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

  The eastern end of that strait was (and often still is) blocked year-round by pack ice moving slowly south from the permanent polar ice cap. Halted by ice late in September, McClure settled in to winter in the strait. During the last ten days of October, with one other man, McClure sledged about fifty-five kilometres to the north coast of Banks Island. Looking out across an ice-choked channel a hundred kilometres wide (now called McClure Strait), he saw Melville Island, which William Edward Parry had reached from the Atlantic in 1819. This viewing across impenetrable ice, he would later argue—and, for its own reasons, the Admiralty would concur—constituted a discovery of the Northwest Passage.

  Spring 1851 brought the sledge journeys cited above. Early in June, when John Rae was completing his snowshoe expedition across Dolphin and Union Strait, McClure and Miertsching travelled south to the entrance of Prince of Wales Strait and interviewed local Inuit, who assured them that Victoria Island was indeed one and indivisible. Back at the ship, after trying and again failing to push north, McClure retreated southward and then swung north around Banks Island.

  At Mercy Bay on the northeast coast, his ship again became trapped by the same perennial flow of pack ice. The winter months did not pass quickly. In the spring of 1852, commencing on April 11, McClure and one other man sledged across the ice of McClure Strait to Melville Island, where Edward Parry had spent months at “Winter Harbour.” He left a note at “Parry’s Rock,” a huge block of sandstone, giving his ship’s coordinates. Back he went to the entrapped Investigator, which, while never a happy ship, now grew increasingly grim and desperate.

  Created by Samuel Gurney Cresswell and William Simpson, this image— Critical Position of HMS Investigator on the North Coast of Baring Island, August 20, 1851—speaks to the navigability of the Northwest Passage claimed by Robert McClure. This “passage” was not viable.

  Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada (C-016105).

  During the winter of 1852–53, with sailors already struggling to survive on reduced rations, the ship became a frozen hell of floggings, imprisonments, starvation, scurvy, and even, for a few, miserable deaths. Almost uniquely for this era, McClure was given to placing certain officers—notably, first lieutenant William Haswell—under arrest for extended periods. Several times, he ordered that men be given forty-eight lashes, the navy-mandated maximum.

  Early in 1853, with his ship still beset and most of his hungry men suffering dreadfully from scurvy, McClure conceived a sinister plan to rid himself of his thirty sickest crew members, who insisted on consuming their short rations of food. He proposed to send them south and east to seek help in two separate sledge parties, both radically undersupplied. He and the healthiest men would remain with the ship to await further developments.

  In April of that year, when he was mere days from enacting this plan, a sailor from HMS Resolute, part of a search expedition trapped ninety-five kilometres away off Melville Island, came upon the Investigator. Someone had found his note at Winter Harbour. McClure refused to abandon ship until he was ordered to do so by a senior officer, who gave the command only after a surgeon visited the Investigator and saw the shocking condition of those “volunteering” to remain. Then, McClure and his crew of walking skeletons sledged and stumbled across the frozen ice pack to the Resolute, which had entered Arctic waters from the Atlantic. The truth of the situation, as William James Mills writes in Exploring Polar Frontiers, “was that a disaster of near Franklinian proportions had been avoided only by the narrowest of margins.”

  Originally, as McClure well knew, a monetary reward had been offered for completing the Northwest Passage by actually sailing a ship from one ocean to the other, Atlantic to Pacific or vice versa. Having abandoned his ship under protest, McClure could later insist that he would have completed the Passage had he been left to his own devices. He argued, further, that walking and sledging across the ice for some distance, and then returning home in another ship, constituted a discovery of the Northwest Passage.

  Of course it did—but only if we accept that walking across an impassable channel choked with heavy ice constitutes a legitimate fulfillment of the original objective. A century would elapse before anyone managed to sail through McClure Strait, as it was dubbed, north of Banks Island. In 1954, as part of the Canadian–U.S. Beaufort Sea Expedition, an American icebreaker, the USCGC Northwind, became the first ship to transit the Passage through there. Ten years before, while attempting that route, the Canadian schooner St. Roch had been forced to beat southwest through Prince of Wales Strait.

