THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BOOTS
In 1819 the geography of North America was little better known than that of Baffin Bay. It was widely accepted, even by Barrow, that Canada had to stop somewhere. But its northern coastline had only been touched upon in two places. In 1789 Alexander Mackenzie had followed the river since named after him and found open sea at a point about 1,000 miles east of Bering Strait. He had been preceded in 1771 by Samuel Hearne who had done the same with the Coppermine River, meeting the ocean 500 miles east of the Mackenzie. Franklin's job was to fill in the gaps.
Barrow's intention was that Franklin should travel overland with boats and canoes to the Great Slave Lake, follow the Coppermine River from there to its mouth and then take to the sea. He would take a bare minimum of naval personnel, using hired help supplied by the Hudson's Bay Company or its larger competitor, the North West Company. Orkney boatmen would see him through the first part of his journey, after which their place would be taken by Canadian porters, or voyageurs, who would escort him from the Great Slave Lake to the coast. Indian and Eskimo guides would assist him and provide whatever food was necessary should his stores run out. On reaching the coast he was advised to go east, either to rendezvous with Parry or to make his way to Repulse Bay, but if he wanted he could go west to the Mackenzie and if he really felt like it he could even go north into the unknown.
The vagueness of Franklin's instructions was perhaps forgivable. Less so was the spirit of penny-pinching that underpinned them. Instead of being a self-contained venture, the expedition was to rely entirely on outside help. Directors of the two Canadian companies had met Franklin in London and offered him their support. But the official announcement bore no resemblance to reality. Only four years earlier the two fur behemoths had been in a state of open war, mobilizing Indian tribes to attack and imprison each other's agents. Although the situation had calmed down, the area was still riven by rivalry. Cooperation was a flag of convenience which could be lowered at any moment, and neither company was actually keen to expend valuable resources in the frivolous and unprofitable cause of exploration. Essentially, Franklin was being ordered to hitch-hike through a war zone into a wilderness.
There was one baffling aspect to the expedition, which was politely not mentioned at the time. Of all the people available to lead it, why had Barrow chosen Franklin?
Born in 1786, in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, into a family with no history of naval service, John Franklin was a beefy, genial giant who literally could not hurt a fly. He was formal, painfully shy and abnormally sensitive: to order, let alone witness, a flogging made him tremble from head to toe. His religious conviction was profound – but lacking Parry's zeal – to the extent that he refused to sully the sabbath even by writing a letter. He carried with him a twelve-point check-list entitled ‘Have I this day walked with God?’ As for fame, he wanted none of it. In April 1819 a panorama was shown at Leicester Square of Buchan's expedition. Franklin featured prominently. ‘I shall not venture to approach very near,’ he told his sister, ‘for fear the passers-by should say, “There goes the fellow in the panorama.”’1
On the face of it this hesitant and rather nice man lacked all the qualities necessary for such an expedition. Buchan would have been the obvious choice, being an experienced leader who had not only commanded the 1818 expedition to the North Pole but had previous experience of land exploration in Canada. However, Buchan seems not to have been approached – or if approached had refused. So the lot fell to Franklin.
Franklin was brave, determined and would obey orders to the letter. He had a good war record, having served at the battle of Trafalgar and the battle of New Orleans. He had also sailed with Flinders on the first-ever circumnavigation of Australia, a feat of which Barrow was eternally admiring. The deciding factor, however, seems to have been Franklin's charm. Everyone who met him agreed that this was his outstanding characteristic – it was impossible not to like him.
It is hard to gauge the extent of Franklin's likeableness from his letters. To family and fellow officers alike he seems to have maintained an aloof stiffness, and yet he managed to catch an exceptional wife: Eleanor Porden, a beautiful, fiercely intelligent but consumptive blue-stocking who had attended Royal Society lectures since the age of nine and at sixteen had written a poem on scientific discovery which was received so well that she had been admitted to the French Institute in Paris. She and Franklin had conducted an awkward romance ever since his return from the North Pole in 1818 and were eventually married in 1823.
It can only have been Franklin's charm that won him the leadership of the 1819 Canadian expedition because he had nothing else to recommend him. Aged thirty-three, he was overweight and suffered from a poor circulation that left his fingers and toes cold even in an English summer. He was unfit and had no experience of land travel. He could not hunt, canoe or trek. Three meals a day were a must; he could not move without tea; and even when he could move he could manage no more than eight miles a day unless he was carried. These last details were recorded with dismay by Governor George Simpson of the Hudson's Bay Company, who had responsibility for the Athabasca district through which Franklin was to travel.
The large doughty man – ‘The Happy Voyager’, as one biographer describes him – left Gravesend on 23 May accompanied by five Britons. As Franklin's right-hand man Barrow had chosen Dr John Richardson, a solemn, diligent Scot who had been a surgeon in the Royal Marines. He was to be the expedition's naturalist, a post which he accepted readily because, ‘if I succeed in making a good collection, I have no doubt of promotion on my return’.2 He admitted that ‘my knowledge of these subjects is very limited’,3 but that seemed to worry no one. As draughtsmen and artists Barrow appointed two midshipmen, the shy, romantic Robert Hood and a conceited bounder named George Back who had served under Franklin in the Trent. Two ordinary seamen were chosen to accompany them: John Hepburn and Samuel Wilks, the latter of whom retired sick on reaching Canada.
From the start there was a disorganized note to proceedings. The ship stopped temporarily off the Norfolk coast where Back found a need to engage himself ‘upon some business at a house two or three miles from Yarmouth’.4 Then, while Back was tucking his shirt in, a favourable wind arose and Franklin had to sail off, leaving Back to find his way to their next stop in the Orkneys. Thrashing his way north by coach and finishing with a thirty-mile boat crossing, Back arrived at Stromness nine days later, only a few hours behind Franklin, to find a celebratory dance already underway in the local hall. Unfazed, he threw himself into proceedings with vigour and ‘could not be prevailed to withdraw from the agreeable scene until a late hour’.5
Here Franklin met his first obstacle: very few Orkney boatmen wanted to join the expedition. The way in which they dithered, dickered and weighed up their chances formed ‘a singular contrast with the ready and thoughtless manner in which an English seaman enters upon any enterprise, however hazardous, without inquiring or desiring to know where he is going or what he is going about’.6 In the end, only four men signed on and even then only until Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca.
