Ice Ghosts Page 4
In every detail of the expedition’s preparation, the Royal Navy expressed confidence that Sir John and his men would sail through the Arctic in historic triumph. They had great faith in technology. The ships were fitted with cutting-edge screw propellers, powered by a converted train engine. Fitzjames, who had been sailing in the Royal Navy since he was a twelve-year-old cabin boy, described Erebus’s upgrade in a letter to his wife after watching a locomotive engine from the London–Greenwich Railway, minus the wheels, arrive dockside. “It came drawn by ten coal black horses and weighs fifteen tons,” he wrote. Cranes lowered the used engines, rated to provide Franklin’s ships up to thirty horsepower, into each vessel. It was a quick, clever way to transform aging bomb vessels into more modern steamers with, designers hoped, just enough power on call to propel them through narrow leads in sea ice.
Bricks of coal dust and coal tar formed under hydraulic pressure, called “patent fuel,” were stacked up in the ships’ stores, to be used sparingly when the commander ordered power from their new retractable screw propellers. The boilers were to be fired up only when wind conditions weren’t right, or the leads were closing too fast, for Erebus and Terror to make progress on their own. But this early version of steam power was no panacea in the High Arctic. Even under the best conditions, the train engines could provide a top speed of four knots, or just a little faster than an easy jog in the park. Not much good against stiff head currents, which are common in the maze of channels through the Arctic Archipelago, but completely useless in a thirty-five-knot gale. Those are as regular as snowfall when winter blows away summer and things get really rough.
Deploying more high-tech gear of the day, the navy installed newly engineered propellers in wells that Franklin’s crewmen could uncouple and lift, along with the rudders. That reduced drag or kept them from being crushed if leads through the sea ice closed on their vulnerable hulls. Of course, as any early adopter knows, the latest gadget can go badly wrong when severely tested in real-world conditions, especially the Arctic’s. No one can say whether Erebus and Terror’s storable propellers and keels worked in an Arctic emergency or got stuck. To defend against powerful pack ice, the navy reinforced their hulls with iron plating and buttressed their frames with ten-inch beams.
Desalinators turned seawater into freshwater, for both the crew and the steam engines, which sucked up more than a ton of water each hour. High levels of lead found in the soft tissues and bones of recovered corpses from the Franklin Expedition point to the freshwater pipes, and not the men’s tinned food, as the likely reason the sailors were slowly poisoned. By one popular theory, that may have impaired the dying men’s judgment as they grew weaker. The most recent science, though, casts strong doubt on whether lead played any role at all in the expedition’s demise. A heating system, probably one that drew hot air off the ships’ galley stoves and piped it along wooden walls, reduced the cold and damp that could foster disease and make it harder for men living in close quarters to survive a winter trapped in ice.
The Admiralty sent along another piece of Victorian-era experimental equipment that was of more dubious value. Fitzjames called it an “India-rubber boat” in his journal. The patent office knew it as the recently invented Halkett Boat, an inflatable dinghy just big enough to carry three men precariously. Erebus and Terror each carried one into the Arctic for the first time. Inuit descriptions of the strange craft to early searchers helped establish the credibility of their stories. Who could concoct a story of Royal Navy sailors deploying foldable boats, pumped full of air, and bobbing about in seas cold enough to kill a man in minutes?
Lieutenant Peter Halkett came up with the dinghy design after Franklin’s canoes were lost in his first Arctic expedition, when eleven of the twenty men died. That got inventive minds thinking. Halkett’s idea was to take the waterproof cloth used to make the Mackintosh raincoat, the venerable British mac, infuse it with India rubber, and sew an inflatable, oval-shaped bladder inside. In the prototype, which Halkett tested on the River Thames, a man’s cloak contained the airtight bladder. It was a cloak boat. In the pockets of what was officially called the Inflated Cloak, the wearer conveniently carried a small paddle blade that could be attached to a gentleman’s walking stick. There was also a handy bellows to inflate the thing. An umbrella served as a sail.