  In 2010, Canadian archaeologists found the wreck of McClure’s Investigator in Mercy Bay, precisely where he abandoned it. The ship sat eight metres below the surface. Today, first-time visitors to Beechey Island often puzzle over why they see four graves and headboards arranged in a line, given that only three men from the Franklin expedition are known to be buried there. The fourth marks the grave of able seaman Thomas Morgan, who died in 1854. He had managed to get off the Investigator, but was already so sick that he did not survive. He was one of the men McClure had earlier singled out to go on a death march.

  18.

  Greenlandic Inuit Save the Kane Expedition

  Late in May 1853, while Robert McClure was trapped in the western Arctic, Elisha Kent Kane sailed on his second voyage out of New York City. On returning from Beechey Island, the articulate, charismatic young doctor had secured the leadership of the Second Grinnell Expedition to sail in search of Franklin. In keeping with prevailing geographical theory, he believed that Franklin and some of his men might yet be alive in the mammal-rich Open Polar Sea at the top of the world. In September, he sailed the small, wooden Advance—26 metres, 144 tons—into Smith Sound, achieving a new farthest north and getting locked into the ice at a bay he named Rensselaer, after his grandmother’s family.

  Here, before he orchestrated a difficult escape, Kane would endure two horrendous winters of endless darkness and cold, with temperatures hovering around thirty-two degrees below zero Celsius. Starting with twenty men and fifty dogs on board, Kane sought to avert sickness with good hygiene. To avoid scurvy, he regularly mustered the men for health inspection, and also checked and cleaned the living quarters. Running low on meat, he relied on cabbage, and then raw potatoes and lime juice. Even so, men began showing symptoms of scurvy—sore joints, swollen gums, patchy discolorations on the skin.

  Original map by Dawn Huck [appeared originally in Race to the Polar Sea, p. 130].

  Kane lost two men after exposure and frost turned their feet black. After enduring amputations, one of them died of tetanus, the other of a bacterial infection. Kane buried them with due ceremony, walling them into a cave on a rocky island. He then had to deal with a near-mutiny. A number of malcontents defected in an attempt to scramble over the ice to Upernavik in northern Greenland. They abandoned him with a few active men and several ailing comrades. The defection, lacking leadership, ended in near-starvation and an ignominious return to the ship.

  By then, thanks to the help of his Inuk interpreter, Hans Hendrik, Kane had established an enduring alliance with the Inuit who lived at Etah, roughly eighty kilometres south. Without that alliance, neither Kane nor any of his men would have returned alive to New York City.

  Hans Christian Hendrik (Suersaq), born in 1834 in Fiskernaes, southern Greenland, would prove invaluable to several Arctic expeditions. He was nineteen years old when, in 1853, Kane called in at his hometown, looking to add an Inuit interpreter and hunter. The local superintendent recommended Hendrik as an expert with kayak and javelin. On meeting the chubby young man, Kane grew skeptical. But then the laid-back Inuk, he wrote later, “as stolid and unimpressible as any of our Indians,” demonstrated his value by spearing a bird on the wing.

  Kane not only agreed to pay Hendrik a modest wage, and to leave his mother two barrels of bread and fifty-two pounds of salt pork, but “became munificent in his eyes when I added the gift of a rifle and a new kayak.” Years later, Hendrik would corroborate t
his account in Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, the Arctic Traveller. He wrote the manuscript “in tolerably plain and intelligible Greenlandish,” according to first translator Henry Rink, and explained that he decided to join up when he learned that Kane would pay his mother. His father, assistant to the three priests in the community, had died the previous year. His mother begged him not to go, he reports: “But I replied, ‘If no mischief happen to me, I shall return, and I shall earn money for you.’”

  Kane sailed into Smith Sound and, as noted above, settled in for the winter, expecting to depart the next spring. The constant darkness took a toll. In mid-November, Hendrik declared that he could no longer tolerate such a confined and miserable existence. He bundled up his clothes, took his rifle and prepared to leave. Later, in his published memoir, he would write: “Never had I seen the dark season like this. To be sure it was awful. I thought we should have no daylight any more. I was seized with fright, and fell a weeping. I never in my life saw such darkness at noon time. As the darkness continued for three months, I really believed we should have no daylight more.”

