FURTHEST WEST
Barrow would detest Ross for the rest of his life. In 1846 he published a history of Arctic exploration in which he ripped Ross to pieces in the most minute and petty fashion. Every action was castigated, even his claiming the land around Lancaster Sound for Britain, ‘with the usual silly ceremony,’ sneered Barrow, ‘the more silly when the object is worthless, as in the present case – a barren, uninhabited country, covered in ice and snow, the only subjects of His Majesty, in this portion of his newly-acquired dominion, consisting of half-starved bears, deer, foxes, white hares, and such other creatures as are commonly met with in these regions of the globe.’1
For all his sneering, however, Barrow was desperately keen that Britain stake its claim to the Arctic and to the North-West Passage. Other countries were already interested in it, particularly Russia and the United States for whom a short-cut between the Pacific and the Atlantic would have been of major importance. Indeed, a Russian expedition was already being planned under Bellingshausen. True, when he sailed in 1820, Bellingshausen perversely sought a short-cut via Antarctica, but Barrow did not know that, and even if he had it would not have made him sleep easier.
Speed was of the essence if the Passage was to be discovered by Britain. The embers of Ross's disgrace were still glowing when Barrow despatched his next two missions. One, under John Franklin, was sent overland to find the sea into which Canada's northern river systems flowed – if this was not the Passage itself, then it would at least be another means of reaching it. The other, under Parry, was to probe from the north and hopefully meet up with Franklin before continuing west.
When Parry sailed on 11 May 1819, his instructions were simple. There was to be no messing around in Baffin Bay, instead he was to head straight for Lancaster Sound and sail through the North-West Passage. If Lancaster Sound was blocked he was to try for an entrance in Smith or Jones Sound. He was not to bother with mapping coastlines, or making scientific observations – although John Ross's Deep Sea Clamm was included in his inventory – but was to reach Russia as quickly as possible, hand in his papers to the Governor of Kamchatka and return home via Owhyhee (Hawaii), maybe even stopping off in China as well. In any event, he was to do, as Barrow petulantly expressed it, that which ‘Ross, from misapprehension, indifference or incapacity, had failed to do’.2
Parry was given two ships, the 375-ton Hecla and the 180-ton Griper. With him he took the pick of the officers and men who had served on the previous expeditions. Almost all of them volunteered, and almost all of them were accepted, including Sabine, James Ross, Alexander Fisher, Henry Hoppner, Frederick Beechey and William Hooper. The only notable exceptions were those who had sided with Ross in the Lancaster Sound furore. The Griper, however, was given to a newcomer, Lt. Matthew Liddon.
William Parry was a planner. During the first voyage he had decided that the Passage could never be conquered in a single season (just as Scoresby had said). A season, or maybe two seasons, would have to be spent in the ice, and Parry equipped his ships accordingly. The two enemies he envisaged were scurvy and boredom. To prevent the former, which tended to strike after about six months at sea, Parry packed as much Vitamin C as possible in the form of pickles, herbs, sauerkraut and lemon juice. This last item – often referred to wrongly as lime juice – was a relatively recent innovation, having first been introduced in 1795, and normally dispensed in pastilles. Parry insisted it be extracted from fresh fruit (in this he was far ahead of his time). Additionally, ‘as a matter of experiment a small quantity of vinegar, in a highly concentrated state, recommended and prepared by Doctor Bollman’3 was taken aboard. Vinegar, like lemon juice, was valued as an anti-scorbutic, and in the cold that they were about to encounter, Dr Bollman's concentrate would prove its worth.
Another innovation Parry laid great store by was canned food. He personally spent an hour at the Rotherhithe premises of Messrs Donkin & Gamble tasting the range of soups available. (Curiously, nobody had thought of inventing a can opener. The huge quantity of cans which Parry eventually ordered had to be cracked open with an axe and mallet.)
To keep his men healthy in mind as well as body he planned, among other things, a series of musical entertainments. He played the violin himself, and practised three or four hours a day – to no great effect, by his own admission. A barrel organ was also taken aboard. It was a fresh and optimistic expedition. Apart from Parry, twenty-eight years old, and Sabine, thirty, every officer was under the age of twenty-three. They were young and they intended to succeed.
