10

LYON'S DEPARTURE

On his return from Foxe Basin in October 1823, Parry had been greeted at Lerwick by a mixed bag of letters. One informed him that his father had died the previous year. Another, from Barrow, told him with a hint of reprimand that a rescue mission was on the point of being sent out to find him – and that he had been promoted to captain in November 1821. A third was from Franklin, offering his congratulations and giving a brief account of his own tribulations in the Arctic. ‘I need not be ashamed to say that I cried over it like a child,’1 Parry wrote.

Parry was no longer the man of the moment. True, on his arrival in London he was asked by Lord Melville to accept the post of hydrographer. But this well-paid job could not compare with the glory of discovering the North-West Passage and Parry feared that if he accepted the offer it might blight his chances of active service. Melville assured him there was no conflict – but naturally he could not draw both salaries simultaneously.

Parry asked Barrow's opinion. Barrow, in turn, spoke to important figures and advised him that he could still sail to the north and be hydrographer at the same time. After all, what did the post entail? Nothing but the occasional supervision. ‘Do not think of quitting this situation,’ said Barrow, ‘for, altho’ it is true that you are to receive no salary for it, as soon as your ship is commissioned, still it is your sheet-anchor; keep hold of the Admiralty while you can – you do not know to what it may hereafter lead.’2

Parry accepted the job. ‘I now stand on very high ground indeed,’³ he wrote to his brother. Shortly afterwards, however, he became ill and was confined to his bed in a London hotel with a delirious fever. Tongues began to wag – Parry was not as forgotten as he suspected -although what they wagged about is unknown. Did it have anything to do with the ‘disgrace’ of his recent voyage? Lyon rushed to his leader's support. ‘Reports of the cause of his illness have risen to an enormous & shameful bulk,’ he wrote. ‘Disappointment in a matrimonial engagement is the true cause.’⁴

It was true. The man who had spent most of the past five years in the Arctic without even catching a cold had been brought low by affairs of the heart. Sabine's niece, the Miss Browne whose life jacket Parry had so daringly inflated all those years ago and with whom, in Parry's eyes at least, he had reached an ‘understanding’, had been inconstant. Inconstancy could mean a wide range of things in those days. Merely being seen with other men was prima facie grounds for inconstancy. But Miss Browne had gone a step further; she had not only been inconstant but had become engaged to another.

This was a terrible shock for a man of Parry's romantic sensibilities. But worse was to come. Miss Browne's mother – perhaps hoping to drive the Arctic hero back to her daughter, perhaps angling for some breach-of-promise compensation, perhaps having caught a whiff of the unspoken Foxe Basin scandal or perhaps just trying to stir things up – let it be known that Parry had dishonourably broken the engagement. His father had just died, his career had been overshadowed, his love had left him for another man, and now he was being calumniated. No wonder Parry had a slight turn. And his health was not improved by a well-meant ditty which was doing the rounds of London's salons:

Parry, why this dejected air?

Why are your looks so much cast down?

None but the Brave deserve the Fair,

Any one may have the Browne!5

‘I have always been susceptible to attachments of this kind,’ he wrote to his brother Charles. ‘I have always felt a desire to be attached somewhere – I have never been easy without it, and with less disposition, I will venture to say, than 99 in 100 of my own profession, to vicious propensities, either in this or other ways, I have always contrived to fancy myself in love with some virtuous woman. There is some romance in this, but I have it still in full force within me, and never, till I am married, shall I, I believe, cease to entertain it.’⁶

Parry recovered eventually, driven in part by the machinations of Miss Browne's mother. ‘I confess a feeling of wounded pride arose within me,’ he wrote, ‘which did a great deal to shake off in a short time the more bitter and less remediable feelings by which I had at first been agitated.’⁷ He found it difficult to face Sabine, the uncle, for a long while afterwards. They could not help meeting, both of them being members of the Royal Society, but they went through the niceties all the same. ‘We avoided mentioning the subject, and he behaved well about it,’⁸ said Parry.

However, Parry had only a little time to dwell on his loss. On 17 January 1824 he was commissioned to the Fury which, with its sister ship the Hecla, was to sail for the Arctic that spring.

Parry had been coy about the North-West Passage following his recent failure. The Foxe Basin expedition had ‘at least served the useful purpose of shewing where the passage is not to be effected’,⁹ he wrote in his journal. But he stated that ‘There is no known opening which seems to present itself so favourably for this purpose as Prince Regent's Inlet.’¹⁰ So Barrow sent him there.

Parry's was just one of four expeditions which Barrow sent out that year. Lyon – ‘mad with joy’¹¹ – was given command of the Griper, in which he was to sail to Repulse Bay, then trek overland to Point Turnagain. Franklin was ordered to prepare himself for another overland assault with Richardson on the Canadian coast, this time travelling down the Mackenzie River rather than the Coppermine. And Captain Frederick Beechey in HMS Blossom was instructed to sail around Cape Horn and attack the passage from the west via the Bering Strait. Lyon and Parry were to find Franklin's open water, and Franklin was to find Beechey's. The scale of it all, fuelled by the excitement of Franklin's grisly debacle, caught the popular imagination. In 1824 anybody connected even remotely with the Arctic was now a hero – even if they had not eaten their boots.

