RIDING THE GLOBE
On 15 May 1850 – the same month in which Eskimos heard the last, sporadic gunfire of Franklin's survivors – the bells of St Mary's Church pealed, the Ulverston Brass Band huffed and trumped in the marketplace and the boys of Tower Bank School started on their march. Everybody turned out to watch as the children toiled up the Hill of Hoad, overlooking Morecambe Bay, towards a 100-foot-high tower in the shape of the Eddystone Lighthouse.
The tower was something special for the people of Ulverston. Eight thousand citizens had attended its foundation. King William IV's widow had contributed to its cost, so had Lord Palmerston and more admirals than you could cock a hat at. It was a monument to Sir John Barrow, erstwhile poor boy of the parish, who had done so well in the world.
At the front of the procession marched Sergeant-Major Bates of the Duke of Lancaster's Own Yeomanry Cavalry, keeping time as his team sang the song that had been drilled into them:
The children marched to the top of the hill, saluted the monument, and returned under the beady eye of Sgt-Major Bates to Ulverston where they had maybe their first taste of beer at a reception held in the local workhouse while local dignitaries gave interminable speeches about the virtues of Sir John Barrow.
John Barrow would have turned in his grave. He had not returned to his home town for fifty years. It was the very place he had spent his life trying to escape.
Barrow had done so many things in his career. He had visited China and South Africa. He had opened Africa to the world, had discovered Antarctica and had prized apart the mandibles of the Arctic. He had set in motion the largest and most expensive series of explorations in the history of mankind. Nothing similar would be attempted until the US and Soviet space programmes of more than a century later. And even then there was little comparison. Whereas the space programme involved bodies of scientists, hordes of advisers and squalls of technicians, engineers and press men, Barrow's programme had relied on nobody but himself. His memorial was not refreshments in the workhouse, speeches from the gentry, columns in the local newspaper and a shrill encomium from a group of schoolchildren; it was the world – mapped, charted and set to rights by the men he had ordered to do so.
The ball Barrow had set rolling in 1816 did not stop at the Hill of Hoad. It trundled on until the Franklin searchers had completed their task and came finally to rest in London's Waterloo Place where, in 1866, the government erected a statue in memory of Sir John Franklin. The statue is still there today, a little pigeon-spattered, staring manfully towards a statue of Captain Scott, whose expedition was as disastrous as his own. It isn't a good likeness: Franklin is far too thin and bookish. And on its plinth it bears the inscription:
TO THE GREAT NAVIGATOR
AND HIS BRAVE COMPANIONS WHO SACRIFICED THEIR LIVES IN COMPLETING THE DISCOVERY OF
THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.
It was erected by the government by popular demand, partly as a reward for Lady Jane's persistence – refusing any monetary reimbursement she had asked only that McClintock and his crew be awarded £5,000 – and partly to shut her up, her name having become a by-word for aggravation in Admiralty circles. Like all governments, they would rather not have borne the expense but in this instance they had little choice. Whether rightly or wrongly, Franklin was now a national hero, an icon of the age, a symbol of British doughtiness and an exemplar of sacrifice to future generations.
Unfortunately the inscription is a lie. Franklin's sacrifice had been in vain; he did not discover the North-West Passage. Like so many others, he found only where it wasn't. McClure had walked the passage – a passage – but it was not until 1905 that a Norwegian named Roald Amundsen sailed east of King William Island through James Ross Strait, dodged the shoals off the North American coast, and finally crossed the Vent’ that had been sought for more than 400 years. He did it in a shallow-draught boat with a small crew and lived off the land. (John Ross would have been pleased.) It took him five years and he declared the Passage useless for anything.
Barrow's reign was finally over. It had started with one disaster – an expedition wiped out in Africa – and had wandered through tragedy and triumph to end with another – an expedition wiped out in the Arctic. Had it been a good reign? In the material balance of things, no, it had not.
Every single one of Barrow's goals had proved worthless in the finding: Timbuctoo was a mud town of no importance; the Niger had little practical application for trade; northern Australia was totally unworkable as the site of a ‘second Singapore'; Antarctica was an inhospitable lump of ice; and the North-West Passage – as Scoresby and others had repeated so wearily – was an utter waste of time. The Open Polar Sea, meanwhile, was not only not worth finding but not even there to be found – although, in Barrow's defence, its absence was only proved in 1909.
Almost everything about Barrow's missions had been wrong – the orders, the ships, the supplies, the funding and the methods. Perhaps no man in the history of exploration has expended so much money and so many lives in pursuit of so desperately pointless a dream.
