Ice Ghosts Read online

  After abandoning their best shelter, Erebus and Terror, in 1848, the mariners had to trek for months, through snow and ice in winter and sucking mud if the weather warmed enough those summers. Their feet were shielded by relatively thin boots insulated with whatever the wearer could scrounge. Royal Navy seamen’s boots were long, square-toed, and rounded at the top to fit a man’s calf. They wouldn’t be much against a January storm on a southern city’s streets today, let alone in an especially cold few years in the Arctic. Brass screws bored through the soles might have improved the traction slightly, and straw or cloth shoved into the empty toe space might have preserved a hint of heat. Compared with the skins of seal, caribou, or polar bear, among the excellent natural insulators in multilayered Inuit kamiik, a blue cloth legging attached to the ankles of the British sailors’ seaboots was useless adornment. Severe frostbite was more likely to occur the longer a man survived, only to die a slow, excruciating death. For men hauling the bulky sledges, sweating and freezing as they leaned into hammering winds, gangrene eating through their toes, the boots would have squeezed and scraped like painful shackles.

  In the Age of Discovery, it seemed science and technology could solve any problem given enough time and determined thought. But just as Mary Shelley had warned in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published the same year Barrow was making his case for Arctic exploration, humans had to be cautious about just how far they wanted to test the limits of nature. Franklin may well have gone too far, expecting Erebus and Terror to take him the final, unknown distance. He had seen for himself part of the western exit from the passage on his earlier overland expeditions. He only had to find a way through the archipelago’s uncharted middle. Late in the summer of 1846, when gales strike suddenly from the north and sea ice can close hard and fast like a vise, faith in steam power might have tempted Franklin to go deeper into Peel Sound than was wise. At that time of year, the Arctic likely gave him fair warning to stop. Instead, a hero past his prime, struggling to regain lost glory, pressed southward along the eastern shores of Prince of Wales Island toward an ice trap waiting to spring shut at the top of Victoria Strait.

  Other expeditions had recovered from disaster, with inevitable losses, and made it home after more than one winter stuck in the Arctic. But that was hardly a sure thing. Getting out of trouble in the High Arctic depends largely on where, and how, you got into it, and whether you can think clearly enough to make lifesaving decisions. Recovering from a stupid choice, or sheer bad luck, was especially difficult where Franklin and his men got stranded: off the northern tip of King William Island, where the easiest big game to hunt—caribou and musk ox—were hard to find in those years. Without good nutrition, the cold wears a man down faster, and the sound judgment of long experience can vanish like a waking dream. That’s how it looked to Sir John Richardson, a surgeon and Franklin friend who had served alongside him in the grueling overland journeys and certified the commander’s fitness for his final attempt at the transit by sea. Based on the scattered clues that searchers had gathered by 1861, which included suspicions the sailors may have been poisoned by improperly canned food and threw much of the rest away, Richardson concluded the survivors were wasting away on short rations.

  “Even on the ordinary full allowance of the navy, scurvy has almost invariably assailed the crews of ships after a second winter within the Arctic circle, the expeditions that have escaped that scourge having had either a large supply of preserved meats and pemican to resort to, and plenty of dried vegetables and vegetable acids, or been successful in adding deer, musk-oxen, and bears, to their stock of provisions.”

  The winters that finished off Franklin and his 128 men were so severe that they became part of Inuit legend. They would long lay blame on the qalunaaq, the white men, for unleashing malevolent spirits upon the island. When American Charles Francis Hall gave up small-town newspapering to go north and hunt for the Franklin Expedition in the 1860s, an Inuit mother told him two shamans, or angakkuit, had cast a spell on the area where the ships were abandoned: “The Innuits wished to live near that place (where the ships were) but could not kill anything for their food. They (the Innuits) really believed that the presence of Koblunas (whites) in that part of the country was the cause of all their (the Innuits’) trouble.”

