EREBUS AND TERROR
When Franklin's expedition left the Thames on 19 May 1845 it would have cheered a bookie's heart. The ships looked clean and efficient, a wide yellow stripe painted across their black bodies so that they bobbed like chunky hornets on the Thames. The crews were keen and the ice-masters were experts in their trade. They carried three years’ provisions which, augmented by hunting and fishing, they hoped might stretch to seven. And all this to cross just a few hundred miles of uncharted water.
Three years’ provisions might have seemed excessive for so short a distance. But the food was not meant for the Arctic alone. It was to see them through the North-West Passage and down to the Sandwich Islands, Britain's nearest revictualling station. Barrow calculated that they might not even have to overwinter. The journey would take them a season – as he had predicted for Ross and Buchan in 1818.
The crews, now as in 1818, were hand-picked, according to Barrow – though hand-picked by whom and for what is hard to tell. The ice-masters, Thomas Reid and William Blanky, were good, experienced men. But only two officers other than Franklin had seen Arctic service: Graham Gore, lieutenant on the Erebus, who had sailed with Back to Repulse Bay; and Crozier, who had been given command of the Terror. The rest seemed to have been chosen at random or, as in the case of Fitzjames who sailed as Franklin's second-in-command on the Erebus, by force of patronage. This ran somewhat counter to Barrow's earlier assertion that trained Arctic hands were falling over themselves to enlist.
Their collective lack of experience, however, had no apparent effect on their morale. Indeed, by the time they reached Greenland they were in the highest of spirits, on which Franklin congratulated himself. ‘I think perhaps,’ he wrote a trifle smugly to his wife, ‘that I have the tact of keeping officers and men happily together in a greater degree than [James] Ross, and for this reason: he is evidently ambitious and wishes to do everything himself.’1
Franklin was in his element. Like a charming, benevolent uncle, he won everyone's affections. He spun stories of his past experiences, surprising the youngsters with tales of legendary events that had occurred on the other side of the world before they were born. He opened the doors to his 1,700-volume library, dispensing Arctic reference books, novels by Dickens and bound editions of Punch. He conducted religious services with profound and regular devotion, and handed out slates to illiterate men who wished to join evening classes.
Twenty years before, he might have been seen as merely pleasant. Now he was viewed as an infallible deity. His officers lounged back with their copies of Punch, ate meals off fine porcelain with silver cutlery, and listened to heartening sermons regarding their success. Life was comfortable and failure was impossible. They trusted Franklin implicitly.
They liked him and he liked them. Ice-master Reid was one of Franklin's favourites, so was Fitzjames, and the busy little Gore, bustling about his natural history experiments, was ‘a treasure’.2 Franklin wrote to Parry telling him how envious he should be: ‘It would do your heart good to see how zealously the officers and men in both ships are working and how amicably we all work together.’3
An unreal Boy's Own atmosphere reigned aboard the Erebus. ’We are very happy. Never was more so in my life,’ Fitzjames wrote. ‘You have no idea how happy we all feel – how determined we all are to be frozen and how anxious to be among the ice. I never left England with less regret.’4 Charles Osmer, Franklin's purser, was almost overcome by the romance of the mission. ‘Never, no never shall I forget the emotions called forth by the deafening cheering,’ he wrote of their departure. ‘The suffocating sob of delight mingled with the fearful anticipation of the dreary void … could not but impress on every mind the importance and magnitude of the voyage we have entered upon. There is something so thrilling in the true British cheer.’5
Here was the Victorian explorer par excellence: a brave, patriotic chap, steadfast but daring, manly but emotional, confident but modest, willing to carry the banner of queen and country to the furthest reaches of the world; ready not only to face the void but to stare it down, and to do so in blind, cheerful ignorance.
On the Terror, by contrast, conditions were more sombre. Crozier was still downcast at his rejection by Sophia Cracroft, and carried his gloom into his official duties. ‘All goes smoothly,’ he wrote to Ross in his ungrammatical fashion, ‘but James dear I am sadly alone, not a soul have I in either ship that I can go and talk to “No congenial spirit as it were.” I am generally busy but it is a very hermitlike life.’6 Crozier lacked the other men's confidence in Franklin. The big man, he wrote, was ‘very decided in his own views but has not good judgement’. He worried that the expedition would ‘blunder into the ice and make a second 1824 out of it’.7 He also feared, like Scoresby, that they had left too late in the season. ‘James I wish you were here,’ he wrote to Ross. ‘I would then have no doubt as to our pursuing the proper course.’8 He had a presentiment he would never come back alive.
