FRANKLIN'S FATE
The sensation aboard the Investigator was incredible. When the news of Pim's arrival broke the lower deck dismissed it as a joke. Then, as the realization dawned, they rushed for the stairs. Even sick men dragged themselves from their hammocks so that they could touch their rescuers and reassure themselves that they were not dreaming.
Pirn and his two sledgers watched aghast as McClure's white, haggard men emerged from the hatch and crawled towards them like so many maggots. Pirn distributed a large piece of bacon from his stores, which was devoured immediately. But the habits of starvation died hard. Come the evening, the crew lined up and began the customary process of drawing lots for who should dispense their evening ‘meal’ – a can of tea and a little piece of biscuit. Pirn and his men broke down and cried.
McClure, who was obviously a little mad, could not believe his luck. For him, Pim's arrival meant not salvation but another chance at the Passage – and another chance, though he never said as much, to claim the £10,000 prize for its completion. However, the situation called for a finesse that was beyond his current state of mind.
On 8 April he sledged with Pirn to the Resolute and told its captain, Henry Kellett, that all was fine. If Kellett would just take his weakest men on board, McClure could complete the Passage with the remainder. Before leaving he had instructed Armstrong to keep the crew on their existing regime. If anybody queried his ability to complete the passage McClure wanted to show that they could survive on their current food stocks.
He might have got away with it – Kellett was halfway to believing him – had he not made the mistake of ordering Armstrong to bring the weaker half of the crew in his wake. When the sad column completed the journey on 2 May, some blind, some insane, some lame, all of them scorbutic and several suffering from severe frostbite, having thrown aside their warm clothes to lighten their load, Kellett was appalled. Armstrong also brought the news that another two men had died shortly after McClure's departure. He laid their deaths squarely on the captain's decision to maintain starvation rations.
Kellett could not ignore the facts. Although sympathetic to McClure's situation, he was senior to him and therefore responsibility for the wrecked mission was his. He told McClure that the decision would be reached by independent medical advice. McClure sledged back to the Investigator with Armstrong and Kellett's surgeon, a man called Domville, on 19 May. The medical men reached a unanimous diagnosis – every single ‘healthy’ man on board the Investigator was suffering from scurvy. To continue would mean certain death. McClure fought to the end. Calling his men on deck he asked them to step forward if they wanted to continue the journey. Only four out of twenty did so.
The Investigator was scrubbed top to bottom prior to their departure. From stem to stern, everything was arranged in neat order, ‘so as to be immediately available for any party whom adverse fate might compel to seek for succour in the Bay of Mercy’.1 McClure called the men to order for a final speech – ‘not at all complimentary’,2 Armstrong wrote – and then they hoisted the colours and left.
On 17 June McClure arrived back at the Resolute with the residue of his crew, thereby traversing the Arctic, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, for the first time in the history of mankind.*
But McClure's troubles were not yet over. Having quit the deathtrap of Mercy Bay he was now in the equally hazardous position of belonging to Belcher's rescue squadron. The Resolute had anchored at Dealy Island, off Melville Island, in the company of the Intrepid under Commander McClintock. It had been McClintock who had sledged to Melville Island and had found there a letter left by McClure the previous year giving the Investigator’s position. While Pirn had gone to find McClure, McClintock had sledged west with nine men to find Franklin. It was a superhuman effort, involving the man-haul of up to 280 pounds per man over a distance of 1,328 miles in 106 days. But it achieved nothing beyond the discovery of a small, barren island, at the cost of the near destruction of his team. When McClintock returned, shortly after McClure had shifted his crew across the ice, one man was dead, two others were on the point of death and the rest were so racked by the ordeal that they did not recover for another twelve months.
In August 1853 the two ships headed for home, by now carrying more sick men than healthy. They went only 100 miles east before the sea froze around them. Yet another winter beckoned for McClure and his crew. His second mate died of pneumonia on 14 September and in the absence of any nearby land was tipped through a square hole that had been cut 200 yards away in the ice. The wind was from the north-west and the temperature was 57 °F below freezing.
Only two men got away to safety that season: McClure's Lt. Cresswell and the deranged Lt. Wynniat, who were sledged to Belcher's depot ship, the North Star off Beechey Island, and caught a ride home on the Phoenix, a screw-driven steamer that had smashed its way through the ice to deliver fresh supplies.
