Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  From the inlet, the Bergmann set a course to reach Gjoa Haven early on September 2, 2016. Adrian Schimnowski had to pick up his tenth crew member, a forty-nine-year-old Inuk named Sammy Kogvik. A member of the Canadian Rangers, the military’s largely Inuit northern reserve force, he was hired by Parks Canada to assist the latest search for the Terror. Schimnowski had trouble tracking down Kogvik and realized why when the two finally met. Kogvik, who speaks English softly and slowly, was wary of outsiders. The increasingly bitter dispute over the handling of the Erebus excavation was further fraying trust between Inuit and qalunaaq. After sizing up the Bergmann expedition’s lead, Kogvik confided that he had been offered a choice of which ship to join. The Inuk asked around and local people told him he could be sure Schimnowski wouldn’t betray him or the Inuit. So he wanted to sail on the Bergmann.

  Like other qalunaaq who manage to thrive in the Arctic, Schimnowski traveled a winding road to get there. He is a trained paramedic and firefighter, once worked on TV as a music-channel video jock, was an interior designer, built custom furniture, and competed in a world dragon-boat championship. He is also an installation artist and a commercial scuba diver. And, like Kogvik, he loves to fish. Above all, Schimnowski has what seems a limitless patience to sit and listen respectfully when Inuit want to be heard. It is a trait all too rare for southerners in the North, where outsiders often come across as pushy, even manipulative, to the Inuit, whose stories recall the times when they were the Arctic’s only humans.

  As the Bergmann steamed east through Simpson Strait, her 450 hp Detroit Diesel engines humming on what was expected to be a thirty-hour voyage to Cambridge Bay, Schimnowski stood on the bridge, quietly listening to Kogvik point out familiar landmarks along the coast. A man of few words, who generally spoke only when spoken to, Kogvik chirped up when he saw a favorite spot, a family member’s hunting cabin, an abandoned piece of equipment, or anything that sparked a pleasant memory. After another long silence, the Inuk suddenly started to talk about Terror Bay, far from sight to the north. About six years earlier—it could have been seven or eight, Kogvik said—he was on his snowmobile crossing the sea ice in Terror Bay to go fishing in the spring with his buddy, an Inuk from Baker Lake. Kogvik called him Uncle Jimmy. Spotting something strange to his left, sticking up from the ice as high as a tall man, the Inuk stopped his snowmobile.

  “What is that?” he asked his friend.

  “I don’t know,” Uncle Jimmy replied.

  Once they got closer, Kogvik knew he was looking at a pole made of wood, roughly a foot and a half in diameter. It looked like part of a ship’s mast. The two men walked up to it, Kogvik pulled his camera from his parka pocket, and he asked his friend to take a picture. Smiling, Kogvik posed for the first one, with his left arm around the object. Then he grabbed on with his right arm and both legs, in a big bear hug, for another snapshot. The sun was getting ready to set, so they hurried off to make camp. The next day, Kogvik’s father-in-law, Ben Putuguq, caught up with them by following their trail in the snow. He had seen the mast too, and he told them stories of a sunken ship from the old days.

  But when they got back to Gjoa Haven, Kogvik reached for his camera in his parka pocket and realized he hadn’t zipped it up. The camera was gone. Without pictures, he had no proof that a mast rose from the ice of Terror Bay. Worse than that, though, losing his camera after the encounter seemed a bad omen. A serious warning. Kogvik and his father-in-law resolved to keep the story secret. Uncle Jimmy was silenced another way: The next year, he plunged through the ice and drowned in a lake not far from Gjoa Haven.

  Others might have listened to the story, smiled dismissively, and changed the subject. But Schimnowski knows that the Arctic often reveals her secrets in strange ways.

  “The Arctic presents a gift to you when you’re ready,” is the way he put it.

  Besides, it wasn’t the first time Schimnowski had heard odd stories about Terror Bay. Inuit spoke of seeing shimmers of a ship beneath the surface, sometimes when the sunlight cut just right across the sea, or when they were flying over in aircraft. Louie Kamookak told me that things that went on in and around the bay were a lot less mundane than that.

