THE MIRAGE OF LANCASTER SOUND
An extraordinary thing was happening in the north. The great mass of ice which stretched from the coast of Greenland to the island of Spitsbergen, and which had hitherto prevented sailors from penetrating further north than 80° 48′, began to break up. What caused this phenomenon remains unknown. It would be nice to conjecture that this was the first hint of the greenhouse effect. More likely, it was just one of those unfathomable, meteorological hiccoughs to which the world is prone. Whatever the cause, the effect was obvious. Eighteen thousand square miles of ice had broken free from the polar cap and were gradually drifting southwards into the Atlantic. Their presence was palpable. European summers became noticeably cooler. In North America, Bostonians were puzzled to find that their maize crops failed to ripen. Iceland was virtually stranded, its bays, ports and inlets clogged by ice. Even in Britain, with its unpredictable weather, people spoke ‘in the common vague way, that the seasons have altered lately’.1
Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, made his own observation. According to one visitor, writing in December 1817, ‘Another very curious fact which he mentioned to me, and the no less curious speculation he has formed upon it, are worthy of remark. The oil of whales is so constituted by nature, that they are suited to a warm temperature, and freeze at a very high degree of the thermometer. That of the Greenland whale, on the other hand, requires a very low temperature to freeze it. Now, Sir J. has observed that the Greenland oil which he uses in his own lamp will never burn of late, (and that, without any great degree of cold) from which he thinks it possible that the constitution of the animal may have been so far changed by a change in the temperature in the elements in which he lives, as, by warming his blood &c, to have affected a change in the nature of the oil he produces. The alteration in the temperature of the water he attributes to the clearing away of the mass of ice attached to the shores of Greenland.’2
Banks had first been alerted to the polar break-up by a whaler from Whitby, William Scoresby (whose father had invented the crow's nest), who had written of his 1817 voyages that he observed ‘about two thousand square leagues of the surface of the Greenland seas, included between the parallels 74° and 80°, perfectly void of all ice, all of which had disappeared within the last two years’.3 Scoresby went on to press his opinion that there was a vast polar sea, frozen on the surface but with free water beneath. He cited in evidence Atlantic whales taken with stone lance-heads from Russia embedded in their flesh, and whales caught in the Bering Strait that carried Greenland harpoons.
It would never be possible to sail over this sea, he reckoned, but a passage might possibly be found at its southern fringes in the Canadian Arctic. His sailing experience told him that such a passage would be navigable for only a few weeks at intervals of several years. ‘Hence, as affording a navigation to the Pacific Ocean, the discovery of a north-west passage could be of no service.’4 But he appealed to Banks's sense of discovery. Both from a scientific and patriotic stand there was much to be gained, as Banks saw it, from exploring this hitherto unknown wilderness.
For two decades at the beginning of the nineteenth century William Scoresby was the most successful whaler in Britain, scouring the Arctic to bring back catches that were consistently greater – vastly greater – than those of his competitors. He went further into the ice than others, took more risks, lost fewer men and made more money: where an ordinary whaling ship could give a return of 25 per cent per annum over an average life of six years, a Scoresby ship returned 33.5 per cent. He himself noted that the inhabitants of Whitby, his home port, regarded his success with superstitious awe.
Physically, he was striking, even sinister-looking. Although slight he was enormously strong, and possessed of a stamina that seems unimaginable nowadays. Once, when his keel was ripped off by ice, and unable to staunch the leak by the usual method of fothering (wrapping a packed sail around and under the ship), he ordered his men to remove the ship's contents, haul it onto a floe and turn it over. During the 120 hours it took to make the repair, Scoresby slept for twelve. His face was that of a gypsy: high cheekbones, dark skin, pointed nose and chin, thin lips, black curly hair. His eyes held a force that even he did not understand. Once, as an experiment, he decided to outstare a ship's guard dog. The beast, reckoned to be the most savage of its kind, ran back and forth snarling in panic as Scoresby approached, before finally jumping overboard and drowning. The same power enabled him to tame polar bears, which he brought back from the Arctic as pets for his friends in Whitby. When at home, and not supervising the blubber vats, he would rescue the same bears from the coppices into which they inevitably escaped. The constabulary cheered, nervously, from a distance.
He was a self-taught scientist. To prove the insulating power of snow under the Arctic sun he grabbed several handfuls and packed them together to form a lens with which he successfully melted lead. He invented what he called ‘ice shoes’ – remarkably like skis, which he had never seen – for crossing thin ice. He devised a ‘marine diver’ with which he calculated that the sea was warmer at the bottom than the top. He was the first to notice that differences in sea colour were caused by plankton. On one whaling expedition he went up the coast of Greenland to reach a latitude of 82° 30’, a northernmost record that would stand until 1827. He wrote a book, published in 1820 under the title An Account of the Arctic Regions, that has been described as ‘the foundation stone of Arctic science’.5
Despite being something of a wonder, Scoresby was at the same time a shy, retiring man and a devout Christian, who refused to fish on Sundays. Although perfectly suited for anything to do with the Arctic he was ill-equipped to navigate the social and political straits of the Admiralty. For most of his life he was to be the establishment's willing dupe.
