The tourist is part of the landscape of our times, as the pilgrim was in the Middle Ages.
—V. S. PRITCHETT, The Spanish Temper
A WEEK BEFORE my pilgrimage began, my partner, Graeme Gibson, and I found a dead crow in the backyard. West Nile Virus, we thought. We put it in the freezer and called the Humane Society. They took the frozen crow away, but said they would not be informing us of the diagnosis as they did not want panic to spread. About this time it occurred to me that I ought to have put on some DEET before pruning the rose bushes: there had been a few mosquitoes.
The day before my departure, I noticed some pink blotches around my waist. I put them down to a Thai spring roll I’d eaten. Perhaps I had an allergy.
Soon the blotches were more numerous, and spreading ouwards. I checked my tongue for furriness, my brain for light-headedness, my neck for stiffness. I did feel peculiar, although no one else seemed to be noticing. By this time I was on a plane bound for Greenland, and, then, suddenly — time passes quickly when you’re infested with microbes — I found myself on a Russian arctic-research vessel called the Akademic Ioffe. I was a temporary staff member of an outfit called Adventure Canada, which sublet the Russian research ship from Peregrine, an Australian tour company that leased the boat for Antarctic cruises. On board with me were a mixed bunch: the Russian crew, the Australian folks who ran the “hotel” aspects of the trip, and the Canadians who planned and executed the daily programs for the sake of the hundred or so eager adventurers who had booked passage. My job was to give a couple of talks on northern exploration as shaped by literary and artistic concepts — a job that, in my virus-addled state, I felt ill-equipped to perform.
Soon we were sailing down the long, long Sondreström Fjord — a fjord being, as our on-board geologist explained, a valley originally scooped out by glaciers and subsequently filled by the sea. Then we turned north and skirted the western coast of Greenland, cruising among huge and spectacular icebergs. The sea was blue, the sky was blue, the icebergs were blue as well, or their recently sheared surfaces were: an unearthly blue, inklike, artificial. As we cruised among them in our rubber Zodiacs, thousand-year-old ice fizzed in the water as its compressed air escaped.
We were bound — eventually — for Baffin Bay, then Lancaster Sound, and finally for Beechy Island, where the first three members of the doomed 1847 Franklin expedition were buried. Was I fated to join them? I wondered, as the mountains rose to the right, and the dazzling ice-filled sea stretched out to the left, and the sunsets went on for hours. Was my head about to explode, for reasons that would appear mysterious to those observing? Was history poised to repeat itself, and would I perish of unknown causes, to be followed shortly by the entire passenger list and crew, just as in the Franklin expedition? I shared these thoughts with no one, although I felt it might be fitting to make a few illegible but poignant notes, to be discovered later, in a tin can or plastic pill container, like the garbled scrap that survived the Franklin debacle: Oh, the dire sad.
But the subject is pilgrimages, or a pilgrimage. I was supposed to be writing about one — this one, the one I was on. But in my blotchy state — the blotches had now reached my wrists, and possibly my brain — I couldn’t quite focus on the general idea. What was a pilgrimage? Had I ever made one before? Could what I was doing now be considered one? And if so, in what sense?
I’d made some literary pilgrimages in my youth, of a sort. I’d thrown up beside the road in Wordsworth country; I’d inspected the Brontë manse and marvelled at the tiny size of its famous inhabitants; I’d been to Dr. Johnson’s house in London, and to the House of the Seven Gables, in Salem, Massachusetts; but did such visits count? All of them had been accidents: I happened to be passing by. How much of the essence of a pilgrimage resides in the intention, rather than in the journey as such?
The dictionary provides some flexibility: a pilgrim can mean simply a wanderer, a sojourner; or it can mean one who travels to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion. Motion is involved, relics not necessarily. But the motion has to be protracted — a stroll to the corner store for a loaf of bread wouldn’t qualify. It also has to be — surely — non-commercial in nature. Marco Polo, although a magnificent traveller, was not a pilgrim. Also, a pilgrimage was supposed to be good for you: good for your health (Temples of Asclepius, Lourdes, the heart of Brother André, with its trail of abandoned crutches), or good for the state of your soul (purchase an indulgence, get time off in Purgatory; become a Pilgrim Father, found the righteous New Jerusalem, somewhere in the Boston area).
