Frozen in Time (24 page)

When Sir John Franklin sailed from the Thames in May 1845, an entire nation believed that the honour of conquering the Northwest Passage was within his grasp. None could have known that inside the tins stored in the ship's hold there ticked a time bomb that helped not only to deny Franklin his triumph but to steal away 129 brave lives. And while good hopes decayed in a relatively short time for the expedition crews, the physicians aboard the
Erebus
and
Terror
would have been helpless to intervene. The health risks imposed by the use of lead-tin solder were simply not appreciated at that time. (It was not until 1890 that government legislation in Britain finally banned soldering on the insides of food tins.)

There is often a terrible price to pay in human exploration reliant upon new technology. That fact was vividly demonstrated again in recent years by the failure of the space shuttles
Challenger
in 1986 and
Columbia
in 2003. Indeed, our explorers of space share a bond with past explorers of the unknown frozen shores of the earth. In many ways, there is no difference between the Franklin and space shuttle disasters. Time, technology, social conditions and politics have changed, but the spirit and motivation underlying both endeavours remain. Both used the most advanced technology of their time and both paid the ultimate price. An article published in an 1855 edition of
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
laments those dangers:

We confess we have not heart enough, in the general enterprise of knowledge, to view such a sacrifice as that of Franklin and his crew without a chill of horror: there is something frightful, inexorable, inhuman, in prosecuting researches, which are mere researches, after such a costly fashion… and when we hear of the martyrs of science, whether they perish among the arctic snow or the sands of the desert, we begin to think of science herself as a placid Juggernaut… with benevolent pretensions, winning, by some weird magic, and throwing away with all the calmness of an abstract and impersonal principle, those generous lives.

These thoughts, published even before M'Clintock made his grisly discoveries, could have been written in response to Beattie's. But such conclusions dwell only on the failure of science and technology and deny the achievements. For after Franklin, others followed. They too used the latest technology available to them, and they succeeded not only in tracing a Northwest Passage but in conquering the last and most forbidding land on earth.

For decades, the elaborate historical constructs fashioned by students of the Franklin disaster provided a grimly satisfactory explanation of the tragedy, one that neatly adhered to prevailing expectations. Fundamentally, the expedition was viewed as a momentous test of endurance against the malignant forces of nature; Franklin's defeat, alas, confirmed the hideous risks that that entailed. Subsequent investigations rarely strayed from the well-worn path—reliance on the cumulative wisdom of early searchers, written records and accepted truths—to consider physical clues, such as first-hand observation and analysis of food sources. Even then, the work was encumbered by the limitations of the existing technology for scientific analysis.

When a Franklin expedition tin, retrieved by M'Clintock, was opened and examined in 1926, the beef contents were declared to be “perfectly satisfactory.” In light of the catastrophic health consequences of ingesting the lead-contaminated contents of such tins, they would seem to have proven rather less than satisfactory to those reliant on the tainted provisions. Results from the contemporary analyses of the human soft-tissue samples by Walt Kowal, Owen Beattie and their colleagues, published in 1991 in the
Journal of Archaeological Science,
only served to underscore the dramatic nature of the lead poisoning identified in the bodies of Beechey Island. Comparison with lead levels in modern populations, even in instances of occupational exposure, confirmed the devastating effects. Lead levels in the soft tissues of the crew members averaged ten to thirty times higher than in modern unexposed individuals. The pattern was similar in all soft tissues examined, including the aorta, stomach, kidney, liver, lung, spleen, bladder, muscle and intestine.

Examination of preserved soft tissues and previously analyzed hair excluded the possibility that the lead exposure was simply a product of non-expedition factors, such as the environment of nineteenth-century industrial Britain. While the three crewmen died early on, within only seven to eleven months of sailing, sufficient time had elapsed to have eliminated most lead absorbed into the soft tissues before their departure. Lead resides in different body tissues for different periods of time after cessation of exposure. In the case of soft tissues, half of the lead present in an organ or tissue would have been eliminated in approximately twenty-one to forty days, with levels continuing to decline at a predictable rate. It is clear that the source of lead exposure originated not from factors or conditions encountered in England, but from those encountered aboard the discovery vessels themselves—aboard the
Erebus
and
Terror.
Here, too, contemporary scientific methods provide confirmation.

