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

  During the previous cold, dark winter, while based at Fort Simpson, Rae had written George Simpson requesting a leave of absence. After his recent hard work in searching for John Franklin, he anticipated that this would be granted. From York Factory, he intended to keep right on travelling, first to New York City and then to his beloved Orkney.

  Just over two years earlier, on April 10, 1848, Rae and John Richardson had reached New York City from Liverpool. They had travelled north to Montreal by steamship, and spent three days with Sir George Simpson at his stone mansion in nearby Lachine. Anxious to begin their search, they left separately. Richardson travelled west in the steamer British Empire, and Rae took passage in the Canada, supervising eleven Iroquois and French-Canadian voyageurs who would form the backbone of a canoeing crew of sixteen.

  In early May, reunited, Rae and Richardson paddled northwest out of Sault Ste. Marie, hugging the coast of Lake Superior, the so-called King of Lakes, which Richardson rightly described as occupying nearly as much space as the whole of England. The two Scots travelled in separate canoes, each with eight voyageurs, and followed the usual fur-trade route.

  At Cumberland House, having travelled 2,237 kilometres from Sault Ste. Marie in forty-one days, Rae caught up with Chief Trader John Bell and the twenty British servicemen who, having arrived from York Factory, would accompany them to the Arctic. On June 13, 1848, after interviewing these men, Rae wrote to George Simpson expressing misgivings. None of the miners, sappers and sailors were accustomed to portaging, or to travelling in canoes and small boats. None were hunters. Neither the four boats nor the British servicemen were suited to the work ahead. The only positive development, Rae wrote, was that Albert One-Eye, a young Inuk interpreter, had joined the expedition.

  Rae had met the youth in 1842 at Moose Factory. Since Albert had full use of both eyes, probably he was the son of a man who had lost an eye. He had been born around 1824 on the east coast of James Bay, in the so-called “Eastmain” of HBC territory. When he was eighteen, a visiting chief trader thought that Albert showed promise. He brought him across Hudson Bay to Moose Factory, the largest post in the south. John Rae was already there when Albert signed on to work for seven years as an apprentice labourer.

  Within the year, however, he was seconded to work as an interpreter at Fort George, some distance north of Eastmain. He was still there early in 1848 when Rae had thought to request his services. From Fort George, HBC trader John Spencer wrote that he was “exceedingly sorry to part with him,” adding that Albert was “a nice steady lad, and a favourite with his tribe.” On June 13, from Cumberland House, Rae wrote to Simpson that he and Richardson were bringing no hunters to the Arctic coast. They would depend on Rae’s own hunting, and on “the exertions of our Esquimaux interpreter . . . a fine active lad” who would “no doubt prove to be a good deer hunter.”

  While John Richardson was the nominal leader of the search expedition, John Rae, infinitely more capable in rough country, took charge. He led the party north through Great Slave Lake and, in August 1848, down the Mackenzie River. Albert One-Eye had no difficulty communicating with the Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta, as Richardson later attested. One local man, asked whether any white men were living on a given island, said yes. Richardson had visited that island the previous day and knew otherwise. He told Albert to tell the man he was lying. “He received this retort with a smile,” Richardson wrote, “and without the slightest discomposure, but did not repeat his assertion.” As historian Kenn Harper has noted, Albert would appear to have conveyed Richardson’s assertion less confrontationally than the explorer himself.

  Fort Confidence, Winter View, 1850–51. John Rae created this pen-and-ink drawing.

  Courtesy of HBC Archives.

  From the mouth of the Mackenzie, Rae followed the coast eastward, retracing the route Richardson had followed two decades before. With winter coming on, and having found no sign of Franklin, he led the way up the Coppermine River and then to Great Slave Lake. He and Richardson spent the winter at Fort Confidence, which Dease and Simpson had built a decade before. They erected a small observatory and took meteorological readings sixteen or seventeen times a day. Decades later, weather historian Tim Ball would note that “no one kept more precise records than John Rae.”