  “Terror Bay is known for many spooky encounters in the past,” Kamookak said. “Gives me the shivers.”

  Schimnowski asked his team if they wanted to make a detour and take a look. They were game. In a satellite phone call to Jim Balsillie, each man pausing to let his voice echo back from space, Balsillie greenlighted the Bergmann to change course for Terror Bay. The ship arrived at 4 a.m. Cocaptain David McIsaac eased back the throttle to creep into uncharted waters. Without modern charts to show seabed hazards, there is no way to know what is lurking beneath you in Terror Bay until it rears up on the sounder display or your vessel comes to a screeching halt on a hidden shoal. During the 2014 search, the sixty-four-foot vessel briefly ran aground on a sandy shoal in Simpson Strait, but the crew managed to free her without serious damage. It’s not something you want to experience twice in the High Arctic. Especially in the darkness before dawn. McIsaac slowly brought the Bergmann north into the bay to a depth of just over forty-nine feet. At 6 a.m., the crew launched their Dolphin, a sixteen-foot aluminum-hulled skiff with two 20 hp outboard motors. With no ice cover or snow on the land, it was difficult for Kogvik to recall precisely where he had seen the mysterious mast.

  Inuit stories described the silhouette of a masted ship that could be seen from an island in the bay at sunset in spring, so the searchers headed for a group of islands to the east. They had to skirt numerous shoals, often motoring in waters just three to nine feet deep. Yves Bernard, a diver and petty officer, first class, in the Royal Canadian Navy, watched the seafloor with a side-scan sonar device mounted on the skiff’s transom. The fruitless search in the shallows jogged Kogvik’s memory of his track across the bay years earlier, and the searchers shifted to deeper waters. Still nothing. They gave it about fifteen minutes and then headed back to the Bergmann to have some breakfast and discuss options.

  By 8:20 on the morning of September 3, the crew had agreed to give up and continue on to Cambridge Bay. McIsaac set the autopilot to take the Bergmann out of the bay about 1,300 feet to the west of the route she took in, partly to get a wider field of depth soundings to make any return that much safer. He handed over the helm to his son Daniel and went below for a bathroom break while the others squeezed in around the galley table to eat omelettes, hash browns, and bacon with hot coffee. Fifteen minutes later, with the engines running at full RPMs to propel the ship at seven knots, the bay’s very flat bottom suddenly started to peak. The Bergmann was roughly seven hundred feet north of open water. A large object appeared on the sounder’s display, mounted to the right of the helm, as a reddish-orange silhouette. Too big to be a school of fish, Daniel McIsaac thought. Too soft an image to be a large boulder. McIsaac wondered if he had actually seen masts, but he was more focused on not running into something. Heart thumping, he throttled back immediately to stop the boat.

  “What do you think that is there?” McIsaac said to Navy Master Seaman Matt Briggs, the only other person on the bridge. After a quick head-scratch and some raised eyebrows, McIsaac hollered: “Adrian! Can you come up here?”

  No reply. McIsaac told the boatswain to get Schimnowski. Quick.

  “You guys better get up here!” Briggs shouted down from the top of the wheelhouse ladder. Cocaptain Gerry Chidley, who grew up on the trawler that became the Bergmann and was the most seasoned mariner aboard, reached the bridge first. He leaned in to squint at the sounder screen. For the first time anyone could remember, Chidley was speechless.

  “What’s that?” he blurted.

  “I have no idea,” McIsaac replied, bug-eyed with his hands in the air. “I was hopin’ you would tell me.”

  Seconds later, the whole crew was crowding around the sounder display, craning for a look. Awestruck. The bridge erupted in laughter when someone asked Captain David if he had flushed the toilet into
the sea. A second pass over the object revealed it to be a ship with three masts sitting on the bottom, in just under seventy-nine feet of water. At the highest point, she stood about thirty feet above the seabed.

