Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  “This is what a whole bottle looks like,” one said. “This is what a musket looks like.”

  Rick was more than impressed. The pipe-smoking intellectual, in tweed jacket with elbow patches, to Zacharchuk’s leather-clad motorbike rider, the archaeologist sensed this was one of the rare moments in science when amateurs leapfrog experts. Rick spent evenings with the divers, listening intently, imagining the possibilities. Zacharchuk brought him a small truckload of old bottles in a Renault R-4 hatchback as a hint of what they had in storage, and a clue to the even bigger treasures waiting on the riverbed. What really changed the world as Rick saw it was a map the divers showed him. They had taken a navigation chart and meticulously drawn a grid across the sections where they dove, each one lettered along with the specific locations of objects marked in subsections.

  These weren’t just scavengers hauling up treasure, Rick realized. They were marine archaeologists, ahead of their time. The only important work they hadn’t done was stratigraphy, a technique borrowed from geology that records objects’ precise positions in sedimentary layers to provide more clues and context. Otherwise, the divers were doing the science of archaeology without formal training or title, which Rick was eager to bestow. Why not come and work for him at Parks Canada, the federal agency that oversaw national historical sites, he suggested? Gilmore passed. He had a more lucrative offer from a telecom company. Zacharchuk jumped at the chance. He started out on a one-year contract in the fall of 1964, with a $500 advance and a $1,500 limit on expenses.

  As the first head of Canada’s marine archaeological unit, and its only staff member, Walter Zacharchuk was boss, employee, and supplier. He even had to provide a boat, with diving equipment that he had bought—a humble, uncertain beginning for what became the team of scientists who led the hunt for Erebus and Terror. Decades later, Zacharchuk’s own place in history was secured when Vice-Admiral Mark Norman of the Royal Canadian Navy not only called him “the father of underwater archaeology in Canada” but also compared the diver who got his start with a tin can and a garden hose to Jacques Cousteau himself.

  _______

  ZACHARCHUK soon had a staff member, hired on contract. In a cable-knit sweater, looking at once the windblown and aristocratic graybeard, Robert Grenier fits what became the Cousteau archetype. But that is a comparison underwater archaeologists tend to resist. They see Cousteau, who was not a trained scientist, as more of an enlightened treasure hunter, showman, inventor, and environmental activist than a pioneer of their profession. Even in the early 1960s, before Cousteau had filmed the prime-time special that led to an eight-season run for The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau on American TV, Grenier was a diver with a degree in archaeology and classics from Quebec’s Laval University. He also has the pedigree of old French blood in North America. His ancestor, Captain Claude François Grenier, arrived in the early 1790s, when it seems the Catholic officer deserted during the French Revolution to escape a religious pogrom.

  In 1978, Robert Grenier had led a wreck search that moved underwater archaeology into subzero North Atlantic seas off Labrador, where the current flowing south from the Arctic carries icebergs, like mythical castles calved from glaciers in western Greenland. Grenier’s extraordinary discovery of a Basque whaling boat called the San Juan on the bottom of a remote bay rewrote early North American history. She sank, with a cargo of whale oil, in a fall storm in 1565. Grenier’s find shed new light on North America’s first industrial-scale whaling operation, a lucrative but dangerous industry that Basque sailors established in the sixteenth century to feed Europe’s growing demand for lamp oil. The crush of a thrashing bowhead whale’s fluke may have killed some of the 125 Basque sailors found buried nearby in unmarked graves on Labrador’s Red Bay. They were laid to rest on the same windswept shore where comrades flensed whale carcasses and rendered the blubber in large vats each summer before making the treacherous voyage back across the North Atlantic. Some of the dead men were covered only in a thin layer of sod, suggesting they may have been trapped by a brutal winter that killed them. The ground was frozen so hard that survivors, likely near death themselves, couldn’t dig proper graves. Franklin’s men suffered a similar fate a few hundred years later, and Grenier’s work in the icy waters of Red Bay was an essential step toward finding out what happened to their lost ships farther north.

