Ice Ghosts Read online

  At the top of the Admiralty’s short list for the 1845 expedition commander was Sir Edward William Parry. But the explorer who pioneered survival on ice in the High Arctic was tired of the place. He turned down the high command. The Royal Navy then tried Sir James Clark Ross, whose discovery of the North Magnetic Pole made him ideal for the expedition’s twin goals of science and exploration. One potential problem: His uncle John had written that nasty pamphlet excoriating Barrow as a fraud. But there was a much bigger hurdle: Sir James had promised his newlywed wife that he too had put the Arctic behind him. Barrow thought the younger James Fitzjames, who made captain the year of the voyage, would do well. But the Admiralty ruled him out as too green at age thirty-two and put him in charge of the magnetic observations instead. As the Admiralty’s leaders worked their way farther down the list of prospects, both Franklin and his wife were lobbying hard. Sir John knew Jane feared what would happen if he sat idle in retirement. In 1830, during a hiatus before he took the governor’s job in Van Diemen’s Land, Lady Franklin had warned of “the shame and remorse” of being idle and vain again. She wanted him back in the Arctic and insisted the wives of two other polar veterans wanted the same for their husbands. Jane was hardly subtle, writing:

  “When all the latent energies of your nature are elicited, not only I, but all the world (most proudly do I say even literally that all the world) knows what you can do, and England has acknowledged with shouts which almost drowned the declaration that:—

  ‘In the proud memorials of her fame,

  Stands, linked with deathless glory, Franklin’s name.’”

  Lady Franklin stepped up the pressure after Sir John’s disgraced callback from the colony. In a letter to Sir James Clark Ross, who had already told Franklin he would turn down the Arctic expedition command if offered, Jane stressed that support from “his own department,” the Royal Navy, would help him overcome the Colonial Office’s opposition. She confided “the most conflicted feelings” about her aging husband going back to the Arctic. But if Sir James, whom she called “the right person,” wasn’t going, “I should wish Sir John to have it in his power to go and not be put aside for his age. I do not think he would wish to go unless he felt himself equal to it.” She was worried about the impact of Lord Stanley’s “injustice and tyranny” on Franklin’s spirit if the great explorer ended up jobless. Death in the cold, northern desert seemed a better fate than that.

  “I dread exceedingly the effect on his mind of being without honourable and immediate employment,” she said, “and it is this which enables me to support the idea of parting with him on a service of difficulty and danger better than I otherwise should.”

  Before settling on a final choice for commander, the Admiralty sought Franklin’s views on the proposed expedition, which he summarized in a letter in early 1844. This was his chance to impress the decision-makers and secure his spot on the bridge for what could well be the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Steam engines would give ships a good chance of making the final, uncharted distance between the already explored entrance and exit from the archipelago, he suggested in a reply to Lord Haddington. Even if that failed, the overriding benefit of continued exploration justified another attempt, Franklin maintained, leaving no doubt he was eager to go north under any circumstances. Age, and the pain of colonial politics, hadn’t sapped his passion for discovery. He wanted to finish the job. With the best-equipped ships ever to sail for the Arctic ready to search for the passage’s relatively short missing link, it seemed the next to try for the biggest prize left in navigation was destined to grab it.

  “Should there be any who say of these Arctic expeditions, To what purpose have they been? I would desire them to compare our present map of that region and of the northern coast of America with that of 1818, when these expeditions commenced,” Franklin argued against the growing number of doubters. “They will find in the latter only three points marked on the northern coast of America, and nothing to the northward of it. Surely it cannot be denied that so large an addition to the geography of the northern parts of America and the Arctic regions is, in itself, an object worthy of all the efforts that have been made in the course of former expeditions.”

