In the published memoirs of that stubborn and often maddening Arctic explorer Sir John Ross, there is a remarkable illustration of an encounter that took place on August 10, 1818, between two British naval officers and a band of Greenland Eskimos.

The most striking thing about this drawing is the contrast of cultures it depicts. The Eskimos are dressed, as one might expect, in jackets, trousers, and boots made from fur and sealskin, perfectly adapted for the harsh climate of ultima Thule. The two men who greet them are attired exactly as they would be had they been envoys to some palm-fringed island in the South Pacific or off the coast of Africa. There they stand, resplendent in cocked hats, tailcoats, and white gloves, swords dangling from their waists, the points of their buckled shoes that once trod the parquet floors of Mayfair sinking into the soft snow – costumed actors in a savage land.

Behind them, against a magnificent backdrop of chiselled mountains, their two ships float at anchor – square-rigged vessels of the kind that defeated the French at Trafalgar but that will prove hopelessly unfit for Arctic channels. The seamen aboard are shivering in regulation wool and broadcloth, since no exploring nation has yet recognized the need for special Arctic clothing.

Officers and natives are equally startled by this unexpected encounter. The two peoples view the world in ways as different as their appearance. Almost a century will pass before either recognizes the need to understand or learn from the other.

The British officers have until now met only one Eskimo, the Anglicized interpreter John Sacheuse, whom they call Sackhouse. The Eskimos here, on the rim of Melville Bay on the western shore of Greenland, have never before seen a white man. To the naval officers, who stand peering at these strange, squat creatures, muffled in furs, the moon itself could scarcely seem more remote than this bleak, treeless shore. To the Eskimos, their astonishing visitors must be celestial beings. In a dialect Sacheuse can hardly understand they ask, “Where do you come from, the sun or the moon?”

The picture is all the more remarkable because it was sketched by Sacheuse himself. A young Christianized native from southern Greenland, he had stowed away two years earlier on a whaling ship and eventually reached England, where he studied drawing under one of the Nasmyth family of landscape and portrait artists.

Sacheuse has here recorded a historic moment, for this is the first Arctic expedition of the nineteenth century, the new beginning of a long quest, first for the North West Passage, later for the North Pole. That quest, pursued for most of the century, will foster a golden age of exploration. Ship after ship – British at the outset and later American, Scandinavian, Austrian, and Italian – will sail off through the ice-clogged northern seas on the most romantic of voyages, seeking a Passage that may not exist and has no commercial value and an almost unidentifiable pinpoint at the top of the world that has very little scientific significance.

The two naval officers in Sacheuse’s illustration are Commander John Ross, captain of the Isabella and leader of the expedition, and his second-in-command, Lieutenant William Edward Parry of the Alexander. Both men have an appointment with history, but history will not treat them equally. Ross’s reputation will be clouded by the events of this first journey. He will never quite recover from the resulting wave of sarcasm and vituperation. Parry, the taller of the two, will go on to acquire a towering reputation as “the beau ideal of the Arctic officer.” History, like life, is not always fair. Ross did not deserve the extremes of criticism levelled against him; Parry did not merit the excessive adulation he received. In the tangled web of Arctic channels, luck was often as important as skill; in the hierarchy of the Royal Navy, class and cronyism often outweighed ability. Parry had luck and class. John Ross had neither.

Ross’s assignment was to try to fill up some of the blank spaces on the map of the Arctic. There were so many of them, so much to discover! Was Greenland an island, for instance, or was it connected to North America? Nobody knew; Ross was asked to find out. Did Baffin Bay exist or was it a figment of an earlier explorer’s imagination? Nobody was quite sure. Another of Ross’s tasks was to determine its existence. But the most important of all his instructions was “to endeavour to ascertain the practicability of a Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean along the Northern Coast of America.”

That was the real quest – to find the elusive transcontinental channel that had obsessed and frustrated English mariners and explorers from Elizabethan days. As Martin Frobisher had declared, “it is still the only thing left undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and remarkable.”

The swashbuckling Frobisher, friend of Drake and Hawkins, was the first to seek the Passage in three voyages between 1576 and 1578. He was as optimistic as he was naïve. He was sure that Frobisher “Strait” led westward to the Pacific and that a fortune in gold lay on an island near its mouth. His backers were more interested in the gold, which turned out to be iron pyrites, so that Frobisher never managed to explore the strait, which we now know to be only a bay.

Seven years later, a more hard-headed Elizabethan, John Davis, a friend of Walter Raleigh, tried again. He rediscovered Greenland, which had been forgotten after the failure of the Norse colonies three centuries before. Then he crossed the ice-choked strait that bears his name to chart the east coast of a new land (Baffin Island). He was convinced the mysterious Passage existed but was frustrated in his attempts to sail farther north by an implacable barrier of ice.

Like Frobisher before him, Davis had noted a broad stretch of water north of Ungava. As every schoolchild knows, Henry Hudson sailed through this strait – it is named for him – in 1610. On bursting out into a seemingly limitless sea he thought he had reached the Pacific. It was, in fact, Hudson Bay, and it was there, after a dreadful winter, that he met his death at the hands of a mutinous crew, four of whom were later murdered in a skirmish with the natives.

Those who survived were brought home by Hudson’s first mate, Robert Bylot, whose pardon was ensured through that feat of seamanship. Bylot made two more mercantile voyages to the great bay and concluded there was no navigable passage leading to the Pacific from its western shores.

The next year, 1616, the indefatigable Bylot made a fourth Arctic voyage with the brilliant William Baffin as his pilot. They managed to get through the ice that had stopped Davis, travelling three hundred miles farther north than he had – a record that stood for more than two centuries – and mapped the entire bay that now bears Baffin’s name. They also found three broad openings, any one of which might lead to lands unknown and which they named for their patrons, Sir James Lancaster, “Alderman Jones,” and Sir Thomas Smith. These deep, navigable sounds were to play their part in the nineteenth-century exploration of the frozen world. Two led to the North West Passage. The third – Smith Sound – was the gateway to the North Pole.

After that, interest in the Passage dwindled. When Luke Foxe returned in 1631 after exploring the Foxe Channel and Foxe Basin north of Hudson Bay, he reported that there could be no route to the Orient south of the Arctic Circle. That killed all hope of a commercially practical Passage. There was a brief flurry a century later when Christopher Middleton explored the west coast of Southampton Island in Hudson Bay. He thought the channel known as Roes Welcome Sound might lead to the Passage, but all it led to was a cul-de-sac, which he ruefully named Repulse Bay. Such is the resilience of the questing spirit that a century later Repulse Bay again became a target for those aiming at the secret of the North West Passage. Once again, Repulse Bay repulsed them.

For, just as the Elizabethans had forgotten about the existence of Greenland, so the British of the Regency period had forgotten the whereabouts of Frobisher’s discoveries and, even more astonishing, had disputed whether there really was a Baffin Bay at all. In spite of the fact that whaling ships had been operating in Davis Strait for two centuries and had undoubtedly penetrated the bay, Baffin’s discoveries became suspect. Finally, the bay was removed from the maps of the time.

Indeed, except for Hudson Bay and part of Baffin Island, the Arctic region was a blank on the map. Even the northern continental coastline remained an enigma. Only two overland explorers had managed to reach the Arctic waters: Samuel Hearne at the Coppermine’s mouth in 1771, Alexander Mackenzie at the Mackenzie delta in 1789. From the tip of Russian Alaska to the shores of Hudson Bay, everything, save for these two pinpoints, was uncharted and mysterious. It was quite possible, for all anyone knew, that a chunk of North America could reach as far as the Pole itself. But one thing was certain: if somewhere in that fog-shrouded realm a Passage linking the oceans was found to exist, it couldn’t be much more than a curiosity.

Why, then, was the British Admiralty dispatching two shiploads of seamen in a new search for a navigable channel through the unknown Arctic? The answer is that the Navy had to find something for its ships, its men, and, most important, its officers to do now that Europe was at peace. Britain controlled the seas. Napoleon had been packed off to exile in 1815. There were no wars left for the Royal Navy to fight. Its new enemy would be the elements themselves.

By 1817, when the idea of a renewed search for the North West Passage was first proposed, 90 per cent of all naval officers were unemployed, eking out a miserable existence on half pay, which was not much above starvation scale, and yearning for an opportunity – any opportunity – that would restore them to service and bring them promotion. Most of the able seamen had been discharged after the defeat of France; their numbers had dropped from 140,000 to 19,000. But the officers, who belonged to a different class, were kept on; in fact, their strength was actually increased to 6,000. This time-honoured custom led to a ridiculous disproportion. In the British Navy there was an officer for every three men.

Under such conditions promotion was impossible. To reach high rank, a young lieutenant like Edward Parry would have to have some miraculous feat to perform. No wonder, then, that men who had never seen a palm tree or an iceberg were desperate to go to the ends of the earth – literally – if not for the glory of King and Empire at least to serve their own ambitions. The Navy was eager to send them. What matter if the ships were too big and cumbersome and the crews too large for effective Arctic service? What matter if the Passage was commercially impractical? England was about to embark on a new age of discovery in which it was the exploit itself that counted. Like the headwaters of the Nile and the mysterious Congo, the Passage was there, waiting to be conquered, and so was the North Pole. The race to succeed took on some of the aspects of an international sporting event. How humiliating it would be for England if a mariner from another nation – a Russian, perhaps, or an upstart American – should get there first and seize the prize!

The moving spirit behind this new attitude was an Admiralty bureaucrat named John Barrow, Jr., a moon-faced man with short-cropped hair, bristling black brows, and the tenacious temperament of a bull terrier. He came from humble farming stock in North Lancashire, and the position he held for the best part of forty years – second secretary to the Admiralty – sounds humble enough; but he was a powerful figure in the service. John Ross, who didn’t care for him, said that Barrow gave the impression that he was first secretary, and, in fact, there were some then and later who thought he was.

Certainly Barrow’s career was remarkable. He had left school at thirteen and risen to his position through a combination of hard work, energy, and administrative ability, as well as an instinct for getting to know the right people and choosing the most influential patrons. In his job he took all the latitude allowed. He was responsible for the internal operations of the Admiralty, but in that role he could be highly selective. If you wanted to get on in the Navy it was useful to be on the right side of the second secretary – and it helped if you were a member of the upper crust. Barrow, the dirt farmer’s son, had some of the snobbery of the British working class.

He has been called the father of modern Arctic exploration. He wasn’t imaginative, but he was curious. He shared with his contemporaries that passion for charts and statistics that was the mark of the English adventurer. The “most honourable and useful” employment for the Navy in peacetime, Barrow felt, was to complete the geographical and hydrographical surveys that had been launched in the previous century by such seamen as Cook and Vancouver. Napoleon was no sooner locked up in St. Helena (Barrow’s suggestion) than the Admiralty dispatched an expedition to the Congo, the first for which Barrow was responsible.