  During the winter of 1848–49, Richardson turned sixty-one. He could see that, given Rae’s abilities, he himself had become superfluous. In May 1849, he started the long journey home to England. Before he left, Rae elicited written instructions to seek Franklin along the shores of Wollaston Land and Victoria Land, and to abandon the quest at the end of the year. From Fort Confidence, Rae informed George Simpson that he would descend the Coppermine River, and then try to cross Dolphin and Union Strait to Victoria Island. The crew would include Albert, whom he described as “a very fine lad” and “fit for any of the duties of a labourer.”

  From Fort Confidence, Rae set out on June 7. On reaching the coast in early July, he found Coronation Gulf still clogged with ice. With half a dozen men, he pushed on to Cape Krusenstern, bent on crossing the fast-flowing Dolphin and Union Strait to Wollaston Land. Ice prevented any such crossing. Finally, on August 19, spying more open water than before, Rae pushed out into the swirling floes.

  The men reached open water and rowed on through a soupy fog. They covered twelve kilometres, but then came up against a driving stream of rolling ice floes. With visibility approaching zero, Rae gave the order to turn back. After struggling for three hours, the men emerged from the fog and ran up onto an icy barricade. They hauled the boat for almost a kilometre, attaining land several hundred metres south of their original campsite. Rae hoped to try again, and waited two more days, but a northern gale blew up and jammed “our cold and persevering opponent in large heaps along the shore.”

  Finally, amidst howling winds and driving rain, Rae acknowledged that he had run out of time. Even if John Franklin waited just across the channel, nobody was going to reach him on this occasion. Rae started leading the way up the Coppermine River. Then, on August 24, after getting past Bloody Falls, tragedy struck. The men had successfully manoeuvred their boat up the most treacherous part of the rapids and had reached an area where the current was strong but the river smooth.

  Rae judged it safe to take a loaded boat up the river, with some of the men on shore hauling it along with a rope. “When halfway up some unaccountable panic seized the steersman,” wrote Rae, and “he called on the trackers to slack the line, which was no sooner done sufficiently far, than he and the bowsman sprung on shore, and permitted the boat to sheer out into midstream [where] the line snapped, and the boat driving broadside to the current was soon upset.”

  John Rae and Albert One-Eye ran along the riverbank, hoping that the boat would get caught in an eddy. The boat passed close to where Albert stood waiting, and he managed to hook it by the keel with an oar. Rae ran to help him. He snatched a pole from the water and jammed it into a broken plank. He called to Albert to hold on with him. Either Albert didn’t hear him or thought he had a better idea. He sprang onto the capsized boat just before the current swept it towards the head of a little bay. Rae thought Albert was safe there, but in seconds he saw the boat come out of the protection of the bay, driven by the current. It began sliding beneath the surface. Albert tried to leap from the boat onto the rocks. Rae wrote later that the young man slipped and tumbled into the water, “nor did he rise again to the surface.”

  For Albert’s death, Rae never forgave the steersman, whom he described as “a notorious thief and equally noted for falsehood.” He had hoped that, once this expedition was done, he would be able to keep Albert with him when he took charge of the Mackenzie River District. Rae had told Simpson that “he would be useful in the event of it becoming desirable to have any negotiations with the Esquimaux at the mouth of the Mackenzie,” and he hoped “to make him in every way a most useful man to the Company.”

  At Fort Confidence, Rae mourned the loss of Albert One-Eye. “This melanch
oly accident has distressed me more than I can well express,” he wrote. “Albert was liked by everyone, for his good temper, lively disposition and great activity in doing anything that was required of him. I had become much attached to the poor fellow.”

  Now, on June 25, 1850, one day shy of Great Slave Lake, and while dreaming of returning home to his beloved Orkney, Rae encountered two native canoeists carrying an “extraordinary express.” He went ashore to accept delivery, then sat on the banks of the broad, fast-flowing river to read three communications. The first came from George Simpson at Lachine. Searchers had found no trace of John Franklin. England grew increasingly alarmed. Simpson wanted Rae to renew his search immediately, and to travel farther north than ever before. Reeling, Rae turned to the other two letters. From London, Lady Franklin wrote in a friendly, respectful and indeed flattering manner: “[My anticipations were not] so extravagant as other people’s, for it has been the custom of people to throw upon you everything that others failed to accomplish—‘oh Rae’s in that quarter, Rae will do that’—as if you and your single boat could explore hundreds of miles NSE & West and as if no obstacles of any kind could interfere . . . Myself, I think that your quarter is by far the most promising of any, for it is the quarter to which my husband was most distinctly . . . directed to proceed, and where I have no doubt he directed his most strenuous efforts.”

