Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  Drawing on Parry’s private journal, Barrow lambasted Ross’s decision to turn back in Lancaster Sound “at the very moment which afforded the brightest prospect of success.” Sabine weighed in with further criticism, accusing Ross of plagiarism and misrepresentation. In December 1818, before this controversy reached a crescendo, Ross had received the promised promotion from commander to captain. But Barrow ensured that, for the Royal Navy, he would never sail again.

  The British Admiralty recognized that on his first voyage, John Sakeouse had made a singular contribution. The governing board proposed to send the Inuk on another Arctic expedition under Lieutenant Edward Parry. In London, while sorting out details, the Penny Magazine tells us that Sakeouse took “great delight in relating his adventures with the ‘Northmen.’” Always able to laugh at himself, he alluded “with great good humour and somewhat touchingly . . . to his own ignorance when first he landed in this country. He then imagined the first cow he saw to be a wild and dangerous animal, and hastily retreated to the boat for the harpoon, that he might defend himself and his companions from this ferocious-looking beast.”

  Sakeouse became so popular in London drawing rooms that his friends feared “either that the poor fellow’s head would be turned, or that he would get into bad company and acquire dissipated habits.” He soon tired of the big city, however, and returned to Edinburgh to live among his old friends.

  The Admiralty Board, not known for free spending, sent money north, stipulating that Sakeouse “be educated in as liberal a manner as possible.” The young man welcomed this initiative, and applied himself to his courses “with astonishing ardour and perseverance.” The artist Alexander Nasmyth resumed teaching him art, and introduced Sakeouse to his own family. Another man traded English lessons for instruction in Inuktitut. Sakeouse enjoyed meeting people, and was so entertaining that he spent his evenings “cheerfully and profitably.”

  One evening, however, when he was “attacked in a most ungenerous and cowardly way in the streets, he resented the indignities put upon him in a very summary manner, by fairly knocking several of the party down . . . It is due to poor John to state that upon this occasion he behaved for a long time with great forbearance. But upon being struck, he was roused to exert his strength, which was prodigious.”

  In January 1819, Sakeouse was delighted to learn that the Admiralty wished him to accompany Edward Parry on another two-ship expedition to the Arctic. He eagerly anticipated sailing into Lancaster Sound when, without warning, according to the Penny Magazine, he “was seized with an inflammatory complaint.” The finest doctors in Edinburgh attended him and, after a few days, he seemed to recover. But as “he began to gain strength, he by no means liked the discipline to which he was subjected, and the prescribed regimen still more displeased him.” Sakeouse suffered a relapse, and on Sunday evening, February 14, 1819, at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, he died.

  Many of Edinburgh’s leading lights attended his funeral, and several luminaries journeyed north from London. People remembered Sakeouse as gentle, modest and obliging, and noted that he appreciated any kindness extended to him. “In a snowy day, last winter,” according to Blackwood’s Magazine, “he met two children at some distance from Leith, and observing them to be suffering from the cold, he took off his jacket, and having carefully wrapped them in it, brought them safely home. He would take no reward, and seemed to be quite unconscious that he had done anything remarkable.” In May 1819, when Edward Parry sailed again for the Arctic, he bitterly regretted the absence of John Sakeouse.

  7.

  Edward Parry Identifies a Northern Channel

  Because he did not believe in the existence of the Croker Mountains, John Barrow, the Admiralty mastermind, decided to double-down—to dispatch not one but two expeditions to investigate the Northwest Passage. Both would become legendary, though for dramatically different reasons. The lesser, an overland expedition, would be led by John Franklin (see the next chapter).

  William Edward Parry would lead the more important. Recently turned twenty-eight, and newly appointed to the rank of lieutenant commander, Parry received orders to sail directly to Lancaster Sound, in which John Ross had apparently sighted the disputed mountains. Early in May of 1819, less than six months after he returned from that voyage, Parry set out from London with two former bomb-ships, the 352-ton Hecla and the 180-ton Griper. They carried complements, respectively, of fifty-seven and thirty-seven men.

