Frozen in Time

by Owen Beattie

  Most vital to Beattie’s investigation, however, were the results of a trace level analysis conducted on hair. (Four-inch-/10-cm-long strands of hair from the nape of Torrington’s neck had been submitted for laboratory analysis to determine if Torrington had been exposed to large amounts of lead. The hair was long enough to show levels of lead ingestion throughout the first eight months of the Franklin expedition.) For Beattie was astounded by the results of the carefully controlled test. Lead levels in the hair exceeded 600 parts per million, levels indicating acute lead poison- ing. Only over the last inch or so did the level of exposure drop, and then only slightly. This would have been due to a drop in the consumption of food during the last four to eight weeks of Torrington’s life, when he was seriously ill.

  By combining information gathered from the manner of Torrington’s burial, the new information about his physical condition and illnesses and period accounts of similar burial services conducted in the Arctic, it was now possible for Beattie and his research colleagues to re-create Torrington’s final days, death and burial with some accuracy.

  There is no question that during the last couple of weeks of life, John Torrington would have known his time had almost come. Beattie’s studies revealed that the petty officer’s health had never been good, but in late December 1845, it was different. John Torrington was dying. He had boarded the Terror eight months earlier, doubtless filled with high hopes. He must have been outwardly healthy when the expedition made its last contact with whaling vessels in late July and early August, or he would have been sent home. Indeed, sickness seems to have struck in September, about the same time that Franklin’s two ships anchored for the winter some 660 feet (200 metres) off the northeast section of Beechey Island.

  It was a slow-moving and lingering illness. The early symptoms of the deadly combination of emphysema and tuberculosis with lead poisoning would have included loss of appetite, irritability, lack of concentration, shortness of breath and fatigue. Torrington probably continued to work until mid- to late-November, when he would have been sent to the sick bay. The lack of any bed sores on his body shows that during much of December, on the advice of the ship’s physician, Torrington would have taken slow walks below deck several times a day. There he could talk with friends and, from time to time, before the illness became acute, look out through the gloom of the Arctic winter at the barren, snowswept rock of Beechey Island.

  Torrington’s physical condition would have worsened dramatically over Christmas. His behaviour would have grown unpredictable, with dramatic mood swings that must have caused grave concern to surgeons Alexander Macdonald and John Peddie. For there was no way that these men, with the knowledge and equipment of their time, could have known the true nature of his illness. All they would have been able to do for Torrington through most of the course of his disease was to keep him well-fed, likely relying more heavily on tinned provisions as the preferred food. Yet, despite their attention, his weight would have continued slowly dropping to the point of malnutrition. Then, probably during the last days of 1845, Torrington developed pneumonia, a serious blow considering his already diminished state of health. He would never again look out into the Arctic night.

  Sometime in the days immediately preceding death, Torrington would have given his few possessions to someone who would promise to return them to his father and stepmother when the expedition had sailed through the Northwest Passage into the Bering Strait and returned triumphantly to England. Towards the end, the twenty-year-old sailor would have fallen into a delerium, then suffered a series of convulsions before dying on New Year’s Day.

  News of the expedition’s first loss would likely have spread quickly through the crew of the Terror, and the surgeon would have notified Captain Francis Crozier. Within minutes, the men of the Erebus, including Franklin, would have been informed of John Torrington’s death. The surgeons probably debated the cause, going over the protracted and progressive nature of his disease before concluding it was pneumonia complicated by a history of tuberculosis. There was no call for an autopsy. Torrington’s body was then carefully cleaned and groomed below deck, where the temperature probably hovered continually around 50˚F (10˚C). It was 1 January, and his death surely cast a shadow over any New Year celebrations.

  After Torrington’s body was washed, he was dressed in his shirt and trousers. The two surgeons took care in binding his limbs to his body: one of them wrapped a cotton strip round the body and arms at the level of the elbow, tying a bow at the front; the other quickly tied cotton strips round the big toes, ankles and thighs.