It was he who first suggested to Banks that the Admiralty might undertake an expedition to settle the North-West Passage question once and for all. As he pointed out, if overseen by a whaling captain -he had himself in mind – ‘the fishery might occasionally be prosecuted without detriment to the other object of the voyage [and] the expenses would be proportionately reduced and might possibly be altogether defrayed’.6 Banks was interested, and thanked him for his ‘very intelligent letter’.7 But he had one query. If such a thing was possible, why had no whaler yet tried for the government's prize? And if the prize was too difficult, ‘allow me to ask your opinion whether an act offering a thousand pounds for the reaching of every degree of latitude from 82° to the Pole would be likely to induce the masters of ships to make a trial to reach at least some of the unknown degrees of Latitude?’8
Scoresby's reply could be paraphrased in terms of expense and self-interest. But it is so uncompromisingly practical that it is worth repeating in full.
I am aware of the premiums offered by the Legislature for the attainment of certain situations on the polar regions, but am not surprised that they have not produced a single attempt, neither do I believe they ever will. Several reasons operate against them.
1st Few of the commanders of Greenland ships have either a taste for discovery or sufficient nautical knowledge for effecting them.
2nd The expenses of a fishing ship are so considerable that no owner considers himself justifiable in sinking these expenses and foregoing the advantages which may reasonably be expected of the fishing, to pursue objects of discovery in contemplation of a reward, the conditions of which are not known to be even possible. Besides, if we view the so called NW or NE Passage as practicable, we shall find the expense of outfit, trials, insurance, hire of ship and wages of the crew and Captain, would swallow up at least half of the premium offered. Now it is evident to those who visit the Greenland seas that were such a passage once accomplished it might not again be practicable in ten or even twenty years – it is evident that no premium could be adequate to the expense.
I do not mean to imply that there is no such thing as a northern passage to India, for I do not think the point has been satisfactorily determined; yet I firmly believe that if such a passage does exist, it will be found only at intervals of some years; this I deduce from attentive observation of the nature, drift and general outline of the polar ice.9
In all the years spent searching for the North-West Passage, past and future, no advice was crisper than that given by Scoresby. Banks was duly impressed and suggested – following Scoresby's between-the-lines reasoning – that Scoresby lead any proposed expedition.
Barrow liked the idea very much. Although he was not yet finished with Africa, Tuckey's disaster had been a blow. What more glorious alternative could there be than the discovery of a polar route to the Orient?
Barrow's opinions on the Arctic were as intransigent as the ones he held on Africa. He not only believed that the North-West Passage existed and was perfectly navigable – whatever the evidence otherwise – but that the North Pole was open water. This was not as silly as it sounded; it was an incontrovertible fact that ice flowed south and the only obvious reason for it to do so was pressure from above. Theorists conjured a huge cistern of temperate water that forced its surrounding ring of ice down into the Atlantic and the Pacific. As for the North Pole, the same theorists imagined it to be a rocky outcrop – a little nipple of basalt perhaps – that poked from the earth's northern axis. Barrow was a believer in both the solid Pole and the ‘Open Polar Sea’ that surrounded it. When he despatched his first missions to the Arctic he expected them to prove his every conjecture.
The only stumbling block then was that Scoresby was not a naval man. When Scoresby came with his father from Whitby to meet him, Barrow was at first duplicitous and then rude. Scoresby's diary told the story. ‘I found Mr. Barrow was particularly anxious that my Father or I, or both of us, should go in the proposed expedition; yet to my surprise he evaded conversation on the subject and generally avoided me in the room until, provoked by his conduct I watched an opportunity and put the question plainly to him – was it decided that I should have an employment in either of the expeditions, and if so, what situation was it that I might expect? He answered shortly and indirectly that if I wished to go I must call the next day at the Navy Board and give in my proposals, and then turning sharply he left the room.’10
Bewildered, Scoresby approached Banks who told him with some embarrassment that if the expedition went ahead it would be under naval control but that, should he be interested as ‘they very much wished’,11 he would be welcomed as a pilot. Scoresby went home disappointed and out of pocket. ‘[From my interview] it clearly appeared that I had undertaken a journey to Town for nothing, and had been called upon in such a way that I could have no claim for my expenses.’12
On 29 November 1817, Banks wrote – on Barrow's insistence – to Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, urging him to seize the opportunity the change in conditions offered. Now was the time ‘to endeavour to correct and amend the very defective geography of the Arctic Regions more especially on the side of America. To attempt the Circumnavigation of old Greenland, if an island or islands as there is reason to suppose. To prove the existence or non-existence of Baffin's Bay; and to endeavour to ascertain the practicability of a Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, along the Northern Coast of North America. These are objects which may be considered as peculiarly interesting to Great Britain not only from their proximity and the national advantages which they involve but also for the marked attention they called forth and the Discoveries made in consequence thereof in the very earliest periods of our foreign navigation.’13
Barrow waited a year before triumphantly publishing Scoresby's plans as his (anonymous) own in the Quarterly Review. And in 1818 he secured permission for two naval expeditions. The first, under Commander John Ross and Lieutenant William Edward Parry, was to try for the North-West Passage. The second, under Captain David Buchan and Lieutenant John Franklin, was to try for the North Pole. All the officers, Barrow crowed, were hand-picked and certain to succeed. Their orders confirmed his confidence: Buchan and Franklin were to cross the Pole and meet up with Ross and Parry after they had traversed the North-West Passage. The enterprise was to take a matter of months.
