The Franklin Conspiracy Read online

  Jane Franklin, as always, remained a force unto herself. With Anderson’s return, she was again pushing for another expedition, this one to do what she had been trying to do for so many years: send a ship down Prince Regent Inlet to winter on the Boothia Peninsula, and from there dispatch search parties across to King William Island.

  We can only wonder what horror of mind and soul she must have suffered on first hearing Rae’s revelations. Perhaps if she had been seeking her husband in the wrong place, she could have consoled herself with the thought she had simply made a mistake. But the horror was that she had been searching in the right place from the start. She and she alone had stood any hope of reaching Franklin’s crew, and she had failed. If only she had not listened to James Clark Ross; if only she had chosen someone other than Captain Forsyth; if only she had been more adamant with Captain Kennedy (or, if only she hadn’t instructed him to check up on the navy’s search—if indeed she did); if only she had tried harder. She would have to live with the horror for the rest of her life.

  It was at this point that the Americans gallantly returned the resurrected Resolute, newly repaired after a year in dry dock. She was a “consecrated ship”. She too was meant to complete a job left undone. And yet, like the Anderson Expedition, her mere existence acted as a source of further delay, drawing Lady Franklin’s resources and energy to an effort which ultimately proved futile. Another year passed, a year of furious lobbying and letter writing, handshaking and trembling speeches, all directed toward seeing the Resolute dispatched on a seemingly inevitable voyage to Prince Regent Inlet.

  And then, with startling suddenness, everything changed. We might say that after carrying out its carefully orchestrated conspiracy for so long, after so successfully setting false trails, emptying cairns, determining the search areas, controlling and concealing, misleading and covering-up, after all the deceit and all the cunning trickery, the Admiralty finally made a mistake.

  It destroyed the Resolute.

  Everything else could be rationalized away. Jane Franklin could tell herself that she had been cursed with terrible luck, that the navy was simply incompetent, that coincidences happen. She could blame the unpredictable weather or the lack of preparation; she could curse the name of individual officers (like Belcher) or curse herself for her personal choices (like Forsyth); she could put anything and everything down to cruel fickle Fate, and wish to God things might have been different—were it not for the destruction of the Resolute. This wasn’t an act of incompetence or poor leadership; it wasn’t the fault of ice conditions or an Arctic blizzard. The Resolute had been destroyed in a clear and deliberate act designed to keep her from doing what so clearly had to be done: reach her husband. And it had been destroyed by order of the First Lord of the Admiralty. Against the wishes of the Americans who had restored the ship, against the wishes of the public, against even the wishes of the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, the Resolute had been dismantled, and for that crime there could be no excuse.

  If there was a point of revelation in this story, a precise moment when Lady Franklin at long last realized the nature of the thing she faced, it must have been now. The enemy was not Fate; her enemy wore a uniform. Her enemy carried a sword and saluted smartly, all the while weaving a web of lies and deceit. Her enemy had made only one mistake but it was enough. It must have been so clear to her.

  She wasted no time; that was the navy’s game. With the year well under way and the Arctic sailing season fast approaching, she purchased the Fox, a 177-ton schooner-rigged screw-yacht that had only been used once before on a trip to Norway. It cost her 2000 pounds. Once again financing flowed from private sources, totalling nearly 3000 pounds, of which 5 pounds was donated by “The brothers and sisters of the late John and Thomas Hartnell of H.M.S. Erebus”1 (the former lying in a somewhat disturbed state on distant Beechey Island. To this sum, Lady Franklin added a further 7000 pounds of her personal wealth, which was now considerably smaller than in earlier days. In Aberdeen, the Fox was refitted and strengthened to face the ice.

  And then there was another matter to decide.

  ONE MAN

  If the Franklin search were to be made as a motion picture, this would be the moment when the music would soar, the moment of truth and vindication to which all else had been steadily leading. For so many years, Jane Franklin had found herself the naive victim, betrayed by those who had seemed her friends, betrayed by men of honour and repute, betrayed by nearly everyone. She was a woman besieged, surrounded by the faceless enemy, deep in its home, beaten at every turn. And so she turned to the only man left who had not betrayed her.