Shortly after the Phoenix left, its accompanying transport, the Breadalbane, was nipped. It sank within fifteen minutes, giving its crew just time to reach safety. (The Breadalbane was found by Canadian divers in 1981, lying in 340 feet of water.)
Belcher's squadron now consisted of the Resolute and the Intrepid, stranded midway between Byam Martin Island and the west shore of Bathurst Land; his own two ships, the Assistance and the Pioneer, icebound in Wellington Channel; and the North Star, at Beechey Island. Sprinkled between them were the crews of the Investigator and the Breadalbane.
The Arctic demanded one more sacrifice before it was through with the expedition. It chose Bellot, the cheery French favourite of Lady Jane, who had returned the previous year on the Prince Albert and had promptly caught a passage back to the Arctic on the Phoenix. Disembarking at Beechey Island, Bellot had announced his willingness to carry messages to Belcher. He set off overland on 12 August in his salmon-pink outfit with four seamen and a gutta-percha boat. Six days into the journey, he went out to test the ice. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. Where he had been standing, a fifteen-foot fissure of water lapped inkily against the floes.
Shaky enough at the best of times, Belcher's command disintegrated completely during the winter of 1853–4. Transferring his flag at a moment's whim, he disconcerted his officers to the point of mutiny. Sherard Osborn, commanding the Pioneer, had previously supported his leader but now he withdrew his charity. So did Lt. Charles Richards of the Assistance, hitherto a soother of troubled waters.
Nobody knew what to do. Osborn's opinions were ‘indirectly asked and invariably contradicted’ which led him to declare that the crew were ‘a body of men especially chosen to serve with one of the most diabolical creatures ever allowed to rule on earth’. They were ‘half mad under the sting of unmerited abuse and brutal contumely’.3 A few weeks later Osborn was stripped of his command and confined under arrest to his cabin.
The calm and mediatory Richards also gave up. ‘I am obliged to own that there Is something rotten in the state,’ he wrote to Barrow Jnr. Belcher was ‘much broken down in health, and … his temper is more than proportionately affected by it … Support him I must under any circumstances, tho’ I see and know he is acting most injudiciously. I only hope I can escape without discredit.’4
Even McClure was a little taken aback at Belcher's behaviour. ‘Things are as bad as can be or as you might expect under B.,’ he wrote to James Ross. ‘Nothing but Courts Martial he, but as their Lordships will decide these matters, best it is kept quiet until it becomes public which it must very speedily.’ As for the Arctic, it was a place ‘which I hope to have done with forever’.5
The story of Belcher's mission could fill a book of its own. Suffice to say that he decided his ships were lost – quite unreasonably, according to Kellett – and ordered every single man on board the North Star.
The ice broke in mid-August 1854, and Belcher fled for home. Had it not been for the providential arrival of two more supply ships, the North Star would have had no less than six ships’ companies crammed aboard. Belcher's disgrace was complete. He had lost four ships, had found nothing of Franklin and, in his rush to save his skin, had neglected to explore the vicinity of King William Land, the only remaining place where Franklin might yet be found. He had also abandoned Collinson and the Enterprise.
Collinson, in fact, arrived home in 1855, having penetrated very creditably to within forty miles of King William Island. However, his crew was barely functioning. By the time he emerged from the Arctic, his first, second and third officers were all under arrest. So was his second ice-master, Francis Skead, who had been shut up in his cabin for thirty-two months. The only officers still at liberty were the surgeon and his assistant. Meanwhile the ship was being operated by one of the mates. Accusations flew: Collinson was a liar, a tyrant, a drunkard, a bully; he was a coward who had failed at every opportunity to press ahead; he was stupid, incompetent, careless – the list was endless. Collinson responded by calling for the whole lot to be court-martialled. They, in turn, swore that they would stake their very commissions to have Collinson brought to trial. And so it went on.
In the end it all fizzled out inconclusively. But there was one last reminder of the Admiralty's Arctic debacle. In 1855 the Resolute broke free from the ice and floated down Lancaster Sound. It was picked up by an American whaler who was so riddled with glee at salvaging one of Her Majesty's indomitable ships that he left his own ship to be collected the next year and sailed home in triumph aboard the Resolute. He sold it to the US Navy who, with equal glee, polished it until it shone and returned it to Queen Victoria. (In an odd game of diplomatic pass-the-parcel it was later chopped up and made into a desk which was handed back to the US President. The desk is still in the Oval Office.)
