THE OVERLANDERS
By some strange twist of reasoning John Ross's failure to find the North-West Passage became absolute proof of its existence. Everyone was convinced that its discovery was at hand. ‘I feel more confident than I have ever previously ventured to feel,’ Sabine wrote as early as December 1833, ‘that the probability of accomplishing a passage is now so great as fully to justify the attempt.’1 Richardson was equally sanguine. ‘I have no doubt that a passage will ultimately be found,’2 he told James Ross the following year. Before they could act, however, they had to see what Back had discovered on his rescue mission overland.
Back had sailed from England on 17 February 1833 accompanied by three seamen and a waspish little surgeon called Dr Richard King whom Back described as Very amiable and will make a good voyageur’.3 Four months later the team were at Fort Alexander on Lake Winnipeg, poised to strike north to Great Slave Lake. From there their destination was the Great Fish River, unrecorded on any map but of whose existence Back had been told by an Indian in 1820 and which he hoped would lead them in the direction of Boothia Felix.
The last time he was in the region Back had been castigated for his overbearing attitude by Governor George Simpson. This time he provoked an opposite reaction from Thomas Simpson, the twenty-five-year-old cousin of George, who was a clerk with the Hudson's Bay Company. In Thomas Simpson's opinion Back was ‘deficient, I should say in that commanding manner with the people so necessary in this savage country’, but otherwise he seemed ‘a very easy, affable man’.4
Leading a party that now numbered twenty, Back set off for the Great Fish. His method was identical to that used by Franklin on his two previous missions: boats and portage. And although he spent most of his time scouting ahead of his men in a canoe, leaving the day-to-day organization to King – who commented on the fact – he ran a well-organized and successful enterprise, following the river down ‘a violent and tempestuous course of five hundred and thirty geographical miles, running through an iron ribbed country without a single tree on the whole line of its banks’.5
By this time Back was no longer trying to rescue Ross, news of whose safe arrival home had been despatched to the Arctic in the closing months of 1833. However, as he was already in place he had been instructed to carry on and find what he could. The general feeling – in Canada, at least – was that it might satisfy his sense of self-importance if he was allowed to map the odd undiscovered mile.
The journey was not without its difficulties, which were noted by a Hudson's Bay man called MacTavish who had a low opinion of Back. They ‘have been playing the same tune’, he wrote, ‘they have starved this winter again’.6 It was not quite true. Back and his men did not starve, but hundreds of Indians who had gathered outside his encampment did. ‘You'll hear what a fine story they'll make out of this bungle,’ MacTavish wrote in April 1834. ‘They will, you may be sure, take none of the blame for themselves … they will return next summer, & like all expeditions will do little & speak a great deal.’7
Back's affability had obviously worn off. When he reported that the voyageurs received him ‘with a would-be politeness’ MacTavish waxed angry. What did Back expect in the wilds of Canada: ‘the capers and grimaces of a Frenchified Fool?’ The voyageurs had treated him fairly and that was enough. Back's expedition had ‘disgruntled the Gents. in this country by … the returns they made them for their kindness’, he told his sister. Back was utterly ‘heartless’.8
Heartless or not, Back reached the river's mouth in August 1834, and charted a bay of clear sea water that he named Chantrey Inlet. There was land to the north – King William Land and Boothia Felix as it happened – but he did not have food or fuel to go further. King, eager with anticipation, wanted him to continue. Had Back done so he would have discovered two vital pieces of information: that Boothia Felix was indeed a peninsula, as John Ross had said it was, and that King William Land was an island. But Back turned away, and for the second time the truth was missed.
Back returned to England on 8 September 1835, where he was greeted by Barrow's hearty approbation. Back had borne his ordeal with ‘a degree of cheerfulness and good humour peculiar to himself, Barrow wrote. ‘He never shrunk from difficulties, never murmured, never desponded. Like a true British seaman, the greater the danger the more firmly he stuck to the bark, determined to hold on, sink or swim. The praiseworthy object alone which he had in view took full possession of his mind.’9
This was not entirely correct. Back's mind had not been wholly occupied by his mission. He had commented on every woman he met, whether it be a ‘good strapping dame’ or ‘an interesting girl of seventeen’.10 Nor had he been particularly cheerful. If anything, the opposite. Thomas Simpson, previously such a fan of Back, changed his mind: ‘Back I believe to be not only a vain but a bad man.’11 When Back's journal came out in 1836, Simpson described it as ‘a painted bauble, all ornament and conceit, and no substance’.12
Back seemed to have a knack for making enemies. First there was Franklin, then the two Simpsons and MacTavish in Canada. Now, on his return, he stirred up trouble for George Ross, John Ross's brother -whom he privately called an ‘old fool’ – by suggesting he had been fiddling the expedition's books. Odiously, the first person he told was George Ross's son, claiming that his father ‘had received subscriptions from the public, which [he] never had accounted for, and had been guilty of gross malversation in misapplying the funds … to [his] own private ends’.13 The only evidence to support this accusation was that George Ross had resigned as secretary of the expedition following the safe return of John Ross. But in Back's mind this was clear proof of guilt – George Ross had been found out and had jumped before he could be pushed.
