Resolute (10 page)

CHAPTER 5.

T
HEY HAD BECOME HEROES
—yet neither Franklin nor Parry had found the passage. But there was another man determined to capitalize on what, despite their failure, Franklin and Parry had managed to discover, and gain the glory for himself. For almost ten years John Ross had waited for his chance to regain his lost honor, to redeem himself for aborting the
Isabella's
mission because of a mirage. And he was sure that he knew how to do it. If only he was given the opportunity, he would sail down Prince Regent Inlet past where Parry had made his last discovery, and find the passage by continuing on to where Franklin had tuned back at Point Turnagain.

He knew, however, that given the Croker Mountains fiasco, the Admiralty, and particularly Barrow, would never give him the chance. The only answer was to mount an expedition financed by private funds. He found them in the person of Felix Booth, the nation's largest gin distiller and a man known for his philanthropic pursuits, a man who was willing to fund Ross's expedition in return for the prospect of having a significant yet undiscovered Arctic landmark named in his honor.

Ross had definite ideas about how he would succeed where the others had failed. Despite the ridicule he had endured, Ross had lost none of his confidence in himself or his ability to find the passage. He was convinced that both Franklin and Parry had taken too many men along with them. Keeping an expedition supplied with food—especially when it was now obvious that spending at least one winter in the ice was to be expected—was, he believed, perhaps the greatest challenge. The fewer men to feed, the better the chance of success. Ross was also convinced that the ships that Buchan and Parry had sailed in were too large for Arctic waters. A smaller ship would be far more capable of maneuvering through the ice-filled waters, particularly if that vessel was powered by steam.

On May 23, 1829, with a crew less than a fifth the size of the 117-man contingent that Parry had taken on his third voyage, Ross sailed from England in the 164-ton steam picket
Victory
, towing a sixteen-ton tender behind him. On July 28, he reached Disko Island on the west coast of Greenland.

Fortune smiled down upon him. He had entered the Arctic during one of the mildest seasons that even the oldest Greenlanders could remember. Entering Baffin Bay, he found it incredibly free of ice and steamed across it in nine days. On his second voyage, it had taken Parry two months to get through. On August 6, Ross was at the entrance to Lancaster Sound. This time he saw no mountains and in thirty-six hours he was into Prince Regent Inlet. His one frustration was with the steam engine, which had been giving him trouble since he had departed. Finally tired of having his men spend so much time repairing the faulty boiler and the pumps, he had the engine turned off and raised his sails.

On August 12, the
Victory
was off Fury Beach, the site where Parry had previously abandoned the
Fury.
An important part of Ross's plan was to assure himself of having enough supplies by taking on some of the huge amount of stores that Parry had been forced to leave behind. But he found that both the current and the tide prevented him from anchoring close enough to the beach. Disappointed, he sailed on and found Cresswell Bay, which at first appeared as though it might be a passageway to the west. When he discovered that it was a dead end, he turned back north for another try at Fury Beach. This time the tide and currents were in his favor and he was able to put in close enough to get at the supplies.

Again, he was in luck. Parry's abandoned stores were not only still in good condition; there were more of them than Ross had hoped for. Before his men were finished loading whatever they could onto the
Victory
, they had replenished their supplies with ten tons of coal, new sails, masts, and anchors, and found enough food to last them for at least three years. No wonder that as they rowed back to their ships, the Arctic air was filled with the cry “God save Fury Beach.”

Underway again, Ross sailed south down Prince Regent Inlet. By August 16, he had traveled further down the inlet than anyone had ever done. By the end of September he had penetrated three hundred miles further than Parry. He was only some 289 miles from where Franklin had first seen the Polar Sea. Success was at hand. Although he was reluctant to give Barrow any credit, perhaps he was right. Perhaps the passage could be found in a single season.

Then his luck abandoned him. The first week of October brought with it enormous winds, mountainous seas, and towering icebergs. He had reached the huge gulf that lay at the bottom of Prince Regent Inlet but he was being assailed by ice that threatened to destroy him. Later he would write in his
Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage
, published in 1835, that his readers should remember that “ice is stone—a rock floating in a stream…[and] imagine if they can, these mountains of crystal hurled through a narrow strait by a rapid tide; meeting, as mountains might meet, with a huge noise of thunder, breaking from each other's precipices huge fragments, or rending each other asunder, till, losing their former equilibrium, they fall over head long, lifting the sea around in breakers, and whirling it into eddies while flatter fields of ice, formed against these masses…by the wind and the steam, rise out of them until they fall back on themselves, adding to the indescribable commotion and noise.”

He had no option. He had to find a suitable place to winter down. Fortunately, he found it, naming the land adjacent to where he put in (which he mistakenly thought was an island, but was actually a peninsula), Boothia Felix. He then named the water, which he had barely managed to get through, the Gulf of Boothia. Felix Booth and the gin he bottled had received their measure of immortality.

Like Parry before him, Ross now turned his attention to preparing for the long winter ahead. Like Parry, he had his men build an observatory on shore. He set up a daily schedule that kept the men busy at work throughout each long day. He initiated an afternoon regimen of exercise. He set up a school in which reading, writing, and the principles of navigation were taught.