The Admiralty was through with Barrow's Arctic business. It gave McClure £10,000 for his trouble – Collinson was most put out – wrote Franklin off as a loss, and called it a day. Not a moment too soon, as far as England's fickle public was concerned. The Hull Advertiser spoke for all when it said: ‘We hope that our countrymen will all agree that the mania of Arctic Expeditions has lasted long enough … We admit the claim of science but not to the extent of repeated wholesale sacrifices of human life.’6 Franklin had been fun while he lasted. Now there was something else to keep people interested: the Crimean War.
What had happened to Franklin? It was John Rae, the Hudson's Bay Company overland man, who found out. Even as Belcher was planning his departure, Rae was zipping across the Arctic, his aim being to explore the one blank space the Admiralty had left unfilled: King William Land. Approaching overland from Repulse Bay he met a group of Eskimos who told him, in gruesome detail, of an event that had taken place four winters before in 1849–50.
To summarize Rae's account, the Eskimos had met a group of forty men dragging a boat southwards down King William Land. They were led by a tall, stout, middle-aged officer (possibly Crozier). They were all very thin and indicated by sign language that their ships had been crushed in the ice. They purchased a seal from the Eskimos.
Later in the season, when the ice was still firm, the Eskimos had crossed to the North American mainland, and had discovered the remains of the party lying a day's march from the Great Fish River. Bodies were scattered all over the place, some in tents, others under the boat, which had been turned over to provide a shelter, and others simply lying in the open. The officer had a telescope over his shoulder and a double-barrelled gun beneath him. Many of the bodies had been hacked with sharp knives and the cooking pots contained human remains. The number of dead in that place was thirty. On a nearby island they discovered another five corpses. Not all the party had died, as became obvious later in the year when the Eskimos heard gunshots – presumably some time after May, when the game came north again.
In confirmation of their story the Eskimos sold Rae a number of articles they had picked up at the scene: a silver table-spoon with the initials ‘F.R.M.C (Crozier), a silver fork with the initials ‘H.D.S.G.’ (Harry Goodsir, assistant surgeon on the Erebus), three more silver forks with the initials ‘A.McD.’ (Alexander McDonald, assistant surgeon on the Terror), ’G.A.M.’ (Gillies A. McBean, second master on the Terror), and ‘J.S.P.’ (John S. Peddie, surgeon on the Erebus), a round silver plate inscribed ‘Sir John Franklin, K.C.B.’, and a star of the Royal Guelphic Order inscribed with the date 1835 and the ironic motto Nec aspera terrent- ’Difficulties do not terrify’.
The truth was out. Hurrying back to York Factory, Rae despatched his news to England on 1 September. It was greeted with relief by the Admiralty – they now had absolutely no reason to keep on searching -and with stunned horror by Lady Franklin and the Arctic Council. To return with a few relics was one thing but to accompany them with a story of cannibalism and wholesale death by starvation was beyond the pale.
Doubts were raised. Had Rae visited the spot where the deaths had occurred? No. Could he explain why Franklin's men had gone south to the Great Fish where they knew from previous expeditions that there would be no food at that time of the year? No. Had he anything to support his disgusting and most un-English tale other than the word of a few untutored natives who could count no higher than five? No.
While the dust was rising over Rae's report, the Hudson's Bay Company sent another overland team under a chief factor called James Anderson to explore Montreal Island, the only island in the Great Fish estuary that might correspond to the one on which the Eskimos had found five bodies. He came across a site where a boat had obviously been repaired. Chunks of wood littered the ground, hacked by unskilled hands. A segment of straking bore the word ‘Erebus’ beneath its black paint. There were various tools, pieces of bunting, and one or two sections of snowshoe bearing the name Stanley, surgeon on the Erebus. But there were no graves, no corpses, no human remains. He went on to search a large stretch of mainland coastline. Again nothing, not a single bone.
