Squadron, Royal Canadian Engineers, deployed southwest of King William Island under the command of Lieutenant J. G. Critchley. Their mission was to follow up on Learmonth’s tip about Inuit testimony and a submerged wreck near the Klutschak Peninsula, which thrusts up from the North American mainland. The divers had no sonar or other equipment to look underwater. They only had their eyes, staring down at the seabed as they were towed by a rope, dodging ice floes in water around 29 degrees Fahrenheit. Their hooded wetsuits were marginally thicker than the standard for scuba diving, but the divers cut holes in their booties to keep from inflating into black balloons as they were dragged through the ocean. As a result, the icy water constantly flowed over their skin like a damp draft through a meat locker, never resting long enough to form an insulating layer. Instead, it constantly sapped the searchers’ strength.

  Bob Shaw, a twenty-five-year-old corporal, could see ice crystals floating past on the current when he was down around twenty feet. The smallest were like the first few snowflakes of a flurry in the early winter twilight. Others were closer to tiny ice cubes, Shaw thought. He held onto a towboard, about three feet long, with a depth gauge, dive watch, and compass fastened to the top. The army called the device an underwater sled. Diving plank would be more like it. Army engineers cut it from a piece of plywood in their workshop. Two holes jigsawed out of each side served as handgrips. A length of five-eighths-inch nylon rope, knotted through holes at the top of the board, ran more than a hundred feet to the transom of an inflatable boat that was about twelve feet long and propelled by an 18 hp outboard motor. The throttle never got much higher than idle—just enough to keep the boat barely moving forward against any currents, or to cut around ice floes. In effect, it was trolling, with a soldier on a rope instead of a lure on a fishing line.

  Holding on with elbows slightly bent, a diver tilted the front edge of the plywood down to descend. He’d point it up to glide back toward the surface. To signal, in the event he spotted something interesting, the diver let go of the board altogether. When it popped up on the surface, a spotter shouted for the boat to stop. That did not happen often during Operation Franklin. At maximum depth, between forty and fifty feet, divers could see only around twenty feet in front of them, which was considered good visibility. As clear as diving in the Caribbean, Shaw thought. Just a helluva lot colder. The most promising object that caught his eye on the sandy bottom was a rusting tin can, which wasn’t nearly old enough to be from a Royal Navy expedition. Learmonth had warned that a lot of fur-trade wrecks, and their rubbish, were scattered across the Canadian Arctic. Shaw might have been examining one piece of that trash. Realizing it wasn’t anything significant, he stopped for a moment anyway to watch a little fish swim in and out. It was a diversion from the monotony and numbing cold. For frogmen trained to carry out clandestine combat operations in the Cold War, this was more like cold water torture. Before long, Shaw couldn’t think about much more than being in a nice, warm sleeping bag. The freezing water sapped his body heat and his strength, stiffening his fingers and joints until he could barely function.

  The only places to try to warm up were in the team’s two ten-person tents, which had hexagonal walls of canvas and an inner lining of nylon. One was reserved for drying wetsuits. The other was the divers’ home. With limited stores of fresh water in jerry cans, a camping stove, and heavy winds clawing to tear holes in the thin walls, it took a wet diver straight out of the frigid sea some imagination and concentration to feel warm enough to stop shivering. At the start, they were able to search the seabed, working lines perpendicular to the shore, for fifty-five minutes at a stretch. The inflatable towed one diver out at a time in a straight line, until his shift was over and the boat took him back to the island to warm up. Then the next man went in the water on a parallel track. On Shaw’s first run, he surfaced to grab hold of the boat, buffeted by waves, for a belt of hot coffee from a Thermos. His hand was shaking so badly he couldn’t get the drink to his lips without spilling it.

  “Hell, just pour it into my glove,” Shaw told a buddy, who promptly did just that. Steaming hot from the container, the coffee was barely tepid against the corporal’s hand. The touch of warmth, followed by a sip and a jolt of caffeine, was enough to steady his hand for a proper gulp or two of coffee before heading underwater for a few more minutes.

  By the third week, shifts were down almost by half to an average of just thirty minutes. When ice floes closed in, the frogmen did their best to use them as dive platforms and plunge off, attached to lifelines. Dive operations had to shut down completely just t
wo days after they began, because a storm blew so many ice floes south that they packed the narrow channels around the cluster of islands. They couldn’t go back underwater until three days before Operation Franklin was called off altogether on August 21. So the divers spent most of their time on land, eyes down and scanning the ridges and shorelines, where they had better luck.

  After completing less than two of the hunt’s scheduled three weeks, the land, sea, and air mission hadn’t found Franklin’s grave, any of his expedition’s records, or either of his ships. The soldiers did, however, collect a few artifacts: an old spoon, likely Inuit-made from wood and brass, lying near a tall, unidentified cairn on the Boothia Peninsula; the remains of a foot near Two Grave Bay; the sole and heel of a boot, with wooden hobs, at Cape Felix; shreds of canvas, an Inuk’s skull and bones, believed to be a female’s, along with harpoon tips and spearheads, and a Hudson’s Bay Company snow knife. Divers found nothing important underwater, but they did pick up several artifacts during the island searches. On O’Reilly, Shaw walked a ridge overlooking the shore while teammates tracked roughly parallel to him down to the waterline. The corporal stumbled upon a piece of splintered wood, about two feet long, with a join in the middle. He cut it down to the length of his forearm, square and flat at one end and tapering to the other. The wood was light. Maybe fir or pine, Shaw guessed. Whatever it was, he knew it came from somewhere outside the treeless Arctic. Polished up later, it had a rich grain, befitting a Royal Navy officer’s cabin, maybe even the commander’s. The diver kept it as a souvenir.

  The objects the soldiers photographed, in black-and-white images, included a slightly weathered, solid-wood belaying pin, with a curved handle and a cylindrical pin. Just the right size for clubbing someone, it was intended to secure running rigging on the bulwarks of a large sailing ship. The dive team also found two round iron bars called drift pins, one snapped shorter and slightly bent. They likely held together heavy parts of a big ship that had to withstand a lot of strain, as the keel or stern of a Royal Navy bomb ship would under the intense compression of winter sea ice. Among the other artifacts were pieces of a small boat’s gunwale, the rusted remnants of four rectangular cans, torn and twisted bits of copper sheeting, along with fragments of wooden timbers, a barrel stave, and dowel pins. There was also a three-quarter piece of wooden disk, identified as a wood coverplate from a block. It resembled the plug for a deck hawsehole leading down to the iron pipe that channeled the anchor’s heavy rope cable into its locker. One that looked very similar turned up on another island decades later—a critical clue in the hunt.