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

  John Rae had been born in the Hall of Clestrain at Stromness, Orkney, in 1813. The son of a prosperous land agent, he had spent his youth climbing, fishing, hiking, hunting and sailing. In his mid-teens, this Orcadian Scot had trained as a doctor at the University of Edinburgh. At nineteen, he sailed with the Hudson’s Bay Company as a surgeon. Ice prevented the ship from returning home, and Rae spent a winter near the bottom of Hudson Bay at tiny Charlton Island—the very island where, two centuries before, Henry Hudson had endured one horrific winter.

  There, Rae survived food shortages, freezing-cold temperatures, and an outbreak of scurvy that killed two men. In the spring, realizing he was well suited to “the wild sort of life” available with the HBC, he signed on to serve two years as a company doctor—and ended up remaining at Moose Factory, the HBC’s second-largest fur-trading post, for more than a decade. Here, Rae went on countless hunting trips with a Cree hunchback named George Rivers. A tall, well-built, powerful fellow in his youth, Rivers had injured his spine and remained so bent over that he stood little more than five feet tall. That didn’t stop him.

  Orcadian photographer James Grieve created this image. It combines two photos: one of a statue of John Rae erected in Stromness in 2013 to mark the 200th anniversary of the explorer’s birth, and another of the Hall of Clestrain, Rae’s birthplace, as it looks today. The John Rae Society is working to restore the Hall and turn it into a visitor attraction.

  Courtesy of James Grieve Photography.

  With Rivers, Rae hunted moose and caribou, which provided the Cree not only with a staple food but also with hide that, once tanned, they fashioned into jackets, trousers and skirts. Rae had arrived as an excellent outdoorsman. But Rivers taught him native techniques of hunting and trapping, showing him how to cache meat under heavy stones to protect it from predators, and how to clean, skin and butcher large game, securing the blood in a bag made by turning the stomach inside out. He taught Rae to remove the gullet of a carcass, explaining that if this was not done, the meat would quickly become unfit to eat.

  Rivers proved to be a fearless canoeist, an admirable shot and an excellent cook. The young doctor repaid the Cree for his tutelage by getting him a double-barrelled shotgun from England, with which he then made remarkable shots. With the help of Rivers, Rae mastered canoeing and snowshoeing. Still in his twenties, he became legendary as a survivalist and snowshoe walker. Once, making a long-distance home call, he covered 167 kilometres in two days—119 on the second.

  In 1844, while Sir John and Lady Franklin lobbied to secure the leadership of that epochal Royal Navy expedition, John Rae visited Montreal from Moose Factory. There, he had convinced George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, that he was the man to complete the geographical survey of the Arctic coast of North America. He needed to learn the latest surveying techniques, and the following year, as Franklin sailed into the Passage, Rae accomplished an extraordinary overland journey. First, he paddled from Moose Factory to Red River (Fort Garry), a distance of 1,175 kilometres. When his intended instructor grew ill and died, Rae added another 2,230 kilometres. First he donned snowshoes and spent two months trekking to Sault Ste. Marie, hunting as he went. After sojourning there, he continued mostly by canoe to Toronto. There, at the magnetic observatory, a simple log structure (long gone) built six years before on the present-day grounds of the University of Toronto, he studied with the distinguished scientist John Henry Lefroy, learning how to use a sextant and take magnetic observations.

  During the autumn of 1845, as Franklin prepared to winter on Beechey Island, John Rae made his way back to Red River, mostly by canoe, and then beat east and north in a York boat first to Moose Factory (1,176 kilometres) and then to York Factory (992 kilometres). He arrived in a freezing gale on October 8, and there spent the ensuing winter, supervising the building of two boats and hiring men for his expedition. In June 1846, with two twenty-two-foot-long sailboats, John Rae set out from York Factory with a dozen men—six Scots (including four from his native Orkney), two French Canadians, one Métis and one Cree.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company made John Rae a chief factor in 1850. Eight years later, J. Scott created this mezzotint of the explorer after a painting by S. Pearce. It is at the Wellcome Library, London.