Needless to say, not all pilgrimages work out as advertised. Consider the Crusades.
When I thought of pilgrims, however, I thought first of literature. Most of the pilgrims I’d known had been encountered there.
There’s Chaucer, of course: his Canterbury pilgrims are a sociable batch, making their trip together because it’s spring, and they’ve got wanderlust, and they want to have fun. Whatever religious gloss they may put upon it, what they really enjoy is travelling in a merry company, and observing one another’s wardrobes and foibles, and telling tales.
There’s the seventeenth-century variety of pilgrim, exemplified by those in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. For these hardy Protestants, the pilgrim’s journey took him not to a shrine but through this mortal vale of tears and spiritual battles toward his goal, the heavenly home to be gained after his death.
The eighteenth century went on grand tours and sentimental journeys rather than pilgrimages, but with the Romantic age the pilgrimage was back. Consider Lord Byron’s long poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Its hero is a wastrel, though filled with restless longing for he knows not what. But the sacred places he visits are not churches; they are sublime landscapes, with many a cliff and chasm, and the poem ends with a panegyric to the immensity of the sea, which contains the frequently-quoted stanza,
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean — roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin — his control
Stops with the shore; — upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.
Putting all these varieties of pilgrimages together, what do we get? At first glance, nothing very consistent. However, there are a few links. For instance, a pilgrim — it seems — is never first on the ground. Someone else has always been there before him, and has come to an unfortunate (though heroic or saintly) end. It is in honour of these forerunners that the pilgrim takes up his staff. Chaucer’s jolly company is headed to Canterbury, scene of the murder of Thomas à Becket. Bunyan’s pilgrims are following in the footsteps of the crucified Christ; and even Byron’s Childe Harold ends with the contemplation of a myriad tragic shipwrecks and drownings. A dead body, it seems, usually precedes the live pilgrim.
The journey I undertook had elements of all three sorts of pilgrimages. I sojourned with a merry company, and told tales, and listened to them as well. I observed sublime landscapes, and sublime seascapes too, and meditated on dead sailors and drowned vessels.
As for spiritual battles, although I myself did not engage in any, those who’d given the route its haunted notoriety had most certainly engaged in them. We were taking the same sea road travelled by Franklin and his crew when they set out to discover the Northwest Passage in 1845 and were never seen again; between their hopeful departure and the discovery of their silverware and gnawed bones, much anguish must have occurred.
But Franklin himself was not the direct object of my pilgrimage. My immediate agenda concerned a friend of mine, fellow poet Gwendolyn MacEwen. In the early 1960s, when she was in her early twenties, she’d written a remarkable verse drama for radio about the Franklin expedition, named after Franklin’s two ships: the Terror and the Erebus. I’d heard this play when it was first broadcast, and had been very impressed by it — all the more so because Gwen had never been to the Arctic and had never visited the Franklin expedition’s three poignant graves. She had sailed these seas in imagination only, and had died in her mid-forties, without ever glimpsing an iceberg.
My pilgrimage — if it can be called that — was undertaken for her. I would go where she’d been unable to go, stand where she had never stood, see what she had seen only with the mind’s eye.
A sentimental gesture, but then, pilgrimages are sentimental by nature.
The voyage proceeded. Elements of the Chaucerian pilgrimage manifested themselves at mealtimes, with merry tales, and jests involving Viking outfits and kilts and false beards, and, on one memorable occasion, fur sunglasses and fur jockstraps. The Protestant-style soul-searching spiritual journey was an individual matter, as such things are: there was a lot of journal keeping aboard ship. Ruminations of the human state and the state of nature were frequent: anxiety not over the life to come but over the near future, for it was evident even to an untrained eye that the glaciers are receding at a rapid pace.
The Byronic version of the pilgrimage was experienced on the bridge or (with mittens) out on deck, as the (where are the adjectives? “Spectacular,” “grand” and “sublime” hardly do it) indescribable scenery drifted past. “Look at that iceberg/cliff/rockface,” people would say, entranced. “It looks just like a Lawren Harris painting.” And yes, it did, only better, and so did that one, and the amazing one over there, purple and green and pink in the sunset, and then indigo and an unearthly yellow colour . . . You found yourself just standing, with eyes and mouth open, for hours.
