Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  They slid between ‘two perpendicular walls of ice’ into a calm sea where the Terror was waiting for them. Thanks to Ross’s superb seamanship, the Erebus was intact – but only just: its sails and masts were wrecked; the bow anchor had driven through wood and copper sheathing to puncture the hull – and if nobody had been physically injured they were psychologically at their limits. When they reached Port Louis on the Falkland Islands on 6 April it was not a day too soon.

  The Falklands were not the nicest place for a furlough. The weather was bad, accommodation was basic, company was restricted to the military garrison plus a few missionaries en route to South America, and food was so limited that for a while the entire island survived off the stores in Ross’s ships. The crews of Erebus and Terror agreed that Ross had only chosen such a vile spot to stop them jumping ship. Ignoring their ill-temper, Ross had them build an observatory for magnetic readings. After that he told them to build a warehouse and a pier. Then, with time on his hands, he surveyed the island for a better harbour than Port Louis. His eventual choice was a spot now known as Port Stanley, the capital of the Falklands.

  When not surveying and building they hunted the feral cattle that roamed the interior – the skin on one bull’s neck was two inches thick – and when tired of that they sailed to Tierra del Fuego for more magnetic observations, then back to the Falklands where, supplies having newly arrived, they filled their holds and departed on 17 December for another stab at Antarctica.

  Their third try, down the 55th meridian, was less successful than their second. They barely penetrated the Antarctic Circle, reaching 71° 30’S as against 78° 11’ in 1840. But they found new islands off South Georgia and had the enviable experience of travelling though a pod of whales so dense that they had to nudge them aside. On 5 March Ross considered his task was done and signalled to Crozier that they should go north. They docked at Simon’s Bay, South Africa, on 4 April. As at Hobart, colonialists prepared a grand welcome. But Ross and Crozier did not have the heart for it: they had been away too long and were incapable of polite chit-chat. When an admiral’s daughter approached Ross – who had once been considered the handsomest man in the Navy – he said, ‘You see how our hands shake? One night in the Antarctic did this for both of us.’ They returned to Britain on 5 September, after four and half years in the southern ice.

  Ross was rewarded handsomely. He was knighted, promoted and awarded gold medals, married the woman of his dreams, and earned enough money to buy a modest estate in Buckinghamshire. Crozier received less – a promotion from lieutenant to commander. He continued in naval service, becoming second-in-command to Franklin on his 1845 expedition to the North-West Passage. Ross, however, sank into retirement, too blasted by his Antarctic ordeal to contemplate further polar exploits. He died in 1862.

  His achievements outlived him. What he had done was without compare. In two wooden ships – the last expedition ever to be conducted solely by sail – he had broken a record that would not be bettered for 50 years, and then with difficulty, by steam power. Maybe Dumont d’Urville had been the first to stand on Antarctica, but Ross had gone further south and had prepared the ground for others to come. In the 1900s, when Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen vied to reach the South Pole, they did so via the Ross Ice Shelf. Ross was the best Antarctic navigator of the century and, incidentally, one of the first charters of global warming. After Robert Falcon Scott’s conquest of the South Pole in 1912 the naturalist Joseph Hooker, last surviving crew member of the Terror, looked at Scott’s maps of the Ross Ice Shelf and said: ‘the only serious omission ... is that of the marvellous retrocession of the Barrier since Ross mapped it. To me this seems the most momentous change to be brought about in little more than half a century. I have seen doubts cast upon Ross’s demarcation of the sea front of the Barrier – but that is ridiculous, he was a first-rate naval surveyor.’ The clean white world envisaged by Ross’s men had shrunk by approximately a mile every year since they discovered it.

  The search for Franklin (1845–59)

  Sir John Franklin, the man who had done so much to chart the North-West Passage and whose boot-eating odyssey had thrilled the world during the 1820s, was, in 1844, at a loose end. Newly returned from the penal colony of Tasmania, where his governorship had not been a success, he was keen to find employment and, as it happened, there was a project in the Admiralty pipeline for which he felt himself perfectly suited: the North-West Passage. In what would be one of his last acts in office, Second Secretary Sir John Barrow was launching yet another expedition to find the troublesome seaway.

  It did not matter to Barrow that the North-West Passage had already been proved commercially unviable, or that, as many people had told him many times, Arctic weather conditions were such that it could be traversed only on rare occasions. These considerations had long since ceased to bother him. No, the North-West Passage was now a badge of honour, and Barrow was determined that Britain should pin it to the national lapel. ‘If the completion of the passage be left to be performed by some other power,’ he admonished, ‘England, by her neglect of it, after having opened both the East and West doors, would be laughed at by all the world for having hesitated to cross the threshold.’ There were only 300 miles or so between the seas around Melville Island and the Canadian coast; there were two ships, the Erebus and Terror, ready primed for polar service after their return from Antarctica in 1843; and there was an experienced and well-trained squad of officers at hand to lead the expedition. After a brief period of bullying and blustering, Barrow received parliamentary approval for the final conquest of the North-West Passage.

