Authors: Martin W. Sandler
Resolute (35 page)
Using a powerful electron microscope, the two scientists were able to trace the pattern of the cut marks on the bones and determine conclusively that the flesh from the remains had been deliberately cut away by the types of knives carried by Franklin's men. “This evidence,” reported Keenleyside, “is strongly suggestive of cannibalism among these Franklin crewmembers. I don't see any other possible explanation that would account for these cut marks.” More than one hundred years after Rae and Schwatka had issued their controversial reports, Keenleyside and Bertulli's tests corroborated the Inuit accounts.
We will, in all likelihood, never know exactly how the men of the Franklin expedition died or if indeed scurvy and lead poisoning were the only major factors. What becomes obvious is thatâadded to all the mysteries that consumed a nation and much of the worldâthere are several supreme ironies, including the fact that, in the end, it became clear that there was not one, but several Northwest Passages, various winding routes, all of them treacherous, that are open or closed according to the ice, wind, weather, and tides during any particular season. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that after all the expeditions, all the frustrations and sufferings, and after all the deaths, the final conclusion was that an Arctic water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific never had beenâand probably never would beâcommercially viable.
Robert McClure is still given credit for having been the first to prove the passage's existence, although there are those students of the Arctic experience who believe that, in their desperate march south to the Great Fish River, those of Franklin's men who were still alive might have spotted the final link before McClure.
The first actual navigation of the Passage was not achieved until 1906. Despite John Barrow's obsession, it was not accomplished by an Englishman, but by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Nor was it done, as Barrow had believed it would be, in a single season. It took Amundsen three torturous years sailing in the tiny converted herring boat
Gjöa
to complete the voyage. “We bungled through zigzag as if we were drunk,” the explorer would write. “It was just like sailing through an uncleared field.” Sixty-one years had elapsed between Franklin's final attempt and Amundsen's three-year accomplishment. It would be another thirty-four years before, in 1940, the first single-season passage was achieved by the
St. Roch
, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police steam schooner, commanded by Henry Larsen.
The greatest test as to whether the passage would ever be commercially viable occurred in 1969, when the supertanker SS
Manhattan
set out to test the feasibility of the waterway for the transport of oil by attempting to bring the first cargo of Alaskan crude oil to refineries on the East Coast. The
Manhattan
was a supertanker in every sense of the wordâ670 feet long, with a 125-foot steel-armored bow that weighed over 5,000 tons. Its hull was covered with nine-foot-thick and thirty-foot-deep protective steel. Unlike the
Erebus
and the
Terror
, the
Manhattan
knew its exact route, thanks to computers, satellite photographs, and hydrographic maps. Yet despite all these modern advantages, the ship became imprisoned in the ice in McClure Strait. Badly damaged, it was finally freed by icebreakers and had to spend months in dry dock while extensive repairs were made.
In a prime example of the way in which Arctic waters are almost never the same from one year to the next, several ships actually completed a navigation of the passage in 2000, a year in which the polar ice was thinner than at almost any time in memory. This development led to the speculation that one of the few benefits of global warming might be the opening of the passage for increasing periods of time. Most scientists have come to believe that that is highly unlikely. And for those who have devoted themselves to Arctic matters, the notion of a commercially viable Northwest Passage raises a most intriguing issue. In a television interview, Pierre Berton was asked to comment on what, to him, would be the result if increasing ice melt-off made the passage more navigable. “I'm afraid,” Berton responded, “a commercially viable Northwest Passage would detract from the romance of the region. Not too many years ago I sailed through the Panama Canal. Before my cruise I read up on the building of the canal and the horrific problems, the wildness of the region and so forth. You can imagine my disappointment when I finally made the passage and could easily have mistaken it for a cruise up the Hudson River. I expect that a tamed Northwest Passage would produce the same result. Already GPS, snowmobiles, and the like have jaded us, and, I think make it difficult to appreciate [the Arctic explorers'] accomplishments.”
As
THE SUPERTANKER
SS
Manhattan
discovered, one of the great ironies of the more than four-hundred-year search for the Northwest Passage was that, in the end, it was proven to be a commercially unviable route because it was frozen over so much of the year.
BERTON'S COMMENTS GO
to the heart of the enduring fascination with the entire Franklin saga. For it is almost impossible to consider all that took place between Barrow's launching of the first expeditions in 1818 and Franklin's final attempt without realizing that, for so many of those who sought the passage, the great attraction was not the prize itself but the challenge and romance of seeking it. It was the doing, not the gaining, that drove this unique breed of men.