By 9 August they had reached Resolution Island and twenty-one days later they were at York Factory, the main port on the south-west corner of Hudson Bay. From here it was 500 miles to Cumberland House, a depot on the Saskatchewan River, and from there another 850 miles to Fort Chipewyan and a further 350 miles to the Great Slave Lake. To complete this immense journey Franklin was supplied by the two companies with a boat that was too small to hold all his supplies – the remainder would be sent on, he was cheerfully informed – and yet too heavy to surmount the various portages they would encounter along the Saskatchewan. Having on one occasion dragged the boat through a quarter of a mile of deep bog, and on another having spent a whole day covering a stretch of 1,300 yards, the men insisted Franklin unload part of his stores or he would never reach Cumberland House. Thus another chunk of cargo was left behind – hopefully, once again, to be forwarded.
The expedition reached Cumberland House in October, the spray from their oars freezing before it hit the water. By the first week of November the river was frozen over and all hope of further travel was postponed until spring. Cumberland House was little more than a log cabin, with reindeer parchment stretched across the windows in place of glass. It housed some thirty Hudson's Bay men, and was served by 120 Cree Indian hunters who brought in produce from an area of 20,000 square miles. Normally the Cree lived their own separate existence but this winter, which was exceptionally bad, they poured into Cumberland House to collect provisions. Franklin was told that conditions were so appalling that some families had started eating each other.
Franklin left on 8 January for Fort Chipewyan, taking Back and Hepburn with him, to arrange voyageurs and supplies for the next leg of their journey. He was quite unprepared for the long march overland through Canada's pine forests. The weather was abominably cold: their thermometers froze, their scientific instruments froze, their tea froze seconds after it had been poured. At night they too froze, in the absence of any tents. They counted it a stroke of fortune if an insulating layer of snow fell on their blankets.
Almost as bad as the cold was the discomfort of travelling in native snowshoes, which for a man like Franklin was even more arduous than walking. As Hood described the journey, ‘The sufferer feels his frame crushed by unaccountable pressure; he drags a galling and stubborn weight at his feet, and his track is marked with blood … When he arises from sleep, half his body seems dead, till quickened into feeling by the irritation of his sores.’7 In spite of the discomfort, Franklin remained in stolid good humour. In fact, his companions were awed by his placidity. Once when a mosquito landed on his arm he simply blew it off. Hepburn asked why he didn't give it a good swat. Franklin's eerily saintly reply was that there was enough room in the world for the two of them.
Led by Canadian guides who drove the suffering tenderfoots along at an average eleven miles per day, they reached Fort Chipewyan on 26 March 1820, having covered precisely 857 miles – eleven miles less than the distance from Land's End to John O’ Groats. The journey brought ‘a great intermixture of agreeable and disagreeable circumstances’, Franklin wrote understatedly. ‘Could the amount of each be balanced, I suspect the latter would much preponderate.’8
At Fort Chipewyan, Franklin was lucky enough to meet someone who could tell him a little of what lay ahead. Peter Dease, a North West Company employee, had spent several winters north of Great Slave Lake and was able to provide a sketchy outline of the topography and the conditions ahead – snow and ice featured prominently in both cases.
But that was where Franklin's luck ended. The voyageurs, whom Barrow had considered so easily hired, showed no interest in the scheme. They did not like the idea of the sea; they feared the possibility of marauding Indians; they were unused to such long and arduous journeys – 160 miles or so was their usual distance; and they did not know the country. As for food, the best Franklin could elicit was the promise that hunters would supply their needs along the way, and that the chief of the Coppermine Indians was willing to help them. Nobody had enough that year. At one post he had been informed that they had only 500 pounds of dried meat for the coming season; five years earlier they had had 30,000 pounds.
Anticipating something of the sort, Franklin had ordered Richardson and Hood to collect supplies from trading posts as they came up from Cumberland House in the summer. But when Richardson's party finally arrived at Fort Chipewyan on 12 July, it brought disappointing news: the North West Company had given them ten bags of pemmican – a nutritious Indian recipe of pounded, dried meat mixed with fat – which were so mouldy they had to be thrown away; and the Hudson's Bay men had given them nothing at all, having eaten the provisions put aside. All Richardson could show for his exertions was pemmican sufficient to last one day.
Somehow, Franklin managed to scratch up a limited amount of food and a gang of sixteen voyageurs consisting mostly of the men Richardson had brought with him from Cumberland House. Three of the voyageurs’ wives also joined the group – with their children – to make moccasins and clothes at the next winter stop. Few of the voyageurs were up to the standard required. But what could Franklin do? Every man worth his salt was needed to fight the two Companies’ ‘disgraceful and barbarous’9 internal war. ‘The complement required for this arduous enterprise was complied with but the quality caused some little demur,’ sympathized a Hudson's Bay employee, Colin Robertson, that summer. ‘This [is] a most unfortunate juncture for an undertaking of so much hazard … men of known fidelity accustomed to the manners and habits of the natives are so necessary in the present contest, that I fear the Captain's portion of good men bears no proportion to those of inferior character. He appears to be an amiable, gentlemanly man, and I regret the painful situation he is placed in, from the strong party spirit that at present exists in this part of the country.’10
Franklin left Fort Chipewyan on 18 July and reached his next stop, Fort Providence on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, ten days later. Here, through the agency of a North West interpreter, Mr Wentzel, he made contact with the Indians who would be hunting for him in the months to come. Their leader, a man ‘of very grave aspect’11 named Akaitcho, smoked a pipe, downed a dram then embarked on a long ‘harangue’12 in which he explained that happy as he was to see them he would be even happier if he profited from the meeting. And what exactly was the purpose of their journey? Akaitcho was an intelligent man, ‘of great penetration and shrewdness’.13 He quickly grasped the concept of the North-West Passage and listened contentedly to Franklin's half-truths that its discovery would bring valuable commerce to the region. He inquired about Franklin's expedition and asked some surprisingly acute questions about Parry's pincer movement coming from the north. Then, with an air of innocence, he wondered why, if it was so important to trade, the North-West Passage had not been discovered before. Franklin was stumped.
Having made his point, Akaitcho set out his terms. He would do his best to help them provided he was rewarded with cloth, ammunition, tobacco, weapons, a few tools and the discharge of all debts he and his men had incurred with the North West Company. Most importantly, however, he did not want to enter Eskimo territory. The harmless, happy-go-lucky people whom Parry and Ross had encountered were viewed with fear and hatred by the Indians. Usually each side kept to themselves, but on their traditional border, the climate line between mostly frozen land and mostly unfrozen land, they occasionally fought battles. On Samuel Hearne's journey down the Coppermine River, for example, an Eskimo group had been massacred at a place called Bloody Falls by a party of Indians. It had been such a hideous and traumatic occasion for both peoples that neither was willing to approach the area. The Indians feared retaliation, the Eskimos a recurrence. Further, Akaitcho warned that game would be scarce in the northern regions, particularly in this hard year, and that a constant supply of food could not be guaranteed. That being understood, Akaitcho declared himself satisfied with the deal.
