Resolute (34 page)

THE DISCOVERY OF THOUSANDS
of relics from the Franklin expedition—begun in earnest with John Rae's acquisition of objects from the Inuit—captivated the public. The items in this illustration of objects found near the cairn discovered by William Hobson includes a medicine chest, a stove, a prayer book, sun goggles, a gun, and a flag.

By now, however, the ice would most assuredly have been building up. He would have had to find a haven for the winter. That he found it in the harbor at Beechey Island is another fact that we know for certain. The three graves and the scattered relics bear indisputable testimony. And there, at Beechey Island, is where the real mysteries begin.

Why was there no message in the cairn found on the island? Almost every passage-seeker who had been forced to winter down had built cairns and had placed messages within them detailing where he had been, what had transpired, and what he planned to do once he was released from the ice. It was standard naval procedure. And no one adhered to accepted procedure more than John Franklin. Was he so confident that once spring came he would gallantly sail away to the open sea and the glory beyond that leaving a message behind seemed superfluous? Some have suggested that perhaps the weather broke so suddenly in the spring that Franklin, anxious to get underway while he could, simply had no time to prepare a document. But he had been on the island for months. Why would he not have prepared a message long before then? It has also been speculated that Sir John might have indeed deposited a note in the cairn but that it had been stolen by natives. This too is highly unlikely since there were no Inuit on or near barren Beechey Island. The frustrating answer to all these questions is that we will probably never know.

What we can be pretty sure about is that, in the spring of 1846, Franklin, adhering to his orders, probably set out for Cape Walker. As Arctic authorities have pointed out, he would not have known that he was heading straight for one of the great phenomena of the north—the gigantic impenetrable stream of ice that, in the spring, pores down from the Beaufort Sea. Once he ran up against this moving barrier with its one-hundred-foot thick packs of ice, he would have had to turn back. To the south of him lay the unexplored and hitherto unnavigated Peel Sound, which, Franklin believed, led to King William Land. He was right. When he completed his Peel Sound passage he would have actually been able to see the northern tip of King William Land. It was only one hundred miles away (see map, page 76).

But, as we know from the note that Hobson found—the only message that would ever be discovered—the ice then set in, and on September 12, 1846, the
Erebus
and the
Terror
were once again imprisoned. Nine months later, Franklin was dead. How did he die? Where was he laid to rest? Certainly his burial would have been treated with great ceremony. Was it at sea or in a grave that has never been found?

In many ways, even greater mystery surrounds Francis Crozier, the officer who assumed command of the expedition once Franklin was gone, the man whom Schwatka believed was the white stranger the Inuit swore they had seen wandering near their villages. In the years following the search for Franklin, there would be even more rumors about Crozier than there had been about Franklin. Some had him living among the Chipewyans. Others had him wandering aimlessly throughout the north where he had spent most of his life. Whatever finally happened to him, it was Crozier who inherited the burden of trying to save the expedition after its leader and twenty-four of its men had died.

It was a staggering total. Of all those who had gone out in search of the passage since 1818, only seventeen had perished. And with his men dying every day, Crozier knew it was going to get much worse. His options were limited. Should he stay where he was, hoping that by May or at least June, the ice would break up and he could head for home? Or should he abandon the ships and head for the Great Fish River, hoping that it would take him either to where the whaling fleet would be that summer or to the Hudson's Bay Company Trading post on Great Slave Lake? One thing was for certain: Any hope of completing the search for the passage was gone. His one goal had to be saving as many members of the expedition as he could.

He chose to leave the ships and head for the river. To this day, there is disagreement as to whether it was a horrendous mistake. As George Back had discovered, the Great Fish River was incredibly difficult to navigate, and Crozier's men were in a weakened condition, to say the least. In Crozier's defense, he probably counted on the river being ice-free, relieving his men of the burden of having to drag heavy boats over the ice. There would also be fish in the river and perhaps game along its banks, another important consideration for men who were rapidly running out of food. And Crozier knew that before they had left England, Franklin had been informed that if, by any chance, the expedition had not been heard from by the spring of 1848, the Hudson's Bay Company would launch a search for it. Crozier may well have thought that he might encounter help even before reaching the company outpost at Great Slave Lake.

