Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  The soldiers had good reason to believe the things they discovered had come from a Franklin vessel, even though they were far to the south of where the expedition members had abandoned their ships in 1848. Either Erebus or Terror seemed tantalizingly close, just as the Inuit had always said. But where? The answer to that gnawing question was still as elusive in 1967 as it had been for close to 120 years.

  WAITING FOR A RIDE out on a Voyageur helicopter, which was grounded with engine problems, the divers had to stretch a week’s rations for another five days. Even after the memo fight with the supply clerk months earlier, there was little choice: mainly canned meats, sausages, sardines, instant potatoes, and candies and coffee for pick-me-ups from the sugar and caffeine. There was also something resembling jambalaya, which the team had set aside for just such an emergency. When the chopper finally got in to take them out, the exhausted soldiers were down to their last can of the stuff. The long wait left Corporal Shaw time for some tinkering with his piece of wood. He heated up a coat hanger over a Coleman stove and gradually burned a small depression, shaped like a black eye, to make an ashtray.

  “O’Reilly Is. N.W.T.,” he wrote next to it. (The site was in the Northwest Territories then. It is now part of Nunavut, a self-governing, mainly Inuit territory.) Shaw also etched in each teammate’s name: Vic, John, Ken, Bob, and Larry.

  In its after-action report, the dive team concluded that “time has erased any signs on land left by Franklin’s expedition.” They only thing left to do, their final report recommended, “would be to locate Franklin’s ships and locate from them the records that would have been left on ship.” The concentration of debris they found was mainly on the southern tip of a small finger-shaped island, and on the nearby shores of O’Reilly. Critchley’s hand-drawn map unofficially named the narrow strip Critchley Island after himself. Tipping his cap to the rest of the team, there was also Shaw Bay to the east, then Butler Bay, just southeast of Nail Island, where the 1965 search found the spike with the Royal Navy’s broad arrow, and, farther east and south, Davidson and Marks Islands. Small X’s marked the location of each discovery. The map was attached to the military report, which concluded that the scattering of objects “indicates that an old wooden ship is in the close vicinity.”

  Army searchers working on the northwest tip of King William Island found another intriguing clue at a cairn on Cape Felix. It was in a message left by Sergeant Henry Larsen, the RCMP inspector, during his transit of the Northwest Passage in 1959.

  “We note two small islets off this cape. . . . It is believed that Sir John Franklin’s grave might be on one of these islets.”

  A helicopter couldn’t even confirm the islets still existed above water because so much ice had piled up in the early freeze that summer.

  12

  The Hunt Goes Underwater

  No chain of islands on Earth is more vicious than the Arctic Archipelago. Like teeth lining colossal jaws, some ninety-four large islands, and 36,469 smaller ones, stretch across a territory about half the size of the contiguous United States. They can bite down and swallow ships whole. Even the earliest, most hopeful searchers, who mapped large parts of the archipelago as they looked for Erebus and Terror and their crews, knew it would take a miracle to find anyone in that gargantuan maw. Large Royal Navy sailing ships, driven by favorable winds, could make fast, early progress on a current flowing east to west only to hit a powerful opposing flow, or struggle for headway against circling gyres as they navigated deeper into the archipelago’s myriad channels. They could sail calmly across large basins gouged by ancient glaciers to a depth of more than 1,900 feet and then suddenly run into shoals, hiding just beneath the surface, waiting to tear into a ship’s hull.

  For decades, searchers looking for Erebus and Terror only turned up promising scraps: a splintered piece of wood here, some fragments of copper or other metal sheeting there. Proof of origin was extremely hard to come by. Experts knew to look for telltale markings, especially the broad arrow, also known as a crow’s foot. The Royal Navy stamped it on bits of ships big and small. Even seemingly insignificant items, like a tack or a screw, bore the broad arrow to counter the many thieves who tried to walk off with whatever they could sell from dockyards and other opportune places to pinch things. Finding Inuit with obvious artifacts from the Franklin Expedition hadn’t brought searchers any closer to finding Sir John’s ships. Their trail remained stone cold until the hunt moved beneath the water’s surface.