  One last time she invited Captain Coppin into her home. She “spoke painfully of her previous selections”.2 She asked him a fairly simple question: who should she send this time?

  As simple as the question was, it was nonetheless remarkable for the person to whom it was directed. Captain Coppin wasn’t an Edward Parry or a James Clark Ross; he wasn’t a member of the illustrious Arctic Council to which she had so often turned in the past; he was a lowly shipbuilder whose sole claim to her ear arose from his daughter having seen words written on a wall by a ghost. Yet, his advice had guided her for so long, urging her to send ships down Prince Regent Inlet when the Admiralty and its experts insisted there was no need. Captain Coppin had been proven right and, more importantly, Captain Coppin had known it all along. He had never claimed to have seen the ghostly vision, yet he had acted as certain as if he had. He had been reluctant to allow Jane Franklin to speak with his daughter personally; he had refused to have his story made public in a proposed book by Charles Dickens, bowing out “for sacred family reasons”.3 Yet, all along, working quietly in the background, he had been insistent: Victory Point. There, he said, Franklin would be found. How could she not have suspected a secret truth beneath the ghost story?

  If so, Captain Coppin must surely have recognized this. Perhaps there was a moment of silent understanding, a meeting of eyes, the moment unconsciously echoing that strange instance when Captain Belcher was handed back his sword in silence—a small conspiracy of their own. It takes little imagination to see the true meaning of the question put to Captain Coppin; a squint of the eye and the significance grows clear as if momentarily glimpsed through thinning fog on the Arctic sea. Jane Franklin wasn’t just asking him who to send, she was asking him who in all of England she could trust. Captain Coppin took a piece of paper and scrawled a name.

  Francis Leopold McClintock.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Voyage of the Fox

  Down these mean streets a man must go

  who is not himself mean; who is neither tarnished

  nor afraid.

  Raymond Chandler,

  The Simple Art of Murder

  SO UNACCOUNTABLY CIVIL

  The Fox set sail in early July 1857 with a crew of twenty-five, seventeen of whom had been involved in previous Franklin searches, all of whom had been hand-picked by McClintock.

  Captain Collinson, formerly of the Enterprise in its voyage to the brink of success and back, took charge of the business end of things. Was this atonement perhaps? A way of making up for the part he had played in turning a blind eye to the evidence of Sir John Franklin’s lost ships in Victoria Strait, perhaps while emptying a cairn or two (or three) along the way? Collinson had spent much of that hapless earlier voyage drunk in his cabin. Had he been something less than a willing accomplice to the machinations of his superiors?

  As for McClintock, his command of this voyage seems somehow entirely fitting, inevitable even. It was McClintock who had travelled with James Clark Ross over the north shore of Somerset Island and down Peel Sound way back in 1849, the first of the Franklin searches. During that journey, McClintock had hung back with the men who hauled the sledges while Ross scouted the terrain ahead. McClintock had returned to the Arctic with Austin’s four-ship flotilla in 1850, where he had set sledging records travelling west along the shores of Melville Island. Then in 1852
he had again returned to Melville Island, this time in command of his own ship, the steamer Intrepid. Again his sledgers had not turned up a sliver of wood to indicate Franklin’s crew had met with disaster in that area. It had been on McClintock’s suggestion that Captain Kellett had planned to dispatch a sledge party down Peel Sound in the spring of 1854, an expedition that McClintock would certainly have been ordered to command. When Sir Edward Belcher’s orders to abandon all ships came through early that spring, McClintock offered to remain behind and continue the search—a request which was denied. It was as if his entire career had been steadily guiding him toward this one final voyage.

  The Admiralty itself seemed remarkably complacent, once Lady Franklin’s expedition became a fait accompli. Permission was granted for McClintock’s chosen officers to join the private venture. McClintock, however, clearly had his own reasons to feel uneasy, though what he believed we can only guess. Before accepting Lady Franklin’s request to command the Fox, McClintock wrote to James Clark Ross, his former commander: “What I would wish to ask you is how far I might expect the countenance of the scientific bodies . . . and in how far the Admiralty sanction ought to be obtained, as I do not wish to be so impolitic as to act counter to their wishes.” He then added, “I have not mentioned this subject to anyone and should [the voyage] not take place we would be better not to let it be known that I’d ever contemplated accepting.”1