The men who inspired such confidence were all different, but shared three things in common: none of them had been anywhere near the Arctic; they were only going now for the chance of employment; and, secretly, they all hoped it might lead to promotion. Nobody even considered the first. The second was so obvious as to be not worth mentioning. And the third was so presumptuous that it dared not be spoken aloud – save by John Ross who, commendably, demanded it from the start.
His Royal Highness the Prince Regent having signified his pleasure to Viscount Melville, that an attempt should be made to discover a Northern Passage, by sea, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean; We have, in consequence thereof, caused four ships or vessels to be fitted out and appropriated for that purpose, two of which, the Isabella and the Alexander, are intended to proceed together by the north-westward through Davis’ Strait; and two, the Dorothea and Trent, in a direction as due north as may be found practicable through the Spitsbergen seas.14
Thus began Ross's orders. Whether John Ross was the right man to lead this first expedition into the Arctic has long been a matter of debate. Born in West Galloway on 24 June 1777, he had joined the navy at the early age of nine and by the end of the Napoleonic Wars had risen to the rank of lieutenant. His had been an eventful war, ranging from the West Indies to the Mediterranean to the Baltic. He was resourceful, without doubt – in Stockholm he was present at the armed deposition of the mad King Gustavus IV Adolphus, and was forced to flee the country in disguise. He was brave too – at the batteries of Bilbao he survived terrible injuries: both legs and one arm were broken, he was spitted by a bayonet, and received three sabre wounds to the head. He was short, red-haired and quick-tempered. He was stubborn and vain; during his lifetime he had his portrait painted at least four times. Yet somehow he was appealing. Like Scoresby he was self-taught and was forever tinkering with new ideas. He had no hesitation in crossing the establishment, and while refusing to admit his mistakes, was willing to learn from them.
Ross was clearly capable. Of the 900 commanders who served between 1814 and 1818 only nine were constantly employed and Ross was one of them. As further proof of his ability, he had risen thus far without any patronage other than that of his fellow officers, one of whom, Sir George Hope, had pressed for his appointment to lead the current expedition. However, Ross was not Barrow's first choice. The man whom the Second Secretary would have liked to see in charge was William Edward Parry.
Born in 1790, Parry was a young man on the make, whose war service had been spent mostly in placid blockades of the Baltic and America. Pious, ambitious, with a good nose for what to say, when to say it, and most important, who to say it to, he was Barrow's favourite. His father was a society doctor in Bath and he knew all the right people – a vital qualification in Barrow's eyes. Parry was a networker. As he enthused after one visit to Banks's house at 22 Soho Square, ‘This is an instance, out of many, of the incalculable advantage of being on the spot. I always like to meet people face to face.’15 Rather annoyingly, Parry was also very good at his job. In the words of a later historian and explorer, Sir Clements Markham, he was ‘the beau ideal of an Arctic officer’.16
Ironically, Parry had never particularly wanted to go to the Arctic. His heart had been set on joining the Congo mission under Tuckey. But he was not too worried where he was sent so long as he was sent somewhere. As he wrote, ‘hot or cold was all one to him, Africa or the Pole’.17
If Barrow could not have his way with the command of the mission, he could at least choose the remaining officers. He put Parry in charge of the second ship and when John Ross arrived in London he found there was space for only one more officer in the whole expedition. Ross chose his nephew James. A darker, taller version of his uncle, James Clark Ross shared the same temper, arrogance and vanity (five portraits). Unlike John Ross, however, he was politically astute and had the knack of making himself popular. He had served with his uncle ever since joining the navy in 1812, aged eleven, and was now a midshipman. In time he would become the navy's most experienced Arctic officer.
Descending on the Isabella – which, at 385 tons as opposed to the Alexander’s 2521/2, he judged ‘the most proper ship for the senior officer’18 – John Ross oversaw the ships’ conversion to Arctic service. Everything was done to prepare for the icy conditions ahead. Both ships were double-planked, their interiors braced with extra timbers and their bows sharpened and reinforced with three-quarter-inch iron plates. Spare rudders and capstans were installed. Ice anchors, ice poles and ice saws were stowed, and a canvas roof was packed against the eventuality of a winter aboard ship. Beds, as opposed to bunks, were provided in case they had to be moved ashore in the event of shipwreck. The crews – mostly whalermen who had been tempted by the Admiralty's offer of double pay – were issued with cold-weather clothing and fur blankets. The officers, meanwhile, were supplied with a twenty-five-volume library of Arctic reference books, to which the Naval and Military Bible Society added ninety uplifting tracts to be shared between both ships. Against the possibility of wreck or repair they were given more than 3,000 feet of timber and 56,000 nails ranging in weight from six pounds to twenty-two ounces.