All in all, his fellow explorers agreed, Back was a self-promoting schemer. The only man not to notice Back's faults was Barrow. But then Barrow was in a cheerful mood that year, having just received a baronetcy. ‘No one can admit more strongly than does his Majesty the claims literary, scientific and official, which are united in the person of his highly esteemed friend Mr. Barrow,’14 wrote King William happily, when he informed Barrow of his elevation. The honour was certainly deserved but, alas, it was not given on merit alone. It had been proposed by Croker, who still held considerable influence even though he had been turfed out of office in 1830 when the Duke of Clarence succeeded to the throne.
A rift seemed to have opened between the First and Second Secretaries, as Croker hinted in a letter to Prime Minister Robert Peel in which he referred to Barrow as ‘my old friend and now connection’.15 However, in recommending the baronetcy, Croker was thinking not so much of Barrow as of his own descendants. Croker's daughter Nony was married to Barrow's eldest son George, therefore the title would eventually pass to Croker's grandson.
For a man to whom position meant so much, Barrow was hesitant about accepting. Titles did not come free, but required a certain outlay that he was not certain he could afford. Irritatedly, Croker told him he would supply the necessary monies but he must accept the honour on all accounts, if only for his children's sake. Barrow eventually agreed. The baronetcy was ‘unexpected and I fear I may add in all sincerity, unmerited’, he wrote to Peel. ‘It is a distinction to which I never had ambition to aspire, but I accept it, as I ought, with all humility and thankfulness, valuing it the more on the ground on which you have put it, of long and faithful service.’16
*
With Back's return the way was now clear for another stab at the North-West Passage and in 1836 Sir John Barrow urged the Royal Geographical Society, of which he was Vice-President, supported by the Royal Society, of which he was a Fellow, to suggest it to the Admiralty, of which he was Secretary. Naturally, the idea was approved.
Opinions were divided as to its exact route. Barrow favoured an approach south of Melville Island, being convinced against all the evidence that there was open water between Parry's furthest point and Alaska. Beaufort, Franklin and Richardson supported him and the latter, in a fit of optimism, hazarded that a route might even be found north of Melville Island. Two years previously, Richardson had privately suggested to James Ross that an overland expedition was ‘likely to be fully as efficient as a ship one … and much more economical’.17 But such an opinion was best kept quiet given Barrow's enthusiasm that the Passage was to be crossed by ship. Only one man suggested a land expedition, and when Richardson saw what happened to him, he was glad of his reticence.
The man was Dr Richard King, who had returned from the Great Fish River – or the Back River, as it was now called – brimming over with correct and entirely unfashionable views. In his two-volume journal, published independently of Back's, he attacked every value that the Arctic establishment held dear. He criticized the Hudson's Bay Company for their policy towards the natives – ‘the most venemous thing I have read for a long time’,18 Thomas Simpson recorded – and sneered at Barrow's ponderous ship expeditions. What was needed, he explained, was a small overland party – led by himself – which could move on foot or by dog team across the country, living off the land and probing the shores of North America until the passage was found. It would be effective and above all cheap. Compared with the £70,000 bill for Parry's fiasco in the Fury, and the £5,000 it had cost to mount Back's last expedition, King budgeted a mere £1,000 for a venture such as the one he proposed. ‘The question has been asked,’ he wrote, ‘how I can anticipate success in an undertaking which has baffled a Parry, a Franklin, and a Back?’19 Scathingly, he admitted that his chances would be very low were he to follow their cumbersome, time-consuming, money-wasting methods.