But it was not the fetid jungles of the Dark Continent that caught Barrow’s fancy; it was the Arctic. Although he had travelled in both Africa and China, he had been drawn to the polar regions ever since he had made a youthful voyage to Greenland on a whaler. A little learning had made Barrow an expert. He hadn’t even seen an iceberg, but he had fallen in love with the idea of the Arctic. His understanding of that mysterious realm was, to put it charitably, imperfect. Its known terrors failed to dampen his enthusiasm or smother his optimism. Barrow always overestimated the ability of nineteenth-century expeditions to bull their way through the appalling pressures of the shifting ice pack. To him, the discovery of the Passage was a kind of joyride – a romantic excursion into the Unknown.

Barrow himself didn’t believe there was a Baffin Bay. In his optimism he was convinced of the presence of an “Open Polar Sea” – a temperate ocean, free of ice, surrounding the Pole and walled off from the rest of the world by a frozen barrier. He was wrong on both counts, but then who knew what really lay in the uncharted North? Was there really open water hidden beyond the fog? Were there islands, peninsulas, channels? Or, as many believed, was there a clear, easily navigable route that would link Europe with Asia?

The North West Passage had glamour. There was a good deal of talk, then and later, about the advancement of science, but it was the elusive Passage that caught the imagination. Certainly science would be advanced – seas charted, coastlines mapped, thousands of minute observations recorded, the flora and fauna of the new land meticulously noted, geological specimens collected, the habits of the natives exhaustively studied. The keeping of records of every kind was a British obsession. But all this was incidental to the Great Quest. Nobody gave out handsome prizes for scientific discoveries, but there would be a sultan’s ransom for the first man who could thread his way through the Arctic labyrinth. National honour was at stake. As Barrow put it, “it would be somewhat mortifying if a naval power but of yesterday should complete a discovery in the nineteenth century, which was so happily commenced by Englishmen in the sixteenth.” He meant Russia.

To the Royal Navy, anything seemed possible in those heady post-Napoleonic days. The frustrations and failures of the Elizabethan and Jacobean explorers were forgotten or minimized. Had not Nelson triumphed over the French Navy? Every Englishman was convinced that the nineteenth century belonged to Britain. It was inconceivable that a couple of stout ships could not sweep through the Arctic in a single winter to the greater glory of the Empire. As Barrow, the super-optimist, put it in his convoluted prose, “from the zeal and abilities of the persons employed in the arduous enterprise everything may be expected to be done within the scope of possibility.”

Whoever discovered the answer to this puzzle would be rich beyond his wildest dreams. Nudged by Barrow, the Royal Society persuaded parliament to offer a series of prizes to anyone who could solve the mystery – or even part of it. The first explorer to reach a longitude of 110 degrees west would get five thousand pounds. Twenty degrees farther west, to the meridian of the Mackenzie, the ante was doubled. At 150 degrees west, the prize reached fifteen thousand pounds; and if the Pacific were attained, it would be twenty thousand – an enormous sum in those tax-free days, equal to well over a million dollars in 1988.

But there was another prize to be captured, as elusive as the North West Passage and even more difficult to attain. The North Pole represented the ultimate in geographical discovery. Like that of the Passage, its value was symbolic rather than commercial. Whoever managed to reach it would gain lasting renown, not only for himself but also for his country.

As the leading maritime nation, Great Britain could not afford to ignore this trophy. Thus Barrow planned two expeditions for the spring of 1818. He was convinced, as many were (though without a shred of evidence), that a belt of temperate water, free of ice, surrounded the Pole. If a ship could force its way through the intervening pack, the rest of the voyage would be simple. Of course it wasn’t simple, as Captain David Buchan quickly learned. Buchan was in command of two ships, Dorothea and Trent, assigned to navigate the seas north of Spitzbergen. There he got an object lesson in the power of moving ice. At one point his frustrated crews, dragging the two ships through the pack with anchors and ropes, found after three days of struggle that they had actually been pushed back two miles.

The savage storm that soon followed all but wrecked both vessels. Nipped by the great bergs, hurled from floe to jagged floe (the Trent‘s bell tolling mournfully as she rolled from side to side), they were fortunate to limp back to Spitzbergen, where the attempt on the Pole was called off. Both ships returned to England in October. The expedition is notable only because Buchan’s second-in-command, the commander of the Trent, was Lieutenant John Franklin, making the first of four journeys into the frozen world that would, in the end, claim him and thus immortalize his name.

The second expedition that Barrow planned was to seek the North West Passage by sailing up through the dubious Baffin Bay. Somewhere along its western side, Barrow felt sure, there must be an entrance that would lead, presumably, to Russia. The Navy searched diligently for an officer who had experience with ice conditions and found none. Finally, it hit on Commander John Ross, who had spent two seasons in the Baltic, which, though not very frigid, was as close as any naval officer had come to polar conditions. At that time, there were seven hundred officers with the same rank as Ross. He was one of only forty-six who were actively employed. Naturally he jumped at the chance; it was his only hope of being promoted to post captain.

This stocky red-haired Scot, around whom so much controversy was to swirl, seemed the best choice for an Arctic adventure. Not yet forty-one, he had three decades of sea experience. He was undeniably brave, having been wounded no fewer than thirteen times in battle – “scarred from head to foot,” in the words of a future polar explorer, Elisha Kane. Ross boasted of his injuries, claiming that few other naval officers in his condition “could perform those services which require strength and manual labour.” Modesty was never Ross’s strong suit. But Parry, his second-in-command, liked him on sight and found him breezy, good tempered, affable, and clever at surveys. It was an assessment that Parry would later revise.

Ross was good at surveys. He was also inventive. He had an inquiring mind and shared with his fellow Britons the growing preoccupation with science that was to distinguish the century. He had several ingenious inventions to his credit, including a new sextant known as the Royal William. He was also a firm disciple of phrenology, which had invaded England from the continent in 1814 and captivated the literati. Belief in this curious pseudo-science did not make John Ross an eccentric. Many leading figures of the day, including Jane Griffin, the future Lady Franklin, were convinced that character and ability could be determined by examining the shape of a person’s skull. Using drawings of the cranium, subdivided by dotted lines like those on butchers’ charts, the phrenologists identified bumps of knowledge, passion, and greed. Ross, in fact, called himself a phrenologist and would later write a paper on the subject, analysing the bumps on the heads of various acquaintances from Lady Elizabeth Yorke to the Countess of Hardwicke.

Ross was the choice of Sir George Hope, one of the Lords of the Admiralty, and there was nothing Barrow could do about that. The second secretary, who was ambitious for recognition, would have preferred the polished and more pliant Parry to the rough-hewn and independent Scotsman. He was never Ross’s friend; he would soon become his enemy.

Like Barrow, Ross was of relatively humble stock, a son of the manse; Parry ranked higher on the social scale. His father was a fashionable doctor in Bath, a governor of the Bath hospital, and a fellow of the Royal Society. He had influential friends: his practice included members of the nobility. Young Parry was enrolled in one of the best grammar schools in England before going off to sea at thirteen. (Ross had gone to sea at eleven.) His cultured family had wide interests in art, music, and literature, and he got into the Navy through the influence of Admiral Cornwallis, the commander of the Channel fleet, whose niece was one of Dr. Parry’s patients. In the nineteenth-century navy, as Parry well understood, connections counted.

He believed in “the incalculable advantage of being on the spot.” When he returned from the West Indies in 1817, he wangled an introduction to the venerable Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society – a man to whom the Navy listened. He cultivated both Banks and Barrow, presenting each with a slim volume he’d written on nautical astronomy, carefully dedicated to the admiral under whom he’d served in the West Indies. He wrote gleefully to his parents about these important contacts. “Independently of the immediate advantages to be derived from such introductions I feel that it must be the means of future advantage in every possible way,” he exclaimed. “I feel already that I begin to stand upon higher ground than before.…”

Barrow, the farmer’s son who liked to hobnob with members of the upper classes, took to him at once, for he saw him as an ally. He became Parry’s patron; Parry became his loyal disciple. Parry would be the means by which Barrow achieved recognition for launching an era of Arctic exploration; Barrow would be the instrument that would give Parry an Arctic command of his own.

But in 1818 Parry was no better qualified for Arctic exploration than Ross, whose Baltic stint had scarcely prepared him for the rigours of the white world. There was one man who was qualified – the most experienced sea captain in England at that time. William Scoresby was quite prepared to go. But neither the Admiralty nor John Barrow had any intention of sending him. For William Scoresby wasn’t Navy. He was a member of that despised commercial band of Greenland whalers who had been pushing farther and farther north without recognition for decades. A whaling captain in charge of one of His Majesty’s ships? The prospect was unthinkable.

In the annals of Arctic exploration, Scoresby has rarely been given his due. John Barrow, among others, saw to that. Barrow took most of the kudos for persuading the Admiralty, through Banks, to seek out the Passage on Scoresby’s evidence that a miraculous change in the Arctic climate had increased the possibility of channels open to the west. In fact, Scoresby had been making meticulous observations in this area and communicating them to Sir Joseph Banks long before Barrow entered the fray.

Scoresby was an extraordinary man, perhaps the most remarkable Arctic expert of his era. A whaler like his father, he had been eighteen years at sea, seven of them as a master. He had been given his first command at the age of twenty-one and was soon known as the most courageous and skilful of the Greenland whalers. But he was more than that. In the winters, when the whaling season ended, he had taken classes in philosophy and science at Edinburgh. Like Ross, he was inventive. He had devised a new “marine diver” to take the temperature of deep-sea waters (and discovered that the water on the ocean floor was warmer than that at the surface). He had invented a pair of “ice shoes” for walking more easily across the pack. He had produced a paper on polar ice conditions and in 1818 was completing his monumental work, which has since been called “one of the most remarkable books in the English language” as well as “the foundation stone of Arctic science.”

This was the man the British Navy snubbed when it planned its first expedition. Scoresby did not have Ross’s bulldog stubbornness or Parry’s natural charm and good looks. His face was weathered by the elements, and his nose and cheekbones were a little too prominent. He was unassuming, even shy, and a devout Christian who forbade his crews to go after whales on the Lord’s Day. Years later he would be ordained a minister.

For the past decade, Scoresby had been in regular communication with the ailing Joseph Banks, describing his scientific investigations in the chemical composition of sea water and polar ice, in the movements of the Arctic currents, in the infinitely diverse forms of snowflakes, and in the new botanical species he had discovered on the Greenland shore. In 1817, he found the coast of Greenland clear of ice for the first time in anyone’s memory. At Banks’s request he sent him details; the sea, he said, was “perfectly devoid of ice” as far north as the 80th parallel. Conditions were perfect for a voyage of discovery, and he, William Scoresby, was eager to command it.

Scoresby was no romantic. He had no illusions about the Passage. In a prescient letter to Banks, he forecast that it would “be found only at intervals of some years” because the Arctic climate and the Arctic ice were ever shifting and changing, a fact that the British naval explorers never fully comprehended. Even if someone accomplished a voyage through the unknown Arctic fastness to the Pacific “it might not again be practical in ten or twenty years.” That was an assessment that holds true today.

