Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The ice broke in Prince of Wales Strait in June 1851, and by August McClure was back where he had been the previous September, staring across the ice to Melville Island. At this point he had three options: to stay where he was and hope the ice broke in 1852; to retrace his route and search for a passage across the north of Banks Island; or to go home. He chose the second without hesitation. Seventeen days later he was at 73° 55’ N, with Banks Island to starboard, the Arctic pack to port, and ahead of him a sliver of open water barely wider than the ship itself. If he entered that channel he was committed: he would be unable to reverse or turn around; he could only continue until he reached a dead end or open seas. In he went.

  One has to admire McClure. He was so stubborn, so determined not to be defeated by the Arctic, that he was willing to stake his life on this slender chance of success. On the other hand, he was risking not just his life but the lives of everyone aboard, and he was doing so for the worst of reasons: fame. It was remotely conceivable that Franklin might have sailed to Banks Island, but had he done so it would have been against orders and in the face of every report since 1820 stating that the ice was impassable west of Melville Island. Of course, 1845 might have been one of those freak years when the ice was open; but in that case it would have been open in Peel Sound too and Franklin, whose primary directive was to sail south-west, would not have bothered with Banks Island. But McClure no longer cared much about Franklin. Since the moment in September 1850 when he came within an ace of reaching Melville Island his goal had been to claim the £10,000 bounty for being first through the North-West Passage.

  He applied himself to the task with vigour: when the wind failed he ordered his men to tow the ship; when ice blocked the channel he blew it apart with gunpowder. By the end of September he was at Mercy Bay on the north-east shore of Banks Island, even closer to Melville Island than he had been the previous year; and, miraculously, the sea was clear. Here was the opportunity he had been waiting for. But at the last moment his nerve failed. The season was far advanced and, rather than risk an entrapment in the pack, he decided to stay where he was. Completion of the Passage would have to wait until the following year.

  Collinson, meanwhile, had entered the ice a year behind McClure, and had followed almost exactly the same route up Prince of Wales Strait and then round the western coast of Banks Island to a point named Cape Kellett. Here, discovering that McClure had sailed that way only 13 days before, he turned south for the open waters of the North American mainland and put the Enterprise into a harbour on Victoria Island – Cambridge Bay, northeast of Franklin’s Point Turnagain. From there he sledged to Melville Island, only to find that, once again, McClure had beaten him to it. ‘We had passed within sixty miles of the Investigator and had fallen upon the traces of her exploring parties [but] we again missed the opportunity of communication,’ he recorded with asperity. Returning to winter quarters, he put his ice-master, Francis Skead, under arrest for insubordination. What he might have done was go east to King William Island, the one part of the Arctic that had yet to be searched, and in which Franklin might yet be found. But he did not, instead sending his sledgers to chart the west coast of Victoria Island, a relatively unimportant mission that had little to do with the matter at hand. From his cabin Skead sneered at Collinson, who he claimed was not only a drunk but an overcautious, hidebound bully. In his opinion, the only thing stopping them going east as well as west was that two perfectly sound officers had, like himself, been placed under arrest ‘on trifling charges’. Collinson ignored Skead’s fulminations. ‘Discipline,’ he intoned, ‘is essential to comfort.’

  Collinson’s disappointment at Melville Island was nothing compared with McClure’s. When the Investigator’s sledgers reached the spot 20 days before, they found a cairn containing a message from McClintock dated the previous summer. McClure fell to his knees and wept. If only he had risked that last stretch of open water – or if he had crossed the ice earlier in the season – he might have met Austin’s western division. Still, he would have a chance this coming summer. Placing a note of his own in the cairn, he retreated to the ship to await warmer weather. But there was no summer for McClure and his men – at least not in the accepted meaning of the word. In August, a month by which they could have expected to be afloat, they were able to skate on Mercy Bay; and by September new ice was forming. Obviously, they would have to wait until the summer of 1853 to complete the Passage.