He formally presented his proposal in April 1836, describing an expedition whose object was to solve the all-important question of whether or not Boothia Felix was a peninsula. It was greeted with derision. Franklin, the man at whose accomplishments King had just scoffed, got his own back when Barrow asked him to review the proposal. ‘The plan of Mr. King,’ Franklin wrote in his large, jagged handwriting, ‘appears to me so meagre in its detail that it will not furnish any satisfactory information.’ All King seemed interested in was Boothia Felix, not the grand object of the passage. ‘On the whole this plan seems so uncertain,’ Franklin concluded, ‘that I cannot recommend it.’20
Oddly, though, Franklin felt quite able to recommend an outline put forward in the same year by Barrow which envisaged a ship being sent to Repulse Bay, or its southerly neighbour Wager Bay, and landing a shore party whose objective was to explore the southern shores of the Gulf of Boothia. The unstated goal was to ascertain whether Boothia Felix was a peninsula.
Barrow approached it in his usual roundabout way. He presented the idea to Beaufort and asked him to start a correspondence on the matter with the Royal Geographical Society. Beaufort did as he was told, and Barrow replied with an enthusiastic letter of support – puffing at the same time his favourite route south-west from Barrow Strait with two large ships. Richardson, whom Barrow had also primed to write in, agreed that Beaufort was correct in promoting a land attack via Wager or Repulse Bay. So too, later, did Franklin. Everything was going swimmingly until John Ross wrote (uninvited) to say how they had all got it wrong. Any attempt should be made by sea in just the way he had done it, and as for Barrow's alternative, ‘no man in his senses would commit such an act of imprudence’.21 Being the arbiter of the correspondence, Barrow was unable to block Ross's letter which was duly printed in the Royal Geographical Journal alongside his own contribution.
It was three against one. Ross was ignored and the expedition went ahead. Everyone expected James Ross to command it. ‘You are now quite without a rival for the command,’22 Sabine enthused. But in the end Barrow's new favourite, George Back, was the chosen one. He left Chatham on 14 June 1836 aboard the Terror, destined for Repulse Bay. Apart from the business of discovery, his instructions included the explicit injunction ‘that this Arctic expedition may be distinguished from all others, by the promptness of its execution, and by escaping from the gloomy and unprofitable waste of eight months’ detention: it is therefore our distinct orders that every effort shall be made to return to England in the fall of this year’.23 Barrow had stolen King's notion of economy too.
Back was given a choice of two routes to Repulse Bay: the disastrous one chosen by Lyon to the south of Southampton Island or the preferred one via Frozen Strait to the north, ‘which was performed with apparent ease’ by Parry in 1821. He naturally chose the latter and endured an appalling ten-month voyage during which he was seized by the ice, buffeted by floes which at one point hurled the Terror forty feet up a cliff, and attacked by an iceberg which crushed the ship so thoroughly that Back feared it would sink. Having come nowhere near Repulse Bay, he turned for home. Struggling across the Atlantic, water pouring through the smashed timbers, his fears were realized: the Terror was going down. He beached his waterlogged vessel on the shores of Ireland, returned to London and never went to the Arctic again. For this he was rewarded with the Royal Geographical Society's Gold Medal, an Admiralty desk job and, in due course, a knighthood.
James Ross, meanwhile, had been sent on a lowly mission to rescue stranded whalers in Davis Strait. It wasn't what he'd been hoping for but he had the satisfaction of knowing he had been chosen in preference to his uncle, who had also applied for the job, and at least it kept his name before the public – though the only man to show an interest was Captain Edward Belcher, a stupid, blustery officer who had sailed with Beechey on the Blossom and who was everyone's acquaintance but nobody's friend. ‘They appear to believe,’ Belcher told James Ross, ‘that if all have not escaped they are wrecked and therefore do not want aid until the summer. You must look to this and bring up such information as will settle their hash.’24 Ross went and came back again, the whalers having disentangled themselves without his assistance.
1836 had been a bad year for all concerned. Back had failed. James Ross had been disappointed. Barrow had been thwarted. In the reserves, meanwhile, both John Franklin and John Ross had fallen on hard times.