Scoresby in 1817 knew what the Navy took decades to learn. He scorned the proponents of the Open Polar Sea theory, a fantasy that Barrow for one would never relinquish. (Another delusion was that land extended all the way to the Pole, joining the continents of Asia and America.) The idea that beyond an intervening wall of ice lay a warmer ocean, free of impediment, was one no Greenland whaler could accept. The barrier was there; all could see it. Why should it suddenly vanish in a colder clime? To believe that required an excess of optimism and wishful thinking. But in post-war Britain there was no lack of those.

Banks would have liked to see Scoresby in charge, if not of the expedition itself, at least of one of the pair of ships being fitted out for Arctic service. In December 1817, he urged the whaler to come to London to meet Barrow. The encounter that followed was, to put it mildly, not propitious. Barrow was more than evasive; he was alarmingly rude when the two met for the first time in Banks’s drawing room. When Scoresby tried to approach him, Barrow edged away. Scoresby persisted, finally managed to corner him, and asked, bluntly, what his expectations were. Barrow responded coldly that if he really wanted to go he should call next day at the Navy Board and make his proposals. With that he turned sharply and left the room.

Banks then told Scoresby as gently as possible that all his efforts to get him a command had failed. The Admiralty could not or would not employ anybody but its own officers. He might, perhaps, be taken on as a pilot, but an officer of the line would be in command. Banks, who wasn’t Navy himself, knew something of naval snubs from his exploring years in the South Seas aboard British ships. He was both disappointed and sympathetic, but he did not have the energy to circumvent Barrow. He was old and sick with gout, confined to a wheelchair, and approaching his death. Scoresby decided to have nothing more to do with the expedition. He had come to London at his own expense – all for nothing. Barrow never again mentioned him by name or gave him further credit for helping to launch a new era in Arctic exploration.

2 The Croker Mountains

On April 21, 1818, the expedition to seek the Passage set off for Baffin Bay with Ross in the Isabella (385 tons) and Parry commanding the smaller Alexander (252 tons). These were transports. Ross didn’t think either was suitable for Arctic exploration and said so in his brusque fashion, whereupon he was told, equally brusquely, that he didn’t have to go if he didn’t like the conditions. He knuckled under. In fact, Parry’s vessel had difficulty keeping up with the Isabella, a deficiency that limited its usefulness. But the Navy had no intention of building special vessels for Arctic service. In six decades of polar exploration it never did so. After all, its main task was the defence of the realm. Exploration was no more than a peacetime diversion. The Navy’s refitters did their best to brace and strengthen the converted ships for their coming battle with the ice; but if war came they would be expected to perform a different and, to the Navy, more important service.

By mid-June, the expedition had crossed the Atlantic and entered Davis Strait, and the officers and their crews had their first view of the icebound sea in all its splendour and all its menace. Here was a crystalline world of azure and emerald, indigo and alabaster – dazzling to the eye, disturbing to the soul. No explorer who passed through this maze of drifting, misshapen bergs ever failed to record the feelings and sensations that engulfed him when he first encountered the glittering metropolis of moving ice. To some the great frozen mountains that whirled past seemed to have been sculptured by a celestial architect, for here were cathedrals and palaces, statues and castles, all of brilliant white, coruscating in the sun’s rays, each one slightly out of focus as in a dream. Some reminded Parry of the slabs at Stonehenge; there were actually some upright pieces supporting a third resting horizontally on top. Ross was confounded by the intensity of the colours – the greens and blues and the blazing whites. “It is hardly possible,” he scribbled in his journal, “to imagine anything more exquisite … by night as well as by day they glitter with a vividness of colour beyond the power of art to represent.…”

Both men were awed by the strangeness of the savage realm they’d invaded. Soon they would enter unknown waters. Meanwhile, it was comforting to encounter the whaling fleet – some three dozen ships flying the British red ensign – and to hear the cheers of the whalers as they passed through. It was, Parry thought, rather like coming upon a flourishing European seaport. But he also knew that this was where civilization ended.

From the whalers Parry and Ross got their first warning of the vagaries of the Arctic climate. The warm-up, it seemed, had ended. The ice was far more formidable than expected. The previous winter had been terrible – the worst in a decade. The whaling fleet was hard put to find a clear passage north.

The following day Parry climbed one of Greenland’s mountains to take some observations and was moved by the spectacle below. It made him shudder at his own insignificance, he said, and taught him to reflect “upon the immensity of the creator who could call these stupendous mountains and those enormous masses of ice into being.”

No more devout explorer ever entered the Arctic. The evangelical movement, with its emphasis on prayer and Sunday observance, was then sweeping Great Britain. It did not attract the apparently godless lower classes, but it did have a marked influence on middle-class Anglicans such as Parry. The movement emphasized the need to spread the gospel among the lower orders, and these, of course, included British seamen, who by and large could scarcely be called fervent churchgoers. Almost forty years later, when Parry was an admiral, he would address these seamen in an inspirational pamphlet. “I want to see every man among you,” he wrote, “… sailing under the British flag, a religious man, having the fear of God before his eyes and the love of God glowing in his heart.”

To Parry, a man without religion was like a clock without weights or mainspring. He himself prayed constantly, day and night. His sense of the infinite, already well developed, was certainly deepened and strengthened by the Arctic. In a later remarkable declaration Parry announced that he would give up his wife before he would give up his God.

The start of the quest

By July 2, Parry saw another manifestation of the Creator’s power. The two ships entered a dismaying labyrinth of icebergs. Parry set himself the task of counting them and gave up when he reached one thousand. For the next month the expedition moved sluggishly north along the Greenland coast, beset by ice, blinded by fog, and almost crushed by the pressure of the encroaching pack during one screeching gale. It was a close call. The sterns of the two vessels collided violently. Spars, rigging, lifeboats were torn apart. Even the hardened whalers were shaken by the near catastrophe; their own boats, they said, could not have stood such a hammering.

A day or so later, not far from the aboriginal village of Etah, Ross and Parry came face to face with an unknown Eskimo culture – the encounter recorded in the illustration by John Sacheuse, their native interpreter from South Greenland. Even Sacheuse had never heard of, much less encountered, this strange race of polar Eskimos whom Ross dubbed “Arctic Highlanders.” He could understand their dialect only with great difficulty.

The scene that followed was pure farce. The natives on the shore hung back, obviously terrified at the strange apparitions on the ships. It was decided that one of Parry’s officers should go forward bearing a white flag on which was painted the civilized emblem for peace – a hand holding an olive branch. The natives, of course, had no idea what an olive branch was, or what it was supposed to mean. On these bleak shores no olive trees grew – actually, no trees at all. Yet none of the white men seemed to appreciate the absurdity of the gesture. Ross made a more practical move. He put up a flag on a pole and tied a bag full of presents to it. That worked marvellously.

These Eskimos had had no contact with the world beyond their desolate domain. They were astonished at the presence of Sacheuse, for it had not occurred to them that there might be others like themselves in the world. As for the men with sickly looking skins, they were convinced they had come from the sky. They knew nothing of boats – had never seen one; even the native word “kayak” had no meaning for them. They spoke to the ships as if they were living things. “We have seen them move their wings,” they said. When Sacheuse tried to explain that ships were floating houses, they had difficulty believing him.

They were startled by their first glimpse of a mirror and tried to discover the monster they believed was hiding behind it. They laughed at the metal frames of the eye-glasses worn by some of the seamen, spit out in disgust the biscuit that was offered, wondered what kind of ice the window panes were made of and what kind of animal produced the strange “skins” the officers were wearing. They were shown a watch, thought it was alive, and asked if it was good to eat. The sight of a little pig terrified them; a demonstration of hammer and nails charmed them; the ships’ furniture baffled them, for the only wood they’d ever known came from a dwarf shrub whose stem was no thicker than a finger.

Between these naïve people and the English mariners there was a gap that would not be bridged until each learned from the other. Sacheuse made them take off their caps in the presence of the officers, a gesture that suggests how quickly he had absorbed the white way of life. It was the first small attempt – one of many that would be made in the years to come – to “civilize” the natives. They obeyed cheerfully enough but must have been as mystified by the ritual as the English were to find that human beings actually lived in this uninviting land. Yet nobody on this so-called scientific expedition thought to investigate how a band of people who couldn’t count past ten had managed to adapt to their formidable homeland – an omission, repeated through the century, that would cost many future explorers their lives.

The expedition had now reached the top of Baffin Bay, rediscovering it after two centuries. (Baffin’s charts turned out to be surprisingly accurate.) Ross sailed west to the southern tip of what is now Ellesmere Island, then south, seeking a channel that might lead him to the North West Passage. At the end of August a possibility loomed up – a long inlet leading westward that William Baffin had named for his patron Sir James Lancaster, one of the founders of the East India Company.

Was this the way to the Orient? Or was it simply a dead end, a bay rather than a strait? Nobody knew. Baffin himself had given up hope at this point and failed to trace it to its end. But Parry, for one, was full of optimism. Surely this was the route that could lead, if not directly to the Russian coast, at least into the heart of the Arctic to connect with other lanes of water!

Ross was less sure. As the two ships moved up the sound he became convinced that no passage existed. That suspicion was confirmed on a foggy afternoon at the end of August when they reached the thirty-mile point. Ross hove to, waiting for Parry to catch up and the weather to clear. The officer of the watch roused him from his cabin to announce the fog was lifting. Squinting into the ten-minute gap that appeared in the murk, Ross saw, or thought he saw, a chain of mountains blocking all access to the west. He was apparently the only man who glimpsed that mysterious range, which he charted as the Croker Mountains, named after the first secretary of the Admiralty. That was the story he told Parry and the others. Later, in his published account, he changed it and insisted that two of his crew had also seen the mountains. Few believed him.

To the stunned surprise and anger of Parry and the others, Ross, without a word of explanation, turned about and headed for home, skimming down the sound past the Alexander “as if some mischief was behind him.”

William Hooper, purser of the Alexander, expressed in his journal that day the frustration and disappointment felt aboard Parry’s ship: “Thus vanished our golden dreams, our brilliant hopes, our high expectations! – and without the satisfaction of proving those dreams to be visionary, these hopes to be fallacious, those expectations to be delusive! To describe our mortification and disappointment would be impossible, at thus having our increasing hopes annihilated in a moment, without the shadow of reasoning appearing.…” It wasn’t until the next day, when the expedition put in to shore near the mouth of Lancaster Sound, that Parry was given any explanation by Ross. Parry held his tongue; Ross, he indicated later, was beyond argument. (But Parry, who had other fish to fry, was also remarkably silent about the episode in his private journal.)

Ross’s actions were nonetheless inexplicable. He seems to have misinterpreted his instructions, claiming his main task was to explore Baffin Bay. Yet his orders were quite clear: the principal object of the voyage was to see if there was a passage leading toward the Pacific. It was almost as if the doughty seaman didn’t believe in the existence of the North West Passage and had seized the first opportunity to confirm that opinion.