  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  After sailing north for two weeks, Rae arrived at Churchill. Here he rounded out his party by adding two Inuit interpreters: Ouligbuck and one of his sons, a boy of thirteen or fourteen called William Ouligbuck Jr. The senior Ouligbuck had travelled with John Richardson on Franklin’s second overland expedition. He had later ventured along the coast with Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson.

  The younger Ouligbuck had entered the written record in 1843, when he visited York Factory with his parents. Letitia Hargrave, wife of Chief Trader James Hargrave, wrote of him: “The boy is about 12, and speaks ten languages. He is otherwise a little scamp, but very smart & hideously fat and husky-like, tho’ very well dressed.” Two years later, Hargrave wrote to his opposite number at Fort Churchill that Ouligbuck Sr. “has been retained in the service solely with a view towards [going north with Rae] . . . As his son appears to be such a useful lad, he will likewise be included in the party—an opportunity which must be gratifying to his father.”

  Since the youth would “act as the second interpreter,” Hargrave asked that “all the people at the Fort should be directed to address him in the English language only.” Before the expedition was over, Rae would run out of patience with young William, describing him as an “incorrigible thief . . . [who] was twice caught with the old man’s bale open, eating sugar; some tobacco was also taken, and the trousers of most of the men . . . completely cleared of buttons by the same hands.” The young rascal, given to filching his father’s sugar and tobacco, and of playing practical jokes, sounds almost like a contemporary teenager.

  In his published journal, Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea, Rae described how, on reaching Repulse Bay on July 24, 1846, he felt relieved to see four Inuit on the rocky shore. Their presence meant that he would find animals to hunt, and might be able to trade for fuel, cooking oil and perhaps even sled dogs. With the help of Ouligbuck, Rae inquired about the geography of the region. He would have to see for himself, of course, but now he learned that Thomas Simpson had been wrong: no channel led westward from here, or even from Lord Mayor Bay, to anywhere near the mouth of the Castor and Pollux River.

  Rae had yet to discover the virtues of Inuit igloos or snow houses, and he supervised the building of a stone house, twenty feet by fourteen, which he named Fort Hope. As winter deepened, he visited a nearby Inuit camp. He found the snow house of an old man named Shishak so cozy and warm that his waistcoat, which had frozen stiff, actually thawed.

  Rae sought instruction in how to build an igloo. After a few trials, he and a couple of his men became proficient ice-masons. By December 1846, they had built four snow huts, linked by tunnels, in which to store provisions. Later, as the cold and continuous darkness took hold, they constructed two observatories of snow, with an ice pillar in each—one for meteorological readings, the other to study the magnetic effects of the aurora borealis, or northern lights.

  Using Ouligbuck and his son as interpreters, Rae collected Inuit stories from a communicative Inuk named Arkshuk. He learned, for example, that after the creation of the world, a mighty conjuror had raised himself up into the heavens, taking both fire and his beautiful sister with him. When the two argued, he scorched one side of her face. She escaped and formed the moon. “When it is new moon,” Rae wrote, “the burnt side of her face is towards us; when full moon, the reverse is the case.”

  Dr. John Rae at Repulse Bay, 1846 by Charles Fraser Comfort (1932).

  Courtesy of HBC Corporate Collection (ART-00032).

  In April 1847, having survived temperatures as low as minus forty-three degrees Celsius, Rae set out westward with five men on a surveying expedition. Heading north, he chanced
upon the snowhuts of two Inuit families who were fishing for trout. He hired one of the men, Kei-ik-too-oo, to help haul supplies for two days. The man harnessed his dog team, took on a heavy load and, after applying a mixture of moss and wet snow to his sled runners, glided away rapidly over the snow. Rae immediately noted the superiority of the iced runners over the bare ones he had been using, and adjusted his practice accordingly. Rae also described how he and his men built snow houses each night, raising “a good roomy dwelling” in an hour. A second party erected a kitchen, a necessary addition, “although our cooking was none of the most delicate or extensive . . . had it been only to thaw snow” for drinking water.

