An aerial view of massive pieces of broken Arctic ice. Franklin’s ships would have contended with far worse conditions than the ice congestion in this scene.
ANTHONY DALTON
CHAPTER
9
THE ADMIRALTY’S ORDERS TO FRANKLIN, as issued by Sir John Barrow, may have been written in plain English, but the ice, not Admiralty orders, would decide the expedition’s route. In fact, the orders were somewhat ambiguous and following them to the letter would have been all but impossible. The essence of the instructions, however, was to find a route through the Northwest Passage and follow it to the Bering Sea. The expedition should attempt to reach Cape Walker, on the northeastern part of Russell Island, just off the north coast of Prince of Wales Island. From there, the ships were to follow the most direct or convenient route to the west or southwest. But mere words on paper did not matter much when the ice dictated all movements.
Erebus and Terror are known to have sailed through Lancaster Sound as far as Barrow Strait. There they encountered ice too heavy for even those bull-nosed, steam-powered ships to force through, so Franklin turned his charges north into Wellington Channel, looking for open water. He failed to find a useable route but did successfully circumnavigate Cornwallis Island and returned to the ice of Barrow Strait, but he did not cross it to Cape Walker. With winter coming on fast, he had to find a safe haven in which to anchor the ships until the following open-water season, if it came.
Thanks to relics found at Cape Riley on the southwest corner of Devon Island and in a cairn on Beechey Island, we know that the expedition spent the winter of 1845–46 in the ice off bleak and desolate Beechey Island. Although blocked by heavy ice, the ships were out of the currents and protected by high cliffs. They would not need to be moved until breakup in the late spring. Moored within a short distance of each other, the two ships would have been connected by a trail across the ice marked with vertical stakes. Among the relics on Beechey Island were scattered a few hundred cans of food. Those unopened cans would one day answer a serious question about the expedition.
The winter would have been long and cold, but when the weather occasionally relented, the men could walk ashore on a marked route to stretch their legs, a small but important luxury. A storehouse and a smithy had been built ashore, which also gave them more room to move around on board. A large portion of the provisions that had crammed the ships and made them so uncomfortable went into safe storage on land for the duration of the sojourn in the ice. Even though the two ships were immovable in the icy bay, the sailors still had to work. They spent hours each day shovelling excess snow off the already insulated decks and stripping ice off the masts. Beyond that, the decks inside the ships had to be scrubbed constantly to keep them clean and as free of bacteria as possible.
Three deaths occurred that first winter, apparently of tuberculosis or scurvy. The men were buried on Beechey Island and markers erected over their graves. Autopsies performed on the bodies over a century later, in 1984, by Dr. Owen Beattie confirmed tuberculosis and pneumonia, but also revealed traces of lead poisoning in the body of seaman/stoker John Torrington.
As soon as the ice of Barrow Strait began to fracture and show signs of breaking up around the ships the following year, sailors reloaded the vessels and prepared for sea. They reinstalled and rigged the topmasts and yards, which had been stored for the winter, and replaced the sails. With the movement of the ice, the ships came alive again.
There were four routes available to Franklin from Beechey Island to the Beaufort Sea—if he could find them and, of course, if ice conditions permitted. He could have gone due south along the east coast of Somerset Island and through Bellot Strait to Franklin Strait, or he could have rounded the north end of Somerset Island and taken Peel Sound to Franklin Strait. A third option would have been to pass Cape Walker and follow the west side of Prince of Wales Island down McClintock Channel to the south end of Franklin Strait. He also could have attempted to sail due west into McClure Strait, the shortest and most direct course to the Beaufort Sea, but due to normal heavy ice concentration, that route was almost certainly not open to him.
It is most probable that Erebus and Terror followed one of the two routes to the south past Prince of Wales Island until they were beset by ice off the north or northwest coast of King William Island, between that piece of land and Gateshead Island. In late summer, under heavy ice conditions of the kind that Franklin would have encountered, Peel Sound should have offered the least resistance. The ice there would have been broken, in motion and of no great thickness. By contrast, the ice in McClintock Channel would have been much more concentrated and up to six feet (1.8 metres) thick.
An aerial view of massive pieces of broken Arctic ice. Franklin’s ships would have contended with far worse conditions than the ice congestion in this scene.
ANTHONY DALTON
Unfortunately for the expedition, and due to inaccurate mapping by earlier explorers, Franklin’s charts would have shown King William Island marked as King William Land and attached to the North American mainland at the Boothia Peninsula. That extreme error meant that Franklin and his officers did not know there was a navigable passage down the east side of King William Island, or that it continued through a narrow strait between the south side of that large island and the mainland, connecting to Queen Maud Gulf. Beyond that, through Coronation Gulf, named by Franklin in 1820, the waterway led almost due west to the open sea.
Assuming Franklin and his ice-navigation advisors had worked the ships down Peel Sound to a point close to the northwest shore of King William Island, they would have crunched into the much more compacted ice of the south end of McClintock Channel. Had they then continued to attempt to push south for the mainland, into what is now Victoria Strait, they would have found the ships surrounded by increasingly heavy ice. As the season advanced and the temperatures dropped, the ships became frozen in. They were trapped and had to prepare for another Arctic winter. This time, being well offshore, there would be no possibility of moving stores to the land.
Winter ice between King William Island, Prince of Wales Island and Victoria Island is a solid mass, dangerous in the extreme to a ship caught in its embrace. The ice is a confusion of blocks of all shapes and sizes littering the frozen sea. Worse, that ice is in motion, very slow motion to be sure, but in motion nonetheless. The ice is adrift on a weak current setting to the south, but that current can move ice mountains. As winter progresses, the frozen fields crack and raft up and over other ice. The rafting builds pressure ridges, sometimes as high as 100 feet (30 metres) above the surrounding fields. None of the icefields are smooth; most are a jumble of pale blue and white building blocks. Despite its enormous weight, as the ice moves with the current, it flexes and fractures. Its power is enormous. Ships can be crushed in minutes, and Erebus and Terror were no exception to that rule.
What would it have been like trapped in the ice, listening to it creaking and groaning and fracturing? Many years later, Captain Francis Leopold McClintock described it in his journal on October 28, 1857, while he was searching for evidence of Franklin in the Lady Franklin–sponsored luxury yacht Fox:
This evening, to our great astonishment, there occurred a disruption and movement of the ice within 200 yards of the ship. As I sit now in my cabin I can distinctly hear the ice crushing; it resembles the continued roar of distant surf, and there are many other occasional sounds; some of them remind me of the low moaning of the wind, others are loud and harsh, as if trains of heavy wagons with ungreased axles were slowly labouring along. Upon a less-favoured night these sounds might be appalling; even as it is, they are sufficiently ominous to invite reflection.
Once their ships had become trapped in the ice, the officers and men on board Erebus and Terror would have had to listen to the cacophony day and night for months at a time. They would never have been free of the fear that the next explosion of ice against ice might crush the two ships. Despite that fear, they had nowhere else to go. The world of ice outside the wooden hulls had become their prison.