To justify the expedition's scientific aims the Admiralty and the Royal Society donated chronometers and compasses – the Isabella carried seven different models of each – plus a number of other instruments, among them Henry Kater's Pendulum for measuring the ellipticity of the globe, Mr Plentty's Cork Life Boat, Englefield's Mountain Barometer and Companion, Burt's Buoy and Knipper, Trengrouse's Apparatus for Saving Lives, and Troughton's Whirling Horizon. John Ross would later contribute to the array with a dredging device of his own invention which he whimsically christened ‘the Deep Sea Clamm’.
There were the usual trinkets for distribution to the natives: 129 gallons of gin and brandy, 102 pounds of snuff, 40 umbrellas and other essentials. Should the recipients prove hostile there were a number of muskets and shotguns as well as nine eighteen-pounder carronades.
Ross recorded every detail scrupulously, right down to the pay which each man could expect. He himself would receive £46 per month and Parry £23. Midshipmen, including James Ross, would be paid £6 2s 8d. Able-bodied seamen got £3, the cook £4 and the carpenter £6. The plutocrat of the crew was the Isabella’s surgeon who almost touched Ross with £39 4s 6d. The marine privates who were supposed to keep order and quell mutinies were the lowest-paid, receiving a dismissive £1 14s 10d for not being proper sailors. The roster also included two supernumeraries: Captain Edward Sabine of the Royal Artillery who was to be the expedition's expert on natural history and magnetic observations (he had some experience of the latter but little of the former); and an Eskimo called John Sackheuse who was enlisted at £3 to act as interpreter. Sackheuse was the joker in the Admiralty pack. A native of southern Greenland, he had somehow made his way to Britain – as a stowaway on a whaler according to his more practised accounts which, it must be said, tended to vary. He declared himself to be a committed Christian whose one aim was to return home and convert his fellow countrymen.
Preparations started at Deptford in January 1818, and for the next three months created a good deal of excitement. As the grandest and most ambitious naval adventure to date it caught the public fancy. People swarmed from London on day excursions to Deptford, checking on progress as eagerly as did Ross and Parry. Despite windy weather, the crowds swelled to a peak on 31 March when His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence, Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Sir Thomas Byam Martin, Comptroller of the Navy, arrived in the stately red-and-gold Admiralty barge to give the ships their final inspection.
The Dorothea and Trent had undergone similar preparations and when a favourable south-easterly wind came on 25 April, all four vessels sailed out of the Thames and up the east coast of Britain. By the end of the month they were off Lerwick and on 1 May the two expeditions parted company.
By 3 June, Ross was in Davis Strait off the west coast of Greenland. Seven days later the two ships were sailing up a ten-mile-wide channel between the coast and the central ice pack of Baffin Bay. This was by no means uncharted territory, as was underlined when they rounded a corner and discovered the whaling fleet, ‘between thirty and forty British ships at anchor, giving to this frozen and desolate region the appearance of a flourishing seaport … Every ship cheered us as we passed.’19 But for Ross, Parry and the others who had never visited the Arctic before, it was like entering a new world. The sea jostled with icebergs of fantastic shapes and colours, the cliffs screamed with sea birds and the sun shone for twenty-four hours of the day. ‘It is hardly possible,’ wrote Ross of the massed bergs, ‘to imagine anything more exquisite … by night as well as day they glitter with a vividness of colour beyond the power of art to represent.’20 Everything was weird and new. Even vision was distorted. Ross reported that at a distance of only a few miles ships appeared to be of ‘monstrous height’21 – a phenomenon which he was unable to explain but which was caused by atmospheric refraction.
Parry too was awed by their surroundings. ‘The weather was beautifully fine and clear,’ he wrote on one calm night, ‘and nothing could exceed the serenity, and at the same time the grandeur, of the whole scene around us. The water was glassy smooth, and the ships glided gently among the numberless masses of ice … The land of Greenland, rugged, high, and almost entirely covered with snow, filled up the eastern horizon, and Disko Island was now more plainly visible to the Northward, its hills reflecting the bright redness of the midnight sun.’22
It was early in the season – a month early, according to the whalers – and the ice had yet to be broken by bad weather. Ross tried and failed to find a way through the central pack before following what leads he could closer to the shore. At times both crews were forced to disembark and haul their ships through narrow channels in the ice, heaving to the rhythm set by the Isabella's fiddler.