  The medical officer Alexander Armstrong did not share his captain’s confidence: his concern was not whether a crossing would be feasible but whether they would be alive to make it. McClure had put his men on two-thirds rations when the Investigator reached Mercy Bay; the next winter he had cut that to half-rations; now their allowance was reduced still further, to six ounces of meat and two of vegetables per diem. There was game to be shot on Banks Island, but their inexperience and incompetence meant that they rarely hit anything. As Armstrong pointed out, their supplies were ‘Quite inadequate ... to sustain life for any lengthened period’. Maybe, though, it did not matter if food was scarce, because it looked as if scurvy would get them long before starvation did. By July, 16 men had the disease, and as McClure halved the crew’s daily measure of lemon juice – it was running out like everything else – the numbers multiplied. Come New Year almost everybody was showing signs of scurvy, and 20 men were sick, two of them near death.

  McClure ignored the growing casualty list. To him, the only thing that mattered was the completion of the North-West Passage. He spent most of the winter alone in his cabin, emerging only to refuse the crews’ petitions for extra rations, to have people flogged for stealing food, and to order the company to reduce its consumption of coal. As the temperature dropped to – 99° F, the coldest ever recorded on an Arctic expedition, one man slipped and broke his leg, another lost his mind and a third became so demented that he started howling at night. Reading McClure’s journal, one gets the impression that he too had taken leave of his senses. ‘The winter found us ready to combat its rigours as cheerfully as on previous occasions,’ he wrote. ‘Dancing, skylarking and singing were kept up on the lower deck with unflagging spirit, good humour and vitality.’ All they had to do to survive the winter was maintain a regime of ‘cheerfulness, energetic exercise and regularity of habits’. This was news to his crew. They gnawed their meat raw (it lasted longer that way) while beneath them the ship’s bolts cracked in the cold.

  For all his insouciance, McClure knew that he could make the North-West Passage only if he found more food or reduced the number of mouths he had to feed. He therefore drew up a plan of evacuation. One team would sledge to Melville Island, where they might meet a rescue ship. (Belcher’s fleet was now in the vicinity, but they did not know that.) Another was to travel south to the mainland in the hope of finding assistance from an outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He, meanwhile, would remain on the Investigator to forge the Passage with a skeleton crew. When Armstrong saw the sledging roster he was dismayed: it included the sickest, least essential men on the expedition. (McClure had actually sought his advice as to who was most dispensable.) He thought they would be lucky if they covered half the distance before keeling over, and advised McClure ‘of the absolute unfitness of the men for the performance of this journey’. McClure noted his comments and proceeded with the cull of useless mouths.

  In the first week of April 1853 the sledge parties were ready – eager even, for they would at least be doing something, and however slim their chances they could be no worse than if they stayed on the Investigator. Then, after long months of inaction and boredom, time suddenly contracted. One of the stronger men, who had been in charge of the sick bay, fell ill. He went to bed on 5 April and died on the 6th from scurvy. While gravediggers hacked at the frozen ground, McClure took a stroll with one of his lieutenants. Pondering the wasteland of ice that lay before them, they noticed a figure at the mouth of Mercy Bay. It was one of the sledgers practising, McClure said. When the man ran towards them,
waving his arms, they assumed he was being chased by a polar bear. Too far off to help, they waited for the kill. But there was no polar bear. The man came nearer and nearer, gesticulating wildly. From his soot-blackened face and clothes McClure wondered if he was an Inuit. But if that was the case, why was he behaving so oddly? ‘In the name of God, who are you?’ he shouted. The man replied: ‘I’m Lieutenant Pim of the Resolute, and I’ve come to relieve Captain McClure and the Investigators.’ Behind him, a sledge party emerged at the mouth of Mercy Bay.

