Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Page 21

  In August 1853, in a cold, drizzling rain, and accompanied by just seven men, William Ouligbuck among them, John Rae sailed a small boat into Repulse Bay. He hoped to complete the survey of the west coast of Boothia early the following year, travelling overland before spring breakup. The previous year, after delivering those bits of wreckage he had discovered to the British Admiralty, Rae had received the Founder’s Gold Medal from the Royal Geographical Society for making “many important additions . . . to the geography of the Arctic regions.”

  This image of William Ouligbuck was collected at York Factory by George Simpson McTavish (1863–1943), the great grandson of Sir George Simpson. It turns up in his privately printed book, Behind the Palisades.

  Courtesy of Kenn Harper.

  While visiting his mother in Stromness, Orkney, Rae developed a plan to complete the mapping of the Arctic coast of North America. He outlined it in a letter published in the Times on November 26, 1852. In a postscript, he added: “I do not mention the lost navigators as there is not the slightest hope of finding any traces of them in the quarter to which I am going.” In January 1853, Rae returned to London. He visited Sir John Richardson, his former travelling companion, and dined with artist-explorer George Back, who entrusted him with that knife for Ouligbuck Senior.

  Now, in mid-August, Repulse Bay looked more bleak and dreary, more forbidding, than Rae remembered. It also wore a more wintry and Arctic aspect than he had expected to face so early. Thick ice clogged the shoreline, and immense snowdrifts filled every ravine and every steep bank with a southern exposure. A mass of ice and snow several feet deep covered his old landing place.

  Proceeding slowly up the North Pole River, Rae located a new, more amenable landing spot and moored the boat. Jumping ashore, awash in memories, Rae went directly to Fort Hope, the dwelling he had constructed in 1846. He found the stone walls exactly as he had left them. The little mud oven, although exposed to the weather, was still in perfect condition. Inuit hunters had used it to cache meat. In the woods, he found the path where, every night before going to bed, he had paced back and forth to warm his feet. Around the stone house, in the hard-packed mud, he found footprints tracing the outlines of his men’s British-made shoes, the marks as clear and fresh as if they had been made seven days rather than seven years before.

  Rae completed his reconnaissance with mixed feelings—wintering here had not been easy—and then returned to the river. He found the boat moored, the tents pitched, and the cargo partly unloaded. This pleased him enormously, “my fellows being all so well up in their work that they did not require my superintendence.”

  Since his first sojourn here at Repulse Bay, Rae had learned a lot, mainly from the Inuit, about wintering above the treeline. He did not even consider reoccupying Fort Hope, the stone house he had built seven years earlier. Instead, he and the men pitched tents. As soon as they had enough snow, then directed by William Ouligbuck, they erected igloos and moved into them.

  November brought sunny weather and a mean temperature of minus twenty-seven degrees Celsius. But December brought gales, drifting snow and a mean of minus thirty. And February proved the harshest month of all, with temperatures falling as low as minus forty-seven and the sun never rising above the horizon. By then, the meticulous Rae had begun preparing for the looming spring journey. He had hired carpenter Jacob Beads, a relative of John Beads, who had previously snowshoed with Rae to Victoria Island, and was also attached to this expedition. In a workshop built of snow, Rae had the “very handy” Jacob Beads dismantle the party’s four sledges, reduce their framing and put them back together more securely than before. Acting on Rae’s instructions, Beads narrowed the runners and reduced the sledges’ weight by a third.

  To locate weaknesses and determine the speed at which he might travel, Rae timed his men hauling loaded sledges over a measured mile. He, too, practised over that distance, hauling his sledge with 120 pounds on it. He set aside the fixed ration he proposed to use and, along with the men, tested it for four days. He examined his “six-inch sextant by Dollard” and adjusted his two chronometers, which he wore inside a thick blanket belt around his waist to protect them from cold.

