Captain Francis Crozier

by Michael Smith

  Having decided to leave the ships, the biggest gamble facing Crozier was deciding the direction in which to take his party. The crucial factor was food. He had left England with the knowledge that no plans had been laid down for relief, and as far as he knew, Crozier had to find his own way out of the Arctic. The nearest outposts of civilisation – the Hudson’s Bay Company settlements at Fort Resolution or Fort Providence on the Great Slave Lake – were over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) to the southwest along the Great Fish River.

  On the other hand, he knew that a large stock of supplies was stashed to the north in the more remote region at Fury Beach. He chose the Great Fish River. As events unfolded, it was the wrong choice.

  The most obvious direction was north to Fury Beach, some 250 miles (400 kilometres) away in Prince Regent Inlet, where twenty years earlier he and Parry had stockpiled tons of provisions from the wreckage of Fury. Blankly, the ice master of Terror had been a member of the expedition.

  The cache of supplies would sustain his men for a while and once revived Crozier could follow the example of John Ross who in 1833 camped at Fury Beach before leading his men north up Prince Regent Inlet to Lancaster Sound, where they were picked up by a passing ship. Whalers were active in Lancaster Sound and the chances of being spotted were fairly high.

  But there was a good reason for not going north to Fury Beach. Shortly before leaving London, rumours were circulating in naval circles that rogue whalers planned to salvage Fury’s provisions from Fury Beach and sell them for a quick profit. The risk of trekking 250 miles (400 kilometres) and finding the food depot empty was too great for Crozier to contemplate.

  The tragedy is that the cache was never plundered. In the event, the relief expedition of Ross and Bird did head for Prince Regent Inlet and Fury Beach. But Investigator and Enterprise over-wintered on Somerset Island in 1848–49 and sledging parties did not reach Fury Beach until the summer of 1849 – well over a year after Crozier left Erebus and Terror.

  The alternative plan was to strike out for the south to the mouth of the Great Fish River, about 250 miles (400 kilometres) away. From the estuary, the party could hope to reach Fort Resolution or Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake – a daunting trip of about 700 miles (1,120 kilometres) along a treacherous stretch of river.

  But the territory around the Great Fish River – unlike that of Fury Beach – was a known source of game and offered the near certainty of nourishment for men facing starvation. It was, almost certainly, the prospect of finding fresh meat and fish which weighed heavily in the balance for Crozier.

  Back, who explored the area a decade earlier, reported a large amount of wildlife there. Equally, it was known as one of the most popular hunting grounds for the Eskimos. The libraries of Erebus and Terror each carried a copy of Back’s book about his voyage and Crozier must have read the full-blown accounts of a region teeming with caribou, birds and salmon.

  Unknown to Crozier, the Admiralty’s relief expeditions were already underway. But the last place they intended to search was the very place Crozier was leading his men. The journey up the Great Fish River was widely regarded in Arctic circles as the most difficult territory to traverse and long written off in London as an improbable means of escape. Ross considered navigation of the river as ‘impossible’ and Back saw no hope for the men from Erebus and Terror if they struck out for the river. He declared: ‘I can say from experience that no toilworn and exhausted party could have the least chance of existence by going there.’

  According to Back, the river was punctuated with a succession of 83 dangerous rapids and waterfalls on its long, winding route. He called it a ‘violent and tortuous course’ and also warned that in one area the river ran through a particularly desolate stretch of country – the Barren Lands – where animal life was notably scarce.

  Franklin, the only man in the party who knew the area from two earlier hair-raising journeys, would never have taken his men to the Great Fish River. But Franklin was dead and for Crozier the need to find fresh food was critical.

  It seems evident that Crozier made his crucial decision during the winter months and that he sent advance parties ashore to King William Island to lay down depots of provisions and equipment. The boats, though still enormously heavy, were modified slightly to reduce their weight.