  As Pim and his team doled out food to the starving men, McClure questioned them about the Resolute. It was part of Belcher’s fleet, he learned, and was anchored off Melville Island under the command of Henry Kellett. Alongside was the Intrepid, under Frank McClintock, whose long-distance sledgers had discovered the note McClure had left the summer before. Belcher’s other three ships, meanwhile, were safely moored in Wellington Channel, off Cornwallis Island. McClure was overjoyed, but not at the prospect of salvation: in his madness, he saw his rescuers as a means whereby he could complete the North-West Pasage. If he could offload the weaker half of his crew onto the Resolute, then he and the remainder would have enough food to sail the Investigator to freedom in the summer. On 8 April he sledged with Pim to the Resolute and very nearly succeeded in persuading Kellett to accept his plan. Unfortunately, he had ordered Armstrong to bring the invalids in his wake. When Kellett saw the horrible company of insane, lame, blind, frostbitten and scorbutic scarecrows staggering over the ice, and when Armstrong informed him that another two men had died shortly after McClure’s departure, he realized the Investigator was in far worse shape than McClure had been willing to admit. His doctors confirmed his suspicion. Returning with McClure to Mercy Bay, they reported that of the 20 ‘healthy’ men on board, none was fit for service and only four were willing to spend another season in the ice. On Kellett’s orders McClure mothballed the Investigator, and by 17 June he was aboard the Resolute with the rest of his crew.

  Safety did not mean escape. The Resolute could not sail without the Intrepid, whose commander was still sledging west in search of Franklin. When McClintock returned a few weeks later he had been away 106 days, during which he had man-hauled 1,328 miles without seeing a trace of his quarry. The journey, moreover, had been so arduous that one man had died in harness, two others were on the point of death and the rest did not recover fully for another 12 months. When the two ships eventually sailed in August they were trapped by the ice before they had gone 100 miles. Clad only in the one set of clothes they had worn on the journey from the Investigator, McClure’s men shivered the winter away in cramped and uncomfortable conditions. More men died and the sick list grew longer. It was now their fourth winter in the Arctic.

  By April 1854 McClintock had undertaken several more mammoth sledge journeys and had, finally, come to the conclusion that they ought to look south, in the direction of Peel Sound and King William Island. But, ready as he was to make the attempt, he found himself unable to do so. This was not because the men were unavailable (though they might have been unwilling: McClintock’s man-hauling took a terrible toll; another two of his sledgers had died in January) but because Kellett needed them for his own purposes. An extraordinary message had come in from Belcher, ordering him to abandon both ships and bring the crews to Beechey Island. In Kellett’s opinion, anyone who left their ships – particularly when they were sound and had every expectation of being able to escape in the summer – ‘would deserve to have their jackets taken off their backs’. He therefore ordered McClintock to sledge to Beechey Island and persuade Belcher of his folly. Belcher didn’t care what Kellett thought. He had already decided to abandon not only Kellett’s two ships but another two of his own. The crews of all four would escape on the remaining vessel, North Star, which was anchored in the open waters off Beechey Island. This they did, to the disgust of every officer, cramming the crews of six ships – Kellett’s two, Belcher’s two, McClure’s one, plus the survivors of the Breadalbane, a transport that had been nipped the year before – onto the North Star before sailing ignominiously to Lancaster Sound where, luckily, they were able to transfer excess personnel onto a couple of supply ships that were sailing north with extra provisions. The severity of Belcher’s regime shocked even McClure who, after a taste of life on the North Star, wrote that the Arctic was a place ‘which I hope to have done with forever’.

  When they arrived in London, Belcher was court-martialled for the loss of his fleet* and was acquitted of any culpable wrongdoing. But the board handed back his sword in stony silence, thereby signalling their disapproval of his failure to find Franklin and his abandonment not only of his own ships but of Collinson’s Enterprise. They were appreciative, however, of McClure’s exploits. In taking his ship to Banks Island, and then crossing the ice to Melville Island, he had become the first man to traverse the North-West Passage. He was given a gold medal and was awarded the £10,000 prize he had longed for. That he had completed the last stretch on foot instead of by sail was a technicality the Admiralty hadn’t the strength to argue. After so much expense and loss of life it just wanted the thing done with.