On 24 March 1824 the main participants in all four ventures met at a dinner party hosted by Franklin and his wife of eight months, Eleanor. Among the guests was a young woman by the name of Jane Griffin who penned an interesting series of portraits. ‘Captain Parry was in the room when we arrived – he is a tall, large, fine-looking man, of commanding appearance, but possessing nothing of the fine gentleman – his manner and appearance rather excite the idea of a slight degree of roughness and bluntness – his figure is rather slouching, his face full & round, his hair dark & rather curling. -Captn. Lyon was the next object of interest – he is a young man of about 30, of good height & gentlemanly-looking – he has large, soft, grey eyes, heavy eyelids & good teeth & is altogether very pleasing. Mr. Barrow of the Admiralty sat at the top of the table – he is said to be humorous & obstinate & exhibited both propensities. Captn. Beechey was another of the heroes of the same class – he is a prim looking little man & was very silent.’12 Richardson she described as ‘a middle sized man & appears about Captn. Franklin's age. He was not well-dressed – & looks like a Scotchman as he is – he has broad & high cheek bones, a widish mouth, grey eyes & brown hair -upon the whole rather plain, but the countenance thoughtful, mild & pleasing.’¹³

It was a lively occasion in which they discussed everything from opera – ‘Captn. Franklin told me he had never been & did not think he could sit it out. Captn. Lyon has never been but once & does not mean to go again’¹⁴ – to craniology. ‘The Lyon’ showed the ladies his tattoos under the table, and Barrow, for no good reason, had a go at old Isaac D'Israeli – the future prime minister's father – which left him ‘evidently much hurt & vexed’.15

The only person not to enjoy himself was Parry. ‘He occasionally bursts into hearty laughs & seems to enjoy a joke,’ wrote Jane Griffin, but for the most part he seemed ‘far from lighthearted & exhibits traces of heartfelt & recent suffering’.¹⁶ This was possibly a hangover from the Browne affair. Yet there was something deeper. By contrast with Lyon, he did not appear to relish his forthcoming voyage. ‘Captn. Parry seems to be going [north] again rather against his inclination -he complained to Fanny [Jane Griffin's sister] that he had seen nothing of any other parts of the world … Fanny remarked … what a state of excitement he and his ship must be in when they first arrived in a situation where they could get news of their country and particularly of their friends. Captn. P. replied with deep emotion, “Ah, indeed! Nobody knows.”’¹⁷

For once in the history of Barrow's expeditions one gets an inkling of what his officers must have felt. To the public they were presented as diligent, devout and, above all, dedicated men who pursued their goals with loyal and thrusting ardour. This was true only to an extent. The thrill of exploration did move them – as did the prospect of promotion, higher salaries and fame. But for many the price was not worth paying. Many officers and seamen chose to return to the Arctic year after year. But an equal number chose not to. For this last group the hardship, and possible death, which they might face were not half so enticing as a quiet life without promotion on one of Britain's many naval stations around the globe.

Parry was edging towards the quitters’ side. He was no longer as young as he had been; his joints were stiffening with rheumatism and he wanted to find his ‘virtuous woman’. He dreaded the years of imprisonment in the ice which another voyage might entail, and as he said to Fanny Griffin, he wanted to see more of the world. Nevertheless he was, at this point, still locked into his career. He would go wherever Barrow sent him. But that did not mean he wanted to.

*

The usual brouhaha surrounded the Hecla and the Fury as they were readied in Deptford. Six thousand people signed Parry's visitors’ book, among them several members of the royal family and a young lady called Isabella, daughter of Lord Stanley of Alderley, whom Parry invited into his cabin for wine and cakes. In a reserved manner – no life jackets here – he fell for her.

Public confidence was high, and when Parry held a ball to mark his departure, the press reported it luminously. All the Arctic heroes were there, as well as all the present officers, including Lt. Henry Hoppner as second-in-command, Lt. Foster as astrologer-chaplain, Lts. James Ross and, new to the Arctic, Horatio Austin, plus Midshipmen Edward Bird, Francis Crozier and the purser William Hooper who had sailed with Parry on every single one of his voyages. Disappointingly for Parry, most of the attention centred on John Franklin. ‘I suppose the newspapers have told you how the ladies pulled him to pieces at Captain Parry's ball,’ wrote Franklin's wife, Eleanor. ‘He was in such request that I wonder they left a bit of him for me. I do not quite know what to say of his flirting in such a manner with half the Belles of London …’18

Sadly the confidence was misplaced: this was to be Parry's most calamitous mission to date. Indeed, it has been said that if Parry's third voyage had been his first he would never have made a second. They departed on 19 May 1824 but from the moment Parry arrived in the Arctic things began to go wrong. He reached Baffin Bay only to find the central pack was twice as wide as normal. By the time he had battled through it to reach Lancaster Sound on 10 September he was a month behind schedule and almost at the end of the navigable season. Three days later, when both ships were caught in the ice just twenty-one miles from Prince Regent Inlet, he consulted with Lt. Hoppner of the Fury whether they should turn for home. Both men agreed that such a course would be disgraceful. Far better to carry on, overwinter, and see what the next year brought. Meanwhile, westerly gales opened the sea and drove both ships back until they were nearly spewed out of Lancaster Sound. Then the wind turned and the ships were blown back again. They reached Prince Regent Inlet, sailed down it for about fifty miles and readied themselves for winter in a bay on the east coast that Parry called Port Bowen.