Given the results, it would not be difficult to dismiss the entire endeavor as a failure. From the very beginning, it was marked with tragic mistakes, colossal blunders, lessons never learned, even outright lunacyâall enveloped in an unwavering arrogance. Most expedition organizers never understood that expeditions could simply be too large. Nor, despite all they had been told, would they accept the fact that conditions in one area of the Arctic could be totally different from year to year. Most commanders exhausted their men by insisting that they, not dogs, pull the sledges. Almost all continued to dress inadequately for the Arctic climate. And not until the expeditions of Hall and Schwatka did they begin to truly listen to the Inuit, who had so much to tell them, not only about surviving in the North, but about what they had seen and heard regarding the lost expedition.
But these same men, willing to sail into the unknown, willing to endure years of hardship wintering in the ice, waiting for the thaws that might allow brief periods of exploration, willing to face the harshest climate imaginable, gave the world a lesson in courage, daring, and dedication to duty. When the search for both the Northwest Passage and Franklin was over, geographical and scientific exploration had been advanced as never before and almost all the Arctic archipelagoâonce totally unknownâhad been revealed.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of all was the way in which these men inspired future generations of seekers and adventurers, willing to make the same types of sacrifices for the romance of challenging the unknown. No one said it better than Roald Amundsen, the man who was the first to sail the passage and the first to reach the South Pole. As a young man he had immersed himself in the tales of Parry, the Rosses, Kane, Hall, and others. Their stories, he stated, “thrilled me as nothing I had ever read before. What appealed to me most were the sufferings that John Franklin and his men had to endure. A strange ambition burned within me, to endure the same privationsâ¦I decided to be an explorer.”
“There is nothing worth living for but to have one's name inscribed on the Arctic chart.”
âA
LFRED
L
ORD
T
ENNYSON
, ca. 1855
R.
A
LEXANDER
A
RMSTRONG
Armstrong, who stood beside Robert McClure in October 1850 as they became the first to view the final link in the Northwest Passage, went on to a distinguished career both as an author and as a medical administrator. Unlike McClure's self-serving published account of the extraordinary experiences of the
Investigator
âin which he omitted almost all negative aspects of the voyageâArmstrong's
Personal Narrative of the Discovery of the North-west Passage
was totally unembellished. Armstrong's other book,
Observations on Naval Hygiene and Scurvy, More Particularly as the Latter Appears During a Polar Voyage
, was a major medical contribution. During the quarter century following the publication of that book in 1858, Armstrong, among other appointments, served as superintendent at the naval hospital in Malta and as the director general of the medical department of the Royal Navy. Knighted in 1871, he died four years later.
ORATIO
A
USTIN
After returning from his 1850-51 expedition, Austin never regained the level of esteem he had held before taking his five-vessel fleet out in search of Franklin. Although a special committee, convened to look into the dispute that had arisen between Austin and the whaling captain William Penny, decided that Penny was probably the chief instigator of their argument, the committee, made up of five naval veterans, privately felt that Austin had ended his search far earlier than was necessary.
Austin was never again asked to lead an Arctic search, and spent the last fifteen years of his career first as superintendent of the Southampton packet service, then as superintendent of the Deptford Dockyard, and finally as head of the Malta Dockyard. Despite his removal from the public eye, he was promoted to vice admiral in 1864 and was knighted in March 1865, some eight months before his death.
EORGE
B
ACK
When George Back somehow managed to beach the crippled
Terror
on the coast of Ireland after the vessel had been trapped for the better part of nine months atop an ice floe, he was barely alive. Although he was only forty at the time, he would never fully regain his health, and the traumatic voyage marked the end of his naval career. Now recognized, along with Samuel Cresswell, as the most accomplished of the Arctic shipboard artists, Back was rewarded for his achievementsâparticularly his heroics during the first Franklin overland expeditionâwith a knighthood in 1839.
He spent much of his later years actively involved in the Royal Geographical Society and was, for seven years, its vice president. He would be remembered by his fellow explorers as one of the most arrogant and self-important of men. His reputation as a “ladies' man” would also remain with him, perhaps best summarized by one observer who stated, “If he was in love with himself, he had not right to suppose every lady he met [felt] the same.”
