Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Page 20

  Soon after the three hunters left, Hendrik approached Kane “with a long face” and asked permission to travel south to acquire some walrus hide for boots. He declined the offer of dogs, insisting that the weather was fine and that he could walk the eighty or ninety kilometres to Etah. The commander consented—but then waited in vain for his return.

  For a while Kane worried. But from other visitors, he gleaned that Hendrik had formed an attachment to a young woman named Mersuk, the daughter of Shanghu. “Hans was a favorite with all,” Kane wrote later, “the fair especially, and, as a match, one of the greatest men in the country.” He continued to inquire after him, because “independent of everything like duty, I was very fond of him.”

  Later, Hans Hendrik wrote that he doubted his companions would ever reach Upernavik. While visiting Etah, he fell sick, and the local men “behaved so kindly towards me, I began to think of remaining with them.” Still, he says that when he went off for the last time, he intended to return. But the men of Etah “began persuading me to remain. My companions would never reach Upernavik, they said, and they would take me along with them when they removed.”

  Still, he adds, “it was my intention to return. But I began to envy the natives with whom I stayed, who supplied themselves with all their wants and lived happily.” Eventually, he writes, “I got a sweetheart whom I resolved never to part with, but to keep as my wife in the country of the Christians. Since then, she has been baptized and partaken of the Lord’s Supper.” This was Mersuk, who became the mother of his children.

  Now, Kane wrote that some of his men were “fearfully down.” But thanks to the meat provided by Hans and the other Inuit hunters, most began shaking off scurvy. Forced to burn even the ship’s beams for fuel, Kane had preserved just enough wood to build two sledges seventeen and a half feet in length. Late in April, he set a departure date. Starting on May 17, using the new sledges, the men would drag the two whaleboats south to open water beyond Etah. They would use a smaller sledge to haul the tiny Red Eric. From water’s edge, they would set sail for Upernavik.

  Kane himself would use a dogsled to ferry food and equipment as far as Anoatok, an abandoned Inuit hunting camp, halfway to Etah, that would serve as a staging post. Four of the other men could not walk. These Kane would transport by dogsled, first to Anoatok, and then to the edge of the ice pack. With preparations progressing, Kane assembled his officers and announced that he would make one final attempt to search northward for any trace of John Franklin, possibly still trapped behind a great ring of ice in the Open Polar Sea.

  So far, the expedition had identified Kennedy Channel, which runs between Greenland and Ellesmere Island and today forms part of “the American route to the Pole.” As well, Kane had discovered the largest glacier in the northern hemisphere, and named it after scientist Alexander von Humboldt. In April, after a final northward sortie, Kane closed “the operations of the search” for Franklin.

  Focusing exclusively on the projected evacuation, and determined to avoid anything resembling the debacle that ended the mutiny, Kane organized everything from the cooking apparatus to the arms and ammunition. He put Ohlsen in charge of the boats. Despite the man’s unparalleled abilities as a carpenter, however, and some capable assistance, nobody could confidently declare even one of the three vessels seaworthy.

  The two whaleboats—twenty feet long, seven wide, three deep—had been battered by exposure to snow and ice. Ohlsen had reinforced the bottoms and fitted them with a neat housing of light canvas. And he had provided each of them with a mast that could be unshipped and carried with the oars, boathooks and ice poles. Yet the planking of both remained so dry that it could hardly be made tight by caulking. The third boat, the little Red Eric, was small enough to be mounted on the old sledge, the Faith, and could eventually be cut up for firewood.

  With departure looming, Kane allowed the men twenty-four hours to select eight pounds of personal effects. Each man had woollen underclothes and a complete fur suit in the Inuit style, including kapetah, nessak and nannooke, or shirt, hood and trousers. Each had two pairs of boots, extra socks and a rue-raddy, a long canvas strap for hauling, adjusted to the proper length. Kane had also stipulated Inuit-style goggles to protect against snow blindness; sleeping bags of buffalo fur; eiderdown quilts covered in waterproof canvas; and canvas bags for personal effects, all of them numbered to avoid confusion.