  Hans Hendrik (Suersaq) was nineteen years old when he came aboard the Advance at Fiskernaes, southern Greenland. He would prove invaluable. Sketch by Elisha Kent Kane.

  Hendrik remained on the ship after talking with Kane. The commander ascertained that the young man yearned after “one of the softer sex at Fiskernaes,” and noted that “he looked as wretched as any lover of a milder clime.” Kane gave him a dose of salts and a key promotion: “He has now all the dignity of a henchman. He harnesses my dogs, builds my traps, and walks with me on my ice-tramps; and, except hunting, is excused all other duty. He is really attached to me, and as happy as a fat man ought to be.” Kane’s response to Hendrik, who had difficulty adjusting to a shipboard existence, led one jealous seaman to refer to the youth as “the captain’s pet Eskimo.”

  In April 1854, while Kane sat below deck with a man dying of tetanus, he heard strange sounds coming from the nearby shore. He climbed into the sunlight to see figures “on all sides of the rocky harbor, dotting the snow-shores and emerging from the bleakness of the cliffs, wild and uncouth.” Inuit hunters had climbed onto the highest fragments of land ice to stand waving and calling out “singly and conspicuously, like the figures in a tableau of the opera.”

  Hans Hendrik was away hunting. But soon he returned and found he could communicate with these people, who lived farther north even than those John Ross had encountered some four decades before. At first, Hendrik wrote later, “I feared they might be murderers, as they lived apart from any [Christian Greenlanders]; but, on the contrary, they were harmless men.”

  After some initial misunderstandings—pushing, shoving, pilfering, and then some brazen robbery—Kane negotiated a solemn treaty. Through Hendrik, the Inuit agreed to steal no more, and also to lead the sailors to finding animals. In return, the white men would release three hunters they had captured thieving, and use their guns to shoot game on joint expeditions.

  As a result of this friendship treaty, the sailors and the Inuit began hunting together. “I can hardly say how valuable the advice of our Esquimaux friends has been to us upon our hunts,” Kane would write. “Every movement of ice or wind or season is noted, and they predicted its influence upon the course of the birds of passage with the same sagacity that has taught them the habits of the resident animals.”

  Kane’s vivid descriptions of Arctic wildlife resonate with contemporary implications. He describes hunting birds, seals and walrus, all now seriously depleted in numbers, and incidentally waxes eloquent about the strength of polar bears. He relates, for example, how several bears ravaged a cache of provisions, smashing open iron caskets, and tossing aside boulders that had tested the strength of three men.

  During the second winter, with the ship still locked solid, the people of Etah retreated into two large huts buried in snow, completely enclosed except for vent holes. At one point, Kane lived among them for a week. While joining in settlement life, he also functioned as an ethnographer. In his book Arctic Explorations, Kane would devote more than twenty pages to describing habits and customs, touching on everything from eating utensils to mourning rituals, religious beliefs and the perquisites of the Nalegak-soak, or head chief, who enjoyed “the questionable privilege of having as many wives as he could support.”

  Kane’s detailed depictions of clothes, sledges, weapons, housing and habits provide a unique opportunity to juxtapose today and yesterday. Unlike some others, this gentleman from Philadelphia proved humble enough to learn from hunter-gatherers who had been born into a tradition of Arctic survival.

  An excellent artist, Kane drew sketches that later he developed into etchings for his book. At some point, using musical notation, and as evidenced in the archives at the American Philosophical Society, he went so far as to transcribe “An Eskimo Round” for six voices. Over a period of several months, Kane would add to these sketches, producing detailed descriptions and drawings of life among the Inuit. One historian, L. H. Neatby, would suggest that these writings “make the most interesting part of his Arctic Explorations.” For many southerners, in that age before even movies or photos, Kane created the conventional image of the “Eskimo.”