  Marine archaeology wasn’t born until the early 1960s, some two decades after Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his partner, Émile Gagnan, invented the Aqua-Lung, which they renamed with the acronym SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). Imagined riches had drawn divers to shipwrecks long before Cousteau and Gagnan made it easier with scuba gear. Dressed in bulky helmets and canvas suits, tethered to clattering air pumps in boats bobbing on the surface, earlier wreck explorers had grabbed what they could, even if that meant hammering and prying at a historic site to pull pieces off. Scuba gear freed divers to go deeper inside wrecks and strip them of gold ingots, scattered coins and jewels, and other valuables. Archaeologists who saw the potential for significant discoveries underwater first worked through divers as their eyes and hands. But there was more frustration than success, prompting one early practitioner to complain that “it is far easier to teach diving to an archaeologist than archaeology to a diver!”

  CANADA BECAME a pioneer in underwater archaeology through the tenacity and invention of Walter Zacharchuk, the country’s first professional marine archaeologist. Born in Poland to ethnic Ukrainian parents who escaped the Soviet Union before they could be imprisoned during the Bolshevik Revolution, Zacharchuk was only eight when the Nazis forced him to work. His small fingers were ideal for poking into the tiny spaces of a gas-fired machine producing medicine vials in the small, east-central German town of Grossbreitenbach. For two years, he sweated in the factory, standing in shorts and kneesocks that he darned himself with scorched, blistered fingers. He slept in a bunk in a drafty barracks, barely surviving on starvation rations of buttermilk and cornmeal, supplemented with cauliflower and turnips when they were available.

  After liberation in 1945, the Red Cross pieced his family back together. Two years after the war ended, Zacharchuk’s brother-in-law, an official in the French Ministère de l’Aire, the Air Ministry, took him south to Toulon, for centuries a major French naval port on the Côte d’Azur. One day at the beach, looking out on the Mediterranean where Admiral Horatio Nelson’s Royal Navy fleet had imposed a blockade during the Napoleonic Wars, Zacharchuk spotted men in green wetsuits emerging from the water.

  They were French military frogmen. Watching them trudge up the beach, dripping water trailed from a hidden world, the twelve-year-old was hooked hard. Zacharchuk eagerly asked if he could look through one of their diving masks. They obliged, and he ran to the water’s edge and jumped into the sea. One second, the boy was waist-deep in water near a rocky outcrop, standing in a hurtful world where dreaming of a future usually led to disappointment. The next, he was submerged in an enchanting universe, floating in a soothing, almost weightless place where sounds were muffled and life seemed magical, even as the ocean seeped into the diver’s mask that was too big for his head. It was a revelation: There, in the hypnotic ballet of swaying sea grass, moss, and darting fingerlings, a child saw his destiny.

  In 1948, the family moved to Montreal. Zacharchuk, now fourteen, worked a part-time job riding a bicycle route to pick up rolls of film from drugstores and deliver them for developing at his landlord’s photo shop. He was still trying to figure out how to get back to the undersea world that the French frogmen had let him see. Zacharchuk couldn’t afford diving gear, so he went to work building his own.

  Fortunately, John Date, an English coppersmith and brass molder, had started making deep-sea diving equipment in Montreal in 1853. Date manufactured the big, round diving helmets with small glass face plates that were attached to air h
oses and crankshaft pumps on the surface. Zacharchuk started hanging around Date’s Concord Street factory, pestering staff for information and examining the bulky crankshaft pump, with cast-iron cylinders, that still did the job long after scuba tanks were commonplace. Zacharchuk figured he could reverse engineer Date’s system for next to nothing. Which was almost more than he could afford.

