by Paul Watson
“Blair,” the first officer said to Rutherford, “I don’t like this.”
“Go around,” he added seconds later.
“Go around thrust,” the captain called out.
An instant later, at 4:41:51 in the afternoon, as the flight crew aborted the landing, the plane crashed into a low hill about one nautical mile short of the runway. Eight passengers and all four crewmembers died. Three other passengers, including a seven-year-old girl, escaped the flaming wreckage despite serious injuries. Bergmann was not one of them. He was dead, age fifty-five. Troops stationed at the airport, waiting for the start of the military exercises, heard the blast and ran out to see a dense plume of oily black smoke billowing into the Arctic sky. Navy diver Larry Lyver, a corporal at the time, was expecting a mock operation to raise the wing of a downed plane from the sea. For a split second, he thought the exercise had started early. Just as quickly, he realized this was the real thing. He rushed to the crash site with other troops to look for survivors. In the following days, he had the grim task of searching for human remains. A garment bag caught his eye. He took a closer look and saw a name on it: Bergmann. His remains, along with those of other passengers and crew, were moved to the wet lab of the logistics center that he once ran. It was now a makeshift morgue.
On the way to Bergmann’s funeral, Balsillie decided to ask his friend’s widow for permission to rename the ship hunting for Erebus and Terror in his honor. The giant white polar bear logo emblazoned on the side of R/V Martin Bergmann was designed from one that the two men had seen together. The scientist woke up Balsillie one morning at 2 a.m. to watch the bear on an ice floe in the Northwest Passage. Balsillie, a deep sleeper, wanted to stay in bed, but Bergmann coaxed him out on the icebreaker’s cold steel deck in his underwear. Together, they marveled at the polar bear, hungry because disappearing ice made it harder to catch seals. The animal reared up on its hind legs, sniffing for scraps of food, like a king reduced to a beggar in a vanishing kingdom. Bergmann’s children flew up to Cambridge Bay to help paint the vessel. Oksana Schimnowski, her husband Adrian, and their kids worked on it with them. Under pressure to get the ship ready for the Arctic, her new name gave Schimnowski a new sense of purpose to honor her late mentor.
“It became really, really important, for so many reasons,” she said. “It wasn’t just to find shipwrecks anymore, but to continue to be brave and continue to take risks. And not let anything deter you from your goals. That was Marty.”
15
“That’s It!”
For all that had changed since the Arctic lured Sir John Franklin deeper, with a late season of clear sailing followed by a freeze-up that snatched hold of Erebus and Terror and refused to let them go, one quirk never changed. Just when the Arctic seemed to be giving way, she swung around and bit hard. After several summers of relatively open waters for searchers in the area where Franklin’s men abandoned their ships, the sea ice was back with a vengeance in 2014. That was just the latest problem to plague a mission that was dragging on, at risk of becoming a political albatross for politicians long past the point where they predicted finding one of Franklin’s missing ships.
Pressure was building for results, and not just because taxpayers were getting restless. Jim Balsillie’s ship was recovering from an inauspicious start. On her first day out in 2011, rust damage in the sputtering engine forced the ship back to Cambridge Bay. Someone had forgotten to put an upturned bucket over the Bergmann’s engine exhaust, an essential last step to keep snow out of the engine before her first Arctic winter. It needed a complete rebuild, not an easy task in a good month that far north, and a major migraine when the federal search team was counting on five solid weeks of work from the vessel. Skeptics had a field day. Instead of wondering what Balsillie’s angle was, now they figured he was just another southern blowhard who didn’t have a clue how to make it in the Arctic.
“The Parks guys were really quite bothered,” Balsillie told me, recalling how angry he was too at the time.
Fortunately, his foundation partner, Tim MacDonald, was big in the hardware business. He flew up a team of mechanics and had the ship in good shape in time to complete about ten days of wreck hunting. The skeptics turned. They praised “the little ship that could” for covering a lot of square miles after missing 80 percent of the season under repairs.
“It worked,” a federal team member conceded to Balsillie. “We now believe.”