Franklin had the same presentiment – though it would never be made public until many years later. While preparing for the trip, he had fallen asleep by the fire. In the chair opposite, Lady Jane was sewing a silk Union Jack in the by-now customary way. Playfully, she threw it over his feet. Franklin woke in horror, and warned her never to do it again. In the Royal Navy, the only time a man was wrapped in a Union Jack was when he was dead.
On 26 July 1845, Franklin's ships were spotted by two whalers, waiting for the ice to clear off Lancaster Sound. The whalers reported that they were cheerful, confident and had every expectation of success. Franklin said he could make his supplies spin out for at least five years if he had to.
Neither the Erebus nor the Terror nor the 133 men aboard them were ever seen again.
Within two years the expedition was destroyed – vaporized would be a better word – by an unknown calamity that sprayed human debris across the dark, unknown heart of the Arctic. In decades to come, explorers would pick wonderingly through the bundles of cloth, whitened bones, personal articles, stacks of supplies and scraps of wood that comprised the remains of the best-equipped Arctic fleet to have left England's shores. Two of Franklin's men were eventually found. They lay in a boat drawn up on the shore, with loaded muskets and a small supply of food by their sides. One, obviously an officer, wore a fur coat. Their skeletal grins gave no answer to a question that would burn for more than 150 years.
On 9 February 1847, true to his word, John Ross marched into Whitehall clutching a sheaf of maps and documents. He was ready, he announced, to rescue his friend Franklin. Word was passed to the Admiralty Board, which was then in session. A harried officer came out, took Ross's message, and went back inside. A few minutes later a head came round the door. No rescue expedition was being contemplated at the present. The head withdrew and the door closed behind it.
Ross was mortified. He tried again, incorporating into his outline the tempting idea of a sledge journey to the North Pole once the rescue had been accomplished. It was planned to the smallest detail, right down to the shop in Trondheim where the expedition should buy its winter clothes. The result was the same.
Dr King also proposed a rescue party, travelling overland down the Great Fish River to explore the western coast of Boothia where he was convinced Franklin would be. He never received a reply.
Throughout that spring and summer the Admiralty maintained its position. ‘I do not think there is the smallest reason of apprehension or anxiety for the safety and success of the expedition under the command of Sir John Franklin,’9 James Ross wrote on 2 March. He was supported by Barrow, Sabine, Back, Beechey, Parry, Richardson and all the other Arctic luminaries. Only Beaufort had a niggling suspicion that all might not be well. ‘Though I would not let a whisper of anxiety escape from me,’ he told James Ross, ‘one must perceive that if he be not forthcoming by next winter, some substantive steps must be taken in 1848 – and for that step certain measures must be set on foot in 1847.’10 Interestingly, this letter had been written in January, before John Ross had started agitating for a rescue. Apparently Beaufort's doubts were later soothed.
After all, what was the cause for worry? Franklin had been away only two winters and had supplies, as he had stated, for another three. If John Ross had survived four years in the Arctic Franklin could last as long if not longer.
John Ross was furious at his rejection. He was even angrier when Parry, Sabine, Richardson and James Ross voiced doubts that he had ever brought the subject of rescue to Franklin's attention. ‘I am not surprised that the former (particularly Sir James Ross) whose hostility to me has long been notorious, should attempt to cast doubts on the veracity of my statements,’11 he fumed in a letter to the Admiralty. ‘These gentlemen would treat whatever emanated from me as an “absurdity”.’12 Behind it he saw the hand of his old enemy. ‘I beg leave to state that it was not uncommon for Sir John Barrow to withhold from the Board to which he was secretary, any Communication creditable to me and if Sir John Franklin mentioned to him my suggestion, that was quite sufficient for its omission.’13
Undeterred, John Ross approached the Marquis of Nottingham, President of the Royal Society. ‘You will go and get frozen in like Franklin, and we shall have to send after you!’14 was Nottingham's retort. As a gesture, however, he agreed to consult experts on the matter. The experts, of course, were the Admiralty cabal who thought there was no need for a rescue expedition and so the door was again shut in Ross's face.