  On a winter’s day in February 1845, Lord Haddington summoned Franklin to his London office. Franklin thought his legacy was riding on the outcome. In fact, Sir John’s very life was on the line as he made his way to the Admiralty buildings on the west side of Whitehall, which housed important government offices, including the Treasury. The seat of Royal Navy power was across the cobblestone street from Great Scotland Yard, home of the Metropolitan Police. The Admiralty was an imposing eighteenth-century brick building with three stories. It was easy to spot from a distance because of its towering rooftop semaphore, a city landmark in its day. A Victorian-era travel guide, which included thirty-five thousand fares for horse-drawn cabs, described the tower as “one of the minor sights of London.” Operators of the device, similar to mechanical arms on railway tracks, sent coded messages through relay stations, where men watching through telescopes passed them along to seaports on the horizon. Urgent communications, like the warning of a looming invasion from the continent, once took days to convey via messengers on horseback. The semaphore network could transmit them within hours.

  The front entrance to the Admiralty’s main building took Franklin past sentries and panels of dolphins in relief, through a triumphal arch in a broad stone screen. That was built in the eighteenth century to ward off troublemakers after sailors rioted. Franklin walked beneath sculptures of winged sea horses, flanked by colonnades of Tuscan columns, shadowed by three-bay domed pavilions. This was the majesty to which he was accustomed, a far cry from the humiliation of Van Diemen’s Land. This place, the exalted fulcrum of the Royal Navy that had made him a man to be reckoned with, emanated the might of a navy that raised Britain to the pinnacle of her imperial power. The Admiralty, it seemed, could accomplish anything the Admiralty wanted. Why not Sir John Franklin too?

  Upstairs, the six Lords Commissioners and the civil servants who advised them met in a high-ceilinged boardroom with tall windows along one side and a fireplace on the other. There they decided weighty matters of a military force overseeing a far-flung empire, such as whether even to bother trying for the Northwest Passage again, with all the cost and risk that entailed. Seated around a long mahogany table, surrounded by pull-down charts and a big, mounted wind vane, they decided the fates of many men and, at times, the course of naval history. Sir John’s meeting didn’t start well. Lord Haddington promptly told the explorer that time might have passed him by. He suggested Franklin take heart from the fame he had already earned and stay comfortable at home. In a question that must have hurt, the man who held the key to Franklin’s destiny asked whether his body could withstand another run at the Arctic.

  “Have you really thought seriously of the nature of the undertaking at your age, for, you know, I know your age: you are 59,” Lord Haddington said.

  “Not quite,” Sir John interjected, eager not to be unfairly aged a couple of months short of his birthday.

  The cabinet minister responsible for the Royal Navy was still worried he’d be to blame if Franklin “broke down” on what would be his fourth polar expedition, his third as commander. Franklin, either thinking Lord Haddington was being kind in his concern or simply desperate to please, repeatedly offered to undergo a physical examination.

  “I know all your services,” Lord Haddington continued. “They have been very various, and latterly you have been on a civil service which must have caused you great care and anxiety.”

  That one, bringing the ugliness of Van Diemen’s Land into the room, certainly stung. Franklin insisted again that the Arctic, brutal as nature could be, wasn’t too much for him. If he weren’t sure of it, he wouldn’t ask to go. After all, this one wouldn’t be a walking expedition, like his first two. Admitting the obvious, he was too fat for that now.

  Franklin pressed one las
t, simple argument, the humble words of a fallen man grasping for lost honor by denying the almost pathetically obvious: “I have nothing to gain by it.”

  Silent for a moment, Lord Haddington said: “We’ll consider the conversation as not having passed. It requires a little consideration. In a day or two you will hear from me.”

  To deal with questions of his age, strength, and ability to withstand the cold, Franklin decided to get a note from a doctor. He contacted his friend and surgeon Sir John Richardson, who knew a few things about being cold in the Arctic. On Franklin’s disastrous, first overland expedition to the mouth of the Coppermine River, a storm destroyed their canoes, forcing Richardson to swim for his life. He suffered severe hypothermia. During six Arctic winters with Franklin, including two overland expeditions that covered thousands of miles, Richardson wrote, he had never seen his friend and leader suffer frostbite. The surgeon certified Franklin fit for duty.