As usual Parry had something up his sleeve: not a theatre but a festival – ‘masquerades without licentiousness’, he wrote, ‘carnivals without excess!’19 On 1 November, in as actorly manner as he could contrive, Parry wrapped himself in a huge cloak, walked over the ice to the Fury, and revealed himself as an old beggar whose face and wooden leg was familiar to anyone who knew the streets of Chatham. ‘Give a copper to poor Joe,’ wailed Parry, scraping wildly on his fiddle, ‘who's lost his timbers in defence of his King and country.’²⁰ He almost brought the house down.

Others came in his wake. Henry Hoppner dressed himself up as a fashionable lady, Midshipman Crozier arrived as a black footman. Throughout the winter a host of unlikely characters flounced across the decks performing quadrilles, waltzes and various other dances. There were Highlanders, Turkish odalisques, chimney sweeps, rag-and-bone men, country bumpkins, city bricklayers, oriental princesses and fashionable Parisian fops. Deep in the intestines of the Arctic, Parry's officers whirled and capered as if they were at a Venetian ball.

Parry, though, was more distant than usual. All the winter offered him was ‘inanimate stillness’ and ‘motionless torpor’.²¹ His rheumatism was biting, and James Ross, his midshipman, was often asked to take observations. ‘Dear Ross,’ ran one of Parry's orders, ‘You will much oblige me by taking the Needles, as well as the Vibrations, during your hours on the hill to-day … I have so much pain in my loins, when in motion, that I shall not be able to fetch the hill to-day. Yours very truly, W. E. Parry.’²²

The winter finally ended on 20 July 1825, when the ships sprang free of the ice. Prince Regent Inlet was theirs for the taking. However, ten days after leaving Port Bowen, during which they had made only sixty miles or so down the west coast of Prince Regent Inlet, both ships were in trouble. They were driven landwards and although the Hecla extricated herself, the Fury was nipped by a massive berg which threw the ship against the shore ice. Hoppner listened helplessly as the Fury broke beneath him. First came the trembling; then the violent cracks as the beams gave way; the rudder went with a report like gunfire; water gurgled in through leaking seams. When the berg finally relented, Hoppner's men were working the pumps around the clock. It was clear that the Fury would have to be grounded for emergency repairs.

The Fury’s stores were unloaded on a beach at the northern cape of Gresswell Bay and the crew were transferred to the Hecla. For a fortnight the men and officers from both ships fought to get the Fury into a position where she could be repaired, but gales, blizzards and icebergs thwarted their every effort. On 21 August, with some of the men so exhausted that they could scarcely comprehend Parry's orders, work was brought to a halt by the severest gale to date. They were forced to flee southwards in the Hecla and when they returned four days later they found the Fury lying on its side in a foot of water on the same beach where they had deposited its stores. There was nothing that could be done.

Parry had no choice but to return home. This dismal chronicle of events did nothing to help his reputation or his self-image. ‘The only real cause for wonder is our long exemption from such a catastrophe,’23 he wrote phlegmatically in his journal. Others took a more critical view. According to the Gentleman's Quarterly, ’the last two expeditions undertaken by Captain Parry have been particularly unfortunate. Literally nothing has been accomplished.’²⁴ Even Barrow, writing in the Quarterly Review, was forced to admit that Parry's latest effort ‘has added little or nothing to our stock of geographical knowledge’. The state of the North-West Passage was ‘precisely where it was at the conclusion of his first voyage’.²⁵

To further compound Parry's humiliation he had to attend the obligatory court martial which followed the loss of any ship. ‘By a curious necessity,’ he wrote to his sister Gertrude, ‘there not being Captains enough to form a Court without me, I sat as a member, although it was, in fact, myself on whom the responsibility of the abandonment of the Fury rested.’ All were of course acquitted and the court ‘passed a high and flattering encomium on the exertions of all engaged in the Expedition’.²⁶ Nevertheless, Parry's failure was exhibited to more than 100 naval officers who had come to watch the proceedings.

If Parry's voyage to Prince Regent Inlet had been a miserable failure, it was nothing compared with Lyon's expedition to Repulse Bay. On 9 November 1824, while Parry was wintering in Port Bowen, Lyon had staggered back to England only five months after he set out, having endured the most hellish sea voyage yet experienced by any of Barrow's men.

The Griper- ’that coffin’,27 Lyon called it in disgust – had never been popular with any of its commanders and its faults were fully demonstrated on this mission. It pitched appallingly, with a draught that was a foot lower in the bow than the stern, and was so sluggish even with full sail that its accompanying transport, the Snap, struggled to keep it in sight without losing all headway and eventually had to tow it across the Atlantic. When they reached the entrance to Hudson Bay in August 1824, the Griper took on board the Snap’s supplies and immediately proved too small to contain them comfortably. ‘We found our narrow decks completely crowded by them,’ complained Lyon. ‘The gangways, forecastle, and abaft the mizzenmast, were filled with casks, hawsers, whale-lines, and stream-cables, while on our straightened lower deck we were obliged to place casks and other stores, in every part but that allotted to the ship's company's mess tables; and even my cabin had a quantity of things stowed away in it. The launch was filled high above her gunwales with various articles, and our chains and waist were lumbered with spars, spare plank, sledges, wheels, &c.’²⁸ All the gear and provisions to last thirty months were squeezed into a ship which, as Lyon plaintively pointed out, had carried no more than a year's supply on Parry's voyage.

