The Franklin Conspiracy Page 22

  What makes Beck’s story so remarkable is his claim that on the tin was the inscription: “September 3 1846”. He made this claim nine years before the Victory Point record was discovered, when all the evidence (namely the graves) indicated Franklin had left Beechey Island long before that date. We can’t help but notice the coincidence of the two dates: Adam Beck’s and the date given by Fitzjames on the Victory Point record. Fitzjames said the ships were first beset in the ice on September 12, 1846; Beck’s sign placed the expedition on Beechey Island only nine days before this. Taken together, the two dates clearly indicate that Franklin, knowing the 1846 season was almost over, returned to his berth on Beechey Island on September 3, having found the way south blocked by ice for the second year in a row, and having already explored Wellington Channel. Nine days later, the ships were stuck fast. This is what Beck’s find would seem to be telling us.

  Of course, once again, everyone called Adam Beck a liar.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Passage from Beechey Island

  “Well, sometimes I’ve believed as

  many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

  Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-glass

  A VOYAGE IN ICE?

  If Franklin spent his second winter at Beechey Island, how did he get into the ice off King William Island in the spring? More importantly, Fitzjames made it clear that the ships had been beset in the ice all winter, since September. How could the ships become beset in the ice off Beechey Island, yet end up beset in the ice off King William Island, without becoming “unbeset” somewhere in the middle?

  One solution to this puzzle was proposed by Parker Snow, Lady Franklin’s civilian champion, who had tried so hard to keep Captain Forsyth from giving up the search in 1850. Snow got his idea from the incredible winter voyage of the first American expedition, when those two ships had been pushed up Wellington Channel, then back down to Barrow Strait, east through Lancaster Sound and south down Baffin Bay, all while stuck in a huge ice-pan.

  Snow proposed, “Let us suppose that on September 12th, 1846, the Erebus and Terror were beset and had to winter (their second winter) at the outer part of Beechey Island. They are in the pack, as the Americans were, only more clear of the drift. They remained there till, say April, when they are forced out of the place, carried away to the westward and then driven down Melville Sound to King William Island before May.”1

  It was an ingenious solution, bolstered by the evidence of the American expedition’s drift — but objections could certainly be raised. The Americans had shown that the ice drift carried ships out into Baffin Bay by way of Lancaster Sound, not west toward Peel Sound. The spectacular ice stream flowing down from the Beaufort Sea also travelled east before flowing south down to King William Island. To have reached either Peel Sound or the ice stream, Franklin’s ships would have to have somehow drifted west through the very spot where the Americans had drifted east. Even more damaging is the fact that in 1875 Sir Allen Young (who had searched Prince of Wales Island while McClintock visited King William Island) tried to journey through the Northwest Passage (Franklin’s, not McClure’s) aboard the Pandora. Again, he found Peel Sound almost totally clear of ice, except at the bottom near Bellot Strait, where he was forced to turn back before a field of ice which was slowly drifting north up the sound. A century later, photographer Mike Beedell and Jeff MacInnis (the son of Canadian explorer Joe MacInnis) travelled through the Northwest Passage using a tiny 450-pound Hobie catamaran. In Peel Sound they worked their way north, sometimes sailing, sometimes scrambling over the ice, and sometimes riding the floes, all with a wind at their backs from the south. Could Franklin’s ships have drifted westward where the Americans had drifted eastward, then south down Peel Sound where the ice flowed north?

  THE INCREDIBLE OMISSION

  As if all this weren’t puzzling enough, the Victory Point record itself adds still more to the mystery. Astonishingly, nowhere in the 1847 message does Fitzjames indicate what route the ships used to reach King William Island. It was an incredible omission, and one that has never been explained. The record gave a detailed report of the voyage up Wellington Channel, even including the highest latitude reached, and the route by which the ships returned. Yet, none of this was important to what was ostensibly the purpose of the voyage: the completion of the Northwest Passage. Franklin broke no records by reaching 77 degrees latitude; Edward Parry had attained a north latitude of 82 degrees in 1827. The journey was interesting, certainly, but it was no more than a side trip. What mattered was knowing how the ships had gotten as far as they had. How had they reached King William Island? Southwest of Cape Walker? Peel Sound? Or through one of the hypothetical straits thought to link Prince Regent Inlet to the water west of Boothia?

  How could Fitzjames have failed to recognize how important that information would be? Because of this omission, even today historians remain uncertain about how the expedition arrived at King William Island.

  If Franklin did use Peel Sound, as most believe, whether under his own steam or adrift in an ice pan, shouldn’t Fitzjames have recorded the vital discovery that Peel Sound was not a bay but a sound? When Franklin set out from England, Cape Walker was thought to be the northwest corner of Somerset, which was why he was ordered to seek a passage only beyond that point. Shouldn’t the Victory Point record have noted that Cape Walker was actually the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island, that there was a passage — the Passage — between Somerset and Prince of Wales Island, and that Franklin had violated his orders by travelling, not southwest of Cape Walker, but southeast?

  For all these reasons, Fitzjames’ omission makes positively no sense — no sense that is, unless Fitzjames did not know how he had reached King William Island.