  At Davis Strait, instead of taking the whaling route northward along the west coast of Greenland before swinging west, as John Ross had done, Parry challenged the Middle Ice—a generally impassable array of massive icebergs and lethal bergy bits between Greenland and Baffin Island. Whalers avoided it. Parry’s risky manoeuvre could save time, but meant butting through the ice. This time out he was lucky. By the end of July, having survived several close calls, he reached the entrance to Lancaster Sound. Had he been correct in repudiating Ross? An “oppressive anxiety . . . was visible in every countenance,” he wrote later, “while, as the breeze increased to a fresh gale, we ran quickly to the westward.”

  At 6:00 p.m. on August 2, 1819, while noting a long swell “rolling in from the southward and eastward,” Parry wrote, “land was reported to be seen ahead. The vexation and anxiety produced on every countenance by such a report was but too visible.” On drawing nearer, however, this “was found to be only an island, of no very large extent, and that, on each side of it, the horizon still appeared clear for several points of the compass.”

  In 1819, William Edward Parry led one of the most successful of all Arctic voyages.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  Directly ahead, as far as the eye could see, lay an open channel 130 kilometres wide. The Croker Mountains did not exist. Vindicated, jubilant and relishing the cheers of his companions, Edward Parry sailed onwards. On August 6, he came upon a broad channel, at least fifty kilometres wide, that opened to the south. Thinking this might lead to a coastal waterway, Parry sailed into Prince Regent Inlet, as he named it, for about two hundred kilometres. But then, encountering ice, he turned around and, back at Lancaster Sound, resumed sailing westward through the broad channel that, from this inlet onwards, he called Barrow Strait.

  On September 4, after sailing through heavy weather, and also past a notable waterway leading north, “Wellington Channel,” Parry reached 110° west longitude. After Sunday prayers, he told his men that, having achieved the first objective set by the Board of Longitude, they had won £5,000 (£1,000 for him as captain and the rest to be distributed among his men). The next day, at Melville Island, the two ships dropped anchor for the first time. The men raised the Union Jack. Over the next several days, they spent time on shore, found coal for burning, and hunted and bagged a great many succulent ptarmigan.

  Crewmen work HMS Hecla and Griper into Winter Harbour in 1819. This engraving is based on a sketch by Parry’s Lieutenant Frederick William Beechey, who visited Beechey Island during this voyage and named it after his father, artist William Beechey.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  With temperatures falling and the days growing shorter, Parry beat farther west. On September 17, at nearly 113°, he met impenetrable ice at what would later be named McClure Strait. He retreated to a cove he had spotted on Melville Island. As ice formed around the two ships, Parry managed to warp them, or haul them by using a line attached to a fixed anchor, into a safe spot at a place he called Winter Harbour. He wrote of feeling exhilarated, and why not? His voyage was already an unprecedented success. He had charted more than 1,600 kilometres of coastline and discovered a waterway that, measured from Greenland, extended roughly halfway to the Icy Cape that, four decades before, Captain James Cook had reached from the west.

  Now came a second great challenge: wintering in the High Arctic. For this, Parry had prepared. As cold and twenty-four-hour darkness gripped the expedition, he engaged his men with literacy classes and theatrical entertainments. Geophysicist
Edward Sabine, the thirty-one-year-old Royal Artillery captain, set up a magnetic observatory 650 metres from the ships—far enough that the iron in the vessels would not interfere with his readings.

  Sabine had sailed on the Croker Mountain expedition with Ross, and later recalled his “mortification at having come away from a place which I considered as the most interesting in the world for magnetic observations, and where my expectations had been raised to the highest pitch, without having had an opportunity of making them.” Now, when he wasn’t taking readings, Sabine edited a newspaper filled with jokes and shipboard shenanigans.

  Midshipman James Clark Ross, still just nineteen, emerged as the most popular actor in the Royal Arctic Theatre, and proved sporting enough to take on many female roles. Early in June, Edward Parry took a dozen men and spent two weeks hauling a handcart filled with supplies along the coast of Melville Island. Then came a six-week struggle to free the ships from the surrounding ice.