But why the haste? Why this sudden scramble to return home? Parry had expected to winter on the shores of Baffin Bay; so had most of the crew. “Do not expect us back this year,” a young artilleryman named Captain Edward Sabine, the astronomer of the voyage, wrote to his brother. “… Ross will not return if he can possibly find an excuse for waiting on the northern coast of America.” But Ross had found an excuse to hightail it for home, even though the expedition was supplied with winter clothing and provisions for another season. Thus were sown the seeds of dissension that pitted Parry, Sabine, and, of course, John Barrow, against the commander.

There were suggestions later that all had not been well on the expedition. Ross was convinced that “a serious conspiracy existed during the voyage and still existed against him.” The conspirators included Parry, Sabine, and possibly his own nephew, a young midshipman and future polar hero, James Clark Ross. No doubt Ross felt he had reason for the charge. At one point, he had managed to sneak a look at one of Sabine’s letters to his sister in which the astronomer had called Ross “a stupid fellow.” Thus, on the very first voyage of discovery, there was a hint of the terrible tensions that marked so many later forays, when men found themselves crammed together under trying conditions for long months in a forbidding climate. There was much worse to come.

The expedition returned to England on November 11, 1818. John Wilson Croker, whose name was on a range of mountains that most of Ross’s officers believed imaginary, invited the commander to dine on the sixteenth. Ross was about to accept the invitation when he received a heartbreaking letter from his wife. Their only child was dead.

“I am not fit to go into company,” he told Croker. “I must write to my wife.”

To which Croker replied, “Damn the child. You’ll get more children, come and dine with me.”

This appalling response shook Ross, who responded with anger, “Mr. Croker, you have an only child of your own. If it please God to take him from you I hope you will be better supported under the calamity than I am, but I cannot and will not dine with you.”

Croker was “very much displeased.” Barrow was already furious at what he considered the failure of both his expeditions, in spite of the solid contributions each had made to science. The attempt at the Pole might be excused; nature had clearly conspired against Buchan and Franklin on that first abortive expedition in 1818. But Ross’s dereliction in not examining Lancaster Sound could not be forgiven. Ross had restored Baffin Bay to the map, encountered a new race of Eskimos, made a series of scientific observations, and collected new botanical specimens. But to Barrow, it was the Passage that really counted.

Parry certainly believed a passage existed and undoubtedly said so to Barrow. But publicly he kept quiet, as he had on board the Alexander. There would certainly be a new expedition in the spring, and Parry badly wanted to lead it. So did Ross, who had been promoted to post captain and who applied for the command on December 29.

Parry was ahead of him by almost a fortnight. He had nothing to gain by a controversy with his old commander. It certainly wouldn’t help his naval career. Besides, what if Ross was right about the Croker Mountains? Parry would look a fool if he disputed that discovery. He whispered his opinions to his family but swore them to silence. “Every future prospect of mine depends on it being kept secret,” he explained. Let the “blundering Ross,” as Parry called him, blunder further.

Ross did. In January 1819, he published his account of the voyage. This contained not only the author’s own engraving of the mysterious mountains but also a further explanation of his reasons for turning back. The sound, he declared, had been blocked by ice. That was news to Parry and Sabine.

Ross’s work was scarcely off the presses of John Murray’s publishing house before Barrow pounced. In a savage article in the Quarterly Review, he tore Ross’s book to shreds. The article ran to fifty pages and was unsigned, but everybody knew who had written it.

In his review Barrow came close to calling Ross a coward. He talked of his “indifference and want of perseverance.” He hammered away at what he called Ross’s “habitual inaccuracy and looseness of description.” He sneered at his chapter on the new-found band of Greenland Eskimos and made fun of the term “Arctic Highlanders.” (“He has transferred half of Scotland to the shores of this bay.”) He attacked the “absurdity and inconsistency of the plates,” especially those dealing with the Croker Mountains. No paragraph, however minor, escaped his scrutiny – even Ross’s description of the icebergs at night. “Icebergs display no colour at night,” Barrow scoffed.

There was worse to come. Young Edward Sabine now entered the lists. He had been hired, on Joseph Banks’s recommendation, to make scientific observations during the voyage. He’d had little scientific training but spent several months diligently studying the variations of the compass and the vibrations of the pendulum. He was outraged that Ross in his book downgraded his efforts, gave another officer credit for certain observations, and criticized Sabine’s qualities as a naturalist, which he’d never claimed to be.

Sabine fought back with a pamphlet, accusing Ross of plagiarism. He said that the commander had stolen material from one of his papers on the Eskimos and made extensive use of other material without giving him credit. Ross replied with another pamphlet claiming he hadn’t trusted Sabine’s work and so had made his own observations.

The Navy could not ignore this unseemly sniping. The Admiralty Board held a court of inquiry and decided that John Ross’s actions were not becoming to an officer and a gentleman. He was retired on half pay and never again given a naval command. Ross would be heard from again, but in the meantime, Edward Parry would lead the next expedition to seek the North West Passage.

3 Winter Harbour

Even the most cursory study of the annals of Arctic exploration makes one thing clear: many a reputation rests on luck as much as skill. The shifting Arctic climate doomed some men to frustration and even to death while it made heroes out of others. Parry was luckier than most. He sailed north at the right moment, when the Arctic channels were clearer of ice than they had been in a decade. In fact, he almost got through the North West Passage. More than thirty years would go by before any other vessel got as far; and no other sailing ship entering from the east ever got farther.

If Parry had tried in the previous year or if in 1819 he had met with the violent winds and ice conditions encountered by later explorers, he would not have achieved his place in history. In his day the shifting nature of the polar winds and currents and the implacable movements of the great ice streams were not understood. Parry himself was never able to repeat his triumph. Everything after 1819 was anticlimax. His real achievement lies not in his passage through the Arctic archipelago; other experienced officers in the British Navy could have made it through to Melville Island in that salubrious summer. His greater accomplishment was his understanding of his crew and his determination to keep them healthy in mind as well as body.

The greatest peril of wintering in the Arctic was not the cold; it was boredom. For eight, sometimes ten months nothing moved. Ships became prisons. Masts and superstructure were taken down, hatches hermetically sealed, the ships smothered in blankets of insulating snow. Hived together in these wooden cockleshells with little to do, the best-disciplined seamen could break down. Small irritations could be magnified into raging quarrels. Fancied insults could lead to mutinous talk and even mutiny, as Bligh in the South Seas and Hudson in the North had discovered.

Parry was determined to cope with the monotony of the Arctic winter, and it is a tribute to his careful planning, which the more intelligent of his successors copied, that the British Navy was comparatively free of the friction that marred many of the later private Arctic expeditions from the United States.

Parry’s background fitted him for the role. Since childhood he had loved music; he had a good ear and at the age of four could repeat any tune after hearing it once. At school he threw himself into competitive sport and amateur theatricals. As a young naval officer he practised the violin three or four hours a day (though never, of course, on Sundays). He would, he said, sacrifice almost anything to become a tolerable player – anything, that is, except his duties. There would be plenty of music aboard Parry’s ships (he even brought a barrel organ along) and there would be sports, amateur theatricals, and a newspaper, all designed to maintain a happy ship.

Parry belonged to a new generation of explorers as Ross had belonged to the old. He was the model by which those who followed would be judged, the touchstone for the British in the Arctic. He personified those public school values for which Thomas Arnold was soon to make Rugby famous. He had an unquestioning faith in the British ability to surmount any obstacle. In his observations of the Eskimos his measures were invariably Anglo-Saxon; their failings, strengths, and morals were judged by British standards. Devout, steadfast, and loyal, he believed in hard work and team spirit, was meticulous in collecting every kind of specimen and recording every scintilla of data, and saw the absolute necessity of keeping the lower orders occupied. A beau ideal, indeed.

A handsome officer, tall, slightly stooped, with curly chestnut hair and soft grey eyes, he was amiable, well spoken, and eager to please, but never too eager – just the sort of man to appeal to John Barrow. There was that certain studied diffidence about Parry that would become a hallmark of the Victorian Englishman. His journals are rarely exclamatory; he doesn’t go overboard with excitement, nor does he make too much of hardship. That would be indecent, although, of course, it would be equally indecent if you did anything less than your best.

He worried about scurvy, the nemesis of every Arctic traveller, and urged that the Navy’s favourite antiscorbutic, lemon juice (wrongly referred to as lime juice), should be prepared from fresh fruit. Along with this he carried pickles, spices, herbs, and sauerkraut. The new era of Arctic exploration coincided with the invention of tinned food. Parry was convinced that canned soups, vegetables, and meats would help stave off the disease and at least vary the traditional diet of salt meat. He ordered quantities of tinned food, which was so new that nobody had yet invented the can opener. Parry’s cooks used an axe.

He could scarcely believe his good fortune at having been given such a senior command. He was only twenty-eight, but at that he was the oldest officer on the expedition. Sabine, who had again signed on as supernumerary, was thirty, but all the others, including Lieutenant Matthew Liddon, commander of Parry’s second ship, Griper, and John Ross’s nephew, James, were under twenty-three. Parry’s ship, Hecla, was a bomb vessel built at the close of the Napoleonic Wars and therefore of exceptionally sturdy construction, “a charming ship” in contrast to Liddon’s Griper, one of “these paltry Gunbrigs … utterly unfit for this service!”

By April 1819 the ships – resplendent in a fresh coating of black and yellow paint – were ready to go. The British public was agog, its appetite whetted by the controversy over the Croker Mountains, its imagination fired by the prospect of a solution to the perennial puzzle of the Passage. The Navy had never stood higher in public esteem. A companion voyage to Parry’s, led by another officer, John Franklin, newly returned from his failed attempt to reach the Pole, would trek overland to explore the Arctic coastline of North America. (Few questioned the incongruity of a naval man leading a land exploration.) Together, Franklin and Parry would conquer the Arctic for the glory of England and Empire!

Down to the docks at Greenwich the well-wishers flocked. In Parry’s view, no other official expedition had ever attracted “a more hearty feeling of national interest.” The multitudes that scrambled aboard the decks included Edward Sabine’s niece, a Miss Browne, with whom, it was understood, Parry had an understanding. A flirtatious little incident followed when Parry amused his party by encircling the girl with a life preserver and making her inflate it.

At last the wind was right, and the ships were towed down the sunlit Thames as crowds cheered and handkerchiefs fluttered. Parry’s instructions, on leaving the Nore on May 11 and crossing the Atlantic, were to head directly up Davis Strait to Lancaster Sound and attempt the passage. If the Croker Mountains should bar the way, he was to continue north to those other inlets with the plebeian names, Jones and Smith sounds, in hopes that one might lead into the heart of the Arctic. Once again the Admiralty instructions made it clear that the search for the Passage was his primary object. Scientific work was secondary. He was not to stop to examine or chart the coastline. He was to get through as quickly as possible and deliver his documents to the Russian governor at Kamchatka, sail on to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and then return home. Optimism ran high; Parry had forecast the possibility of getting through to China although that was “perhaps too much to hope for.”