Barrow's plan was springing apart at the seams. Instead of the tight group living off available resources, which had been envisaged, Franklin's party had already amassed nineteen dependent voyageurs. Now it had collected at least an equal number of Indians who would have to feed themselves as well as their charges. Barrow's skeleton approach to land travel was correct but in this instance its application was flawed. Had Franklin been travelling through Africa, say, where food was more-or-less readily available, his core of European explorers would have been fine. Had the party been smaller – two or three fit men – it could have foraged its way across the Arctic with little difficulty. But this expedition fell between two stools: it wasn't an opportunistic darter of the kind that would later criss-cross the Arctic (ironically in search of Franklin himself) nor was it a self-contained bruiser like Parry's, currently stuck at Melville Island.
Franklin's intention was to travel to a suitable spot near the Coppermine, where he would build a home to see them through the winter. The next summer his group would make its way downriver until they reached the sea. At this juncture his guides would be sent back and a reduced party would take to the sea in canoes, mapping the coast to the eastward for as long as their supplies lasted. If they reached Repulse Bay they hoped to obtain sufficient food from local Eskimos to carry them back to York Factory. If, however, they were unable to reach their goal they would retrace their steps or take a short-cut home through the so-called Barren Lands, whichever seemed best.
The plan was haphazard to the point of foolhardiness. But in that respect it differed little from the overall tenor of the undertaking. As George Simpson wrote, with some asperity, ‘it appears to me that the mission was projected and entered into without mature consideration and the necessary previous arrangements totally neglected’.14
On Sunday, 20 August, a forest fire engulfed a portion of land about 150 miles from Fort Providence, clouding the area with smoke for three days. Akaitcho, who had been expecting a small signal fire to announce Franklin's presence at the chosen winter camp, must have sighed in exasperation. Still, the white men had arrived safely.
This exuberant display of incompetence marked the completion of Franklin's eighteen-day voyage from Fort Providence. In the frigid Canadian winter fire was feared more than the cold. Surrounded as they were by trees, and with all available water frozen over, the voyageurs had long learned to be careful with flame. But this was the third fire Franklin had allowed to get out of hand. One conflagration had already burned down his tent and only Hepburn's quick actions had saved the stock of gunpowder which had been stored within. Another had almost destroyed the entire camp, causing its rapid evacuation. On a fourth occasion, which did not quite qualify as a major incident, Back's fur blanket had caught light while he was sleeping in it.
Tough, tundra-wise people, the voyageurs began to have serious misgivings about their leader. He knew nothing about the land. To compound their doubts, Franklin's food had begun to give out on the third day from Fort Providence. By the tenth his stores were exhausted. Only a few deer carcases brought in by Akaitcho's men had seen them to their present position.
The voyageurs have often been targeted as the weak point on this fateful expedition – unfairly. They weren't the finest of their kind but they were nevertheless professionals who were at home with their job and had a good understanding of what it entailed. Given enough food, and a fixed goal, they would have been capable of achieving anything. However, they were going into an uncharted region under a man who knew not the first thing about survival and who could not even provide them with enough food. For men whose efficiency was related directly to calorie intake this was an unforgivable sin. They made their discontent clear, forcing Franklin to quell a mutiny with harsh words: ‘I therefore felt the duty incumbent upon me to address them in the strongest manner on the danger of insubordination, and to assure them of my determination to inflict the heaviest punishment on any that should persist in their refusal to go on, or in any other way to attempt to retard the Expedition.’15 The placid Franklin, it seemed, could rouse himself when the occasion demanded it.
The spot Akaitcho had chosen for the winter was perfect, being near a river and surrounded by pine trees mature enough to shelter them from the worst gales. Franklin's fire had compromised the shelter but his men were soon at work felling charred trees to construct an encampment called Fort Enterprise. It comprised a five-room log cabin for the four officers with a rather smaller one for the sixteen voyageurs. Left to their own devices, Akaitcho's forty Indians huddled round as best they could.
Throughout the winter Franklin was beset by problems. Supplies came through only intermittently thanks to the rival Companies’ habit of either appropriating them for their own use or, in some cases, simply dumping them because one or other side was not doing its fair share. Ammunition supplies became so low that Franklin was forced to melt down pewter mugs for bullets. But the five rounds he was able to give each hunter were simply wasted – the Indians had no heart for hunting when they could stay in the relative comfort of Fort Enterprise. Finally, Franklin sent Back to stir the authorities into action. He returned after a remarkable 1,200-mile trek in snowshoes ‘having succeeded in the procuration of supplies beyond [Franklin's] most sanguine expectations.16
Back was an effective ambassador, giving short shrift to anyone who stood in his way. He browbeat both Companies’ representatives at every stop between Fort Enterprise and Cumberland House so successfully that George Simpson complained about his ‘impertinent interference in our affairs’.17 He wrote to one trader that Back had got away with too much. ‘That Gentleman seems to think that every thing must give way to his demands,’18 he stormed.
Back's extraordinary journey benefited the expedition in more ways than one. Shortly before he left, he and Hood had been at loggerheads over the daughter of one of the Indian hunters, a beautiful sixteen-year-old Indian girl called Greenstockings. Both men fancied themselves as Lotharios: Hood adopted a subtle and effective approach, fathering at least one child during the winter; Back took a more direct, aggressive tack which seems not to have worked. Greenstockings became such a bone of contention that the two midshipmen were ready to fight a duel over her, and would have done so had not Hepburn secretly removed the charges from their pistols. There was, Simpson wrote, ‘a want of unanimity among themselves’.19 Back's prolonged absence can have done nothing but good.
The want of unanimity was not confined to the officers. It engulfed the whole enterprise. The North West clerk at Fort Providence, a man named Weeks, had been spreading rumours about Franklin and his men. They were opportunists, he said, who lived off the Company's credit and the goodwill of their employees. He refused to honour Franklin's bills and advised the Indians to go no further. The Hudson's Bay Company was also against Franklin, thanks to reports -unsubstantiated – of his having taken sides in the Companies’ dispute. Simpson wrote a stern letter to one of his factors, advising him to give Franklin no more supplies, and warning him that Back was probably a spy for the other camp.