  The six-year underwater excavation of the San Juan, which helped set new standards in the field, ended in 1984. The wreck stayed on the ocean floor, but Grenier and his team raised a chalupa, one of the small boats that the whalers used to chase and harpoon their prey. Piece by piece, archaeologists reassembled the centuries-old craft. After several years soaking in a vat of polyethylene glycol, the restored vessel was put on permanent display at a museum in Red Bay.

  The year after the pioneering underwater project ended, Grenier took over as head of the underwater archaeology department from Zacharchuk, who moved on to private consulting. Grenier also became president of the International Committee on the Underwater Cultural Heritage (ICUCH), which aims to inventory, conserve, and promote interest in the world’s underwater cultural heritage. He played a key role in negotiating an international agreement that sets out rules on how to treat hundreds of thousands of shipwrecks around the world.

  Called the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, one of its most important principles holds that wrecks are usually better left where they lie.

  UNESCO’s underwater cultural heritage agreement, which came into force in 2009, commits countries to leave shipwrecks in situ, or in the place where they lie underwater, as the first option. That emphasizes the need to preserve historical context as well as the scientific importance of leaving a ship where it sank. But exceptions are allowed to the in situ rule if the purpose is to make a significant contribution to the protection or knowledge of underwater cultural heritage. The backdrop of the logo symbolizing that global commitment is the chalupa that the Basque whalers left behind on the bottom of Red Bay.

  A LEGENDARY DIVER, inventor, and explorer—a more brash Canadian version of Cousteau—was determined to show that humans could, and should, be working undersea in the Arctic. Joe MacInnis, who included physician, poet, photographer, author, scientist, and aquanaut on his résumé, kept powerful company. The first man to swim and photograph beneath the ice cap at the North Pole, he also walked upside down under Arctic ice with Britain’s Prince Charles for half an hour, carrying an umbrella.

  MacInnis took iconic CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite beneath the waves with him, as well as fellow Canadians Pierre Trudeau, who was prime minister at the time, and Hollywood director James Cameron. They worked together exploring the wreck of the RMS Titanic, the luxury cruise ship that hit an iceberg southeast of Newfoundland in 1912 and sank about 12,500 feet to the bottom of the Atlantic. Another ally was Canada’s Dome Petroleum, which saw mutual benefit in MacInnis’s exploration and innovation underwater in the Arctic. In his prime, the diver was so adept at influencing the influential that his own friend—canoeist, artist, and filmmaker Bill Mason—marveled at his ability to hit up anyone for money to fund the next big idea.

  “Well, you can call him anything you want. But I know MacInnis as well as anybody,” Mason said wryly. “And I’ll tell you right now: He’s a con man. Joe starts talking about the Arctic and whales and sunken ships. Before you know it, you’re reaching into your pocket, or worse still, pleading to go along. If that guy had been born a couple of hundred years ago, he’d a been on one of those [Royal Navy] ships. And knowing MacInnis, he probably would have been in command.”

  In the late 1960s, when the US Navy put aquanauts in a yellow steel tube called Sealab III to see what would happen while they lived for twelve days on the deep sea floor, the military brought in MacInnis as a consultant. He then decided cheaper was better and built an underwater habitat of his own for just $10,000, which he drew from his personal bank account in 1969. MacInnis came up with the idea while doodling o
n a napkin in a New York restaurant. A young engineer in the city noticed that the rough sketch looked similar to a railway ore carrier. So they modified one, sprayed the insides with a two-inch coating of plastic foam insulation, and attached a bottom filled with ten tons of iron-ore ballast to weigh down the structure underwater. Painted yellow and blue, it looked like a giant version of a backpacker’s propane stove, with a small window and a dome, both made of plexiglass. MacInnis called his prototype Sublimnos, which he made up from the root word limnology—the study of inland waters as ecosystems interacting with their drainage basins and the atmosphere. The world’s first freshwater habitat, Sublimnos was also the only one operating beneath ice when Lake Huron froze over each winter.