The tissues and solder were subjected to lead isotope ratio analysis, a means of “fingerprinting” the source of lead. The results indicated that the lead in the tissues was identical to that in the solder used in the food cans. These findings, published in the journal
Nature,
in 1990, concluded that the lead contamination came not from a variety of sources, but, without exception, from a single European geological location. Had the body lead resulted from chronic personal exposure to a variety of local and environmental sources before the crews' embarkation, or even afterward, it is unreasonable to suppose that all the individuals would have demonstrated the same isotopic ratios. Unless the sampled sailors had literally lived under the same roof (a possibility discounted by British Admiralty records that show the crews were drawn from regions throughout the United Kingdom), the ratios of lead found in the tissues of each crew member would have been skewed differently. What's more, while representing short-term exposure, the lead in the soft tissues was indistinguishable from lead in the bones. This evidence confirms that the lead stored in the bones of crew members before the expedition was swamped by the subsequent massive exposure resulting from the solder in the tins. There is no question of the source of the lead found in the bodies of Franklin's men: it came from the tinned foods. The devastating impact on their health followed.

Furthermore, research conducted on skeletal remains discovered at a previously unrecorded site discovered on King William Island in 1992 served to provide independent corroboration of Beattie's research. The results of this new investigation, published by Anne Keenleyside et al in the
Journal of Archaeological Science
in 1996, stated that the “pattern of distribution of lead between bones indicates excessive intake of lead during the period of the expedition. Predictions of blood lead levels based on the measured bone lead concentrations, suggest that the current upper limit for occupational exposure recommended to prevent neurological changes was exceeded.” In 1997, a second publication arising from this research stated that “elevated lead levels in the remains are consistent with previous measurements and support the conclusions of Beattie and colleagues that lead poisoning had greatly debilitated the men by this point.”

Tinned foods came into widespread use among the general population by the late 1800s, becoming “almost a necessity,” and this popularity was mirrored by a dawning sense of the danger posed by the use of solder containing lead. These suspicions are recorded in the medical literature of the time. Documented instances of “metallic poisoning,” or lead poisoning, attributed to consumption of tinned foods, began to appear in the 1880s, and reference is made to the common complaint regarding drops or fragments of solder found mixed with the food contents within the tins. The
Medical News
in 1883 warned: “In cases of obscure nervous affections look out for lead-poisoning, and bear in mind the use of canned food as a source of such poisoning.” Physicians started to raise questions as to the desirability of tinning as a means of food preservation. Changes to the design of food cans were subsequently introduced, addressing the most obvious lead-contamination sources, but not before the world's most prestigious medical journal,
The Lancet,
asked why bottles were not substituted for tins. The answer surely lay with an industry that had an enormous capital stake in the trade, and the jobs associated with it. Nor are the serious consequences of lead relegated to the nineteenth century. Only in recent decades has lead been removed from house paints, gasoline and food tins (though tinned goods and lead-glazed ceramics in developing countries continue to be problematic); as well, drinking water is monitored to identify and manage the hazard.

Microbiological research into Hartnell and Braine also produced another curious, perhaps ominous, discovery. Not only have bacterial strains of the genus
Clostridium
survived the prolonged period of freezing, but some of the strains have shown resistance to modern antibiotics, a remarkable characteristic considering that the bacteria originated nearly a century before the development of antibiotics. It has been suggested that strains of bacteria more tolerant of pollutants can also show resistance to antibiotics. Medical researchers are only beginning to investigate the significance and implications of this evidence, especially in relation to the role of environmental pollutants in exacerbating the development of such resistance. There is a certain irony in the possibility that men who lived during the reign of Victoria should be the ones to alert scientists to such an insidious effect of the poison, lead, in our own time.