Lady Jane and her supporters were overjoyed. Something had happened to the Erebus and Terror, that much was certain. Although it was now ten years since the expedition had sailed from England, some of its members might still be alive. Lady Jane had to admit that her husband was probably not one of them – by now he would be seventy years old – but some of the younger and fitter members might have survived with the help of the Eskimos. And if they had survived they might have with them diaries and logs containing details of the calamity which had befallen her husband. A new expedition was called for at once.
The Admiralty refused all Lady Jane's appeals. And in a vast, bureaucratic faux pas sent her a letter informing her that as they wished to wind up the year's accounts to 31 March 1854, they were assuming Franklin and his men to be dead and that she was, as of that date, entitled to a widow's pension. Lady Jane turned down the offer in a magnificently scathing twelve-page letter that she published for public consumption.
Within the twinkling of an eye she had £1,250 of subscriptions towards a new expedition and on 18 April 1857 she appointed McClintock to command the Fox, a 177-ton, screw-driven yacht, on which he was to sail to the Arctic and take one of his famous sledge parties to find her husband – or his remains. (Rae was clearly the better man for the job,, but Lady Jane was having nothing to do with such a merchant of doom.)
After a frightful journey through Baffin Bay, during which his tiny vessel was almost ‘knocked into lucifer matches’,7 McClintock sailed down Prince Regent Sound in 1858, spent a season trying to get through Bellot Strait, and in 1859 began his investigations. Interviews with Eskimos revealed that they had seen men travelling south, dropping dead as they walked – how many, and when, they could not say. They spoke of a ship that had been wrecked on the coast of King William Land. It had contained many books which were all now destroyed by the weather, and the body of a big man with long teeth. It had been there the year before and was presumably still there now – though when asked if the ship had masts they said no, mentioning the word ‘fire’ and laughing amongst themselves.
Had the ship been burned? McClintock was frantic to find out. First, however, he had to take on more supplies. Using dog sledges -he had at last abandoned man-hauling in favour of local customs – he went to Fury Beach. Much depleted by John Ross, this little Woolwich of the Arctic nevertheless provided him with a much-needed 1,200 pounds of sugar. Had he wanted, McClintock could have had his pick of tinned vegetables, soup, split peas, tobacco, flour and coal, all as good as when they had been deposited thirty-four years previously.
Having restocked, McClintock began his exploration of King William Island. He himself sledged down its eastern coast to explore Montreal Island before heading north up the west coast of King William Island. His second officer, William Hobson, was sent around the north and west. Montreal Island yielded nothing but a few shards of iron and the odd scrap of wood – much as Anderson had said. King William Island, however, was more profitable. Shortly after midnight on 25 May 1859, McClintock found his first skeleton. It was lying face down on a strip of high ground and belonged to a steward, as far as he could tell from the scraps of uniform. Alongside it was a brush, a comb and a pocket-book whose frozen pages might once have held valuable information but revealed nothing once thawed. The Eskimos had spoken truthfully – Franklin's men had fallen down and died as they walked.
Continuing, McClintock found the remains of a cairn. It had obviously been built by Franklin's crew but had since been demolished by animals or Eskimos. Any message it might have contained was lost. Twelve miles on, however, he found a message from Hobson. The lieutenant had found a cairn at Victory Point (James Ross's furthest point west), containing the first record of Franklin's expedition. It was a standard printed form, ‘Whoever finds this paper is requested to foward it to the Secretary of the Admiralty, London …’, with spaces left for dates and place-names. It was damp, and fringed with rust stains from the metal canister in which it had been stored. It contained the following message:
H.M. Ships ‘Erebus’ and Terror’
28th of May 1847, wintered in the ice in lat. 70° 5’ N., 98° 23’
W.
Having wintered in 1846–7 [a mistake; the true date was 1845–6] at Beechey Island, in lat. 74° 43’ 28” N., long. 91° 39’ 15” W., after having ascended Wellington Channel to lat. 77°, and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island.
Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition.
All well.
Party, consisting of 2 officers and 6 men, left the ship on Monday, 24th May 1847.
It was signed, ‘Gm. GORE, Lieut, CHAS. F. DES VOEUX, Mate.’8
Here it was, the news they had been looking for. Franklin had gone into Wellington Channel and he had sailed round Cornwallis Island, a feat which none of his rescuers had managed. The Admiralty had not been so stupid after all to concentrate their efforts in that direction. But if Franklin had managed to sail round Cornwallis Island the winter of 1845–6 must have been very mild – so mild that he had been able to press down the normally ice-clogged Peel Sound and reach the west coast of King William Island.