  At Victory Point, a short note was left that provided history with its only written account of the loss of the ships, the death toll and the expedition’s attempt to reach Back’s Great Fish River. The note was written around the margin of the original message left by Gore on King William Island a year earlier. Like the earlier communiqué, it was written by Fitzjames.

  The message, the last official word from the expedition, contained news of Franklin’s death and the abandonment of the ships. A postscript, which appears to have been written as an after thought, was added by Crozier and gave notice of the planned march to reach the Great Fish River.

  chapter twenty

  A Slow Execution

  Crozier’s escape plan was hugely ambitious. From the scraps of information and theories pieced together over the past 150 years, it appears that Crozier intended to reach the outposts some 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) away on the Great Slave Lake in a single season, anything to avoid the misery of spending another winter in the ice.

  The aim was to cover the initial 250 miles (400 kilometres) to the estuary of Back’s Great Fish River by early June – the time when the first migratory flocks of birds and herds of animals would arrive from the south. After feeding on freshly killed game, it was hoped the waters of the Great Fish River would have thawed sufficiently to permit the boats to be launched for a dash to one of the Hudson’s Bay stations before the autumn freeze descended.

  Crozier’s plan depended on weeks of heavy labour dragging the bulky ships’ boats across the ice on specially adapted sledges. It was a bold but desperate plan destined to fail because of exhaustion, illness and starvation.

  The intolerably heavy and unwieldy sledges were made from planks of oak fitted with steel runners, each weighing about one-third of a ton (300 kilograms). The boats, which measured almost 28 feet (8 metres), weighed up to 800 pounds (350 kilograms). When loaded with supplies and equipment, the huge physical effort needed to haul well over 1,400 pounds (650 kilograms) to the river was far beyond the capacity of Crozier’s flagging men. McClintock later estimated that the retreating party could not have carried more than 40 days’ food for over 100 men.

  Crozier initially retreated in orderly fashion along the west coast of King William Island towards Simpson Strait, a longer route than travelling due south, but preferable because the smoother sea ice made travel a little easier than on broken land. But it appears that the weakest men soon began to fall by the wayside, drained from the appalling toil of pulling monstrous sledges and laid waste by scurvy.

  Crozier was now presented with a terrible dilemma: should he leave the weak and dying to save the strong? His priority, undoubtedly, would have been to get as many men as possible to fresh food, even if this meant abandoning the weakest members of the party, who were already doomed.

  The party was reduced to a pathetic procession of weak and dying men, still dressed in wholly unsuitable woollen uniforms and navy boots and clinging resolutely to the useless paraphernalia of life at home. Despite the enormity of the crisis, the men still carried their ‘home from home’ on the sledges. At a time when the situation cried out for carrying only food and essential gear, the sledges were crammed with a desiderata of Bibles and other books, engraved cutlery and china dinner plates, changes of clothing and footwear, soap and toothbrushes, cigar cases and sealing wax.

  McClintock, who found the trail of discarded objects a decade later, glumly concluded that the already exhausted and sick men were hauling ‘a mere accumulation of dead weight’. The unnecessary baggage, he said with classic understatement, was ‘very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews’.1

  The retreating party was struck by
a major emergency soon after beginning the march south. About one-third of the party, probably those suffering from acute scurvy , was too ill to march. A field hospital for the sick was erected at Terror Bay, on the south-west corner of King William Island. It was here that, for the first time on the expedition, the party became divided.

  The sick were left behind, with some finding their way back to the ships and some, according to later Eskimo accounts, breaking off in search of their own independent sources of game. They were never seen again.

  Under the leadership of Crozier, the main body of men continued the march towards the Great Fish River and it is likely that Crozier would have sent the most able hunters ahead to forage for game. He almost certainly intended to return to Terror Bay with fresh meat for the ailing men once the bulk of his party had reached the hunting grounds. But rescue never came and Eskimos later found the remains of about 30 men in the area around Terror Bay, where the retreating party had first been split.