  You don’t have to walk far beyond the edge of Nunavut’s Gjoa Haven today to be at the mercy of the same wilderness that trapped and killed Franklin and his men, with a vengeance that the Royal Navy had never seen in its long and glorious history of Arctic exploration. A person feels very small, and frail, standing alone in the dead of winter, when the rolling sea is frozen hard and thick, the birds have flown far south, and the air is still. The only sound is your own breathing. Hold that for a moment, out of fear or awe, and you hear nothing but silence, complete and true. Life isn’t so certain anymore.

  _______

  AS CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER and author W. Gillies Ross wrote, quoting yet another Franklin buff, Alfred Friendly: “The Franklin search—grandiose yet hugely ineffective—has been called ‘the most extensive, expensive, perverse, ill-starred and abundantly written-about manhunt in history.’” Based on information from salvors, who plumb the depths for wrecks with the zeal of prospectors digging for the next motherlode, UNESCO estimates that more than three million shipwrecks lie on the bottom of the Earth’s rivers, lakes, and oceans. Some are more than a thousand years old. None have spawned so many search expeditions, spanning so many generations, or fueled as much historical debate and political intrigue, as Erebus and Terror.

  Sir John Franklin and his brave sailors have sustained a puzzling hold on the minds of many people for more than 170 years. From 1847 to 1859, no fewer than thirty-six expeditions sailed in search of the men or their remains or to resupply those who were searching. Three others tried but had to abort before reaching the Far North. The Admiralty offered a reward of £20,000, equivalent to more than $1.8 million today, for rescuing the Franklin Expedition, or half that amount for determining its fate. That helped sweeten the prospect of solving a mystery that had become a public obsession in Britain. Lady Franklin spent most of her own fortune to bankroll efforts when the Admiralty tried to move on. In more recent decades, countless others have gone looking—from obsessed adventurers trekking across the tundra to billionaires seeking the kind of legacy mere money can’t buy. Add in the cost of professional searches and the total bill easily runs into tens of millions of today’s dollars.

  Like Shakespeare, it seems, the Franklin tale never grows old because people of each generation can read into it what they want, or need, to see. When science and pushing the boundaries fall out of favor, Sir John Franklin is regarded as a fool. When cynical politics is the problem with the world, Franklin is seen as a wise man pushing the limits of the wilderness while cloistered Lords of the Admiralty, and their backstabbing friends, are to blame for the catastrophe. One truth is eternal: Royal Navy prejudice toward indigenous people helped doom the Franklin Expedition, and the arrogant disregard for Inuit knowledge prolonged efforts to find out what happened to Sir John Franklin and the men he led to their deaths. Today, as the Arctic loses the ice cover that helps cool the planet, it would be wise to heed the cost of ignoring the people who best know that fragile, wrathful place.

  The long hunt for Erebus and Terror was never purely about finding lost sailors or solving the riddles of a naval disaster that rattled British faith in their power over the sea. Like any epic, this one is rich with the timeless contradictions of the human condition. There is courage and folly, hubris and blind ambition, ingenuity and synchronicity. As those meaningful coincidences unfold, and lines of fate converge, they seem to defy mere chance. Perhaps there is more to those metaphysical moments than archaeologists, historians, and others investigating the tangible can concede. The people who have lived in the High Arctic the longest—the Inuit who have understood a capricious place for centuries—are certain of this: If you must see to know, you will miss many things tha
t are real.

  After generations of political and bureaucratic maneuvering, the building of careers and the burnishing of legacies, it’s easy to forget that this is a long, costly hunt for two sunken ships with no cargo of gold or jewels or any other treasure beyond the relics of history. Finding the commander’s body, perhaps mummified by the permafrost, would be an even bigger breakthrough, worthy of a hero’s funeral in England. Still, at the heart of the Franklin mystery is why people would spend so much time, money, and effort, for so many generations, searching one of the most unforgiving places on Earth to discover what seems obvious: Franklin and his men challenged the Arctic and the Arctic won. Many have tried the Arctic’s patience since then and paid dearly. It’s one of the last places left on our planet that holds out, as long as it can, refusing to bow to human will. Which, of course, only tempts more conquerors to try.

