Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Read online

  Original map by Dawn Huck.

  DEDICATION

  Dedicated to

  THE FORGOTTEN HEROES AND HEROINES

  OF ARCTIC EXPLORATION

  EPIGRAPH

  Dead reckoning:

  Dead reckoning is the process of determining one’s present position by projecting course(s) and speed(s) from a known past position, and predicting a future position by projecting course(s) and speed(s) from a known present position . . .

  —National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

  CONTENTS

  The Original Northwest Passage by Dawn Huck

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Challenging “Official” History

  PART ONE: An Arctic Dreamland 1. Nightmares and Fever Dreams

  2. Catastrophe Engulfs Jens Munk

  3. What Thanadelthur Made Possible

  4. Matonabbee Leads Hearne to the Coast

  5. Mackenzie Establishes a Second Location

  PART TWO: An Arrival of Strangers 6. An Inuit Artist Sails with John Ross

  7. Edward Parry Identifies a Northern Channel

  8. The Yellowknife Rescue John Franklin

  9. Tattannoeuck Prevents a Second Debacle

  PART THREE: Mysteries and Complications 10. James Clark Ross Locates Magnetic North

  11. Two HBC Men Map the Coast

  12. What If This Inuk Had Sailed with Franklin?

  13. Lady Franklin Sends Her Husband to Conquer the Passage

  PART FOUR: Learning from First Peoples 14. An Orcadian Scot Joins the Search

  15. Voyagers Find Graves on Beechey Island

  16. John Rae Mounts a Tour de Force

  17. Robert McClure Narrowly Escapes Disaster

  18. Greenlandic Inuit Save the Kane Expedition

  19. The Scot, the Inuk, the Ojibway

  PART FIVE: The Victorian Response 20. Lady Franklin Enlists Charles Dickens

  21. The Lady Won’t Be Denied

  22. Leopold McClintock Retrieves a Record

  23. Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin?

  PART SIX: The Myth of Franklin 24. Lady Franklin Creates an Arctic Hero

  25. Tookoolito and Hall Gather Inuit Accounts

  26. Inuit Hunters Keep Castaways Alive

  27. Ebierbing and Tulugaq Work Magic for Schwatka

  28. Lady Franklin Attains Westminster Abbey

  PART SEVEN: Setting the Record Straight 29. The Last Viking in Gjoa Haven

  30. “Give Me My Father’s Body”

  31. Rasmussen Establishes Unity of Inuit Culture

  32. Erebus and Terror Validate Inuit Testimony

  Epilogue: Dead Reckoning in the Northwest Passage

  Acknowledgements

  Selected References

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Ken McGoogan

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Challenging “Official” History

  The discoveries of Erebus and Terror have sparked renewed interest in the history of Arctic exploration, and particularly in the long-lost expedition of Sir John Franklin. Even before archaeologists finished searching the ships, analysts went to work parsing the implications of the findings. Did early searchers misinterpret the one-page record found on the northwest coast of King William Island, where in 1848 Franklin’s men landed after abandoning their ice-locked vessels? Did some sailors return and reboard? Did they drift south, or did they actively sail one or both ships? Does it matter? “Franklinistas” yearn for answers to such questions.

  On the other hand, some thinkers have suggested that this single-minded focus, the “gravitational pull of the Franklin disaster,” distorts our understanding of exploration history. In Writing Arctic Disaster, Adriana Craciun argues that Franklin made only a minor contribution to Arctic discovery. And she questions the wisdom of celebrating “a failed British expedition, whose architects sought to demonstrate the superiority of British science over Inuit knowledge.”

  This book, Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage, sets out to navigate between extreme positions. It is a voyage of discovery. The late Pierre Berton established a point of departure, a known past position, with The Arctic Grail. But that work appeared in 1988—almost three decades ago. To determine our present position in these agitated seas, we must take into account everything we have learned since then—about climate change, for example, and the Inuit oral tradition. Berton begins his history in 1818, with a Royal Navy initiative, so signalling his acceptance of the orthodox British framing of the narrative. Since The Arctic Grail appeared, numerous Canadian authors have drawn attention to Inuit contributors. But until now, nobody has sought to integrate those figures into a sweeping chronicle of northern exploration.

  To research Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage, I have visited Scotland, England, Tasmania, Norway and the United States. In the Arctic, I have had the privilege of going out on the land with Inuk historian Louie Kamookak. And every summer since 2007, I have sailed in the Northwest Passage as a resource staffer with the travel company Adventure Canada. On board ship, when I wasn’t giving talks, I learned from such Inuit culturalists as politician Tagak Curley, lawyer-activist Aaju Peter and singer-songwriter Susan Aglukark. I rubbed shoulders also with archaeologists, geologists, ornithologists, anthropologists, art historians and wildlife biologists. My voyaging immersed me in debates over climate change, adventure tourism and who controls the Northwest Passage.