  On Sunday, May 20, 1855, Kane summoned all hands into the dismantled winter cabin to say a formal goodbye to the brig. The moss walls had been torn down and the wood supports burned. Most of the bedding had been stored on the boats and the galley sat cold and empty. In these bleak surroundings, Kane said a prayer, read a chapter from the Bible and took down the inspirational portrait of Sir John Franklin. Having removed the picture from its frame, he cased it for protection in an India rubber scroll. To a stanchion near the foot of the gangway, Kane fixed a note justifying the abandonment of the vessel, and explaining that “a third winter would force us . . . [to] give up all hope of remaining by the vessel and her resources. It would therefore in no manner advance the search after Sir John Franklin.”

  After saying a temporary goodbye to the four invalids who could not walk and would, for a while, remain on the brig, all the other hands went up on deck. Kane hoisted and saluted the American flag, and then hauled it down for the last time. He dispensed with further ceremony. He believed that cheers would be a mockery and, lacking alcohol, proposed no final toast. “When all hands were quite ready,” he would write, “we scrambled off over the ice together, much like a gang of stevedores going to work over a quayful of broken cargo.”

  Kane and his men had to haul their boats across a massive field of ice. As the weather warmed and the ice began to melt, the journey south became increasingly hazardous.

  Determined to maintain discipline, the lack of which had doomed the defection, Elisha Kent Kane established clear lines of control. He assigned each man a fixed place in the drag lines, and ordered everyone except the whaleboat captains to take a turn at cooking. Recognizing that six worn-down men could not hope to haul the heavily laden sledges, Kane stipulated that the entire party would haul first one sledge and then the other. They would slog five kilometres to accomplish one, fifteen to advance three.

  By May 24, the men had moved both whaleboats eleven kilometres south. That night, instead of returning to the brig, they began a routine of sleeping beside the boats beneath canvas housing. The next day, having patched and caulked the Red Eric, three men hauled it across the ice and entered it into the rotation. Temperatures remained below zero, though now the sun scarcely set. To avoid glare, the men slept by day and travelled through the twilight hours.

  Kane began moving the four invalids to Anoatok, one by one. Using six dogs and a light sledge, he also shuttled provisions from the brig until the total weight reached fifteen hundred pounds—as much as the two whaleboats could carry. And now some Inuit friends from Etah, having discovered the evacuation in progress, had begun lending a hand without being asked. Already, an older man, Nessark, had used his dogs to transport supplies, and helped Kane bake bread on the brig.

  With the sun climbing higher each day, temperatures rose and the ice-belt running along the coast grew soft. On June 5, the sledge carrying the Hope crashed through the ice and dragged six men into the water. They managed to crawl onto the ice, but Kane began to worry that he might be cut off from the relief hut at Anoatok. He set about moving the stores forward to two temporary stations.

  Soon, heavy snow and widening chasms rendered the ice-belt almost impassable. Driven out onto the floes, Kane saw with growing concern that the ice had become sodden and stained with water from below. Besides the loads in transit, nearly nine hundred pounds of provisions remained at Anoatok, and two hundred pounds more, including shot and bullet bags, waited to be removed from another location.

  Kane decided to ask the people of Etah to lend him two of their four dogs. He sent word ordering the invalids at A
noatok to be ready for instant removal and pressed on to Etah, arriving near midnight, with the sun low in the sky. Despite the temperature, twenty degrees below zero Celsius, he found thirty people gathered outside on the bare rocks. Melting snow had reduced their huts to a shambles, so now they camped out, variously socializing, sleeping, cooking auks or chomping on bird skins.

  After spending the night, Kane left his tired dogs and took the settlement’s only team in unequal exchange. Old Nessark piled Kane’s sledge with walrus meat, and two young men came part way to assist him through a stretch of broken ice. Later, in Arctic Explorations, Kane would remember familiar figures with melancholy: “It pains me when I think of their approaching destiny—in the region of night and winter, where the earth yields no fruit and the waters are locked—without the resorts of skill or even the rude materials of art, and walled in from the world by barriers of ice without an outlet.”