  Above deck, where the ship had been draped with a canvas cover to keep out the snow and some of the cold (the temperature would still be around 14˚F/-10˚C), the carpenter Thomas Honey and his mate Alexander Wilson began carefully constructing the coffin, Macdonald having provided them with Torrington’s measurements. They used a stock timber, mahogany, measuring c inch (1.9 cm) thick by 12 inches (30 cm) wide. The lid and coffin bottom were each constructed of three pieces: a long central piece with shaped sections attached by dowels to each side. The box was constructed of the same type of wood; the curves at the shoulder produced by kerfing (a series of parallel cuts made across the inside width of the board, allowing it to be bent without breaking). Square iron nails were used to secure these sections together.

  The coffin lid and box were then carefully wrapped in navy blue wool material, held in place by narrow white ribbons nailed to the coffin and outlining its contours. Torrington’s messmates had taken great care in preparing the labelled metal plaque that was to be attached to the outside of the coffin lid. Another task of the carpenters, under the direction of one of Terror’s lieutenants, was the preparation of an inscribed headboard.

  Carrying picks and shovels, a small group of seamen from the Terror then walked from the ship to a location on the island just upslope from the armourer’s forge. Here, they used their feet and shovels to sweep away a thin layer of snow from a small area of beach gravel. In the bitter cold, where the earth seemed like iron, they must have wondered about the seemingly backbreaking work they’d been assigned. But Franklin had ordered a proper burial, as close as circumstances would permit to that which John Torrington would have received in his native Manchester. After perhaps a few brief words, several of the seamen grabbed a pickaxe each.

  The digging would have been treacherous and difficult, illuminated only by lamplight. In the near darkness, the pickaxes would have sent up showers of sparks as they struck against the icy earth. As the sailors took turns hacking at the ground in the deepening grave, they finally reached a depth of 5 feet (1.45 metres).

  Preparations for the burial of John Torrington would have taken a day or two, but finally the small, slender coffin was lowered on ropes over the ship’s side down to the ice, several feet below. It was probably then secured to a small sledge and no doubt draped with a flag. A party of seamen picked up the ropes secured to the front of the sledge and began to drag it slowly over the ice and snow towards the gravesite. If Beattie’s own experience of King William Island was any indication, it must have been a tortuous trail, with small hummocks of ice preventing them from dragging the coffin in a straight line. Instead, they would have had to zigzag towards the shore.

  A small procession would have followed, probably made up of Torrington’s messmates and friends from the Terror and led by Sir John Franklin, Captain Francis Crozier, Commander James Fitzjames and some of the Terror’s officers. Someone carried the wooden headboard, a monument not only to Torrington but, as events turned out, to the whole expedition.

  A layer of snow found on the coffin lid by Beattie and his team shows that a light snow was falling that day, early in January 1846. The men who stayed on the ships probably watched as, man by man, the procession was swallowed by the snow. Soon all that would have been seen were the lamps, flickering and swaying like fireflies around the shadows of the invisible party. Then th
ey too disappeared.

  Franklin probably presided at the burial. He was a deeply religious man who, eight months earlier, had asked the British Admiralty to furnish one hundred Bibles, prayer books and testaments for sale at cost aboard the ships.

  The snow, a spiralling yellow curtain in the lamplight, swirled around the group standing at the graveside. Some sifted and settled into the grave, obscuring the last view of Torrington’s coffin. Each breath of Franklin’s would have been made visible by the gripping cold, the sound of his voice blending with the icy, penetrating wind that always seems to blow at Beechey Island. His words were probably brief, but presented with obvious reverence and sincerity. Quickly, the ceremony was over, and thoughts turned away from the young man who, just months before at Woolwich, near London, had joined Franklin’s carefully selected crew a relatively healthy man.