John Ross's book had not done as well as he had expected. Booth, his good friend, had advanced £5,000 to cover the cost of publication, and had loaned him a further £6,000. In return he had demanded a half-share in the journal and was charging interest on the rest. Once everything had been paid off there was little profit left. ‘If any one will give me £500 down and take all the risk,’ John Ross told his brother George, ‘I shall make them over all I have to benefit & have benefited by the speculation!’25
Ross's prospects of future employment were limited. He would never be given a command while Barrow was still alive, and having made so many enemies in the naval establishment he had little chance of work anywhere in Britain. As a friend wrote from Ireland, ‘I am afraid you have some Enemy at Head Quarters. Capt. Jas. [James Ross] is an insinuating fellow and from his plausible stories has made many friends here at your expense. I presume he has done the same in England.’26 Ross lapsed back into the life of a gentleman amateur, toying with this and that, overseeing the extension to his ‘castle’ at Stranraer, and juggling the demands of a marriage that was already falling apart. However, his friends in Parliament, who had previously helped him over the inquiry into his mission, finally arranged his appointment as British Consul in Stockholm. It was an ideal post, given his fluency in the language and his previous experience in Sweden. He sailed for Scandinavia in 1839 and stayed there until 1846, returning home only on fleeting visits.
Franklin lacked Ross's self-contained nature. He knew nothing of phrenology, steam power or other modish subjects. He had no castle to build, no grouse to shoot. He had nothing, in fact, but the ability to command ships and lead men. It was what he did best and there was no call for it.
Since his last expedition to Canada Franklin had been on duty in the Mediterranean, overseeing Greece's transition from Ottoman colony to independent nation. On his return in 1834 he had lobbied unsuccessfully for command of the expedition that was eventually given to Back. After that he had petitioned the Admiralty, stating that he was ready for any service. But all they could offer, in time-honoured fashion, was the promise that they would bear him in mind. He tried again in 1836, with the same result. He therefore turned to the Colonial Office, with whom he had had dealings during his Canadian treks. ‘I have always felt an interest in new colonies,’27 he wrote transparently. Disinterestedly, they told him the Governorship of Antigua was vacant. Franklin might have been tempted, but his wife Jane was against it. She pointed out that Antigua formed part of the Leeward Islands, which had their own Governor-in-Chief; Franklin would therefore be a subordinate. And whatever its charms, one could not ignore Antigua's size: the place was a good deal smaller than the Isle of Wight. This was not what polar heroes were destined for. She told Franklin to refuse and to point out in his refusal that the position was beneath him. Franklin did as he was told, to the delight of his friends. Beaufort assured him he had made the right decision and praised Lady Jane as ‘a woman of most excellent understanding & judgement’.28 His refusal could only make the Colonial Office respect him the more, Beaufort said.
Beaufort was right. Within a fortnight Franklin was offered a much more prestigious assignment as Governor of Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania). And he was offered it in a grovelling manner with the assurance of a £2,500 per annum salary. This was much more to Lady Jane's liking, notwithstanding that Van Diemen's Land was a convict settlement. As with Parry, when he left for Australia Franklin wondered if his acceptance would hamper his naval prospects. But when Beaufort assured him that his worries were ‘all my eye’,29 Franklin signed on at once.
Franklin was still a figure to be conjured with despite his recent absence from the polar scene. When the charming man who had eaten his boots announced his new appointment the whole country was pleased. The citizens of Spilsby, his birthplace, passed round the hat for a piece of silver plate. At Horncastle, near Lincoln, where he was currently staying, schools were given a day off, church bells rang incessantly, and Franklin was guest of honour at a public dinner. The only discordant note came from his friend Thomas Arnold, the Rugby educationalist, who knew Franklin maybe better than Franklin knew himself. ‘I am not sure,’ Arnold counselled, ‘how far this appointment may be a subject of congratulation to yourself, as I am sure it is to the settlement.’30
Arnold was right to voice his doubts. Franklin's kind, vacillating personality was not suited to a colony of convicts. But Franklin went there all the same, shepherded along by the restless Lady Jane.
With Johns Ross and Franklin out of the way the other unemployed Arctonauts battered at the Admiralty gates.
Dr Richard King was keen, as always, for an overland mission and submitted his application to the Royal Geographical Society in strident tones. He asked the Fellows to consider how most journeys ‘have been either unsuccessful, or attended with prodigious loss or risk – how great an expense they unavoidably incur compared with the amount of real advantage to be expected’.31 King wondered, undiplomatically, whether ‘it be right to recommend to the government the equipment of a fresh expedition … until one or two points have been settled by the more economical as well as the more promising agency of overland expeditions’.32
James Ross put forward a counter-proposal, in language that sounded suspiciously like Barrow's: ‘I will not trifle with your time,’ he told the Royal Geographical Society, ‘by stopping to confute the absurdly erroneous notions that are entertained by some as to the Expense, Danger, Loss of Life & hardships & privations that those who embark in services of this nature are said to be exposed to, nor will I labour to point out the many advantages that have already resulted from these Expeditions & are likely to result from future perseverance.’33 His expedition was to follow Barrow's preferred route south-west of Melville Island and was to comprise two large ships of 300–400 tons. Large ships were important, Ross explained in a circular argument of the kind John Barrow favoured, because they had to hold sufficient provisions to feed the large crews that were necessary to haul such large ships through the ice.