  Along the way, I revelled above all in visiting historical sites. On one occasion, we chanced upon an impressive cairn in a bay off Boothia Peninsula, and I determined only later that it marked the grave of a cook who had sailed with Canadian explorer Henry Larsen. On another, we explored Rensselaer Bay on the Greenland coast, where Elisha Kent Kane spent two winters trapped in the ice. Back in 1999, years before these outings, I had gone north to locate a cairn that explorer John Rae had built in 1854 and, with a couple of friends, ended up lugging an awkward plaque across bog and tundra.

  The author in 1999, lugging a plaque to the John Rae cairn overlooking Rae Strait.

  Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

  The Clipper Adventurer, now called the Sea Adventurer, is an expeditionary cruise ship that sails frequently in the Northwest Passage.

  Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

  That experience stayed with me. But I also vividly remember my initial Adventure Canada visit to Beechey Island, where in 1846 John Franklin buried the first three men to die on his final expedition. After going ashore in a Zodiac, we stood gazing at their graves while a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace” and giant flakes of snow softly fell and melted as they hit the ground. I felt moved by what I heard and saw—the skirling of the pipes, the desolate loneliness of the landscape. And yet, even after reading the wooden headboards, facsimiles of the originals, I felt more shaken by what I did not see—by the absence of ice.

  At this time I was writing Race to the Polar Sea, and I knew we had arrived at Beechey Island two weeks later than Kane had in 1850. And yet, where his ship got frozen into pack ice, and he struggled through snow and ice when he stumbled ashore, I saw nothing around me but open water and naked rock and scree. As I stood at the three Franklin graves, I realized that climate change is bringing a centuries-old saga to an abrupt conclusion. And that nineteenth-century stories of Arctic exploration are more relevant than ever—irreplaceable touchstones that enable us to compare and contrast, and to grasp what the Northwest Passage is telling us.


  In style and structure, Dead Reckoning is more literary than academic, more narrative than analytical—although, yes, I am bent on dragging Arctic discovery into the twenty-first century. By the time I set foot on Beechey, I had spent most of a decade researching and writing about northern exploration. Yet I was still meeting people who believed that John Franklin was “the discoverer of the Northwest Passage.” In the twentieth century, even some Canadian historians followed their British counterparts in creating an “official” history that culminates not with the triumphant Northwest Passage voyage of Amundsen, nor with the discovery of Rae Strait, which enabled the Norwegian explorer to succeed, but with Franklin’s calamitous 1845 expedition.

  Orthodox history nods grudgingly towards those non-British voyagers who cannot be completely ignored—men like Amundsen, Kane and Charles Francis Hall. Yet it continually shortchanges those highlighted by another book from the mid-1980s—Company of Adventurers by Peter C. Newman. Fur-trade explorers who made remarkable contributions by working with native peoples include Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie and John Rae, the first great champion of Inuit oral history. A peerless explorer, Rae was defrauded of his rightful recognition after a campaign led by Lady Franklin, widow of Sir John. Ironically, she too looms large in these pages because she orchestrated an Arctic search that transformed the map of Canada’s northern archipelago.

  The Beechey Island gravesite. The three farthest headstones, which are replicas, mark the graves of the first crewmen to die (in 1846) during the last expedition led by John Franklin. The nearest grave is that of Thomas Morgan of HMS Investigator, who died here in 1854.

  Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

  The twenty-first century demands a more inclusive narrative of Arctic exploration—one that accommodates both neglected explorers and forgotten First Peoples. With Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage, I hope to restore the unsung heroes to their rightful eminence. Certainly, such British naval officers as Franklin, James Clark Ross and William Edward Parry risked starvation, hardship and often their very lives in a quest for glory at the top of the world. But they were far from alone. Dead Reckoning recognizes the contributions of the fur-trade explorers, and of the Dene, the Ojibway, the Cree and, above all, the Inuit, whose Thule ancestors have inhabited the Canadian Arctic for almost one thousand years. Were it not for the Inuit, John Franklin’s ships would still be lying undiscovered at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

  Part One

  AN ARCTIC DREAMLAND

  1.

  Nightmares and Fever Dreams

  Archaeologists have identified several peoples who arrived in the Canadian Arctic before the time frame encompassed by this narrative. The Dorset crossed the Bering Land Bridge around 500 BC, for example, and the Thule, ancestors of contemporary Inuit, followed in the eleventh century AD. Vikings turned up early enough to interact with both Dorset and Thule. But the European idea of seeking a navigable Northwest Passage across the top of North America, that vision of discovery—that was born later, in England.

  By the mid-1800s, when John Franklin occasioned what Adriana Craciun has called “the worst polar disaster in history, and the worst catastrophe in British exploration,” European explorers had spent three centuries searching for the Northwest Passage. They had suffered scurvy, frostbite, amputation and starvation, and many had lost their lives in a hunt so difficult that its achievement promised fame, fortune and the love of women. Those who led the search frequently got caught up in a vision of extraordinary success, a fantasy of emerging from Arctic waters into the Pacific Ocean as the most heroic adventurers of their day.