But there seemed to be competition on the horizon. In the fall of 2012, software billionaire Paul Allen’s $250 million yacht M/Y Octopus was at the top of Victoria Strait, where the crews had left Erebus and Terror locked solid in ice. With thirteen cabins for guests, another twenty-eight for the vessel’s fifty-seven crew, this was not just any yacht. It was a 414-foot exploration platform, equipped with a submarine and a remotely operated vehicle perfect for scanning the deep seabed. A hangar had room for two helicopters.
Canadian naval surveillance picked up the Octopus running what appeared to be a zigzag navigation pattern. That suggested the ship might be interested in more than the scenery, perhaps even a historic sighting of a Franklin wreck. Allen never claimed publicly to be looking for Erebus or Terror. But the Microsoft cofounder’s attraction to shipwreck hunting was confirmed three years later when he led a team aboard the Octopus that discovered the remains of the 863-foot Japanese battleship Musashi, a heavily armed warship that US forces sank in the Philippines on October 24, 1944.
Allen’s “interest in exploration is driven by his belief in finding the undiscovered, especially historic marvels like the Musashi,” a statement on the reclusive tycoon’s website explained.
The Octopus sighting off King William Island, regardless of Allen’s intentions, was an urgent reminder to frustrated members of Canada’s federal mission that they weren’t the only ones who might like to find Franklin’s wrecks.
When the Arctic threw a wrench in the works again in 2014, talk of a curse was making more sense.
The first day of September 2014: Almost 168 years to the day that a storm likely caught Erebus and Terror, Arctic gales would be back to howl again any day now. But for a moment, the Arctic was still calm, allowing a cloistered quiet to settle on the icebreaker’s bridge. For the shipwreck searchers aboard the CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in their sixth year of a high-pressure mission to find the wrecks of the lost Franklin Expedition, it was an auspicious sign. Maybe this day the Arctic would finally yield some of her secrets. There was no radio squawk. No crew banter. Not a tremble from the Laurier’s three huge diesel-electric engines, deep in the icebreaker’s steamy belly. The deck crew had dropped anchor and lowered three boats into the frigid waters: the hydrographers’ Kinglet and Gannet, and the marine archaeologists’ Investigator. The hunt was on for another day. Perched above the broad, powerful bow, a captain could look out across the endless, mesmerizing wilderness and believe for the moment that he was in charge and everything was under control. But not Coast Guard Captain Bill Noon. His wise mariner’s head is crammed with memories of hammering gales, pitching decks, and the endless watch for hidden shoals or ice traps. He never forgets that the Arctic always has the final word.
“Patience is the key up here,” Noon wrote in his captain’s log on September 1, 2014, “so we will go hard wherever the ice and weather let us work.”
The 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition was off to a good start, but time was short. The first faint chills of winter were blowing on the pure Arctic air, and the brief search window was about to slam shut. In a matter of weeks, the waters where the Laurier lay peacefully at anchor in eastern Queen Maud Gulf would be a vast block of ice, shifting and fracturing under immense pressure with cracks as loud as rifle shots.
This was set up to be the most sophisticated search ever for Erebus and Terror. More than a dozen government agencies and private partners had teamed up, and the Canadian Space Agency provided satellite support. Federal hydrographers, the experts at surveying the seabed, painstakingly scanned t
he ocean bottom, slowly filling in vast blanks in uncharted waters as they kept an eye out for shipwrecks. Some 90 percent of the Canadian Arctic waters still hadn’t been charted to modern standards, and in stretches of the Northwest Passage where at least one of the Franklin wrecks might lie, navigators had to rely on soundings that dated back to the original nineteenth-century search expeditions.