It certainly was. It was as well that Parry did not realize how slim his chances were of forcing his way through. In a bad season, when the ice was heavy, the odds were about one in a hundred, in a light season about fifty-fifty. Even in an exceptional season – and this was an exceptional season – there was a 25-per-cent chance of failure.

Parry’s first setback came when he ran into the great river of ice that detaches itself from the polar pack and pours down the centre of Davis Strait. Boldly, he had decided to force his way directly through it to the west – a short cut that would save weeks of detours – using the Hecla as a battering ram to clear the way for the weaker Griper. But by June 25 he was trapped, and a week went by before he could extricate both ships. Unable to penetrate that chill barrier, he sailed north for three weeks, crossing the Arctic Circle into Baffin Bay before attempting once more to bull his way through by brute force.

Now his crews experienced for the first time the exhausting drudgery that would plague Arctic exploration for all of the century. Straining at the oars in small boats, they attempted to tow the big vessels through the ice-choked channels. Winding and sweating at the capstans, with cables attached to anchors in the bergs, they warped their ships westward, foot by foot. Trudging along the floes, clinging to hawsers like tug-of-war teams, they manhauled them in the direction of Lancaster Sound. On one long day they toiled for eleven hours and moved no more than four miles. Once, when the Hecla was trapped, the crews worked for seven hours with ice saws to cut her free, only to find her frozen in again at day’s end. Parry urged them on with extra rations of rum and meat.

On July 28, with his men wet and played out, Parry broke out of the eighty-mile barrier and reached open water off the western coast of Baffin Bay. Soon the ears of the exhausted seamen were assailed by the music of the great black whales – eighty-two of them counted in a single day – a shrill, ringing sound, rather like hundreds of musical glasses badly played.

The broad entrance to Lancaster Sound lay directly ahead, the towering mountains of Bylot Island crowning its southern gatepost. Parry viewed the spectacle with mingled apprehension and excitement. The next few days would make his reputation or break it. He could not wait for the slower Griper. As soon as the wind was favourable, he signalled a rendezvous with Liddon and, on August 1, headed up the sound under full sail.

The weather was clear; the mysterious channel lay open. As the wind increased to a gale Parry could notice the “breathless anxiety … now visible in every countenance.” Nobody had sailed up this broad lane of water since the days of the Iceland fishermen who almost certainly had explored it six centuries before. Everything was new: long inlets – or were they only bays? – leading south and north from both shores; serrated hills on the south rising one above the other to the snow-clad peaks above, contrasting with the smoother outline of the north shore, only flecked with snow. Was there land ahead? Was the route to the North West Passage blocked, as Ross believed? William Hooper, who had been Parry’s purser on the previous voyage with Ross and who was now purser of the Hecla, wrote in his journal, “I never remember to have spent a day of so much fearful anxiety.” Ever since entering the sound he had been overcome by “an agony of feeling … gradually winding itself up.”

But the lookout, high in the crow’s-nest – a barrel tied to the top mast – could see no hint of any barrier. Here, the sound, clear of ice, was eighty miles wide. Two days went by and all hands began to feel a sense of relief. The optimists who had figured the distance and bearing to the west began to believe that the Passage could be mastered.

Then, at six on the evening of August 4, hopes were dashed when the lookout reported land ahead. “Vexation and anxiety” were seen on every countenance until it turned out to be a small island. At last the question was answered: the channel ahead was clear. Ross’s failing eyesight had played him false, or perhaps he was deceived by one of the mirages caused by the refraction of light that were to become familiar to future explorers. Parry was careful not to gloat, but the ship’s surgeon, Alexander Fisher, confided to his diary that none could “avoid feeling a secret satisfaction that their opinions have turned out to be true.…”

The Griper joined Parry’s ship, passing under her stern and raising a shout of congratulation at what Hooper called “our escape from Croker’s Mountains.” The purser was ecstatic: “There was something peculiarly animating in the joy which lighted every countenance.… We had arrived in a sea which had never before been navigated, we were gazing on land that European eyes had never before beheld … and before us was the prospect of realizing all our wishes, and of exalting the honor of our country.…”

The Croker Mountains vanished from the map. Where Ross had insisted he had seen land there was only water ahead – a broad strait that Parry named, not for Croker, but for his patron, John Barrow. The first secretary would have to be content to have his name on a small bay on the north shore of Lancaster Sound.

The water highway stretched straight as a bowsprit directly into the heart of the unknown Arctic archipelago. Parry was like a man travelling through a long tunnel, able only to guess at the mysteries that lay to the north and south. On the north shore of the sound he could see precipices, cut by chasms and fiords, rising sheer for five hundred feet above the rubbled beach; to the south, the tableland was interrupted by broad channels, one of them (which he named Prince Regent Inlet) more than forty miles wide. Was this the route to the Bering Sea?

Blocked by ice ahead, Parry, joined now by the Griper, turned into the inlet and sailed southwest for more than one hundred miles past the snow-choked ravines and vertical rock walls of the great island (Somerset) on his starboard. More ice barred his way, facing him with a new dilemma. Perhaps this was only a bay after all! Back he went into Lancaster Sound, finding open water along the north shore. Snow, sleet, and rain held him up, but then, on August 12, the weather cleared and he headed west into the very heart of the archipelago.

Island masses loomed up, bisected by more broad channels to which he gave names. He left the Precambrian cliffs and glacially ravaged peaks that rose above the notched coastline of Devon Island, crossed the thirty-mile mouth of the broad channel that led into the northern mists and which he named for the Duke of Wellington, and swept on – past the terraced rock hills of Cornwallis Island, past the tattered fringes and wriggling fiords of Bathurst Island, and finally into the immense inland sea that he named Viscount Melville Sound after the First Lord of the Admiralty.

Parry’s first voyage, 1819-20

On September 4 the two ships crossed the meridian of 110 degrees west and the following day, after divine service, Parry broke the news to his ecstatic crew that they had gained the five-thousand-pound parliamentary bounty. His own portion would be one thousand pounds, a small fortune at that time. It was well earned; in one remarkable five-week sweep, he had explored some eight hundred miles of new coastline.

To the north of the sound Parry could see the twelve-hundred-foot cliffs and the rugged highlands of another great island, which he also named for Viscount Melville. Eighteen days later, with the weather worsening and more ice forming, he gave up the struggle and went into winter quarters in a small bay on the island’s south shore. It was an exacting task. The crew worked for nineteen hours without a break in the ghostly light of the aurora sawing a channel, square by square, in the bay ice, which seemed to reform before their eyes. After three days, a channel 2⅓ miles long had been cut and the ships safely warped through. They would remain here for more than eight months, protected from the fury of the sea by a reef of rocks. Parry named it Winter Harbour.

Parry and his men were now marooned at the very heart of the darkest and most desolate realm in all the northern hemisphere. The nearest permanent civilized community lay twelve hundred miles to the east at the wretched little hamlet of Godhavn on an island on Greenland’s west coast. The nearest white men were the fur traders at Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake, seven hundred miles to the south. Another twelve hundred miles to the southwest were the uninhabited shores of Russian Alaska and beyond that Siberia. To the north, a frozen world stretched stark and empty to the Pole. Thus for hundreds of miles in every direction the land was devoid of human life; the nearest Eskimos were close to five hundred miles away. Soon any surrounding wildlife would vanish, including exotic quadrupeds yet to be identified – muskoxen, caribou, lemmings – as well as new species of gulls and terns. A few guttering candles, rationed carefully to one inch a day, flickered wanly in the polar night to mark the one point of civilization that existed in a frozen realm almost as large as Europe.

These were the first white men to winter in the Arctic archipelago. Under such conditions Parry realized men could become half crazed. His regime, foreshadowing Dr. Arnold, had one purpose: to keep his crews so busy that no man would have a moment to consider his situation. There would be plenty of daily exercise, regular inspections of men and their quarters, and afternoons crammed with make-work. The emphasis was on physical health, cleanliness, and “business.” The men were up at 5:45 scrubbing the decks with warm sand. They breakfasted at 8 a.m., were inspected right down to their fingernails at 9:15, and then set about running round the deck, or, in good weather, on the shore. They were kept occupied all afternoon, drawing, knotting yarn, making points and gaskets. After supper (“tea” for the officers) they were allowed to play games or sing and dance until bedtime at nine. The officers’ evening occupations were, to use Parry’s words, of “a more rational kind.” They read books, wrote letters, played chess or musical instruments.

Around them in the gathering gloom, the land stretched off, desolate and dreary, deathlike in its stillness, offering no interest for the eye or amusement for the mind. Parry noted that if he spotted a stone of more than usual size on one of the short walks he took from the ship, his eyes were hypnotically drawn to it and he found himself pulled in its direction. So deceptive was the unvarying surface of the snow that objects apparently half a mile away could be reached after a minute’s stroll. In such a landscape it was easy for a man to lose his bearings. Parry found it necessary to forbid anyone to wander far from the ships. When the darkness fell their isolation was complete. In mid-season one could, with difficulty, read a newspaper by daylight only at noon.

He had not reckoned with the intensity of the cold. The slightest touch of an unmittened hand on a metal object tore off the skin. A telescope placed against the eye burned like a red-hot brand. The men’s leather boots were totally impractical; they froze hard and brought on frostbite. Parry devised more flexible footwear of canvas and green hide. Sores refused to heal. Lemon juice and vinegar froze solid and broke their containers; so did mercury in the thermometers. When doors were opened, a thick fog poured down the hatchways, condensing on the walls and turning to ice. Damp bedding froze, forcing the men into hammocks. Steam rising from the bake ovens congealed and froze, forcing a reduction in the bread allowance. There wasn’t enough fuel to heat the ships. The crews were never warm. The officers played chess bundled up in scarves and greatcoats.

In spite of all this, the expedition produced and printed a weekly newspaper to which Parry himself contributed and put on fortnightly theatricals (the female impersonators shivering gamely in their thin garments). It was almost too cold, Parry admitted, for actors or audience to enjoy the shows. In his own cabin the temperature dropped in February to just seven degrees Fahrenheit.

By mid-March, with Liddon and more than twenty men sick – half from scurvy – Parry began to look to the future. When would the thaw come? How long must they remain imprisoned? A month later it was still bitingly cold. Parry had not reckoned on that; he began to have doubts about completing the passage to the west.

Another fortnight dragged by. The sun now shone at midnight. The temperature nudged back up to the freezing point. Game began to appear – a few ptarmigan and, a month later, caribou. The fresh meat reduced the danger of scurvy but too late for one seaman, William Scott, who died at the end of June.

That month Parry travelled north across Melville Island on a fortnight’s journey with four officers and eight men to a great indentation on the coast that he named Hecla and Griper Bay. They dragged eight hundred pounds of equipment with them on a two-wheeled cart – the first example of manhauling by naval personnel in the North. Although Parry knew the Eskimos used dogs for hauling sledges and would later make some use of them himself, the tradition he established – of men in harness, like draught animals – would continue into the new century to the days of Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic. The British Navy was never comfortable with dogs.