  Also from London, Sir Francis Beaufort, the Admiralty’s chief hydrographer—England’s official mapmaker—contributed a final letter: “I cannot let the mail go without telling you how intensely fixed all eyes are upon you . . . [and] upon what is yet in your power, and in yours alone, to do next season . . . Let me then, my dear Doctor, add my voice to the moans of the wives and children of the two unfortunate ships, and to the humane and energetic suggestions of your heart, and implore you to save neither money nor labour in fulfilling your holy mission. Two ships will sail in ten days for Bering Strait—others in spring for Baffin Bay. The Americans are preparing an expedition but to you I look for the solution of our melancholy suspense.”

  Having read the letters through, Rae walked alone along the banks of the Mackenzie. He felt as low as he had ever felt in his life. On his last expedition, he had failed not only in his main objective, finding Franklin, but even in his secondary one of reaching Wollaston Land and perhaps discovering the final link in the Northwest Passage. About Franklin, missing now for five years, nobody could hope to discover good news. Rae had been dreaming not of returning to Arctic searching, but of travelling to Orkney and then London to seek a wife. Instead of strolling around Hyde Park with a pretty girl on his arm, he would soon be battling blizzards in the fierce, unforgiving North. He stood looking over the Mackenzie River, swiping at the mosquitoes that swarmed around his head. Why, oh why, hadn’t Franklin stayed home?

  On the Mackenzie River, while discharging his responsibilities as chief factor, John Rae organized a two-part expedition to resume the search for Franklin—a tour de force. Come autumn, he would return north to Fort Confidence with fourteen men (and a few country wives). During the ensuing winter, he would design and build two boats. Next spring, having secured enough food through hunting and fishing, he would set out. Before the ice thawed, he would lead a few men to the Arctic coast. On snowshoes, he would cross the Dolphin and Union Strait and explore the shores of Victoria Land. He would recross that strait before spring thaw and travel to a temporary provision station on the Kendall River near the coast. There he would meet a contingent of his men, who would have dragged the two boats to that location. Then, with a larger party, he would descend the Coppermine River and, as the ice broke up, sail the boats into Coronation Gulf and beyond.

  Having envisaged this two-part search, John Rae set about making it real. At Fort Confidence during the ensuing winter, Rae taught John Beads and Peter Linklater—two men of Orcadian background born in Rupert’s Land—how to build igloos. These two would accompany him on the first part of the expedition. Rae also gave Hector Mackenzie, his popular, fiddle-playing second-in-command, also from Rupert’s Land, detailed instructions covering every contingency. He advised him what to do, for example, if Rae himself failed to return, if he sent word of some important finding or if letters arrived announcing that Franklin had been found.

  The party would carry no useless weight. While naval officers sledding in the Arctic would haul bedding weighing almost twenty-five pounds per man, Rae had reduced this by limiting himself and his companions to one blanket, one deerskin robe and two hairy deer-skins. Writing to George Simpson, he had described this as “rather luxurious, being 22 lbs. weight for all, but we can easily lighten it if required.”

  When travelling, Rae wore Inuit-style clothing: a fur cap, large leather mitts with fur around the wrist, and moccasins made of smoked moose skin, large enough to accommodate two or three blanket socks and with thongs of skin stretched across the soles to prevent slipping. He also wore a light cloth coat with its hood and sleeves lined with leather, a cloth vest and thick moose skin trousers. He carried “a spare woolen shirt or two and a coat made of the thinnest fawn skin with the fur on, weighing not more than four or five pounds, to put on in the snow hut, or when taking observations.” His personal effects consisted of a pocket comb, a toothbrush, a towel and a bit of coarse yellow soap.