  Lord Haddington was true to his word. In two days, February 7, 1845, a letter arrived at Franklin’s door bearing the Admiralty’s seal. He had received his command. Once again, he would be facing his preferred opponent, the Arctic. Franklin liked his chances.

  FRANKLIN’S OFFICIAL instructions followed three months later, dated May 5, 1845, deeming it “expedient that further attempt should be made for the accomplishment of a north-west passage by sea from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, of which passage a small portion only remains to be completed.” That principal objective was set out in the first of twenty-three clauses, eight of which covered scientific observations, using equipment on board to study magnetism. That responsibility, along with recording observations of the atmosphere and weather, would fall to Fitzjames. He would also be captain of Erebus, Franklin’s flagship. The commander was further told “to make use of every means in your power to collect and preserve specimens of animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms.” At sea, Franklin reminded Fitzjames that meant “observing everything from a flea to a whale in the unknown regions we are to visit.”

  The bulk of the Admiralty’s orders—which would become the focus of a lively debate among experts as months, and then years, passed without word from the expedition—spelled out the route Franklin was to take. The steam engines and propellers were only to be used to push through any leads that opened in the ice pack, or to beat unfavorable winds or complete calm, and always with an eye on the small supply of coal Erebus and Terror carried. Sir John was ordered to follow a well-known course through Barrow Strait to Melville Island. From there, “it is hoped that the remaining portion of the passage, about 900 miles, to the Bhering’s Strait [between Alaska and Russia] may also be found equally free from obstruction,” the Admiralty’s instructions read. On this point, the orders were very clear: Franklin was not to stop to examine any routes northward or southward until he reached Cape Walker, at the northeast tip of Russell Island, which sits just north of Prince of Wales Island.

  The Admiralty was concerned about the “unusual magnitude and apparently fixed state of the barrier ice” that Sir William Parry reported when he and his crew were beset a quarter century earlier in HMS Hecla and HMS Griper, off Cape Dundas, on the southern shores of Melville Island. They named the spot Winter Harbor and spent ten months there, showing that sailors could survive a winter on the ice. It was the farthest point west that Royal Navy explorers had reached in the Arctic Archipelago, and Parry proved to be the ideal leader in a horrible situation. He knew that discipline, routine, innovation, and entertainment were essential to surviving not just the cold and gloom but also the interminable boredom. The commander and his men learned the hard way to deal with basic problems that came with hunkering down in a Royal Navy ship for an Arctic winter, lessons that were passed down to the Franklin Expedition.

  In dank quarters below deck, where condensation from stoves, a makeshift brewery, and sailors’ breath showered the men with a steady drip, they published a weekly newspaper, the North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle. Someone had accidentally brought along a book of plays, so Parry ordered his officers to perform for the crewmen. For Christmas, they wrote a musical about being stuck in the Arctic Archipelago, and surviving into the dead of winter. Gathered in the candlelit fog on the Hecla, the air they breathed below freezing, the men laughed and sang and forgot, for the moment, that they might never escape. Parry kept morale high, his men working together, until the Arctic let him take them home.

  Writing instructions to Franklin almost twenty-six years later, the Admiralty heeded the ordeal of Parry and his men. They provided some intriguing leeway once Sir John was sailing west for Melville Island: If permanent ice blocked his way farther to the east, and an alternate route north between Devon and Cornwallis Islands appeared to be open—and if the quick shift from summer to winter allowed him enough time—he should head up there. In apparent contradiction to the earlier clause ordering Franklin to follow Parry’s well-known route, the instruction allowed him the option to see if he could find “a more ready access to the open sea, where there would be neither islands nor banks to arrest and fix the floating masses of ice.” That crucial alternative may have come from Franklin himself as an amendment to a first draft, because the section is written in the margin of the original document. The added option may very well have set him and his sailors on course to their doom.

  Other clauses seemed unnecessary for an explorer of Franklin’s experience, but the Admiralty preferred to nail things down wherever possible. If the expedition had to winter over, the commander should try to find safe harbor and attend to his men’s health. If Franklin happened to meet “either Eskimaux or Indians, near the place where you winter, you are to endeavor by every means in your power to cultivate a friendship with them, by making them presents of such articles as you may be supplied with, and which may be useful or agreeable to them; you will, however, take care not to suffer yourself to be surprised by them but use every precaution, and be constantly on your guard against any hostility.”

