Resolute (4 page)

Not only was it possible, but it could be accomplished, he believed, in a single season. It was an optimism without foundation. For, in truth, Barrow, like almost everyone else of his time—except the whalers—knew very little about the Arctic. He was convinced that the North Pole was surrounded by an Open Polar Sea, a warm, ice-free ocean, entry into which was blocked by a barrier of ice. Break through this barrier, enter the Open Polar Sea, he told the first seekers he sent out, and you'll find the passage.

He could not have been more wrong. There was no Open Polar Sea and, as his explorers quickly discovered, the Arctic was unlike any place they could ever have imagined—enormous (more than one million square miles), confusing, foreboding, and immensely dangerous. It was, as later commentators would characterize it, an “Otherworld” marked by extraordinary extremes. For two months in the summer the sun never set. For more than two months in the winter it was never seen. “I long for the sunlight,” American polar explorer Elisha Kent Kane wrote poetically in his journal during his first voyage to the Arctic in 1850. “Dear sun, no wonder you are worshipped.” From January to July in particular, temperatures could range from forty degrees below zero to fourteen above. The logs of various passage-seekers recorded temperatures as low as sixty degrees below zero. Yet, on one of four expeditions led by Edward Parry, the British rear admiral, there was a period during which temperatures rose to sixty-six. The sun was so hot that tar oozed out of the seams of Parry's ships. To his astonishment, it actually rained for thirty consecutive hours.

But mostly the Arctic was unbelievably cold. On an Arctic expedition in 1848, one of the sailors aboard the HMS
Enterprise
foolishly attempted to carry out some work without wearing gloves. When one of his hands froze, he tried to thaw it out by putting it in a basin of water. His hand was so cold that it froze the water solid, and the poor sailor had to have it amputated.

It was frigid; it was unpredictable—but above all else it was a region dominated by ice. “Lagoons are largely closed by the end of [September],” whaling historian Everett S. Allen noted in his 1973 book,
Children of the Light:

Those who sought the passage left home knowing that the journey would inevitably include at least one winter, if not more, locked in the ice, unable to move until a hoped-for spring thaw, always aware of the deadly unpredictability of the ice that imprisoned them. They also knew that, even under the best of circumstances, wintering in the ice would be a supreme test of their courage and resolve. “When the cabin door was opened,” recalled one Arctic adventurer, “a blast of cold air rushed in, causing condensation which made the walls damp. At nighttime the condensation froze, and we slept in a miniature ice palace, crystals sparkling in the light, gleaming icicles hanging from the deck above, some several inches long. All along the outer side of my bunk was a sheet of ice which melted when I got into bed, so that during the night the upper part of my blanket was sodden while the bottom half was like a small ice floe.”

Not that the Arctic was without its unique beauty. Even the most articulate of the explorers found themselves lacking the words to adequately describe the magnificence of the aurora borealis, a sight made even more unforgettable by the fact that it appeared most often during the calmest, coldest nights when the frozen world around them was eerily silent. The crusty polar veteran John Ross was moved to wax poetic about the icebergs that never failed to amaze him. “It is hardly possible to imagine anything more exquisite,” he wrote. “By night as well as by day they glitter with a vividness of color beyond the power of art to represent.”

There was one Arctic phenomenon, however, that was as disturbing as it was often beautiful. At one time or another, almost every venturer into the frozen North experienced dramatic mirages caused both by the refraction of the pale Arctic light and the seemingly endless snow- and ice-covered flat landscape. Seeing things that weren't really there was, at best, disturbing. At worst, it led to claims of discoveries of mountains or bodies of water that existed only in the “discoverer's” imagination. Elisha Kane found himself particularly prone to these mirages. “There is a black globe floating in the air about three [degrees] north of the sun,” he noted in his journal. “Is it a bird or a balloon? … On a sudden, it changes shape…It is a grand piano … You had hardly named it before it was an anvil…
Presto
it has made itself duplicate—a pair of colossal dumbbells. A moment! and it is the black globe again.”

A
SHIP FLOATS
past a glacier in an illustration from Elisha Kent Kane's best-selling book
Arctic Explorations.
Like most of his fellow northern explorers, Kane never stopped marveling at the ever-threatening yet sublime Arctic landscape, particularly the icebergs he encountered.

