Trial by Ice (3 page)

Brokenhearted, Ross returned to Lady Franklin the worn letter she had asked him to deliver to her missing husband. “May it be the will of God if you are not restored to us earlier that you should open this letter & that it may give you comfort in all your trials…,” it read.

Failure of the search parties only fanned the flames of speculation and sold more papers. Books, lectures, and pamphlets extolled the mysteries and dangers of the uncharted North. To a world choked in industrial smoke and blinded by the drab monotony of factory towns, the pristine Arctic, deadly yet enthralling, offered escape.

Far away in Cincinnati, Charles Francis Hall read every word published about the lost Franklin expedition. While running his newspaper, the
Daily Press,
he filled its pages with facts about Franklin and the missing men. Secretly he dreamed of finding them. Here was a cause that fired his imagination. Finding them would fulfill all his dreams in a single stroke. Wealth, fame, and recognition would be his. He set out to learn everything he could about the Arctic. Nothing else mattered now. His family moved to the background; his business withered. Finding Sir John Franklin and exploring the Arctic became his raison d'etre.

By 1859 Hall's fascination with Franklin and the Arctic spilled over onto his editorial page. Editorials headed does sir john franklin still live? and lady franklin appeared in his paper. In
an editorial he volunteered to join an expedition led by Dr. Isaac Hayes that planned to reach the North Pole.

Hayes never responded. But at thirty-eight Hall cast his die, and the roll changed his life. Two weeks after printing his article, he sold his newspaper. He would form his own expedition and rescue the Franklin survivors. Despite having a wife, a young daughter, and a son on the way, Hall abandoned everything and directed all his energies toward reaching the Arctic.

Without money to outfit an expedition, Hall's dream languished while he planned and stuffed his mind with facts about the far North. He wrote, petitioned, and visited every influential person he could in Ohio, impressing Gov. Salmon P. Chase and Sen. George Pugh. While Hall was traveling to the East Coast, fortune linked him to Henry Grinnell, founder and first president of the
American Geographical Society. A millionaire shipping and whaling magnate, Grinnell had retired to pursue his humanitarian interests, of which polar exploration ranked highest. Grinnell had privately funded a rescue expedition to find Franklin in 1849 after the United States refused to spend the money. In 1852 Grinnell funded a second exploration under Dr. Elisha Kent Kane.

When Capt. Francis McClintock of HMS
Fox
returned with evidence that Sir John Franklin had died and the
Erebus
and
Terror
had been lost, official enthusiasm for a rescue attempt ended. But Hall was undeterred. Many unanswered questions remained. Later he would write: “I felt convinced that survivors might yet be found.”

However, securing passage to the Arctic did not go smoothly for the would-be explorer. While Hall negotiated with Capt. John Quayle for a ride, his nemesis, Dr. Isaac Hayes, stole his captain. With funding to expand on Dr. Kane's discoveries, Hayes no doubt hoped to find Franklin as well. Hall fumed for days over Hayes's action. “I spurn his TRICKERYhis DEVILTRY!!” he scratched venomously in his diary.

Finally, after fits and starts, opportunity struck. Hall wrangled a berth on the
George Henry,
a whaling bark heading north from New London, Connecticut. Using funds raised by his friends in Cincinnati, New York, and New London, Hall paid his passage and outfitted a small sailboat to explore the region in search of Franklin's lost men on a modest budget of $980. Grinnell donated $343, but most of the others gave only a few dollars. Pitifully, even Hall's wife donated $27 from her pinched household budget. The “New Franklin Research Expedition,” an exalted name for Hall's one-man show, was on its way to the Arctic.

While little prospect existed that the Franklin party remained intact, persistent rumors still fanned hopes that survivors were living among the Eskimos. A fierce gale on the twenty-seventh of September 1860 changed Hall's plans. Whipping through the region, it sank and scattered the fleet with which Hall traveled. His own small craft wrecked, Hall was now on his own. Undaunted he commandeered a dogsled and headed inland.

Two and one half years later, he reappeared. Now a seasoned Arctic traveler, he had proved himself capable of surviving in the far
North. His bundle of sketches, charts, and detailed notes also confirmed him as a capable explorer. The self-taught cartographer and explorer showed he had learned his skills well. Exploiting leads gleaned from the Inuit, he returned with solid evidence that he had found Sir Martin Frobisher's lost colony on Kodlunarn Island in Countess of Warwick Sound. Mining activity there proved to be the site of Frobisher's gold scraped from the frozen earth some 285 years before. Maps that Hall made during his travels proved highly accurateso exact, in fact, that the world would have to wait until aerial photography to improve upon them.

Most important, Hall had made valuable contacts among the Inuit. Living among them, he adopted their methods with notable success, something other white men had failed to do. In turn, he had gained the trust and respect of several Inuit. Two gems in the rough returned with him, Ebierbing and Tookoolito. Called Joe and Hannah by white men, whose tongues stumbled over their Inuit names, the husband-and-wife team had already proved invaluable. Both spoke English, the result of a voyage to England in 1853. Tookoolito spoke fluently and could read some, making her useful as an interpreter. Ebierbing was a skilled pilot, well versed in the treacherous ways of the Arctic pack ice. Additionally both had “acquired many of the habits of civilization,” Hall acknowledged. In fact, the two were celebrities in their own right. Both husband and wife had taken tea with Queen Victoria, and Tookoolito often wore European-style dresses.

Now incurably infected with the Arctic bug, Hall raised more money and lectured throughout the winter. Now that he was a proven success, funds and support flowed to him wherever he went. Come spring he raced back to the Arctic to take up where he had left off. While the country plunged into its bloody civil war, Hall fought his own battles with the cold, the darkness, and the isolation of the Arctic. In the following years both the United States and Hall emerged changed, hardened and focused by their trials yet resolved to move on.