  Finally, on August 1, the vessels escaped into open water. Parry again steered west. At the southwestern tip of Melville Island, just beyond 113°, he sailed up near a wall of multi-year ice that stood thirteen to sixteen metres (fifty feet) high. Recognizing an impenetrable barrier when he saw one, Parry turned around and sailed for home.

  Early in November, having completed one of the most successful Arctic sailing expeditions of all time, Edward Parry arrived in London to a hero’s welcome. Overnight, he became the most celebrated man in England. He was promoted to commander and, in his hometown of Bath, he received the keys to the city. In his journal, he wrote that he was confident that the western outlet of the Passage would be found at Bering Strait.

  But that wall of ice at 113° had made an impression. Parry doubted now that anyone would be able to reach Bering Strait through Lancaster Sound. Wondering about the thoroughness and efficiency of earlier explorers, he turned his attention to Hudson Bay. Perhaps a channel swung north before it reached those areas traversed by Hearne and Mackenzie? He identified Cumberland Sound, Sir Thomas Rowe’s Welcome and Repulse Bay as “the points most worthy of attention.” And he added that “one, or perhaps each of them, may afford a practicable passage into the Polar Sea.”

  Parry wanted to lead an expedition into those reaches, where “there certainly does seem more than an equal chance of finding the desired passage.” But he also realized, as he told his family, that “the success we met with is to be attributed under Providence to the concurrence of many very favorable circumstances.” In his journal he went further still, tempering his earlier optimism and cautioning against “entertaining too sanguine a hope of finding such a [northwest] passage, the existence of which is still nearly as uncertain as it was two hundred years ago, and which possibly may not exist at all.”

  8.

  The Yellowknife Rescue John Franklin

  The Inuit hamlet of Kugluktuk, formerly known as Coppermine, is located at the mouth of the Coppermine River, where it empties into the Arctic Ocean. From a ridge at the edge of town, you can gaze across the river and see the bluff where, on July 17, 1771, at latitude 67°8´25˝ north, Samuel Hearne stood looking out when he became the first explorer to reach this northern coast of North America. Fifty years later almost to the day, on July 18, 1821, having followed Hearne’s route to this location, John Franklin of the Royal Navy established a campsite at that vantage point.

  A few kilometres upriver, he had taken unhappy leave of Akaitcho, an eminent Yellowknife-Dene who had warned him against continuing his journey this late in the year. A fearsome leader of about 190 people, and a man who had lived all of his thirty-five years in this part of the world, Akaitcho told Franklin that if he now set out eastward along the coast, he would never return alive. The naval officer proved impervious to advice. He said goodbye to Akaitcho and his hunters and proceeded to this location with twenty men. He would follow his Royal Navy orders to the letter.

  Lieutenant John Franklin had left England on May 23, 1819, eleven days after Edward Parry embarked on his epochal voyage. He was ordered to explore the Arctic coast of North America from the mouth of the Coppermine eastward to Hudson Bay. The hope was that, in tandem with Parry’s voyage, this two-pronged exploration might locate the Northwest Passage. In Sir John Franklin’s Journals and Correspondence: The First Arctic Land Expedition, editor Richard C. Davis notes that a growing interest in geomagnetism and the shifting magnetic poles provided a second motivation.

  From this campsite at the mouth of the Coppermine River, ignoring warnings from Yellowknife guides who knew the area, John Franklin set out eastward along the Arctic coast. George Back, one of two artists on the expedition, painted this view.

  Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, Special collections.

  The Admiralty’s John Barrow, increasingly aware of the unreliability of compass readings near the north magnetic pole, surmised that Samuel Hearne might have been wrong about the latitude he had reached. To ascertain the position and direction of the coastline eastward from that location, he wanted “an officer well skilled in astronomical and geographical science, and in the use of instruments.”