At the same time, the voyageurs were getting restless. Spurred by two of their number, the interpreters Pierre St Germain and Jean Baptiste Adam, they complained that the expedition was heading for certain death. This time Franklin's bluster was ineffectual. On being threatened with a trial in England, St Germain laughed. ‘It is immaterial to me where I lose my life,’ he said, ‘for the whole party will perish.’20 The situation would have become ugly had not Wentzel intervened. He placated the Indians, pointing out that they had entered into the agreement with the full knowledge that Franklin could only pay them by writs which would be honoured at a later stage. He also mediated with the voyageurs until the status quo was restored. But a lingering notion of distrust was not dispelled until Akaitcho was satisfied that Franklin had not concealed hidden stores for the use of himself and his men. Thus the winter passed in discontent until 4 June 1821 when Franklin set out for the Coppermine.
Once moving, the expedition's squabbles faded, but were soon replaced by other problems. The Indian guides, who knew the region little better than Franklin himself, proved useless. Crossing a frozen lake they directed him to its west shore, then, suddenly remembering an important feature in the landscape, they sent him to the north-east. The ocean was now distant, now near. ‘Our reliance on the information of the guides, which had been for some time shaken, was now quite at an end,’21 Franklin wrote on 14 July, having climbed a hill to get a view of the promised sea to find ‘a plain similar to that we had just left, terminated by another range of trap hills, between whose tops the summits of some distant blue mountains appeared’.22 Richardson, however, always more willing to trust the natives, walked another three miles that evening and spied the sought-after Arctic Ocean. To his disappointment but no great surprise, it was covered with ice. He brought his news back to camp as the sun's last rays fell on the surrounding peaks.
They had crossed the line dividing Indian territory from Eskimo and Akaitcho's men were becoming increasingly nervous, especially when they reached Bloody Falls to find an Eskimo encampment still in place. But its occupants had already fled at the Indians’ approach, leaving their dogs, tents and food behind. If Franklin needed a reminder that food was scarce, the Eskimo camp provided it. The dried salmon was putrid and covered with maggots. Hung out to dry on wooden frames was their future sustenance: a number of small birds and two mice. Apart from one elderly cripple and his wife, who had been unable to evacuate and who prodded feebly at the intruders with a brass-tipped spear, the Eskimos kept their distance. Occasionally, they could be spotted hovering singly at a safe distance, but despite all attempts to draw them into conversation they could not be tempted nearer.
Even this, however, was too much for the Indians. They left for home on 18 July, according to the agreement Akaitcho had made with Franklin. The following day Wentzel also left, leaving Franklin with fifteen men: the two interpreters, St Germain and Adam, plus thirteen others whose names were Augustus, Junius, Michel Teroahauté, Joseph Benoit, Credit, Registe Vaillant, Jean Baptiste Belanger and Solomon Belanger, Gabriel Beauparlant, Fontano, Ignace Perrault, Joseph Peltier and François Samandré. Of these, St Germain and Adam wanted to go with Wentzel, arguing not unreasonably that their services were no longer needed now the Indians had gone. However, much as Franklin would have liked to rid himself of the troublemakers, they were the best hunters in the party. He put them under twenty-four-hour watch until Wentzel and the Indians were a safe distance upriver.
To every man who left, Franklin gave strict instructions that depots of food were to be left at various points inland and, in particular, that a large supply of dried meat was to be cached at Fort Enterprise. This last was of vital importance because Franklin feared that should he fail to reach Repulse Bay – and it was looking increasingly likely that he would – he would nevertheless have gone sufficiently far to be cut off from the Coppermine by winter ice. Therefore he would have to travel overland through the uncharted territory of the Barren Lands to Fort Enterprise, relying for food on whatever could be shot or trapped en route. As the ground was almost certainly empty at that time of the year they would be near starving-point by the time they reached base and thus it was imperative that Fort Enterprise be well stocked.
Franklin drummed this fact into Wentzel. Then, a few days later, he set off for the coast in three bark canoes containing fourteen days’ provisions and a group of voyageurs who were terrified of the sea -they had never seen it – who were equally terrified of the Eskimos they might meet on land, who had limited hunting skills and who were appalled at the prospect of hunger. ‘It is of no use to speak to a Canadian voyageur of going upon short allowance,’ wrote Richardson. ‘They prefer running the risk of going entirely without hereafter, that they may have a present belly full, and if it is not given to them they will steal it and in their opinion it is no disgrace to be caught pilfering provisions.’23 Several men, he noted, had ‘secreted and distributed among themselves a bag of small shot. They hope thus to be enabled … privately to procure ducks and geese and to avoid the necessity of sharing them with the officers.’24 These words, which appeared in Richardson's journal on Thursday 19 July 1821, were followed with supreme lack of concern by a one-page description of the starry flounder.
The three canoes reached open sea – Richardson had either misconstrued the state of the ice or it had opened since – and scuttled eastwards. They followed the coastline along every creek and indentation for 555 miles before Franklin called a halt. During this time storms had arisen which broke fifteen timbers in one canoe, nearly separated the struts from the bark in another and had the voyageurs gibbering with terror. Despite frequent landings they had amassed only a bare sufficiency of food – for which Franklin blamed the baleful influence of St Germain and Adam: ‘we now strongly suspected that their recent want of success in hunting had proceeded from an intentional relaxation in their efforts to kill deer in order that the want of provisions might compel us to put a period to our voyage.’25
On 18 August, Franklin walked overland to mark his furthest point east – the aptly named Point Turnagain. Then, on 22 August 1821, the very day, unknown to him, that Parry had sailed into Repulse Bay, he turned back for Fort Enterprise. As he had feared, Franklin had explored himself into a corner. The seas were too rough to reach the Coppermine, and the deer had already begun to move south for the winter. He therefore made for the mouth of what he called Hood's River, a spot they had visited on their outward journey, which seemed to lead in the direction of Fort Enterprise and where they had sighted plenty of game. This would be the short side of a triangle that would lead them back to their winter base with its stores of dried meat.
The voyage to Hood's River took three days, during which Franklin was pleased to see that the voyageurs were at last exerting themselves, driven by the prospect of being once more in their element. On landing he ordered the large, sea-going canoes broken up to build two smaller, portable versions that could be carried overland and launched whenever one of Canada's unpredictable rivers blocked their path.
The voyageurs were overjoyed to be on land again. But they were less happy when Franklin forbade them dinner. The deer had migrated south and those that remained were too shy to be shot. Pemmican was limited. That evening, the first of many, they went without dinner.
The canoes were hard to carry. They blew about in the wind and scraped against sharp rocks which also ripped the men's moccasins to shreds. The going was treacherous, and as Richardson remarked, ‘If any one had broken a limb here, his fate would have been melancholy indeed, we could neither have remained with him, nor carried him on with us.’26 Had they had the opportunity to escape, the voyageurs would have fled en masse. But they had nowhere to go.