  In its particulars, the vision changed over the centuries. But in the mid-1500s, with Spanish and Portuguese galleons controlling southern trade routes to the fabled riches of Cathay (China and India) by way of the Cape of Good Hope or the Strait of Magellan, London merchants dreamed of locating a waterway that would enable them to sail, unaccosted, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Such a discovery, they fervently believed, would make them wealthy beyond their wildest imaginings. Such riches would make them powerful. They would enjoy the love of beautiful women. In 1576, a consortium of English merchants called the Muscovy Company sent the veteran sailor Martin Frobisher to locate the elusive passage.

  He had a reputation as a hard-driving man, but in Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer, author James McDermott reminds us that he averted more than one near-disaster at sea: “If Frobisher may be condemned for his autocratic and inflexible nature, he deserves also the credit for confronting . . . dangers with a single-mindedness that might have evaded more balanced temperaments.”

  A swashbuckling privateer, essentially a government-sanctioned pirate, Frobisher sailed north and west from England with three ships. Five weeks out, he lost two of them to a storm. In Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England’s Arctic Colony, author Robert Ruby describes how the captain saved his own ship: “Frobisher himself grabbed the foresail and held on until the wind tore it away, along with the spar. Somehow he kept his footing. Crawling aft, he cut down the mizzenmast with an axe to reduce the storm’s pressure on the ship—in those conditions, the less canvas, the better. He took charge, and imperiousness was his best quality.”

  Sir Martin Frobisher by Cornelis Ketel, c. 1577.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  Reduced to a single vessel, Frobisher sailed on. He sighted the coast of Labrador on July 28, and in mid-August reached land at what would one day be called Baffin Island, entering the mouth of the bay that now bears his name. With ice and wind discouraging any farther northward advance, he sailed west into this long narrow inlet towards present-day Iqualuit to see, as Ruby put it, “whether he might carry himself through the same into some open sea on the back side.”

  Now came the first of many cross-cultural misunderstandings that would mark the gradual elaboration of the Arctic map. Having determined that he had entered a bay and not a strait, Frobisher spotted a group of Inuit hunters on shore and welcomed one of them aboard his ship. Using sign language, he arranged to take a guided tour of the region. He sent the visitor ashore in a small boat with five of his men, warning them not to get too close to the other hunters. The crewmen, heedless, were taken captive.

  After searching fruitlessly for several days, and with winter approaching, Frobisher took his would-be guide as a hostage (he soon died) and sailed for home. According to Inuit oral history, the five sailors lived among the locals for several years, but then put to sea from Baffin Island in a makeshift boat, never to be seen again.

  Meanwhile, arriving in London in October 1576, Frobisher produced a chunk of hard black rock “as great as a half-penny loaf.” One of his men had picked it up, mistaking it for a piece of burnable coal. Four experts examined the rock, and one went along with the idea that it might contain gold. Frobisher and his backers, led by Michael Lok of the Muscovy Company, leveraged this assessment to gain financing for another voyage.

  With the additional backing of Queen Elizabeth, and focused now on mining for precious metals, Frobisher sailed west across the Atlantic not once but twice more, in 1577 and 1578. On his second voyage, bringing a long-standing European tradition to the Arctic, and despite having encountered a handful of inhabitants, Frobisher claimed his “newly discovered” lands for England. Back home, Queen Elizabeth named the new territory Meta Incognita, or “the unknown limits.”

  On his final Arctic voyage, Frobisher sailed from Plymouth with fifteen ships—to this day, the largest Arctic expedition ever assembled. He intended to establish a mining colony of a hundred men. As he neared Baffin Island, ice and stormy weather wrecked one ship and drove him south into the mouth of a rushing tidal waterway that would later be named Hudson Strait. He sailed almost a hundred kilometres up this “mistaken strait,” then turned back reluctantly and beat his way north.

  By the time he reached Frobisher Bay, he had lost more ships and so much material that founding a settlement had become imp
ossible. On Kodlunarn Island near the entrance to that inlet, he built a stone house whose ruins would be discovered, thanks to Inuit oral history, almost three hundred years later by the American Charles Francis Hall. Frobisher brought home a small mountain of black rocks this time, all of which would prove to be worthless. This debacle ruined Michael Lok, who published a denunciation entitled “The Abuses of Captayn Furbusher Agaynst the Companye, Ano 1578.”

  Undeterred, Frobisher sailed with Sir Francis Drake to the West Indies, and was later knighted for heroism in fighting the Spanish Armada in 1588. He died in 1594 after sustaining a gunshot wound while besieging a Spanish-held fortress near Brest.

  Back in England, a less colourful but more meticulous navigator took up the search for the Northwest Passage in the late 1580s. John Davis crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times and produced the first coherent picture of the northeastern latitudes of North America, and of the west coast of Greenland. In 1585, he established friendly relations with a few Greenlandic Inuit before crossing the large strait that now bears his name. On the northeast coast of Baffin Island, Davis entered and began exploring Cumberland Sound. As winter came on, he ran out of time and departed for home, thinking that he might have discovered the entrance to the Passage.

  The next year, he sailed again and skirted Baffin Island, but failed to penetrate Cumberland Sound or to make any new discoveries. In 1587, Davis tried a third time. He sailed north along the Greenland coast to a prominent headland near present-day Upernavik, and named it Sanderson’s Hope. He met and made friends with a second group of Greenlandic Inuit.