REDERICK
W
ILLIAM
B
EECHEY
At one point early in his career, Beechey, the geologist who accompanied John Franklin on the
Trent
in his 1818 North Pole expedition, seemed destined to become one of the most prominent of the naval explorers. Yet he never approached that status. From 1835 to 1847, he was engaged in conducting surveys for the Admiralty along the coast of South America and the coast of Ireland. He did become a member of the Arctic Council and for three years served as an aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria. In 1855, a year after being promoted to rear admiral, he was elected president of the Royal Geographical Society, but died shortly thereafter. Beechey Island, the site of the first significant discoveries in the Franklin search, was named for his father, the acclaimed artist Sir William Beechey, the official portrait painter to Queen Victoria.
DWARD
B
ELCHER
Following his court-martial and the added ridicule he received when the
Resolute
was found, and then refurbished and given back to England by the Americans, Belcher devoted the rest of his life to writing and to scientific research. His books included the three-volume novel
Horatio Howard Brenton
, which many are certain provided the inspiration for C. S. Forester's immensely successful Captain Horatio Hornblower series. The fact that Forester's wife was a Belcher, and that the first name of his title character was the same as that of Belcher's main character, and that the fictitious Hornblower rose through the ranks of the British navy in much the same manner as Belcher, almost assuredly makes the connection more than a coincidence.
Although it is difficult to explain, Belcher's disgraceful performance in the Arctic, the ridicule he received from both public and press, and the silent reprimand he received from the Admiralty did not prevent his being showered with honors. Promoted to vice admiral in 1861, he was raised in rank to admiral eleven years later. He was also made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. Ironically, Belcher, who died in 1877, went to his grave having received more honors than many of those who had served with far greater distinction.
AVID
B
UCHAN
After returning from his unsuccessful 1818 search for the North Pole, David Buchan spent most of the rest of his life in Newfoundland. For several consecutive winters he served as governor of the province, filling in for the senior official who left for warmer climes during the cold winter months. In 1825, Buchan became Newfoundland's high sheriff, and during the next seven years was involved in attempting to settle the complex disputes that continually arose in a region just beginning to move toward representative government. In the late 1830s, for reasons still unknown, Buchan left Newfoundland and signed on with the East India Company. In December 1838, he was aboard that company's vessel
Upton Castle
as it set out from Calcutta to the Arctic. Neither the ship nor Buchan was ever heard from again.
AMES
B
UDDINGTON
The man who found the
Resolute
had a long and fruitful life after rescuing the ship. Less than a year after his remarkable voyage back to New London, he took the
George Henry
back to Davis Strait, this time returning with his hold filled with bone and oil. Two years later he completed another successful whaling voyage.
Following the whale hunt, he decided he had had enough of the sea and headed west to Illinois to take up the life of a farmer. But the sea was in his blood and, little more than a year later, he was back on the Connecticut coast. In 1871, the United States government, impressed by his knowledge of the Arctic, hired him to serve as ice pilot on the supply ship
Congress
when it was sent to Greenland to bring supplies to Charles Francis Hall's
Polaris
expedition, for which his nephew Sidney was sailing master.
In 1876, the government hired Buddington again, this time to captain the former whaling vessel
Era
on a five-month expedition to Hudson Bay in search of mica. By this time, his son James, Jr., who had been the
George Henry's
cabin boy when the
Resolute
had been found, had become one of the nation's leading sealing captains. In 1887, at the age of seventy, Buddington signed on as a first mate on one of his son's expeditions. For Buddington, it wasn't a pleasant experience. “I couldn't stand that,” he wrote to his daughter. “Those little seals are almost human.”
Two years after returning from this trip he sailed again with his son but this time in a hunt for whales. It was his last voyage. Retiring to Staten Island, Buddington had much to reflect upon. At the age of ninety he wrote, “I do not belong to any church. I believe [that] nature's God is good. He has cared for me when I was almost sure there was no hope. I have nothing to say against folks who like to worship God under a roof. That's there. But I like to sit out here and look at the sea and sky. That's an open Bible any man can read to suit himself.”
James Buddington died on December 23, 1908, exactly 53 years to the day on which he brought the
Resolute
into New London Harbor.
ICHARD
C
OLLINSON
Richard Collinson never forgave Robert McClure for his deceptions during what was supposed to be a joint search for Franklin in 1850. He fully believed that if McClure had stayed with him, they not only would
have jointly
found the Northwest Passage but would have found Franklin as well. Angry as well with the Admiralty for not awarding him a share of McClure's prize, he never requested another command. He did remain active, however, and provided important counsel to Lady Franklin as she organized the
Fox
expedition.