As with Ross's expedition, Parry's voyage was the object of intense interest. The public flocked to Deptford, where the ships were being strengthened for Arctic service, the engineers working late into the night under huge oil flares. Lords and ladies came, as did courteous but critical naval officers and a host of London's middle-class for whom a trip to Deptford was worth as much, but without the expense, as an appearance on Rotten Row. By the time the ships were ready there was barely room to move for the crush of tourists. On 13 April Parry wrote that ‘From 12 till 4 o'clock, the parties came on board by crowds … I had invited Sabine's friends … and was in hopes of having them quietly to ourselves … but when they came to my cabin it was so pre-occupied with other ladies and gentlemen, that no entrance could be gained until some of the others took their leave … I had scarcely a moment to attend to them, being constantly called on deck by dozens of cards that were handed down to me.’4
In Parry's albeit prejudiced eyes, no other expedition had attracted ‘a more hearty feeling of national interest’.5 He made the most of it, taking parties up Greenwich Hill to the Observatory, rowing them along the Thames to the strains of the ‘Canadian Boat-Song’, before finally inviting them aboard the Hecla for dinner at 5.30 p.m. When his guests climbed aboard their carriages at 9 p.m., they did so with distended stomachs, some tipsiness, and a feeling that they had been part of a great national enterprise.
In the meantime, as Parry directed his guests hither and thither, he had become increasingly enamoured of a Miss Browne, Sabine's niece, who visited far more often than a sense of national interest warranted. She began to feature regularly in his diary and by the end of April he was confident enough to indulge in a display of Pooterish daring. ‘I amused my party yesterday very much,’ he wrote, ‘by putting my life-preserver on Miss Browne, and making her blow it up, or inflate it, herself!’6
In every venture Barrow sent forth there was an element of incompetence. Something, somewhere, was always lacking. The ships might be bad or the supplies inadequate or the clothing wrong or the instructions ill-considered or any other thing. That this was so was not Barrow's fault; he had little money to play with and his ambitions always outstripped available resources. Nevertheless, something was always wrong. In Parry's case that something was the Griper. When Parry looked at the Hecla he saw ‘a charming ship’.7 When he looked at the Griper he could hardly contain his contempt: one of ‘these paltry Gunbrigs … utterly unfit for this service!’8 So slow was the Griper that it seemed it would never reach Davis Strait, let alone the North-West Passage. Eventually he had to tow the Griper behind the Hecla, and actually made better time than if they had sailed separately.
In Baffin Bay, Parry made his first important decision of the voyage. He could either go north round the central pack and brave the nutcracker hazards of Melville Bay, or he could forge through the central pack. The former was known and unsafe. The latter was unknown and unsafe. He plumped for the latter. In June 1819 he sailed into the central pack and immediately became beset among the bergs. By the time he had extricated himself, a week later, he had drifted thirteen miles to the south and was still on the Greenland side of the pack. For his next attempt he sailed along Greenland's coast, following Ross's old course, until he reached the latitude of Lancaster Sound. At night, when the fog came down, they fired muskets to keep in contact. Once, in the gloom, they sighted a whaler which was recognized by its green lower masts as the Brunswick from Hull. Beating a broom against the deck the men of the Brunswick drummed a message across the ice. Nineteen blows: nineteen whales. They had a full hold and were going home.
It was comforting to know they had company in these waters. But the Brunswick was going one way, they were going another. At about 73° north Parry turned the Hecla west and butted his way through the central pack, the reinforced bows of his ship clearing a way for Liddon's slower, feebler Griper. The pack here was an estimated eighty miles wide, but it was weaker than it had been to the south, having been broken up by the weather. For three weeks Parry warped and towed his ships through the channels. Sometimes he also ‘tracked’, which was a cross between towing and warping, where his men heaved on a hawser until the ship sprang free of the ice. It was tiring and dangerous work. One day they hauled for eleven hours to make four miles. On another they sawed for seven hours to free the Hecla from the ice only to find her frozen in again at nightfall. Sometimes the anchor could break free from the ice, its pent-up pressure sending the warpers flying across deck.
Parry watched over his men like a mother hen. He saw them out of wet clothes after a day's hauling, and tempted them into dry ones with drams of rum. His efforts paid off. On 28 July, the two ships broke through into clear water, and a few days afterwards they sighted the flag, still flying, that Ross had planted with such ‘silly ceremony’ by the mouth of Lancaster Sound. Here, on the very doorstep of the North-West Passage, they were forced to wait for a favourable wind. It came on 2 August and, having arranged to rendezvous with the Griper at the 85th meridian, Parry raised sail and entered the sound. ‘It is more easy to imagine than describe the oppressive anxiety which was visible in every countenance,’ recorded Parry, ‘while, as the breeze increased to a fresh gale, we ran quickly to the Westward.’9 This was the moment of make or break. If Ross's range of mountains did exist, then the North-West Passage was probably unattainable. And worse still, despite having kept himself legally clean over the Ross affair, Parry would be hurled into the darkest lockers of naval pariahdom for his failure. He had already seen what Barrow could do.