  Working through the winter, in their basement workshop in a rented Rosemont duplex, Walt and his father, Cyrille, built the air pump out of two large apple-juice cans. They put a piston in each and a rocking beam across the top. Then they attached one-way valves to control the airflow in and out. Two copper tubes leading to a one-gallon paint can served as a reservoir. Twenty feet of stiff, red-rubber garden hose completed the contraption. The pump lever was a broomstick. Zacharchuk didn’t dare try constructing a helmet. Cyrille made a face mask from quarter-inch plate glass, cut in an oval, attached to a piece of car-tire inner tube, bound together with string, and held onto Walt’s face with inner-tube straps and water pressure.

  Zacharchuk tried it out from a pier on a summer day in 1951, in Saint-Paul-de-l’Île-aux-Noix, which sits across from a 210-acre island in the Richelieu River, about ten miles north of the US border. Since the late eighteenth century, it had been a strategic post on the main route from Montreal to New York. Zacharchuk’s diving platform looked out on Fort Lennox, which the British started building as a bulwark against American invaders in 1819—the same year Sir John Franklin began his first overland expedition to the Arctic. During World War II, it housed Jewish refugees who escaped the Nazis. The marina’s pier gave Zacharchuk an ideal spot for his tin-can air pump, down close enough to the water for the garden hose to reach his mouth and stay there. His girlfriend Doreen, who not only stuck with the experiment but eventually became his wife, worked the broomstick pump handle.

  When Zacharchuk stepped into the river, his lips pinched around the garden hose, he could barely dunk his head below the surface without stopping the airflow. The tin-can piston couldn’t overcome the surrounding water’s pressure. He got glimpses of sunfish and rock bass hanging around rusting bicycles, soft-drink bottles, cans, and other trash. Which was enough to tempt him back to the drawing board. In an early modification, he strapped a hot-water bottle to his back and ran the garden hose through that, which provided a reservoir of air at ambient pressure. The improvisation got him down four feet, with a lead-weight belt. His ears were painful at five feet until, on his mother’s advice, Zacharchuk put a button under his tongue and cleared his eustachian tubes from throat to ears with each swallow.

  A simple philosophy ensured Zacharchuk never gave up: “You gotta live with what you’re getting.”

  It helps to have a Plan B. Zacharchuk was still hanging out at John Date’s dive shop, cleaning floors and doing other odd jobs to work off the price of an imported regulator, made by the French company La Spirotechnique. The shop was happy to get rid of the thing because scuba still hadn’t caught on with its customers. Now he had a regulator but no air tanks, which usually hold compressed air at 2,200 psi. After watching Cousteau’s specials on TV, and voraciously reading dive magazines, an idea dawned on Zacharchuk: Fire extinguishers are rated at 1,800 psi. Not perfect, but close enough, he thought. Why not turn them into scuba tanks? He bought a fire extinguisher for around $5 from a scrap dealer outside Montreal, cleaned it up, and then scrounged for a European gooseneck valve to attach the regulator. That only left him with a bigger problem: No compressed-gas company would touch it. Zacharchuk went from one to another, trying to find a sympathetic staffer to fill his fire-extinguisher scuba tank with air. Everyone looked at him, a gangly seventeen-year-old kid, about 120 pounds wet, as though he were nuts. They were afraid the thing would blow up under pressure, with the blast force of up to several hundred pounds of TNT.

  In 1953, Zacharchuk ended up at Liquid Air, a subsidiary of France’s Air Liquide in Montreal. This time, the person he talked to at the front desk was more helpful. He called someone out to take a look. It was Émile Gagnan, the same French engineer who had invented scuba with Cousteau. He had immigrated to Canada six years earlier, fearing postwar France would go to the Communists, and set up shop in Montreal to produce the Aqua-Lung for the North American market. Zacharchuk had no idea who he was talking to until later. But the guy sure seemed to know a lot about diving equipment when the kid explained he was having trouble getting his French regulator to fit his fire-extinguisher air tank.

  “It’s very easy,” Gagnan assured him.