  From the Dolphin, crewmembers confirmed with side-scan sonar and a high-end chirp sounder (more commonly used as a fish finder) that they were looking at a large shipwreck similar in size to Erebus. They returned to the Bergmann and deployed a camera array: Four GoPros, one of them sealed in a high-pressure underwater casing, were fastened to a stainless-steel cage some two feet high, a foot across, and a foot deep. Lights to illuminate the seabed and laser markers to measure objects were attached to the bottom. The whole thing weighed fifteen pounds and transmitted live video to the ship along an umbilical cord designed to detach if the array got snagged. With the Bergmann drifting at under two knots, the cameras picked up stunning images of an almost completely intact ship, with wooden pieces that had broken off the standing masts scattered about her deck, and what appeared to be an anchor on the starboard bow. The Terror had sailed with several anchors, of different sizes. A bowsprit, about twenty feet long, pointed like a giant lance from the ship’s bow.

  By the time the camera batteries were changed, and the array was deployed for a third time, the wind and currents had started to shift. The camera cage was getting too close to the bow, so Schimnowski ordered it drawn up on the hand spool. Then the array suddenly disconnected from the umbilical, close to the seafloor, either because it touched the wreck’s bow or the umbilical itself brushed against a mast or the bowsprit, triggering a quick release mechanism that let the cameras go to avoid snagging on the wreck. Either way, the video was lost. The crew hadn’t saved any of it as instructed. Like Kogvik before them, the discovery team had nothing to show for their find. No pictures, no proof. So the Bergmann set off for Cambridge Bay to pick up a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) with a high-definition video camera, refuel and resupply, and hurry back to Terror Bay. That’s not easy in a vessel as small as the Bergmann. She often rolls and pitches when Arctic seas become heavy in late summer. When the ship is punching through large swells, any crewmembers trying to catch some sleep suffer the torture of levitating above their bunks as the bow dips, only to crash down as it rises. Again and again, through the night.

  But the return to Terror Bay made the bruises and queasy stomachs worth it. Bernard maneuvered the green-and-black SeaBotix ROV, equipped with a robotic arm, spotlight, high-definition camera, and a GPS locator. Like an eye peeping into a frozen past, the camera spotted the ship’s bell, lying on its side, on the deck. There was also a cannon. Glass panes were still firmly in three of four tall windows of the cabin where the Terror’s commander, Franklin’s deputy, Captain Francis Crozier, slept and worked at the stern.

  “This vessel looks like it was buttoned down tight for winter and it sank,” Schimnowski told me. “Everything was shut. Even the windows are still intact. If you could lift this boat out of the water, and pump the water out, it would probably float.”

  The team first thought they were looking at a ship listing at about forty-five degrees to starboard on the seabed. But the third dive with the ROV led to a much different conclusion: “We noticed the wreck is sitting level on the seabed floor not at a list—which means the boat sank gently to the bottom,” Schimnowski said in an update e-mailed from the High Arctic as news of the discovery spread around the world.

  Bernard maneuvered the ROV through an open hatch to get a look at the Terror’s interior.

  “We spotted two wine bottles, tables and empty shelving,” Schimnowski e-mailed from the site. “Found a desk with open drawers with something in the back corner of the drawer.”

  At least one of the bottles was lying on its side on what appeared to be a shelf. Plates were neatly stacked in the mess hall. A pot was still sitting in the hole of a rack that once held several. But Schimnowski was struck that divers had found many more things scattered around Erebus. He speculated that Terror’s crewmen had taken off as much as they could before locking her up.

  Even more intriguing, the ROV video showed a thick rope, some thirty feet long, running from a capstan through a hole in the deck. It was lilting in the ocean current alongside the Terror’s starboard side. To the eye of an experienced Arctic mariner like David McIsaac, it looked like a line that had broken free from an anchor. He thinks archaeologists will find the anchor dug into the seafloor. But it’s also possible the ship was anchored to an ice floe that carried the vessel there on the currents.

  “Sailors definitely took her there,” McIsaac insisted. “It would be impossible for her to get to where she was by drifting.”

  If he’s right, that would undercut the old lead-addled-sailors theory even more. To somehow return to their abandoned ships and navigate both of them south toward the continental mainland, crews who were decimated by sickness, hunger, and frostbite must have fought a gargantuan struggle to keep sailing. At least some of them had managed to complete their mission and find the missing link in the Northwest Passage. They just didn’t live to claim the honor.