  In many ways, Torrington’s was an uneventful death, yet the confirmation of high lead levels in his body was of great significance in the context of the entire expedition. Beattie had stepped beyond the conventional theories about the expedition’s end. It now seemed clear that the startling proof of lead poisoning in Torrington, coupled with the results from the Booth Point skeleton and the bone remains gathered in 1982, demonstrated that lead had played an important, if not pivotal, role in the Franklin disaster. Lost was the accepted explanation of scurvy and starvation alone carrying off the expedition. Beattie’s medical findings from Torrington opened the door on a whole new way of looking at this and other nineteenth-century expeditions. But such a radical new theory about the underlying cause of the destruction of one of history’s great voyages of discovery needed to be backed up by as much evidence as possible. The more bodies demonstrating lead contamination, the more credible the case that the theory applied to the entire expedition.

  Therefore, the laboratory discoveries made during 1984 only served to underline the importance of returning to Beechey Island and establishing the cause of death of Hartnell and Braine. Another important part of the investigation would be to establish what conditions must have been like on the expedition during 1845–46, and to reconstruct the last months and days in the lives of the three men buried on Beechey Island. Their bodies would provide an unprecedented and privileged opportunity to look into British and Canadian history—but a three-dimensional history, represented by the only true “survivors” of Franklin’s expedition.

  After the 1984 field season ended and news of the preservation of John Torrington and John Hartnell was announced, two indirect descendants of Hartnell contacted Beattie. Donald Bray of Croydon, England, was astonished to see coverage of Beattie’s expedition and to hear the name of his ancestor mentioned. Bray, a retired sub-postmaster, had devoted years to tracing his family history and was in possession of rare letters and documents that added haunting insights into Hartnell’s family and life. Most touching were two letters to John and Thomas Hartnell, one sent by their mother, Sarah, and the other by their brother, Charles, both of which were intended to greet the sailors upon their completion of the Northwest Passage. The two men never received the letters, dated 23 December 1847. John Hartnell had already been dead for nearly two years and Thomas’s death probably came the following summer on King William Island.

  “My Dear Children,” Sarah Hartnell’s letter began, “It is a great pleasure to me to have a chance to write you. I hope you are both well. I assure you I have many anxious moments about you but I endeavour to cast my prayers on Him who is too good to be unkind.” After a reference to her own illness and other news about family and friends, the letter ended: “If it is the Lord’s will may we be spared to meet on earth. If not God grant we may all meet around His throne to praise Him to all eternity.” Perhaps Sarah knew, as parents sometimes do, that her sons were facing their deaths.

  Another descendant of John Hartnell would, along with three other specialists, join Beattie’s scientific team when he returned to the field in 1986. Brian Spenceley, a professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and a great-great-nephew of Hartnell, would soon be able to experience that which no other man has: to look into the eyes of a relative who has been dead for more than a century.

  14. Hartnell Redux

  Jumping out of the Twin Otter onto the snow-blanketed ground of Beechey Island on 8 June 1986, Beattie was temporarily blinded by the bright, sunny sky and the sun’s rays reflecting off the white ground. Only gradually did major geographical features and the three tiny headstones that poked their way through the snow become visible, assuring him that he was once again on the island where so many memories lay.

  This time Beattie planned to complete his examinations of the Franklin graveyard; part of his research team had already arrived with him from Resolute. That group, consisting of archaeologist Eric Damkjar, project photographer Brian Spenceley, historical consultant Dr. Jim Savelle (who was a co-investigator with Beattie during the 1981 season and now served as a research scholar at the Scott Polar Research Institute) and field assistants Arne Carlson, Walt Kowal and Joelee Nungaq would set up camp and then conduct the detailed archaeological work and exhumations. A team of specialists consisting of pathologist Dr. Roger Amy, radiologist Dr. Derek Notman, radiology technician Larry Anderson and Arc-tic clothing specialist Barbara Schweger would arrive one week later.

  Beattie was starting his 1986 field season earlier than in 1984, in order to avoid the problem of water run-off from melting snow. But as the temperatures remained below freezing in June and a brisk wind swept across the island for a good number of days, heightening the cold, the investigators had to endure additional hardships.