July was the only really bearable month on Melville Island, but the ice still choked the harbour. As Parry’s surgeon, Fisher, whiled away the hours carving the names of the ships on a huge sandstone boulder on the beach – a famous monument in the years to follow – Parry chafed to be off, his sails in readiness for an immediate start. He knew how little time he had: nine weeks at the most, a painful truth he could not conceal from the crew.

The delays that followed in late July and early August were maddening. The ice melted; they moved forward. The ice blocked their way; they anchored. The ice shifted; they moved again. The wind changed; the ice moved back. On August 4 they were able at last to set off into the west. Again the ice – the implacable ice! – frustrated them. The following day the floes closed in on the Griper, hoisting her two feet out of the water before retreating. Parry sent an officer ashore to climb a promontory and examine the state of the frozen sea to the west. He reported land some fifty miles distant, but the sea itself was covered with floes as far as the eye could reach, so closely joined that no gleam of water shone through. Parry named the new land Banks Land after the president of the Royal Society whose death, unknown to Parry, had occurred the previous month.

His optimism was fading. The previous summer the Passage had seemed within his grasp. All winter he had planned to break out of Winter Harbour and sail blithely on to the Bering Sea. Now the Arctic was showing its real face. The ice held him in thrall for five days. When it cleared he veered north-northwest. Again it stopped him. He ran east looking for a southern gap and once more found himself beset. Like a rodent in a trap he was scurrying this way and that, vainly seeking escape. On August 23, his ships battered by heavy blows, he managed to reach Cape Providence after performing “six miles of the most difficult navigation I have ever known among ice.” He had no way of knowing then that he was facing the dreaded ice stream that flows down from the Beaufort Sea, where the ice is fifty feet thick, its growth unimpeded by the presence of islands. This polar pack, squeezing down past Banks Land into Melville Sound and on through the channels that lead south and east toward the North American coast, is all but impenetrable, as John Franklin would one day discover. One hundred and twenty-four years would pass before the motors of the tough little RCMP schooner St. Roch finally pushed it through the barrier on the eastern side of the present Banks Island.

By now heartsick and disillusioned, Parry had to admit that any further attempt was fruitless. He could not know, nor would it have been much comfort to him if he had known, that no sailing vessel would ever conquer the Passage – and no other vessel, either, in his century. A decision had to be made. By careful rationing he might stretch his food and fuel for another winter, but he could not answer for his crew’s health. Reluctantly he turned his ships eastward, hoping to find an alternate passage to the south. None appeared. At the end of August he set off for England and was home by the end of October with all but one of the ninety-four men who had gone north with him.

Parry had been bamboozled by the vagaries of Arctic weather. He hadn’t reckoned on the severity of the climate or the shortness of the summer. He was convinced, rightly, that his chosen route was impractical. If the Passage was to be conquered another way must be found. Future explorers would have to hug the continental coastline, which his colleague Franklin was charting.

He remained an optimist. Promoted to commander, buoyed up by the applause of the politicians, the congratulations of the Navy, and the cheers of the public, he could be pardoned for believing that next time he’d make it. But almost nine decades would pass before any white explorer travelled from Atlantic to Pacific by way of the cold Arctic seas.

4 Fame, fortune, and frustration

William Edward Parry was the nineteenth century’s first hero-explorer. He stood at the head of a long line of celebrated Britons that would include Franklin and M’Clintock, Burton and Speke, Livingstone and Stanley, Scott and Shackleton. These were folk figures, larger than life, their failings, flaws, and human frailties ignored by a public and a press that saw in them the personification of Imperial expansion.

Fortune accompanied fame. Parry had one thousand pounds from parliament; now he accepted another thousand from the British publisher John Murray for the rights to his journal. He agonized briefly over whether he should take the money; but when he learned, to his annoyance, that Dr. Fisher was about to publish an account of his own, he swallowed his scruples and rushed into print without bothering to add the appendices that were planned to make up half the book.

Letters of congratulation poured in. Parry might not have discovered the Passage, but he had, in his phrase, “made a large hole in it.” Equally important, he and his crew had “done our duty.” Surprisingly, one of the first fan letters came from the maligned John Ross. Parry had to admit that it was also among the most ardent and sincere. What a curiosity! “I propose having it framed and glazed and then to put it into the British Museum,” he wrote to his parents. What was his old adversary up to? Was Ross trying to curry favour? Parry would have none of that. He proposed in his own good time to pen a civil response but in such a way as “to prevent the possibility of his bringing on a correspondence, which is the game he now wants to play.”

Meanwhile, his time was occupied by a round of social events that might have turned the head of a less phlegmatic officer. His portrait was painted by a member of the Royal Academy. He was given the freedom of his native city, Bath. He was presented at court; the new king, George IV, offered congratulations. London hostesses vied for his presence; exclusive clubs sought his membership, “which many noblemen would be glad to accept if they could get it” – a slight touch of snobbishness there, but one can hardly condemn Parry for revelling in his new-found glory, purchased at considerable cost and hardship. The first of the Arctic heroes was setting a pattern that others would seek to emulate. Considering the spoils, who would not dare to brave the Arctic blasts?

Certainly Parry was eager to be off again. His main business that winter of 1820-21 was to prepare for a second voyage to conquer the Passage. Nothing less, as he told Barrow, would satisfy the British public. The quest had taken on some of the characteristics of a race. Parry’s main fear was that the Russians would beat the English to it.

The decision was made before the year was out. Once again, as in all British naval expeditions, there would be two ships (if one foundered the other would succour the beleaguered crew), the Hecla again and the Fury, which was the Hecla’s sister, all its working parts interchangeable. Parry would command the Fury. The Hecla’s commander would be a dashing young lieutenant, George Lyon, “a most gentlemanly clever fellow,” so Parry had been told, whose drawings “are the most beautiful I ever saw.” Lyon was used to hardship; he had barely survived a mission to the desert interior of North Africa on which a companion had died. Some of Parry’s shipmates from earlier voyages, including James Clark Ross, would also join the new expedition, whose commander was so optimistic that he urged Barrow to send a supply ship to meet him in the Bering Strait. The Navy declined.

This time trunks of theatrical costumes were packed aboard along with the mandatory printing press, the magic lantern, and a full library of books that would be used in the schoolroom Parry intended to establish. In that long Arctic night he was determined that his unlettered crew would learn to read their Bibles.

He expected this time to spend at least two winters in the Arctic; he was, in fact, provisioned for three. To help fend off scurvy he proposed to grow great quantities of mustard and cress and ordered stacks of hot frames for the purpose. As for the cold and the dreadful dampness, he would thwart that with the newly designed “Sylvester stove,” named for its inventor. It would carry warm air to every part of the ship (hermetically sealed this time with a cork lining) and, thanks to a more abundant supply of fuel, would burn day and night. Although the Navy was still sticking to wool, flannel, and leather, Parry improved on his improvised footgear, using flexible canvas tops and insulating cork soles and even made a small concession to aboriginal culture by supplying deerskin jackets for his men. He himself took along a fur coat to wear over his uniform.

Thus equipped, the expedition was ready to sail. “Oh, how I long to be among the ice!” exclaimed Parry, with all the zest of a schoolboy. This time his route would be different. The only other known avenue leading into the Arctic was Henry Hudson’s original route. Was it possible that despite earlier disappointments a passage still might be found leading westward from Hudson Bay? The most likely opening was Repulse Bay, which had certainly repulsed Christopher Middleton in the previous century. Still, it had been only partially explored. Was it really a bay or, like Lancaster Sound, might it prove to be a strait? This was Parry’s initial goal. Perhaps he might be able to link up with John Franklin, still exploring the Arctic coast of North America to the west.

Again, his instructions ordered him to give the Passage priority. Everything else including the mapping of the continental coastline was to be secondary. In retrospect, the Navy seems to have got its priorities backward. The Elizabethan idea that the Passage would provide a practical route to the fabled wealth of the Orient had long been discarded. But the collection of botanical and geological specimens, the recording of the folkways of the aborigines, the magnetic and environmental observations – all these made sense. So did the mapping of the islands and the charting of the coastline. Yet everybody remained obsessed by the puzzle of the Passage, even though it was the least important of the Arctic mysteries. It fired the imagination of the most hard-headed. The search was akin to other quests that whispered to Englishmen of romance, brave deeds, daring sacrifice. England was about to enter a new age – another Arthurian period, perhaps – with a new Grail to be sought and new glory to be won.

At Deptford, crowds sought to swarm aboard the Hecla, to walk decks and touch railings that had once been encased in ice, to bask vicariously in her ordeal. So many demanded admission that Parry mounted a grand ball on the Fury, which was especially decked out for the occasion. As the band played on the upper deck, the glittering company danced on and on into the night under a rising moon, each celebrant convinced that he was in the presence of adventure.

Ten days later – April 27, 1821 – both vessels were ready to sail. On May 8, they reached the Nore. Six weeks later they were off Hudson Strait. Here Parry sent one final letter home, invoking the Deity and recording his own humility in the presence of his Maker. “I never felt so strongly the vanity, uncertainty, and comparative unimportance of everything this world can give,” he wrote, “and the paramount necessity of preparation for another and a better life than this.”

The only known route to Repulse Bay was to circle round the western shores of Southampton Island at the top of Hudson Bay. But Parry decided to gamble by taking a short cut through the mysterious Frozen Strait, which lay to the northeast. This was unknown territory. Some, indeed, believed the strait didn’t exist; half the available maps didn’t show it. Parry wasn’t even sure that he had reached the entrance and so pushed blindly on in a thick fog and a fierce blizzard to find, to his surprise, that he had come through the strait, which wasn’t frozen, and entered Repulse Bay without knowing it. Alas, a quick survey disclosed that the bay was land locked. This was not the route to the Passage. If one was to be found it must be farther north.

Parry’s second voyage, 1821-22

For the next six weeks he searched for a promising inlet but found nothing. At last, on October 8, he gave up, found an anchorage off the east coast of the Melville Peninsula (the name of the First Lord was becoming ubiquitous), and anchored at a point he called Winter Island. This would be his resting place until the following July.

It was a long winter, but it passed more comfortably than the one Parry had endured on his earlier voyage. The new Sylvester stove kept the ships warm and dry, and scurvy was not a problem, thanks partly to the hundred pounds of mustard and cress that Parry managed to grow. Nor was the crew affected by the melancholy brought on by the long night, for in these southern latitudes the sun did not completely vanish.

Lyon, who was used to the garish hues of the Mediterranean, was charmed by the pastels of the northern skies. The delicacy and the pureness of the tinting, he thought, excelled anything he’d seen in Italy, while the pink blush that accompanied a hard frost was “far more pleasing than the glittering borders which are so profusely seen on the clouds of warmer climates.”