By the time of my first talk on board ship, the original pink blotches were fading, but more had appeared. (Considerately, they stopped at the neckline.) The disorganization of my discourse was probably set down to the scrambled state in which “creative” people are thought to exist on a daily basis. I considered explaining about my curious disease, but then people might have thought they were on a plague ship and jumped overboard, or got themselves airlifted. Anyway, I was still walking and talking. It’s just that I didn’t appear to myself to be entirely responsible for what was coming out of my mouth. “Was that all right?” I asked Graeme. But he had been up on the bridge, watching fulmars.
What did I say? I think I began by remarking to my audience that Voltaire would have considered them all mad. To pay money for a voyage, not to some centre of civilization where the proper study of mankind would be man, or even to some well-tended chateau with symmetrical plantings surrounding it, but to an icy waste with very large amounts of rock, water, and sand in it — this would have seemed to Voltaire the height of folly. Men did not risk their lives in such places unless there was a reason — money to be made, for instance. What changed between Voltaire and us — or between Voltaire and, for instance, Sir Edmund Hilary uselessly climbing Mount Everest, and Scott uselessly freezing himself in the Antarctic? A changed world view. Burke’s idea of the Sublime became a Romantic yardstick, and the sublime could not be the Sublime without danger. The history of arctic exploration in the nineteenth century was seen through this glass, and those who went north and described and painted these landscapes did so with the Romantic hero looking over their shoulders.
Franklin’s expedition — I think I said — occurred at a sort of hinge in time — the moment when such risky explorations ceased to be undertaken in hope of gain — no one deeply believed, by 1847, that the Northwest Passage would be the key to China and would make Britain very, very rich — and began to be undertaken in the spirit of heroic enterprise, as a sort of barrel trip over Niagara Falls. What was being defied by derring-do explorers and potential martyrs was not pagans, but Nature herself. “They forged the last link with their lives,” reads the inscription on Franklin’s memorial in Westminster Abbey — an inscription for which Lady Jane Franklin, the widow, worked long and hard, as she worked to ensure that Franklin was seen as a hero in the Christian Romantic mode. But the last link of what? Of an idea. For as Ken McGoogan so ably demonstrates in his book, Fatal Passage — a book I was reading as I was ferried blotchily across Baffin Bay — Franklin didn’t really find the Northwest Passage. He found a body of water that was always choked with ice, instead, and which ought not to have counted.
After he died, and after his ships had been locked in the ice for three years, his men set out overland, cooking and eating one another as they went. When the first news of these culinary activities reached England, brought by the intrepid explorer John Rae, Lady Franklin was most distressed: for if Franklin had indulged in cannibalism, he would not be a hero, but only a sort of chef. (John Rae, we now know, was right about the cannibalism, though Franklin himself had undoubtedly died before it got underway.)
Some time during this admittedly rambling talk, I read from Gwendolyn’s verse drama, in which she suggests that Franklin created the Northwest Passage by an act of imagination and will:
Ah, Franklin!
To follow you, one does not need geography.
At least not totally, but more of that
Instrumental knowledge the bones have,
Their limits, their measurings.
The eye creates the horizon,
The ear invents the wind,
The hand reaching out from a parka sleeve
By touch demands that the touched thing be.
A fitting motif for pilgrimages: for what inspires them if not a purely imaginative link between place and spirit?
Having crossed Baffin Bay, we travelled through Lancaster Sound, and finally along the wild, and — again, adjectives fail — oddly Egyptian-looking sandstone cliffs of Devon Island. Devon is the largest uninhabited island in the world. Was it here we saw two polar bears eating a dead walrus, while groups of seal swam in the little harbour? I find I have recorded the event and the date — September 1 — but not the exact location. There were several sites from the Thule people — those who preceded the present Inuit — and our on-ship archaeologist explained them to us. The huge whale ribs that once acted as roof beams were still there.
The sun shone, the breezes blew. Although it was autumn, several small arctic flowers were still in bloom. Pakak Innuksuk and Akoo Peters, Inuit culture resource people, drum-danced and sang. At such moments the Arctic is intensely alive. It seems a benign landscape, mild and hazy and welcoming, a place of many delights.