  Map 11: The area around King William Island where Crozier led the bid to escape the ice.

  Crozier’s plight was little better than the condemned men at Terror Bay. It was a predicament brought into sharp focus when Crozier’s party met a small group of Eskimo families. The retreating men ran into the small band of Eskimos near Cape Herschel in Washington Bay on the southern shores of King William Island, a headland that overlooks the western entrance to Simpson Strait.

  What followed was among the most painful and illuminating episodes in the history of Arctic exploration. Eskimo accounts of the meeting indicated that the men under Crozier now numbered around 40. Charles Francis Hall, the American newspaper proprietor turned polar explorer, came to the area some years later and met Eskimos who remembered the encounter. Hall was convinced from their descriptions that the party’s leader was Crozier. Some Eskimos knew of Crozier and one told Hall that Crozier was ‘so poor and nearly starved’.2

  Crozier explained to the natives that his ships were trapped in the ice and persuaded them to give the men some fresh seal meat, which they devoured. The men, according to the Eskimos, were all thin and ravenously hungry.

  The explorers and the Eskimos, in a scene faintly reminiscent of Crozier’s winter at Igloolik in 1822–23, camped together for the night. In the morning, Crozier pleaded with the Eskimo to stay with his men and help them find fresh game. He rubbed his hand over his stomach, repeatedly saying netchuk (seal) as he beseeched the natives to stay. The Eskimos knew from bitter experience that the hunting grounds around Cape Herschel would never support their own families and dozens of starving men. There was no room for sentiment and the seamen could only watch as the natives ambled away to fend for themselves.3

  The heartbreaking exchange between the hungry seamen and brutally pragmatic Eskimos was the most striking illustration of how little naval explorers had learned about the Arctic in 30 years of endeavour. The bitter irony was seeing Crozier’s decimated party reduced to begging for scraps of food from people that polite British society regarded as inferiors and savages.

  The main body of survivors struggled on throughout the summer of 1848, hugging the southern coast of King William Island as they made their way very slowly towards the Great Fish River. In their wake, they left a trail of dead. In the words of the Eskimos, men fell dying as they walked.

  One skeleton, believed to be that of Lieutenant Henry Vesconte of Erebus, was discovered by Hall and subsequently returned to London for burial beneath the pavement at Greenwich Hospital, London. The remains of another body, later identified as Lieutenant Irving of Terror, was found years after at Victory Point and interred with full military honours at Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.

  The bones of two more victims were found in 1905 by members of the Gjøa party under Roald Amundsen as he made the first ever navigation of the North West Passage. In a ceremony heavy with symbolism, Amundsen’s men buried the skeletal remains of the vanquished and sailed into the history books as the victors.

  It was a bitter-sweet occasion for Amundsen, the proficient Norwegian who ventured into polar exploration after being inspired as a young man by tales of the Franklin expedition. But despite his admiration for the sheer guts of the lost party, he could never fully understand how the expedition had descended into such a catastrophic disaster.

  Amundsen’s expedition spent two winters at Gjoa Haven on the south-east coast of King William Island, about 100 miles (160 kilometres) from where almost 60 years earlier Crozier struggled ashore after abandoning Erebus and Terror. In contrast to the armada of British naval expeditions to the region, Amundsen took a small boat with a shallow draught. He and his crew lived like Eskimos, wearing furs, stalking game and even learning the language.

  Gjoa Haven, little more than 60 miles (96 kilometres) from where Crozier’s starving party of sailors had begged the Eskimos for scraps, lies on the caribou migration routes and is an infinitely more fertile hunting ground than the west coast where Crozier landed.

