Sir John Franklin shortly after he was knighted by George IV in 1829, sixteen years before his fatal expedition,
At the time of his appointment, Franklin was unemployed on half pay from the Navy. Two years earlier he had been recalled from Tasmania, where for six years he had been lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony of three thousand souls. He and his wife Jane had run afoul of the Colonial Office for having pushed for social and educational reforms deemed inappropriate by the government bureaucracy. A balding and corpulent man, he was a month away from his sixtieth birthday, but, in the opinion of Admiral Perry, “fitter than any I know.” Franklin was popular with his seniors at the Admiralty, with colleagues, friends, and the men serving under him. Contemporaries variously described him in positive terms: a religious and gentle person; honest with a sense of justice and compassion; a modest man awkward at social gatherings, not flamboyant or abrasive; a man of duty and a sense of purpose; having a sense of humour and viewing life as a glass half full rather than half empty.
Franklin had gone to sea with the Royal Navy at age fourteen and within six months found himself in the heat of the Battle of Copenhagen. Later, as a midshipman he was on the seventy-four-gun Bellerophon at the Battle of Trafalgar, and during the War of 1812 he was lightly wounded at the Battle of New Orleans. After the Napoleonic wars, the young officer was discharged on half pay, but later appointed by Barrow to lead an overland exploration to the mouth of the Coppermine River in the Canadian Arctic. It was here that the young officer made a name for himself.
Lieutenant Franklin quit England with four others: his second-in-command, a physician named John Richardson; two midshipmen, Robert Hood and George Beck; and a servant, Ordinary Seaman John Hepburn. Before it was all over the select group had expanded to twenty, including French Canadian voyageurs and local Natives. The expedition set off from York House on the southwest coast of Hudson Bay in September 1819 and returned to the starting point three years later. Its purpose was to reach the mouth of the Coppermine River over land and then move east along the continent’s north coast in an exploration of a possible channel to Hudson Bay, an additional step closer to linking the Northwest Passage. Two Christmases later, after exhausting slogging and canoeing through the “endless rugged, scabrous landscape of jagged rock and skinny trees” of the Canadian northwest, they reached the juncture of the Coppermine and salt water. It had been an appallingly difficult passage undertaken by birchbark canoes, dog-sledges, and snowshoes. Franklin wrote:
The task of beating a track [with snowshoes] through deep snow for the dogs was so very fatiguing that each of the men took the lead in turn … soon after we encamped the snow fell heavily, which was an advantage by its affording us an additional covering to our blankets … the suffering [snowshoeing] occasions can be fairly imagined by a person who thinks upon the inconvenience of marching with a weight of two or three pounds constantly attached to galled feet and swelled ankles…[1]
Franklin’s life seems to have been plagued by bad luck, and certainly what followed in the months after his passage up the Coppermine was a sequence of one misfortune after another. Barrow had made arrangements with the Hudson’s Bay and the North West companies to supply the expedition with food and other necessities, but by the time Franklin entered their territories the two rivals were in a bitter struggle with one another and had little time for the naval visitors. Now, twenty-one months into the journey, Franklin was entirely dependent on the Copper Indians, not only as guides, but for their team’s food requirements.
In mid-August, however, the Natives decided to quit the group and return home, leaving the five Englishmen, thirteen French voyageurs, and two Inuit to their own devices. The abandoned party set off eastward in two large canoes, hugging the coastline and carrying a ten-day supply of food, and, in the ensuing four weeks, they managed to cover three hundred miles — but found no trace of Hudson Bay. Discouraged, suffering from fatigue and ill-fed stomachs, and with winter rapidly approaching, Franklin decided to terminate the search and strike out overland back to Fort Enterprise where they had spent the previous winter. There they would find shelter and stores of pemmican that had been purposely left by them.