This was where all Barrow's certainties rose up and hit Franklin on the head. He had not sailed east around King William Island because Barrow had been convinced that King William Island was part of Boothia and that Boothia was separated from the mainland by a stretch of sea to the south through which the pent-up floes would be driven harmlessly into open water. In fact, the icy strait James Ross had crossed between Boothia and King William Island was the only possible way through the North-West Passage. To go west was to enter the most intransigent ice-trap in the Arctic, where the floes surged in from the northern oceans and, finding no escape, flung themselves ceaselessly against the shore of King William Island – as James Ross had noticed but had not been able to explain.
The ice had opened as wide as it ever would in the history of mankind, lured Franklin into its depths and then, when the weather reverted to normal, snapped around him. That much was clear from a second message scribbled around the margins of the first.
April 25th, 1848. H.M. Ships ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of F.R.M. Crozier, landed here, in lat. 69° 37’ 42” N., long. 98° 41’ W. Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June 1847; and the total loss by deaths in this expedition has been, to this date, 9 officers and 15 men.
And start on to-morrow, 26th, for Back's Fish River.
It was signed ‘F.R.M. CROZIER, Captain and Senior Officer, JAMES FITZJAMES, Captain, H.M.S “Erebus”.’ Despite their losses and their entrapment of nineteen months, they were still alert, as a remarkably precise postscript showed:
This paper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831, 4 miles to the northward, where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in June 1847. Sir James Ross's pillar has not, however been found; and the paper has been transferred to this position, which is that in which Sir James Ross's pillar was erected.9
The disease that attacked Franklin's ships had been fast and ferocious. On 28 May 1847 all had been well. A fortnight later Franklin was dead and in the following months another twenty-four men died too. This was an unheard-of casualty rate. It could not have been scurvy; they knew by now how to combat it; and had it reared its head the first signs would have been apparent by the time the first message was written. So what was it?
McClintock's party never found the answer. But they did find clues as to what had happened after the ships had been abandoned. Having sledged along the coast of King William Island for seventy miles they encountered a boat containing two human skeletons. The boat was a cumbersome affair, that had been lightened by the substitution of thin fir planks for the upper seven oak strakes but even so weighed 700–800 pounds. It was mounted on a sledge of massive oak beams bound together with iron bolts that weighed as much if not more than the boat itself. The sledge, McCormick recorded, had a battered appearance as if it had been dragged many miles across rough country.
McClintock picked through the evidence like a forensic scientist. One of the skeletons belonged to a large, well-built, middle-aged man. It lay in the bow but had been so ravaged by wild animals that it was impossible to tell whether it had fallen there or had been dragged. Near it were the remains of a slipper – eleven inches long, white, with a black trim, and decorated in red and yellow. Its calfskin lining was intact as was its red-ribboned piping. Next to the slipper, neatly aligned, was a pair of sturdy walking boots.
The second skeleton lay under the boat's after-thwarts. Better preserved than the first, and smaller, it was wrapped in furs and thick cloth. Most likely this man had been the last to die. Next to him lay five watches and two double-barrelled guns propped, loaded, muzzle upwards, against the boat's side. Books were scattered about, among them A Manual of Private Devotion inscribed on the title-page, ‘G. Back; to Graham Gore.’ Others bore similar inscriptions to ‘G.G.’.
Strewn throughout the boat was an improbable amount of equipment. There were cloth winter boots, sea-boots, heavy ankle boots and strong shoes. There were silk handkerchiefs – black, white and patterned – towels, soap, sponges, toothbrushes, and hair combs. There were gun-covers, twine, nails, saws, files, powder, bullets, a glove whose fingers were packed with shot, cartridges, wads, knives -dinner and clasp – needle-and-thread cases, boxes of gunners’ slow matches, bayonet scabbards, knife sheaths and two rolls of sheet lead. There was also a small amount of tobacco, forty pounds of chocolate, twenty-six pieces of Sir John Franklin's silver, some sealing wax, and an empty tin that had once held twenty-two pounds of meat.