  Franklin had shown some aptitude. Officially appointed in April, he departed one month later with five fellow Royal Navy men. In a biography of George Back, one of two junior officers (midshipmen) who joined the expedition, Peter Steele writes that the deeply religious Franklin “was plump, unfit and unused to hard exercise, with no experience of travelling on foot, or running rivers in canoes, or hunting for food—as neither did any of his chosen officers.” No competent contemporary traveller, he adds, “would contemplate allowing less than a year to embark on such a major journey, even over already known and mapped country.”

  Together with some Selkirk settlers bound for Red River Settlement, Franklin sailed on a Hudson’s Bay Company ship, the Prince of Wales, with instructions to make his way from Coppermine to Hudson Bay while keeping detailed meteorological and magnetic records. The Admiralty, with no experience mounting overland expeditions, and no appreciation of the challenges involved, proposed to draw logistical support from the two fur-trading companies active in Rupert’s Land.

  In London, representatives of the HBC and the North West Company agreed to assist Franklin in every way possible. But in the North Country, their rivalry was spiralling into a murderous crescendo. Each company accused the other of ambushing and killing agents. This poisonous situation would make cooperation difficult at best. And on August 30, 1819, when Franklin arrived at York Factory, headquarters of the HBC, he discovered that three North West Company partners were being detained there—hardly a good omen.

  Franklin spent twenty-three months making his way 4,090 kilometres northwest from York Factory on Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Coppermine at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. He faced one obstacle after another. Initially, the HBC could spare only one traditional York boat and a single man, so he had to leave much of his gear for later forwarding. The explorer Alexander Mackenzie had responded to a pre-departure request for information by observing that Franklin should not expect, in his first season, to get beyond Île-àla-Crosse—wise words.

  This is probably the earliest likeness of John Franklin. It is based on a painting by William Derby, born the same year as Franklin (1786), and illustrates an article by L. T. Burwash in the Canadian Geographical Journal of November 1930.

  Courtesy of Randall Osczevski.

  A newcomer to Red River Settlement, on the other hand, had written recommending bacon as a primary meat source. Words not so wise. As yet unfamiliar with pemmican, the light-weight, dried-meat staple of the voyageur diet, much less with hunting buffalo and caribou, Franklin had brought seven hundred pounds of salted pig, which on arrival was already mouldy and inedible.

  The hefty lieutenant did not take naturally to rough-country trekking. On the Hayes River at Robinson Falls, according to George Back, Franklin was walking along a rocky bluff when he slipped on some moss “and notwithstanding his attempts to stop himself, went int
o the stream.” He landed in deep water ninety metres downstream, “and after many fruitless trials to get a landing, he was fortunately saved by one of the boats, which by dint of chance was near the spot.”

  With the occasional help of HBC men travelling in the same direction, Franklin and his men transported a huge weight of supplies and instruments along rough trails and over portages. They travelled 1,130 kilometres up the Nelson and Saskatchewan Rivers to Cumberland House, arriving late in October. Franklin sent one able seaman home because, assigned to carry supplies with the voyageurs and four tough Orcadian Scots, he had been unable to maintain the pace.

  Franklin stayed a couple of months at Cumberland House, some 685 kilometres short of Île-à-la-Crosse. Then, starting in mid-January 1820, with George Back, a single seaman (John Hepburn) and some Indian guides, Franklin spent another two months trekking north on snowshoes. He made his way to Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca, with a view to organizing the next leg of the trip. He arrived on March 26, having covered 1,380 kilometres in sixty-seven days.

  This travel rate, about twenty-one kilometres per day, would have drawn derisive laughter from expert snowshoers, who regularly travelled at three times that speed. George Back, age twenty-two, wrote in a letter to his brother that the journey highlighted “a wide difference between Franklin and me . . . he had never been accustomed to any vigorous exertion; besides, his frame is bulky without activity.”

  Even so, George Simpson, now emerging as a fur-trade impresario, exaggerated when he disparaged Franklin: “He must have three meals per diem. Tea is indispensable, and with the utmost exertion, he cannot walk above Eight miles in one day.” By the time Simpson wrote that, the two men had exchanged acerbic letters, with the HBC governor challenging Franklin’s Royal Navy assumption that the fur trade existed primarily to serve his expedition.