Ice Ghosts
The first time a young shaman experiences this light,
while sitting up on the bench invoking his helping spirits,
it is as if the house in which he is suddenly rises;
he sees far ahead of him, through mountains,
exactly as if the earth were one great plain,
and his eyes could reach to the end of the earth.
Nothing is hidden from him any longer;
not only can he see things far, far away,
but he can also discover souls, stolen souls,
which are either kept concealed in far, strange lands
or have been taken up or down to the Land of the Dead.
—KNUD RASMUSSEN, Danish polar explorer, anthropologist, and first European to cross the Northwest Passage by dogsled, reporting on his research into Inuit origins in the early 1920s
For all the souls
lost at sea
CONTENTS
MAPS
CHRONOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
PART I
THE EXPEDITION
1.Franklin’s Last Mission
2.HMS Erebus and Terror
3.Frozen In
PART II
THE HUNT
4.The Hunt Begins
5.Lady Franklin’s Mission
6.The Arctic Committee
7.Ghost Ships
8.Starvation Cove
PART III
THE DISCOVERY
9.An Inuk Detective
10.He Who Takes Long Strides
11.Operation Franklin
12.The Hunt Goes Underwater
13.Skull Island
14.Fast Ice
15.“That’s It!”
16.Terror Bay
17.An Offering to the Dead
Afterword
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCE NOTES
CREDITS
INDEX
CHRONOLOGY
1576–1578—English explorer Martin Frobisher makes three voyages in search of the Northwest Passage, instead discovering Labrador, Baffin Island, and Frobisher Bay (present-day Iqaluit).
1771—English explorer Samuel Hearne is the first European to reach the Arctic coast of North America, where he witnesses a native massacre of Inuit while surveying the Coppermine River.
1805—British warships defeat the French and Spanish in the Battle of Trafalgar, leading to decisive victory in the Napoleonic Wars a decade later.
1814—Almost a decade after narrowly surviving the Battle of Trafalgar, Lieutenant John Franklin is wounded in a British naval assault on New Orleans.
1818—Amid massive Royal Navy layoffs, Sir John Barrow persuasively argues the case for a return to Arctic exploration and a renewed search for the Northwest Passage as a peacetime mission. John Ross commands an expedition to the Arctic Archipelago but mistakenly concludes that Lancaster Sound is blocked by mountains. John Franklin serves on a second, failed expedition seeking a polar passage northwest of Spitsbergen, off Norway.
1819–1822—English explorer John Franklin leads an overland expedition instructed to map the Arctic coastline east of the Coppermine River. Eleven of twenty men die. Franklin is heralded as a hero, despite rumors of murder and cannibalism on the trek south.
1823—Romantic poet Eleanor Anne Porden marries John Franklin.
1825–1827—John Franklin leads his second overland expedition, leaving his ill wife, Eleanor, with her blessing. She dies six days after he departs for the Arctic. Franklin and surgeon John Richardson map more than 1,000 miles of Arctic coastline.
1828—Sir John Franklin weds Jane Griffin, a friend of his late wife.
1831—James Clark Ross discovers the North Magnetic Pole, on the Boothia Peninsula, while serving under his uncle John Ross in an expedition funded by gin magnate Felix Booth.
1836–1843—Sir John Franklin is governor of Van Diemen’s Land, a penal colony that becomes Tasmania. Political opponents force his humiliating recall to England.
1839–1843—The Royal Navy sends James Clark Ross in search of the South Magnetic Pole with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The ships collide, but stay afloat, in stormy Antarctic seas.
1845—Eager to rebound from the Van Diemen’s Land fiasco, Sir John Franklin persuades the Royal Navy command to let him lead another expedition with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to find the final missing link in the Northwest Passage.
1846—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror are beset by heavy sea ice on September 12, off the northwest coast of King William Island.
1847—His ships still trapped in the ice, Sir John Franklin dies in the High Arctic on June 11. The cause of death and the whereabouts of his body remain unknown.
1850—Britain’s Royal Navy launches the first full-scale search for the Franklin Expedition. An American expedition joins the massive search on land and sea.