In these early days the expedition had a carnival-like air. The men climbed bergs and tobogganed down snow chutes. The officers set up observatories, meticulously recorded their findings and toasted their successes. Even when the Isabellas fiddler fell through the ice into subzero waters he emerged unscathed and, after a change of clothes, was soon back at his post, scraping away cheerfully.
But if the journey was a carnival it was a Dantesque one, tinged at times with madness and surreal images. They sailed past the Whale Islands, whose governor, a Norwegian named Flushe who had lived there for the last eleven years with his wife, children, six Danes and 100 Eskimos, paddled out to inform them that last year had been so hard they had had to eat their dogs, and this year was even harder. Then he plashed gloomily back to his lonely existence. Past Love Bay, on Disko Island, they saw a Danish whale factory which had been set alight by rival whalers. Later, venturing ashore at Four Island Point, they encountered a British surgeon buying skulls from an Eskimo cemetery. This world was as detached as it could be from their own.
For a while they kept company with three whalers, among them the Three Brothers of Hull, a famous old ship which would be lost later in the season. Those of Ross's men who had never before seen whales were amazed at the sight. En masse the sound of their blowing resembled distant artillery; their spouts rose into the air like smoke from a village. James Ross was given the chance of killing a forty-six-foot black-and-white specimen, which his uncle found a distasteful sight. He recorded, with a sympathy unusual for the time, the whale's spout turning red with blood, and the harpooners’ boats withdrawing to avoid their quarry, ‘rolling and writhing in dreadful agony, lashing the sea from side to side with his tail and fins, till he expired’.23 But he was grateful for the whale's nine tons of blubber, which was divided 5:4 between the two ships to provide fuel and light should they have to overwinter. They sailed on, leaving behind the carcass, or krang as whalers called it, a stinking hulk at which seabirds would peck till the skeleton sank to the bottom.
By the end of July the whales and the whalers had gone and the two naval vessels were on their own. They were now in uncharted waters and the weather was turning. The ice was breaking up, the men were back on board, and heavy gales became commonplace. They were near the top of Baffin Bay and had long passed the furthest recorded north for this area of 75° 12′. Icebergs were everywhere -Parry counted 1,000 before giving up – and the weather was harsh. Even experienced men were cowed by the conditions. During one gale the two ships were forced against each other by the ice and it seemed as if they were going to be crushed. At the last moment, however, the wind changed and the ice backed off. The Isabella and the Alexander parted reluctantly, their entangled anchors stretching out until the Alexander’s hawser snapped. All agreed that they owed their lives to the reinforcements installed by the Deptford gangs. ‘Neither the masters, the mates, nor those who had been all their lives in the Greenland service, had ever experienced such imminent peril,’ Ross wrote, ‘and they declared a common whaler must have been crushed to atoms.’24
In search of a safe haven, Ross ordered a harbour to be cut in the ice of what he called Melville Bay. It was good, solid ice, unlike the vagrant bergs and uncertain young ice which filled the sea. Normally it would have been a good decision. The ice in Baffin Bay comprises three kinds: sea ice, quickly formed, quickly disintegrated; land ice, solid the year round; and the central pack, which is fed by the Arctic Ocean and accumulates into a mass of bergs wavering between the safety of cold seas and the prevailing pressure of a north wind. Normally the central pack moves southwards. But when a strong wind blows up Baffin Bay the ice changes direction. When this happens, seasoned sailors do as Ross did – they cut a harbour in the firm, land ice, and hope that it will protect them.
Ross, the first man ever to try this trick in this spot, was unlucky. His harbour was hardly ready when the wind changed and the central pack came piling in. He barely escaped it. In a huge surge the pack slammed against the land ice, concertinaing it into fifty-foot-high ridges. The harbour, so laboriously cut with the nine-foot ice saws, disappeared in an instant. This area of the Arctic would become known as a deathtrap. In 1819 the central pack smashed fourteen whalers; in 1821, eleven; another seven in 1822; in 1830 nineteen ships were crushed, leaving several thousand men stranded on the ice. All in all, Ross got off lightly.
By 8 August the seas were calm again. And the following day they saw a small group of men gesticulating from the shore to the east. At first Ross thought they were shipwrecked sailors; but when the ships tacked, and the men ‘set up a simultaneous shout, accompanied with many strange gesticulations, and went off in their sledges with amazing velocity’,25 he realized they must be Eskimos.
The Eskimos had good reason to be shy. They had never seen a white man before. In fact, they had never seen other Eskimos either. They were Polar Eskimos, who had split from the main group of Greenland Eskimos in about 1450, and had wandered northwards during a period known as the Little Ice Age, adapting to the cold and the available food supply to such a degree that they had lost most of the usual Arctic skills. When southern Greenlanders finally made contact in 1856 – when the Little Ice Age was coming to a close – the Polar Eskimos had to be taught such essentials as how to use a kayak, how to fire a bow and arrow, how to hunt caribou and how to net migrating char. Little wonder then, that they avoided Ross. As far as they knew, they were the only people in the world.