Parry was not alone in his worries. ‘I never remember to have spent a day of so much fearful anxiety,’10 wrote his co-conspirator, William Hooper. Little wonder that he and the other officers crowded the rigging for hours on end. The same fate awaited all of them. On 4 August their worst hopes were realized. Land was spotted dead ahead. Every face was filled with ‘vexation and anxiety’11 until the land proved to be a mere island. The Sound was clear. Croker's Mountains did not exist. Ross had been wrong.
Triumphant cheers arose from the crew of the Griper as they finally caught up with the Hecla and beheld the wide, empty expanse of Lancaster Sound stretching to the west. Few could ‘avoid feeling a secret satisfaction that their opinions have turned out to be true’,12 wrote Alexander Fisher in his chatty diary, which he had begun with a brief description of the beauties of England in the spring. Hooper, meanwhile, was delighted. Not for him such secret relief. Gone were the anxious and woe-laden faces, replaced now by self-righteous justification. ‘There was something particularly animating in the joy which lighted every countenance,’ he thrilled. ‘We had arrived in a sea which had never before been navigated, we were gazing on land that European eyes had never before beheld … and before us was the prospect of realizing all our wishes, and of exalting the honour of our country.’13
There was no denying the excitement of the occasion. Before them lay the clear waters of Lancaster Sound, at least eighty miles wide. To the north were the fissured precipices of Devon Island, separating Lancaster Sound from Jones Sound, which rose 500 feet from the stony beaches at their base. To the south was a flat plateau riven by broad channels, each of them as clear and navigable as Lancaster Sound. Parry named them as he sailed westwards: Navy Board Inlet, Admiralty Inlet and Prince Regent Inlet. Each represented a possible route to the Pacific should Lancaster Sound prove a dead end, but none was more tempting than Prince Regent Inlet, a magnificent forty-mile-wide thoroughfare.
By the time they reached Prince Regent Inlet, Lancaster Sound had begun to narrow, giving Parry an excuse to call it Barrow Strait. Conditions worsened, and at 89° west their way was blocked by ice. But nothing could dishearten Parry on this extraordinary trip. Pausing only to marvel at his first sight of narwhals, and the appearance of a school of white whales – between eighteen and twenty feet long, and passing beneath the ships with ‘a shrill, ringing sound, not unlike musical glasses when badly played’14 which ceased as soon as they came above water – he turned back to Prince Regent Inlet and tacked into its promising depths. He travelled 120 miles before turning back at 71° 53′ 30”. In that brief distance, however, he was able to name numerous headlands, capes and inlets – the land to his west became North Somerset, later renamed as Somerset Island – and discovered from his instruments that the North Magnetic Pole was very close. But there was something about Prince Regent Inlet which did not appeal. As opposed to the dramatic cliffs of Barrow Strait, with their striated layers of snow and rock interspersed at regular intervals by natural buttresses of stone, the land past which he sailed was often bland and flat. Beechey, Hoppner and Sabine explored a section of the east coast and found it ‘more barren and dreary than any on which they had yet landed in the arctic regions; there being scarcely any appearance of vegetation, except here and there a small tuft of stunted grass, and one or two species of saxifrage and poppy, although the ground was so swampy in many places that they could scarcely walk about’.15
One can forgive Parry for not wanting to investigate further. What was this grubby inlet when set against the clean-cut passage and clear waters of Barrow Strait? But before he left, he wrote an assessment of his situation that would have important repercussions in the future: ‘I saw no reason to doubt the practicality of ships penetrating much farther south … if the determining the geography of this part of the arctic regions be considered worth the time which must necessarily be occupied in effecting it.’16 Back he went to Barrow Strait where, by a miracle, the ice was beginning to clear. On 19 August, after battling his way through wind, rain, sleet and snow, he was able to continue his journey west.
This time it was the north shore which drew his attention. As Somerset Island passed monotonously to the south, Parry found first a ‘noble channel’,17 clear of land or ice and thirty miles wide, which he called Wellington Channel – could this be another route to the Pacific? – followed by a lump of coastline which he named Cornwallis Island. The topography was different this far west. Instead of the limestone plateaux and cliffs which they had encountered earlier the islands were low, sandy hills with, here and there, smooth, brown stretches of land coated in the most ‘luxuriant moss’.18 This moss was the northernmost grazing of America's caribou reindeer, which had not migrated this far north yet, but would do so in due course. The Arctic was coming to life before them, and were it not for the constant presence of ice most would have judged themselves near the point of exit. Parry named his discoveries the North Georgia Islands.