1853—HMS Breadalbane, bearing fresh supplies for Franklin Expedition searchers, is nipped by sea ice and sinks off Beechey Island. HMS Investigator is abandoned to the ice.
1854—Scottish fur trader and explorer John Rae has a chance encounter with Inuk hunter In-nook-poo-zhee-jook, who provides the first account describing dozens of white men dying at what is later named Starvation Cove.
1859—On Irish explorer Francis Leopold McClintock’s expedition, financed by Lady Jane Franklin, Irish Lieutenant William Hobson discovers the notes and remains left by Franklin’s men at Victory Point, providing the first written evidence in the disappearance of the Franklin Expedition.
1869—American explorer Charles Francis Hall’s expedition to King William Island includes the discovery of skeletal remains of Franklin Expedition members.
1964—Walter Zacharchuk, a former child laborer under the Nazis who went on to build his own diving equipment, becomes Canada’s first professional underwater archaeologist.
1966—Louie Kamookak, an Inuk boy caring for his dying great-grandmother Hummahuk on the tundra, hears the stories that set him on a lifelong search for Sir John Franklin’s grave.
1967—In honor of Canada’s centenary, its military launches an air, land, and sea search for Sir John Franklin’s Arctic grave, and any documents it might contain, but finds nothing significant.
1980—Canadian inventor and explorer Joseph MacInnis discovers the submerged wreck of HMS Breadalbane after a three-year search.
2008—The Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper announces a renewed search for the wrecks of Erebus and Terror, committing to a three-year effort.
2010—A team of Parks Canada underwater archaeologists discovers the wreck of HMS Investigator in Mercy Bay.
2014—Helicopter pilot Captain Andrew Stirling finds an iron davit piece on an island shore in eastern Queen Maud Gulf on September 1. Following up on that lead the next day, Parks Canada marine archaeologists find the wreck of Sir John Franklin’s flagship, HMS Erebus.
2016—Acting on a mysterious tip from Inuk guide Sammy Kogvik, Adrian Schimnowski’s Arctic Research Foundation team discovers the almost perfectly preserved wreck of HMS Terror.
INTRODUCTION
At sea in the High Arctic, it’s easy to lose sight of where you are.
We’ve been steaming for days on the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier without seeing much more than ocean and sky, the gray threads of distant island shorelines, and vast stretches of fractured, drifting ice. It’s late summer, in the few weeks between the final melt and the next full freeze. Like clouds parting after a storm, the sea ice is cracking and drifting. The Northwest Passage is opening.
By the thousands, pans of ice weighing many tons, carved by wind and sea into a floating gallery of blue, green, and aquamarine sculptures, slowly glide past. Any that get in our way crash against the icebreaker’s thick steel hul
l with a slushy smush that rises above the rumble of the Laurier’s powerful diesel engines. As she ploddingly shoves aside the blocks of sea ice, they dive and pop up like corks, stirring the ocean to a frothy roil.
After months of meticulous planning, and years of frustrated searching, everyone in this latest expedition is on edge. More than a hundred people are making the renewed push to find Sir John Franklin’s sunken ships. Second-guessers are sniping from afar, politicians with an eye to reelection pressing for results. The searchers urgently need to know how much leeway the Arctic will grant before the sea ice closes again, and more than 165 years of hunting pauses once more until the Arctic deigns to let the big ships back in.
That’s if the money doesn’t dry up first.
Year to year, it’s anyone’s guess what the mercurial North, and fickle taxpayers, will allow. So it was in the mid-nineteenth century, when the British Admiralty sent the Franklin Expedition to search for the passage’s elusive western exit. So it is now. An ice-free channel one August can be clogged with hull-crushing floes the next. There’s never much time to fathom the Arctic’s moods. They swing wildly from sunny, with warm rays glinting off seas so calm they look like metallic mirrors, to stormy, when wicked gales send waves crashing over an icebreaker’s massive bow for days.
More than a century and a half after Franklin and his men were lost, the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition is only days old and the Arctic is already closing the search window. For years, as the global climate grew steadily warmer, the climb in average temperatures way up here has been increasing faster than anyplace else on Earth. But northerly winds howling down from the North Pole can still blow a vengeful cold. Darkness is starting to eat into the twenty-four-hour daylight, devouring a larger slice of the midnight sun with each passing day. Another hard season of winter darkness is descending fast.