The expedition's woes started in earnest in September with the premature arrival of winter. Confined to their tent by a howling storm, they ate their last piece of pemmican on 4 September. Three days later, when the weather had lessened, they resumed their march. Before they even started Franklin fainted from a combination of hunger and exposure. That same day the voyageurs dropped one of the canoes, rendering it useless (this was a greater disaster than at first realized as the remaining canoe had been accidentally built too small and was therefore unable to cross a river of any size without being lashed to its larger counterpart). Franklin had strong suspicions that the canoe had been dropped on purpose, but making the best of things, he used the remains as firewood to heat the last of their supplies – a tin of soup.
From now on they had nothing to eat save what could be had from the land. The game had not altogether disappeared. They were able to shoot the occasional deer but it was not enough to satisfy their hunger, and even when they made a kill they were so overburdened that although they got a good meal at the time they could not carry the excess with them. The voyageurs, whose standard ration was eight pounds of meat a day, and who were carrying some ninety pounds apiece, were hardest hit. One can blame them for their stupidity, but little else, when they secretly threw away the expedition's weighty fishing nets. The loss infuriated Franklin. But by now even he was willing to jettison articles. In a belated purge, he deposited Richardson's natural history specimens, most of the expedition's scientific instruments and the hefty manuals which were required for their operation.
As the winter worsened the game became scarce, then it vanished altogether. They were driven to eating lichen from the rocks, an acrid and barely nutritious growth which induced severe diarrhoea. Many of them could stomach no more than a few mouthfuls. In a sleight of hand worthy of the finest restaurant, they dubbed it tripes de roche.
On 14 September, while crossing a river, the canoe overturned. With it went Franklin's journal. Solomon Belanger was stranded in mid-river, up to his waist in freezing water for several minutes until he was rescued. ‘He was instantly stripped,’ wrote Richardson, ‘and being rolled up in blankets, two men undressed themselves and went to bed with him – but it was some hours before he recovered his warmth and sensation.’27
The following day they were lucky enough to shoot a deer. But that, apart from another deer on 25 September and a single partridge on 29 October, was to be their only game for another two months. During that period they lived off tripes de roche, augmented by a few scraps of deer skin from which the hair had first been singed. Occasionally, if they were lucky, they might find the remains of a wolf kill left over from the previous season. Although lacking any meat, the bones could be made edible by heating them in the fire. Anything that could be eaten was eaten, right down to their spare shoes which, having been either roasted or boiled, were ‘greedily devoured’.28 In fact, their shoes were probably the most palatable item on the menu. The tripes de roche caused diarrhoea, and the charred bones were so acrid, even when made into soup, that their mouths became ulcerated. The few sections of putrid spinal marrow which they managed to suck from the backbones of dead deer took the skin off their lips.
The expedition began to break up, both physically and mentally. The line elongated and split as the stronger members forged ahead, and the weaker dropped behind. Back led the way, with some of the fitter voyageurs. But while Richardson was able to keep pace in the centre, Franklin and Hood fell back to the rear. Hood, racked by diarrhoea from the tripes de roche, which seemed to affect him more than the others, was fading fast.
The voyageurs, meanwhile, were well nigh uncontrollable. On 23 September Richardson recorded with despair that ‘The canoe was broken today and left behind, notwithstanding every remonstrance. The men had become desperate and were perfectly regardless of the commands of the officers.’29 Only with the greatest difficulty could they be persuaded not to drop everything and make a mad dash for Fort Enterprise. That they did not do so owed less to the officers’ commands than the fact that they did not know where Fort Enterprise was.
The men's belief that Franklin knew where he was going was all that kept them even vaguely obedient. But the truth was that Franklin did not really know where he was. The countryside was hilly and unfamiliar. The magnetic deviation for this area was unknown, making it impossible to adjust their compass readings with any degree of accuracy. And in weather conditions that ranged from thick snow, through thick rain, to thick mist, they were unable to take their bearings from the sun. When they did catch a brief glimpse of the sun and adjusted their course accordingly, it merely sowed the suspicion that Franklin was lost.
A mutiny would have been inevitable had they not reached on 26 September a river which, from its size and course, could only have been the Coppermine. From his calculations Franklin reckoned Fort Enterprise was only forty miles away. The news cheered everyone, as did the discovery of a deer carcase whose meat, although putrid, was cooked and eaten on the spot. When this failed to satisfy, the intestines were scraped up and thrown into the pot. The chance discovery of a number of cranberry and blueberry bushes added further to their joy. But even so, wrote Richardson, ‘nothing could allay our inordinate appetites’.30
After the euphoria came disappointment. They may well have been forty miles from Fort Enterprise but in order to reach it they first had to cross the swiftly flowing Coppermine which was here 120 yards wide. They could possibly have managed it had they had even one canoe. But they had none. ‘They bitterly execrated their folly and impatience in breaking the canoe,’ Richardson wrote, ‘and the remainder of the day was spent in wandering slowly along the river, looking in vain for a fordable place and inventing schemes for crossing, no sooner devised than abandoned.’31
The voyageurs, in the depths of despondency, all but gave up. They became ‘careless and disobedient, they had ceased to dread punishment or hope for reward’.32 At length, however, they rallied round to construct a raft from the meagre willow trees which grew along the river's bank. It was a poor vessel, the wood being green and heavy with sap. At best it could carry only one man. And it was quite unnavigable, the available trees being neither thick enough to make a paddle nor long enough to make a pole capable of reaching the bottom. However, if it could make just the initial trip, carrying a line to the opposite bank, then the expedition could be ferried across one by one. But the raft never reached the opposite bank. Driven back by adverse winds it went no further than the voyageurs, waist-deep in freezing water, could push it.
Then Richardson stepped forward. If the raft could make no headway maybe a swimmer could. Back was scouting ahead with his hunters. Richardson was the strongest officer left. Tying the line around his waist he launched himself into the river. For a man who was already reduced to skin and bone, and who suffered accordingly from degrees of cold that would normally have been disregarded, to willingly immerse himself in temperatures of less than 38 °F was an act of enormous bravery. Sadly, his courage achieved nothing. Only a short distance from the bank Richardson's arms became so numb that he could not move them. Turning on his back, he kicked on with his legs. He had almost reached the other side when his legs too gave out and he sank to the riverbed. Seeing him go under, the others hauled on the line and drew him back to safety. When they dragged him ashore he was unable to move and could barely speak. Following his muttered instructions they placed him beside a fire and waited for sensation to reappear. Several hours later he was finally strong enough to crawl into a tent. But the whole of his left side was paralysed and although feeling was gradually restored his left arm and leg did not regain their full strength for another five months. To make matters worse he had stepped on a knife just before diving into the river and had cut his foot to the bone.
