The Franklin Conspiracy Read online

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Ghost Ship

  “Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget

  this lost Lenore!”

  Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

  Edgar Allan Poe,

  The Raven

  OUT OF THE DARKNESS

  It had been a fantastically complex and, at times, costly dance of deception. If we are correct, the Victory Point Conspiracy had been carried out over thirty years, ever since Edward Parry’s Fury entered the Arctic in 1824, there to vanish forever. We have argued that James Clark Ross, during that disastrous voyage, first began to suspect something was to be found on King William Island, returning later aboard his uncle’s ship, Victory, to confirm his discovery. Eventually, the navy had outfitted a spectacular expedition—the Erebus and Terror, a sort of pre-atomic Manhattan Project—and dispatched it into the unknown; then, when the expedition had so obviously met with disaster, the navy found itself increasing forced to extremes in an effort to cover-up the entire thing.

  It had very nearly succeeded. But, in the end, it was a secret too big to remain hidden, even in the vastness of the Arctic. Within a month of Belcher’s return, word finally arrived which pointed the way at last: King William Island. Not surprisingly, the news had come from the one source that many people had suggested but none had tried: the Inuit.

  But the British Navy wasn’t yet done in its machinations. There was testimony, but only Inuit testimony, translated and imperfect. Artifacts had been found that provided proof that disaster had overtaken the expedition, but, as yet, the secret of King William Island itself had not been breached. If Franklin had left records behind—in the cairn on Beechey Island, at Cape Walker, or in the three cairns on Victoria Island—those messages had long since been “suppressed”, as Penny said. Time was on the navy’s side. Victory Point remained a long way from England, and every year that passed was another year during which evidence might be eradicated by the ceaseless fury of the Arctic weather. All they had to do was wait.

  But then, out of the blue-white north, as if guided by the ghosts of those they had sought so long to bury without honour, sailed Kellett’s ship, Resolute. It was a voyage impossible to explain. Without a crew, her hatches sealed, her rigging white with rime, the Resolute had broken free of the ice in the summer, navigated the shoals and heavy ice of Viscount Melville Sound, passed through Barrow Strait and then Lancaster Sound, and finally glided into Baffin Bay, where she was sighted the next year by Captain Buddington of the whaler George Henry.

  It was but one more inexplicable event in the weird chain of happenings that made up the story of the lost Franklin expedition. Only two expeditions had ever successfully travelled the track followed by the Resolute: Edward Parry’s in 1819, and Captain Kellett’s. Kellett had only succeeded because he had the screw steamer Intrepid to pull the wind-driven Resolute out of the shallows and off the grinding ice pans. If it had not happened, we would have said it was impossible.

  Nonetheless, the proof was there for all to see as Buddington, taking the ghost ship in tow, led her proudly to New London, Connecticut. To Buddington’s surprise, the British government immediately laid claim to their abandoned vessel, but then reversed their decision and returned her to her salvager. We might well wonder if this wasn’t just an excuse to allow the Admiralty time to search and recover any compromising documents still aboard her.

  But events were rapidly assuming a momentum all their own. The American Congress stepped in and purchased the vessel for $40,000. She was sent to an American naval yard to be refitted. One year later she sailed again, this time on a voyage back to England, as a gift to the Royal Navy from their friends across the pond. It was understood by one and all that she was being returned for the purpose of fulfilling her destiny in the Arctic. The American ambassador referred to her as “a consecrated ship”. Henry Grinnell, the man behind the American expedition (actually, expeditions, since there had been a second one sent while Belcher was still in the Arctic, which had come to nothing), wrote to the British government at Lady Franklin’s behest. The Royal Irish Academy passed a motion that the Resolute be employed in one final voyage to King William Island. Jane Franklin, gathering support wherever she spoke, talked of the Resolute’s “sacred mission”. The Queen, Prince Albert, The Prince of Wales, and other Royals greeted the ship when she arrived at Cowes. Even the Prime Minister was onside. It seemed nothing could stand in the way of this last inevitable push to discover once and for all the true fate of Sir John Franklin.

  So the navy, hardly known for its subtlety, did the only thing it could. Under the orders of Sir Charles Wood, First Lord of the Admiralty, the Resolute was dismantled and “run up on the mud”.1

  It was a stunning slap in the face to the Americans and a ruthless stab in the back to Lady Franklin. It was a last, desperate play made by an Admiralty backed into a corner and determined to see that no force on earth would resurrect the Resolute a second time. But it was also the end of the game. Even the destruction of the Resolute could not stop what had grown to be inevitable. Before the strength of will shown by Lady Franklin, all the lies, all the misdirection were no more than temporary setbacks. She would soon find her husband’s expedition, though not her husband. She was only one woman, but the navy could not stop her.

  Yet, there remains the possibility that the cover-up did succeed in its principle aim. After all, for all the evidence ultimately discovered strung in a grisly trail down the west coast of King William Island, we will never know what was lost to the wind and the blowing snow, to the cold and the ice, during the many years the secret lay silent and undiscovered under the northern lights. There were clues enough, as we will soon see; but what else might those first searchers have found had they reached Victory Point back in 1849, when the disaster was only a year in the past? We will never know; and in this the Victory Point Conspiracy was a success.