  With preparations complete, Rae set out on part one of his expedition. He donned his snowshoes and, on April 25, 1851, led four men and four sledges east out of Fort Confidence. Dogs hauled three of the sledges, harnessed not in rows, as was British naval practice, but in an Inuit-style fan-out. Two men hauled the fourth sledge. For the snowshoe journey, Rae carried enough pemmican and flour to last thirty-five days and enough grease to serve as cooking fuel at a rate of one pound per day. Unlike government sledging parties, his would not stop for lunch but only for a moment to take what the Hudson’s Bay men called “a pipe,” eating a mouthful or two of pemmican before resuming the trek.

  The weather turned ugly on April 27 as Rae arrived at the Kendall River station. After huddling in an igloo through two days of stormy weather, Rae led them with his men north. The fatigue party travelled to within sixteen kilometres of the Arctic coast, doing most of the heavy hauling, and turned back on May 2. Rae pressed on with Beads and Linklater, both of whom had been born in Rupert’s Land and were in their early twenties: fit men and ideal travelling companions.

  On reaching the Arctic coast at Richardson Bay eight kilometres west of the mouth of the Coppermine River, Rae found the ice ahead free of hummocks and pressure ridges and not unfavourable for travelling. In the afternoon, with the sun high in the sky, the glare off the ice and snow threatened the men with snow blindness, whose victims feel as if sand has lodged in their eyes. To avoid this, Rae decided to rest during the day and travel by night, when visibility would resemble that of twilight at the lower latitudes.

  John Rae identified with and learned from the native peoples, both First Nations and Inuit. This watercolour portrait, Dr. John Rae, Arctic Explorer (1862) by William Armstrong, comes from the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

  Courtesy of the Glenbow Museum (55.17.1).

  Two hours before midnight, he donned snowshoes and set out across Coronation Gulf towards Wollaston Peninsula on Victoria Island. In order to examine bays, rivers and inlets while his men drove the dogs straight ahead, Rae hauled a small sledge piled with bedding, instruments, pemmican, a musket and tools for building a snow hut. After slogging along the coast, he touched land at Point Lockyer and then crossed Dolphin and Union Strait by way of Douglas Island, where he cached provisions for the return journey.

  Four days out, near Cape Lady Franklin, Rae reached Wollaston Land, believed at the time to be separate from Victoria Island. Searching for the lost ships of the Franklin expedition and for a non-existent strait between Wollaston and Victoria, Rae travelled east along the coast. At one point, between observations for time and latitude, Rae shot ten hares: “These fine animals were very large and tame, and several more mi
ght have been killed, also a number of partridges, had it been requisite to waste time or ammunition in following them.”

  When the temperature plummeted to thirty degrees below zero Celsius, the men—one of them badly frostbitten in the face—retreated with satisfaction to their latest igloo. On May 10, Rae ventured beyond where Dease and Simpson had reached in 1839, having passed this point from the east without encountering any north-south strait. From here, he would soon resume the search by boat. Now he turned around to retrace his steps, bent on searching to the west of his landing spot.

  That night, a snowstorm reduced visibility to sixty feet. Fortunately, the snowshoers had the wind at their backs. Rae found their previous track and so didn’t need repeatedly to take bearings: “After a very cold but smart walk of rather more than seven hours duration, we were very glad to find ourselves snug under cover of our old quarters, our clothes being penetrated in every direction with the finely powdered snow.”

  The storm that raged through the next night made travel impossible, but in the morning, accompanied by the panting of dogs, the creaking of sledges and the gentle whump whump whump of snowshoes, Rae again headed west dragging his sledge, which weighed over thirty-five pounds. Battling rough ice and blowing snow, following the coast as it swung north, Rae came upon thirteen Inuit lodges. He chatted amicably with the inhabitants. Timid at first, they soon gained enough confidence to sell him seal meat for the dogs and boots, shoes and sealskins for the men. These Inuit, living on the west coast of Wollaston Peninsula, had seen neither white men nor sailing ships.

  By May 23, with spring thaw threatening to trap the boatless party on the wrong side of Dolphin and Union Strait, Rae realized he must soon turn back. Resting in the igloo as night came on, scribbling notes by candlelight, the explorer decided to make one last sortie northward. He would travel light, bringing only Peter Linklater, the faster of the two young men, and leaving the dogs and John Beads to rest in the camp before the long return journey.