The Franklin Conspiracy Read online

  Having learned all he could, McClintock returned to the Fox to wait for the spring to arrive and the real search to begin.

  THE UNSPEAKABLY PRECIOUS DOCUMENTS

  On April 2nd, the sledge teams set out once again. Once more, McClintock’s efforts could not help but raise questions about the sincerity of the naval expeditions which had preceded him. True, the searchers now had a rough idea as to where to look. Rae’s informers suggested the mouth of the Great Fish River was a likely spot to find relics and bodies; specifically, five bodies had been mentioned as lying exposed on Montreal Island. On the other hand, McClintock’s informers spoke of a ship being crushed in the ice near the northern tip of King William Island. If both stories were true, then Franklin’s crew must have abandoned ship in the ice of Victoria Strait and trudged all the way down the west and south coasts of King William Island, then crossed Simpson Strait to the mainland near the Great Fish River. This hardly narrowed down the search area.

  As well, there was the question of the second ship. The Inuit McClintock had spoken to only told him of one ship which had been sunk by ice. What had happened to the other one? It had to be out there somewhere, but where?

  Franklin was most probably to be found on King William Island, but McClintock wasn’t prepared to take the chance that he might be wrong. Though he had neither enough men nor enough dog-drivers, McClintock resolved to divide his small party into three groups [see map 21]. McClintock himself would lead his group down to the Great Fish River, then back to King William Island from below. A second group, under the leadership of Lieutenant William Hobson, McClintock’s second-in-command, was to cross to King William Island from the north, beginning their search at the north tip of the island and tracing the west coast southward. Finally, a third group, under the command of Allen Young, the Fox’s navigator, was instructed to search Prince of Wales Island, already partially searched by the naval sledgers under Ommanney and also by Kennedy and Bellot.

  Map 21

  McClintock’s 3 Sledge Parties

  Historians have generally held that McClintock gave Hobson the most promising area to search as a magnanimous gesture. For example, Leslie Neatby commented, “Thus, with a generosity in strong contrast to the egotism later displayed by Robert Peary in a similar situation, he [McClintock] yielded to his lieutenant the first chance of making the prized discovery of Franklin’s record.”3

  In fact, McClintock did nothing of the kind. His instructions from Lady Franklin had been quite clear. In a letter, she had begun by assuring him, “You have kindly invited me to give you ‘Instructions,’ but I cannot bring myself to feel that it would be right in me in any way to influence your judgment in the conduct of your noble undertaking; and indeed I have no temptation to do so, since it appears to me that your views are almost identical with those which I have independently formed.”4 She might not be prepared to tell him where to look, but she certainly intended to make sure he knew what he was after:

  As to the objects of the expedition and their relative importance, I am sure you know that the rescue of any possible survivor of the ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ would be to me, as it would be to you, the noblest results of our efforts. . . . Next to it in importance is the recovery of the unspeakably precious documents of the expedition, public and private. . . . I trust it will be in your power to confirm, directly or inferentially, the claims of my husband’s expedition to the earliest discovery of the passage.

  McClintock’s instructions then were to search for survivors (which were unlikely to be found after so many years), retrieve the ship’s records, and prove that Franklin’s crew, in their last desperate march over the bleak snows, had recognized the Northwest Passage for what it was. McClintock was not being generous by sending Hobson to the northern tip of King William Island; to have done otherwise would have been to betray Lady Franklin’s trust. Wherever Franklin’s crew had begun their death march, they had completed it in the south, along the south shore of King William Island and the mainland beyond. This was where the final link in the Passage lay and only there could the proof of its discovery be found.

  As for the “unspeakably precious” records, McClintock believed that there was one obvious place to search; that was a famous cairn erected on the south shore of King William Island by Thomas Simpson during his explorations with Dease. McClintock felt, “The opportunity afforded by the cairn of depositing in a known position—and that, too, where their own discoveries terminated—some record of their own proceedings, or, it might be, a portion of their scientific journals, would scarcely have been disregarded.”5 Thus Simpson’s cairn beckoned like a light in the fog. There the records must be found, and to search there, McClintock trusted no one but himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Other Shoe Drops

  Anything like the sound of a rat

  Makes my heart go pit-a-pat!

  Robert Browning,

  The Pied Piper of Hamelin

  THE SECOND SHIP

  Initially, the searchers divided into two groups, with Young setting off for Prince of Wales Island, while McClintock and Hobson travelled together. Silk banners fluttered in the chill air, festooning the sledges, McClintock’s given to him by Lady Franklin personally and embroidered with her name. The men wore coloured spectacles to protect their eyes, but still found themselves suffering the horrible agonies of snow blindness. Two days later, the party reached the west coast of Boothia Peninsula and on April 20th they ran into the same Inuit from whom they had bought relics back in March.

  Once again, McClintock noticed tools fashioned from wood obviously taken from a ship’s boat—a snow shovel, a spear handle, a bow. From a young man, he purchased a knife that had indistinct markings “such as ship’s cutlasses or swords usually have”.1

  Then, from the same young man, he obtained something else.