Promoted to rear admiral in 1869 and then knighted, Collinson spent much of his later years involved in the activities of Trinity House, the organization that maintained navigational aids such as lights and buoys along England's rivers and its coastline. In 1875 he became head of Trinity House and remained deeply involved in the work of that establishment until his death in 1883.
AMUEL
C
RESSWELL
As artist aboard the Ross and McClure expeditions, Cresswell produced many of the most beautifully rendered and revealing depictions of the Arctic adventure. His
Series of Eight Sketches in Color ⦠of the Voyage of the H.M.S.
Investigator, published in 1854, and his illustrations for McClure's
Discovery of the North-West Passage by the H.M.S.
Investigator, published in 1856, were hailed throughout Great Britain and captured the personal attention of Queen Victoria. Cresswell later served in the Baltic during the Crimean War and in the China Seas where he was promoted to the rank of captain. He died in 1867, a few months after retiring.
ETER
D
EASE
Peter Dease never received the level of acclaim for the achievements of his 1837-39 Arctic expedition given posthumously to his partner Thomas Simpson. But if it had not been for the mild-mannered Dease's organizational abilities, his skill with the natives, and his ability to keep the bombastic Simpson under control, the expedition, in all probability, would not have been nearly as successful. Two years after returning from his exploration, Dease retired to a farm near Montreal where, for the next twenty years, he lived surrounded by his large family.
DWIN
D
E
H
AVEN
After returning from leading the first Grinnell Expedition, Edwin De Haven had had enough of the Arctic. For a short time he served in the U.S. Coast Survey, but then found true satisfaction by spending the rest of his career serving under famed oceanographer Matthew Maury at the U.S. Naval Observatory. Failing eyesight caused him to retire in 1862 and he died three years later.
ANE
F
RANKLIN
Even after she was shown proof that her husband was dead, Lady Jane Franklin, the woman who never gave up, continued to press the Admiralty to search for the
Erebus
and the
Terror
and for the remains of the Franklin expedition. Although all of her requests were politely denied, she remained an Arctic force, with her advice continually being sought by young explorers such as Sherard Osborn. In 1860 she was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.
Accompanied by her niece Sophia, she continued to travel extensively, visiting Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, the United States, South America, China, Japan, and India. When she died in 1875, the pallbearers included Leopold M'Clintock and Richard Collinson. Her most appropriate tribute was the inscription placed under the statue of John Franklin in Westminster Abbey. Written by the Dean of Westminster, it reads, “This monument was erected by Jane, his widow, who, after long waiting, and sending in search of him, herself departed to seek and to find him in the realms of light, July 18, 1875, aged 83 years.”
She did not depart without eventually adding yet another mystery to the Franklin saga. Years after she died, her heirs left her personal papers to the Scott Polar Research Institute with the proviso that the institute was to “take out whatever is of polar interest and burn the rest.” What was it about Lady Jane Franklin that they did not want us to know?
ENRY
J. H
ARTSTENE
The life of the man who brought the
Resolute
home to England would have taken a much different turn had Lady Franklin been granted her wish to have him take the ship back to the Arctic on yet another search for her husband. Instead of potentially being the man to make the startling discoveries on King William Island, Hartstene returned to his naval duties and was involved in taking soundings for the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Hartstene, a devoted South Carolinian, resigned his commission and became an officer in the Confederate Navy. A year later, for reasons never determined, Henry Hartstene went insane.
SAAC
H
AYES
The man who thought he had discovered the Open Polar Sea came home to find his nation on the brink of civil war, and during the conflict served as an army surgeon at Satterlee Hospital in Philadelphia. After the war, he conducted another brief expedition to Greenland. Upon returning home, he moved to New York City. From 1876 until his death in 1881, he was a member of the New York State Assembly.
ILLIAM
H
OBSON
Upon returning to England in the Fox after finding the only written evidence of Sir John Franklin ever discovered, William Hobson was treated to a hero's welcome. In 1860, he was given command of the HMS
Pantaloon
and in 1862 took command of the HMS
Vigilant.
Advancing to the rank of captain, he retired in 1872. He died eight years later, still hailed as having made the most important discovery in one of history's greatest searches