Ross spent an unfruitful day trying to make contact with the elusive Eskimos. He placed gifts on a four-foot-high stool; they went untouched. He released a dog with beads around its neck; the dog was later found asleep on the ice by the stool, its beads as undisturbed as the gifts. He erected a flag, displaying the sun and the moon over a sprig of Arctic shrub, the only plant he had found in the region. Like the gifts, and like the dog, it was ignored. Finally, Ross hung a bag of presents on the pole, painted it with a large hand pointing towards the ships, and waited. The following morning, at about 10 a.m., eight sledges hove into view and halted on the shore, giving the flag and the hand a wide berth. An advance party of four men disembarked, walked across the ice and hovered nervously behind a strip of open water. John Sackheuse was sent to greet them and soon established that they spoke a recognizable dialect of his own language. They had come this far south in order to hunt narwhals, he translated, and they were terrified that the strangers intended to kill them.
Clad in his Western finery, including a beaver-skin hat, Sackheuse reassured them that it was safe.
‘Come on!’ he shouted.
‘Go away!’ the Eskimos shouted back.26
Sackheuse returned to the ship and came back with two men carrying a plank which was laid across the channel. Crossing to the other side, he offered gifts: beads, a shirt and a knife. The first two failed to tempt but the knife was irresistible. A man snatched it up. Sackheuse held out his hand. Tentatively, the man touched it.
In the history of European exploration this contact stands out as one of the most benign and bizarre. Descending from their ships in full naval regalia – cocked hats, dress swords, tailcoats and buckled shoes – Ross and Parry advanced across the ice towards the fur-clad Eskimos. They handed over gifts of mirrors and knives, which were received with rapture. Meanwhile they pulled hard on their noses, on Sackheuse's sombre instruction that this was the accepted mode of greeting. By this time the initial four Eskimos had been joined by the remaining four who had stayed on the sleds, and the entire company, talking, shouting and thrashing their dogs with whips to shut them up, were invited aboard the Isabella. This was not exploitation, or conquest, merely a meeting. Neither side had any design on the other. They were simply curious about each other.
The Eskimos learned about the strangers. They learned that their ships did not come from the moon or the sun, despite the peculiar flag which had been displayed. They learned, too, that the ships were inanimate objects. ‘Who are you? What are you? Where do you come from?’27 one Eskimo yelled at a boat. It took a full display of launching and landing, with men aboard, to persuade him that it was nothing more than a vessel that floated on water. They learned that the strangers kept pigs – frightening – and a terrier – despicably small -and possessed more iron than they could have believed possible. In the metal-free Arctic, iron was prized more than anything: one man tried valiantly to heave the ironsmith's anvil away but made do in the end with a big hammer that was later recovered from a snowdrift. They learned that the strangers could paint: three of them had their portraits done by Lt. Hoppner and Midshipmen Skene and Bushnan. They also learned, after an odd display by Mr Beverley, Ross's surgeon, that the strangers could juggle, but at this ‘they became uneasy, and expressed a wish to go on deck’.28
The Eskimos asked interminable questions. What kind of ice were the Isabella’s skylights made from? Were watches good to eat? What skin did the strangers make their cables from? Was there anyone on the other side of a mirror? Were the ships really inanimate (after all, they had seen their wings move)? And how could they be made of wood, when the only source in the Arctic was a little willow whose trunk was no thicker than a finger? More importantly, were the newcomers a race of men, or did they have any women? On being shown ‘a miniature I had of Mrs. Ross’29 they departed en masse for the Alexander, which they presumed must contain the Isabella’s female contingent. They returned very quickly.
On that day and others, as they gradually crept around this unexplored part of Baffin Bay, the white men learned in turn about the Eskimos. They learned that they were a new and undiscovered people – Ross called them Arctic Highlanders – and had ‘no knowledge of any thing but what originates, or is found, in their own country’. In fact, the Arctic Highlanders were so isolated that they had even lost their mythology: ‘nor have they any tradition how they came to this spot,’ wrote Ross, ‘or from whence they came; having until the moment of our arrival, believed themselves to be the only inhabitants of the universe’.30 They did not even have any interest in the afterlife, saying only that long ago a wise man had suggested they might go to the moon when they were dead but that the idea was now generally rejected. To Ross's very great credit he did not proselytize, but merely recorded.