In the end no expedition was sent, because there was already one in the field. In 1836 the Hudson's Bay Company had despatched Thomas Simpson and Peter Dease to do the Admiralty's job for it. They travelled light, with just a handful of men and a few boats, and in two years achieved more than Barrow had in the past twenty.
Simpson was arrogant, physically strong and insatiably ambitious -rather like his enemy Back, in fact – to which he added a fanaticism reminiscent of Gordon Laing. Had he been left to his own devices he would probably have hurried the expedition straight to an icy grave. Fortunately, Dease acted as a restraining influence. This calm, laid-back man who had advised Franklin on his two overland journeys was the perfect foil to Simpson and although Simpson would later claim all the credit to himself, the expedition was very much a joint effort.
They left Athabasca early in 1837, travelled down the Mackenzie River and set off west along the coast. By 31 July the men were exhausted and ready to go home. Simpson left them where they were and forged ahead on his own. On 4 August he had the indescribable joy of sighting Point Barrow, the furthest point east reached by Beechey. ‘I and I alone have the well-earned honour of uniting the Arctic to the great Western Ocean,’34 he wrote. Retracing his steps he picked up Dease and returned inland, bound for the Coppermine. Throughout the summer of 1839 the two men sailed along the coasts Franklin had so laboriously mapped, passed his Point Turnagain and reached Back's Chantrey Inlet.
It was a towering achievement, accomplished with apparently total ease, that came within a hair's breadth of completing the North-West Passage. The Hudson's Bay men were delighted at the way Dease and Simpson had eclipsed the bumbling British navy. ‘I suppose friend Back looks blue upon it now,’35 one man wrote. As before, needless to say, this corner of the Arctic proved troublesome. Simpson believed that Boothia Felix was an island and that King William Land was not. He was wrong on both counts and his mistaken beliefs, which were given authority by his success in every other department, would have disastrous repercussions in the future.
The journey had had the usual tensions. Simpson declared that Dease had been a deadweight. ‘It is no vanity to say that everything which requires either planning or execution devolves upon me,’ he wrote. Dease was ‘the last man in the world for a discoverer’.36 Dease agreed cheerfully that he had been an indolent supernumerary from start to finish. This was inaccurate but Dease, who was a wise man, looked forward to a long and trouble-free life. He knew the truth would out eventually. More serious was Simpson's attitude to the mixed-blood voyageurs he had taken with him. ‘To the extravagant and profligate habits of the half-breed families I have an insuperable aversion,’ he wrote. They were ‘worthless and depraved’, subject to ‘uncontrollable passions’.37 This was an unwise attitude, to say the least, particularly as Simpson intended leading the same men on a new expedition into the Arctic.
Flushed with success he announced a plan to complete his explorations on a two-year voyage that would take him from Chantrey Inlet to the Fury and Hecla Strait. It would cost a mere £500 which would be supplied by himself. ‘I feel an irresistible presentiment that I am destined to bear the Honourable Company's flag fairly through and out of the Polar Sea,’ he wrote. The glory would be his and no other's: ‘Fame I will have but it must be alone.’38
The Hudson's Bay Company agreed. So did London where, to Simpson's amusement, his journey had become a debating point between the Whig and Tory parties. And so did Dease, who relinquished all rights to accompany Simpson and slipped back into his happy-go-lucky life with careless ease. Barrow, meanwhile, was delighted. Dease and Simpson had ‘quashed by their persevering and energetic labours’ all John Ross's nonsense about isthmuses and ‘the absurdities to which they gave rise’. Their journal ‘carries with it the stamp of truth and modesty’, he wrote.39 He persuaded the Royal Geographical Society to award Simpson its Gold Medal plus a pension of £100.
But Simpson was dead before he heard of either the medal or his plan's acceptance. The precise details of his death are murky. Suicide was the official explanation, but it seems that while travelling across Canada with four mixed-race voyageurs in the summer of 1840 Simpson voiced his opinions a little too freely. He was taken to a quiet spot in the wilderness and was shot.