  He showed Zacharchuk how to add a pressure reducer and an adapter. The engineer suggested he go to a hospital and ask for a mouthpiece, made of rubber and plastic with a tilt valve, used to help patients breathe during seizures. It was elegantly close to a diver’s mouthpiece. Within days, Zacharchuk had one. The modifications cost around $75, more than what he took home in a month working the graveyard shift as a newsroom copy clerk, who spoke seven languages fluently, at CBC Radio’s English service. Liquid Air agreed to fill the makeshift tank, which worked perfectly, giving Zacharchuk just over an hour in as much as thirty feet of water. That was enough for him to start freelancing as a diver, mostly searching for outboard motors, anchors, fishing gear, and other items that had fallen off boats at the marina, for a few bucks per salvage. Zacharchuk quickly discovered that the riverbed was rich in historic artifacts. He found old English mallet bottles that once held wine and liquor, and ornate metal badges from British troops’ tall, cylindrical shako hats. There were lots of buttons, including one made of pewter from a soldier’s eighteenth-century uniform. In the silt and weeds, he uncovered anchors, muskets, more cannonballs than he could count, and cans filled with sawdust impregnated with animal-fat tallow or wax and small, cast-iron balls. Warriors of the day called them canister shot.

  More lucrative contract work soon came his way. He got paid to install flow meters in city sewers, recover bodies from river accidents and suicides, and repair municipal water-filtration works. Finally he saved up enough cash to buy factory-made diving gear. He bought sheets of neoprene rubber and glued together his wet suit. In 1958, Zacharchuk met another self-made diver named Sean Gilmore. They teamed up just as the YMCA was about to ruin their business plans by turning out scuba divers by the dozens. While George Bass was laying the foundation of underwater archaeology in the United States, Zacharchuk and Gilmore were becoming skilled amateurs dabbling in a new scientific discipline that few even knew existed.

  They dove in the summer, usually at night when the contrast made things easier to spot on the riverbed. In winter, they searched the archives, learning more about the stories behind the objects. Months spent poring over historical records and books revealed parts of the rich human stories behind the retrieved objects. Zacharchuk and Gilmore schooled themselves on archaeological techniques that were standard practice on land and adapted them under water. Instead of just scooping up relics, they carefully plotted their positions on a grid first, and they recorded other details that could explain how they ended up on the riverbed. The divers also read up on artifact conservation. Letting wood that had been submerged for more than a century dry naturally usually meant watching history turn to dust. The team experimented and got good results by slowly soaking the wood in linseed oil, and, later, in a sugar solution. Zacharchuk turned the family bathtub into a restoration vat, which was constantly filled with soaking relics—from smaller items like buckles and buttons to bigger daggers, swords, and muskets. His wife, Doreen, took their newborn baby to her mother-in-law’s tub for bathing.

  The divers soon had more artifacts than space—enough of history’s detritus to fill a five-ton truck. Museum curators and historians turned up their noses. The divers couldn’t find anyone to even consider taking the objects off their hands. The head of a big tobacco company was interested in their pitch for funds to donate the trove for public display on Montreal’s Île Sainte-Hélène. Until he got lung cancer and died. Antique dealers listened politely, mostly becaus
e they were interested in old bottles. But they were more helpful with historical details, and conservation advice. No one, Zacharchuk figured, was going to take a couple of scavenging divers seriously.

  “Number one, it’s because we don’t have degrees,” he thought. “Two, we’re men in black, wet, rubber suits. Who the hell would believe we’d have such an amount of important artifacts? They have divers coming out of their ears. These days, everyone with a Rolex watch is an archaeologist.”

  Things suddenly changed on a summer day in 1964, when Zacharchuk and Gilmore duckwalked out of the river, dripping harbingers from the deep. They bumped into John Rick, head of archaeology at Parks Canada, who had set up a field school on Île aux Noix, just outside Fort Lennox, where an instructor and students were digging trenches and sifting the dirt to pick out broken bits of pottery and shards of glass. Rick was stunned at the exquisitely preserved objects the divers carried out of the water.