  Amundsen’s party shot wildlife by the hundreds and threw away the unwanted remains. Amundsen, the greatest of all polar explorers, never underestimated the severe difficulties of survival in the Arctic and respected the efforts of the early venturers to the region. He once said: ‘It is difficult for men living in comfort in civilised countries to realise the harshness of the Arctic.’4 But he was astonished that so many British seamen starved to death in the same region where his men, only 50 years later, lived in comparative luxury. He wrote:

  Map 12: The North West passage navigated by Amundsen, 1903-05

  [Franklin] and his men had perished from starvation – oddly enough, at a spot, where, when we reached it, we happened to find an abundance of game on land and fish in the water.5

  At one stage during the 1848 retreat, Crozier’s men stood only approximately 10 miles (16 kilometres) from the Gjoa Haven area and the hunting grounds that would sustain Amundsen so admirably half a century later. As Gjøa sailed along Simpson Strait in the open-water season to complete the maiden voyage through the North West Passage, Amundsen flew the ship’s colours in salute to the men of Erebus and Terror.

  Crozier’s last journey along the southern shores of King William Island and into Simpson Strait in 1848 bristles with historic significance. In reaching the channel, Crozier had confirmed that the waters of Simpson Strait were the final link between east and west of the North American continent – the North West Passage.

  The stragglers of Crozier’s party reached Point Hall on the southern tip of King William Island overlooking Simpson Strait during the middle of 1848. On the Todd Islands, a cluster of tiny islets, more of the party fell dead. It is impossible to know how many had survived at this stage. Recent research suggests that only a handful of men were still standing. The small group of survivors dragged themselves a further 10 miles (16 kilometres) across the iced-clogged waters of Simpson Strait to the mainland of Canada.

  Almost half a century later, Amundsen’s Gjøa crossed the same narrow stretch of water while making the first transit of the passage.

  Moving slowly over the sea ice, the exhausted men passed Point Richardson and entered a narrow inlet on Adelaide Peninsula. The site, about 200 miles (320 kilometres) from where Erebus and Terror were abandoned, was among the last camps for survivors. It was later given the macabre name of Starvation Cove.

  The full details of what happened after Starvation Cove are impossible to discern. The bones and relics scattered around King William Island and the conflicting and confusing Eskimo stories about what happened to the kabloonas (white men), have left a bewildering trail of hopeful guesses, speculative theories and wild fantasies. All that can be said with certainty is that no one truly knows.

  It appears that a small number of the 105 men who set out in April 1848 survived to fight another winter. A handful, it seems, managed to return to the ships and may have survived a little longer than those caught in the autumnal wilderness. Modern research by the writer David Woodman argues that a few men clung to life
around Starvation Cove until 1851, some three years after the ships were abandoned.

  One man who definitely did not survive the winter of 1848 was Sir John Barrow, the architect of the navy’s catastrophic quest for the North West Passage. Barrow died peacefully in bed on 23 November, aged 84 and blissfully unaware of the tragic climax to his 30-year obsession with the Arctic.

  Hundreds of miles to the north of King William Island and Starvation Cove, Ross and Bird sat through another Arctic winter, quietly planning a series of sledge journeys down Peel Sound and towards Fury Beach in Prince Regent Inlet during 1849. One party reached Fury Beach in the summer of 1849, where it found the cache of supplies left by Parry and Crozier from the wrecked Fury more than twenty years earlier. The depot was still largely intact and there was no sign of any recent visits to the site.

  Ross set out in mid-May, tramping southwards down Peel Sound along the coast of Somerset Island with very heavy sledges and a dozen men, including McClintock on his first Arctic venture. The party came to a halt on 6 June 1849 near Bellot Strait, the small channel that divides Somerset Island and Boothia Peninsula.

  From a headland, Ross could see nothing to the south but an unbroken panorama of tightly packed ice stretching perhaps 50 miles (80 kilometres) into the distance. He was utterly convinced that no ships could possibly have penetrated these waters.

  At that moment, Ross stood only about 180 miles (288 kilometres) from where Erebus and Terror lay seized by the ice in Victoria Strait. With dogs and light Eskimo sledges, it was a journey of no more than ten days, perhaps less. Ross had neither. His food was running low and some of his men were already showing signs of scurvy.