Resolute (11 page)

JAMES CLARK ROSS
and his men celebrate their discovery of the Magnetic North Pole. For Ross, it would be the realization of his greatest ambition, to him greater even than finding the passage. “It almost seemed,” he would state, “as if our voyage and all its labours were at an end and nothing now remained but to venture home and be happy for the rest of our days.”

Fury Beach was three hundred miles away. To make sure that there would be enough food to sustain them on their life-or-death march, Ross decided to set up a series of supply depots along the way. Crew members would drag a boat full of provisions to a certain point along the route to the beach and drop them off. They would then return with the empty boat, fill it up again, and hike to a spot beyond where they had deposited the previous cache. It was a long process that proved as arduous as the trip to Fury Beach itself. The route twisted and turned so much that at one point it took a supply party a month to progress just eighteen miles though they had traveled over one hundred.

Finally, on May 29, they were ready to leave the
Victory
and the tender and move out. “The colours were hoisted and nailed to the mast,” he would write. “We drank a parting glass to our poor ship and having seen every man out, in the evening, I took my own adieu of the
Victory
, which deserved a better fate. It was the first vessel that I had ever been obliged to abandon, after having served in thirty-six, during a period of forty-two years. It was like the last parting of an old friend.”

It was now a race against time. Traveling on two-thirds rations, the crew slept at night in trenches dug into the snow. Ross had made many mistakes, but one of his earliest decisions was being proven correct. The small party was barely surviving. A larger one would surely have perished.

By June 10, 1832, they had passed their last cache of food and were halfway to Fury Beach. Ahead of them lay ice so rugged that to continue carrying the boats seemed a hopeless task. Some of the men demanded that the boats be abandoned and that a final dash for Fury Beach be made. Ross refused, stating that if they abandoned the boats, they would have no chance of ever leaving the beach once they reached it. Instead, he sent James Clark Ross ahead with two men to see if the supplies that had still remained on Fury Beach when the
Victory
sailed on three years earlier were still there. Two weeks later his nephew returned. The food was still there and in good condition. And he had more good news: The younger Ross and his party had found three of the
Fury's
whaleboat-type vessels, all in seaworthy condition, scattered along the coast. No longer needing to drag the two boats they had lugged for more than 150 miles, Ross and his men reached Fury Beach in six days. Immediately the half-starved crew fell upon the food, but Ross, knowing the effects that too much food would have on their empty stomachs, rationed it out. That night, however, when the commander was asleep, the men ate their fill, and, as Ross wrote in his journal, “suffered severely from eating too much.”

It would be another month before the waters cleared sufficiently for them to leave the beach. As they made their way down the channel, most of the men, for the first time in as long as they could remember, felt a glimmer of hope. Maybe, once they reached the sound, there would be whalers there. Maybe they would be rescued.

On September 1, they had progressed far enough for Ross to stand on a high point on the northern tip of Somerset Island on Batty Bay and determine what lay ahead of them. As he looked out on Prince Regent Inlet, Barrow Strait, and Lancaster Sound, all he could see was an unbroken mass of ice. They were stymied again. There was nothing for them to do but abandon the boats and return on foot to Fury Beach.

It was too much. A fourth winter in the Arctic. And this time without a ship to shelter them. Even the always-cheerful James Clark Ross became despondent. “[My] nephew seemed to have more than hesitated respecting our escape,” Ross wrote, “and I began myself to question whether we should succeed in passing the barrier of ice this season; in which case there would be no resource for us but another winter, another year…if indeed, it should be the fortune of any one to survive after another such year as the three last.”

To his credit, Ross would not give up. The day after they arrived back at Fury Beach, he put everyone to work building a shelter that was nothing more than a framework of spars and canvas surrounded by a nine-foot wall of snow. Ross named it Somerset House.

The weather during the early months of 1835 was so severe that there was no game to be hunted. Spirits dropped to a new low when the expedition's carpenter fell ill and died. Several other crew members became sick and terribly weak. Remarkably, whenever the weather temporarily moderated, Ross was able to marshal his strength and lead the remaining thirteen healthy men back and forth to Batty Bay, where they sheltered provisions and prepared the boats they had left behind should they ever be fortunate enough to get underway again.