  There was a final epilogue to the story of the Resolute, a last little twist to the tale that somehow reads like the punchline to a very dark joke, a final detail to render complete a story of conspiracy and cover-up.

  After the Resolute was dismantled, a desk was fashioned from her oak beams, which was then given to the American president, Chester A. Arthur, as a gift. The desk was eventually placed in storage, where it sat in dust and darkness for a century. Then, almost like the Resolute itself, the desk was discovered and resurrected, being dragged out into the light of a world which had survived two world wars and now trembled in the shadow of the Hydrogen bomb. The desk had been found by the wife of another American president and, under her care, it was restored and resumed its place in the White House. It was said to have been the President’s favourite desk, and its polished oak surface must often have reflected his features like a dark and clouded mirror.

  That president was John F. Kennedy.

  PART III

  Into the Darkness

  “Is there anybody there?” said the traveller,

  Knocking on the moonlit door.

  Walter de La Mare,

  The Listeners

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  John Rae

  And the highwayman came riding –

  Riding – riding –

  The highwayman came riding, up to the

  old inn-door.

  Charles Howard, Duke of Norfolk,

  The Highwayman

  THE HONOURED DEAD

  It was autumn, 1854, and Jane Franklin must have wondered if she had finally been defeated in her quest. Belcher’s “last of the Arctic voyages” seemed almost certainly to have been precisely that.

  A staggering tally of six naval ships had been left and lost to the crushing caress of the relentless ice, all within the past two years. McClure’s Investigator had been abandoned at Banks Land; Belcher’s ship Assistance and Osborn’s Pioneer had been deserted in Wellington Channel; Kellett’s Resolute and McClintock’s Intrepid had suffered the same fate in Viscount Melville Sound (though Resolute would ev
entually rise like a phoenix from the ashes, for the moment it seemed safe to write it off for good); and, finally, there was the Breadalbane, a transport ship dispatched the previous year with provisions for Belcher’s expedition. Off Beechey Island, the Breadalbane had been suddenly holed by an ice pan, her crew barely having time to save themselves as she settled beneath the icy waters in only fifteen minutes. (Amongst all these ships, it is somewhat ironic that the one to achieve a degree of immortality was the lowly sunken transport. In August 1980, Dr. Joe MacInnis headed a Canadian expedition that relocated the wreck under 340 feet of water in Barrow Strait.)

  As far as Jane Franklin knew, Collinsonand the Enterprise were still searching in the western Arctic, but she didn’t hold out great hope for that expedition. In actual fact, Collinson had already slipped back out of the Arctic the way he came in, and was now heading quickly for Hong Kong.

  Finally, the American Grinnell expedition (the second such voyage) remained in Arctic waters, ostensibly searching for signs of Sir John; but again the Americans had unaccountably chosen to explore Smith Sound at the top of Baffin Bay, about as far from the probable region of Franklin’s grave as you could hope to get.

  But the unkindest cut of all had come in March. Though the deed itself was unexpected, the perpetrator was par for the course. The Admiralty ruled that as of March 31, all 129 men who had entered the Arctic nine years before aboard HM ships Erebus and Terror were officially to be listed as dead. The navy made this callous decision at a time when Belcher’s five vessels were still supposedly searching, Collinson had yet to be heard from, and the Americans, whatever the odds against their finding anything in Smith Sound, were still hard at work.

  It was perfectly true that no stretch of the imagination, no matter how desperate or contrived, could concoct a scenario whereby Franklin’s crews could subsist on their provisions for nine years. On the other hand, Franklin wasn’t exactly lost on the moon. John Ross could never have lasted four years on the provisions he had taken with him to Prince Regent Inlet in 1829, but he had found the Inuit more than happy to supply food for those first two winters. Perhaps Franklin had likewise encountered Inuit to hunt game for his crew. Failing this, it was even suggested that a few survivors might have sought refuge among the Arctic peoples; perhaps even after nine years some of Franklin’s crew were to be found living in igloos in some tiny, out-of-the-way Inuit encampment, alive but unable to communicate with the outside world. And then there were all those supply caches to consider: no longer just the one at Fury Beach, but the many that had been established since then. If Franklin had managed to reach one of them, perhaps . . . perhaps . . .

  But the Admiralty could not be swayed. The crews of Erebus and Terror were dead and that was the end of it. Even Sir John Franklin, the greatest hero of all, was written off as easily as the navy would soon write off her six lost ships. It is difficult to find a suitable comparison from our own age, but it was as if NASA were to have lost contact with Neil Armstrong on the moon, then declared him dead, while there was still a possibility his radio was merely malfunctioning.

  With the return of Belcher’s overcrowded expedition in September, whatever hope had remained for Jane Franklin must have been crushed as swiftly as the Breadalbane itself. Six ships lost—how could she convince the navy to send out another expedition after such a disaster?