On his second trip Hall found artifacts from the lost expedition. With the help of his Inuit friends, he gathered cups, spoons, and boxes abandoned by the doomed men. The engraved arrow of the Royal Navy on the items left no doubt about their ownership.

On King William Island, he stumbled upon a skeleton partially hidden in the blowing snow. One of the teeth remaining in the bleached skull contained a curious metal plug. After some hand-wringing, Hall gathered up the bones and brought them back with him. Study of that dental work in England identified the remains as belonging to Lt. H. T. D. Le Vesconte of the
Erebus.

That convinced Hall that all the men of the Franklin expedition were dead. He could no longer help them. But now a fresh passion drove him. Wandering among the desolate peaks, he saw his new destiny.
He would be first to plant the American flag at the North Pole.

He now called himself an explorer.

Craftily Hall wrote the Senate of a gigantic whale struck in the Arctic Ocean by Captain Winslow of the whaling bark
Tamerlane
that yielded 310 barrels of oil. The profit from that whale alone reached twenty thousand dollars. Seven such whales would more than pay for the five years of exploration. Knowledge gained from an expedition led by him, he implied, could only improve America's whaling profits.

Lobbying, lecturing, pressing the flesh, Charles Francis Hall moved about the country preaching his quest for the Arctic grail. Wealth, fame, adventure, scientific explorationhe offered it all to anyone who would listen. He prowled the halls of Congress to advance his cause. Hall sought the ear of anyone with influence. Many listened carefully.

His burning desire and single-mindedness of purpose poured forth in all his speeches, moving his listeners. Hall was on a mission, and his passion to claim the North Pole for the United States rang with the same zeal as that of the long-dead abolitionist John Brown. In everything he did, Charles Francis Hall left no doubt in the minds of his listeners that reaching the North Pole meant more to him than his life.

Though not everyone was willing to pay such a price, the shimmering, shifting cap of ice covering the very top of the world has captured explorers' attentions from the first moment they realized the world was round. Between 1496 and 1857 no less than 134 voyages and expeditions probed the Arctic. During that time 257 volumes were published dealing with Arctic research. But that implacable
white expanse would swallow many lives and fortunes before relinquishing its secrets.

After the philosophers' stone of the Middle Ages failed to materialize, the quest for the fabled Northwest Passage began. If it wasn't possible to transmute lead into gold, a shorter path to the precious metal was the next best option. Finding the quickest trade route from Europe to China and India promised untold riches to the lucky explorer who unlocked that door. For this reason incursions north, probing along the coast of North America, found ready backers. Merchants were always willing to risk their money rather than their lives for greater profit. Since Spain and Portugal regulated the southern routes to the East, occupying strategic stopping places and discouraging ships of other nations with a vengeance, many thought to venture north, presumably unfettered. If the Orient could be reached going south, surely a way through northern waters also existed.

Henry VIII gave letters of patent ordering John and Sebastian Cabot “to discover and conquer unknown lands” on their way sailing north to Cathay. Sir Hugh Willoughby, under the papers of the Muscovy Company of London, closely followed. While mistaking Newfoundland for the mainland of China, John Cabot sailed as far north as the Arctic Circle. The treacherous ice pack, however, seized Sir Hugh's ship and carried it southwest with the ocean's current. Eventually the vessel, its entire ship's company frozen to death, fetched up off the coast of Lapland.

From 1576 to 1578 Martin Frobisher explored for Henry's daughter, Elizabeth. He returned to England with piles of black ore, termed “witches' gold,” that he found while exploring along the coast. Speculation that the material would yield gold ran rampant in the court, and Elizabeth herself funded Frobisher's other trips.

In 1610 Henry Hudson sailed into the expanse of water that now bears his name. Tricked by the sheer size of Hudson Bay, he believed it to be the Pacific Ocean and sailed south in search of China. The rapid onset of winter forced the expedition to lie near Southampton Island until spring. Nearly starving, his men mutinied. Henry Hudson, his son, one loyal ship's carpenter named John King, and a handful of scurvy-struck seamen were set adrift in an open boat. Perhaps the greatest navigator of his time then
vanished forever in the gray waters. Those of his mutinous crew whom the Indians did not kill returned home. To save their necks from the hangman's rope, they diverted attention to their discovery of the “true route” to the Orient.

A flurry of activity followed. William Baffin sailed north in 1616 through the ice of Davis Strait to discover Baffin Bay. Turning west along the bay, he encountered Lancaster Sound. Rising in the distance, the mass of Somerset Island convinced him that the sound was merely another of the endless bays that befuddled him. Sailing away, Baffin never realized he had found the true opening to the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Two hundred years later, Sir James Ross would make the same mistake. Enthusiasm for a Northwest Passage to Asia waned as each explorer returned empty-handed.

But a new treasure emergedone unrelated to the Far East. Fursthe soft gold of lynx, seal, and sea otter hidescommanded lofty prices as fashions changed. In fact, at that time the Asians started buying. Yet only the bitterest winters cultivated the finest furs. That meant going north. In Alaska the Russian Trading Company decimated the sea otter population, along with the Aleut nation, in its ruthless quest for the animals' buttery skins. In the Northwest the Hudson Bay Trading Company chose the more humane method of trade to amass its piles of furs. Wool blankets, metal knives, and cooking pots exchanged well for furs, and the natives remained friendly. British trading methods proved far more cost-effective than Russian subjugation. With peaceful commerce, much less money had to be spent on forts and soldiers, thus ensuring greater profit.

What took the most prodigious bite out of the profits was the arduous voyage around the tip of South America. Notorious for its stormy passage, the Horn claimed countless ships and thousands of tons of cargo. Sailing around Cape Horn was possible only during certain times of the year. A winter voyage was suicidal.