In any other circumstance Richardson would have been carried as an invalid for the rest of the journey. But hunger allowed neither invalids nor carriers. They were all in the same state. Richardson's body, when stripped of clothes, was a horrible mirror to the others of how far they had sunk. ‘I cannot describe,’ wrote Franklin, ‘what everyone felt at beholding the skeleton which the doctor's debilitated frame exhibited.’33 The voyageurs were aghast. ‘Ah! que nous sommes maigres!’34 they exclaimed simultaneously.
Ironically, it was St Germain, the voyageurs’ discontented ringleader, who came up with a solution. He volunteered to make a canoe from willow branches and the canvas in which their bedding was wrapped. It took him two days to complete the task, during which time the whole party almost disintegrated. The voyageurs, utterly downcast by Richardson's failure, reconciled themselves to death. They refused to gather tripes de roche, declaring they would rather die than waste their last hours harvesting such a revolting crop. Junius wandered off, presumably to find his own way home, and was never seen again.
Of the officers, Richardson was lame, Franklin was prostrate, Hood was so thin that he hardly cast a shadow and even the redoubtable Back could not stand without a stick. It was left to John Hepburn, the hero-seaman of the expedition, to gather a few scraps of lichen for his commanders. Their weakness can be gauged by Franklin's attempt on 3 October to visit St Germain at his canoe-building site. The voyageur was working in a grove of willows three-quarters of a mile distant. Franklin returned after three hours having been unable to reach his objective. They were now so famished that they did not care whether they ate or not. ‘The sensation of hunger is no longer felt by us,’35 Richardson recorded. Yet the memory of food lingered obstinately in their minds – ‘we are scarcely able to converse upon any other subject than the pleasures of eating’.36
St Germain finished his slight, one-man canoe on 4 October. They ‘assembled in anxious expectation’37 as he set out and cheered as he carried a line to the other side. One by one they hauled themselves across, the canoe sinking lower with each crossing until the last men were in water to their knees. Their heaviest bundle, the spare clothes and bedding, was soaked through when it arrived.
They had crossed the Coppermine and had only forty miles to travel before they reached Fort Enterprise. At their previous rate of about six miles per day, salvation was only a week's march away. As they struggled forwards, however, it became obvious that even a week was too much for some. Far behind everybody else the two weakest voyageurs, Credit and Vaillant, collapsed. When Richardson tracked back to see what had happened, Vaillant was ‘unable to rise and scarcely capable of replying to my questions’.38 He died that day. Credit was never found.
Franklin split his party into two. Back, still hobbling on a stick, was sent ahead with Solomon Belanger, Beauparlant and St Germain to contact Akaitcho's Indians at Fort Enterprise and to bring supplies to the men who lagged behind. But once Back had gone, Richardson put forward another proposal: he himself was lame and Hood was so weak as to be incapable; why not leave the two of them, with Hepburn to act as nursemaid, while Franklin went ahead to intercept Back's supplies? Without the drag of its two weakest members, ran Richardson's reasoning, Franklin's party would have a better chance of survival. ‘I was distressed beyond description at the thought of leaving them in such a dangerous situation, and for a long time combated their proposal'; Franklin wrote, ‘but they strenuously urged that this step afforded the only chance of safety for the party, and I reluctantly acceded to it.’39
Franklin went only four and a half miles before he had a crisis. Two voyageurs – Michel and Jean Baptiste Belanger – declared themselves too weak to continue and asked permission to return to Richardson's camp. The voyageurs were by now in tatters, literally, having thrown aside their tent and cut the canvas into a manageable blanket. Franklin waved them off wearily. A little later another man, Perrault, burst into tears, declared he could go no further, and asked permission to follow Michel and Belanger. Once again Franklin consented. No snow had fallen, the tracks were still clear, and Perrault would have no difficulty finding his way back. A fourth voyageur, Fontano, was sent with him, having become so slow and weak that he was seriously jeopardizing the chances of the others. ‘I cannot describe my anguish,’ Franklin wrote, ‘on the occasion of separating from another companion under circumstances so distressing. There was, however, no alternative. The extreme debility of the party put the carrying him quite out of the question, as he himself admitted.’40
Franklin heaved himself and his remaining five voyageurs forward to Fort Enterprise. There was no game to be shot even had Adam, his hunter, found any or been strong enough to lift his gun. The Barren Lands were truly barren. ‘There was no tripes de roche,’ Franklin regretted, so ‘we drank tea and ate some of our shoes for supper.’41
They reached Fort Enterprise on 12 October. It was empty. There were no supplies, there was no store of dried meat, there were no Indians. What they found was a note from Back saying that he had been there two days earlier and was going in search of Akaitcho, God willing that he and his three companions should survive so far. Believing that the white men were doomed, Akaitcho had taken his men hunting.
The only food available was tripes de roche, and the detritus of last year's stay: bones from the ash heap, and a pile of skins which the Indians had used as bedding. This, Franklin decided optimistically, ‘would support us tolerably well for a while’.42 Two days later, while they were feeding the floorboards into the fire – the one point in Fort Enterprise's favour was its availability of wood – the door burst open to reveal Solomon Belanger, one of Back's voyageurs. Belanger was covered in a thin coating of ice, and could barely speak. He did, however, have the strength to give Franklin a letter. Back had seen no Indians and requested further instructions.
Once again Franklin split his party. Sending Belanger back with the message that Back was to change course for Fort Providence in the hope of intercepting the Indians as they made their way back to winter quarters, he decided to set off upriver himself in the same direction with Augustus and Benoit. Peltier and Samandré, meanwhile, would stay at the fort to look after Adam, whose legs had swollen so much he could not walk.
Two days into the trek, Franklin's snowshoes fell irreparably to pieces, forcing him to return to Fort Enterprise while Augustus and Benoit struggled on. Over the following week snowstorms blew around Fort Enterprise while the four men within sank into a hunger-induced stupor. Adam and Samandré lay in bed, sobbing quietly. Franklin and Peltier, slightly stronger than the others, did their best to collect food and firewood, but they moved like zombies. ‘We perceived our strength decline every day,’ Franklin wrote, ‘and every exertion began to be irksome. When we were once seated the greatest effort was necessary in order to rise, and we frequently had to lift each other from our seats.’43 But they were cheered by the thought that either Back, or the two voyageurs, would surely have caught up with the Indians by 26 October. It could only be a matter of days before help arrived.
It was now four weeks since any of them had tasted meat.
Michel reached Richardson's camp on 9 October 1821. He was alone. He explained that he and Belanger had split up on the march back and as he had not yet arrived he assumed he must have got lost. Of Perrault and Fontano he said nothing save that the former had given him his rifle and ammunition before he left, with which he had been able to shoot a partridge and a hare.