It is certainly not easy—and for some, doubtless impossible—to entertain the notion that so basic an instrument of human convenience as a tin can could have been a major factor in the loss of the Franklin expedition. From a purely emotional standpoint, it should have been
anything
else. If rigid adherence to conventional interpretations of the disaster is not to be followed, with scurvy, starvation, stress and hypothermia judged the relevant health factors, then at least it would be more palatable to know that any new evidence to arise did so from investigation of more glamorous sources of information, such as the
Erebus
and
Terror,
still at rest in the icy deep. The fundamental lesson of the forensic investigation into the Franklin expedition is the very recognition that so great an undertaking as the most celebrated of all Arctic voyages could be vulnerable to so apparently minute a factor. Profound questions arise from the investigations of the simple evidence represented by the tins, questions not limited to the role of lead as a factor in the fate of the Franklin expedition, but rather the health consequences of European food-preserving technology of the nineteenth century on an entire era of exploration.

Before Franklin, there were the curious references to an unexplained illness that appeared in the narrative of Captain George Back from 1836–37. Immediately following Franklin, there was the official report of Sir James Clark Ross regarding his unsuccessful 1848–49 search expedition. It is notable that Ross, like Franklin, was supplied with tinned provisions by Stephan Goldner. The outbreaks of “debility” amongst Arctic expeditions did not end there, however; another outbreak is germane to this discussion.

Commander George Washington De Long, captain of the 1879–81 Arctic voyage of the U.S. steamer,
Jeannette,
had taken specific precautions against “debility.” Whilst unconvinced about lime juice's efficacy, he well understood “the importance attached to it by Arctic medical authorities and Arctic voyagers generally [and] did not care to depart from an established custom.” De Long had three barrels of lime juice loaded aboard the
Jeannette.
The expedition also carried large stores of canned meats, soups and vegetables.

De Long sought the North Pole, failing which he intended to navigate the Northwest Passage. It would be a privately backed expedition; De Long's benefactor was a newspaper proprietor, James Gordon Bennett, owner of the
New York Herald
and the man who also assigned correspondent Henry Morton Stanley to travel to Africa to locate the British missionary Dr. David Livingstone. Bennett's influence was such that he was able to secure an Act of the United States Congress declaring the
Jeannette'
s voyage a “national undertaking.”

De Long had been involved in an earlier cruise into the eastern Arctic, and had written, “I never in my life saw such a dreary land of desolation, and I hope I may never find myself cast away in such a perfectly God-forsaken place.” He was not an Arctic lion either, in appearance (balding, pince-nez) or temperament (he was sensitive and studious), but he had caught a bad case of what his wife termed “the polar virus.”

The
Jeannette
sailed from San Francisco on 8 July 1879, with a scientific staff that included an astronomer, meteorologist and naturalist from the Smithsonian Institution. Beset by ice on 6 September, she then drifted for two years in the polar pack as sickness gradually tightened its hold on her 33 crewmen. The men were largely dependent on tinned foods, and, as their symptoms worsened to include severe abdominal pain, fear spread that something in their diet was poisoning them. The crew was already in a severely weakened state when the
Jeannette
was finally crushed by the pack-ice in the Laptev Sea in 1881, though the men escaped, dragging three boats and supplies over hundreds of miles to open water. There was no fresh meat to be had out on the ice, only what provisions they could carry with them. One boat foundered in the icy sea, the other two were separated before they reached land at Siberia's Lena Delta.

Wandering across the marshy and featureless land of the delta, the crew of one boat stumbled across a native village and was saved. The men in the other boat—including De Long—faced a terrible ordeal. They located small huts, but found they had been abandoned: “We can see traces of Russians or other civilized beings. A rude checker-board, wooden forks, pieces of pencil, etc.” They struggled on for a month, killing several reindeer, but it was not enough. De Long made the painful decision to kill and eat the ship's mascot, a dog named Snoozer. Soon his party was reduced to eating the animal hides the men had worn for warmth, their boot soles and, finally, moss dug from the frozen ground.

Their final days were recorded in pitiful detail by De Long, the delirious howls of the starved men “a horrible accompaniment to the wretchedness of our surroundings.” In his journal, he also recorded the strange dream of the ship's surgeon, James Ambler: “He seemed to be accompanying the survivors of Sir John Franklin's last expedition on their journey to the Great Fish River.” Certainly the appalling nature of their suffering had a great deal in common with that of the Franklin crewmen, and Ambler's dream proved portentous: he suffered the throes of just such a death. When his body was found, there was a trickle of blood from his mouth, into which his fingers were stuffed.