But Ross was no Parry. He was not interested in providing entertainment for his crew. To Ross, who believed that expeditions should be run like military operations, plays, pageants, and shipboard newspapers were frivolities that got in the way of needed discipline. And unlike Parry, Ross did not believe in mingling with his men in order to boost their spirits during their winter imprisonment. He spent most of his time in his cabin and refused to listen to any advice or suggestions given to him by either his men or his officers—among them his nephew James Clark Ross, who he had taken along as second in command. Ross's aloofness, at times, made the challenge of maintaining morale even more difficult.

Fortunately, as had been the case during Perry's second expedition, the monotony of the long winter was broken periodically by visits from groups of Inuit who came from a nearby village. Ross's men taught the natives how to play leapfrog and football, and entertained them with dances aboard ship. In turn, the crew paid regular visits to the native village where, with the consent of their husbands, they slept with the Inuit women.

Ross did not engage in any of the social interaction with the natives. But he did accept their help. The Inuit showed him where salmon could be caught, and where game such as musk oxen could be found. They gave Ross and his nephew sledges and dog teams, along with mushing lessons. And, when Ross showed them his primitive map, they obligingly sketched in rivers and coastline. When, however, they told the commander that there was no way out of where he was to the south and that his only hope was in finding a way to the north, he told them that this was something he needed to determine for himself.

FOR ELEVEN MONTHS
, the
Victory
and the tiny tender remained frozen in the ice. Then, on June 20, 1830, the temperature amazingly rose to sixty-two degrees. Within three weeks the ice was breaking up around the ships. They were free! (Or so they thought.) But in choosing his winter refuge, Ross had unwittingly made a major error. He had anchored down during a period of high tides. Now the tides were so low that he was unable to get the
Victory
over a sandbar that stretched across Felix Harbor. The crew's only option was to unload almost everything off both the ship and its tender and haul them over the bar. This accomplished, they reloaded both vessels, a process that, in all, took them more than two weeks.

Now, at last, they could be off. But they were wrong again. To their horror, they found that the seas ahead of them were still frozen over despite the warming trend. Determined to break through, the crew struggled for two months but managed to move forward only three miles. Once again, Ross had no choice. It was October, and they would have to spend yet another winter marooned in the pack.

Naming the spot where he dropped anchor Sheriff Harbor (Booth had once been sheriff of London), Ross grimly faced the reality of an additional winter in the ice. His only consolation was the hope that this second winter would be shorter that the last. It would not only fail to be shorter; it would last for two more years. Even when the calendar told him that the summer of 1831 had arrived, the
Victory
remained trapped.

As the months in the ice had turned first into one year, then two, and then three, tensions aboard the ship became extreme. The men blamed Ross for having chosen the wrong harbor for their first wintering. There was concern that the food they had taken on at Fury Beach would run out. There was talk of mutiny.

Throughout the unprecedented ordeal, the one calming influence was James Clark Ross. Taller and swarthier than his uncle, he nevertheless had the same vanity and the same quick temper. Unlike his relative, however, he truly cared what people thought about him and openly courted popularity. It was he to whom the men turned when they had a complaint. It was he who committed himself to boosting morale whenever he could. And it was James Clark Ross who made the most meaningful discovery of the ice-plagued expedition.

During the first two winters that the
Victory
was frozen in the ice, the younger Ross left the ship and explored the coastline both by boat and in the dogsleds that the Inuit had donated. By the time he was finished with his roving, he had accounted for two-thirds of the charting of the more than six hundred miles of new territory that the expedition had encountered. Among his discoveries was the fact that Boothia Felix was not an island, as his uncle believed, but a peninsula. Even if the expedition had not been imprisoned, John Ross had been headed for a dead end, not the glory he sought. On the same long sledging excursion, James Clark Ross reached a desolate area that he named King William Land. It was really an island and, although of course he had no way of knowing it, it would be a place that would have enormous significance in the years to come.

The younger Ross's greatest achievement came in the still icebound spring of 1831. His ambition, in fact the reason that he had signed on for the voyage, was to find the Magnetic North Pole. A year earlier on one of his sledging trips, he had come to within a few miles of what he was sure was the long sought-after spot. But he didn't have the equipment with him to confirm it. Now, a year later—June 1, 1831—he stood on another desolate spot, which he named Victory Point. There the needle on his compass pointed straight downward and stopped moving. After another day's readings, he knew he had made the discovery. Later, stating that this was the spot
(
70° 5'17” north and 96°46'45” west) that “Nature…had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers,” he planted the Union Jack and “took possession of the North Magnetic Pole and its adjoining territory in the name of Great Britain and King William the Fourth.”

His nephew's accomplishments notwithstanding, John Ross was becoming increasingly disconsolate. The winter of 1832 was proving to be as unrelenting as the previous dark season had been, with no relief in sight. He doubted that he and the men could survive a fourth winter trapped in the ice. There was only one decision to be made—the most difficult of his life. The crew would have to abandon the
Victory
and trek overland to Fury Beach, where they could live off the food that still remained there. Then, hopefully, in the spring they could take to the boats they would drag with them and make their way into Lancaster Sound. If they were lucky, the whaling fleet would find and rescue them. (Franklin expedition member George Back organized a search party for Ross; in the end he was not Ross's rescuer, but instead had several harrowing adventures of his own over the course of two separate expeditions; see note, page 262).