A mystery also attaches itself to the almost eight-hundred-pound boat that Hobson and M'Clintock discovered, loaded to the gunwales with seemingly superfluous supplies. M'Clintock simply couldn't understand what Crozier and his fellow officers had been thinking in hauling all that equipment off the ships if they were to be abandoned. But here again, Crozier might have had what to him were plausible reasons. Over the years, for example, much has been made of the fact that among the equipment found on shore were four heavy iron boat stoves, which had been dragged from the ships. Why in the world had that been done? It seemed ludicrous, especially to M'Clintock and Hobson.

In his 2000 book
Ice Blink
, however, Scott Cookman offered an intriguing explanation. Did Crozier, knowing that the boat stoves cooked much faster than the single immovable stoves on the
Erebus
and the
Terror
, have them placed ashore so that biscuits could quickly be made to help sustain the men in their long march in hope of rescue? M'Clintock and Hobson were also amazed to find such “unnecessary,” items as curtain rods among the equipment. But, as Cookman has also speculated, Crozier, aware that lightning posed a serious threat in that flat open region, may well have carried the curtain rods along to be used as improvised lightning rods.

All this, of course, is based on educated speculation. And new theories continue to appear. Of these, the most compelling by far is that put forth by oceanographer and author David C. Woodman. After spending ten years researching and analyzing Inuit testimony collected by the various searchers for Franklin, Woodman published his conclusions. Most intriguing among them is his belief that not all of Franklin's men died in 1848 or 1849, and that it was not until 1851 that the last of the survivors left the area where the
Erebus
and the
Terror
were abandoned. From his investigations, Woodman also concluded that Inuit, in all likelihood, actually visited the ships while Franklin's men were still aboard and that some of them were eyewitness to the sinking of one of the ships. (The enigma of what really happened to Franklin and his men continues to fascinate people; see note, page 278).

All of the speculations are, of course, a major part of the Franklin mystique. They will end only if conclusive firsthand accounts are discovered. Not that this is out of the realm of possibility. As Woodman and others have reminded us, in 1973 a clearly legible note, written in 1851 by a Franklin searcher, Commander Charles Phillips, was found at Cornwallis Island. And in 1871 a similarly legible letter, written by Dutchman William Barents, one of the first of the northern explorers, was found in the Arctic. It had been written 1595.

It is not inconceivable that one day a twenty-first or twenty-second century adventurer will turn over a stone slab or find a long-hidden cairn and all will be revealed. Until then, the precise path of the final voyage of the
Erebus
and the
Terror
, and the exact place and time of the death of their crews will remain a mystery.

Ironically, the one thing that does not remain a mystery is how the men of the Franklin expedition probably died. Scurvy was undoubtedly a major factor. As Pierre Berton, author of the
The Arctic Grail
—the landmark 1988 book on all of nineteenth century British Arctic exploration—pointed out, the lack of fresh vegetables and meat, combined with the huge amounts of salt that the Franklin party consumed, led, without question, to the outbreak of the debilitating and often fatal disease of scurvy. “One thing that went wrong,” Berton wrote, “was they ate too much salt meat. Even the birds they shot, they salted down. This killed the vitamins and left them susceptible to scurvy…If you take only salt meat and no fresh vegetables or fresh food, by the third year you'll come down with scurvy. This was true for every expedition that went to the north…. These explorers were not hunters. As Englishmen, they were used to shooting grouse on the moors. They didn't know anything about shooting big game and didn't have the weapons for it. Not only that, but they made absolutely no contact…with Eskimo hunters who could have brought them [fresh] meat.”