A volatile land of bitter uncertainties, the Arctic was indeed a place like no other. The thousands who sought the passage and the thousands of others who went searching for those who disappeared in the quest quickly learned that, above all else, it was the most humbling experience of their lives. On his first expedition to the Arctic, Elisha Kane was fascinated with the icebergs he encountered. In his journal he wrote: “An iceberg is one of God's own buildings, preaching its lessons of humility to the miniature structures of man.”

So
WHY DID
they do it? Why did they sail off into the most hostile environment imaginable, into uncharted waters, never knowing what lay ahead or whether they would ever return? Some, no doubt, were lured by the financial rewards that Barrow, in 1818, had persuaded Parliament to offer to whoever could penetrate furthest into the Arctic. The first passage-seeker to reach longitude 110 degrees west would receive £5,000. Whoever first reached 130 degrees west would get twice that amount. At 150 degrees west, the prize soared to £15,000. The jackpot would go to the explorer who first reached the Pacific, making the Northwest Passage a reality: £20,000, or almost a million and a half U.S. dollars in today's currency.

It was a strong enticement, but one that would benefit only the few who achieved these goals. A much larger motivation lay in the state of British naval affairs. By 1817, England's long war with France was over, Napoleon was in exile, Europe was at peace, and there were no wars left to occupy the British navy. Of the 140,000 seamen who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars, more than 120,000 had been discharged. Six thousand officers had been retained, but now there was little meaningful work for them to do. Without the challenges and dangers of war, there was little chance for heroism, little chance for public acclaim, and thus little chance for advancing their careers, which was the consuming ambition of all British naval officers. The opportunity for recognition suddenly presented by the renewed search for the Northwest Passage offered a way to excel. Three hundred years after he uttered them, the words of early British passage-seeker Martin Frobisher still rang true. The discovery of the Northwest Passage, he had declared, “is still the only thing left undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and remarkable.”

There were other motivations as well. An anonymous thirteenth-century Viking explorer explained his reasons for undertaking a voyage to Greenland and Vinland, in a treatise entitled
The King's Mirror.
“As you are anxious to know what one looks for in that land, or why one goes there at such peril, it is that one is moved to do so by the character of human nature, … the thirst for knowledge: for in man's nature lies that inclination to explore and see things of which he has been told, in order to know whether it is as he has been told or not.” After four hundred years, only the periphery of the Arctic had been explored. For those brave enough to sail in to the unknown, the search for the Northwest Passage presented the greatest chance they would ever have to attain immortality by, as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it, “inscribing themselves on the Arctic chart.”

All of these men also brought something else with them, something that transcended the desire for promotion and fame. Almost to a man, they saw themselves as knights of old, off on a romantic, quasi-religious crusade. Like John Barrow, they were determined that the passage be found by Englishmen, not Americans or Russians, and that the landmarks of the Arctic, once discovered, be marked with English names. At the same time, they were imbued with the unshakable belief that the English way of doing things was the only way.

Almost all the naval officers were from the British upper class. Their inbred Victorian snobbery would not permit them to listen to the advice of English or American whalers, men who had spent years coping with the Arctic environment. Once in the Arctic, most of the officers did not seek the help or advice of the natives, insisting instead on having their heavy, equipment-laden sledges pulled by their men—rather than by dogs, in the fashion of those who lived in the frozen North. And they remained in the Arctic dressed in full dress British wool uniforms rather than in the practical furs worn by the Inuit. It was an arrogance that went beyond national pride. It would lead to extraordinary heroics and accomplishments. But it would also lead to colossal failures and tragedies.

They were a special breed, these men who sought the passage. They wanted to be heroes, and, for the most part, they were. Driven by a noble obsession, they were willing to leave homes, wives, and families behind for the credit of finding something new. Most had no choice. “They cannot help it,” England's former Lord Chancellor, Lord Henry Brougham explained. “It is in the blood.”

CHAPTER 2.

W
HATEVER THEIR MOTIVATION
, the would-be explorers' chances for fame, fortune, or promotion depended upon being selected by John Barrow to take part in his crusade. Early in 1818, a royal decree announced that the crusade was about to begin:

Actually, the decree was misleading. Barrow was not sending all four ships out to find the Northwest Passage. That was the mission of the
Isabella
and the
Alexander.
The task of the
Dorothea
and the
Trent
was to reach the North Pole. Although it was never as much of a priority for Barrow as finding the passage, the discovery of the North Pole, he knew, would be a great feather in England's cap. Heaven forbid that the first person to step out on the Pole hail from another nation. And, in Barrow's mind, reaching the Pole should not be any more difficult than discovering the route to the Orient.