Adding to the chaos were two Shetland ponies, which Lyon had purchased as an experimental mode of transport for the overland leg of his expedition. They were pleasant companions, walking about the decks ‘as familiarly as large dogs’,²⁹ but in a ship so small they became a serious inconvenience, and the vast quantity of hay required to sustain them for such a long period strained the Griper’s capacity still further.

Never before had a single ship been sent out for such a potentially long voyage. Perhaps Barrow, lulled by the apparent ease in which Parry had overwintered, had decided a back-up was superfluous. But in the light of Parry's own opinions on the necessity of having two ships, the Admiralty was obviously pinching pennies. Lyon felt the lack – so sorely that not even the beauties of the Arctic sky, which had previously driven him to rhapsodies, could compensate. ‘Lovely as the surrounding dazzling view may have been,’ he wrote, ‘I could not but yield to a sensation of loneliness which I had never before experienced on the last voyage; and I felt most forcibly the want of an accompanying ship, if not to help us, at least to break the deathlike stillness of the scene. The agreeable visits from ship to ship, which so pleasingly break in on the monotony of a Polar voyage were now denied us.’30

For a man on his first solo command, Lyon was understandably nervous. But he was not going to admit defeat. ‘We had already in our passage across the Atlantic arranged our little plans of improvement and amusement, and I looked forward with pleasure to the approach of winter.’³¹ It would be nice to have seen Lyon's ‘plans of amusement’ in action for if anyone knew the meaning of entertainment it was him. Unfortunately they were never put into operation.

Normally the northern reaches of Hudson Bay were ice-free in August, but the season of 1824 was unaccountably thick. The sea was crowded with ice ‘and in many places closely packed as far as the eye could reach’.³² Lyon turned disadvantage to good purpose by using a large floe as a rest stop. He had washing lines erected on the ice which were soon strung with drying clothes. The men played leapfrog, the officers wandered about taking potshots at passing loons, and the ship's ponies, geese, ducks and hens were let loose to wander at will. Meanwhile the Griper waited with loose sails, ready to evacuate ‘our floating farm-yard’³³ at a moment's notice.

As he pressed on, Lyon noted that the sea was not only icier but foggier than usual. Like previous voyagers he noted the peculiar qualities of Arctic fog. They could often see no further than 100 yards yet overhead shone a sky of ‘most provoking brilliancy’.34 Icicles grew so fast on the rigging that it was possible to measure their increase with the naked eye. When the fog lifted, as rapidly as it descended, the entire ship glistened as if it were made of glass.

Lyon might have wafted his way poetically to Repulse Bay had he not made a strange decision for which he gives no explanation in his journal and which would baffle later commentators. Instead of sailing to the north of Southampton Island, through Frozen Strait, as he had done with Parry, he decided to go south and approach Repulse Bay via the stretch of water known by the idiosyncratic and misleading name, Roes Welcome Sound. Lyon was trying too hard. He wanted not only to reach Repulse Bay but to map all the approaches to it. He had already tested the approach to Hudson Bay by attacking it from the south, rather than through the tricky currents off Resolution Island to the north, a process which had left him much shaken and in full agreement that the traditional route was best. His detour to the south of Southampton Island had exactly the same effect. Expecting a panorama of sheer-sided cliffs, as had been charted by previous navigators, he found a treacherous labyrinth of shoals extending a full mile into the sea that tested the Griper to its balky limits.

Here and there he was able to make a landing, where he encountered Eskimos and bartered with them for supplies of fresh salmon. They were different from the tribes he had previously met, in that they scooted across the water on inflated hides, or in large, skin-hulled boats powered by translucent sails made from walrus intestines. But in other respects they displayed no novelty of behaviour that Lyon could add to his already respectable catalogue of Eskimo life. There was one thing, however, that Lyon would remember forever. On wandering through an Eskimo cemetery, he came across the grave of a particularly small individual. Driven by previous reports of a race of pygmies who lived in the region, he removed the stones covering the corpse. Instead of the expected pygmy he found the body of a little child, preserved in a pristine state by the cold. On its neck lay the nest of a snow-bunting – the Arctic equivalent of a robin – which had wormed through the chinks to find a home for its young. For once Lyon was at a loss. ‘I could not, on this occasion, view its little nest, placed on the breast of infancy, without wishing that I possessed the power of poetically expressing the feelings it excited.’35 The image was so strong that even Barrow was later moved by it and, to make up for Lyon's lack of poetic flair, he commissioned a ghastly poem by ‘Georgiana’ whose three, mercifully brief, verses utterly missed the pathos of the occasion.