  During the second winter of entrapment, Kane wrote in his journal: “I have determined to borrow a lesson from our Esquimaux neighbours, and am turning the brig into an igloo.” Praising Inuit housing and diet as “the safest and best to which the necessity of our circumstances invited us,” Kane put his men to work prying moss and turf from the rocks and applying this material to the quarterdeck for warmth. Below decks, he created a large room roughly eighteen feet square, with interior walls again of moss and turf.

  Having analyzed the functional ingenuity of the tossut, or narrow entrance-tunnel, to the conventional igloo, which keeps heat loss to a minimum, Kane got Christian Ohlsen, the carpenter, to create a similar entrance to the cabin from the much colder hold of the vessel. The winter quarters lacked “the dignity of a year ago,” the captain wrote, but he and his men had become warriors under siege, hunkered down in a “casemate” or bunker, with all their energies “concentrated against the enemy outside.”

  Recognizing that Inuit attire suited the climate, Kane took to wearing bird-skin socks and fur boots; a fox-skin jumper, or loose-fitting shirt with an airtight hood; and bear-skin breeches, though he altered these to shelter those “parts which in the civilized countries are shielded most carefully.” Outdoors, he learned to use “a fox’s tail held between the teeth to protect the nose in the wind.”

  By forging a cross-cultural alliance with the help of Hendrik, Kane not only saved the lives of most of his men but set an example that is still remembered among the Inuit of Greenland. In the 1980s, after criticizing several other explorers for their arrogance and insensitivity, the Frenchman Jean Malaurie would hail the “extraordinary agreements” Kane made with the Inuit, and observe that “the favorable memory that Kane has left among my Eskimo friends is vague, certainly, but tenacious.”

  In the spring of 1855, when the ice showed no signs of breaking up, Kane developed a detailed escape plan. Around mid-May, when the cold grew less intense, he would lead the men in dragging boats along the ice-belt, and then over the pack ice of Smith Sound—a difficult trek of perhaps 110 kilometres. The men would then climb into boats and sail south, and so complete a journey “of alternating ice and water of more than thirteen hundred miles [two thousand kilometres].” At least four of the men would have to be carried—three because of amputations, and one as a result of a frost wound.

  To the men, Kane offered an optimistic analysis. The hunting would soon improve, and collectively they would conquer scurvy with fresh meat. Warmer weather would enable them to reach Etah. It would also allow them to clean the cabin, filthy from lampblack, and to dry and air their fetid sleeping gear. Also, he exhorted the men to stick together. Only by doing so could they meet the challenges that lay ahead. Already he had begun sorting thro
ugh documents and records, selecting those he must preserve. He set the men to working on clothing, boots, bedding and provisions, and kept them busy cutting up and stitching canvas and skins.

  With the Advance still locked in the ice, Kane took Hendrik and a few others to check how far the ice pack extended. Near Littleton Island, they spotted a great number of ducks, and tracked their flight to a rugged little ledge so thick with wild fowl that a man could not walk without stepping on a nest. The men killed a couple of hundred birds for food. A rocky island crowded with gulls proved especially productive, and Kane named it “Hans Island.”

  Hendrik was by far the best hunter on the expedition. At one point, with most of the men sick and provisions nearly gone, Kane wrote: “If Hans gives way, God help us.” Back on the ship, Kane sent Hendrik to seek help from Etah. Before long, he reported that the young man arrived with fresh food, three fellow hunters and much to relate: “To men in our condition,” Kane wrote, “Hans was as a man from the cities.” After spending one night at Anoatok, Hendrik had reached Etah late the next day. He was welcomed—but found himself surrounded by “lean figures of misery.” The people of Etah, too, had endured famine, and been reduced even to eating twenty-six of their thirty dogs.

  When Hendrik proposed a walrus hunt, his listeners rolled their eyes. They had tried repeatedly to kill walrus. But when the sea is frozen, that crafty creature can only be taken at an ice hole. With a harpoon, this was proving an insurmountable challenge, because even a struck walrus could escape into the water. In response, Hendrik showed the people Kane’s rifle, and demonstrated what it could do. They dug out a sledge and harnessed the last four dogs. During the ensuing hunt, the men harpooned and shot not only a walrus, which took five musket balls, but also two seals.