  MacInnis lowered it thirty-two feet to the bottom of the lake’s Georgian Bay. The site is near Tobermory, Ontario, where thousand-year-old cedar trees top the cliffs of the Bruce Peninsula. There are more than twenty historic shipwrecks in the clear waters off the town, several protected in a national marine park. The area, including Big Tub Harbor, is so rich with easily accessible archaeological sites that it has been called the freshwater diving capital of the world. MacInnis had an “open hatch policy.” Anyone with a booked spot could get into his diving bell, which Popular Mechanics called “a bargain basement habitat.” The cover art of the 1971 edition featuring MacInnis’s project imagined an amphibious jet dropping off campers at a dock for their vacation in a submersible the size of a Volkswagen. Thousands of people accepted the invitation to use Sublimnos, including a fashion designer, medical students, engineers, and a kid in junior high who wanted to go deep on his science project.

  MacInnis chafed at government regulation. In one speech, he compared lawmakers and civil servants to a fat seal wriggling clumsily across ice in a film. He wanted slow movers out of his way, where they couldn’t impede progress. Deep-sea divers, MacInnis boasted to a club of well-heeled businessmen, are “rugged individuals who are in the front ranks of free enterprise.” Like many explorers before him—people like Franklin and Ross, with little patience for the petty games of politicians and bureaucrats—MacInnis saw conquest in the High Arctic as the ultimate prize. To him, sixty-three hours at the North Pole, on an ice cap fifteen feet thick and 450 miles from the nearest land in April 1974, was the bliss of something close to pure freedom.

  “My colleagues on this expedition, and in all of the nine expeditions to the north, have the same motivation that fires an exploring businessman,” he once told a lunch gathering at Toronto’s tony Empire Club of Canada. “They both start with a dream and follow it with vision and perseverance. At the North Pole, we were extremely fortunate. We had no overburden of bureaucracy.

  “There was no one to tell us what to do and how to do it, and none of us was concerned about welfare payments or pension cheques.”

  The centerpiece of MacInnis’s push for undersea work in the Arctic was Sub-Igloo, which he launched at the end of 1972. MacInnis and his team built the habitat out of transparent acrylic and placed it on the seabed at Resolute Bay as a divers’ refuge and communications station with 360-degree visibility. He pitched the unit as semiportable and deployable without heavy equipment. Filled with air, with eight tons of upward buoyancy, it would provide shelter, safety, and contact with the outside world. MacInnis installed a red, Canadian-designed Contempra telephone, which he used to call Trudeau. The walls were so transparent that it was easy to forget the pulsing jellyfish and anemones were outside. Divers’ companions sometimes tossed water on the inside of the station as a reminder there was something between them and a sea so cold that it could kill with just five minutes of exposure. MacInnis envisioned Sub-Igloo as critical to the coming legions of cold-water divers as small tents are to mountaineers.

  “Tomorrow’s ocean world includes exploratory [oil] well heads, sub-sea production platforms, pipelines and an extraordinary amount of work for scientific and industrial divers,” he predicted. “If we are to understand, use, and effectively manage this part of Canada, almost half the territory of the nation, then we must develop the capability to actually work and when necessary, live under the ice.”

  Neither Sub-Igloo or Sublimnos survived. MacInnis’s vision of developing a new subsea economy in Canada’s Arctic is still largely that. He then turned to a new dream, one nagging at most divers’ minds. MacInnis was going to discover a shipwreck, but not on some reef or rocky shore in tropical waters. He would do it in the Arctic Archipelago, where no one had done it before. The idea came to him on Cornwallis Island in April 1975, while standing on a hill overlooking Resolute Bay, waiting for Prince Charles, then twenty-six and an officer in the Royal Navy. MacInnis landed first on the snow in a Twin Otter bush plane with skis, beneath the cliffs of Beechey Island that once towered above Franklin and his men. Prince Charles was following in another plane, which couldn’t land in a buffeting wind. MacInnis tromped up a steep slope through knee-deep snow to a cairn with a marble tablet that Francis McClintock had erected on behalf of Lady Franklin. The monument she commissioned was made in New York, under Henry Grinnell’s direction, and dated 1855. The American expedition tasked to erect it couldn’t reach Beechey Island, so the memorial waited in Greenland until McClintock picked it up to fulfill Jane’s wish in 1859. Alone with his thoughts in the Arctic cold 116 years later, MacInnis read the epitaph:

  To the Memory of

  FRANKLIN

  CROZIER, FITZJAMES,

  and all their gallant brother officers and faithful companions

  who have suffered and perished in the cause of science and the

  service of their country.