By 1 September Lyon was in the ‘Welcome’ and was in serious trouble, ‘the ship pitching bows under and a tremendous sea running’,³⁶ while the winds drove them towards a shore which had a tidal drop of fifteen feet – considerably less than the Griper’s draught. He flung out his anchors, one of which was lost immediately. Fearing the total destruction of the ship, which would be inevitable when the tide fell, he had all boats readied for evacuation, though it was obvious to all that only one boat, the longboat, had the slightest chance of surviving such seas. The men drew lots calmly, accepting their fate without murmur, even though the Griper’s two smaller boats would have been swamped the second they were launched. ‘The surf was running to an awful height,’ Lyon wrote, ‘and it appeared evident that no human powers could save us.’³⁷ By 3 p.m. the tide had dropped and only six feet of water separated the ship from the seabed. They threw out every inessential item they could lay their hands on in order to reduce their draught. But to no avail. Every wave that came in lifted the ship and crashed it against the bottom, simultaneously swamping it with water.

Lyon ordered his men to put on ‘their best and warmest clothing, to enable them to support life as long as possible’.³⁸ The officers meanwhile grabbed some of the precious instruments, ‘although it was acknowledged by all that not the slightest hope remained’.³⁹ Then Lyon called the whole crew aft and asked them to pray, while simultaneously bidding them farewell. ‘I thanked every one for their excellent conduct, and cautioned them, as we should, in all probability, soon appear before our Maker, to enter His presence as men resigned to their fate.’⁴⁰ They sat down in small groups on the deck, drenched by torrential waves, awaiting their imminent deaths, and dozed off. Those who could not sleep began to chat.

At 6 p.m. a heavier swell than usual caused the rudder to rise in its housing and break the after lockers. Miraculously, no major leak followed and even more miraculously, it was the last big swell. They were saved.

In the small hours of 2 September, when the weather had cleared and the Griper was riding steady, Lyon saw the shore on which he and his crew would have had to land. ‘Not a single green patch was seen on the flat shingle beach, and our sense of deliverance was doubly felt from the conviction that if any of us should have lived to reach the shore, the most wretched death by starvation would have been inevitable.’41 He named the spot ‘Bay of God's Mercy’. Then, ‘the ship being now somewhat to rights’,⁴² he called everyone up for a quick prayer of thanks, and pressed on.

Two days later, with a pang of guilt, he remembered the Shetland ponies. At the first signs of foul weather they had been strapped in slings near the bow. Since then they had swung forgotten throughout the turmoil, pelted with snow, ice and water, and were amazingly still alive – though whether they were still sane was another matter. However, there was no longer anything for them to eat, the hay having long since been jettisoned, and Lyon regretfully ordered them to be killed. They were probably then eaten, though this was passed over in Lyon's journal.

Lyon's compasses were useless by this time, and he spent an interesting if unnecessary few hours swivelling the Griper round to see where the Magnetic Pole might be – north-west by north from their present position, he judged, though after his last disappointment with Parry he was unwilling to admit the existence of a Magnetic Pole.

On 12 September more foul weather threatened and Lyon dropped all anchors again, halfway up the western coast of Southampton Island. The tide was running at two knots on the surface and at a greater velocity below. Bearing down on them were two or three streams of solid ice which a normal ship would have been able to ride out but which the Griper, its bowsprit plunging underwater with every wave, could well have done without. Luckily they met the lighter edge of the floes and lost merely ‘the bobstays and larboard iron bumpkin’.43 But they were so heavily laden that every wave crashed over them in icy sheets. ‘That night was piercingly cold,’ Lyon wrote, ‘and the sea continued to wash fore and aft the decks while constant snow fell. As the lower deck was afloat, our people and all their hammocks thoroughly soaked, no rest could be obtained.’⁴⁴

A hurricane blew up. The ship pitched so sharply that it was impossible to stand upright below decks. Those who ventured above were whipped by sharp snow flakes and showered with water whose warmth they welcomed until it almost immediately turned their clothes to ice. Lyon strove desperately and in vain to control his ship. But with every floe that burst upon him he dreaded that his cables would part. Worse still was the prospect that his bowsprit would be caught and once that went it would bring down the masts. ‘We were all so exhausted, and the ship was so coated with ice,’ he wrote, ‘that nothing could have been done to save them.’⁴⁵ Throughout the night the wind increased. The watch lashed themselves to the mast and huddled there, encased in ice. When Lyon went up to check on them he could barely reach the mast, so heavy were the waves which pounded over the deck. He had never seen such a dark, fierce night. Over the heads of the watch, rocking in the tumult, a small lantern swung to and fro.

On the 13th the gale still blew with ‘terrific violence’⁴⁶ and water sloshed aboard faster than the sluices could discharge it. At 6 a.m. the sea rose to unprecedented heights and snapped every single cable. They were now anchorless and driving fast before the wind for Southampton Island. The ship was broadside to and heeled over so far that the crew could not keep their footing on the sheet ice which covered the deck. For the second time in less than a week all hands came on top and prayed.

Once again the prayer worked. The wind changed direction and the Griper, its lee gunwales in the water, was able to move offshore. But the Arctic wasn't finished with them yet. ‘At eight,’ Lyon wrote, ‘the fore trysail gaff went in the slings, but we were unable to lower it, on account of the amazing force of the wind, and every rope being encrusted with a thick coating of ice.’47 A wave rose and stove the larboard waist boat against the side of the ship. Then at 11 a.m. another one swept it away.