In the clear nights, devoid of haze, the moon and the stars shone with such lustre that Lyon was almost persuaded the surrounding desolation was pleasing. As for the aurora, he, like every other newcomer to the North, was dazzled and awed. When it first appeared, he noted a shower of falling rays “like those thrown from a rocket,” trickling and pulsating down the great well of the sky. This was followed by a series of massive illuminations, some as faint as the glow of the Milky Way and others like “wondrous showers of fire,” streaming and shooting in all directions. He could almost fancy that he heard a rushing sound because of the sudden glare and the rapid bursts of light, but that, he was convinced, was an illusion: the aurora was as silent as the land itself.

There were diversions. The officers shaved off their whiskers to play female roles in the theatre. (Parry played Sir Anthony Absolute in Sheridan’s The Rivals.) The school was a success; by year’s end, every man had learned to read. But the greatest event was the arrival on February 1 of a band of sixty Eskimos “as desirous of pleasing us as we were ready to be pleased.” Soon there was fiddling and dancing on the decks as the newcomers made repeated visits to the ships.

As Parry noted, in his restrained way, the natives “served in no small degree to enliven us at this season.” There were undoubtedly other pleasures. The Eskimo women were remarkably accommodating, as later explorers discovered. (Both Peary and Stefansson took native mistresses.) It is hard to believe, though there is little supporting evidence, that fleeting alliances were not formed by the officers and men of the Parry expedition. That, after all, had been the pattern in the South Seas since the days of the Bounty. The only recorded hint comes from a private diary kept by the American explorer Charles Francis Hall, who visited the area more than forty years later. An old Eskimo woman named Erktua told Hall that Parry was her first lover and Lyon her second and that Parry had been jealous of Lyon. She added that Lyon, after abandoning her, had left two Eskimo sisters pregnant. Hall believed her story but later questioned it when he learned that Erktua was claiming that he had tried to seduce her. Parry noted that the Eskimo men were accustomed to exchanging wives and that it was not uncommon for the men to offer their spouses freely for sale. The women, he noted, were modest enough when their husbands were with them, but in their absence “evinced … their utter disregard of connubial fidelity.” The departure of the men was usually a signal for throwing aside restraint. Lyon, who noticed many young Eskimo couples showing affection by the traditional method of rubbing noses, also noted that “they have no scruples on the score of mutual infidelity.… It is considered extremely friendly for two men to exchange wives for a day or two, and the request is sometimes made by the women themselves. These extraordinary civilities, although known, are never talked of, and are contrived as secretly as possible.” Small wonder then that Parry wrote of the natives’ presence enlivening the season.

Were these winters in Foxe Basin as placid and as pleasant as the official journals of the two commanders indicate? The British were notoriously tight lipped in these matters, but here and there a hint of darker passions emerges. In the light of what is now known about the tensions and dissensions that existed on so many later voyages, it is not reasonable to believe that even under Parry everything was congenial. Two months after Parry returned to England, Douglas Clavering, an old naval hand who had just returned from a scientific voyage to Greenland and Spitzbergen on the Griper, wrote to a friend that Parry, who was already planning a third expedition, had declined to take any of his former officers (with one exception, James Clark Ross) on the voyage, “in consequence of quarrels, misbehaviour and insubordination.” Besides the expedition to Foxe Basin being a complete failure, Clavering wrote, “from one acquainted with the facts … I know enough to say … it is also thought most disgraceful.” Clavering’s gossip seems to have come from James Ross himself, through his friend Edward Sabine.

In the official journals, of course, there is no suspicion of discord. In May, Parry sent Lyon off on a fortnight’s sledge trip up the Melville Peninsula to seek an opening to the west – a journey that left the travellers badly frostbitten. Lyon did not find a passage but thought there might be a route around the peninsula to the north, and Parry, desperate to get his ships free of the ice, kept his crews toiling for three weeks to saw a channel out to open water. Although two men died, perhaps from the effects of the work, Parry was able on July 2 to set his course north.

At Igloolik, the native village at the top of Foxe Basin, he again encountered an impenetrable barrier. But thanks to the Eskimos, who turned out to be astonishingly expert map makers, he was pretty sure a passage existed to the west between the head of the peninsula and the west coast of Baffin Island.

Once again Lyon was dispatched across the ice with a band of Eskimos to pick up fresh fish and assess the chances of getting through. He lived with the natives and clearly enjoyed the experience. He learned to eat their food (including an Eskimo delicacy, nerooka, the contents of the entrails and stomachs of slaughtered deer) “on the principle that no man who wishes to conciliate or inquire into the manners of savages should refuse to fare as they do.” He danced with the Eskimo women, taught them to play leapfrog, even allowed himself to be tattooed in the native style. Waking one midnight in a tent from a feeling of great warmth, he discovered he was sharing a large deerskin coverlet with his Eskimo host, his two wives, and their favourite puppy, “all fast asleep and stark naked.”

But Lyon found no open water. The ice, though decaying, was still as thick as three feet while the land was obscured by fog. Parry’s patience was wearing thin. He was convinced he was at the threshold of the Passage, yet he couldn’t move. On their maps, the Eskimos had indicated the presence of a narrow fiord. Did it actually lead to the open sea? Parry determined to find out for himself. On August 18, 1822, he stood on the north point of the Melville Peninsula overlooking the narrowest part of the inlet the Eskimos had shown. Toward the west, where the water widened, he could see no land and was certain he had discovered the polar sea. He was convinced he could force his way by this narrow strait, which he named for his ships – Fury and Hecla. Now all he could do was to wait for the ice to clear.

But the ice did not clear. The weather grew almost balmy. An eastern breeze sprang up. But the ice refused to budge. By late September, with a bitter gale blowing in from the northwest, Parry gave up. In his later, matter-of-fact account, one can sense the bitterness of his disappointment. He had waited until the last moment, cherishing the belief that a miracle might occur, but there was no miracle. When he called his officers together, all agreed they should remain at Igloolik for another winter and try again the following summer. They could not know that it would be eleven months to the day before they could once more break free of the encircling bonds of ice.

5 Innuee and kabloonas

For the next ten months, Parry and his crews were in almost daily contact with the band of two hundred Eskimos who spent the winter at Igloolik. A strong case can be made, though few thought to make it at the time, that the only important results of this abortive and largely negative expedition were the accounts that Parry and Lyon brought back of the natives’ customs and society. Lyon’s work especially provided the underpinnings for later anthropological studies of the Melville Peninsula natives.

Both officers had been privileged to observe an aboriginal society in its untouched state, before the onset of white civilization – a society that had managed to exist and even to thrive in one of the harshest environments on the globe. Parry produced a long essay on Eskimo culture in an appendix to his published journal. Lyon devoted most of his published account to describing his adventures among the natives and his observations of their habits.

They were, of course, amateurs, not anthropologists. Anthropology, in fact, hadn’t yet become a discipline and wouldn’t do so until mid-century. But both were keen observers. They liked the Eskimos, and in that long and monotonous confinement they had the time to examine a culture that both found foreign and fascinating. If they judged the Eskimos in terms of their own moral standards it is not surprising. After all, they were English officers; it did not occur to them, nor would it have occurred to any other Englishman in that age, that differing conditions require differing codes of conduct. Parry’s attitude was similar to that expressed by naval colleagues who followed in his footsteps. The cheerful natives, he discovered, “maintain a degree of harmony among themselves which is scarcely ever disturbed.” That being the case, they could only benefit from Christian evangelism. “On a disposition thus naturally charitable what might not a Christian education and Christian principles effect!”

Parry’s assessment here makes curious reading in the context of an earlier passage. He had seen and commented on the effect that a century of Christian civilization had produced among the Eskimos of Hudson Strait, whom he compared unfavourably with those of Igloolik. These “civilized” Eskimos were thieves, pilferers, and pickpockets, so greedy that one even offered to sell his two children for some trade goods – but only after removing their clothes, which weren’t part of the bargain! Parry couldn’t abide them, but he failed to link cause and effect.

By contrast, the uncivilized natives of Southampton Island and the Melville Peninsula were honest to a fault. If you dropped a handkerchief or a glove, they ran after you to return it. Sledges could be left unguarded without fear of loss. Lyon once purposely left a stock of knives, scissors, looking-glasses, and other coveted objects in an Eskimo hut, then wandered off, leaving a dozen natives behind. When he returned, he found his possessions intact and carefully covered with a skin.

There were some minor cases of pilfering. Parry, in an act of singular insensitivity, tied up one thief and threatened to have him flogged. But, as Lyon said, where objects of iron were involved, “it is scarcely to be wondered that such a temptation should prove irresistible; had small golden bars been thrown in the streets of London, how would they have fared?”

To Parry and Lyon, the most unusual aspect of the Eskimo character was its lack of passion. They were not a warlike or quarrelsome people. Those human emotions, so much a part of the European psychological profile, were curiously lacking or, at the very least, sublimated. Love and jealousy were apparently unknown – a fact that Lyon divined from his study of “the deplorable state of morals and common decency” among the women, who, though remarkably modest in public (even sitting apart from the men at a dance), thought nothing of bestowing their favours in private “without shame and without complaint from their husbands.”

In Lyon’s view, the Eskimos did not possess much of the milk of human kindness. Sympathy, compassion, gratitude – these qualities did not appear on the surface. Death was so much a part of Eskimo life that they had become inured to it. In a pitiless land, there was no room for pity. Three days of lamentation were allowed after a death, and the mourners all cried real tears – but only for about a minute. They seemed indifferent to the presence of death. Nobody bothered to cover corpses. Bodies were dug up and gnawed by the dogs. Lyon once saw a plate of meat placed on the body of a dead child that lay wrapped in his cabin. The British thought the Eskimos callous, but in the Arctic, where exposure, starvation, and disease killed so many so young, no other attitude was possible if sanity were to be maintained.

Parry remarked on what he called “the selfishness of the savage”; he thought it one of their greatest failings. The British, who showered presents on the natives and fed them when they were near starvation, were annoyed that none said thank you or showed gratitude. Obviously, it never occurred to any Eskimo to acknowledge a gift or a service. In their own world, they were forced to depend on one another. You helped a man out one day; he helped you out the next. That was the way the Arctic world worked; no one was expected to acknowledge kindness. The Eskimos cheerfully helped the British, hauling water on sledges, showing them how to build a snow wall around the Fury, drawing maps of the coastline, bringing in fresh fish. In return they expected presents, but to say thank you would have been redundant. Their own doors were always open and their food shared with strangers without hope or expectation of payment.

They accepted tragedy as they accepted death, with fatalistic indifference or, on occasion, with laughter and high spirits. A man could leave his dying wife, not caring who looked after her in his absence. A sister could laugh at the sufferings of a dying brother. A sick woman could be blockaded inside a snow hut without anybody bothering to discover when she died. Old people with no dependants were simply left to eke out a living or expire. This “brutal insensitivity,” as Lyon called it, was appalling to his English readers, who could not comprehend the savage conditions faced by the people of Igloolik.