Parks Canada’s underwater archaeologists were still officially in the lead as the hunt entered its sixth year. The Royal Canadian Navy tasked HMCS Kingston, a lightly armed coastal defense vessel built for minesweeping, to help. The military’s secretive research arm sent a robotic sub named Arctic Explorer. Some twenty-three feet long, and weighing more than two tons, the autonomous underwater vehicle was built to work at depths beyond sixteen thousand feet, even beneath a cover of thick ice, without any contact with the surface. Wired to an inertial navigation system with precise fiberoptic gyroscopes, the device’s computer brain was programmed with limited intelligence, allowing it to make basic decisions. The robot could decide how to get around undersea obstacles, without any guidance from satellites or radio commands. Its mission complete, the robot could find its own way back to home base, even if that was a drifting ship or ice camp. Arctic Explorer bristled with cutting-edge technology, including high-frequency synthetic aperture sonar, which a team of handlers expected to provide a high-resolution look at the seabed hundreds of feet below the surface.
A partner under contract with the expedition, a Canadian firm specializing in high-end Arctic cruises, chartered a ship to deliver the military’s smart submersible to the High Arctic. It turned to the Russians. If Moscow wanted to get a better understanding of the Canadian military’s secret robotic marine technology, it could now take a front-row seat. Arctic Explorer’s handlers would spend days working with the state-of-the-art device, troubleshooting problems and discussing workarounds, aboard Akademik Sergey Vavilov. The 383-foot vessel was built in Finland for scientific research, but it was now pure luxury, with fine dining, a hotwater spa, sauna, massage room, theater-style presentation room, and other amenities for affluent cruisers. On this expedition, its passengers included well-heeled tourists and executives from large companies that came in as partners with the Royal Canadian Geographical society. They paid for the privilege of watching what, on paper at least, would be the front line in the hunt for Franklin’s lost ships. The armada was led by the Sir Wilfrid Laurier, on which the core team of archaeologists, hydrographers, their two survey boats, and other critical components were based, and the Bergmann, which covered by far the most territory each year that it took part. For the third year in a row, searchers aimed to explore two zones in the same short season between the summer ice melt and the fall storm season. The northern block was at the top of Victoria and Alexandra Straits, where ghost ships might have drifted or sailed from the 1848 point of desertion. The southern hunt was to concentrate on Wilmot and Crampton Bay, northeast of O’Reilly Island, in the extreme eastern end of Queen Maud Gulf.
That was the plan. The Arctic, as she usually does, decided otherwise. For years, climate change had been warming up the Arctic, but she remained as unpredictable as ever. After several summers of rapidly shrinking ice cover and relatively clear sailing in the passage north of King William Island, sea ice had come roaring back. The Royal Navy’s Kingston was tasked to come south into the northern search zone after acting as a stage for Stephen Harper’s annual High Arctic photo opportunity. But the sea ice was so heavy that the Kingston never made it close to Victoria Strait. The Vavilov, renamed One Ocean Voyager for better media optics, steamed into position in the northern search area, crewed by Russians and proudly flying a large Russian flag. The military’s engineers put the robotic sub in the water, but it never got beyond test runs. They kept the cruise-ship passengers entertained for a while, but they did nothing to help locate the shipwrecks. Handlers didn’t want to let Arctic Explorer head down under the ice. Losing a multimillion-dollar robotic sub would make for more humiliating headlines than news that they were operating it off a Russian-flagged ship had already generated.
Not long after the thirty-nine-day expedition began on August 13, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and its partners were bickering about being stranded in the northern search area while the experts worked the far more promising southern area. The plan called for the Laurier to bring the core team north to join up with the Russian cruise ship, but with so much ice still clogging the northern search area, Bill Noon stayed to the south. Just as sea ice streaming down through McClintock Channel, like cement down a trough, had trapped Franklin and his men, it now blocked the people trying to find his ships. They were particularly interested in the bottleneck that Tom Zagon’s research had shown, where ice flowing south from Victoria Strait passes through the constricted entrance to Alexandra Strait. If Erebus or Terror had been drifting among ice floes that were crashing into each other, with heavy sea ice rafting one or both of the bomb vessels, they might well have gone down there.