  With spring arriving, and hoping still to buy sled dogs, Rae sent three men to search one final time for any sign of Inuit. They found none, and the explorer resigned himself to man-hauling. He would leave three men—Thomas Mistegan, Murdoch McLennan and John Beads—to guard the boat and other property. Next to himself, the Ojibway Mistegan was the expedition’s best hunter, so those who stayed behind would not starve. Rae put Beads in charge, however, because during the winter he had taught the young man to read and write well enough to keep a rough journal.

  On March 31, 1854, having lived off the land through yet another Arctic winter, forty-year-old John Rae left Repulse Bay, leading four men more than a decade younger. The five began their journey in bright sunshine and, despite the heavy work ahead, in excellent health and spirits. Two of the men who would remain behind accompanied them for twelve kilometres.

  Rae at first headed northwest along the same route as he had taken in 1847. He proposed to cross Boothia Peninsula and chart its western coast from the mouth of the Castor and Pollux River, the farthest Dease and Simpson had reached, to Bellot Strait, identified in 1852. Two days out, Rae realized that one of the chosen four, already suffering fatigue and pains in his chest, would be unable to keep the pace. He sent him back to Repulse Bay in favour of Thomas Mistegan, who had been bitterly disappointed at being left. In addition to his other qualities, Mistegan was an admirable snowshoe walker and sledge-hauler who could tolerate cold. The Ojibway hunter caught up with the party on April 4. The men prepared him a special supper, to which he did ample justice after his forced march of fifty-five kilometres.

  John Rae travelled Inuit-style, building igloos as he went. These snow huts remained impenetrable to stormy winds. They required, on average, one hour to build, but stood ready, with doors blocked up, for the return journey. Also, a traveller would not have the trouble of pitching, taking down, packing on a sledge and hauling a cumbrous tent, which, like bedding, would keep gaining weight from moisture. Another advantage was that moisture from the men’s breath adhered firmly to the igloo’s walls, instead of condensing and dripping onto the bedding as it did in a tent.

  Unlike naval explorers, who cooked twice a day and stopped for lunch, Rae travelled non-stop, usually breakfasting on fruit, a piece of frozen pemmican and half a biscuit: “We never stopped to eat or drink, but put a small piece of our breakfast allowance of pemmican in our pockets, which we munched at our pleasure.” Supper usually consisted of still more pemmican, boiled with flour and preserved potato into a porridge called rababoo.

  At night, all five men “lay under one covering,” Rae wrote, “taking our coats off, so that our arms might be more closely in contact with our bodies. This and the changing of our moccasins was all the undressing we went through. I always occupied an outside place, and the cook for the next day the other. Those inside were warm enough, but when either of the outsiders felt chilly on the exposed side, all he had to do was turn round, give his neighbours a nudge and we’d all put about, and the chilly party was soon warmed. We got so speedily accustomed to this that I believe we used to turn over from one side to the other when required without waking.”

  Rae had started out as early as he dared in the travelling season, and now the weather turned wintry again. Gale-force winds and heavy, drifting snow confined the men to snow huts or reduced them to travelling as little as nine kilometres a day. The temperature fell to minus fifty-two degrees Celsius, and Jacob Beads froze two of his toes. By April 10, when the party reached the point on the coast of Committee Bay from which the explorer intended to travel due west across Boothia Peninsula, all the men, including Rae, had endured some degree of snow blindness, their eyes stinging as if filled with sand.

  Rae led the men forward through the zero visibility of a violent snowstorm, steering by compass
. For a while the skies cleared, but at Pelly Bay, a dense fog descended and again the compass became necessary. Confronted by impassable mountainous terrain, Rae veered southwest across Boothia Peninsula and came across the fresh footprints of an Inuk hauling a sledge. Rae sent Ouligbuck and Mistegan to find the traveller. After eleven hours, they returned with seventeen Inuit, among them five women. Rae had met some of these people at Repulse Bay in 1847, but others had never seen Europeans before and behaved aggressively.

