Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Off Franklin went, each step being marked by disaster and disappointment. At their first stop the campfire got out of hand and burned down a large section of forest. Then Back nearly killed himself when his sleeping fur caught light. Akaitcho’s hunters were hardly to be seen, and when they did make an appearance had little to show for their troubles. The squabbling fur companies could not agree who was to provide the party with food, with the result that supplies became so short that the voyageurs mutinied, forcing Franklin to send Back to fetch pemmican from Cumberland House. Donning snowshoes, Back made the 1,200-mile round journey in a matter of months, and returned ‘having succeeded in the procuration of supplies beyond [their] most sanguine expectations’. But Back’s efforts were not enough to quell the voyageurs’ pessimism. When Franklin warned the ringleader, a man called St Germain, of the penalty he might face if brought to trial in England, he was greeted with hollow laughter. ‘It is immaterial to me where I lose my life,’ said St Germain, ‘for the whole party will perish.’ The only positive aspect of the trip was that they no longer had to lug the weighty wooden boat behind them. Seeing the impracticability of hauling it to the Coppermine, Franklin had opted instead for three, lightweight bark canoes that could be either sailed or paddled and were seaworthy enough for the coastal reconnaissance he had in mind.

  That winter they built a camp comprising two log huts, one of five rooms for the four officers and a slightly smaller one for the 16 voyageurs – the Indians were left to find what shelter they could – to which they gave the name Fort Enterprise. Here, nursing their grievances and discontents (Back and Hood had fallen in love with an Indian girl named Greenstockings and at one point were ready to fight a duel over her), they festered until June 1821, when they resumed their march for the mouth of the Coppermine. By 18 July they were approaching Bloody Falls, where it had been agreed the Indians would turn back. Franklin felt no great sadness at their departure: besides being lacklustre hunters, they had also proved incompetent guides, knowing the terrain no better than he himself. In some ways, too, it was as well they should leave, for there was much preparation to be done for the expedition’s return. Franklin had already decided to go east when he reached the sea, and he was aware that in order to chart the maximum amount of coastline he ran the risk of being cut off by the ice, in which case he would have to return overland to the Coppermine, relying for sustenance on whatever wildlife he could trap or shoot. His party would be near-starving when they arrived and would have no time to lay down stores for the winter. It was imperative, therefore, that the Indians leave caches of food at certain prearranged points and, above all, that they stock Fort Enterprise with dried meat. He drummed it into them: if they did not stock Fort Enterprise he and his men would die. A few days later he ordered his party into the canoes and, with 14 days’ food, paddled down the Coppermine.

  The sea was open, the canoes handled well and the voyageurs managed to subdue their terror at being afloat on the waves. (None of them had ever seen the sea before.) Franklin steered his little fleet through the North-West Passage, charting every creek and bay for 555 miles until, on 18 August, he called a halt. He would have gone further had there been enough food, but game had generally been scarce and even when it was plentiful, as for instance at the mouth of a river that he named after Hood, the voyageurs had shot little. In Franklin’s mind this was yet another sign of their untrustworthiness: ‘we now strongly suspected that their recent want of success in hunting had proceeded from an intentional relaxation in their efforts to kill deer in order that the want of provisions might compel us to put a period to our voyage’. Walking along the shore, he marked his furthest east – a promontory that he called Point Turnagain – then readied his group for the journey home.

  The season was too far advanced for them to reach the mouth of the Coppermine, so they sailed back to Hood River where they could shoot enough game to last them during the march to Fort Enterprise. The canoes having been badly damaged by storms, they dismantled all three and reassembled them to create two smaller models for crossing the many rivers that blocked their path. Unfortunately, they had left it too late: the deer had already fled south before the coming winter, and Hood River, once so bountiful, was now devoid of wildlife. As the Arctic winter came down, bringing snowstorms and gales, they struggled to control their cut-down canoes, which blew about in the wind and snagged against rocks. The going was slippery and, in Richardson’s words, ‘If anyone had broken a limb here, his fate would have been melancholy indeed, we could neither have remained with him, nor carried him on with us’. They ate their last pemmican on 4 September. On the same day Franklin fainted from hunger and exposure, and the voyageurs dropped one of the canoes, breaking its fragile hull beyond repair. Franklin suspected it had been done on purpose; but, turning adversity to advantage, he used the remains to build a fire, on which they boiled the last of their provisions: a tin of soup. From that date they had nothing to eat save what they could scavenge.