  Kane also prepared a census, “exactly confirmed by three separate informants,” that identified 140 souls scattered along almost a thousand kilometres of coast from the Great River near Cape Melville to the wind-loved hut of Anoatok. Within this narrow range, he wrote, the people exist “in love and community of resources as a single family.” They situated their huts one dog-march apart. They named each rock and hill, so even the youngest hunter could go to retrieve a cache of meat deposited anywhere in the region.

  But now, Kane had no time to reflect. From Etah, with fresh dogs and a sledge-load of meat, he raced back to the whaleboats, which had arrived within five kilometres of Anoatok. Warmer weather, improved hunting and diet, and increased exercise had made all the men healthier—but also hungrier. Some food remained on the brig, and Kane managed to retrieve that.

  Increasingly fearful of getting cut off from Anoatok, Kane began shuttling invalids from there to the whaleboats. The next day, one of his men returned from Etah with several Inuit, sledges piled with meat and blubber, and every sound dog that remained. Once again, Kane controlled a serviceable dog team: “The comfort and security of such a possession to men in our critical position can hardly be realized,” he would write. “It was more than an addition of ten strong men to our party.”

  From the Advance, Kane fetched the last bit of burnable pork fat, so necessary to the looming boat journey. Then, from Anoatok, he retrieved the sick men. Travelling along beneath the cliffs, he marvelled at the dramatic changes in the landscape. The hot sun released rocks that had been frozen into the ice, and they rolled down the debris-strewn slopes “with the din of a battle-field . . . clogging the ice-belt at the foot.”

  On June 16, 1855, after losing one man to the ice in a sledging accident, Kane and his crew began stowing cargo in their boats at the mouth of the bay near Etah, fewer than two kilometres from open water. The men had been steadily hauling for one month, except for a brief spell when, with a breeze blowing from the north, they had managed to sail across a stretch of smooth ice, using the long steering oars as booms. Thrilling to this new sensation, the men had broken into song: “Storm along, my hearty boys!”

  But mostly they had slogged ahead, battling hummocks and snowdrifts with capstan bars and levers, or proceeding carefully over “salt ice marshes” scattered with threatening black pools. Without the help of the Inuit, Kane wrote, the escape might have foundered. The local people supplied the visitors with enormous numbers of small auks, which men and dogs together consumed at a rate of eight thousand a week. Once, when a sledge sank so deeply into the ice that the whaleboat floated loose, five Inuit men and two women worked with the sailors for more than half a day, asking for nothing.

  Finally, at water’s edge, moved by affection and gratitude, Kane distributed needles, thread, items of clothing and even his surgical amputation knives among the Inuit of Etah. His remaining sled dogs he donated to the community as a whole, taking only Toodlamik and Whitey into the boats: “I could not part with them, the leaders of my team.”

  Some of the Inuit wept, and Kane felt his heart go out to them—“so long our neighbors, and of late so staunchly our friends.” Without these people, he wrote, “our dreary journey would have been prolonged at least a fortnight, and we are so late even now that hours may measure our lives.” As the wind continued to blow, Kane gathered “these desolate and confiding people” around him on the ice beach and spoke to them as to brothers and sisters.

  Kane told them that other groups of Inuit lived a few hundred miles to the south, where the cold was less intense, the season of daylight longer and the hunting better. He told them that, if they acted boldly and carefully, in a few seasons of patient march, they could reach that more welcoming environment. He implored them to make that march.

  On the afternoon of June 19, the sea grew quiet and the sky cleared. At four o’clock, Kane and his men readied the boats, lashing the sledges and slinging them outside the gunwales. The three vessels were small and heavily laden. Split with frost, warped by sunshine and open at the seams, they would need to be caulked repeatedly. In these frail craft, Kane proposed to sail almost eight hundred kilometres. With the sea looking smooth as a garden lake, and despite overhanging black nimbus clouds, the captain and his men pushed off from the ice beach. Stars and stripes flying, they were making for home.

  Contemporary Upernavik is a colourful town of 1,200. But in 1855, when Elisha Kent Kane and his men arrived in small boats, these few buildings constituted the entire settlement.

  Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

  The voyagers had spent one month (May 17 to June 16) transporting supplies and dragging three small boats eighty or ninety kilometres south across ice to Etah. Now, having said a fond farewell to the Inuit who had helped him survive, Kane and his sixteen remaining men piled into tiny boats and began the eight-hundred-kilometre voyage to Upernavik. They survived seven storm-tossed weeks in those open boats, battling blizzards and threatening ice floes, and enduring near starvation.