The Arctic Highlanders were as pristine as a people could be. They could count no higher than five, and had no expression for a quantity greater than two fives, ten – which simply became ‘a lot’. They had no laws of possession, so dear to the European mind, and would walk off happily with anything that took their fancy. They could play football, put on a fine display of dog-sledging, make spears from narwhal tusks and hunt foxes that came in three colours: black, red and white. They danced in an embarrassingly familiar manner – ‘The gestures and actions were not wanting,’ as a later, very Victorian commentator put it, ‘in that reprehensible element, for which the Nautch of India and the Can-can of the most polished nation in the world are notorious.’31 The Arctic Highlanders also had iron of their own. This last was a discovery of tremendous importance. Eskimos were nomads, not miners; and besides, there was no iron in the Arctic to be mined. Yet, as Ross noticed, their knives were edged with flattened strips of the metal. At first he assumed these little strips had been made from the detritus of Western civilization – washed-up barrel-hoops or nails. On closer inquiry, however, he learned that the Arctic Highlanders had their own mother lode in the Sowallik, or Iron Mountains. Having questioned a man as to its source Ross discovered that, within a few days’ travel, there was a place where iron lay scattered above the ground: little bits here and there, but a lump about four feet long from which the Eskimos chipped shards using a hard green stone. As a final favour, before the Eskimos left, Ross asked for a piece of this iron. He suspected it might be from a meteorite. Sure enough, when it was analysed, it was found to be of extra-terrestrial origin.
On the 16th, Ross made another unique find. Rounding a headland which he named Gape York, he encountered a 600-foot cliff covered in crimson snow. A party was sent ashore and discovered that the colour was no mere surface bloom, but penetrated the snow down to the very rock, in places at depths of twelve feet. Under a microscope, magnified 110 times, the snow was seen to be riddled with minute, round, red particles. The general opinion was that it was some form of plant life, perhaps seeds which had drifted from the russet-tinted vegetation which lined the top of the cliffs.
They were wrong to suppose the particles were seeds. But they were right to say it was of vegetable origin. The startling phenomenon of red snow, now an accepted part of Arctic geography, is caused by a rapidly multiplying, unicellular plant called Protococcus nivalis.
So far, Ross's expedition had been a success. He had mapped the eastern side of Baffin Bay, and had made two important scientific finds – a new race of Eskimos and the crimson snow. He would dearly have liked to spend more time with the Arctic Highlanders. But he had already made his tentative farewells in order to fulfil the main thrust of his orders – to ascertain the existence of a North-West Passage. In this he was to be astonishingly, perversely, incompetent.
At the northern tip of Baffin Bay is a seaway – normally clogged with ice, but a seaway nonetheless – called Smith Sound, which leads up the north-western coast of Greenland. Ross reached the mouth of Smith Sound on 19 August, surveyed it from a distance of twelve leagues, and declared it a bay. There was no way north out of Baffin Bay, Ross said. To the south-west of Smith Sound lies Jones Sound, a similarly ice-clogged passage which leads west to the Arctic Ocean. At midnight on 23 August, Ross saw that it ended in a ‘ridge of very high mountains’.32 Without bothering to investigate further, he announced that Jones Sound, too, was a bay.
To the south of Jones Sound is Lancaster Sound. If any North-West Passage existed, this was judged its most likely entrance, and as the two ships approached it on 30 August, their rigging was crowded with sailors peering for signs of an open strait. In the morning of 1 September, Ross sailed into Lancaster Sound with the slower Alexander lagging behind. It was 4 a.m. and foggy. But even in such poor visibility, Ross determined that Lancaster Sound, too, was a bay. He described the moment at length in his journal.
The land which I then saw was a high ridge of mountains, extending directly across the bottom of the inlet. This chain appeared high in the centre, and those towards the north had, at times the appearance of islands, being insulated by fog at their bases. Although a passage in this direction appeared hopeless, I was determined completely to explore it, as the wind was favourable; and, therefore, continued all sail. At eight the wind fell a little, and the Alexander being far astern I sounded and found six hundred and seventy-four fathoms, with a soft muddy bottom. There was, however, no current, [Ross's orders had stated very specifically that he was to find and follow the current which, it was presumed, must carry the ice from the open polar sea] and the temperature of the mud was 291/2° – The weather now variable, being cloud and clear at intervals. Mr. Beverley, who was most sanguine, went up to the crow's nest; and at twelve, reported to me, that before it became very thick, he had seen the land across the bay, except for a very short space.
Although all hopes were given up, even by the most sanguine, that a passage existed, and the weather continued thick, I determined to stand higher up, and put into any harbour I might discover, for the purpose of making magnetical observations. Here I felt the want of a consort, which I could employ to explore a coast, or discover a harbour; but the Alexander sailed so badly, and was so leewardly, that she could not be safely employed on such a service. During this day we shortened sail several times, to prevent our losing sight of her altogether.
About one, the Alexander being nearly out of sight to the eastward, we hove to for half an hour, to let her come up a little; and at half-past one, she being within six or seven miles of us, we again made all sail … At half-past two, (when I went off deck to dinner) there were some hopes of its clearing, and I left orders to be called on the appearance of land or ice ahead. At three, the officer of the watch, who was relieved to his dinner by Mr. Lewis, reported, on his coming into the cabin, that there was some appearance of its clearing at the bottom of the bay; I immediately, therefore, went on deck, and soon after it completely cleared for about ten minutes, and I distinctly saw the land, round the bottom of the bay, forming a connected chain of montains with those which extended along the north and south sides. This land appeared to be at the distance of eight leagues; and Mr. Lewis, the master, and James Haig, leading man, being sent for, they took its bearings, which were inserted in the log; the water on the surface was at temperature 34°. At this moment I also saw a continuity of ice, at the distance of seven miles, extending from one side of the bay to the other … At a quarter past three, the weather again became thick and unsettled; and being now perfectly satisfied that there was no passage in this direction, nor any harbour into which I could enter, for the purpose of making magnetical observations, I tacked to join the Alexander, which was at the distance of eight miles; and having joined her a little after four, we stood to the southeastward.33
Before he turned south, Ross named the new features on his chart. The range he had seen at the end of Lancaster Sound became the ‘Croker Mountains’ and the bay before them ‘Barrow Bay’.
