April 25th, 1848. H.M. Ships ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of F. R. M. Crozier, landed here, in lat. 69° 37’ 42” N, long. 98° 41’ W. Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June 1847; and the total loss by deaths in this expedition has been, to this date, 9 officers and 15 men.
And start on to-morrow, 26th, for Backs’s Fish River.
F.R.M. CROZIER, Captain and Senior Officer. JAMES FITZJAMES, Captain, H.M.S ‘Erebus’.
Backs’s Fish River to which the note referred was the Great Fish River, which had been discovered in the 1830s by George Back, Franklin’s erstwhile travelling companion, and lay due south of King William Island. Now Rae’s reports made sense: Crozier had taken his men to the nearest point of escape but had been defeated by the climate and terrain. But if that was the case, why had Gore’s boat been pointing north? Had a group turned back for Victory Point, perhaps with the idea of crossing overland to Prince Regent Inlet and escaping as John Ross had done in 1833? North of Victory Point McClintock found tantalizing suggestions that this might have been the case: cairns, campsites, some pieces of clothing and three small tents. One of the cairns contained a piece of white paper, but its message had long since faded, and although they dug a ten-foot-wide trench around it they found no new clues. Most importantly, neither at Victory Point, nor at the campsites to the north, nor at any point on his journey over King William Island, did McClintock find more than the barest trace of the countless tins of food that Franklin had confidently expected would see him through five years in the Arctic. Understandably, the survivors would have hoarded them to the last minute; but one would expect a trail of empties to have been dropped on the way. Where had they gone? McClintock and his men did not have the time for further detective work. By August they were back on the Fox, two men suffering from scurvy and the rest exhausted. They reached Britain on the 20th with their unwelcome news.
That Franklin was dead could no longer be disputed, to the relief of all save his widow. Seven hundred thousand pounds sterling and 250 US dollars of public and private money had been spent looking for him, and now a line could be drawn under the accounts. How he had died, and what had happened to the survivors (if any) and the two ships, was a mystery that the Admiralty did not wish to pursue. Privately funded American expeditions would later go in search of him – those led in the 1860s by Charles Francis Hall unearthed (possibly unreliable) Inuit testimony regarding the fate of the last survivors – but too often their real goal was the North Pole. For more than a century the world had to be content with the findings of Rae, McClintock and Hall, a rumour that the tinned meat had been bad, and the extraordinary sighting in 1851 of two ships floating down Baffin Bay on an ice floe. The latter was not a mirage but solid fact, reported by a navy brig: furthermore, the ships had been painted the Admiralty’s distinctive black with a yellow stripe, and the only naval vessels missing in the Arctic at that date were the Erebus and Terror. It seems odd that they could have drifted from Peel Sound to Baffin Bay, especially as part of the journey was against prevailing currents; but Belcher’s Resolute would do something similar, so the possibility cannot be discounted. On the other hand, Collinson had found wreckage near Cambridge Bay that included a fragment of doorframe. He thought nothing of it at the time but, unless the North-West Passage had ingested some hapless whaler from the seas above Bering Strait, he had probably stumbled on the remains of one of Franklin’s ships. The findings of Collinson in 1854, and the navy brig in 1851, have yet to be reconciled.
In the late 20th century forensic science was applied to the problem. During the 1980s a pair of US researchers exhumed the three graves on Beechey Island (the bodies were nightmarishly well preserved) and gave them a proper autopsy. The corpses had already been examined by the Franklin searchers, who had concluded that they had died of pneumonia-related illnesses. A more detailed analysis, however, revealed that they contained toxic quantities of lead, probably from the solder used to seal the seams of their food cans. Lead poisoning causes lethargy, irrationality and debilitation, all of which could have contributed to the expedition’s downfall. But lead poisoning is a slow, accumulative illness and it is hard to believe it could have been responsible for the sudden rash of deaths that had hit the ships. The first message, written in May 1847, had ended ‘All well’. By the time Crozier wrote his marginal addendum in April 1848, 24 men were dead. One imagines Franklin suffered the heart attack that was, by all accounts, long overdue. But what of the others? Whatever malady hit the Erebus and Terror, it was something swifter and more virulent than lead poisoning. In the 1990s new evidence suggested that, as the Victorians suspected, the canned meat had been tainted. This was a more likely proposition. Their immune systems weakened by two Arctic winters on standard naval provisions, officers and men would have been devastated by botulism. Scurvy might also have worked its malign influence. But if their provisions ran out, as Franklin had said and John Ross had proved, they could have lived off the land: there were deer, there were salmon, there were birds, bears, seals and prawns. Why Franklin’s men were unable to kill game – or perhaps to find it? – is, like so much else surrounding his expedition, a mystery.
Where some of the men went after they abandoned ship has been plotted with a degree of accuracy: investigators have found a trail of skulls and skeletons leading down the west coast of King William Island and the shores of mainland America. None of the remains have been identified, but from their distribution it appears that some men were killed and that their meatier parts were eaten on the spot, while the torsos – lighter than thighs and arms – were carried for some while before the ribs were carved up. Knife marks on the finger bones have been given as evidence that the men were jointed before being shared out. Some, however, claim that the same marks are typical of a man defending himself against a foe armed with a knife, and that Crozier’s party was attacked and massacred by Inuit. The scenario is not farfetched, but if the victims were defending themselves against anybody, it may well have been against the cannibals in their midst rather than the Inuit.
The questions that hang over the Franklin expedition can only be settled when its journals are discovered. These would certainly have been the last thing Crozier discarded, and would equally certainly have been placed where future searchers could find them. The Inuit spoke of a hole being dug on land and covered with a strange, soft stuff that later went hard (cement?). Perhaps this was Franklin’s grave, perhaps it was a repository for the journals, or perhaps it was just a platform for the expedition’s scientific instruments. When it can be ascertained whether Crozier went north or south, and when somebody has the time, money and luck to find his and Franklin’s records, then all will be revealed. At the time of writing they have yet to be found, despite a burgeoning tourist industry dedicated to that very task.
If the fate of Britain’s most notorious Arctic expedition remains uncertain, its legacy is precise. In geographical terms the search for Franklin filled every gap in the Arctic that earlier explorers had left untouched, the most poignant of which was that around King William Island. It was not a land but an island, and if Franklin had gone east instead of west at the bottom of Peel Sound he would have discovered a narrow strait between King William Island and Boothia that led to the softer waters of Point Turnagain. As it was, he had been trapped by the ice pouring in from the Arctic Ocean, whose pressure, in the form of stranded berglets on King William Island, had first been recorded by James Ross in 1832. More importantly, Franklin inspired a new generation of polar explorers. One of the officers involved in his non-rescue was a lieutenant named Clements Markham, who was so taken with the romance of it all that he later instigated Britain’s doomed, man-hauled attempts at the North and South Poles. The thrill was not exclusive to Britain: Norway’s Roald Amundsen, who would become the 20th century’s most garlanded explorer, wrote: ‘[Frank
lin’s story] thrilled me as nothing I had ever read before. What appealed to me most was the sufferings that Sir John and his men had to endure. A strange ambition burned inside me, to endure the same privations ... I decided to be an explorer.’ Dead, Franklin became an even greater hero than when he was alive.
PART 3
THE AGE OF ENDEAVOUR
THE AGE OF ENDEAVOUR
On 1 May 1851 the Great Exhibition opened in London’s Hyde Park. Here, canopied under a monumental edifice of cast-iron and glass, was a showcase of industrial prowess the like of which had never been seen before. In every field, from mining to manufacturing, from furniture to farming, the power of technology was laid bare – there were great engines and machines, locomotives, bridges, a knife with 300 blades, a glass fountain 27 feet high and weighing 11 tons, the largest sideboard known to humankind, and countless other marvels. Even the building bore the stamp of Victorian ingenuity. The ‘Crystal Palace’, as it was dubbed, was a revolutionary piece of architecture, whose statistics spoke for themselves: constructed in the course of seven months by 2,200 workers, it comprised 4,000 tons of iron, 400 tons of glass, 30 miles of guttering and 200 miles of wooden sash bars, was tall enough to contain three mature elm trees and was twice as long as St Paul’s Cathedral. All in all, the Great Exhibition was a stupendous experience, a statement not only of present might but of future potential. By the time it closed on 15 October more than six million visitors from all over the globe had paid a total of £365,000 to pass through its gates. One 85-year-old woman walked all the way from Cornwall to see it. Another woman made the shorter journey from Windsor Castle and was so impressed that she came not once but 30 times, each visit filling her with deeper awe for the period over which she and her country presided: ‘We are capable’, Queen Victoria wrote in her diary, ‘of doing anything.’
The certainty that one could do anything underpinned the Victorian Age. Although discovery was seen by some as a peripheral activity compared with the nitty-gritty of increasing output, building sewers, developing new medicines and generally getting on with business, it was intrinsic to many themes of the industrial world, particularly that of Empire. Missionaries and travellers who opened stretches of ‘darkest’ Africa were often precursors to armed invasion. Even in places it seemed pointless or impossible to conquer – the Poles, for instance, or the Himalayas – it was still important to plant the flag, because there was always the hope that they might be commercially valuable. The main reason France explored the Sahara during the last half of the 19th century was to build a railway connecting Algeria to its West African colonies. (The rumour that a field of emeralds lay hidden in the dunes did nothing to put them off.) The discovery of coal on Greenland and Ellesmere Island caused a brief flurry of excitement. Similarly, the presence in the Arctic of seals, walruses and narwhals indicated that there was money to be made in the region – wildlife was considered as much a resource as minerals: pelts, oil and ivory all fetched good prices – and if they were insufficient in number to merit full-scale exploitation, they were a handy source of income for individuals who needed to offset the costs of private ventures. In 1909, when Robert Peary and Frederick Cook claimed simultaneously to have attained the North Pole, their dispute centred not just on priority but on possession of a cache of walrus ivory. Three years later Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s sledge journey to the South Pole foundered partly because it was carrying unnecessary quantities of rock samples. In fairness, the rocks were collected for scientific purposes; but until they were analysed, who knew what they might not reveal about Antarctica’s potential?
Alongside national prestige and commercial benefit came a third inducement to go exploring: the prospect of having one’s name in the papers. Ever since printing began, people had always been interested in tales of far-off places. In the industrial age an increasingly literate population was informed by an efficient and technologically sophisticated press. As newspaper magnates soon realized, their readers liked sensation. Murder, scandal and gossip sold copies, but nothing increased circulation like a saga of harrowing tribulation amidst exotic surroundings. James Gordon Bennett, the innovatory proprietor of the New York Herald, who has been credited as the father of modern journalism, exploited the seam to its fullest. Too impatient to wait for news to happen, he decided to make it himself. In 1869, for example, it had been several years since anyone had heard of the British missionary and explorer David Livingstone; it was known that he was in southern Africa, but nobody knew precisely where, or if he was dead or alive. Bennett took one of his reporters aside and said: ‘I will tell you what you will do. Draw a thousand pounds now and when you have gone through that, draw another thousand, and when that is spent, draw another, and when you have finished that, draw another and so on – BUT FIND LIVINGSTONE.’ His reporter was a man named Henry Morton Stanley, who not only found Livingstone but became one of the most famous (and newsworthy) African explorers of the century.
There were others like Stanley. Bennett’s ‘Special Correspondents’, as he called them, roamed the globe in increasingly daring, and circulation-boosting, fashion. The programme came to an end in 1879 when Bennett sent an expedition to the North Pole under a US Navy officer, George Washington De Long. Three years later De Long and half his crew were dead, a price that embarrassed even Bennett (though not enough to stop him making headlines out of the disaster). The Herald’s policy was copied by newspapers across the world. Britain’s Daily Telegraph sponsored an African expedition, the Daily Mail an Arctic one, and the Chicago Record Herald made no less than three futile efforts to get an airship to the North Pole. In 1913 a Russian newspaper, the Noyoe Vremya, sent Grigoriy Yakovlevich Sedov to his death on an expedition to Franz Josef Land.
If the media used explorers, explorers also used the media. When governments refused to fund an expedition – as they increasingly did – it was to the press that explorers next appealed. And if the press did not provide the cash, advertisements placed in its pages often did. On an explorer’s successful return he was guaranteed good money for an exclusive account of his deeds. And once again the small ads came to his aid: for among the hundreds of products whose advertising revenue provided newspapers with their income there was not a single one that did not benefit from having an explorer’s name attached. When Karl Weyprecht and Julius von Payer returned to Vienna in 1874, following their discovery of Franz Josef Land, there was a craze for Payer coats and Weyprecht cravats. When the Norwegian neuroscientist Fridtjof Nansen completed the first traverse of Greenland in 1888 his name was attached to caps, cakes, cigars, pens and several pieces of music. There was even a Nansen fly-button. Dr Frederick Cook, who in 1909 claimed to have discovered the North Pole, franchised toy sledges, little figurines of himself in travelling furs, and a remarkable two-foot high pyramid of brown fuzz, adorned by a white plume on its left flank, that was sold to New Yorkers as the ‘Dr Cook Hat’. Cook’s polar rival, Robert Peary, lent his name to practically every manufactured article he had taken on his journey, and several he had not. A shaving brush was given his imprimatur, despite the fact that he was simultaneously selling photographs of himself in full moustaches. The makers of Shredded Wheat wanted it to be known that theirs was the cereal of choice at the Pole. ‘The Underclothes Peary Wore Ninety Degrees North,’ cried the Norfolk & New Brunswick Hosiery Co. There was nothing too low for Peary to franchise, and no price too high for him to accept for it. Even in strait-laced Britain, the Antarctic hero Ernest Shackleton wrote to Vilhjalmur Stefansson (Arctic explorer, also journalist) that the rewards could be great, ‘particularly when you come home from an expedition with a big hurrah’. Roald Amundsen, who traversed the North-West Passage and the North-East Passage, skied to the South Pole, and flew a Zeppelin to the North Pole, was fully aware of the money-spinning potential of his trade. Exploration was not just something he did exceptionally well – it was his livelihood, his career.
To garner the big hurrahs one had, naturally, to do something big, an
d the biggest things were to be done at either end of the world’s axis. This was the heyday of polar exploration, in which expedition after expedition went north and south, advancing by tiny increments and at great human cost towards the ends of the earth. The ‘international steeple chase’, as one Austrian dismissively called it, culminated in 1909 with Peary’s supposed conquest of the North Pole (he probably got no further than 89° N) and Robert Falcon Scott’s tragic attainment in 1912 of the South Pole, where he not only discovered that Amundsen had beaten him by a few weeks but died with his entire party on the return journey. The towering egos and dramatic exploits of those who sought the Poles overshadowed the achievements of those who went after slightly smaller hurrahs. The Franz Josef Land surveys of Frederick Jackson and Benjamin Leigh-Smith, for example, were barely recognized at the time and are treasured today only by Arctic cognoscenti. The Marquess of Ava and Dufferin’s bizarre tour of Iceland is likewise forgotten, as is the Prince of Monaco’s charting of Spitsbergen’s coast. So too are Walter Wellman’s attempt to explore the Arctic in what amounted to a canoe slung beneath a balloon, and the extraordinarily incompetent antics of Evelyn Baldwin and Anthony Fiala in Franz Josef Land. The Danish Literary Expedition to Greenland, meanwhile, has vanished from all but the most abstruse records.
Those who sought the Poles were either wealthy in their own right, were financed by learned bodies and charitable bequests or had raised subscriptions through the press. Having burned their fingers in the past, governments had little enthusiasm for polar exploration (though they were quick to parade their citizens’ success). Elsewhere, however, fame and fortune could be had relatively cheaply. These were heady days, in which a chap – and they were usually, though not exclusively, chaps; often also British – could buy a gun, catch a steamer to some distant port, hire a team of porters and stride off in search of undiscovered lands. If no new territory was to hand then the old would do, so long as one could have a bit of fun along the way. The fun might consist of shooting tigers, lions or elephants, climbing a new mountain, investigating ancient ruins or, in the case of Ewart Grogan, proving oneself worthy of a bride. In 1900 this enterprising man of Irish descent travelled from the Cape to Cairo, partly for the thrill of being the first to do so, but mainly because he wanted to impress his prospective father-in-law.
Off the Map Page 41