  The region through which they were travelling was known as the Badlands. They soon learned why. The terrain was difficult, comprising a mess of rocks, bog and rivers, and game was in short supply. They managed to shoot a few deer in the early stages, but as the weather harshened they were reduced to foraging the rocks for tripes de roche, a barely nutritious lichen that gave them diarrhoea and whose embedded crumbs of stone broke their teeth. On 14 September their remaining canoe was lost when it overturned in a river, nearly killing a voyageur who was plunged into sub-zero water.

  The voyageurs were now almost uncontrollable. ‘The men had become desperate and were perfectly regardless of the commands of the officers,’ Richardson wrote. The only thing that stopped them running for Fort Enterprise was the fact that they didn’t know where it was. Neither, come to that, did Franklin for most of the time. In weather that ranged from heavy rain to dense mist and occasionally light snow, it was impossible to take a reading from the sun. By chance, however, on 26 September they stumbled on a river whose size and speed meant that it could only be the Coppermine. When the sun made a brief appearance Franklin calculated they were just 40 miles from Fort Enterprise. To this cheery news was added the discovery of a putrid deer carcase that they devoured to its intestines before grazing on a grove of cranberry and blueberry bushes. Unfortunately, the Coppermine was 120 yards wide at this point and they had no means of crossing it. ‘They bitterly execrated their folly and impatience in breaking the canoe,’ Richardson wrote of the voyageurs, ‘and the remainder of the day was spent in wandering slowly along the river, looking in vain for a fordable place and inventing schemes for crossing, no sooner devised than abandoned.’

  They constructed a raft from green willows that grew along the bank, but it was unsteady, could only carry one man at a time and sank on its first trial. Richardson stepped into the breach. He offered to swim to the other bank with a line on which they could then manhandle their way across, balancing on the raft. The water was so cold that after a few strokes he lost the use of his arms; turning on his back, he continued with his legs, but they too became paralysed. The men dragged him back by the line he was carrying, stripped off his wet clothes and placed him by the fire to recover. Gradually he regained feeling, but it was another five months before he regained full strength in his left arm and leg. As he lay there, in their single tent, they realized how horribly they had all declined. ‘I cannot describe,’ Franklin wrote, ‘what everyone felt at beholding the skeleton which the doctor’s debilitated frame exhibited.’

  It was St Germain, the most obstructive of the voyageurs, who came to their rescue. Volunteering to make a canoe from willow branches and the canvas that contained their bedding, he disappeared into a small grove of willows and emerged two days later with a frail but watertight vessel capable of holding a single man. It was too late for one voyageur, who wandered into the wilderness, never to be seen again. And it was very nearly too late for the rest of the party: the voyageurs refused to collect tripes de roche, and t
he officers were so enfeebled that they had to rely on the able seaman John Hepburn to gather the lichen for them. As a measure of their weakness, Franklin tried one day to visit St Germain at his grove, three-quarters of a mile away: he returned after three hours without having attained his goal.

  On 4 October they crossed the Coppermine one by one, the canoe becoming more and more waterlogged with each passage. The last package, containing their spare clothes and bedding, was soaked through when it arrived. Still, they were only 40 miles from Fort Enterprise and if they covered just six miles per day they would be there in a week. But a week was too long. Barely had they started than two voyageurs, far to the rear, collapsed. When Richardson went back to find them one man was nearly dead from exhaustion – he died in Richardson’s arms – and the other had vanished. The officers were in little better condition: Hood, who had been unable to stomach the tripes de roche, was a walking shadow; Richardson was lame; Franklin was woefully diminished; and even Back could not move without the aid of a stick. A page from Franklin’s journal revealed how desperate they were. On 5 October he wrote that a voyageur had uncovered the backbone and antlers of a long-dead deer: ‘The wolves and birds of prey had picked them clean, but there still remained a quantity of the spinal marrow which they had not been able to extract. This, although putrid, was esteemed a valuable prize, and the spine being divided into portions, was distributed equally. After eating the marrow, which was so acrid as to excoriate the lips, we rendered the bones friable by burning, and ate them also.’ Almost casually, he related that their hideous dinner was haute cuisine compared to their breakfast: ‘Previous to setting out, the whole party ate the remains of their old shoes, and whatever scraps of leather they had, to strengthen their stomachs for the fatigue of the day’s journey.’