Their compasses were useless, they had no anchors, the gale was blowing them south to they knew not where, the ship was so poor as to be unworkable ‘even in moderate weather’,⁴⁸ and its overburdened draught so great that they could not enter any nearby anchorage. They were without any bearings, they had lost one of their boats, and several of the crew were incapacitated by rheumatism. Their water was in such short supply that they were rationed to one pint per man per day. The foremast was ‘much wrung’, the bowsprit was ‘injured’ and the main mast was splitting. The sky was still black and their only means of navigation was by constant sounding, the men hauling and dropping the lead weight until their hands numbed.

In these conditions, Lyon had no choice but to turn back. Bouncing from shore to shoal, awash with water and taking in more with every wave that swept over it, the Griper somehow wallowed out of Hudson Bay and on 2 October 1824 began its 1,000-mile trip back to England. ‘For the first time since the 28th August,’ Lyon wrote, ‘a period of five weeks, I enjoyed a night of uninterrupted repose.’⁴⁹

On the way home, shrouded by constant fog, they met stray elements of the whaling fleet making their way home from Lancaster Sound. Lyon tried to identify them but they drove balefully past on all quarters. On the few occasions when contact was made, the whalers begged for food, which Lyon duly despatched, catching the tubs that they floated down to him on lines and filling them with bread. Once, on 19 October, a whaling captain named Valentine, commanding the Achilles of Dundee, came aboard and recounted his tale of woe. Whales were scarce that year, and most ships had stayed out so long that they had exhausted their supplies of food. He himself had caught two whales and considered himself a lot luckier than most. ‘Mr. Valentine informed me that he had been exposed, for nearly a month past, to a continuance of the worst weather he had seen in thirty-four years’ experience, in these seas, and that the past season had been the most severe he had ever known.’50 Lyon, with water pouring onto his head from the battered and leaking deck, was in full sympathy.

On 9 November Lyon was in the Channel, lurching his way past the Start and Berry Head, the Portland Lights, and the Needles. On the 10th, he was nearly home. ‘In our distressed state, without anchors, I determined on running into Portsmouth Harbour, as the tide would serve until two P.M., and the wind was so fresh, that had we lost the flood, we could not have remained under sail all night in safety at Spithead. Accordingly, after having shewn our number, and signalized that we had lost all our anchors and cables, we ran into the harbour in a heavy squall.’⁵¹ They moored against a three-decker battleship and three men were immediately transferred to hospital. ‘Thus,’ Lyon wrote tightly, ‘ends the journal of our unsuccessful expedition.’⁵²

Few of Lyon's men ever went to the Arctic again – only one of them, incidentally, had ever been before – and neither did Lyon. Like John Ross before him, he had aroused that strange and unpredictable fury which Barrow reserved for those who had failed, through no fault of their own, to achieve the goal he had set them. There was no official reprimand, but Lyon was considered to have taken undue risks by going to the south of Southampton Island, and for a naval captain to lose all his anchors was beyond the pale.

Twenty years on, when he wrote his Arctic Voyages, Barrow seemed to have forgotten Lyon's failure and spoke nostalgically and kindly of the expedition. He even included a small line drawing of a gift Lyon had given him – a figurine carved out of walrus ivory of a dog gnawing a bone. Absentmindedly, he wondered why on earth the expedition had been equipped with only one ship, and such a poor one at that. The reason, which obviously slipped his memory, was that he himself had ordered it so.

Parry was outraged at the treatment Lyon received and told his brother Charles so in a long letter containing ‘much secret and treasonable matter’,⁵³ ordering him to destroy it as soon as it had been read. Fortunately, his brother kept it in his records. ‘I cannot express the indignation,’ wrote Parry, ‘with which I view this too common attempt on the part of the Admiralty, to let the blame for failure lie on any shoulders but their own. This is certainly the case now, with respect to the Griper, a vessel of such lubberly, shameful construction as to baffle the ingenuity of the most ingenious seaman in England to do anything with her. I know nothing of the absolute merits of the case, on the occasion in which Lyon lost his anchors, and was in consequence obliged to return – but this I know, that a good vessel would not have incurred the same risk or the same necessity, and it is the Admiralty with whom the principal, original and most glaring fault lies.’54

And so one of Barrow's most interesting, entertaining and likeable explorers left the scene.

Franklin had not even left England when Lyon returned from Repulse Bay. Remembering the horrors of his previous overland mission, he had taken the time to organize his present expedition down the Mackenzie River with ruthless efficiency. This time everything was to be arranged in advance. Never again would he put himself in the hands of Canadian voyageurs or the squabbling fur companies -although the latter had by now reconciled their differences and with an eye on Russian encroachment from Alaska were embarrassingly voluble in their protestations of support. George Simpson, who had been so against them before, now gushed that there was not a man in the Hudson's Bay Company, himself included, ‘who would not be happy to form a member of the Expedition and share your danger’.⁵⁵

Franklin took Simpson up on his offer to the degree that he accepted the services of Peter Dease, the man who had previously advised him at Fort Chipewyan, to facilitate the laying in of stores preparatory to the expedition's arrival. But in every other respect he intended the expedition to be as self-contained as possible.

