Resolute (2 page)

O
NE FINDS A VERY LIMITED NUMBER
of events in history that not only encapsulate the spirit of an age, but tremble on the edge of possibility: That Troy, whose topless towers stirred the West's first and greatest epic verse, could actually be found and excavated; that, on a Christmas night in the midst of the worst trench warfare the world had yet seen, British and German troops could gather together, exchanging whiskey and cigars; that three or four small rips in her hull could bring the unsinkable Titanic to the bottom of the ocean in little more than two hours.

The Arctic—where time itself is among the things susceptible to freezing—where, as the inimitable Rudolf Erich Raspe described in his Munchausen tales, sentences spoken in the winter could not be heard until they thawed out the next summer—has seen more than its share of such tales. Writers of fiction and poetry have found it an ideal landscape in which to unfold the extremities of human endeavor; the efforts of a man “to build a fire” in Jack London's story of that name, or the comfort found in a fiery furnace by the eponymous hard-luck prospector of Robert W. Service's “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” could, it seems, have happened nowhere else. And yet it is the Arctic, more than any other place upon Earth, where the adage that “truth is stranger than fiction” finds its most dramatic embodiment, and as the great number of recent books on Arctic explorers testifies, the romance of those “unknown regions of eternal frost” remains strong to this day.

Yet throughout this revival of interest in the history of Arctic exploration, one of its greatest and strangest stories has gone almost completely untold: That of the loss, and uncanny re-appearance, of the British exploration vessel HMS
Resolute.
Here is surely one of the most
singular events in the history of exploration—that a ghost ship, abandoned in the utmost reaches of the Arctic archipelago, could pilot itself to freedom, recovered as a “floating Pompeii” even as the officers who once strode its decks still lived—and yet it became far more than that. By setting the singular story of the
Resolute
in the context of the great international drama of the search for Sir John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition, and setting that story itself within the complex history of national sympathies sometimes divided, sometimes joined by the Atlantic Ocean, Martin Sandler has restored to its entirety a chapter of our history which hitherto has been told only in a piecemeal fashion. It is a story in which ships are as much characters as men, a story of bravery, generosity, and sacrifice, a story of bonds of friendship forged upon an icy anvil. Though long relegated to the periphery of history, the HMS
Resolute
lives on at its very center, as her timbers still stand today before the seat of power of a great nation, witness to decisions and commands its original officers could never have imagined.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked that many of the most important discoveries are of things already known—by which he meant, I believe, that history can only live if one recovers its strangeness, its singularity, even its shock. In this book Martin Sandler has accomplished just that: He has given us anew something we had almost forgotten we possessed—the history of the timbers of a stout ship, in which, at the peak of a great international Arctic drama, all that is best about our nation once set sail.

—Russell A. Potter

Rhode Island College

O
N
M
AY
5, 1845, the “Commissioners for executing the office of High Lord Admiral of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” issued a twenty-three part set of orders to Sir John Franklin, the most revered of all the British naval explorers, which began by stating:

As far as both the Admiralty and the British public were concerned, Franklin's endeavor would, they were certain, be the successful culmination of a quest that had become a national obsession, a quest that had become akin to the search for the Holy Grail—to find the fabled Northwest Passage. It would not turn out as planned. Instead, John Franklin's voyage would be the pivotal development in one of the most remarkable and enduring sagas in history.

It is an epic tale—an adventure, mystery, and detective story all rolled into one, played out against the harshest backdrop in the world. Most of all, it is the story of a unique breed of men, the astronauts of their day, willing to sail into the unknown, willing to risk all for glory, for country, and, truth be known, for the sheer adventure of it all. “They cannot help it, these Arctic fellows; it is in their blood.” That is how Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society described the scores of nineteenth-century explorers who went
searching for the Northwest Passage. The same could have been said for the hundreds of Englishmen and Americans who took part in the thirty-nine expeditions that went seeking those who had disappeared in their search for the passage. What is most astounding is that they did it all under circumstances that we today can hardly imagine. Boldly they ventured into the harshest environment in the world, knowing they would have to spend at least one or even two or three long, dark winters trapped in the ice waiting for the all-too-brief periods when conditions would allow them to resume their search before becoming trapped again. Removed from loved ones and out of touch with the rest of the world for years at a time, they lived with the knowledge that death, in any one of a number of forms, could come at any time. As the American explorer and doctor Isaac Hayes, wrote in 1867:

And they did it all with what we today would regard as the most inadequate of accoutrements—no cell phones, no global positioning systems, no snowmobiles, no helicopters, no synthetic tents or parkas. Instead, they searched treacherous, ice-filled waters armed with what were more sketches than maps, and navigational instruments that would cause modern mariners to shake their heads in dismay. They trudged thousands of miles over the barren, frozen wasteland, hauling their heavy sledges behind them in temperatures that fell to seventy degrees below zero, and often camped on the ice in simple canvas tents. No wonder that the expeditions of the day engendered unprecedented heroics. No wonder that they also spawned deception, intrigue, colossal blunders, outright lunacy, and even murder and cannibalism.

The drama of the search for the passage and for Franklin's lost expedition is made even more compelling and relevant by a new dimension to the saga that, until now, has never really been told in full. In 1962, newspapers throughout the world carried a now-iconic photograph of a young John F. Kennedy, Jr. peering out from beneath a magnificent desk in the White House's Oval Office while his father worked above. It was a charming, human portrayal of the popular president and his equally popular son. Few who viewed the photograph could have realized that the desk in the picture was directly connected to the John Franklin saga. The circumstances of this surprising, unlikely connection present their own fascinating story, one that includes what has been referred to as arguably the “most miraculous voyage ever to take place.” Perhaps most important, it is a story of developments that, in the end, linked America and Great Britain in friendship and provided both nations with a tangible symbol of goodwill that remains until this day.

What remains also are the lessons in courage and determination given to the world by those who lived out the Arctic adventure. Theirs is a story that has never ended, filled with mysteries that are still unsolved. As long as these mysteries endure, there will be modern-day searchers who will seek answers to riddles that continue to captivate us more than 150 years after they first emerged. And there will continue to be men and women determined to follow in the footsteps of Edward Parry, John and James Clark Ross, Elisha Kent Kane, Leopold M'Clintock, Frederick Schwatka, and so many of the others who people this book.

They challenged the unknown. They pushed back the frontiers. They endowed future generations of daring souls with the inspiration to become explorers. They made themselves immortal by inscribing their names forever on the Arctic chart. Their motivation is perhaps best explained by astronaut Michael Collins, a member of the first expedition to reach the moon. “Man,” Collins stated, “has always gone where he has been able to go. It's simple. He will continue pushing back his frontier, no matter how far it takes him from his homeland.”

—Martin W. Sandier
Cotuit, Massacusetts

“It is still the only thing left undone, whereby a
notable mind might be made famous and remarkable.”
—Sixteenth-century explorer
MARTIN FROBISHER