Thus began a 280-mile trek across uncharted tundra called Barren Lands, a vast steppe extending from Hudson Bay to Great Slave Lake, scattered with scrub trees, grasses, mosses, lichens, and sharp rocks that make any crossing treacherous. “If anyone had broken a limb here,” Richardson wrote, “his fate would have been melancholy indeed, as we could neither have remained with him, nor carried him on with us.”[2] Within the travelling group was a handful of voyageurs, those hardy French-Canadian adventurers who played no small role in the opening of the Canadian West through their skills in navigating heavy canoes along the waterways. Hudson’s voyageurs had a particularly difficult time of it, for each carried backpacks averaging ninety pounds. Canoes had long been discarded and when time came to cross rivers and streams, they had to be forded by foot. Early winter made game scarce and the kill of a deer, hare, or partridge was an occasion for jubilation. Provisions had become fully exhausted, and the men were reduced to grubbing for lichens — tripe de roche they were called — plus the occasional rotting carcass discarded by wolves. Hunger became so severe that strips of leather from spare boots were boiled and consumed. (Franklin’s famous account: “there was no tripe de roche, so we drank tea and ate some of our shoes for supper.”)
The group finally made it to the Coppermine River at a point forty miles from Fort Enterprise, according to Franklin’s calculations. Forty miles might just as well have been a thousand as far as any were concerned. Two of the weakest voyageurs stubbornly refused to proceed farther and were left behind where they collapsed. Shortly thereafter, the party split up. Beck, the strongest of the lot, with three others, pressed forward to their destination in order to return with food. Franklin plus seven followed at a slower pace, while Richardson and Hood begged to remain where they were to await Beck’s return. Shortly after Franklin set out, three voyageurs accompanying him pleaded an inability to continue and received permission to retrace their steps to rejoin Richardson and Hood. The food situation seemed critical, but the worst was yet to come. Franklin wrote:
[One of the party] who had been hunting, brought in the antlers and back bone of a deer which had been killed in the summer. The wolves and birds of prey had picked them clean, but there still remained a quantity of the spinal marrow which they were unable to extract. Although putrid, it was esteemed a valuable prize, and the spine being equally divided into portions was evenly distributed. After eating the marrow, which was so acrid as to excoriate the lips, we rendered the bones friable by burning and ate them also.
A couple of days after the voyageurs dropped back, one of them, named Michel Terohaut, staggered into the camp of the Navy men, explaining that he had become separated from his companions who he thought would soon be following. Much to the Englishmen’s relief, Michel carried a welcomed quantity of meat — a hare and a ptarmigan he managed to kill, which the two Englishmen eagerly devoured. A couple of days later, the voyageur returned from an unsuccessful hunt, but with meat from the remains of a wolf that had been killed by the stroke of a caribou’s horn, and this too was divided and consumed. Spirits were lifted. In the next few days, however, Terohaut became surly and began to exhibit erratic behaviour. He disappeared for hours, not telling the others where he was going; he refused to search for tripe de roche or to carry wood, and when Hood asked him why he no longer went hunting, he responded with a remark that was quickly realized as having a sinister connotation, “There are no more animals, you had better kill and eat me.” It then dawned on Richardson and Hood that Terohaut possibly killed his companions and was disappearing to feed off their corpses. The hare, ptarmigan, and scraps of wolf they had so ravenously consumed had in fact been human flesh. Richardson wrote, “We became convinced from circumstances, the details of which may be spared, that it must have been a portion of the
body of Belanger or Perrault.”[3]
The following day was a Sunday and “the morning service was read.” In the afternoon, Richardson heard a gunshot and in seeking to find its source, he came across:
[P]oor Hood lying lifeless at the fire-side, a ball having apparently entered his forehead. I was at first horrified with the idea, that in a fit of despondency he had hurried himself into the presence of his Almighty Judge, by an act of his own hand; but the conduct of Michel soon gave rise to other thoughts, and excited suspicions which were confirmed, when upon examining the body, I discovered that the shot had entered the back of the head, and passed out the forehead, and that the muzzle of the gun had been applied so close as to set fire to the night-cap behind.