For the Arctic, Halkett modified the cloak boat into a boat-in-a-knapsack. On the test run, he paddled several miles from Kew to the Westminster Bridge, dodging numerous Metropolitan steamers that almost ran him over. Franklin endorsed the portable airboat. He gave up the one assigned to him to an overland expedition led by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Dr. John Rae, but he got a replacement just in time for Erebus and Terror’s May 19, 1845, departure from England. Eleven days before Franklin’s expedition set sail, the Secretary of the Admiralty wrote to Halkett to offer qualified support.
“My Lords are of the opinion that your invention is extremely clever and ingenious, and that it might be useful in Exploring and Surveying Expeditions, but they do not consider that it would be applicable for general purposes in the Naval Service.”
In the end, the best-laid plans didn’t amount to much. The Arctic would decide the fate of Franklin and his crewmen. The sailors took comfort from knowing Erebus and Terror had already been through Hell and back.
Terror had probably proven her Arctic mettle best. In 1836, when Sir George Back tried to sail her to Repulse Bay, on the northwest shore of Hudson Bay, he got trapped in a moving minefield of ice floes, some massive with pressure ridges towering above the ship’s deck. When a September gale struck, with the sea ice closing in, Back’s sailors and officers hacked away with axes, ice chisels, handspikes, and long poles, trying to break open a lead. An early winter soon trapped them, about four miles from land, in powerful shore ice that squeezed hard. The violent force created several ice peaks, up to twenty feet high, which pushed Terror hard to starboard and threatened to keel her over. Back and his men could only pray that their ship wouldn’t be torn apart and sink.
“None but those who have experienced it can judge of the weariness of heart, the blank of feeling, the feverish sickliness of taste which gets the better of the whole man under circumstances like these,” he wrote.
Six years later, Erebus and Terror nearly went down together in stormy Antarctic seas under Sir James Clark Ross’s command. With a huge iceberg bearing down through a howling blizzard and ice floes, Erebus tacked hard to port. Terror couldn’t avoid both the iceberg and her sister ship. She hit Erebus so hard that the shock threw almost every man off his feet and embedded an anchor close to eight inches into solid wood.
“Our bowsprit, fore-topmast and other smaller spars, were carried away,” Ross wrote, “and the ships hanging together, entangled by their rigging, and dashing against each other with fearful violence, were falling down upon the weather face of the lofty berg under our lee, against which the waves were breaking and foaming to near the summit of its perpendicular cliffs. Sometimes she rose high above us, almost exposing her keel to view, and again descended as we in our turn rose to the top of the wave, threatening to bury her beneath us, whilst the crashing of the breaking upperworks and boats increased the horror of the scene.”
The storm raged through the night. At first light of daybreak, the ships’ “all’s well” signals hoisted high, Ross saw an almost continuous line of icebergs to windward. The collision had probably saved the mariners’ lives by pushing Erebus and Terror through a small opening that was their only escape.
“It seems, therefore, not at all improbable that the collision with the Terror was the means of our preservation, by forcing us backwards to the only practicable channel, instead of permitting us, as we were endeavouring, to run to the eastward, and become entangled in a labyrinth of heavy bergs, from which escape might have been impracticable, or perhaps impossible.”
Surely ships that had beaten both polar seas could do it again. Erebus was the larger of the two at 372 tons, and more than 1
04 feet long. Terror was slightly smaller at 325 tons, and close to 102 feet long. Each had three masts that rose several stories into the air. The tallest pierced more than 100 feet into the sky. Under full sail in the High Arctic, the ships seemed like spirits to the Inuit. Newly armored against the ice, with train engines to propel them, Franklin’s ships were a force unto themselves. They had been through war, Antarctic gales, and pack ice, yet they had stayed afloat to do it all again.
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HMS Erebus and Terror
On the eve of Franklin’s 1845 voyage into the Arctic Archipelago, Erebus and Terror were packed to the gunwales. It took the expedition’s sailors and officers longer than expected, from four in the morning until six at night, to transfer all the supplies from the transport ship Barretto Junior at their last stop together in Greenland’s Whale Fish Islands. Even after all Captain Fitzjames had seen in his relatively young naval career, two of her majesty’s finest ships getting set to sail into such a forbidding, yet stunningly beautiful new world was a sight to behold. Intoxicating enchantment left no room for fear.