But what a reign it had been! It had encompassed surreal and unrepeatable events. In the future there would be no more cocked hats in the Arctic; no more blue serge uniforms and brass-buttoned waistcoats in the Sahara; no more sailing ships in the shadow of Mt. Erebus; never again would men struggle with reindeer and sledges to conquer the swirling north polar ice cap.
Never again, either, would such a disparate and entertaining band of explorers stalk the world – men such as the obstinate Rosses, the deranged Laing, the pious Parry, the debonair Lyon, the charmingly hopeless Franklin, the bluff Clapperton and his scheming nemesis Denham, the hard men McClure and Collinson, the dreadful Belcher, and the several hundred others, dead or alive, high or low, who made Barrow's dream possible.
Maybe Barrow had produced no great benefits for mankind -unless one counts such benefits as Lyon's ear-numbing conclusion that the aurora borealis made no noise. Maybe, too, his judgements might have been more accurate – although, to give him his due, it is hard to be accurate about the unknown. But he had filled so many gaps on the globe, had instigated so many dramatic events, and had stretched the known world to limits that would not be surpassed for half a century. Was that so bad?
Moreover, Barrow's dream inspired many others. On one of the Franklin search ships was an impressionable midshipman named Clements Markham. He was greatly taken by the ethos of Barrow's expeditions, the struggle to succeed, the pitting of human strength against the far greater forces of nature. He admired the man-hauled sledges which toiled out from his ship and spent his spare time compiling the ancestry of the men in each team. It left such an impression that he followed Barrow in becoming President of the Royal Geographical Society. He stepped precisely and disastrously in his footsteps. When he sent Scott and Shackleton to find the South Pole they went with man-hauled sledges from the Franklin age, complete with heraldic pennants. Their failures are now well-known.
Markham was not the only one to be moved by the endeavours of Barrow's men. Roald Amundsen, the twentieth century's compleat explorer who sailed the North-West Passage, who discovered the South Pole in 1912 and who, in 1926, was among the uncontested first to discover the North Pole – on an Italian Zeppelin – declared in his autobiography that he had been driven by stories of Barrow's men. They ‘thrilled me as nothing I had ever read before. What appealed to me most was the sufferings that Sir John [Franklin] and his men had to endure. A strange ambition burned within me, to endure the same privations … I decided to be an explorer.’2
The theme was expanded upon by McClintock, one of Barrow's longest-lived explorers, in a speech to mark the half-centenary of Franklin's departure: ‘In laying down their lives at the call of duty our countrymen bequeathed to us a rich gift – another of those noble examples not yet rare in our history, and of which we are all so justly proud, one more beacon light to guide our sons to deeds of heroism in the future. These examples of unflinching courage, devotion to duty, and endurance of hardships are as life-blood to naval enterprise.’3
Ultimately, for all his failures, Barrow had done something very important: he had set a benchmark for exploration. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scores of men – and women too – struggled in Barrowesque fashion to reach their pointless goals: Livingstone and Stanley battering away at Africa; Shackleton and Scott impaling themselves on the South Pole; Nansen drifting from Kamchatka to the North Sea on the polar ice that had thwarted Parry; Speke and Burton quarrelling over the source of the Nile; Peary and Cook staking their rancorous claims to the North Pole; Fawcett vanishing into the Amazonian jungle in his doomed quest for Eldorado. They displayed all McClintock's qualifications of courage, devotion and hardship. But, to turn Barrow's words of 1816 back on him, ‘to what purpose'?
John Ross had put this question as early as 1835. What use was there, he asked, in opening an area ‘of which perhaps the only satisfaction that can ever be derived would be, that there is, on a piece of paper, a black line instead of a blank'? It was about as productive as drawing ‘the anatomy of a fly's toe’.4
To find the answer one has to look not at results but at motives, and there is no better motive than the one supplied by William Edward Parry. When Parry was a small boy he had been taken by his parents to have lunch with some friends. Bored by proceedings, he had been given permission to leave the table. He wandered into the library. Books lined the walls. A table stood in the middle of the room. Near the window, on a stand, was a strange, round object that spun when touched – a globe.
The small boy climbed onto the globe and began to pedal it round. He was still doing so when the grown-ups found him.
‘What, Edward! Are you riding on the globe?’
‘Oh yes!’ he said. ‘How I should like to go round it!’5
Riding the globe! There is the motive that propelled Barrow's expeditions and all the others that followed in their wake. They did not want to go round the globe – that had been done. They did not want to investigate the globe – that was left to others. What they wanted was to ride it. And, thanks to John Barrow, they did.