  Travelling north and periodically caching provisions for the return journey, the party arrived at Committee Bay and followed the coast for four days. Bad weather slowed progress, but on April 17, Rae climbed a rise and looked out over a glorious expanse. From where he stood, he could see “a large extent of ice-covered sea studded with innumerable islands. Lord Mayor’s Bay was before me, and the islands were those named by Sir John Ross” in the early 1830s. Rae could also see that, to the west, land connected Boothia Felix to the mainland, making it not an island but a peninsula.

  On the return journey, Rae and two Orcadian men struck out overland across several ranges of ice hills. This meant climbing one hummocky ridge after another. One of his men, Flett, was suffering snow blindness. He “got many queer falls,” Rae wrote, “and was once or twice placed in such situations with his head down hill, his heels up, and the strap of his bundle around his neck, that it would have been impossible for him to get up by his own unaided exertions.”

  Having travelled non-stop for thirty days, Rae arrived back at Repulse Bay, terminating “a journey little short of 600 miles [965 kilometres], the longest, I believe, ever made on foot along the Arctic coast.” Nor was Rae finished. After resting for one week, he took four men and trekked to the west coast of Melville Peninsula, battling fierce winds, drifting snow and more hummocky ice to come within a few kilometres of Fury and Hecla Strait, so named by Royal Navy explorer William Edward Parry.

  Over the course of this first expedition, John Rae charted 1,055 kilometres hitherto unmapped coastline. More than a century later, when explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson read of Rae’s adaptations, and of the way he used local resources, he called him “a genius in the art of travelling.” He insisted that Rae’s innovations constituted a revolutionary advance in northern travel: “Rae was as new as Darwin.” The man himself advanced no such claims. He was the chief hunter of every expedition he ever led, and also the first European to adopt Inuit methods of travel. But he never failed to credit those who taught him, whether they were Cree or Inuit.

  On August 30, 1847, when Rae reached York Factory, he was surprised to find that 20 men had recently arrived from England. An advance party, they had brought four transportable boats to use in searching for Sir John Franklin, who had disappeared with two ships and 128 men. Rae doubted their fitness for undertaking an Arctic search, but that was none of his concern. In a letter from George Simpson, he learned that he had been promoted to chief trader, and that he was free to travel until the annual general meeting of June 1848. John Rae had not been home for fourteen years. On September 24, 1847, he boarded an HBC supply ship and sailed for Stromness.

  On November 1, soon after he arrived home, his report about overwintering above the treeline appeared in the Times. Not long after that, he received an invitation from Sir John Richardson. Then just thirty-four years old, Rae knew Richardson to be England’s finest naturalist. He had read about the older man in Franklin’s first published narrative, and vividly remembered the courage and generosity Richardson had demonstrated. Already the search for Franklin had become a cause célèbre. Who could refuse? He agreed to serve as second-in-command.

  In London, talking with those concerned, Rae gleaned that Franklin and his men carried enough food to last probably until July of 1848. No assistance could reach them before that date, and the men would be on short rations unless they managed to obtain fresh provisions by hunting or fishing. But to anyone who cared to listen, Rae explained that caribou and muskox are wary of hunters, especially if they have migrated from the south. In winter, they are especially difficult to approach because snow fills the ravines and hollows, leaving even an expert hunter no means of concealing himself. The natives had learned to trap deer in pitfalls dug in the snow, a highly specialized technique. With seals, Rae would explain, the challenges were greater still. At Repulse Bay, while the Inuit were bringing in one or more seals a day, the excellent Cree hunter Nibitabo could not obtain even one: the animals always managed to plunge under the ice and swim away, even if they were mortally wounded.