If they discarded pity they also discarded the harsher emotions. Revenge was unknown to them, as was war. They did not quarrel among themselves; an exchange of blows was a rarity. They could not afford the luxury of high passion; they needed to husband their feelings in the daily battle with the environment. They had learned to laugh at adversity, and they laughed and grinned a great deal, even when life was hard for them, as it usually was.

The Eskimos lived for the day – for any day might be their last. Parry thought them improvident, and so they were in his terms. Life for them was feast or famine. When food was available, they ate it all; when there was none, they went without, uncomplaining. The British thought them gluttons, but gluttony in that spare land was one of the few luxuries they knew. They were always thirsty and, when they could, drank copious quantities of water and other fluids. For thirst – raging thirst – was as common in the Arctic as in the desert. To eat snow was tabooed for whites and natives alike, for the resultant loss of body heat could kill a man. But snow could only rarely be melted because fuel was as precious a commodity as food; water was a luxury to be obtained at its expense.

Parry once conducted an experiment by offering a young Eskimo, Tooloak, as much food and drink as he could consume overnight. In just twenty-one hours, eight of which were passed in sleep, Tooloak tucked away ten and a quarter pounds of bread and meat and drank almost two gallons of liquids, including soup and raw spirits. This native gourmandizing was turned into a contest by the irrepressible Lyon, who decided to pit his man, Kangara, against Tooloak. Kangara managed to devour in nineteen hours just under ten pounds of meat, bread, and candles and six quarts of soup and water. Lyon insisted that if Kangara had been given Tooloak’s extra two hours, he would have “beaten him hollow.”

Parry found the Eskimo diet “horrible and disgusting.” The odor of blubber, which the natives crammed into their mouths raw, “was to us almost insufferable.” Some of his crew who first encountered the spectacle in Hudson Strait turned away from the sight in order to avoid being sick, whereupon the mischievous Eskimos ran after them, gleefully holding up pieces of raw blubber, inviting them to eat. Lyon, who had nibbled on sheep’s eyes with the bedouin of the Western desert, was less fastidious. He found the nerooka “acid and rather pungent, resembling as near as I could judge a mixture of sorrel and radish leaves.” Apparently, he concluded, “the acidity recommends it to these people,” but he didn’t ask why nor did he seem to connect the half-digested vegetable diet with the Eskimos’ remarkable freedom from scurvy.

The natives were just as repelled by British food. They couldn’t abide sugar; even the smallest children disliked it. They spat out rum. When one was offered a cup of coffee and a plate of gingerbread, he made a wry face and acted as if he were taking medicine. One miserable woman who had been left to starve after her husband’s death was brought aboard the Hecla and offered bread, jelly, and biscuit. Lyon noticed that she threw the food away after pretending to eat it.

If the Eskimos mystified the British with their customs and attitudes, they, in turn, were confused and baffled by the strange men aboard the big ships. They couldn’t understand, for instance, why these strangers hadn’t brought their wives with them, and when told that some had no wives, they were astonished. Surely every man in the world had at least one wife! Nor could they comprehend a community whose members were not related. In their tight-knit society, everybody was related by blood or adoption. To solve the problem, Lyon told them that he was father to the whole crew. That did not satisfy some of the women, who noted that certain of his “sons” seemed older than he. Nor could they understand the British caste system. It was clear that Parry and Lyon were important men; the Eskimos were convinced they owned their ships. But the gradations of rank confused them; in their society, everyone was equal.

In spite of the clash of cultures, the two peoples got along famously. As Parry put it, “If … they are deficient in some of the higher virtues, as they are called, of savage life, they are certainly free, also, of some of its blackest vices.…” They were immensely helpful to Parry and his men, who, in turn, were generous with them. If the Britons thought of themselves as the Eskimos’ superiors, there is evidence that the Eskimos thought the opposite. Parry noted that “they certainly looked on us in many respects with profound contempt; maintaining the idea of self sufficiency which has induced them … to call themselves, by way of distinction Innuee, or mankind.” There is a telling little anecdote in Parry’s published account of an Eskimo, Okotook, trying to tie some gear onto a sledge by means of a white navy cord. It broke in his hand, whereupon he gave a contemptuous sneer and spat out the word for white man: “Kabloona!” To him, the material was clearly inferior, but then, what could one expect from a kabloona?

To the British, the Eskimos were like children – untutored savages who could only benefit from the white man’s ways. This paternalism was quite unjustified. In the decades that followed, the real children in the Arctic would be the white explorers. Without the Eskimos to care for them, hunt for them, and guide them through that chill, inhospitable realm, scores more would have died of starvation, scurvy, exhaustion, or exposure. Without the Eskimos, the journeys to seek out the Pole and the Passage would not have been possible. Yet their contribution has been noted only obliquely. It was the British Navy’s loss that it learned so little from the natives. Had it paid attention, the tragedies that followed might have been averted.

Here was a nation obsessed by science, whose explorers were charged with collecting everything from skins of the Arctic tern to the shells that lay on the beaches. Here were men of intelligence with a mania for figures, charts, and statistics, recording everything from the water temperatures to the magnetic forces that surround the Pole. Yet few thought it necessary to inquire into the reasons why another set of fellow humans could survive, year after year, winter after winter, in an environment that taxed and often broke the white man’s spirit.

The British felt for the Eskimos, lamented their wretched condition, and couldn’t understand why, on being offered a trip to civilization – as Tooloak was by Parry – they flatly and vociferously refused the proposal. (Parry, to his credit, was relieved. “Not the smallest public advantage could be derived from it,” he declared.) Actually, in most instances, the white men were far worse off and much more wretched than the natives who were the objects of their sympathy. The Eskimos were clothed more practically and housed more efficiently in winter, and enjoyed much better health than the white explorers who were to attempt arduous overland expeditions that brought exhaustion and even death.

The Eskimos wore loose parkas of fur or sealskin, but the British Navy stuck to the more confining wool, flannel, and broadcloth uniforms, with no protective hoods. The Eskimos kept their feet warm in sealskin mukluks; even Parry rejected Navy leather. The Eskimo sleds were light and flexible, the Navy’s heavy and cumbersome – and hauled by men, not dogs. No naval man ever learned the difficult technique of dog driving or the art of building a snow house on the trail. Fifty years after Parry’s experiences, naval ratings were still dragging impossible loads and carrying extra weight in the form of tents that were generally either sodden or frozen.

Most puzzling of all, and most damning, is that in an age of science Europeans were unable to understand how the Eskimos escaped the great Arctic scourge that struck almost every white expedition to the North. The seeds of scurvy were already in Parry’s men, in spite of the lemon juice and marmalade, but no one connected the Eskimos’ diet with the state of their health. Though the effects of vitamins were unknown, the explorers sensed that scurvy was linked to diet and that fresh meat and vegetables helped ward it off. Nobody caught on to the truth that raw meat and blubber are effective antiscorbutics. For another half century, the Navy sent ship after ship into the North loaded down with barrels of salt meat while Navy cooks boiled or roasted away all the vitamins from the fresh provisions that were sometimes available.

Why this apparent blindness? Part of it, no doubt, was the conservatism of the senior service and part the arrogance of the nineteenth-century English upper classes, who considered themselves superior to most other peoples, whether they were Americans, Hottentots, or Eskimos. But another part of it, surely, was fear: the fear of going native. Could any proper Englishman traipse about in ragged seal fur, eating raw blubber and living in hovels built of snow? Those who had done such things in some of the world’s distant corners had been despised as misfits who had thrown away the standards of civilization to become wild animals. Besides, it was considered rather like cheating to do things the easy way. The real triumph consisted of pressing forward against all odds without ever stooping to adopt the native style. To the very proper officers who still donned formal jackets and polished buttons for mess dinners in the Arctic wastes, that idea was unthinkable. They enjoyed these strange, childlike, wayward people, but they didn’t want to copy them.

And yet, when the Eskimos began to leave in the spring in April of 1823, the English missed their company and perhaps even envied their flexibility. The natives were on the move; the white men were still closeted in ships caught fast in the ice.

Parry was determined to send one ship home and carry on alone and had already shifted the Hecla’s stores to the Fury for that purpose. But the winter had been appallingly cold, the ice showed no signs of budging, and the tell-tale signs of scurvy – blackened gums, loose teeth, sore joints – were making their appearance. Parry believed that cleanliness and exercise would help forestall the disease. Of course, he was wrong.

August came; no release. Once again the crews toiled to saw a channel through the pack towards open water. Weakened by illness, debilitated in mind and body by eleven months of being cooped up, they could not apply themselves with the same vigour. When Parry climbed the masthead of the Fury and gazed off to the westward, his heart sank. As far as he could see, the ice stretched off unbroken. There was no help for it. He would have to return home.

On August 12, he bade good-bye to Igloolik. For thirteen months he had hovered off the mouth of the narrow strait to the north, tantalized by the conviction that this was the entrance to the Passage – that the open sea lay less than a hundred miles to the west. Once more he had to admit defeat; the ice master of the Hecla was already dying of scurvy; others would follow unless he could get back to civilization.

It was not easy. Even when he escaped from the ice-locked harbour and fought his way through the pack, there were hold-ups. In one period of twenty-six days, he was beset for twenty-four. The scurvy patient died before he could get home. Finally, on October 10, he anchored off Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, to the ringing of bells and the cheers of the inhabitants, who rushed to the wharfside to greet the ships, “the first race of civilized men we had seen in seven and twenty months.” That night the little town was illuminated as tar barrels blazed in every street.

Parry must have faced this enthusiasm with mixed feelings. His discoveries had been negative: there was no route to the Passage by Hudson Bay, for he was convinced that no ship could squeeze through the ice that clogged Fury and Hecla Strait. On the earlier expedition he had ventured briefly down the long fiord he had named for the Prince Regent – perhaps that would point the way! John Franklin had returned from his survey of the continental coastline to report the discovery of a navigable channel running west. Did the bottom of Prince Regent Inlet connect with that passage? Parry was convinced that it did. All that was left was to mount another expedition to explore it. With his usual optimism he declared that he “had never felt more sanguine of ultimate success.” He was confident that England might yet be destined “to succeed in an attempt which has for centuries engaged her attention, and interested the whole civilized world.”

Parry, in short, had not given up. He was scarcely home before he was lobbying for a third chance to seize the prize. The mystery of the Passage obsessed him, as it obsessed all literate England. No hardship was too unbearable, no years of isolation too stifling, no experience too horrifying to deter the naval explorers from trying again. The most ghastly horrors of all – death by starvation, marked by one act of cannibalism – had been visited on Parry’s friend and colleague John Franklin, in his overland journey to the Arctic. One might expect both men to have shaken the snows of the Arctic from their boots forever to enjoy a more comfortable existence. But even as Parry pushed for another try at the Passage so Franklin pleaded for a second chance to invade the dark interior that had claimed the lives of eleven of his men.

Chapter One

1 John Barrow’s obsession

2 The Croker Mountains

3 Winter Harbour

4 Fame, fortune, and frustration

5 Innuee and kabloonas