  The bigger questions, burning like distant lanterns in an endless Arctic night, are about the nature of the people who went looking for Franklin and his lost sailors, why they did it, and what that tells us about ourselves.

  After all, one way or another, we’re each searching for something.

  PART I

  THE EXPEDITION

  1

  Franklin’s Last Mission

  Knowing when to bow out can be a hero’s saving grace. Sir John missed his cue. Franklin thought he needed one last try at the Northwest Passage to salvage a legacy badly damaged by colonial politics. The woman he loved, his wife Jane, convinced him to go for broke in the very place that had made him a hero. He overplayed a bad hand and it killed him, along with the 128 men who followed Franklin to the High Arctic. For a time, history has been relatively kind to him anyway. Doubters have questioned whether the Admiralty was wise to put a man of his advanced age and fading abilities as an Arctic explorer in charge of the 1845 expedition. Some have been more blunt and called him incompetent. Others point to factors out of his control, such as lead poisoning or botulism in shoddily tinned food, as the real culprits behind the worst disaster in the Royal Navy’s long history of polar exploration. A more likely explanation lies in the volatile moods of the Arctic itself, a land that still resists conquest. As Inuit have long understood, survival at the top of the world is impossible without due respect and cooperation. Like many Royal Navy men before them, Franklin and his crew assumed they could beat the Arctic on their own, eschewing Inuit as irrelevant, godless savages. Until it was too late.

  Sir John had practically begged for the mission. He was only able to talk the Royal Navy high command into letting him go because their preferred commanders wouldn’t. A month shy of his fifty-ninth birthday, when the Franklin Expedition set sail from Greenhithe on the River Thames, he went to sea for the last time as a hard-worn, elderly man. War, polar exploration, and ugly bureaucratic fights had knocked him around many times, but he always found a way to get back on his feet and keep going. A fourth journey in search of the Northwest Passage, the third as commander, seemed Franklin’s last, best chance to reclaim a good name that colonials had tried to steal in Van Diemen’s Land, which would become Tasmania. He had already done more than enough to earn a quiet, comfortable retirement. But that was not the Franklin way. Win or lose, he would make his stand where he belonged: in the ice-choked passage that was a mammoth maritime puzzle waiting to be solved.

  FRANKLIN’S LEGACY should have been strong enough to survive the failure of good intentions in a minor colony built with convict labor and the blood of dispossessed aboriginal people. A veteran of Britain’s most revered victory at sea, Franklin was a signal midshipman in Admiral Viscount Lord Nelson’s fleet in 1805 when the Royal Navy defeated French and Spanish forces in the epic Battle of Trafalgar. HMS Bellerophon closed on the L’Aigle, their masts entangled, and French troops tried to board the British ship. From her clear side, a French man-of-war let loose with a cannon barrage twice, killing some three hundred British sailors. All but seven of the forty-seven British seamen on the Bellerophon’s quarterdeck died. Nearly deaf from the relentless cannonade, Franklin barely made it. A French sniper in a cocked hat overlooked him from the L’Aigle’s foretop, a wooden platform roughly two-thirds of the way up the foremast. He took aim and dropped Franklin’s friend dead on the deck. When Franklin turned to help a Marine sergeant carry a black sailor below to have his wounds wrapped, a sniper shot the injured man through the chest.

  “He’ll have you next,” Franklin told the sergeant, who quickly ducked down into the lower deck, still looking for a good line of sight on the sniper. Seeing the French shooter raise his rifle for another try, Franklin took cover behind a mast, dodging a lead ball that struck a few feet away. Franklin got a good look at the man who wanted to kill him and vowed to remember the French sniper’s face as long as he lived. With the seventh shot, the sergeant finally dispatched the sniper and Franklin watched him plunge headfirst into the sea.