It’s the sixth year of a government-led quest for the wrecks of Franklin’s storied ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. The expedition’s objective is a search box on coldly vengeful seas, where some of the depth soundings on navigation charts are almost as old as the hunt for the lost Franklin Expedition itself. Roughly 10 percent of Canada’s Arctic waters, and some 40 percent of the Northwest Passage, have been charted to modern standards. That’s one reason the long effort to find Erebus and Terror has been so difficult in what ought to be the most promising place: off the northern tip of King William Island. Franklin’s crew, their commander dead from unknown causes, abandoned Erebus and Terror to the ice there in 1848. As they fought scurvy, possible lead poisoning, botulism, hunger, bone-chilling cold, and a creeping madness, the shrinking group of survivors struggled desperately to save themselves from the Arctic, praying for salvation farther south.
IN THEIR DAY, they were like voyagers to Mars would be now, sailing into the unknown, knowing they might never make it home but drawn forward by the fierce need to discover that defines our species. If that meant death, then that was the sacrifice empire and discovery demanded. Get back alive, though, and the gratitude of a great nation was theirs to enjoy as the bravest of conquering heroes. The Vikings are thought to have been the first to try, and fail, to find a Northwest Passage well over a thousand years ago. The idea of a sea trading route from the Atlantic to the markets of Asia had tantalized European minds since at least the early sixteenth century. But there were also skeptics. As William Scoresby Jr., son of a whaler and an accomplished pioneer of Arctic science wrote in 1820, “There have been only three or four intervals of more than fifteen years, in which no expedition was sent out in search of one or other of the supposed passages, from the year 1500.” Since nearly a hundred voyages had tried and failed to find the passage up to that point, “it is not a little surprising that . . . Britain should again revive and attempt the solution of this interesting problem.”
A Northwest Passage was, and still is, pitched more as a promise than a practical way to boost trade and commerce by sharply cutting the distance between Europe and Asia. That makes more sense when looking at a map than it does surrounded by ice floes, in a part of the world constantly hammered by storms, where even in the early twenty-first century countless shoals and other hazards lie uncharted and hidden, waiting to ground a ship or rip a hole in its hull. Scoresby thought his country was embarking on an expensive, dangerous, and pointless venture. His was a dissident voice in a growing public debate, with the Admiralty eyeing the Arctic as the next conquest for a Royal Navy that had just won the Napoleonic Wars. At the core of the chief proponent’s case was the notion that warmer, open water awaited beyond the pack-ice barrier well known to whalers and other Arctic mariners. Find a way through to that polar sailors’ paradise, the leading theory went, and it would be clear sailing over the North Pole to the riches of the East. Scoresby wasn’t buying it.
“It has been advanced as a maxim, that what we wish to be true, we readily believe;—a maxim which, however doubtful in general, has met with a full illustration in the northern voyages of discovery,” he wrote. “A single trial is often sufficient for satisfying us as to the truth of a disputed point; but, in this instance, though nearly an hundred trials have been made, the problem is still considered as unresolved.”
As strange as it sounds today, when anyone with an Internet connection can get a clear view of Earth’s polar ice caps, leading nineteenth-century experts were convinced explorers would find open water at the top of the world. That may have been a miscalculation based on long experience in Spitsbergen, where the North Atlantic Drift funnels warmer water up from the Gulf of Mexico to moderate Norway’s Arctic shores. If explorers could just find a way through the ice in what is now Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, proponents of the Open Polar Sea insisted, the other side of the world was theirs to behold. Problem was, temperate currents didn’t reach there. It was going to take a lot of time, hardship, and death to figure that out.
Among Arctic experts in the early nineteenth century, empiricists had the upper hand. Make enough observations based on direct experience, they insisted, and truth would reveal itself. If centuries of trying hadn’t found a path through the pack ice to a temperate Open Polar Sea, that wasn’t proof one didn’t exist. It simply meant navigators hadn’t found the right lead through the ice that would deliver their ships to the awaiting route north. The Royal Navy hadn’t won its dominance over the world’s seas by turning for home when things got rough. Just one more expedition could mean victory. Run into another wall of ice? Well, maybe the triumphant breakthrough awaited farther to the northwest. Still more ice? Perhaps history would be made by an earlier departure, in spring instead of summer.