John Geiger, a Harper ally and Conservative Party contributor who heads the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, was aboard the Russian cruise ship. If the mission failed, he would have to sell it as a success. And if a shipwreck were discovered, he would make sure Harper got credit for a historical breakthrough certain to make news around the world. But reporters weren’t likely to care what Geiger had to say if they knew he was far out of the picture, surrounded by sea ice, cornered on a Russian cruise ship that the Arctic had reduced to a stymied bystander.
At the daily 7 a.m. briefing on Captain Noon’s bridge, the search team heard that their icebreaker base would be staying in the area of Wilmot and Crampton Bay. Doug Stenton and Robert Park, the land archaeologists, were hoping the Laurier would steam north into Victoria Strait. They had used up half their allotted time on the icebreaker’s helicopter, and Stenton was mildly concerned that he wouldn’t get farther north for some planned survey work. The sea ice choked off that choice. No big deal. There was more work to be done in the southern bay. Stenton had his eye on some small islands that he wanted to reach at some point to complete a systematic check of places archaeologists had never visited.
Scott Youngblut, head of a team of six hydrographers on the expedition, turned to Stenton during the morning meeting and said he needed to set up a temporary GPS reference station in Wilmot and Crampton Bay to give his two survey boats an accurate fix as they continued to head up and down lanes in the sea, scanning the bottom with multibeam sonar mounted to their hulls. The icebreaker carried a pole-mounted multibeam sonar unit, which meant three vessels were producing high-resolution 3-D imagery of the seafloor’s topography. They weren’t just looking for shipwrecks. With each pass, the digital images filled in another bit of the vast hole in navigation charts for Canada’s Arctic, slowly making it safer for the increasing number of ships expected to transit the Northwest Passage as the warming climate melts the ice cover. Youngblut told Stenton he wasn’t picky about where in the bay he put the GPS station, and he offered him and Park seats on the helicopter when he flew out to do it later that day.
Archaeologists had never done a proper study of the islands in Wilmot and Crampton Bay, on the west coast of the Adelaide Peninsula. Stenton talked to Parks about the various options and narrowed them down to a shortlist of small islands. One, several miles northeast of O’Reilly Island, was Stenton’s preferred target. It worked for Youngblut, too, so he got ready to fly aboard the Laurier’s red-and-white Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm Bo 105 chopper, a light-duty German helicopter developed in the 1970s. The pilot was Captain Andrew Stirling, a quick-witted wisecracker with a gray goatee. In his bright orange survival suit, with a tasseled woolen toque drawn down tight to his ears, he could be mistaken for an unusually tall elf—except that on land in the Arctic he walks with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. On guard for wayward polar bears.
Stirling had his own personal connection to the Franklin search. Born a Scot in Dundee, he was from a Roya
l Navy family. His father, Harvey, was a sailor in the Royal Navy for more than two decades. In World War II, he survived two torpedo attacks. The pilot’s grandfather, wounded by a German dum-dum bullet in World War I, joined the staff at the Royal Family’s Balmoral Castle, where he specialized in buffing furniture to a mirror sheen in the art of French polish. He once scolded the future Queen Elizabeth II when the monarch was a child princess who thought she could boss around the hired help. Stirling had inherited something else important from his father, a fascination with archaeology. If anyone was specially suited to ending the long, exasperating hunt for a Royal Navy Franklin wreck, it was Captain Andrew Stirling.
He powered up the helicopter’s twin engines, the rotors thumping like a jackhammer in the Arctic quiet, and within minutes was over the windswept island that Stenton had requested. In a quick flyover, he confirmed there were no bears, only caribou. So Stirling gently set the chopper’s skids on the rocky permafrost and shut her down. Now the only sound was the Arctic breeze, and the odd voice when one of the team felt the need to speak. While the archaeologist went to work studying circles of stones that Inuit hunters used to anchor their animal-hide tents, Youngblut set up his GPS equipment. Stirling walked the shoreline. Following lessons he had learned from the experts, the pilot kept his eyes to the ground, glancing up from time to time to check again for any bears. He soon spotted something that didn’t seem to belong, rust-brown against gray rock. Anyone else with an untrained eye might have walked right past, seeing nothing. But Stirling went closer.