The pre-planning occupied most of 1824 and, until Parry's departure for Prince Regent Inlet, Franklin was in daily contact with him, plotting their respective routes and discussing what provisions and equipment were necessary. Parry, who had hitherto been slightly wary of the man who had stolen his glory and whom he had not met since 1819, fell under Franklin's charm. ‘The steadiness with which Franklin pursues his objective is very admirable,’ he wrote. ‘I esteem his character more and more, as I become better acquainted with it.’56

Vast quantities of stores were sent out to Dease throughout 1824: macaroni, sugar, coffee, chocolate, two years’ supply of tea, etc., all wrapped in three layers of waterproof canvas – the first time Mr Macintosh's excellent invention had been used in the Arctic. Franklin placed an order for pemmican so large that the entire region could not meet it until the following spring. In no hurry, Franklin decided he could wait.

As well as food, Franklin equipped himself with specially built boats whose design was his own but whose construction was supervised by his erstwhile commander Captain Buchan. They were light enough to be carried but strong enough to handle the rapids. The largest was twenty-six feet long and could hold nine men and three tons of equipment yet could be carried by only six people. Lest he face a recurrence of his earlier disaster with river crossings Franklin also took a novel, collapsible canvas boat called the Walnut Shell, which was light, portable and, as Lyon stated, ‘can be packed like a large umbrella’.⁵⁷

He also made sure his expedition was manned almost entirely by Britons. As before he would have to depend on Indian hunters to replenish his supplies, but the active members were men entirely of his own choosing. Richardson was his right-hand man and for draughtsmen he chose Lt. John Bushnan, a reliable young officer who had sailed as midshipman on most of Parry's Arctic voyages, plus a Midshipman E. N. Kendall, who had sailed with Lyon. There was a naturalist named Drummond and a squad of British seamen who could be relied upon to obey orders in any eventuality.

Bushnan died before the expedition set out and was replaced by Back. This was not altogether as Franklin would have wished, some unknown difference having arisen between himself and Back. ‘You know I could have no desire for his company,’ he wrote to Richardson, ‘but I do not see how I can decline it, if the Admiralty press the matter, without … publicly making an exposure of his incapacity in many respects.’⁵⁸ The Admiralty did press the matter and Back, who had become one of Barrow's favourites, arrived post-haste from a promotion station in the West Indies to take his place in the party. Other than this the organization was left entirely to Franklin, with the result that the expedition was one of the most successful to date.

The one shadow across Franklin's exemplary preparations was his wife's health. In 1824 Eleanor Franklin had been diagnosed as fatally consumptive and by the time of her husband's departure on 16 February 1825 it was clear she was dying. Oddly, it was a relief to both of them. The marriage had been a mistake from the start. Eleanor was a London intellectual of great charm, inquisitiveness and lively talent. Franklin was a provincial naval captain of great charm, pre-set values and stolidity. She disliked his religion and his oxlike temperament, but had been swayed by his fame. She recognized the mismatch, writing before their wedding that ‘The question is not, my dear Sir, whether you and I can mutually esteem each other as friends, but whether we are calculated to live together in the closest domestic union. On this point I feel … a distrust even more of myself than of you.’59 But they had gone ahead, had produced a child – called Eleanor after her mother but looking like Franklin ‘through the wrong end of a telescope’,⁶⁰ according to one of his fellow officers – and had settled down to a life of conjugal incompatibility peppered by sad squabbles about Sabbath observance and the like. There was no hint of infidelity, but gossips noticed that Eleanor was still in touch with one of her earlier suitors, and that Franklin was often seen in the company of Miss Jane Griffin, even inviting her to take the Walnut Shell for a trial paddle at Woolwich.

By the New Year of 1825 Franklin was torn between Barrow and his wife. Barrow won. The decision immediately prompted a flurry of ‘idle & contradictory gossip’⁶¹ concerning the state of his marriage. But Eleanor supported his decision. ‘It would be better for me that you were gone,’⁶² she agreed wearily. It escaped neither of them that Franklin himself was embarking on a voyage from which, despite his forearming, he might not survive. ‘He was obliged to settle all his affairs,’ wrote Jane Griffin, ‘as if his wife would certainly not recover and as if he himself would not return.’⁶³

In this atmosphere of mutual despair they sat through a night together reading the funeral service and toasting their doom with the verse from Corinthians: ‘O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?’ Then Eleanor gave him a silk Union Jack, which she had embroidered especially for his expedition. Others had by now joined the death-bed, and in an agony of self-justification Franklin wrote that Eleanor ‘expressed before the whole party her decided wish that I should not delay in going on the expedition, that it has ever been her desire, and that she is not of the opinion that the circumstance of my going has hastened the crisis of her complaint’.64

Her last rites having been read, Eleanor began to improve. ‘Even now,’ Franklin wrote, ‘there are hopes for her recovery, faint as they may be and as I shall consider them.’⁶⁵ He wrote to her regularly for the first few weeks of his voyage, only learning on 22 April, when he landed in North America, that she had died six days after his departure. As the news came he was in the middle of a letter to her. ‘Your flag is yet snug in the box,’ he was writing, ‘and will not be displayed till we get to a more northern region. Mr. Back and the men have arrived …’ The letter stopped abruptly. ‘7 P.M. The distressing intelligence of my dear wife's death has just reached me.’⁶⁶ For all that their marriage had not been perfect, Franklin was stricken. He had had no wish for it to end this way.