The next day it was colder and the wind was up. We reached the west-ernmost end of Devon Island and dropped anchor in the harbour of Beechy Island, a small knob at the western end of Devon. Franklin’s two ships, the Terror and the Erebus, spent their first winter there, protected from the crush of ice. The shore, once the edge of a warmer sea where marine life thrived, is now fossil-strewn, barren, windswept. Many have visited since Franklin’s day; many have posed for the camera beside the three graves there; many have pondered.
Some years ago the three bodies were disinterred, in an attempt to learn more about the expedition. The scientists engaged in this venture — as recorded in John Geiger’s book, Frozen in Time — discovered that high levels of lead poisoning from tinned food must have made a substantial contribution to the disaster. The tin cans themselves can still be seen on the beach: lead as thick as candle drippings closes their seams. The dangers of eating lead were not well understood then, and the symptoms mimicked scurvy. Lead attacks the immune system, and causes disorientation and lapses in judgement. The supplies that were supposed to keep the expedition members alive were in fact killing them.
We disembarked from the Akademic Ioffe in Zodiacs and walked along the beach. I was blotch-free by this time; nevertheless I felt quite weightless. After visiting the graves — the markers are replicas now, as the originals suffered from the pilgrim’s urge to chip off a piece of the action — Graeme and I sat on the shingle near an old coal depot where ships used to leave supplies for other ships until polar bears tore the storage building apart. We ate a piece of chocolate, hoarded by me for this occasion, and toasted Gwen in water from our water bottles, and Graeme sang “The Ballad of Lord Franklin,” the words swallowed up by the wind. Farther along the beach, some bagpiping was underway, so faint we could scarcely hear it.
Inchoate thoughts about spaces, emptiness, gaps; jumping crevasses, I wrote in my notebook. Words travelling across.
The next day we were beset by drifting pack ice, just like Franklin. It was astonishing how quickly the ice moved, and with what strength. We had to go seventy miles around to get away from it.
Pilgrims have traditionally brought something back with them from their journeys. Sometimes it was a cockleshell to show they’d been to Jerusalem, or an expensive splinter claiming to be a piece of the true cross, or the alleged finger-bone of a saint. Modern-day pilgrims, disguised as tourists, bring photos of themselves sticking out their tongues in front of the Eiffel Tower, or postcards, or purchased mementoes — coffee spoons with the crests of cities on them, baseball caps, ashtrays.
There was no stand selling bits of explorer’s finger or T-shirts with Souvenir of Beechy Island on them, so I brought back a pebble. It was identical with the millions of other pebbles on the beach — duncoloured sandstone, no distinguishing features. This pebble travelled with me to Toronto in a makeup kit.
I called my doctor as soon as I arrived, and described my symptoms. “I think I’ve had West Nile Virus,” I said. “Hard to tell,” was his reply. (Worst come to worst, at least I wouldn’t have been buried in the permafrost. I’d have been popped into the ship’s freezer kept specially for that one purpose, so as not to get the bodies mixed up with the beef stroganoff.)
On a hot, dry day in mid-September, I put the Beechy Island pebble into my pocket, took a serving spoon from the kitchen, and walked over to Gwendolyn MacEwen Park, imagining to myself the rather sardonic poem Gwen might have made, both out of the park and out of the pebble event in which I was about to indulge. Accompanying me was David Young, one of whose plays — Unimaginable Island — deals with the unsung heroes of the Scott Antarctic expedition — unsung because they’d had the dubious taste to survive. In order to be a hero — at least in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — it was almost mandatory to be dead.
When we got to the park, David looked the other way while I dug a dusty hole with my spoon and inserted the pebble. So now, somewhere in the heart of darkest Toronto, its exact location known only to me, there’s a tiny piece of geology brought all the way from Beechy Island. The only link between the two places is an act of the imagination, or perhaps two acts — Franklin’s imagining of the Northwest Passage, and the twenty-two-year-old Gwendolyn MacEwen’s imagining of Franklin.
So I’ve followed you here
Like a dozen others, looking for relics
of your ships, your men.
Here to this awful monastery,
where you, where Crozier died,
and all the men with you died,
Seeking a passage from imagination to reality. ...