  The Inuk told McClintock that the knife had been taken from a ship which had been stranded on the shore. On the shore? In March the Inuit had told McClintock the ship sank in Victoria Strait. Now, to his astonishment, he learned that there had been two ships: one had sunk, the other had become stranded in the shallows.

  McClintock was amazed and more than a little suspicious. Why had the Inuit purposely kept this second ship secret, when he had expressly asked if there was only one ship when he had spoken to them earlier in the year? What was worse, McClintock was convinced the younger Inuk had only revealed the existence of the second ship by accident, after which the others had no choice but to admit the truth. Speaking of the older man who had first told him of the sunken ship, McClintock commented darkly, “I think he would willingly have kept us in ignorance of the wreck being upon their coasts, and that the young man unwittingly made it known to us.”2

  What reason did the Inuit have for hiding the stranded ship from the searchers? Just as John Rae had met with resistance from the Inuit of Pelly Bay, and Charles Francis Hall would later discover, McClintock found the Inuit strangely determined to hamper his effort to reach the lost expedition. Why?

  Even more remarkable, McClintock was told (again, by the young man) that some Inuit had climbed aboard the stranded vessel and discovered the body of a “very large man” with “long teeth”.3 This had happened many years before when the young Inuk was just a boy. A body? But whose? The discovery of this stranded ship now became an important priority in the search.

  Another piece of information gleaned from the Inuit seemed unimportant at the time, but McClintock made note of it just the same. Speaking of King William Island, the Inuit told McClintock, “Formerly many natives lived there, now very few remain.”4

  KING WILLIAM ISLAND

  The expedition continued southward to Cape Victoria. At this point, Hobson’s party departed to begin their search along the west coast of King William Island, while McClintock’s sledges headed for the island’s east coast. Crossing the hummock-cluttered ice using sledge-sails, McClintock and his men reached a bay on the opposite side in three days, whe
re they camped on the ice. On May 2nd, the party set foot on King William Island for the first time.

  King William Island — they had arrived at last. Here, somewhere, somehow, Franklin’s expedition had met with terrible disaster. Since that time, no white man had walked these low, snow-clad shores. McClintock and his party were the first. He could not have helped but feel uneasy.

  For two days they worked their way south down the coast. The land lay silent and empty around them, with no sign of the island’s inhabitants. Anxious to contact the local Inuit, McClintock decided to cross to a small island in Rae Strait. There he came upon a village of twenty snow-huts. Other huts were discovered scattered within a few miles to either side. Yet there was no sign of the village’s inhabitants; the place had been deserted, McClintock believed within the past fortnight. Apparently the Inuit had departed so hurriedly, they had left behind an “abundance of blubber”, which McClintock now confiscated for fuel. There were also “scraps and bones of seals strewed about” which the dogs happily gorged themselves on. It was clear that the village’s inhabitants had discovered the wreck on their shores; wood chips were found scattered around. But where had they gone?

  Continuing his journey, McClintock passed through a deep blinding fog for two days, losing his way before coming upon another snow-village on a small islet. This one had also been recently abandoned, and tracks led off to the east toward Boothia Peninsula. McClintock concluded the villages had been winter hunting places, deserted with the approach of spring. But wandering amongst these scattered vacant dwellings, with only the lonely whispering wind and the crunching of his feet in the snow, McClintock might have recalled what he had been told by the Inuit of Boothia Peninsula, that “Formerly many natives lived there, now very few remain.”

  Now, travelling only at night to protect their spectacled eyes from the sun’s burning glare off the snow, they returned to King William Island, then trudged southward down its barren shore. Finally, they came upon an inhabited village of twelve snow-houses and forty Inuit. After so many days spent visiting eerie ghost-villages, it was a relief at last to encounter living beings again. Indeed, the Inuit seemed just as pleased to see the searchers, the children gathering around the small party, poking and prodding them curiously. Again and again the Inuit tapped McClintock on the chest, telling him, “Kammik toomee”. We are friends.

  Once again, McClintock found in their possession relics of the lost expedition, which he purchased in exchange for needles. McClintock still found the Inuit surprisingly difficult to question, partly because Petersen wasn’t entirely comfortable with the dialect, but also because the Inuit were “far more inclined to ask questions than to answer them.”5 Eventually he learned that the stranded ship was to be found five days away on the west side of King William Island. The Inuit told him that their people had pillaged the wreck extensively. They also claimed that the ship had lost her masts. Then they laughed and mentioned something about “fire”. McClintock wasn’t able to learn more about this fire, but Petersen (still having trouble with the dialect) thought the Inuit were saying they had burned down the masts for the wood.

  Once again, McClintock found that none of his informers had actually seen Franklin’s crew while the men were still alive, but they had seen the unburied bodies strewn along the shore, from which they concluded that the seamen had “dropped by the way as they went to the Great Fish River.”6 “They did not themselves witness this,” wrote McClintock, “but discovered their bodies during the winter following.” The most recent visit to the stranded wreck had been made by a woman and a boy during the winter McClintock had spent trapped in the pack of Baffin Bay.