What doubts they may have had about Michel's story were swept away when he produced the food. To Richardson it was as good as a miracle from the Almighty, ‘and we looked upon Michel as the instrument he had chosen to preserve all our lives’.44 They pampered him as much as they were able. When he complained of cold Richardson gave him one of the two shirts he was wearing; Hood offered to share his buffalo hide blanket.
Two days later Michel was once again the Almighty's instrument of salvation. While out hunting he found a wolf that had been killed by a deer. They devoured the strange-tasting meat with unbounded gratitude. But as the days wore on, with no sign of Belanger, who they now presumed dead, Michel became surly and evasive. He disappeared for short periods, declining to say where he had been. He brought back no more meat and refused to gather tripes de roche. At night he did not sleep in the tent, preferring to lie in the open. By the 16th he was threatening to leave them.
Puzzled by his behaviour, and equally puzzled as to why Franklin had sent no supplies, Richardson and Hood decided that if Michel would hunt for four days, they would let him go forward with Hepburn to see what was happening at Fort Enterprise. At this his attitude became even stranger. He would not hunt. ‘It is no use,’ he said, ‘there are no animals, you had better kill and eat me.’45 Later he began to rave against Europeans, claiming they had eaten his uncle.
Richardson's account of those days is the only version available. It was written later, following consultation with Franklin, and does not say when the first doubt formed in Richardson's mind. It does, however, reveal what both officers agreed must have happened. On the way from Franklin to Richardson, Michel had killed Belanger. Being surprised by Perrault, who was last seen carrying his gun and heading for the smoke of Michel's campfire, he had killed him too. Fontano had suffered the same fate. During subsequent days Michel had used the three corpses as a private larder, visiting it whenever he felt hungry. The ‘wolf meat he had brought back was almost certainly human flesh. Possibly he planned the same fate for Richardson, Hood and Hepburn.
On 20 October, Richardson was scrabbling together a few handfuls of frozen lichen. Hepburn was chopping willows for a fire. Michel, who refused to do anything, remained at the tent arguing with Hood. A few minutes after noon there was a shot. Richardson and Hepburn hurried back to find Hood dead. A bullet had entered the back of his skull and emerged neatly through his forehead. It had been fired at such close range that his nightcap was still smouldering. Michel greeted them with a gun in his hand.
Michel's explanation ran as follows: there were two guns in camp, a long one and a short one; Hood was cleaning the long one, and had asked Michel to fetch the short one from the tent; while Michel was doing so the long gun went off, whether by accident or by design he did not know. Suicide, accident or murder? Richardson was no detective, but it was obvious what had happened. The long gun was of the outdated type which Britain sold to native soldiers. It was so long that it was near impossible for a man to press its barrel against his head and simultaneously pull the trigger. It was even more difficult for a man to shoot himself in the back of the head with such a weapon. And for a man to do such a thing while holding in one hand a copy of Bickersteth's Scripture Helps was beyond the realms of likelihood.
Michel protested his innocence and, having a gun in his hand, was listened to with attention. From that point he was never unarmed and refused to let Hepburn and Richardson be on their own. If either opened their mouths he leaped forwards, waving his gun and demanding to know if they accused him of Hood's murder. The two Britons were at the mercy of a deranged man. Hepburn had a gun, and Richardson a small pistol. Both were too weak to cope with physical violence. Michel, on the other hand, was not only healthy but carried a gun, two pistols, a bayonet and a knife. ‘He also,’ wrote Richardson, ‘for the first time, assumed such a tone of superiority in addressing me, as evinced that he considered us to be completely in his power.’46 Which they were.
On 21 October Michel tried to lure Richardson into joining him on a hunting expedition. Richardson wisely refused. They set out for Fort Enterprise on 23 October, cajoling the madman in their midst with a semblance of purpose. Michel responded to the routine, but all the time he was reeling inwardly between guilt, self-justification and despair. Despair won. That day, for the first time, he announced his intention to gather tripes de roche. He told the other two to go ahead and he would catch them up later.
Alone at last, Richardson and Hepburn conferred. They agreed that Michel had definitely murdered Hood and had probably murdered Belanger too. Hepburn offered to shoot Michel but Richardson decided the duty was his. ‘Had my own life alone been threatened,’ he wrote, ‘I would not have purchased it by such a measure; but I considered myself as intrusted also with the protection of Hepburn's, a man, who, by his humane attentions and devotedness, had so endeared himself to me, that I felt more anxiety for his safety than for my own.’47 When Michel caught up with them, Richardson took his pistol and shot him in the head. ‘His principles,’ intoned Richardson, ‘unsupported by a belief in the divine truths of Christianity, were unable to withstand the pressure of severe distress.’48 Then they set out for Fort Enterprise.
‘It is impossible to describe our sensations,’ Richardson wrote, ‘when, on attaining the eminence that overlooks [Fort Enterprise] we beheld the smoke issuing from one of the chimneys.’49 During their journey he and Hepburn had lived off nothing but tripes de roche and Hood's hide blanket. Richardson was now so weak that he fell down twenty times covering a distance of only 100 yards. However, the prospect of salvation gave them strength and on the evening of 29 October they flung open the door of Fort Enterprise.
‘No words can convey an idea of the filth and wretchedness that met our eyes,’50 Richardson wrote. The floor had been pulled up, the partitions had been demolished and the skin off the windows was gone. Of the four men present – Franklin, Samandré, Adam and Peltier – only Peltier seemed able to move. He had risen, expecting them to be an Indian relief party. Now he sank back in despair. Accustomed as Hepburn and Richardson were to the sight of each other's emaciated frames, ‘the ghastly countenances, dilated eye-balls, and sepulchral voices of Captain Franklin and those with him were more than we could at first bear’.51
Richardson and Hepburn had been expecting Franklin to help them. Now they found themselves having to help him. Despite their weakness they were both far stronger than any mail in the building and from that day they undertook the chores of chopping wood and carrying it home. They also went hunting, but were too enfeebled to hold the gun steady on the rare occasions when they encountered game. Franklin, meanwhile, dragged in deer skins from the pile which had been discarded the previous winter. The pile was thirty yards away. Franklin managed to bring back three skins in a day. There were about twenty-six skins in all, thin, rotten things, riddled with warble-fly grubs. The explorers devoured them avidly, right down to the warble grubs which they squeezed out of the hide with their fingernails. They tasted ‘as fine as gooseberries’.52
Contrarily, while Peltier had previously been one of the healthiest in the group, he now collapsed, and Adam showed signs of renewed life. Richardson diagnosed Adam's swollen limbs as the result of protein-deficiency oedema and incised his abdomen, scrotum and legs, whereby ‘a large quantity of water flowing out he obtained some ease’.53 But there was nothing he could do for Peltier or Samandré. They both died on the night of 1 November.