  FINDING THE SECOND Franklin wreck in Terror Bay was like slipping a long-missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle snugly into place. It fit perfectly with various elements of the mystery that seemed already solved. The next body of water to the southeast is Washington Bay. The distance is just twelve miles from one bay’s coast to the next. The Terror’s proven proximity to the place where one of the most credible, and compelling, Inuit accounts of an encounter with starving qalunaaq sent expert minds racing. Washington Bay is where Inuit said a group of hunters came across white men at a crack in the sea ice. They called the leader of that group Aglooka. Historians suspect he was Crozier. If his ship were in fact anchored not far away when the qalunaaq demanded seal meat from the Inuit at Washington Bay, how could the explorers have run out of food? After all, ROV video shows a can of something sitting on a shelf in the mess hall. Did the crew just give up on their canned meat after comrades fell ill, and likely died, poisoned by Clostridium botulinum bacteria?

  Inuit testimony offers evidence of mass death at Terror Bay. A Netsilingmiut woman named Ahlangyah, about fifty-five years old, told of seeing the qalunaaq at the ice fissure in Washington Bay and camping with other Inuit near them for five days, during which five white men lived in a tent and the same number stayed in the boat they had all been dragging over the ice. The Inuit family killed several seals and gave some to the outsiders, Ahlangyah said, and then the whole group, Inuit and qalunaaq, headed off together for the Adelaide Peninsula, hurrying across the melting sea ice before they were trapped for the summer on King William Island. Dragging their boat on a heavy sledge, the white men couldn’t keep up. The Inuit waited for them at Gladman Point, fishing in nearby lakes, but the laggards never made it.

  “Ahlangyah concluded her statement by saying that, in the following spring, when the ground was almost clear of snow, she saw a tent standing on the shore at the head of Terror Bay,” wrote William Henry Gilder, Lieutenant Schwatka’s second-in-command on the American expedition, in 1882. “There were dead bodies in the tent, and outside lay some covered over with sand. There was no flesh on them, nothing but the bones and clothes. She saw nothing to indicate that they had belonged to the party she met before. The bones had the cords or sinews still attached to them. Outside were one or two graves, which the natives did not at that time open. Numerous articles were lying around, such as knives, forks, spoons, watches, many books, clothing, and blankets.”

  Historians think the fallen may have been left in a large hospital tent, with two graves nearby. The Terror’s demise in the same bay, with Erebus lying on the seabed due south, raises another tantalizing possibility: Did both ships stop at what became known as Terror Bay? If dozens of men did, in fact, die ashore, perhaps there was only a small group left, not enough to sail two Royal Navy bomb ships out of the bay. If the few remaining survivors were crewmembers with just the right skills, and bold leadership, it is possible that the f
our or five men whom Inuit recalled living aboard Erebus farther south sailed the hulking ship there on their own, David Woodman told me.

  The wreck of Erebus is roughly forty miles south of the Terror, across Queen Maud Gulf. Looking at both sites on a map, it’s easy to imagine them voyaging together, only to separate as more sailors died, and there were fewer hands on deck. Until archaeologists dive to come up with enough hard facts for a solid rewrite of history, Franklin theorists can enjoy a long field day. Armchair historians, even the braver pros, will be free to speculate, musing on the many possibilities, including mutiny or a valiant struggle to catch up to ships spotted drifting by and reboard them. David Woodman was reluctant to wade too early into what is certain to be a vigorous debate. The Franklin mystery has a way of burning even meticulous researchers like him. But while he awaited more conclusive evidence, Woodman leaned toward the theory that Crozier and 104 survivors started walking south and reached Erebus Bay—just north of Terror Bay—where the growing number of sick and lame men forced them to halt and establish a large encampment.

  “Many, if not all of them, are sent back to the ships and re-man them,” he suggested.

  Tom Zagon, the federal ice expert, believes it is possible that both ships were locked in a floe of thick multiyear ice that would have protected them from intense pressure as they drifted with the current, surrounded by shifting ice floes, through Alexandra Strait. After studying years of satellite imagery, and knowing the damage moving sea ice can do, he finds it hard to believe that men fearing for their lives would try to sail through it.