  The searchers resumed their trek southward. Beyond a wide bay, they came upon a lone snow-hut, surrounded by a fabulous clutter of reindeer and walrus meat, blubber and skins, and, of course, more objects fashioned from wood taken from the stranded ship. But this time, the reception accorded to the party was entirely different. It took some time before the hut’s owners, a man and a woman, came out to meet the visitors. Their behaviour was puzzling. “They trembled with fear, and could not, or would not, say anything except ‘Kammik toomee’”: we are friends. They claimed to have purchased the wooden tools from other Inuit, insisting they knew nothing about the one hundred or so white men dead on their shore. It is hard to believe, given that everyone else in the Arctic seemed to know; how could these two be unaware of the grisly remains scattered on their doorstep? One thing was certain: something had frightened them. McClintock found that “their wits seemed paralyzed, and we could get no information.”7

  WHO HAS ANY DOUBT NOW?

  Giving the woman a needle as a parting gift of friendship, McClintock continued along the coast, passing through yet another ghost-village. Then he left King William Island and crossed over to the mouth of the Great Fish River to the south. But, like Anderson, he found little evidence to support the attention that the Inuit stories seemed to give the place. On Montreal Island, Petersen discovered a few Franklin relics obviously gathered by some Inuk in the past and indicated by a “native mark”, a large stone placed upright on top of another. The island seemed to be covered with these stone markers, but there was no other evidence of the lost expedition and no sign of a cairn.

  Supremely disappointed, the party returned to King William Island on May 24th, reaching the shore near the mouth of the Peffer River and working their way westward. McClintock was headed for Cape Herschel where Thomas Simpson had erected his famous cairn. There McClintock felt certain the expedition’s records would have been deposited. It was the only logical place to search. He came upon a different cairn near Gladman Point, apparently very old and untouched for a long time [see map 22]. Eagerly it was taken apart stone by stone, the ground beneath was searched with a pickaxe, but no record was found. Was it just a cairn left by the Inuit? Possibly. But Simpson’s cairn still beckoned, so onward the party trudged.

  And then, quite suddenly, they came upon their first body.

  After all the years of speculation, all the grisly stories gleaned from the Inuit, all the buttons and cutlery and plates, it must still have been a shock. Here was proof, final and irrefutable, that Franklin’s expedition had met with disaster in this terrible, empty place.

  It was just after midnight and the skeleton lay on a gravel beach where the wind had cleared some of the snow mantle. Amongst the bleached bones, pieces of blue clothing showed through the snow — a uniform composed of a blue jacket with slashed sleeves and braided edging. The loose knot of a handkerchief around the corpse’s throat told McClintock that the man had been a steward. The skeleton lay on its front, and McClintock, writing in his journal, recalled what the Inuit had told him: “they fell down and died as they walked.” The Inuit hadn’t seen the event itself, only the skeletons, just as McClintock did now.

  He noticed that the skeleton’s limbs and smaller bones had either been “gnawed away by small animals” or “dissevered”. It was a curious word to use, and perhaps it was a subtle reference to the thought which must have been constantly on his mind: cannibalism. What horrors might he encounter if he continued along the coast? John Rae had been told of kettles filled with human flesh, bodies cut up. Though McClintock carefully avoided the topic in his journal, it must have haunted him incessantly.

  Map 22

  McClintock’s discoveries on King William Island, 1859

  Near the skeleton, McClintock found a clothes brush and a horn pocket comb “in which a few light-brown hairs still remained.”8 For the first time, a written document was found, a small notebook; but, frustratingly, the pages were frozen together. Perhaps it was just as well the party wasn’t able to open that book; it could only have further added to their anxiety had they known what it contained.

  Later, it would be thawed and found to belong to Henry Peglar, captain of the foretop on the Terror. The notebook contained writing in two hands — one belonging to Peglar, the other unidentified to this day. Much of the book was indecipherable
, but one sentence stood out as having been written during that final desperate march. It was in the handwriting of the unknown man; weirdly, many of the words were spelled backwards. It read: “Oh Death whare is thy sting, the grave at Comfort Cove for who has any doubt how.”9 As frightening as this final message was, it grows more disturbing still if we consider — given that the writing was barely legible — the final word as reading not “how” but “now”.

  THE CAIRN

  McClintock noted that the Inuit would surely have looted the corpse had they discovered it; this was the first of many observations which would lead him to conclude that the Inuit, inexplicably, had refused to venture into the area in search of the wealth of artifacts which they so clearly knew were there.

  After the discovery of the steward’s body, the mood could only have deepened. Grimly, the party continued westward, no longer in doubt that they were walking over the same ground which Franklin’s lost crewmen had followed to their end. They passed another ghost-village peopled only with silent snow-huts. And then they reached Cape Herschel. It was here that Thomas Simpson had constructed his cairn in 1839, atop a towering height of land 150 feet high and set back a quarter mile from the ice-heaped thrust of the cape. Here, more than any other place, McClintock hoped to find the records that he knew Franklin’s crew would have carried with them on their retreat. Eagerly, the party climbed to the cairn, still standing after so many years.