Furthermore, the gun that fired the shot was a long-barrelled rifle. No doubting it: the young midshipman had not committed suicide; he had been murdered. In the next two days, “Michel alarmed us much by his gestures and conduct was constantly muttering to himself … assumed such a tone of superiority as envinced that he considered us to be completely in his power.” He became aggressive and threatening and it was clear to Richardson that their lives were in danger from this crazed individual. While the weaker ones eked out nourishment from tripe de roche, the voyageur had been secretly consuming meat. “Hepburn and I were not in a condition to resist even an open attack, nor could we by any device escape from him. Our united strength was far inferior to his, and, besides his gun, we was armed with two pistols, an Indian bayonet and a knife…. I determined … to put an end to his life by shooting him through the head with a pistol.” On Wednesday Richardson did just that.
That evening around the campfire, “we singed the hair off a part of the buffalo robe that belonged to Hood, and boiled it and ate it.” Such was the desperation brought on by unmitigated hunger.
Four more days of continued march in “thick snowy weather,” often sinking deep into the stuff, finally brought them to Fort Enterprise, where their happy expectations were rudely shattered by a dismal scene of want and neglect. Only four of the expedition’s men remained alive to greet them, and the first to step forward was an atrophied Franklin — “the ghastly countenance, dilated eyeballs and sepulchral voices of Captain Franklin and those with him were more than we could at first bear.”
The stores of food left behind by them on the outbound passage were gone, stolen by the Natives; the deerskin parchments covering the windows were no longer there — boiled and eaten by the starving men and the floorboards had been pried up and used for firewood.
For a week they remained in the desolate building, grubbing for tripe de roche and boiling rotten deerskin and then, on November 7, the stillness of morning was broken by the noises of arriving Natives. Beck had somehow managed to reach their settlement and had sent them to rescue his mates. The new arrivals carried with them a generous supply of pemmican. In the days that followed, they hunted and fished for the survivors and treated them “with the same tenderness they would have bestowed on their own infants.” With strength restored, the entire group set off once more and eventually returned to their starting point on Hudson Bay … and thence home to “England’s pleasant pastures green.” Thus came to an end Franklin’s first Arctic exploration and a seminal chapter in the explorer’s life had drawn to a close.
The expedition had travelled 5,550 miles and in the process, eleven of Franklin’s men perished. The payoff by any standard was negligible: only a tiny portion of the Canadian coastline had been charted — a disastrous venture by any definition. Many criticized Franklin for his obstinacy in refusing to deviate from the set plan even when it became obvious that shortage of food and scarcity of game would make a safe journey impossible. He was accused of being inflexible and incapable of adapting to changing situations. Rumours and dark innuendos circulated concerning Hood’s murder. The only account of the murder was published by Richardson with Franklin’s approbation, and, some asked, what was to prove that Richardson himself had not killed and perhaps eaten Hood?
Despite criticisms, the British public adulated Franklin and his account of the journey in book form became a bestseller going into a number of editions and translations. In the mind of the Victorian majority he was a hero — a hero for the courage displayed in the face of adversity and for stalwart perseverance; “the man who ate his boots,” as he affectionately became known.
Such was the man commanding the Erebus when on that July day of 1845, off Baffin Island, she and the Terror left the whaler’s company to continue their journey into oblivion. The two ships were nearly identical, the Terror slightly smaller at 325 tons with the other at 370 tons. Since they were originally used as floating batteries for the shelling of shore installations, they were solidly constructed to withstand the weight and powerful recoil of five-ton mortars. Squared oak beams eighteen inches thick reinforced the hull athwartship. The extra spacious holds for the storage of shells and explosives were well suited for the expedition’s three-year supply of provisions and equipment.[4] Brought into Her Majesty’s Dockyard, the vessels underwent major refits: decks were doubled in thickness; additional oak beams were installed fore and aft, hulls were scraped clean and the planking doubled; bows were covered by inch-thick sheets of iron; keels were covered with an extra heavy sheeting of copper, and the sails of the three masts replaced with triple-thick canvas. To withstand the cold hatches and gangways were double-doored, cork insulation was installed throughout, and an elaborate piping system was put into place to serve a central heating unit. Sturdy lifeboats were at the davits with “sufficient capacity to carry all the crew if the vessel was lost.”