  Rae was well aware that Franklin was probably facing far worse difficulties than the British public could imagine. But where, exactly? Late in 1847, the Admiralty augmented Richardson and Rae’s proposed Mackenzie River expedition, adding two searches by sea. One ship, the Plover, would enter Arctic waters from the west through Bering Strait and send boats eastward along the top of the continent. The other expedition would sail from the east and include two ships, the Enterprise and the Investigator, under James Clark Ross, who felt compelled to break his vow and go searching. Meanwhile, on March 25, 1848, Rae and Richardson sailed out of Liverpool on the mail steamer Hibernia. They were bent on finding John Franklin. And in this, soon enough, they would be far from alone.

  15.

  Voyagers Find Graves on Beechey Island

  Late one morning in August 1850, while talking on the bow of a ship trapped in the ice off Beechey Island, speculating about what route John Franklin might have taken, an American searcher, Elisha Kent Kane, was startled by the sound of a voice yelling, “Graves!” A sailor was stumbling breathless across the ice from shore. “Graves!” the man shouted. “Franklin’s winter quarters!”

  Searchers had found what has since become the most visited historical site in the Arctic—the graves of the first three men to die during Franklin’s final voyage. At this desolate spot in 1846, while still hoping to discover a northwest passage, the long-winded Franklin would have conducted sonorous funeral services for the dead men. Now, four years later, the Philadelphia-born Kane led searchers in scrambling across the ice and up a short slope to the makeshift cemetery. “Here, amid the sterile uniformity of snow and slate,” he wrote later, “were the head-boards of three graves, made after the old orthodox fashion of gravestones at home.”

  Drawn by James Hamilton from a sketch by Elisha Kent Kane, this is a romanticized representation of the Beechey Island gravesite. In 1850, Kane was present at the discovery of the site.

  Born in 1820, the oldest son of a patrician family based in Philadelphia, then called “the Athens of America,” Elisha Kent Kane trained as a doctor. Despite recurring illness and health problems—his heart condition would kill him within a decade—he became what today we would call an extreme adventurer. While still in his twenties, he descended into a volcano in the Philippines, infiltrated a company of slave traders in West Africa and narrowly survived a stabbing during hand-to-hand combat in the Sierra Madre.

  While sailing as an assistant surgeon in the American Navy, ranging from the Mediterranean to South America, Kane felt revolted by the brutality of shipboard discipline. After seeing one man flogged three times and another receive fifty lashes, he sought and gained a transfer to the United States Coast Survey, which had been created to map harbours and coastlines.

  This government-run department had become the leading proponent of “Humboldtean science” in America. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt had established a new model for geographical studies. While exploring the interior of South America, Humboldt had forged a stellar reputation as a scientific truth-seeker who would risk his life to advance the causes of science and humanity.

  By entering the Coast Survey, as David Chapin observed in Exploring Other Worlds, Kane found a model of exploration worth emula
ting. He liked the idea of men working outdoors, subordinating individual interests to the common good, and sleeping in tents for weeks at a time. Assigned to the steamer Walker, Kane helped survey the southeast coast of North America.

  By January 1850, when he sailed into Charleston, South Carolina, Kane had become keenly interested in the search for Sir John Franklin. The previous April, Lady Franklin had written to American president Zachary Taylor, asking that the United States “join heart and mind in the enterprise of snatching the lost navigators from a dreary grave.” A New York shipping magnate, Henry Grinnell, perceived that the search for Franklin could be combined with a quest to test a scientific hypothesis attracting attention among American geographers—the idea that, at the top of the world, there existed the Open Polar Sea, teeming with fish and mammals.

  After exchanging letters with Lady Franklin, Grinnell decided to sponsor an American search expedition. To keep expenses within reason, he needed the U.S. Navy to supply manpower and provisions—and so he told Jane Franklin. In December 1849, this persuasive woman wrote again to President Taylor. She stressed that the lost sailors, “whether clinging still to their ships or dispersed in various directions, have entered upon a fifth winter in those dark and dreary solitudes, with exhausted means of sustenance.”