  Then came an embarrassing hiatus: who, from the Royal Navy’s elite band of Arctic explorers, was to lead the expedition? James Ross refused, as did Parry; Crozier said he would go, but not as overall commander; Barrow had a favourite in mind, an eager if untried lieutenant named James Fitzjames; but then Franklin raised his head. Old, overweight and unfit, he was clearly beyond his prime; he was, however, the Royal Navy’s senior Arctic officer, and as such his application could not be refused. Frantic politicking ensued, wiser officers doing their best to coax Parry or James Ross out of retirement, but they succeeded merely in strengthening Franklin’s hand. The higher Arctic echelons thought it only right that Franklin be given the post – what were a few hundred miles to a man such as he – and his physical incapacity was immaterial, given that he had to do nothing but sit in his ship. ‘If you don’t let him go,’ Parry warned Lord Haddington, First Lord of the Admiralty, ‘he will die of disappointment.’ Haddington summoned Franklin for an interview in which he tried tactfully to dissuade him. To his every objection Franklin had an answer. At a loss, Haddington resorted to blunt facts. ‘You are sixty,’ he accused. ‘No, my Lord,’ Franklin replied, ‘I am fifty-nine.’ On 7 February 1845 Franklin was given his command.

  His orders were straightforward: he was to proceed to Lancaster Sound, sail as far west as he could, then go south to Point Turnagain – perhaps down Peel Sound, the next passage west after Prince Regent Inlet, to King William Island – and thence west to Bering Strait along the coast he had mapped in the 1820s. Should his path south be blocked, he was instructed to go north in search of the open polar sea, an entity that, despite every indication to the contrary, Barrow still believed was lurking somewhere above Greenland.

  Erebus and Terror were given a thorough overhaul and, somewhat against Barrow’s instincts, were equipped with steam engines – in the case of the Erebus a second-hand model from the Greenwich Railway. Canned food to last three years was packed into their holds. They were supplied with every comfort known to Victorian man, from soap and slippers to silver cutlery and silk handkerchiefs. Against the possibility of a long winter, a 1,700-volume library was installed, including bound editions of Punch to keep them laughing in the darkness. Nobody, however, expected them to be away for very long. They would be revictualling at the Sandwich Islands within a season.

  Franklin left the Thames on 19 May 1845, th
e whole company in good spirits. He and his second-in-command, Fitzjames, were happy aboard Erebus. Crozier, on Terror, had a few reservations, fearing that they had left too late in the season and that Franklin, in whose judgement he did not have complete confidence, would ‘blunder into the ice and make a second 1824 out of it’. But he concealed his worries so effectively that Franklin was able to write to Parry: ‘It would do your heart good to see how zealously officers and men in both ships are working and how amicably we all work together.’ On 26 July they reached Lancaster Sound, where they met two whalers. The explorers seemed confident, and announced that if they did not make the Passage this year then they would do it the next; it was just a matter of waiting, for they could make their supplies last another five years if they had to – perhaps even seven if they killed enough wildlife. Neither Franklin nor Crozier, nor the 133 men under their command, were ever seen alive again.

  The years passed. By 1848 the Admiralty was worried by Franklin’s non-appearance in the Pacific. There was, they told themselves, no real cause for concern: John Ross had survived longer than this with less food and feebler ships; besides, Franklin had intimated he could last until at least 1850, perhaps 1852. But the more experienced officers knew how perilous the North-West Passage could be and were unwilling to take chances. In that year three expeditions went in search of Franklin: one via Lancaster Sound under James Ross (he had grown tired of retirement); another via Bering Strait under one Captain Henry Kellett; and a third overland to the Mackenzie under John Richardson. When all three returned empty-handed a new sense of urgency prevailed. John Barrow, so long the grand master of polar exploration, had died on 23 November 1848, and his successors were at a loss. They therefore instituted a prize for Franklin’s rescue – £20,000 for the man himself, £10,000 for his ships and £10,000 for the North-West Passage – then turned the business over to the Arctic Council. A nebulous group comprising every big name in Britain’s exploring community, the Council had been in existence since the 1830s, mainly as an advisory body. Now, however, it showed that it was capable of action as well as advice. By 1850 there were 13 vessels in Lancaster Sound: two Admiralty fleets under Captains Horatio Austin and William Penny, two US ships financed by the New York philanthropist Henry Grinnell,* a ship sent by Franklin’s widow, Lady Jane, plus a small schooner and a yacht commanded by Sir John Ross.

  With only Franklin’s orders to go by, the rescuers were searching blind. They looked into Peel Sound but found it blocked by ice, so they turned their attention north, assuming he must have gone in that direction. Here, at a spot called Beechey Island, they discovered signs of his presence: a mound of empty food cans and three graves dated 1845. They did not stop to wonder if Peel Sound had been open when Franklin met it, nor why Beechey Island had such a large cemetery. On their own, three graves were nothing to write home about, but in the Arctic they represented an unheard – of casualty rate: no North-West Passager had ever lost so many men to illness in a whole voyage, let alone during the first season. That winter the rescuers cast about, the most energetic searcher being one of Austin’s lieutenants, an Irishman named Francis Leopold McClintock, who led man-hauled sledge parties over remarkable distances across the ice. They came home in 1851, with nothing to show for their efforts beyond a rumour from John Ross’s interpreter that Franklin and his men had been killed by Inuit.

