17.
Robert McClure Narrowly Escapes Disaster
On April 18, 1851, while John Rae was organizing his epic two-part expedition at Great Bear Lake, roughly five hundred kilometres to the north, with his ship Investigator locked in the ice of Prince of Wales Strait, Captain Robert John Le Mesurier McClure was dispatching three exploratory sledge parties. On May 14, 1851, when Rae was trekking westward along the south coast of Victoria Island, one of McClure’s sledge parties—led by William Haswell—reached the north side of Prince Albert Sound. Ten days later, when Rae reached the south side of that same sound, McClure was compiling the data from his sledging team and waiting impatiently for the ice to clear so he could resume his voyage, complete the Northwest Passage and revel in the ensuing fame and fortune.
Robert McClure had been born in 1807 into an Irish family with military connections. He tried the army but at seventeen, seeing where the excitement was, moved to the Royal Navy. He served on anti-slavery patrols in the Caribbean and rose quickly through the ranks. In 1836–37, he ventured to the Arctic as mate on the Terror under George Back, an expedition that narrowly survived a sustained battle with Arctic ice. In 1848, after serving in North America and the Caribbean, he joined the Franklin search as first lieutenant on the Enterprise under captain James Clark Ross—an expedition that, impeded by heavy ice, spent one winter at Port Leopold, on the northeast coast of Somerset Island, and managed only to investigate 250 kilometres of coastline.
Two years later, the Admiralty decided to send two ships into the Arctic from the Pacific. Under the overall command of Richard Collinson in the Enterprise, McClure took charge of the Investigator. The ships ended up sailing separately, and failed to rendezvous in Honolulu, missing each other by a single day. McClure took a dangerous shortcut through the Aleutian Islands and, on July 31, 1850, arrived in Bering Strait ahead of Collinson. Instead of waiting, as a senior naval officer in another ship recommended, the ambitious McClure kept sailing. On August 7, the Investigator became the first exploring ship to round Point Barrow and enter the Beaufort Sea.
With the help of Moravian missionary Johann Miertsching, who had learned Inuktitut during five years in Labrador, McClure interviewed local Inuit, none of whom had any news of Franklin. The expedition’s primary objective—though not McClure’s—was to obtain intelligence about the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin. To that end, the men hoped to capture foxes alive in traps. They would fit them with special copper collars stamped with the positions of ships and supplies and then release them, hoping that one might be caught by Franklin’s men.
Like other expeditions, this one carried gilt metal “rescue buttons” with words pointing to key locations. These the men would give to any Inuit they encountered, hoping they might wear them and attract the notice of any Franklin survivors. As well, McClure periodically released hydrogen-filled balloons that carried messages on pieces of brightly coloured paper. In short, the search was reduced to desperate measures.
Richard Collinson, nominal commander of the expedition, ran into heavy ice in Bering Strait and retreated for the winter to Hong Kong. McClure had already sailed eastward past the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Alone, he lacked the safety of a supporting vessel. With ice forming along the coast, he struck northeast between Victoria Island and Banks Island into Prince of Wales Strait.
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.
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.