McClintock recorded it all with awe. But what amazed him the most was that the boat and its sledge were not pointing south, but north. Gore and his unknown companion had not been trying to escape; they had been heading back to their ships.
At Victory Point, the mystery deepened amidst a gallimaufry of discarded equipment. A huge pile of winter clothing rose almost to McClintock's shoulders. Next to it were four heavy stoves, a collection of iron hoops, a single wooden block from the ship's rigging, strips of lightning conductor, brass curtain rods, a complete medicine chest -'the contents in a remarkable state of preservation’10 – a scattering of scientific instruments and a sextant, leather-covered against frost but with its coloured eye-pieces removed – possibly for use as lenses against snow-blindness. Other rubbish was strewn around, from boot polish to bibles. The only item notably absent was food.
What did it all mean? Why had Crozier's refugees dragged so many inessentials ashore? And why had they left behind important items such as winter clothes, medicines and navigational gear? What had Gore been doing with his boatful of silk handkerchiefs, sponges and chocolate, returning to a place where there was every comfort known to Victorian life save food? And where was that food anyway? Where were the tins of meat and vegetables with which the expedition had been so lavishly stocked? They could not all have been consumed by 1848 – even had Franklin not brought aboard fresh game he would still have tons of provisions in reserve, far more than could be carried on sledges – and McClintock had found only the barest evidence of discarded tins as he retraced the survivors’ route along King William Island. Possibly the tins had been filched by passing Eskimos but McClintock reckoned it unlikely; nothing else had been touched as would have been the case had the sites been disturbed.
Further north lay other mysterious remains. Three miles on from Victory Point was a cairn containing an empty canister. Beyond that was another cairn that yielded nothing. Further still, at the tip of King William Island, a third cairn was surrounded by the remains of three small tents, some scraps of clothing and a few blankets. A folded sheet of white paper had been tucked into the rocks but it yielded nothing, even under a microscope. Two corked bottles had maybe contained something of importance, but they were broken, their messages long since blown away by the same bitter north-west winds that had forced the ice onto Franklin's ships. The cairn was excavated and a trench dug around it to a distance of ten feet, but nothing more was found.
By August both McClintock and Hobson were back on board the Fox. Every man was exhausted and two were suffering from scurvy. They had no option but to sail home. On 6 August they got up steam, McClintock helping the weakened stokers, and two days later pushed north through mushy ice towards a watery sky, reaching the English Channel on the 20th. As far as Britain was concerned, the Franklin search was at an end.
In the last ten years stupendous sums had been expended on the errant captain and his crew. The Admiralty had disbursed approximately £675,000 in addition to which Lady Jane had spent £35,000 of her own and other's money. On top of this the US government had contributed $150,000, and a single American citizen, Henry Grinnell, had poured no less than $100,000 into the endeavour.
What had been achieved? Very little, at the cost of many lives and many ships. True, the Arctic had been given a thorough, cartographic enema. Ships had squeezed into every available crack of its intestines. More than 40,000 miles had been covered by sledge, more than 8,000 miles of coastline had been minutely examined, Wellington Channel had been explored and the archipelago that interposed itself between Parry's 1819 north and Franklin's 1822 south had been charted to within an inch of its life.
Beyond a catalogue of baffling and contradictory evidence, however, the Franklin mystery was unresolved. Where was he? What had happened to his officers and men? It was possible to draw a tentative track of his expedition's progress, but the track could be interpreted a thousand different ways. In the absence of his journals, all that could be said about Franklin was that he and his men had died. Why, where and how remained unknown.
Gulp by gulp the Arctic swallowed the remaining evidence. On King William Island ice turned to slush, slush to yielding bog, and bog to ice again, each successive season sucking the remains into a layer of earth and moss that was pressed down by new layers of fast-freezing snow and new layers of mystery. Whatever journals that remained to tell the tale of the expedition's end were drawn into the cycle. Nothing would ever be found.
In summer, the mosquitoes that Franklin had been reluctant to kill buzzed over King William Island. In winter, the ice that he had been unafraid to face broke against its shores. And the North-West Passage that he had sought so disastrously curled round its eastern coast, an eternal symbol of futility.
* Intriguingly, among his men was a black seaman by the name of Anderson. Thus a black man was present not only at the discovery of the North Pole (Matthew Henson, 1909) but also at the first crossing of the North-West Passage.