  But on August 1, Kane spotted the famous Devil’s Thumb of Melville Bay. Approaching the Duck Islands, he decided to end the voyage, probably the most difficult in Arctic history, not with a reckless display of derring-do, but by wending cautiously through the labyrinth of islands along the coast. On August 6, Kane and his men rounded a cape and spotted the snowy peak of Sanderson’s Hope, which rises above Upernavik. They heard the barking of the dogs, and then the six-clock tolling of the workmen’s bells. Could this be a dream? Hugging the shoreline, they rowed past the old brew house, and then, in a crowd of children, hauled their boats ashore for the last time.

  The people of Upernavik fitted up a loft for the Americans and shared their meagre stores. Now, Kane learned that two vessels had passed this way, looking for him. And from a German newspaper, translated by the local pastor, he gleaned news of the lost Franklin expedition. Some 1,600 kilometres to the southwest, on Boothia Peninsula, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company had retrieved relics. Apparently, the Franklin expedition had ended in disaster. Some of the final survivors had been driven to cannibalism. What? Surely not. Could this be true?

  Original map by Dawn Huck [appeared originally in Fatal Passage, p. 60].

  19.

  The Scot, the Inuk, the Ojibway

  Little more than one year previously, in the early summer of 1854, William Ouligbuck Jr. had sat in a tent at Repulse Bay, interviewing Inuit who arrived with relics from the lost Franklin expedition. As he elicited the story of what had happened and relayed the details to John Rae, the twenty-four-year-old Inuk more than redeemed himself for his youthful follies. As a boy of sixteen, young Ouligbuck had tried Rae’s patience. During his expedition of 1846–47, Rae had twice caught the boy pilfering sugar and tobacco from his father’s bale. Not only that, but young Ouligbuck had stripped the buttons from the men’s trousers, probably thinking to use them as trading articles.

  In November 1852, when from London Rae had begun organizing yet another expedition, he had inquired of the HBC man at York Factory if any interpreters other than Ouligbuck and h
is son William were available: “To Ouligbuck I have no particular objection,” he wrote, “but the boy (his son) that I had with me formerly is one of the greatest rascals unhung—and by his falsehood and misconduct made his father sulky and discontented. I should prefer Ouligbuck’s [other] son Donald, who, altho’ he spoke but little English, was a good-tempered, hard-working fellow.”

  Ouligbuck Sr. had died in 1852. And when Rae arrived at Churchill the following July, on his way farther north, he learned that the designated interpreter, William Ouligbuck Jr., was out hunting porpoises, but was expected back any day. Rae discussed his options with a veteran HBC man named Omond, who insisted that young Ouligbuck, now several years older than the boy Rae remembered, was by far the best man available. Omond declared of the young man that “in addition to his own language he spoke English, Cree and French passably well, that he could be fully relied upon to tell as nearly as possible what was said, and no more, and give the Eskimo reply with equal correctness.”

  Under pressure from the lateness of the season, and seeing no sign of young Ouligbuck, Rae took aboard an Inuk named Munro, whose language skills were passable. Sixty-five kilometres north of Churchill, he encountered a group of Inuit hunters in kayaks, young Ouligbuck among them. Within five minutes, having seen for himself that Munro could not compare linguistically, Rae had engaged William Ouligbuck as interpreter. That young man quickly arranged for the disposal of his share of the game and transferred his possessions.

  One month later when, after a setback at Chesterfield Inlet, Rae decided to change his itinerary and send back half his men, he did not hesitate in choosing an interpreter, but dispatched Munro and kept William Ouligbuck Jr. By September 1854, when Rae was on his way home, he would write: “My good interpreter William Ouligbuck was landed [at Churchill], and before bidding him farewell, I presented him with a very handsomely mounted hunting knife, entrusted to me by Captain Sir George Back, for his former travelling companion Ouligbuck; but as the old man was dead, I took the liberty of giving it to his son, as an inducement to future good conduct should his services be again required.”