By this time, the North Magnetic Pole had so muddied their compasses that Parry ordered the binnacles on which they were mounted to be dismantled as so much ‘useless lumber’.19 He retained only one, to track the course of magnetic change. Meanwhile, the ships steered themselves, using their last true position as a point of reference: the Hecla kept the Griper in line with its stern, and the Griper kept the Hecla in line with its bow.
In this manner they entered a wide sea which Parry named Viscount Melville Sound, and approached a steep-sided island which Parry also named Melville. It was here, halfway along the southern shore of Melville Island, off a point which Parry later named Gape Bounty, that they crossed the 110th meridian on 4 September, thereby winning Parliament's first prize of £5,000. Parry took the opportunity, after Sunday prayers, to break the news to his crew with a schoolmasterish warning that they had done very well but must do a lot better yet if they expected to achieve their goal. ‘The enthusiasm excited by this short … speech was truly astonishing,’ wrote Fisher, not to be cowed by his superior's caution, ‘for the ardour that it inspired might be seen in every countenance.’20
The following day they dropped anchor for the first time since leaving England. In celebration the ships raised every scrap of bunting available. It excited Parry to a display of understated emotion: ‘It created in us no ordinary feelings of pleasure to see the British flag waving for the first time, in these regions, which had previously been considered beyond the limits of the habitable part of the world.’21 The mood was one of quiet jubilation. Even though the thermometer was falling, the nights were drawing in – it was now dark from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., with an hour's dusk either side – and the ice was thickening, nobody seemed to care. There was coal to be found on Melville Island and unlimited amounts of game to be shot. As one seaman said, ‘The Duke of Wellington never lived half so well. We had grouse for breakfast, grouse for dinner, and grouse for supper, to be sure.’22 True, there were one or two cases of frostbite, and a hunting party was lost for three days on Melville Island. But what were such irritations compared to the magnitude of the expedition's achievements?
On 17 September Parry reached his furthest point west, 112° 51’, near a headland called Cape Providence. (It was here that the hunting party was rescued.) By now, winter was beginning to nip. They experienced their first really cold night, when the thermometer dropped to 10 °F, and the sea took on a flat, glossy appearance heralding a new season's growth of ice. ‘During the first formation,’ Parry explained, ‘it is the consistency of honey, which makes it, according to the technical phrase, tough; i.e. difficult for the ships to get through without a fresh gale.’23 Luckily there were gales aplenty, and Parry sped eastward on their strength, flanked by bergs which slopped untidily from the north, towering above his ships and threatening at times to crush them.
On 22 September, Parry made for a cove on Melville Island that he had previously marked as a promising spot for overwintering. Bay ice had already formed – thick, solid plates rather than the honey mush -and every officer and man was called out to work the ice saws. They toiled beneath the wooden triangles from which the saws were suspended, hauling and dropping, until the ice was carved into rectangles of between ten and twenty feet. These were then sliced diagonally so that they could be pulled to clear water. With paternal pride Parry noted that the men ‘who are always fond of doing things in their own way’24 had eased their task by raising canvas on the freed chunks and sailing them out of the channel. ‘Our crews are composed of no common men,’ he wrote. ‘They do everything cheerfully and well.’25 Three days after they had started, working in temperatures that reached 9 °F at the most and which froze at sundown the channel they had just cut, the men had completed a channel two and a third miles long and wide enough for the ships to warp their way to a safe anchorage.
At 3.15 on 26 September the Hecla and Griper reached their winter quarters with three loud and hearty cheers from both ships’ companies. And cheer they might. In the two months since they had entered Lancaster Sound they had mapped more than 1,000 miles of coastline, had won a parliamentary prize – that same prize which Scoresby had doubted worth the trouble – had proved the existence of a seaway which, if not yet the North-West Passage, was certainly a passage of some kind, and had done so without a single death, without even a major injury. They were, in short, as they snugged into what Parry called Winter Harbour, very sanguine. ‘Our prospects, indeed, were truly exhilarating,’ he wrote. ‘The ships had suffered no injury; we had plenty of provisions; crew in high health and spirits; a sea, if not open, at least navigable; and a zealous and unanimous determination in both officers and men to accomplish, by all possible means, the grand object on which we had the happiness to be employed.’26
Parry, the self-effacing self-promoter, laid his achievements at the door of another. In the candlelit gloom of his cabin he summarized their progress in his journal. ‘We had actually entered the Polar Sea,’ he wrote. ‘I [therefore] ventured to distinguish the magnificent opening through which our passage had been effected … by the name of Barrow's Strait … both as a private testimony of my esteem for that gentleman, and as a public acknowledgement due to him for his zeal and exertions in the promotion of Northern Discovery.’27