  But McClintock’s concern seemed unfounded. The Admiralty did grant him permission. The Royal Navy even went so far as to supply some three tons of pemmican, powder for ice blasting, and rockets, all left over from previous expeditions. It was all so unaccountably civil. As the tiny Fox slowly dwindled over the western horizon off the Orkneys, Lady Franklin might well have found herself wondering if she wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  CHANCES UNKNOWN

  Upon reaching the Greenland coast, McClintock promptly purchased ten sled dogs at Godhaven. Noting that he would require twenty more, his interpreter, Petersen (who had been Captain Penny’s interpreter back in 1850), directed him to a small settlement named Proven where more dogs were bought. It was a striking affirmation of intent and determination, and a bold split with the naval expeditions which had gone before. McClintock had made his reputation with man-hauled sledges. Yet, now, for the first time, he used dogs. His message was clear: the navy was no longer calling the shots. This time there would be no excuses.

  Then, after such a defiantly determined start, the expedition ran into trouble with a capital “I”. The ice had not cleared in the upper part of Melville Bay, contrary to what he had been told by whalers. He became trapped, and was forced to spend a terrifying winter locked in the grinding pack. Finally, on April 25th, 1858, after 242 days, the ice broke up and the Fox made its way into Lancaster Sound.

  Having used up most of his coal battling his way across Baffin Bay, McClintock now steered a course for Beechey Island, where a coal cache had been left by the North Star [see map 20]. While at Beechey he erected a monument to Franklin and his crew that had been deposited undelivered at Godhaven by the last American expedition in 1855. The inscription noted that Franklin and his men had “suffered and perished in the cause of science and the service of their country” and that the monument was to commemorate the grief of their countrymen and friends “and the anguish, subdued by faith, of her who has lost, in the heroic leader of the expedition, the most devoted and affectionate of husbands.” It was somehow entirely appropriate that the woman who had fought against impossible odds to discover her husband’s fate, but who had nonetheless shunned personal publicity so much so that few photographs were ever taken of her, did not think to place her own name on this monument to her grief.

  Map 20

  McClintock’s Voyage of the Fox, 1857–1858

  During his brief stopover at Beechey Island, we may wonder if McClintock took time to visit the three lonely graves with their inscribed headstones—monuments of a less heroic nature. Casting his eye over those two strange Biblical passages, he might well have felt an unaccountable chill. “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; consider your ways.” “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.” What happened in this place during that lonely, sunless winter so long ago? How did these three men die? What was Franklin trying to say with those two dark quotations? Were they messages left for others to decipher?

  Perhaps for the first time, standing over those graves, the grim reality of his situation may have closed around McClintock like an Arctic fog. The last two times he had come this way, he had been part of naval flotillas: four ships under Austin, five under Belcher. This time, McClintock had no supply transports to depend upon, no depot ships to fall back on; unlike John Ross’ Felix with its tender Mary, McClintock had brought no ship to transfer to if anything happened to the Fox. For all intents and purposes, it might as well have been 1845 all over again. But, Franklin had travelled with a pair of powerful (and Antarctic-proven) bomb-ketches manned by 129 seamen, their decks heaped with provisions, libraries stocked with three thousand books, two hundred canisters for messages, and two railway steam engines for screw-propulsion. McClintock had one small steam-yacht which had travelled to Norway and back. With this and twenty-five men, he planned to venture into the unknown Arctic.

  True, it was now known that Franklin had found his way down to King William Island. But it still wasn’t known how he had gotten there. By Peel Sound, as McClintock believed? By a channel southwest of Cape Walker, as Lady Franklin continued to hope, wanting to believe her husband had followed his instructions to the letter? Or had he gotten there by going down Prince Regent Inlet and through Bellot Strait, if indeed Kennedy had been correct about that passage’s existence? Nobody knew and so McClintock was effectively as much in the dark as Franklin had been.

  But, in a way, McClintock was in a worse position than Franklin. Franklin, whatever he may have expected to find at Victory Point, had been confident of success. McClintock, on the other hand, knew something terrible had happened to his predecessor. After all the confidence, all the expense, and all the preparation, something had gone disastrously wrong and 129 men had perished in horror. Now McClintock planned to follow them. “Ahead lay chances unknown and incalculable,” wrote historian Leslie Neatby. “The track of the Erebus and the Terror had been traversed only once—by those who had never come back.”