  “They would give us no information on which any reliance could be placed,” Rae wrote in his official report to the HBC, “and none of them would consent to accompany us for a day or two, although I promised to reward them liberally.” The Inuit objected to the party’s travelling farther west, protesting without explanation, so that initially, Rae was baffled. “Finding it was their object to puzzle the interpreter and mislead us,” he wrote, “I declined purchasing more than a piece of seal from them, and sent them away, not however, without some difficulty, as they lingered about with the hope of stealing something; and, notwithstanding our vigilance, succeeded in abstracting from one of the sledges a few pounds of biscuit and grease.”

  The following day brought an odd incident. Early in the afternoon when the party stopped to cache seal meat, William Ouligbuck slipped away and tried to rejoin the Inuit he had met the previous day. Rae noticed his absence and immediately gave chase, determined not to lose his excellent interpreter. He and Mistegan overtook the Inuk after a sharp race of seven or eight kilometres. The young man, crying like a baby, pleaded illness as an excuse for his attempted defection. Rae accepted this, suggesting in his report that Ouligbuck had “eaten too much boiled seal’s flesh, with which he had been regaled at the snowhuts of the natives.”

  This explanation would fail to satisfy many of Rae’s contemporaries, and also some of his later readers. Perhaps the young man, while being entertained for several hours at the snow huts of the locals, had become interested in one of the women and wished to rejoin her. Perhaps Rae suspected or even knew this and chose not to report it.

  Years later, one of the most reliable and articulate Inuit men, In-nook-poo-zhe-jook, would explain that the Pelly Bay entourage had deliberately frightened young Ouligbuck by claiming that hostile Inuit living farther west would probably murder the entire expedition. Yet nothing of the kind had ever occurred in this vicinity. Why the fabrication?

  Rae had deduced that the hunters had cached meat to the west and did not want it stolen, so they frightened Ouligbuck, hoping he would persuade the party to change course. In any case, once overtaken, Ouligbuck wept and expressed his readiness to rejoin the expedition. The falsity of the assertion about hostile Inuit would be demonstrated almost immediately, because two men from Pelly Bay joined the party in travelling west, quite without fear.

  Rae encountered the first of these, See-u-ti-chu, driving a team of dogs with a sledge laden with muskox meat. Rae hired the man, who cached his booty on the spot and recommended heading west along the route he had just travelled. The party had no sooner loaded the dogsled and started out than a second Inuk, In-nook-poo-zhejook, arrived with more dogs and offered to join the party. He would emerge, over time, as a key player in ascertaining the fate of the Franklin expedition.

  Now, the observant Rae noticed that In-nook-poo-zhe-jook wore a gold cap-band and asked him where he had got it. The Inuk, who was notably expressive and articulate, replied that it came from the place where the dead white men were. He had traded for it. Rae proceeded to interrogate him with the help of William Ouligbuck. Later that day, he recorded field notes: “Met a very communicative and apparently intelligent Eskimo; had never met whites before but said that a number of Qallunaat [white people, often rendered ‘kabloonas’], at least 35–40, had starved to death west of a large river a long distance off. Perhaps 10 or 12 days journey. Could not tell the distance, never had been there, and could not accompany us so far. Dead bodies seen beyond two large rivers; did not know the place, could not or would not explain it on a chart.”

  This painting captures one of the most significant moments in exploration history—the moment when, on Boothia Peninsula, John Rae first learned that a number of white men had starved to death some distance to the west. The 1949 painting by Charles Fraser Comfort is called Dr. Rae Meets Eskimos / Discovery of Franklin Expedition Relics. William Ouligbuck speaks to a pointing Inuk in snow goggles, while Rae holds a utensil.

  Courtesy of HBC Corporate Collection (ART-00029).

  Given the advantage of subsequent revelations, we know that In-nook-poo-zhe-jook, who would later visit and investigate scenes of the Franklin tragedy, was himself not yet clear about what had happened where. The remains of thirty-five or forty sailors would eventually be found at Terror Bay on the west coast of King William Island. More remains would turn up on the North American coast near Starvation Cove. The discussion of what happened, where exactly and when would continue into the twenty-first century.