Richardson and Hepburn now began to flag. On 3 November Richardson noted that Hepburn's limbs were beginning to swell – ‘his strength as well as mine is declining rapidly’.54 That day they ate the last of the bones.
On 5 November Adam began to wander, leaping to his feet and seizing his gun with the promise of a good day's hunting and food for all, before subsiding into a dejection so deep that he could not even be persuaded to eat. The others were little better off. They tried not to talk about their situation, chatting instead about ‘common and light subjects’.55 But as Franklin wrote, ‘our minds exhibited symptoms of weakness, evinced by a kind of unreasonable pettishness with each other. Each of us thought the other weaker in intellect than himself, and more in need of advice and assistance. So trifling a circumstance as a change of place, recommended by one as being more warm and comfortable, and refused by the other, from a dread of motion, frequently called forth fretful expressions, which were no sooner uttered than atoned for, to be repeated, perhaps, in the course of a few minutes.’56
They were all so thin that it hurt even to sleep. Their bones ached against the floorboards but they put up with it because the pain of turning to a more comfortable position was even greater. To this was added initially the pain of constant hunger. But once the pangs had eased – after three or four days – they usually enjoyed a few hours in which they dreamed of limitless food.
On 7 November Richardson and Hepburn were in the storehouse, trying to separate logs from the frozen pile stored there the previous winter, when they heard a shot. Three of Akaitcho's Indians were outside. They had been contacted by Back two days previously and on hearing his tale, and on taking in his shrivelled appearance – he too was pathetically reduced, and had lost one man from his party – they had immediately set out with emergency rations comprising fat, some dried venison and a few deer tongues.
Sending the youngest of them back for further supplies, the remaining two Indians swiftly took control. They cleared Fort Enterprise of its corpses, swept out the wet, blackened filth of charred bones and singed hair that covered the floor, and built up a crackling fire. The ease with which they did all this stunned Richardson. ‘We could scarcely,’ he wrote, ‘by any effort of reasoning, efface from our minds the idea that they possessed a supernatural degree of strength.’57
Then came the feeding. Despite Richardson's injunction to ‘be moderate!’, they all suffered severely from overeating. Richardson, who should have known better, devoured the food as extravagantly as the others. For days afterwards – weeks, in Richardson's case – they suffered from distention and indigestion. The passing of a stool caused immense pain. Only Adam, who had to be spoon-fed, escaped the effects of sudden indulgence.
The Indians treated the survivors ‘with the same tenderness they would have bestowed on their own infants’.58 They persuaded them to wash and to shave their beards which had not been touched since they left the coast and which had grown to a ‘hideous length’.59 On learning that the Europeans had eaten too much meat they strung lines across the river and came back with four large trout. In every respect they could not have been more solicitous.
But hardly had salvation arrived than it departed. On 13 November the Indians vanished, leaving behind them a handful of pemmican per man. For a while Franklin feared his men would have to revert to their old diet, save that instead of deer skins they now had fish skins. It transpired, however, that the Indians, fearing their messenger had not reached base, had left on a twenty-four-hour march to fetch more supplies from Akaitcho's camp. The Indians reappeared on the morning of 15 November, having walked through a stormy and snow-filled night with two of their wives and Benoit, one of the voyageurs who had accompanied Back. Once again the survivors were faced with an abundance of food, but this time they measured their pace. On 16 November, a sunny Thursday, they left Fort Enterprise for good.
They reached Fort Providence on 11 December, where they were at last reunited with Back. Then began the recriminations. Why had no food been left at Fort Enterprise? In his defence Akaitcho stated that three of his best hunters had drowned and that he had been unable to obtain ammunition from Fort Providence. But he was quite open about the reason for the lack of provisions: he had believed that Franklin's journey was insanity and that none of his expedition would be seen again.
Wentzel the interpreter was equally to blame, having been repeatedly instructed to make sure sufficient food was left behind. But he drew attention away from his failings with an open attack on Franklin and Richardson. The whole party had acted ‘imprudently, injudiciously and showed in one particular instance an unpardonable want of restraint’.60 Richardson was a murderer who should be brought to trial, he said.
Wentzel was right, in a way. There was nothing to prove that Richardson's story was true. For all anyone knew he and Hepburn might have killed all four voyageurs and Hood, and eaten them. ‘To tell the truth, Wentzel,’ Back had written, ‘things have taken place, which must not be known.’61 In classic conspiracy fashion, Wentzel also stated that when he had joined the mission Franklin and his officers had been all over him. When the business was finished he must come to London for reunion, they had said, nothing could make them happier. But when the business was finished, the same men had advised him to stay in the Arctic for a few more years. It would be in his best interests, they had told him. There should have been some sort of investigation. Had Franklin lost a ship instead of an officer he would be facing a court martial. But Hood was not a ship, and the only witnesses to those fateful days were sticking to their story. In the end both parties dropped their accusations and the matter was swept aside.
The easiest target was of course Akaitcho. But Franklin could not bring himself to attack him. The Indian chief had shown them great kindness and sympathy during their rescue. Moreover, thanks to the usual administrative disputes, he had not yet been paid for any of his troubles. Akaitcho shrugged this off. ‘The world goes badly,’ he told Franklin. ‘All are poor; you are poor, the traders appear to be poor, I and my party are poor likewise; and since the goods have not come in, we cannot have them. I do not regret having supplied you with provisions, for a Copper Indian can never permit white men to suffer from want of food on his lands without flying to their aid.’62
Franklin reached York Factory on 14 July 1822, where Governor George Simpson took a quiet delight in their failure. ‘They do not feel themselves at liberty to enter into the particulars of their disastrous enterprize,’ he wrote on the 16th, ‘and I fear they have not fully achieved the object of their mission.’63 This was putting it mildly. Franklin had travelled 5,500 miles across land and water, had lost eleven of his twenty-strong party, and had returned with the news that he had mapped a minuscule portion of a coastline that everyone already knew existed. Almost every stage of the journey had been mismanaged, and by his decision to press eastwards at any cost, further than his supplies could last, Franklin was directly responsible for the deaths of his men.
But when the story broke, nobody considered Franklin's failings. To do so would have called in question the wisdom of those who sent him. Only Douglas Clavering voiced the worries of his fellow explorers: ‘Was the undertaking worth the suffering his party endured?’64 he wrote to a friend. The answer was no. But what did the public care? Franklin was a hero. He was the man who had eaten his boots.