  Realizing that they would not go far in their present state, Franklin sent Back ahead with St Germain and two other voyageurs, Gabriel Beauparlant and Solomon Bélanger, to alert the Indians at Fort Enterprise to their plight. No sooner had Back set out, however, than Richardson proposed a second split in the party: Hood was too weak to move, he himself was almost crippled, so why didn’t Franklin leave them in the care of Hepburn and intercept the supplies that would surely be on their way within the next few days? Against his inclinations, but persuaded by hunger and by Richardson’s pleading, Franklin agreed that the plan made sense. He gave his compatriots a tent and hobbled south after Back with the remaining voyageurs.

  On 7 October two of Franklin’s voyageurs – Jean Baptiste Belanger and Michel Teroahauté – said they were weary and would like to return to Richardson’s camp. Franklin assented. Then two others, Perrault and Fontano, asked if they could follow. Wearily, Franklin agreed, and having bade them farewell, continued south. ‘There was no tripes de roche,’ he recorded, so ‘we drank tea and ate some of our shoes for supper.’ He reached Fort Enterprise on 12 October. There were no Indians, no food and no sign of Back, apart from a note saying he had been there two days earlier and was going in search of Akaitcho, who had taken his men hunting. Franklin and his men nestled painfully into Fort Enterprise, where they took up the floorboards and lit a fire to roast the previous season’s left-overs: a few bones from the rubbish heap and some deer skins that the Indians had used for bedding. While they lay there, Solomon Belanger burst through the door. He was covered in ice and incapable of speech. When he thawed, he said that Back had not located Akaitcho and awaited instructions.

  Franklin sent Belanger to tell Back to make for Fort Providence, and even accompanied him part of the way with two voyageurs before his snowshoes disintegrated. Returning alone to Fort Enterprise, he tried to comfort the remaining three voyageurs: Adam, Peltier and Samandré. It was a difficult task, for they had not tasted meat in a month and lay weeping on the floor. ‘We perceived our strength decline every day, and every exertion began to be irksome. When we were once seated the greatest effort was necessary in order to rise, and we frequently had to lift each other from our seats.’

  Richardson’s party was in even worse shape. Of the four voyageurs whom Franklin had sent back only one, Michel, arrived – he had become separated from the others, he said – and although he was a capable hunter, his presence around the campfire was unnerving. He seemed on edge and refused to sleep with the Europeans. One evening he returned with the news that he had found a wolf carcase; the slices of meat which he distributed were eaten gratefully. But as the days passed his behaviour became odder and odder: he refused to gather tripes de roche; he spent the days on his own somewhere in the wilderness, and brought back no more meat; on 16 October he threatened to leave them. When Richardson said he could go ahead to Fort Enterprise with Hepburn, provided he spend another four days hunting, he replied, ‘It is no use, there are no animals, you had better kill and eat me.’ The mystification of Richardson and Hood soon turned to suspicion. They concluded that Michel had killed the other voyageurs and that his ‘hunting’ forays were an excuse to devour their corpses. The ‘wolf they had been eating was human flesh.

  On the 20th, while Hepburn and Richardson were gathering firewood and tripes de roche, they heard a gunshot. Returning to the tent, they found Hood dead, shot through the back of the head at such close range that his nightcap was still smouldering. Michel greeted them, a gun in his hand, and gave the extraordinary explanation that Hood had been cleaning his gun when it went off – either that or he had committed suicide. It didn’t take much detective work to see what had happened. The weapon was too long for a man to be able to shoot himself in the head, let alone in the back of the head while reading a copy of Bickersteth’s Scripture Helps (it was still in Hood’s hand when they found him). Clearly, Michel had killed him. However, as Michel protested his innocence so vehemently – and because he was armed – they listened to his story.