  The last loose end (apart from Franklin himself) was Collinson, who returned in 1855 with every single officer under arrest save the surgeon, his assistant and the mate – Skead had been kept in his cabin for 32 months – and having attracted such intense hostility that every man aboard was willing to sacrifice his pension to bring him to justice. ‘Never was there such an expedition set sail under such auspicious auspices; had such golden opportunities which were thrown away; and made such signal failures,’ wrote one critic. His personal failings aside, Collinson could perhaps be condemned on professional grounds for failing to explore King William Island. On the other hand, had the Investigator not sailed ahead he would have had the extra manpower he needed for such an expedition. As it was, his voyage to Victoria Island had proved that the Canadian coast could be navigated in a large ship; and if he had not found Franklin, he had come closer than anyone yet to forging the missing link in the North-West Passage. Roald Amundsen would later describe him as ‘one of the most capable and enterprising sailors the world has ever produced’. Justifiably, he was irritated that McClure should receive £10,000 for what amounted to disobeying orders. He let this be known, at the same time responding to his officers’ demands for legal action with an application to have the whole lot court-martialled. Again, though, the affair was swept under the carpet.

  In the same year, the Admiralty informed Lady Jane Franklin that her husband was dead and that they would no longer be looking for him. They did so on evidence supplied not by Her Majesty’s Navy but by a Hudsons’s Bay employee named John Rae who, while Belcher, Collinson, McClure and co. were frozen in their various bays and channels, had sledged overland from Repulse Bay towards King William Island. En route he had met a group of Inuit who told of an event that had occurred four winters before, in 1849–50. They had met a party of white men dragging a boat down King William Island, led by a tall, middle-aged officer (perhaps Crozier), and had sold them a seal. They said the strangers fell down and died as they walked. Later, they had found the remains of the same party on an island off the Canadian mainland. There were 35 corpses, the officer among them, and from the contents of their cooking pots they had resorted to cannibalism before they died. But some must have survived because the Inuit heard gunshots to the south in May 1850. As proof of their encounter they produced a quantity of silver cutlery bearing the initials of Franklin’s officers, plus one of Franklin’s medals. For Rae, and the Admiralty, this was enough.

  When another man from the Hudson’s Bay Company went to investigate the scene, however, he couldn’t find a single body. At one spot there were signs that a boat had been repaired – one piece of wood bore the word Erebus – but other than that, nothing. Encouraged, Lady Jane Franklin raised money to continue the search, and in 1857 sent McClintock to the Arctic on a tiny steamer, the Fox. McClintock pushed down Prin
ce Regent Inlet, as John Ross had done 20 years before, and began a comprehensive survey of King William Island. On 25 May 1859 he found his first skeleton – a steward, as far as he could make out. The Inuit had not been lying after all – the men had fallen as they walked. A little later he discovered two more skeletons lying in a boat. One, an officer, was still wrapped in his fur overcoat; the other was larger, less well protected, and had been gnawed by wild animals. Two guns were propped against the boat, and inside were slippers, boots, handkerchiefs, sealing-wax, silver cutlery, towels, soap, toothbrushes and countless other inessentials. There were also 40 pounds of chocolate and a 22-pound tin of meat – empty. A number of books bearing the initials ‘G.G.’ suggested that the skeleton in the fur coat might have been Graham Gore, one of Franklin’s officers. Gore and his companion could not have pulled the boat by themselves – with its sledge it weighed a good 1,500 pounds – so the likeliest scenario was that they had fallen ill and been left to fend for themselves while their fellow haulers went ahead in search of food and assistance. Where then were those men? The only clue was the direction in which the boat faced: north.

  To the north lay Victory Point, and it was here that McClintock found the remains of the Franklin expedition. The Erebus and Terror were nowhere to be seen, but discarded equipment lay everywhere: stoves, lightning conductors, curtain rods, medicine chests, scientific instruments, bibles, boot polish, bits of rigging, all sorts of rubbish, and a pile of winter clothing that came up to his shoulders. It was as if some giant hand had emptied the ships of their contents before throwing them away. From a cairn he uncovered a note whose contents went a long way to explaining the mystery. It was dated 28 May 1847 and described how the Erebus and Terror had spent the previous winter at Beechey Island – this would explain the graves and detritus that Austin had found – and had circled Cornwallis Island before sailing down Peel Sound. Around the margin was scrawled a second message that read: