The Eskimos were correct about the existence of a strait, but it was a narrow channel choked with ice and offering precious little possibility of a free passage for their ships. In the distance, however, Parry believed he saw clear signs of open water. Gambling on the ice receding in the summer, he summoned the ships to the entrance of the channel, which he named Fury and Hecla Strait.
Map 4: The voyage of Fury and Hecla 1821-23.
Initially, the gamble paid off because the ice broke away sufficiently for Fury and Hecla to sail a few miles into the channel. Parry believed that Fury and Hecla Strait held the key to the passage and all they had to do was wait for the inevitable break up of the ice that summer before sailing triumphantly through to the Bering Strait. But the mood of optimism began to evaporate as the ice ahead became progressively thicker. Never before had the frustrated Parry witnessed such a barrier.
On one occasion, Crozier and Parry left the ship with a small party to climb the high promontory named Cape North East to scan the horizon for signs of cracks in the ice. It was a treacherous march across broken, slushy sea ice, where dangerous lanes of open water threatened to cut off the retreat back to the ships. As insurance, the party carried planks of wood to bridge any channels of open water it might encounter.
Crozier was the first victim of the unstable ice. While walking with Parry, Crozier found himself separated from the others by a yawning crack in the ice. The plank was far too short to bridge the gap and swimming in the freezing waters would be suicidal. But Crozier, imperturbable and resourceful, calmly dropped the gear he was carrying and moved up the open lane, finding its narrowest point and where he could see large chunks of ice floating in the flowing water. Steeling himself, Crozier began leaping from floe to floe as lumps of ice bobbed along in the current. After a few perilous leaps, he managed to find more solid ground and cheerfully returned to the ship unharmed and seemingly untroubled by his near-fatal ordeal.
The incident was typical of Crozier, a man who possessed a calm head in a crisis. Only weeks later, he was again able to demonstrate his coolness under pressure when for the second time he found himself in peril after getting cut off from the ship.
He had taken two marines ashore in a 9-foot (3-metre) boat, with four days of food supplies, to study and measure the tides at the head of Fury and Hecla Strait. It was another straightforward task, but the weather deteriorated badly soon after the men reached shore. Temperatures plunged sharply and the fast-running tidal flow was whipped up by gale-force winds.
On board Fury, Parry grew alarmed. He admitted to ‘serious apprehension’ about Crozier’s safety and decided to personally lead a rescue party to fetch the young officer before the route back to the ship was closed off by the atrocious weather.
Parry’s searchers struggled ashore in high winds, but could find no trace of Crozier and the two marines. Parties were sent in both directions along the shore and musket shots were fired to alert the missing men, but the cracks of gunfire were drowned out by the roar of the gale.
Parry suspected the worst when, to his astonishment, he found Crozier crouched beside a rock, sheltering from the winds and quietly jotting down his tidal observations. Crozier, totally absorbed in his duty, seemed oblivious to the tempest raging all around, as a mightily relieved Parry recalled:
I had the indescribable satisfaction of seeing Mr Crozier make his appearance from behind a rock, where he was engaged in watching the tide-mark.2
Back on board, the failure to penetrate Fury and Hecla Strait infuriated Parry, who believed he was ‘stopped at the very threshold of the North West Passage’. At one point, the ships resorted to the risky tactic of charging the pack, but the pack held firm and in late September, Fury and Hecla came to a halt at 83° 29′ west – not as far west as Parry managed on the great journey through Lancaster Sound in 1819–20. Parry decided to sit out a second winter in the ice and to have a further stab at Fury and Hecla Strait in 1823.
The party returned to the Eskimo settlement at Igloolik to nurse its disappointment. A tough summer season had yielded little and the normally self-confident Parry admitted that ‘very little had in reality been effected in the furtherance of the North West Passage’.
Igloolik – about 150 miles (240 kilometres) inside the Arctic Circle – was a colder and less hospitable haven for the crews of Fury and Hecla than that enjoyed in the more southerly latitudes of Winter Island. But the party was comforted by the close and generous presence of the friendly band of Eskimos.
Crozier was popular with the Eskimo community, particularly when he helped bring sick natives on board the ships for medical treatment. Having been given responsibility for the task, he personally ferried ailing Eskimos back and forth over the ice, and in the process became one of the party’s most accomplished ice travellers.
Crozier became a familiar sight to the natives on his hospital run and they soon devised their own name for him. The Eskimos initially struggled to pronounce his Scots-French name and called him ‘Croz-har’, but they soon came up with their own pet name for him, which was Aglooka, meaning ‘one who takes long strides’. More pertinently, the Eskimos identified Crozier as esh-e-mu-tar-nar – an officer not as great as the ship’s captain.3
During his contact with the Eskimos at Igloolik, Crozier also revealed that he wanted to return to the ice in the future. According to native testimony passed down over the years, Crozier told the natives of his ambition to lead his own expedition.
An elderly Eskimo from the Igloolik settlement, speaking about 40 years after the visit of Fury and Hecla, told a fascinating story to Charles Francis Hall, an American explorer who spent time in the same region during the 1860s. She revealed that Aglooka (Crozier) had faithfully promised the Eskimo that he would return to the Arctic regions one day as esh-e-mu-ta – captain of the ship.4
chapter five
Fatal Errors
The 1822–23 winter at Igloolik was a decisive moment in the history of British polar exploration. Never before had such a large party – over 100 naval officers and crew, including the navy’s finest explorers of the age – spent so much time living alongside the native Eskimo population. Both communities were provided with an opportunity to observe each other’s lifestyles and habits at close quarters, even though in this environment the native Eskimos had far more to offer their visitors than the British could offer them. Unfortunately, the opportunity to learn was wasted.
The explorers who camped on ships alongside the Eskimo community witnessed everything the natives did over a period of many months. At times there was precious little else to do but watch these aboriginal people go about their daily business and much of what the British saw was meticulously logged. Lyon, in particular, wrote detailed reports that years later encouraged professional anthropological studies of the local people.
However, the explorers wrote down much but understood little. Not once did it occur to them to ask how it was that uneducated, ‘half-savage’ tribes could survive and thrive in a hostile, merciless environment that defeated the educated and technically superior British.
The explorers found the Eskimos interesting and entertaining and marvelled at things such as the art of building an igloo in a gale and the finely honed hunting skills that kept their communities alive. They were mildly perplexed by other traits, such as how the Eskimo gorged on raw flesh or the casual way in which sexual favours were dispensed. But the opportunity to learn by studying the survival skills and lifestyles of the indigenous population was largely wasted.
Parry’s expeditions were ground breaking and innovative affairs. Consequently, his style and methods formed the template for decades of endeavour in the polar regions by generations of British explorers. But the opportunity to make even more progress by studying the survival skills and adopting the lifestyles of the indigenous population was largely wasted and convoys of British explorers went into the ice for another 100 years clinging to the foolish prejudices and methods which were tragically ill suite
d to the envirnment.
The critical failure of the 1822–23 party to learn from the Eskimo lay in the inherent sense of superiority felt by the British towards all foreigners. When Hecla and Fury ventured into the ice in the early 1820s, Britain ruled the world, both militarily and economically. Illiterate Eskimo tribes living above the Arctic Circle were dismissed as hopeless inferiors, or at best regarded as children. Lyon wrote in his journal: ‘I could not look at these modest little savages, without being obliged to draw comparisons rather disadvantageous to many sweet little spoiled children in England.’
British explorers, reflecting the society that sent them north, lacked a basic respect for other cultures and the humility to recognise that native tribes knew more about their own environment than refined naval officers. However, they failed to comprehend that the totally different environment of the Arctic demanded separate rules that were fundamentally alien to the British way of life.
Eskimos have survived in the Arctic wilds for countless generations through a combination of sound diet, effective clothing and efficient living quarters – a simple formula that gave the native population a colossal advantage over the navy in the 1820s.
British explorers brought their own skills and technology from Europe, which they naturally considered far superior to anything the Eskimos possessed. But the trappings of an advanced European culture, such as its clothing and food, had little to do with Arctic survival. Navy expedition ships of the time were little more than a small slice of Britain berthed on a foreign shore. The explorer travelled in his own cocoon, deliberately shutting out the local environment rather than embracing it. For the explorer, the paraphernalia and comforts of home were a self-deluding reassurance that all was well. It was a system that worked well in good times, when food and shelter were in plentiful supply and especially when bands of friendly Eskimos helped bolster the diet with fresh game. But explorers were horribly exposed without their ships and the comfort of naval discipline and familiar routines. Left to fend for themselves and lacking the survival skills of the Eskimos, naval officers and seamen were simply unable to cope.
The question of diet was a perfect example of the huge differences between the natives and the visitors. The Eskimos were meat and fish eaters, greedily stuffing themselves on chunks of raw flesh and blubber whenever they were successful in the hunt. Though an unedifying sight for the cultivated British officers more accustomed to dining off fine bone china and with silver cutlery, the unsightly eating habits did not alter the fact that the Eskimo diet was far superior to the navy’s staple of salted beef or pork as a preventative of scurvy. The enormous advantage of raw flesh over navy rations would eventually be measured in men’s lives.
Navy rations on long Arctic voyages were a recipe for scurvy. Salted or tinned meat and vegetables lost virtually all value as an anti-scorbutic. Parry did make use of pemmican – a compound mixture of dried meat and fat that provided good nutrition – but it was useless in the battle against scurvy. The navy had administered lemon juice to seamen with some success in the eighteenth century, but the quantities were far too small for men on Arctic diets, who went without fresh meat and vegetables for twelve months or longer.
Nor were the explorers very accomplished at hunting and stocking the larder with fresh game. The Eskimos – using primitive bows and arrows or spears – were far more effective than British navy personnel equipped with the latest muskets or shotguns. For navy officers, hunting was a sport; for the natives, it was a matter of life and death. The British rarely managed to kill any seals or caribou and any fresh game they did catch – mostly birds – was too often boiled beyond any worth as an anti-scorbutic.
The men, weaned on salt beef and bacon, refused to eat raw meat or fish donated by kindly Eskimos. Parry himself condemned the native diet as ‘horrible and disgusting’. The Eskimos found navy rations equally objectionable.
Yet when the officers and men of Fury and Hecla were displaying swollen gums and stiffness of the joints in 1822–23 – early signs of scurvy – Parry failed to make the connection between diet and the undeniable fact that the Eskimos were free from scurvy and healthier than his own men. It never occurred to anyone to ask how, year after year, Eskimo communities across the Arctic were not laid waste by scurvy.
Parry also failed to appreciate how Eskimos invariably lived in small groups because the hunting grounds could not support larger groups. By contrast, Parry took 118 men into the Arctic with little intention or realistic prospect of ever living off the land. Officers even took manservants into the ice for the sole purpose of being waited on hand and foot. But each servant was another mouth to feed.
Parry was not alone in misreading what the local environment could support. Despite the overwhelming evidence, the navy continued to send ships into the same region for the next twenty years laden with over 100 dependents and with scurvy in relentless pursuit. Scurvy, in fact, blighted naval expeditions for a further century and was a critical factor in the struggles and disasters which characterised the heroic age of Antarctic exploration in the early twentieth century.
The advantages of Eskimo clothing in the Arctic climate were similarly overlooked. While naval seamen clung to the traditional tight-fitting wool and flannel uniforms, the natives wore loose-fitting caribou fur or sealskin parkas with hoods that allowed body heat to circulate more freely. Sailors laboured in conventional leather boots, while the natives kept their feet dry and warm with sealskin footwear. Parry did experiment with new waterproofs developed by Mackintosh of Glasgow, but these offered no improvement on the simple Eskimo garments that had evolved over centuries.
Nor did the men from Fury and Hecla ever seem to appreciate the comfort of Eskimo living quarters. Igloos can be built quickly and provide adequate and even permanent shelter. Travel is quicker too, since sledges are not burdened with the bulky tents favoured by the navy during Parry’s stay in the Arctic. Yet the art of building a ‘snow house’ remained beyond the ken of the navy’s finest.
Even more remarkable was that no one seems to have spotted the masterful efficiency of using dog teams to pull sledges across the ice. In the pre-mechanised age of travel, dogs were the outstanding form of transport. They move nimbly on the ice, do not consume vast quantities of food that has be carried on the sledge and they work well in teams when managed expertly. But Hecla and Fury’s men never considered it a priority to learn the essential skills of dog driving and for many years afterwards a procession of British explorers went to the Arctic and Antarctic without ever coming to understand the importance of dog teams. In the curious logic of the time, it was considered demeaning for dogs to do the work of men. Although many later British expeditions did take dog teams, they were often more hindrance than help to men who never fully mastered the art of managing the animals.
Ignored lessons: British explorers failed to learn crucial lessons about survival, hunting or travelling efficiently with dog teams.
In the absence of dogs, British parties fell back on hauling their own cumbersome sledges – an exhausting ordeal. Yet it was considered more masculine and noble for navy men to drag sledges than to allow dogs do the work – a ridiculous hypothesis that had tragic consequences during Captain Scott’s disastrous journey to the South Pole in 1912.
William Scoresby, the whaling captain, was far-sighted enough to urge the Admiralty to use dog-drawn sledges for its 1818 North Pole venture and pointed to the remarkable feat of the Cossack, Alexsey Markov, in the Arctic. In 1714, Markov used dog teams to travel an incredible 800 miles (1,280 kilometres) through the wastes of Siberia in just 24 days – an impressive average of almost 34 miles (54 kilometres) a day. Man-hauling navy sledge teams, by contrast, did well to march 8–10 miles (13–16 kilometres) during an exhausting day’s work.
On most days during the winter of 1822–23, intelligent and resourceful men like Crozier, Parry and Ross witnessed the easy efficiency of Eskimo dog teams scampering over the ice. On one occasion, Crozier and Parry went on a
fishing expedition with a few Eskimos. To their utter surprise, a team of ten dogs travelled 40 miles (64 kilometres) in one day while pulling 1,200 pounds (550 kilograms) on a lightweight sledge across ‘very indifferent’ ice, a journey that would have taken man-hauling teams up to a week.
It is possible to understand – though not excuse – how the ‘masters’ failed to learn even the most glaringly obvious lessons from a race they believed to be inferior. In the event, Fury and Hecla left Igloolik in 1823 none the wiser and unwittingly invited future generations of polar explorers to repeat the same mistakes for years to come.
Had the men of Fury and Hecla possessed the humility and respect to seek answers from people they regarded as children, it is entirely possible that at least some of the subsequent disasters in the Arctic and Antarctic during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have been avoided. But, as Pierre Berton, the distinguished Canadian historian, concluded: ‘The real children in the Arctic [were] the white explorers.’1
chapter six
Wreck of the Fury
Winter passed slowly at Igloolik and illness, particularly incipient scurvy, took an increasing toll on the party. By April 1823, most of the Eskimos had gone in search of the spring hunting grounds and the explorers were alone again.
Scurvy had first begun to take effect during the depths of winter. Surgeons noticed the revealing signs of blackened gums and aching joints. By July, almost nine months after reaching Igloolik, the general health of all hands had deteriorated badly. Fife, ice-master of the Hecla, was the worst case and by September he was dead.
The worsening health of the party forced Parry’s hand. Prior to scurvy taking a grip, he had wanted to send Hecla back to Britain and continue the search for the passage with Fury. Despite the obvious risks of venturing further into the ice with only one ship, he began transferring extra supplies to Fury from the holds of Hecla and volunteers were sought for a third winter above the Arctic Circle.
Captain Francis Crozier Page 5