  Rae bought the Inuk’s cap-band on the spot. He wondered whether it might have come from the lost Franklin expedition, but dismissed that as unlikely. Half a dozen ships were searching the waters and islands far to the north. That, everybody agreed, was where the Franklin expedition would be found. Besides, what did he have to act upon? Some white men had died ten or twelve days away in a spot these Inuit hunters had never visited, and that now lay under a thick blanket of snow. The information was too vague. Rae told In-nook-poo-zhe-jook that if he or his companions had any other relics from white men, they should bring them to his winter quarters at Repulse Bay, where they would be well rewarded.

  Both dog teams were tired, and the party made slow progress along a river to Simpson Lake. After a couple of days, the two Inuit who had joined them wished to leave for home. See-u-ti-chu feared that wolverines might plunder his cache of muskox meat. Rae paid both men well, repeated his promise regarding any relics and said goodbye. On resuming his journey, he noticed deer tracks and traces of muskox and realized that the surrounding tundra, frozen and snow covered, was a hunting ground in which game abounded.

  Some weeks before, Jacob Beads had frozen two toes. On April 25, after a hard day’s hike of more than thirty kilometres, he was scarcely able to walk. The slightly built Johnston also showed signs of fatigue. Rae decided to allow these two men to proceed at a slower pace to some rocks that lay directly ahead, where they could build an igloo and wait. The following day, with his two sturdiest men, Mistegan and Ouligbuck, the Ojibway and the Inuk, Rae took four days’ worth of provisions and set out for the mouth of the Castor and Pollux River—the farthest point charted from the west, fifteen years earlier, by Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson.

  On April 27, 1854, Rae reached sea ice: a coastline. He passed several heaps of stones, evidently Inuit caches, before discovering a pillar of stones clearly intended more as a marker than for property protection. Its top had fallen down. He sent Mistegan to trace what looked like the frozen bed of a small river immediately to the west, while with Ouligbuck he dismantled the pillar in search of a document. He discovered none but, checking his latitude, found himself within a quarter mile of Thomas Simpson’s 1839 reading on the cairn he had built at the mouth of the Castor and Pollux River. Mistegan returned and affirmed that the frozen bed was indeed a river. Rae had reached his first goal.

  Now he prepared to carry out the main objective of his expedition. He would travel north and west along the coast of Boothia Peninsula to Bellot Strait, and so complete the mapping of the northern edge of the continent. He and his two men retraced their steps. After a tiring fifteen-hour march over fifty kilometres of rough, icy terrain, they arrived at the snow hut of Beads and Johnston. The two had shot nothing and had gathered little fuel. Beads could scarcely move, and, despite their protests, Rae insisted that the two men remain where they were.

  At two o’clock in the morning on April 30, having loaded provisions for twenty-two days onto sledges for Ouligbuck and Mistegan, and himself drag
ging a third sledge piled with instruments, books and bedding, Rae set out to trace the last uncharted coastline of North America. Through fierce winds and heavy, blowing snow, he forced his way north along the coast of Boothia Peninsula.

  Opposite an island to which he gave the name Stanley, gazing west across the ice, Rae noted a distant promontory and called it Matheson Island (later amended to Matheson Point). To his interested surprise, the coastline showed no sign of turning west, as the charts suggested it should, to link with King William Land. Rae continued north and, on May 6, 1854, arrived at a promontory he named Point de la Guiche (latitude 68°57´7˝ north, longitude 94°32´58˝ west). There, with his two men, Rae stood gazing out over the ice of a frozen channel where naval charts had suggested they would find land.

  Fog and stormy weather had slowed their progress to this point. Given the distances involved, the time left before spring thaw and the condition of his men, Rae realized that he would not be able to reach Bellot Strait and so complete the whole survey of the coast as intended—not without risking lives. Decades later, in a book review, Rae would write: “Thus nearly 800 miles of the 1,000 left unexplored in 1839 [after the expedition of Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson] . . . were completed by me, but there still remained about 200 miles [320 kilometres], between Bellot Strait and the Magnetic Pole on the west shore of Boothia, a blank on the charts, and these were explored by McClintock in his memorable journey [of 1859].”