  THIS TABLET

  is erected near the spot where they passed their first Arctic

  winter and whence they issued forth to conquer difficulties or

  TO DIE.

  It commemorates the grief of their

  admiring countrymen and friends,

  and the anguish, subdued by faith,

  of her who has lost, in the heroic

  leader of the expedition, the most

  devoted and affectionate of husbands.

  _______

  “And so He bringeth them unto the

  Haven where they would be.”

  Back down the slope, near the bush plane, MacInnis joined Stu Hodgson, the federal official in charge of the Northwest Territories. A former union boss on the Vancouver docks, Hodgson was staring out to sea, deep in thought.

  “There’s a ship out there somewhere, Joe, lying on the seafloor, buried under all that ice. . . .”

  MacInnis had his next mission: figuring out where to search for a wreck. He flew to London to get advice from Clive Holland, archivist, deputy librarian, and museum curator at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. Holland was skeptical. No one had ever found a wreck that far north, he reminded MacInnis, who didn’t budge. They went for drinks in a local pub.

  “Ideally, we need a ship in water deep enough for her to be below the ice scour, but shallow enough to be accessible,” MacInnis said. “Something in the seventy to one hundred meters would be perfect. Think of it. A ship buried in freezing waters for such a long period of time would be preserved beautifully. It would be like finding a time capsule.”

  “There are times when I think you must be joking,” Holland replied, “and then there are times when I think you are daft. You want to find something less than 40 meters long, buried under thousands of square kilometers of ice. In water that is ice-free for only a few weeks each year. Where winds are dangerous and unpredictable and where icebergs weigh up to a million tons.”

  By now, though, Holland knew MacInnis wasn’t one to take no for an answer.

  “There are, however, several remote possibilities,” Holland finally conceded. “And I stress the word remote. What is needed is an eyewitness account, preferably a log entry made by an officer. It will be difficult, perhaps impossible, and may take a considerable amount of time.”

  Months later, MacInnis received a typed n
ote from Holland, briefly shortlisting ships that sank in the Arctic Archipelago with a rough location of where they went down. Top of the list was the historian’s recommendation of the wreck most likely to be found.

  It was Breadalbane.

  MacInnis next turned to Phil Nuytten, a cigar-puffing diver, scientist, and inventor based in Vancouver. His deepwater diving creations include the Newtsuit, a lightweight atmospheric system that allows the operator to work at depths of up to a thousand feet, under extreme pressures, without having to decompress on the way up. It looks like a yellow Michelin Man with pincers, ideal for exploring Breadalbane if MacInnis could only figure out where she was. Nuytten was a valuable ally on that front, too. He had another, inner skill: an extraordinary knack for finding things lost deep beneath the sea.

  “Why can’t you look for a ship in the Bahamas?” Nuytten, his feet propped on the corner of his desk, asked MacInnis after hearing the pitch. “It might have some gold on it. If nothing else, we could come away with a suntan.”

  He joined MacInnis’s small team that headed north in the summer of 1978. Working around ice floes in two Zodiac rubber boats, they had a search window of just a few days. Their side-scan sonar device was shaped like a slender torpedo and about six feet long. Affectionately known as a towfish, it picked up nothing interesting beyond deep scours that sea ice had carved out of the seabed for millennia. MacInnis tried, and failed, again the following summer. By 1980, the money was running out. Interest was drying up. He had one last chance. This time, CCGS John A. MacDonald, the same icebreaker that had helped escort the oil supertanker SS Manhattan on a pioneering voyage through the Northwest Passage just over a decade earlier, would haul the towfish. The searchers put it in the water around 8 p.m. on August 13, 1980, and before long the recorder pen was furiously scratching, as sonar hits pinged off something big on the bottom. At first, the lines traced another deep ice scour, around one and a quarter miles south of Beechey Island, some 320 feet down. Then the ghostly image of a ship appeared.