Even Scoresby acknowledged intriguing hints of an undiscovered passage in the observable evidence, such as the unexplained travel of whales over the high latitudes. That seemed impossible if the northern polar region was solid pack ice. How would they surface to breathe? The evidence, however dubious to some, included “whales with stone lances sticking in their fat, (a kind of weapon used by no nation now known,) having been caught both in the sea of Spitzbergen, and in Davis’ Strait.” Fischal Zeeman of India had reported a whale killed in the Strait of Tartary, linking the Sea of Japan and Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk, “in the back of which was sticking a Dutch harpoon, marked with the letters W. B.” The harpoon was traced back to William Bastiaanz, admiral of the Dutch Greenland fleet. It “had been struck into the whale in the Spitzbergen Sea,” off Norway’s northern coast. Intelligent people of the day cited it as proof of open water. More experienced observers like Scoresby knew that ice cover was variable.
Franklin sided with him in doubting the theory of the Open Polar Sea. Captain James Fitzjames reported from Erebus, the expedition flagship christened in the name of the lowest, darkest region of Hell, in a letter home before turning in on the night of June 6, 1845: “At dinner to-day Sir John gave us a pleasant account of being able to get through the ice on the coast of America, and his disbelief in the idea that there is an open polar sea to the northward.” But the expediti
on commander’s orders came from Sir John Barrow, the Admiralty’s top civil servant and chief architect of the revived search for the Northwest Passage. He was a believer.
To a public hungry for stories from the Far North—just as the world was mesmerized by the Apollo missions to the moon in the 1960s—picturing their heroes voyaging through the forbidding Arctic was irresistible. British seamen had been searching for it since the sixteenth century. Robert Thorne, an English merchant, proposed a passage to India by way of the North Pole as early as 1527. Martin Frobisher led three voyages to the Arctic in the latter decades of that century. He made it as far as Baffin Island, in what is now the eastern Canadian Arctic. Queen Elizabeth I imagined that a colony could exploit minerals in the icy wilderness, which she named Meta Incognita. On Frobisher’s third and final expedition in 1578, he sailed with fifteen vessels and ended up in Frobisher Bay, where the city of Iqaluit, capital of the autonomous Inuit territory of Nunavut, now stands. But Frobisher’s settlement failed.
More than 260 years had passed when the Admiralty chose Franklin, a celebrated Arctic explorer seemingly past his prime, to search for the last several hundred miles that would complete the passage to the Pacific. His two vessels were converted bomb ships that had been to Antarctica with James Clark Ross from 1839 to 1843. They had also won glory in battle. In one of the last clashes in the War of 1812, mortars mounted near Terror’s bow fired bombs at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. After watching some of those bombs bursting in air, American lawyer Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that became the lyrics to the US national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
THE ROYAL NAVY outfitted Franklin’s men with woolen mitts and coats that became damp with their own sweat and froze as stiff as wet socks on a winter clothesline. The commander’s mitts, presumably of a quality suiting a knight of the realm on the best-equipped polar expedition, were hand sewn from coarse pieces of white wool blanket from the Hudson’s Bay Company, with a black baize cuff and red silk edging. They look painful next to the elbow-high wolfskin mitts that keep an Inuit traveler’s hands toasty on long journeys. Snow goggles, possibly made aboard ship, put a strip of stiff leather and wire-mesh gauze between a Franklin sailor’s eyes and the relentless winds that tormented them, striking like millions of tiny needles. The gear couldn’t have offered much hope to men who had to survive two vicious winters before the survivors tried to walk out, some dragging heavy sledges or boats over the snow and ice. There were too many easy breaches for the wind to break through and ravage poorly protected skin: Trouser buttons broke and fell off, holes in the cloth were patched with thick flannel, which became frayed and rank in the endless cycle of freeze and thaw. It was only after the Franklin Expedition was lost that the Admiralty made a greater effort to develop clothing specifically for the Arctic.