Personal tragedy aside, Franklin's expedition was so well organized as to allow little scope for failure. He swanned triumphantly through Cumberland House and Fort Resolution and reached the Mackenzie delta on 16 August having encountered no difficulties whatsoever. Here he hoisted Eleanor's silk flag and the entire company gave three cheers and celebrated the occasion with some spirits which had been saved for the purpose. The sight of the flag caused Franklin a brief surge of grief, but not so much as to draw his attention from the fact that his celebratory brandy had been mixed with sea water and was undrinkable.

The trip to the delta had been only for reconnaissance purposes, and having seen the sea free of ice, Franklin retired to a pre-built encampment on Great Bear Lake – source of one of the Mackenzie's tributaries, just to the north of Great Slave Lake – which had been named Fort Franklin in his honour. It was amply stocked with everything from food to a small library. They passed the winter in total comfort, the men playing shinty and blind-man's buff, while Franklin lounged back reading Dante and Milton. ‘I wish you could pop in and partake of our fare,’ he wrote to his friend Roderick Murchison. ‘You would be sure of a hearty welcome, and you should have your choice of either moose or reindeer meat or trout, weighing from forty to fifty pounds; but you must bring wine and bread if you wish either for more than one day.’67

In late June 1826 the whole company set off down the Mackenzie, leaving Dease as caretaker at Fort Franklin. On reaching the delta they split into two groups. Franklin was to follow the coast westwards with Back as his second-in-command and fourteen men among whom was Augustus, the Eskimo voyageur-come-interpreter who had been so bizarrely unaffected by Franklin's previous voyage that he had offered his services again. Richardson, meanwhile, was to take Kendall and ten men to chart the seas in between the Mackenzie and the Coppermine. Both parties were effortlessly successful.

Richardson reached the Coppermine on 7 August, abandoned his boats and walked back to Fort Franklin, arriving in safety on 1 September. Franklin achieved his furthest point west – coincidentally on the same day Richardson achieved his furthest east – at a place called Foggy Island, where worsening conditions and lack of food finally forced him to retreat. This was the point ‘beyond which perseverance would be rashness’.⁶⁸ He arrived back at the fort just three weeks after Richardson.

Together, they had all but conquered the Canadian coast. Richardson had travelled nearly 3,000 miles, of which slightly more than 1,000 had never been seen before by Europeans. Franklin had covered more than 2,000 miles and had mapped 610 miles of new coastline. During their journeys they had suffered only one incident and a threat. The incident came when Franklin's boat was nearly overturned by avaricious Eskimos, and was saved only by Back's ordering a musket volley to be fired into the air. And the threat came when Franklin heard that a group of Indians were planning an ambush because they feared the white men were endangering their trade with the Russians. Franklin duly changed course on the advice of two Eskimos and left the Indians to wait in hiding for as long as they liked.

They spent the rest of the winter in the comfort of Fort Franklin, where Back entertained them with a display of puppet theatre – his cardboard figures maybe lacked the oomph of Parry's winter fests, but were popular enough to merit a run of three nights.

Franklin and Richardson returned to Britain on 1 September 1827. Back and the others arrived shortly after. It had been a glorious success, for which they were rewarded by promotions and ennoblements. Back was promoted to commander – such was Barrow's enthusiasm for his new protégé that the news reached Fort Franklin while Back was still fiddling with his cardboard cut-outs – and both Franklin and Richardson received knighthoods.

Their success was heightened by Beechey's voyage in the Blossom. Beechey had sailed round Cape Horn, at the bottom of South America, and had pressed through Bering Strait as commanded. He had passed Icy Cape, the furthest discovered point east, and with a small boat had winkled through the ice until he was only 160 miles from Foggy Island. Had either Franklin or Beechey realized how close to each other they were they would certainly have pressed on and achieved one of Barrow's greatest desires – the emergence on the west of a group that had started from the east.

The Beechey-Franklin venture was Barrow's most successful to date. It had also thrown up an item of interest that Barrow could not resist. In 1789, Captain Bligh had lost his ship, the Bounty, in the South Pacific in one of the best-publicized mutinies in the history of the Royal Navy. Bligh had been set adrift in a boat to find his way home – which he did – while the mutineers departed for a life of untouchable bliss on as remote a place as they could find. They chose Pitcairn Island, and it was on Pitcairn Island that Beechey stopped by chance for water while making his way around South America. His discovery of the mutineers and their descendants set Barrow thinking.

In 1827, when Beechey and Franklin came home, political circumstances had thrown the Admiralty into a state of flux. Money was even shorter than it had been before. Barrow therefore dropped his plans for the Arctic and devoted the next four years to writing the first history of Captain Bligh and the mutiny on the Bounty, a work which was hugely popular when it came out in 1831 and was still in print 130 years later.

This did not mean he had given up on the Arctic. Far from it. But for the moment he was obliged to bide his time.