John Ross thrived on this kind of confrontation. He spent the rest of the year pestering every important organization in London, down to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At the same time he was mustering affidavits for a resounding rebuttal of Barrow's derogatory Voyages, which had come out the year before. Meanwhile James Ross was putting in readiness the very mission which he had so publicly pooh-poohed. On 8 November he announced his willingness to ‘take command of any expedition their Lordships may contemplate sending to the relief of … Captain Sir John Franklin’.15 He was accepted a month later.
When John Ross heard how he had been outmanoeuvred, he congratulated the Admiralty on their choice. His nephew, he wrote with double-edged significance, ‘was a very clever man’.16 Privately, however, he thought James Ross's expedition was all wrong. His nephew wanted to take two heavy steam ships, like Franklin's, to scour the inlets off Barrow Strait. John Ross wanted him to take a flotilla of four smaller ships – if Franklin's ships had got bogged down, he reasoned, a similarly heavy expedition would suffer the same fate. Then, because he suspected Barrow's collusion in the enterprise, John Ross suggested it was not a rescue mission at all, merely an excuse to have another go at the North-West Passage.
Ross may have been right in his assertion. But in making it he was descending to the same level as Barrow. Had not Ross himself proposed a similar venture with the North Pole as its goal? His mean-spiritedness did him little credit.
In 1848, William Scoresby recorded the first display of electric street lighting. A large bulb was set up in the colonnades of the National Gallery, with a mirror behind and a lens before. The result was stupendous: by the light of this proto-searchlight, which flung the shadow of Nelson's Column across Trafalgar Square and beyond, it was possible to read the small print in a newspaper while standing as far away as Parliament Street.
It was fitting that Scoresby should record this event because it marked the end of an era that he had, partly, set in motion. When he had first agitated for a voyage to the North-West Passage, the world had been a completely different place. Back in 1817, London's streets had been lit by sputtering globes of whale oil – supplied by Scoresby; the swiftest means of public transport was the stagecoach; and the only way of communicating over long distances was by letter. In matters scientific Sir Joseph Banks ruled supreme and the globe was an untouched mystery.
Now, that was all gone. Gas lights were everywhere and electricity would soon be commonplace. Steam locomotives snaked across the country, belching steam and hot ashes as they carried Britons further and faster than ever before. The telegraph had been invented, allowing people to transmit instantaneous messages to anywhere in the realm – and soon to anywhere in the world. As for the mysterious globe – it was no more. The Niger had been discovered, so had Timbuctoo, Lake Chad, the Sahara, the North Magnetic Pole, most of the Arctic, segments of Antarctica, the north coast of Australia, and much else besides.
This new world was no place for Barrow. At eighty-three years of age he remained active and, remarkably, had no need of spectacles. He still wielded influence, and continued to heap scorn on the head of anyone who failed to see things his way. But the eager young man who had discussed the merits of hippopotamus meat with Britain's finest brains a quarter of a century before was fading. No longer was he the young, thrusting member of the Royal Society who sat eagerly by Sir Joseph Banks's side. Now he was the eldest, the ‘Father’ of the dining club.
The great names of his prime had vanished. Sir Humphrey Davy was gone, so were ‘Phenomenon’ Young, John Herschel, Nevil Maskeleyne and John Rennie. There were no more brilliant eccentrics such as Henry Cavendish who wore the same mildewed coat and tricorn hat come rain or shine, indoors or out, whose ‘shrill, disagreeable voice’17 had discussed astronomy in the most popular clubs, and whose aversion to women was so great that he would walk through a ploughed field to avoid meeting one. Gone was the society sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, and gone too was Sir Charles Blagden who had persuaded him to spend two minutes in a 320° clay furnace just to see what happened. They were all dead, leaving only memories and – in the case of Henry Cavendish – a houseful of jewel-encrusted women's underwear.
Barrow joined their ranks at 1 p.m. on 23 November 1848. He ploughed his misdirected furrow to the end. In one of his last letters, written shortly before his death, he castigated a would-be explorer's achievements: ‘I do not think there is a single line in these pages, which I herewith return, worthy of publishing in the Geographical or any other journal, nor do I think anything is to be expected from Capt. [?] – he is merely hashing up old matters and not discoveries, and has wholly laid aside the instructions of Lord Stanley, which were calculated to ascertain with safety, the direction of the ridges and the rivers which, like the bones and blood-vessels of animals, lead to the geographical outline of a country.’18 This letter can be found in the Royal Geographical Society archives. The name of the unfortunate officer is illegible, but it reads suspiciously like Sturt, one of the great pioneers of Australian exploration.