By July 1833, they had eaten the last of their meat; they were almost completely out of food. Once again, Ross found himself with no options. Spending another winter on Fury Beach meant certain death. Their only chance was to get back to the boats in the hope that the ice would clear in time for them to sail into Lancaster Sound before they perished.

They left Somerset House on July 8 and six days later reached the boats. For what had to be the worst month in the entire four-year ordeal, the crew waited for the ice to break up enough for them to escape their latest imprisonment. And their prayers were answered. On August 14, a single channel to the north became clear. Within four hours the tide came in and they launched the boats. Ross could hardly believe it. “It was a change like that of magic,” he recalled, “to find that solid mass of ocean … suddenly converted into water; navigable and navigable to us, who had almost forgotten what it was to float at freedom on the seas.”

PERHAPS THE GREATEST
accomplishment of John Ross's five-year passage-seeking expedition was that it demonstrated how it was possible to survive in the Arctic even under the most threatening circumstances. Key to the expedition's near-disastrous frozen season of 1833 was the erection of the snow-insulated winter shelter named Somerset House.

With renewed strength, they sailed their three boats until, on August 17, they had finally departed Prince Regent Inlet. The next day they passed by the mouth of the fifteen-mile-long Admiralty Inlet, the longest fjord in the world. When the wind died down, they furled their small sails and rowed—for as long as twenty hours at a time. Finally, on August 25 their strength gave out. They were now at the east side of Navy Board Inlet and Ross decided that they had to put ashore. At four in the morning the next day, a lookout that Ross had posted awoke him with a shout. He had seen a sail. Instantly the men began sending off smoke signals. Then they took to the boats, rowing desperately towards where the lookout believed the ship to be. But it had vanished over the horizon. Devastated, they were about to return to shore when another sail was spotted. Feverishly they rowed towards it and this time the ship turned about and headed back towards them. They were saved. When the rescue vessel came close enough, it lowered one of its boats, which pulled alongside Ross's haggard crew. When one of Ross's men asked the name of the ship that had saved them, the vessel's mate replied that his ship was the
“Isabella of Hull
, once commanded by Captain Ross.” Immediately Ross stood up and identified himself. That could not be, the startled mate responded, Ross had been given up for dead two years ago. Calmly the commander stated that he was very much alive.

IT HAD BEEN
an extraordinary journey. Despite four years of entrapment, despite prolonged periods of near starvation, despite being battered by almost everything the Arctic could present, Ross was returning with all but one of his twenty-three-man contingent still alive.

THE WHALING VESSEL
Isabella
of Hull rescues John Ross and his men. That Ross was saved by the very same vessel that he had commanded during his first Arctic adventure was but one of a number of ironic incidents and developments that characterized the entire saga of the long search for the Northwest Passage and the dramatic events that followed.

They had penetrated the Arctic further south than any other explorers. They had come tantalizingly close to linking up with the Polar Sea. And John Clark Ross had discovered the Magnetic North Pole.

Although it was a private expedition, Ross felt that there were important lessons that the navy could learn from his experiences. Chief among them, Ross believed more than ever, was the necessity of seeking the passage with as small a contingent as was necessary. Would the Inuit have been able to hunt for enough food to supply a much larger party than Ross's during his first winter in the ice? Would a larger party have been able to make its way back and forth to Fury Beach and then survive for so long on such a short supply of rations? And would a larger number of boats than Ross's three small vessels have been able to make their way to rescue? Ross thought not.

But the navy did not listen. The next great passage-seeking expedition would be larger than ever. And, to the dismay of all England, its members would not be as fortunate as Ross.

CHAPTER 6.

B
Y THE MID
-1840s, Barrow, despite all the setbacks his explorers had experienced, was more confident of success than ever. He still believed that there was an Open Polar Sea. Much of the Arctic coastline had been mapped. Straits, inlets, bays, and islands had been discovered. Possible links to the prized route had been spotted. The discovery of the passage was at hand. It had to be. He was now eighty-two and he knew that the next search he launched would be his last.