If Ross's journal sounds like a statement for the defence, it is because it was precisely that. He was utterly mistaken. Lancaster Sound was, and is, the one open seaway into the North-West Passage. And had he looked harder he would have found this out.
Why didn't he look harder? The question would bedevil his career much as it bedevilled Arctic historians for more than a century afterwards. As a puzzled study of 1880 put it, Ross was ‘an excellent and accomplished navigator, a man of considerable intellectual power, a Scotchman, and not one given to accept his facts on the endorsement of his imagination’.34 So why?
Was he scared, perhaps? Was he, as Barrow would later suggest, running away from the prospect of a winter in the ice? This is unlikely. His war record proved his bravery and he was not only willing but expecting to overwinter. As he wrote on 9 July, should he be unable to explore Lancaster Sound he hoped to be far enough south to ‘make our winter quarters tolerable’.35
One possible answer lies in the Arctic weather patterns, which become particularly confusing in August. Generally it is sunny and warm; the landscape is one of dry boulders or boggy marshland rather than the preconceived notion of eternal ice. Occasionally, however, freezing fogs can descend. In Ross's time, these fogs arrived in a cloud of white, freezing everything with which they came in contact. Each change of tack was signalled by a shower of ice from the ropes. Meanwhile, although forward visibility was nil, the skies above remained blue. When the fog cleared, visibility improved. But it was a deceptive clarity, obscured by mirages. Objects wobbled and shimmered in the air. A flat ice-field could appear on one side as a towering forest and on the other as a low-lying island. Distant ships swelled to towering castles, and shrank to blobby sausages in the course of an hour. But weather on its own was no excuse. Ross could handle fog. And although he marvelled at the mirages, he knew them for what they were. As he himself said, ‘We were often able to see land at an immense distance, and we have certain proof that the power of vision was extended beyond one hundred and fifty miles.’36
While aware of refraction, Ross was nevertheless unaware of all the tricks it could play. He knew that it could distort visible objects but he did not know that it could create seemingly visible objects where none lay. The effect – like crimson snow, now a matter of Arctic fact – is caused by light penetrating the atmosphere and being reflected back by the ice. On its way up it is distorted by turbulence and by progressively warmer bands of air. To this is added the curve of the earth's atmosphere which lends a natural vertical bias to any image. The result is a chain of sharp peaks, shaded in grey, with dark ridge lines. It looks exactly like a mountain range.
It was undoubtedly this phenomenon that caused Ross to turn back from Lancaster Sound. It may also have caused his retreat from Smith Sound and Jones Sound. But in all three cases there was an added factor: someone, Parry or one of the other officers, maybe even James Ross, had suggested on each occasion that the Sounds be explored further. If there was one thing guaranteed to ensure Ross clung to a bad decision it was someone questioning it. In this instance Ross's natural stubbornness was exacerbated by insecurity. It was his first solo command and he was not going to let his authority be undermined by presumptuous whipper-snappers who lacked his experience – at forty-one, Ross was thirteen years older than Parry, the next in seniority.
Thus, a combination of natural and human factors caused Ross to make such a mess of the mission. But he cannot take the blame entirely. He had been set certain objectives and wanted to complete them as quickly and efficiently as possible. He was a practical man, who wanted to do the job according to instructions, within the price. He wanted his crew to return safely – which they did; not a single man contracted scurvy, not a single man died.
His fault, as his detractors would point out, was that he had lacked imagination. But Ross was not being paid to be imaginative. He was being paid to follow orders. The gist of Ross's orders had been to explore Baffin Bay and to ascertain the possibilities of a North-West Passage leading from it. He had done that. His orders also stated that in case the North-West Passage proved non-existent, Ross was to avoid being caught in the ice. He was to be out of Davis Strait by mid-September or 1 October at the latest. From Lancaster Sound he had 400 miles to cover before he was out of Davis Strait. He obeyed his orders almost to the letter. Having in his own mind ascertained the non-existence of a North-West Passage he sailed south, charting as he went. On 1 October he was off Cumberland Sound, the last of the possible westward entries mapped by Baffin. This, too, was an inlet, and a genuine one in this case. Then he left Davis Strait and headed for home. On 14 November the ships had reached the Thames and two days later Ross was handing in his papers at the Admiralty. Uncannily, Buchan had stepped through the Admiralty doors only fifteen minutes earlier.