  Science was just as important to the mission as completing the Northwest Passage. The empire stood to gain a lot from observations recorded with the expedition’s magnetometers because of the potential improvements to the humble compass. Declination had troubled navigators since Yi Xing, a Chinese Buddhist monk who was an astronomer, mathematician, and engineer in the Tang Dynasty, first described the gap between magnetic north and true north around 720 AD. That was long before Chinese navigators pioneered the use of compasses at sea near the end of the eleventh century. The compass reached European hands the following century. Understanding the gap between the two norths, and potentially cutting hundreds of wasted miles off a navigator’s course, was critical to the world’s greatest naval power. But the expedition’s magnetic readings were also meant to feed a radically new phenomenon: the unprecedented international scientific effort to understand Earth’s magnetic field.

  A Prussian nobleman’s chance encounter with a magnetic rock led to a global effort to gather data to unlock the secrets of Earth’s magnetic field, one of the most ambitious international undertakings the scientific world had ever seen. The accomplishment is even more remarkable because it began in a Europe rebuilding after a long, deeply divisive, and costly war. Its roots run back to the Fichtel Mountains of northeastern Bavaria, where, in 1796, a mining inspector and Prussian nobleman named Alexander von Humboldt was measuring a large block of serpentine rock. His compass went haywire, completely reversing direction. That began a lifelong crusade to crack the secrets of Earth’s geomagnetic field. Humboldt became especially interested in geomagnetic storms, which erupt when solar winds roil the magnetosphere. The disturbances amp up the aurora borealis, or northern lights, and give a fresh jolt to the Arctic’s magic. He wondered whether magnetic storms occurred simultaneously around the planet.

  Humboldt built his first observatory in Berlin in the fall of 1828. Over the next two years, he persuaded colleagues to set up a chain of them to take measurements at the same time, in precisely the sam
e way, in several places. They included Paris and sites across the Russian Empire, including what was then the czarist possession of Alaska. In Beijing, a Greek Orthodox monastery housed one of the new observatories. The British joined the effort when Humboldt wrote, in a long letter that blended history, theory, engineering, and discovery, to the president of the Royal Society, the Duke of Sussex.

  Humboldt’s pitch in April 1836, and the needs of a vast scientific endeavor that demanded synchronized observations in key parts of the world, played perfectly to the Victorian sense that the British Empire was an essential engine of human progress. He asked that the Royal Society “exert its powerful influence” to extend the chain of stations measuring the Earth’s magnetic field, with equipment matching precise specifications, either in the tropics or in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere and in Canada. Soon the list of geomagnetic observatories in British colonies included Toronto, Singapore, and Madras. The global total eventually reached around 150. Like the international space station orbiting Earth at the end of the Cold War, Humboldt’s plan gave nations a compelling scientific reason to work together.

  To help improve the understanding of Arctic Ocean currents, and to increase the possibility of tracking the expedition, the Royal Navy’s high command instructed Franklin, once past latitude 65 degrees north, to record the ships’ position each day on a printed form. Each one was to be sealed in a bottle or copper cylinder and tossed overboard to ride the ocean currents. Erebus and Terror each carried two hundred of the cylinders. The preprinted forms had instructions for anyone who might find one in six languages, including French, Spanish, German, and Danish. They asked that the retrieved document be forwarded to the Secretary of the Admiralty in London, or the closest British consul, with a note of the time and place where it was discovered. Only one of the cylinders was ever reported found. In July 1849, it was recovered from the rocks on Greenland’s coast. That raised hopes, but only briefly because the smudged relic wasn’t much of a clue in what had become the growing Franklin mystery. The report gave the expedition’s position on June 30, 1845, when Erebus and Terror were still traveling with their coal-laden supply ship Barretto Junior, and about to cross the Arctic Circle on their way to Disko.