  Almost a decade after Trafalgar, Franklin was a lieutenant on HMS Bedford when she joined an attack on New Orleans, in the third and final year of the War of 1812. The Bedford was tasked to help move some eight thousand British troops ashore for what they expected would be a rout of General (and future president) Andrew Jackson’s outnumbered defenders. He had around 4,500 fighters, a mishmash of army regulars, Choctaw Indians, freed slaves, and frontiersmen, backed up by French pirate Jean Lafitte. One of Jackson’s men, likely among his famed Tennessee sharpshooters, winged Franklin in the shoulder, wounding him slightly.

  Before seeking command of Erebus and Terror, Franklin had been on three Arctic expeditions, two of them as commander. He was best known for exploring North America’s Arctic coast overland. The first, poorly planned mission nearly killed him. The British press heralded Franklin as the man who ate his leather boots to avoid starvation in 1821, at the end of a three-year expedition that left eleven of twenty men dead, and a whiff of murder, even cannibalism. After such a glorious career in the navy Franklin had served since he was fourteen, petty political backstabbing was his undoing. Sir John took a posting as governor of the island colony of Van Diemen’s Land in 1836. The penal colony’s entrenched family compact, which did whatever was necessary to protect the wealth and privileges that came with access to cheap convict labor, had it in for Sir John and Lady Franklin from the start.

  They wanted to reform the system, not abolish it, but even tinkering was enough to make very determined enemies. Free settlers running a penal colony—mere masters of a brutal backwater—were nothing next to a man who had accomplished, and survived, as much as Sir John. But on their turf, in a bureaucratic knife fight, he was vulnerable. Franklin’s top official conspired against him. The local press maligned him and took special glee in running down Lady Franklin. On a grueling cross-country expedition with her husband and a few friends in 1842, Jane hiked through brush, waded through marshes and swamps, climbed mountains and forded raging rivers, often getting drenched and pelted by rain, hail, sleet, and snow. She was carried part of the way in a palanquin, a spartan wooden armchair with a narrow footrest and four metal rings to hold the bearers’ poles. Four prisoners conveyed her in half-hour shifts.

  The colony was scandalized. The Van Diemen’s Land Chronicle accused the governor of paying “thrice-convicted felons” to join a journey portrayed as a self-indulgent lark. Then came the kicker. The Chronicle claimed the governor rewarded the prisoners with tickets of leave, or a form of parole that could lead to a full pardon. Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary in London, sided with Franklin’s political enemies and recalled him. Humiliated, he lobbied hard with Jane’s help to get back to the place that had made him a hero—the High Arctic. An unshakable sense of betrayal by small men drove Franklin to his death. He took 128 men with him. Jane’s gnawing guilt for urging him to go, as much as her love for a man she had admired since long before they married, compelled her to topple any obstacle in a ceaseless struggle to find him, or at least figure out why he died, lost and forsaken in the ice.

  Portly and bald b
ut for an imperial fringe of unruly hair, Franklin was not the Admiralty’s first choice for the 1845 expedition. He struck Sir John Barrow, and others in the naval establishment, as too old for the job. Franklin complained to his wife that the Earl of Haddington, the top political appointee overseeing the Royal Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty, had confided in Sir James Clark Ross that advancing age wasn’t all that worried him about Franklin. The earl also spoke “of my suffering greatly from cold,” Franklin wrote to his wife.

  With cabinet rank, Lord Haddington was the man through whom politicians expressed their will and, in return, the conduit for the navy to air its complaints to Parliament. If the Admiralty screwed up, the First Lord could expect to feel the heat. Already severely weakened by his political clashes with the Colonial Office, Franklin wasn’t exactly in a strong position to take on someone of Lord Haddington’s clout. Yet he did, with two of the toughest allies he could muster: his wife and Sir John Ross, a polar explorer who couldn’t imagine age or cold hampering Franklin. In his indignant letter to Lady Franklin, Sir John said, “Ross expressed his astonishment at the latter reason, for he had never heard it even hinted at before, which, if it had been the case, must have been spoken of by someone or other of the officers and men who served under him.” Franklin, it seems, scented enemies all around.