“The deck is covered with coals and casks, leaving a small passage fore and aft, and we are very deep in the water,” he wrote in his journal on a July night in Greenland. “We sail, if possible, to-morrow night, and hope to get to Lancaster Sound by the 1st of August, which, however, is a lottery. It is now eleven o’clock, and the sun shines brightly above the snowy peaks of Disco. From the top of one of the islands, the other day, I counted 280 icebergs, and beautiful objects they are.”
Brimming with the optimism of a fresh voyage, Fitzjames told his adoptive family that a long silence would likely mean he had made it safely through the Northwest Passage all the way to Russia.
“Should you hear nothing till next June, send a letter, vià Petersburg, to Petro Paulowski, in Kamschatka, where Osmar was in the BLOSSOM, and had letters from England in three months. And now God bless you, and everything belonging to you.”
The bomb ships’ hulls strained under the burden of provisions, locomotive engines, heating systems, iron plate, and the men who had to coax the overtaxed vessels through tight leads in sea ice. They were so stuffed that some supplies had to be returned on the Barretto to England. Sir John also sent home five of his original contingent of 134 men, declared unfit for service. They turned out to be the lucky ones. Essentials loaded onto Franklin’s vessels included custom-made wolfskin blankets and clothing that the Royal Navy thought sufficient for the cold. That was an improvement over earlier polar expeditions, which were kitted out mainly with standard naval uniforms better suited to the South. But the clothes, coats, and boots supplied to Franklin and his men still couldn’t match the thick, layered furs that kept Inuit alive through tough winters, even during long hours of sledding and hunting.
If that bothered Sir John, he didn’t leave any record of a complaint. Judging from what the commander requisitioned, his focus was on making the ships comfortable homes for winter, well stocked with food, drink, and entertainment, on the assumption the Arctic would beckon him forward each summer with a parting of the sea ice. Franklin knew from hard-earned experience, and from his physician friend Sir John Richardson, that healthy food was the essential of all essentials. Even heavy clothing couldn’t keep an Arctic traveler warm if he were starving. When Franklin’s disastrous 1819–1822 overland expedition to the western exit of the Northwest Passage lost eleven men, the nine survivors ate what they could scrounge. They choked down pieces of year-old caribou skins and scarfed the plump white larvae of warble flies, also known as “bomb flies,” which better describes the big, aggressive bugs that feed off the blood of deer, caribou, and musk ox. Fortunately, they taste much better than they look. Squeezed between molars, the squirming larva explodes with a burst of salty, milky fluid. More of a snack than a meal, however, the bugs don’t pack nearly enough energy for a starving man to save himself.
Richardson learned firsthand about the link between good nutrition and staying warm when he and the other slowly starving men of the first Franklin Expedition tried to ford a raging river in late September. The plan was to run a line across so the men could pull themselves to the other side on a raft made from nearby willow trees. But the wood was too green to float very well. When two hardy French Canadian voyageurs couldn’t make it across by wading through bone-chilling, waist-deep water, Richardson tied a rope around his waist and accidentally stepped on a dagger that cut his foot to the bone. He jumped in anyway and tried to swim across. Richardson’s arms immediately numbed and he couldn’t move them. The physician turned onto his back and kicked closer to the opposite bank, but his legs froze up and he started to sink. The others hauled Richardson in, wrapped him in blankets, and sat their hypothermic doctor in front of a fire of burning willow. It was several hours before he could speak again. The feeling on his left side didn’t return until the following summer. In his journal, when he recalled the brush with death, he blamed it not on a risky move but on weeks of hunger.
“It may be worthy of remark that I should have had little hesitation in any former period of my life, at plunging into water even below 38 degrees Fahrenheit, but at this time I was reduced almost to skin and bone and, like the rest of the party, suffered from degrees of cold that would have been disregarded in health and vigor. During the whole of our march we experienced that no quantity of clothing would keep us warm whilst we fasted, but on those occasions on which we were enabled to go to bed with full stomachs, we passed the night in a warm and comfortable manner.”