  Richardson and Hepburn were in an unenviable position. They were too weak for a fight and, although they had a gun and a pistol in the tent, Michel – carrying a gun, two pistols, a bayonet and a knife – refused to let them out of his sight. For two days they cowered as Michel raved, daring them to accuse him of Hood’s murder. Eventually, Richardson persuaded the deranged voyageur to accompany them to Fort Enterprise, and on the 23rd, when Michel left them alone for a few minutes – ostensibly to gather tripes de roche – Richardson loaded his pistol. When Michel returned Richardson shot him in the head.

  On 29 October, having eaten nothing but lichen and Hood’s fur blanket, they climbed a small hill and at last saw Fort Enterprise, smoke drifting cheerily from its chimney. Elated, they didn’t stop to wonder why Franklin had sent them no assistance, but staggered towards safety. Richardson was now so weak that he collapsed 20 times covering a distance of 100 yards, but the prospect of food and warmth drove him on. Their tribulations were at an end. That evening they flung open the door of Fort Enterprise.

  ‘No words can convey an idea of the filth and wretchedness that met our eyes,’ Richardson wrote. The partitions had been taken down to feed the stove, the floorboards had been lifted, and four corpse-like figures lay on the bare earth. He did not have to be told that Akaitcho’s Indians had failed to stock Fort Enterprise. The evidence was there before him: ‘the ghastly countenances, dilated eye-balls, and sepulchral voices of Captain Franklin and those with him were more than we could at first bear’.

  Exhausted as they were, Richardson and Hepburn were far stronger than the inmates of Fort Enterprise. They chopped wood for the stove and tried also to shoot some deer. But on the rare occasions when they saw an animal their hands shook so badly that they could not draw a bead, leaving the party dependent on a few bones and a pile of 26 deer skins that had been discarded the previous winter. The hides were rotten and riddled with warble-fly grubs, but they dragged them inside and ate them, squeezing the grubs into their mouths. Richardson said they tasted as sweet as gooseberries.

  Franklin and the voyageurs were swollen with pre-starvation oedema, which Richardson drained with his scalpel, but he could not sa
ve Peltier and Samandré, both of whom died on the night of 1 November. Six days later, with the last of the bones gone and the hides coming to an end, they heard a shot. Back had located Akaitcho two days earlier – at a cost: one of his voyageurs had died en route and the whole group was in appalling shape – and three Indians now stood outside the door bearing emergency supplies of fat and dried meat. When they saw the state of the occupants, one man went back for more food while the other two swept the hut clean, stoked the fire to a crackling blaze, carefully spooned food into the starving men’s mouths, and washed and shaved them as if they were babies. The ease with which they performed these simple tasks was a revelation to Richardson: ‘We could scarcely, by any effort of reasoning, efface from our minds the idea that they possessed a supernatural degree of strength.’

  Franklin and his men left Fort Enterprise on 16 November and were reunited with Back at Fort Providence on 11 December. By 14 July 1822 they were at York Factory, where rumours and recriminations were already mounting. The expedition had been impressive in terms of hardship and distance covered – 5,500 miles across land and water – but it had done nothing more than map a small strip of coastline, the existence of which had never seriously been in doubt, and establish that a portion of open sea, which might or might not be part of the North-West Passage, lay to the north of Canada. Franklin had not forged a link with Parry’s expedition and had not investigated the coast between the Coppermine and the Mackenzie. At great expense and effort he had contributed very little to geography, had lost 11 of his 20-strong party in the process and had become involved, vicariously, in a case of murder that was already attracting attention. No wonder that Governor George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company wrote: ‘They do not feel themselves at liberty to enter into the particulars of their disastrous enterprize, and I fear they have not fully achieved the object of their mission.’ Franklin left York Factory on the first available ship for England.