  Each of the crew quickly set to work establishing camp, consisting of the usual array of individual and communal tents, with one new addition, a 16-foot-tall (5-metre) flagpole, where the bright red-and-white Canadian flag snapped in the near constant winds alongside the flag of the Northwest Territories. During this work, however, Beattie’s mind was fixed on something else. For two years, one question had nagged him. It was a question posed by almost everyone he had talked to about the research on Beechey Island: Was there any guarantee that the bodies of John Torrington and John Hartnell were again encased in ice after their 1984 reburials? The theory that the summer meltwater would trickle down into the filled-in excavations, seep into the coffins and subsequently freeze was a good, logical one. But Beattie wondered if the process were so simple. The 1984 exhumation of John Torrington was final and complete; there could be no verification of the theory there. However, uncovering John Hartnell, exposed once in 1852 and again in 1984, would soon answer the question.

  A tent was again erected over Hartnell’s grave to protect the exhumation process from the elements. As before, digging was extremely difficult. The exposure of Hartnell’s coffin required twenty-four hours of continual digging by Kowal, Carlson, Savelle and Nungaq, a process that had now become almost mechanical. One person would labour with the pickaxe until either the pain in his hands or the exhaustion in his arms required rest. The loosened ice and gravel would then be shovelled into buckets by one or two of the excavators, lifted out of the grave to another of them and finally dumped on the growing pile of “back-dirt.” Conversation between the excavators began with recollections of previous archaeological digs, especially those of 1984, but as the hours passed, the relentless sound of the pickaxe, broken regularly by the rasping, fingernail-on-blackboard sound of the shovel pushing into resistant gravel and ice, eventually won out.

  When the coffin lid was finally exposed and the limits of the coffin identified, the group took a long overdue rest and waited for the arrival of the team of specialists. To this point, the excavation was a replay of 1984. But the next step, the removal of the coffin lid, though also done in 1984, would this time provide an answer to the question of the refreezing of the bodies. They were therefore poised at the true beginning of the 1986 investigation.

  During the break in the exhumation work, Be
attie and Damkjar returned to the food-tin dump for a more detailed survey than the one they had conducted in 1984. Two days were spent thoroughly documenting what was left of the tins. Out of the original 700 or so, fragments of fewer than 150 remained. Tins are a very transportable, recognizable and desired artefact for amateur archaeologists and collectors, and, over the decades, people had been depleting the information pool represented by the containers. None of those remaining was complete and most were badly fragmented. But all portions of the tins were represented, including the soldered seams.

  The area of the tin scatter was gridded with string and tied in to a datum point. Each square of the grid was photographed and searched, and every tin fragment located and described. All of the larger pieces and those with particularly good features were individually photographed. Samples of “ordinary” tins were collected for later study, along with some tins that were particularly good examples of poor soldering and manufacture.

  On the second day of work at the can dump, Beattie and Damkjar were interrupted by Nungaq, who had been out hiking on the ice of Union Bay during the break in the digging. He came walking quickly along the spit towards them, his dog Keena held tightly by her chain. “There’s a bear coming,” he said, as he trotted up the rise of the mound. Pointing west, he continued: “Look, over there, it’s coming right for us.” Little interest in the tins remained, as Beattie and Damkjar squinted out over the bright field of ice. Then Beattie saw it. The bear’s head was lowered and it did not appear to be moving at all, though its body was swaying slightly from side to side. From this quick glimpse, Beattie recalled an important lesson. He remembered when he was a student pilot and his instructor had lectured him: “If you spot another airplane coming your way and it appears to be moving, you’re safe—just keep your eye on it. But if that plane looks like it is standing still, watch out, because it’s coming straight for you.” A strange thing to recall at this particular time, but the rule still applied. Although the bear was a good distance away, perhaps a mile, it looked awfully big. And within minutes they were all heading back to camp, cameras swinging from their necks, clutching notebooks, tripods and rifles. They did not want to leave either expensive camera equipment or their collected data at the tin dump for the bear to play with, so they had filled their arms with everything taken to the site. Halfway back to camp, they turned to see the bear crossing the spit with a slow, purposeful gait. They breathed easier when they watched the bear stop for a moment to test the air, then move on, heading across Erebus Bay to Devon Island.