Both ships were given locomotive engines to power the screw propellers, an invention which had newly come into use by the Royal Navy (until then steam powered vessels had sidewheels). Not only were the seven-foot propellers novel, but the ones on the Erebus and Terror were made retractable — in hazardous ice conditions they could be hauled up and stored in special wells. Sails were to be the principal means of propulsion, with the engines serving to navigate through ice floes. To fuel the engines specially built bunkers accommodating ninety tons of coal were installed, allowing the vessels a 2,800-mile range under power. For Victorian times, the vessels were state of the art and proud achievements of Sir John Barrow.
Starvation and scurvy were two fundamental concerns of any Arctic expedition, as experience clearly demonstrated after Franklin’s disastrous foray into the Canadian North. Not only did provisions have to be made for the right quantity of each staple, but the three-year supply had to be judiciously packed to prevent spoilage or infestation by vermin.
In 1845, tin cans had just come into use and Burrow adroitly took advantage of the new process by having many basic foods pre-cooked and delivered in the airtight containers, which seemingly offered indefinite shelf life. The “Deptford Victualling Yard report for HMS Terror,” dated eight days before sailing, tells us that 4,573 pounds of lemon juice were brought on board “in 5 gallon kegs,” as were nearly three tons of pickled cranberries, cucumbers, cabbage, onions, and walnuts — all in the interest of scurvy prevention. (The Erebus received approximately the same amounts.)
For a sense of overall magnitude, some other of the thirty-seven officially listed items included: 66,704 pounds of flour and 16,884 pounds of biscuit; 2,288 gallons of West Indian rum and 2,490 gallons of ale; 47,008 pounds of salt beef, salt pork, and tinned meat. Additionally: tea, pemmican, macaroni, tobacco (3,510 pounds), chocolate (4,573 pounds), and “for the sick,” 200 gallons of wine and brandy.
Officers of both ships had access to government-provided chicken coops for the supply of fresh eggs. (After the chickens ceased laying, they were dispatched to the stew pot.) The officers also had the privilege of bringing on board, at their own expense, whatever they wished by way of supplementary items — things like Westphalia ham, corned beef, canned soups, South Carolina rice, vermicelli, jams, “vegetable essence,” and whisky. Cookman observed that the expedition was:
; [T]he most lavishly provisioned Arctic voyage England had ever assembled. On full allowance, free of scurvy, it could subsist handsomely and with great variety for a minimum of three years — more than ample to force the Passage or outlast any conceivable period they might be trapped in the ice.
These ships were never to return home. The instructions Franklin carried from their Lordships at the Admiralty were straightforward: from Baffin Bay he was to proceed west, “guided by your own observations as to the course most eligible to be taken,”[5] using “the small steam engine and a propeller … only in difficult cases.” Passing through Lancaster Sound, the expedition was to continue west “without loss of time,” hoping “that the remaining portion of the passage, about 900 miles [in fact, 1,400 miles] to the Bhering’s Strait may also be found equally free from [ice] obstruction.” At Cape Walker “we desire that every effort be used to endeavour to penetrate to the southward and the westward in a course as direct towards Bhering’s Strait as the position and extent of the ice, or the existence of land, as present unknown, may admit.” The instructions go on to say that “should you be so fortunate to accomplish a passage through Bhering’s Strait, you are then to proceed to the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii], to refit your ships and refresh your crews.”
Franklin is also advised that should he “meet either Esquimaux or Indians near the place where you winter, you are to endeavour by every means in your power to cultivate a friendship with them, by making them presents of such articles as you may be supplied with.” Should the ships “be detained during a winter” the crews are to carry out magnetical and meteorological observations using the portable observatory supplied for the purpose. Furthermore, having passed 65°N, on a daily basis “throw overboard a bottle or copper cylinder closely sealed and containing a paper stating the date and position at which it was launched … for this purpose we have caused each ship to be supplied with paper, on which is printed, in several languages, a request that whoever may find it should take measures for transmitting it to this office.”
Arctic Obsession Page 16