  Quite obviously she couldn’t. Belcher’s inexplicable abandonment of his ships had effectively driven the nail into her husband’s coffin. For a terrible moment, Lady Franklin perched on the brink of a cruel future, a future reaching on and on until her death, never to know what fate had befallen her husband. The Admiralty very nearly won.

  Then, in late October, barely a month after Belcher’s return, word reached England—Franklin had been found. More incredible still, the man who had happened upon the lost expedition seemed to have been about the only person in the Arctic not actually looking.

  TARZAN OF THE BARREN GROUNDS

  He was Dr. John Rae, the same man who had visited Victoria Island ahead of Collinson, and he is certainly one of the most colourful figures to grace the pages of Canadian history books.

  John Rae was a sort of Tarzan of the Barren Grounds. Employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, he travelled staggering distances through the Canadian North, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by a few native companions. Occasionally he used dog sleds, other times he ate up the snow-clad miles on snowshoe, averaging as much as 24 miles a day. He had Inuit snow goggles shielding his eyes, and he carried what he needed on his back. He needed surprisingly little. So long as he had enough ammunition for his rifle, Rae could supply all the nutritional needs of himself and his companions, gaining weight in bleak northern regions where any other European would have starved to death.

  Rae was born in the Orkneys, where bitter weather served as a sort of overseas kiln, smelting strong, able lads to staff the Company “factories” on the bleak shores of Hudson Bay and the even lonelier posts farther inland. He first entered the service of the “Honourable Company of Adventurers” as a surgeon aboard the supply ship Prince of Wales, on its annual run over to Moose Factory, but he made such a good impression on the Chief Factor that the Company promptly offered him a permanent position. It wasn’t long before his remarkable talent for lengthy, snowshoe-clad treks through the Canadian brush earned him a reputation. He was placed in charge of the Rupert River District and then offered a shot at the history books.

  ROYAL CLEARANCE

  As a condition of its original charter, the Hudson’s Bay Company, back in 1670, had been expected to search for a Northwest Passage in addition to trapping beavers for profit. The Company had been fairly lax in pursuing the former, but now, with the growing public interest in the Royal Navy’s efforts, the Company took up the cudgel.

  In 1836, George Simpson, the Company’s governor, had dispatched his younger cousin, Thomas Simpson, along with another company employee, Peter Warren Dease, to venture up the Mackenzie River and then up the Coppermine. Their goal was to map the southern passage along the roof of the continent, a passage already partly delineated by Franklin, and later to be sailed through by Collinson. In their second expedition, Dease and Simpson travelled east from the Coppermine and discovered a strait directly south of King William Island, a passage which Simpson believed had to continue eastward, cutting directly through Boothia [see map 17]. In other words, Simpson believed there was a water passage connecting the Gulf of Boothia at the bottom of Prince Regent Inlet with the western waters under King William Island. He thought Boothia was an island.

  On the other hand, James Clark Ross and John Ross had already visited the area aboard the Victory. Having spoken to the local Inuit, the Rosses were convinced that no such passage through Boothia existed: Boothia was a peninsula.

  Who was right? Everything might hinge on the answer. If Simpson was right and Boothia was an island, then his strait would effectively be the final link in the Northwest Passage. If the Rosses were correct and Boothia was a peninsula, then the Passage, if it existed, would have to be sought farther north.

  Map 17

  Thomas Simpson’s proposed strait through Boothia

  In 1846, one year after Franklin had set sail on his doomed expedition, the Honourable Company asked John Rae to resolve the question once and for all. Was Boothia an island or a peninsula? To do this, Rae decided to attack the problem from the east, rather than from the west as Simpson had. In two twenty-foot boats named Magnet and North Pole, he set out from Churchill and sailed up the west coast of Hudson Bay to Repulse Bay. Arriving too late to begin his explorations that year, Rae calmly settled in for the winter, naming his little camp Fort Hope.

  The next summer, Rae set off to the north and west, exploring and mapping the southern reaches of Prince Regent Inlet and the Gulf of Boothia. Travelling along the east coast of Boothia, he found no indications of a water passage from the west, and concluded, rightly, that Simpson had been wrong; Boothia was a peninsula, connec
ted to the continent. The Northwest Passage was to be found farther north—if at all.

  But what did the Admiralty think of Rae’s explorations? After all, we have assumed Franklin’s orders were to proceed to King William Island, only a short distance from Rae’s area of inquiry. While his visit coincided with Franklin’s, Rae had no plans to cross Boothia, and there was no reason his expedition should have encountered Franklin’s. The Admiralty may not have given it any thought. On the other hand, when Rae wrote up his adventures for publication, the publisher submitted the manuscript to the Admiralty for clearance. The navy held onto Rae’s book for three years, before returning it to him so completely rewritten that he grumbled, “I did not know my own bantling when it reached me.”1 Why did a book describing the purely geographical explorations of an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company require clearance from the British Royal Navy?

  LESS THAN ADVERTISED

  In 1848, as concern began to grow for the welfare of Franklin’s expedition, Rae was again asked to travel to the Arctic waterways, this time as part of a navy search team. In charge of the party was Sir John Richardson, who had previously trekked with Franklin on the explorer’s two earlier journeys.