  SOME HAD BEEN BURIED . . . SOME HAD NOT

  McClintock steamed south from Beechey Island to his destination, Peel Sound. Five years before, he had planned to sledge down the sound, until his proposal was foiled by Sir Edward Belcher. Now, crossing Barrow Strait, the Fox “shot gallantly past Limestone Island” at the mouth of the passage. And there, sure enough, the water lay clear ahead. Where was the multi-year ice frozen to the bottom? Where was the impassable ice of James Clark Ross and Willy Browne? In someone’s imagination, apparently. With his crew and himself “in a wild state of excitement—a mingling of anxious hopes and fears”, McClintock steered straight down the throat of the passage, success nearly within his grasp. And then, disappointment. Twenty-five miles down Peel Sound, the Fox ran into ice. There was still no sign of the multi-year ice; this was melting ice, “much decayed, and of one year’s growth only”. But it was enough to prevent the tiny Fox from proceeding further.

  Though frustrated by this obstacle, McClintock knew he couldn’t waste time fighting his way through it. He turned around and hurried back up Peel Sound, then down Prince Regent Inlet to the mouth of Bellot Strait. The strait cut through the Boothia-Somerset landmass at its slimmest point: a mere twenty miles long, a scant mile wide at it narrowest. In spite of this, towering granite cliffs measuring 1600 feet high loomed against the sky on either side, the whitewater depths plunging straight down to an astonishing 400 feet only a quarter of a mile from the shore. But here too McClintock was foiled. Six times he braved the narrow, steep-walled strait, each time being driven back by ice, whirlpools, and a powerful current from the west.

  In the
end, frustrated, the season too late even to return to Peel Sound, McClintock returned to the mouth of Bellot Strait to spend a second winter in the cold and the dark.

  Once again, no better proof exists of the navy’s purposeful stalling tactics, than the contrasting efficiency with which the non-naval searches were conducted. McClintock set out on February 17, 1859. Only Kennedy and Bellot’s moonlit January trek to check for Franklin at Fury Beach could claim an earlier beginning. Taking fifteen dogs pulling two sledges and provisions for twenty-four days, McClintock set off with Petersen, the interpreter, and Alexander Thompson, who had also previously been on Penny’s expedition. Following the margin of Bellot Strait to the west coast of Boothia Peninsula, the party sledged south along the shore to the North Magnetic Pole. That is where McClintock hoped to meet with the local Inuit whom James Clark Ross and John Ross had encountered when they had wintered in the area back in 1829. Instead of weighing themselves down with tents, the party built rough igloos.

  It was an astonishing picture: an officer of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy travelling with dogsleds and building igloos? What had happened to the aversion against “going native”? Apparently, that particular aversion only applied while naval officers were operating under the instructions of the Admiralty, not otherwise.

  On March 1st, the expedition had still not located James Clark Ross’ cairn marking the Magnetic Pole, their provisions were in a “reduced state”, and six of the fifteen dogs were too sick to pull the sledges. Certain they could travel only one more day, and still having failed to encounter any Inuit, McClintock looked behind him. To his astonishment, he found a party of Inuit following his party. “Petersen and I immediately buckled on our revolvers and advanced to meet them.”2

  McClintock noticed one Inuk wore a naval button, which McClintock used as an icebreaker to open questions about the lost expedition. Over the next few days more Inuit arrived, having heard that white men were offering to buy relics. McClintock purchased six silver spoons, forks, a silver medal belonging to the assistant surgeon of the Terror, a gold chain, more buttons, and knives made from iron and wood that were obviously taken from one of the ships. He noticed one of the native sledges was made from the stout keel of a ship’s boat, and he bought a six-and-a-half foot spear that seemed to be made from a boat’s gunwale. None of the Inuit had actually seen the lost expedition, but the party was told of a ship crushed in the ice in the direction of Cape Felix at the northern tip of King William Island. Apparently the entire crew had made it to shore safely, but later one Inuk claimed to have seen their bones on an island. Some had been buried, the man told McClintock, some had not.