  This was good enough for the Admiralty, who were reluctant to spend more money on a lost cause – these Arctic expeditions were very expensive. But it was not good enough for Lady Jane Franklin; neither was it good enough for the Arctic Council or the British public. Nobody cared any longer about the North-West Passage, but ‘[It impinges] most emphatically on our national honour that we should ascertain the fate of our missing countrymen and redeem them, if living, from the dangers to which they had been consigned,’ The Times wrote sternly. Franklin, who was at best only a reasonably capable explorer and at worst one of the most ill-starred commanders to set foot in the Arctic, was elevated to the rank of national hero. ‘The blooming child lisps Franklin’s name, as with glittering eye and greedy ear it hears of the wonders of the North, and the brave deeds done there,’ glowed one writer. The Admiralty capitulated. In 1852 a fleet of five ships left for Lancaster Sound, commanded by the odious Captain Sir Edward Belcher.

  A bad-tempered, chancrous martinet, who had sailed as a lieutenant with Beechey aboard the Blossom, Belcher was roundly detested by all who served under him. According to his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Perhaps no officer of equal ability has ever succeeded in inspiring so much personal dislike’, and his spell in the Arctic did nothing to diminish that reputation. Wintering at Cornwallis Island, to the north of Prince Regent Inlet and Peel Sound, he took little direct part in operations, leaving his officers – Kellett, McClintock and a newcomer, Lieutenant Sherard Osborn – to scour the landscape for traces of Franklin while he sat in his cabin and drank, writing vituperative reports on his underlings, occasionally breaking his diatribe to inspect the ice and, if it looked threatening, to move to a safer ship.

  Only too pleased to escape Belcher’s regime, the search parties roamed the ice. They advertised their presence and position in every conceivable way: by painting directions on cliffs, by distributing medals to the Inuit, by strapping collars to Arctic foxes and by sending up balloons with timed fuses that released messages in their wake. The Arctic was so big – and they were looking in the wrong place anyway – that there was little chance of Franklin seeing their notes. But it was an optimistic venture whose chances of producing a result were reinforced by the fact that they were no longer looking for Franklin alone. When the Arctic Council sent the first band of rescuers to Lancaster Sound in 1850 it had not ignored the possibility that Franklin might be stranded at the western end of the North-West Passage. So it had ordered two ships, the Investigator and the Enterprise, to approach via Bering Strait. Nothing had been heard of them since, and Belcher was instructed to rescue them as well.

  If Belcher was bad, so too were Captain Robert McClure of the Investigator and Captain Richard Collinson of the Enterprise. These two men were unflinching disciplinarians who liked receiving orders almost as much as they liked to give them. They were also extremely competitive. They became separated when rounding Cape Horn – the Investigator lost a mast: ‘The fury of the captain was terrible, positively inhuman’ – and when McClure reached Hawaii he heard that Collinson, who was in overall command of the expedition, had stolen a lead. Dragging his men out of the bars – two had already drunk so much that they were on the sick list for a month – he took a perilous short-cut through the Aleutian Islands and darted into the North-West Passage, ignoring strict orders that no ship should be on its own in the Arctic. By the first week of September he had passed the Mackenzie delta, had charted the southern coast of Banks Island, which Parry had spotted from Melville Island 30 years before, and was at the top of a narrow passage that separated it from an as yet undiscovered landmass to the south that he christened Prince Albert Land. On 9 September, at the top of what he called Prince of Wales Strait, his readings showed that he was just 60 miles from Melville Island. It was so near that he could see it. ‘Can it be that so humble a creature as I am will be permitted to perform what has baffled the talented and wise for hundreds of years?’ he wondered.

  It was not to be. The Investigator was hurled back by a gale that lasted for a week, peaking with 17 hours of uninterrupted fury. Convinced they were going to die, the 66 crew ignored their officers’ orders and broached the rum barrels. When the storm abated the ship was stuck in the ice 30 miles south of its 9 September position. The hungover men lined up wretchedly on deck as McClure read them the Articles of War. The Investigator stayed where it was for the rest of the winter, its position making it a perfect base for the man-hauled sledge parties that McClure despatched over Banks Island and Prince Albert Land. The latter was, in fact, a peninsula of the much larger Victoria Island that stretched south-east towards
King William Island, and bordered the channel Richardson had discovered in 1826 between the Mackenzie and Coppermine Rivers. McClure and his men would have discovered this had they sledged far enough. Their efforts at overland exploration, however, were so ham-fisted as almost to kill them. McClure, who for all his faults was not one to stand by while others did the work, led many of the expeditions, at one point driving himself so hard that he had to spend a month in bed. He expected the same sacrifice from his officers, forcing them into harness even when badly frostbitten. Ill-prepared and poorly fed, it was no wonder that the crew broke ranks to wander over the ice on impromptu game shoots from which, as they inevitably became lost in the snow and fog, they had to be rescued.