Scurvy was indeed a major cause of the Franklin tragedy. But it was not the only one. In 1852, in evidence he gave to the British government concerning the graves that he and others had discovered at Beechey Island, Captain Erasmus Ommanney of the
Assistance
stated, “We know that three of their men … died the first year, from which we may infer that they were not enjoying perfect health. It is supposed that their preserved meats were of inferior quality.” And even before Franklin and his ships left port, James Fitzjames, second-in-command aboard the
Erebus
, stated his alarm over the fact that the Admiralty had purchased so many of the expedition's provisions from an unknown supplier because he had quoted them the lowest price.

Fitzjames was referring to Stephan Goldner, the man who had been given the contract to provide the eight thousand tin containers of meats, vegetables, and soups for the Franklin expedition. Fitzjames was aware that, about a year before Goldner had been given that contract, a supply of preserved meat that he had sold to another vessel had gone bad. Later, when the full extent of the Franklin tragedy became known, the
Times
would declare: “If Franklin and his party had been supplied with such food as that condemned, and relied on it as their mainstay in time of need, the very means of saving their lives may have bred a pestilence or famine among them, and have been their destruction.”

It was a statement sadly more prophetic than the
Times
itself realized. At the time when Goldner had been awarded his contract, the tin container was a relatively new invention, only little more than a year old. Cooking the contents of the cans properly was a demanding process. Food inside small two-to-four pound tins needed to be cooked from seven to eleven hours at a consistent temperature of over 250 degrees. Larger cans required much longer cooking. Sealing the cans was a whole other issue. The solder used in these earliest days of canning was made of a combination of 10 percent tin and 90 percent lead. Early canners had no idea of how deadly lead could be if it leached into the food.

Later it would be revealed that because Goldner had fallen so far behind in delivering the eight thousand cans to the
Erebus
and the
Terror
, he had taken disastrous short cuts. Instead of cooking the contents of the smaller cans for seven to eleven hours, he had cooked them for only thirty to seventy-five minutes. And, in his haste, he had cooked them at a temperature some fifty degrees below that which was required. Equally disastrous was the fact that, to save time, Goldner had decided to put much of the food in larger tins. Although they obviously required a longer cooking time, Goldner prepared them in the same, inadequate time as the smaller cans. To make matters much worse, he was totally careless in how the cans were sealed. As investigations would later prove, his hasty, sloppy sealing process resulted in much of the lead-filled solder leaking into the food.

In the 1980s, University of Alberta anthropologist Owen Beattie and author and filmmaker John Geiger led an expedition to the three graves at Beechey Island in order to investigate just how the first of the 129 men of the Franklin expedition had died. After exhuming the bodies of the three men and performing a painstaking, scientific analysis of their remains, particularly their hair, Beattie and Geigier concluded that the three sailors had died from lead poisoning. Their specific conclusion, published in their 1989 book
Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition
, was that the cans that Goldner had supplied had been so improperly sealed that the lead solder had run down inside of the tins, poisoning the food that the men had eaten.

Beattie and Geiger's investigations also resulted in another important finding. While at Beechey Island, they had come upon the stone tent circle that the men of the Penny, Ross, and De Haven expeditions had discovered. Scattered outside the circle, Beattie and Geiger found more than thirty human bone fragments, including parts of a skull that, as tests would reveal, had come from a single Caucasian male who had been between twenty and twenty-five years old when he died. From the knife marks on the bones, the way in which the skull had been taken apart, and the results of forensic tests that were conducted on all the remains, there was only one conclusion that could be drawn. Modern science had confirmed the veracity of the various Inuit accounts.

Further proof that the desperate men of Franklin's lost expedition had resorted to cannibalism came in 1992 when, on King William Island, anthropologist Anne Keenleyside and archaeologist Margaret Bertulli discovered more than four hundred human bones which, they determined, were part of the remains of from eight to eleven persons. From the nature of the large collection of relics they also found at the site, it was obvious that they had discovered yet further evidence of the Franklin party's stay at the island.