Franklin, a known stickler for detail in both his planning and his observations as an explorer, kept in mind the importance of full stomachs when making his request to the Royal Navy’s Victualling Department. It sent so much food that he estimated it would keep the expedition well fed for at least three years—even longer if the men were forced to get by on emergency rations. The long menu included 32,224 pounds of beef, almost as much pork, and more than 33,000 pounds of tinned meat, including boiled and roast beef and mutton, veal and ox-cheek. The ships’ holds also carried canned vegetables, including potatoes, carrots, and parsnips. Each man got about a pint of soup a day. To make the crews’ rations more palatable, cooks could dip into 200 pounds of pepper, 580 gallons of pickled cabbage, onions, and walnuts, 170 pounds of cranberries, and half a ton of mustard. With 23,576 pounds of sugar, and a tenth as much tea, there was an abundance of warm, sweetened beverages to get stranded mariners through a bleak winter’s day.
Then there was the hard stuff, the grog that had kept Royal Navy sailors in good spirits since the mid-eighteenth century, usually in a concoction of weak beer, rum, and lime or lemon juice loaded with Vitamin C to combat scurvy. The Franklin Expedition carried 3,684 gallons of alcohol, likely rum, along with 9,300 pounds of lemon juice and 200 gallons of wine for the sick. Officers packed private caches of more refined wine for their own dining pleasure. They also brought along cigars. Energy boosts came from 9,450 pounds of chocolate. Stores of biscuits, pemmican, suet, raisins, peas, vinegar, Scotch barley, and oatmeal made up the bulk of the remaining stores.
Anyone too ill to be fixed up with a tot or two of wine didn’t have much more to hope for on a Royal Navy ship in the Arctic. An expedition medicine chest, made of mahogany with a lock and strap, and measuring fourteen inches by thirteen inches and some five inches deep, contained twenty-three medicine bottles. They were clear glass, with glass stoppers and leather caps attached with brown thread. Their contents included some of the leading remedies of the day. One was camphorated tincture of opium, spooned out to subdue coughs or to still bowels erupting with diarrhea. There was also perchloride of mercury, a heavy, white crystalline powder used as an escharotic or corrosive salve, often to burn off sores or growths.
Sir John also was prepared to care for his men’s mental health. That lesson was well learned from the Parry Expedition’s long, tedious winter stuck in sea ice. Franklin made sure there was space for an abundant supply of diversions in case he and his men
had a lot of time to kill. Terror had a library of 1,200 books, and the one aboard the Erebus was even bigger by a few hundred more. After cataloguing all the volumes at sea, Fitzjames praised them as a “most splendid collection.” At the practical end were manuals on keeping steam engines running and earlier Arctic explorers’ journals for quick reference. There was also the sentimental read, such as Oliver Goldsmith’s popular The Vicar of Wakefield, as well as the comedy and drama of William Shakespeare’s plays and Charles Dickens’s novels Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers. For laughs at the establishment’s expense, the library shelves offered issues of the satirical weekly magazine Punch. Not long before the ships sailed, Franklin asked the Admiralty to provide 100 Christian books, including Bibles and prayer books, which he planned to sell on board at cost. But he canceled that order after friends and religious groups donated the books the commander wanted.
If the expedition had to winter over, Franklin was ready to make good use of the delay by teaching his largely illiterate sailors how to read and write. Supplies included seventy slates and pencils, along with 200 pens, ink, paper, and Common Arithmetic books. Officers had the pleasure of privacy in cramped cabins where they could work, or settle into a book, at mahogany desks. In the long winter darkness, when crewmen weren’t out on the ice hauling sledges or keeping busy with odd jobs, they would live and toil below deck by the flickering light of candles or oil lamps. The expedition carried 2,700 pounds of candles made from beeswax, the wax of carnauba palms, or from spermaceti, a waxy substance drawn from the head of a sperm whale. The ships also had Argand lamps, which burned whale or vegetable oil. Glass prisms bolted into the outer deck, called Preston’s Patent Ventillating Illuminators, funneled sunlight and fresh air into cabins and mess areas.