  THE RESOLUTE AND THE OCTAVIUS

  It is a remarkable hypothesis, but let us consider it closely. In the Victory Point record, Fitzjames carefully described the explorations up Wellington Channel and down the west side of Cornwallis Island but nothing else. It is as if that was all that had yet been discovered. We are given the latitude and longitude of the expedition’s wintering stop at Beechey Island, but there is no hint of geographical knowledge extending further south. It is almost as if the voyage to King William Island never happened. Or, more properly, it is as if the expedition went from Beechey Island to King William Island without passing through the country between.

  Is this possible? Certainly not that we know of. And yet . . .

  We can’t help but think of the case of the Resolute, Captain Kellett’s ship. When Edward Belcher ordered Kellett to abandon the Resolute, the vessel was still locked fast in the ice deep inside Viscount Melville Sound. The very next year, the Resolute was found floating in Baffin Bay, her hatches still sealed and her rigging frozen. Without a crew, somehow the Resolute found her way through the heavy ice and the labyrinth of shoals found in Viscount Melville Sound, which she had been unable to navigator with a crew two years before. (The steam powered Intrepid pulled her off the shoals.) Somehow she had sailed through Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound, then out into Baffin Bay, all without being sunk by the heaving, grinding icepacks along the way. On boarding her, the salvagers found unspilled glasses of wine still set out on a table. If it had not happened, we would say it was impossible.

  Then there is the even stranger case of the Octavius. Nearly a century before, in November 1762, this British vessel entered the Arctic from the west with a crew of twenty-eight. North of Point Barrow, Alaska, she became trapped in the relentless ice and, unable to get free, vanished into the Arctic. She was presumed lost with all hands. Then on August 17, 1775, the Octavius was found again by the Herald. The lost ship was drifting with the twenty-eight-man crew still aboard her, all frozen to death. She had reappeared off the coast of Greenland fully thirteen years after her disappearance on the opposite side of the Arctic. Thirteen years. How could any ship, let alone a ship built in the 1700s, have remained afloat in the Arctic ice for t
hirteen years? How could the Octavius have crossed the Arctic without a crew, somehow navigating the Northwest Passage, which the navy’s far more powerful vessels later failed to traverse?

  THE REST IS MERE CONJECTURE

  If an answer is to be sought to this mystery, it is to be sought at only one place: Beechey Island. Here the Franklin expedition spent its first winter in the Arctic. We have already glimpsed a hint of strange happenings during that first winter; the three deaths, the two grim Biblical passages on the headstones: “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts: Consider your ways.”; “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.”

  Then, if we are correct, the expedition returned to Beechey Island for a second winter. There were no deaths this time, but somehow, early in the spring, the members of the expedition found themselves locked in the ice off King William Island with no idea how they had got there. The later searchers commented on the evidence of a remarkably hasty departure from Beechey Island. But for us, one detail more than any other seems imbued with a disturbing significance. This is the pair of cashmere gloves discovered carefully set out on a rock, a pebble in each palm to keep them from blowing away. Those gloves had been set down for only a short time, but their owner had never returned to claim them.

  However, perhaps the eeriest event to occur at Beechey Island concerns none other than Jane Franklin’s champion from across the English Channel, Joseph-René Bellot. As we have already seen, Bellot took part in the Canadian expedition under Captain Kennedy. Though no sign of Franklin was discovered, Bellot was not one to give up easily. On his return, he set about trying to convince his own government to organize a French expedition to take up the search. In the end, his zeal wasn’t shared by his compatriots and he was turned down. Lady Franklin offered Bellot a ship of his own, the steamer Isabel, and Kennedy even offered to serve under his former subordinate. In the end, the Isabel left without Bellot, which was just as well since it got only as far as Valparaiso before the crew mutinied on Kennedy.

  Instead, Bellot returned to the Arctic in a last-minute posting aboard the transport Phoenix, sent out to re-provision Belcher’s expedition. In charge of the Phoenix was Captain Edward Inglefield, who we have previously met exhuming the body of John Hartnell. It was to be Bellot’s final expedition and one which would cost him his life.

  His death sent shockwaves back across the Atlantic; Jane Franklin was especially distressed by his loss, and she later saw that a memorial plaque was placed on Beechey Island beside her husband’s. As to what actually happened, historians have been remarkably varied in their recountings. Stephen Leacock, in Adventurers of the Far North (part of the famous Chronicles of Canada series), played it safe by simply noting, “The gallant Bellot, attempting to carry dispatches over the ice, sealed his devotion with his life.”2 Noel Wright wrote that Bellot, “appears to have been swept off an ice-floe by the force of the wind.”3 Pierre Berton stated, “Without warning, a great fissure fifteen feet wide opened up under him. He was gone in an instant.”4 And Peter Newman claimed Bellot “drowned en route to Lancaster Sound.”5

  The reason for these many interpretations lies in the truly mysterious circumstances of his death. When the Phoenix reached Beechey Island, Bellot promptly offered to carry dispatches up Wellington Channel to Belcher’s ships, Assistance and Pioneer. He set off on August 12th with a sledge, a gutta-purcha (a type of latex) boat, and three companions, including one who would later serve as quartermaster on the Fox. The party travelled on the ice for two days, until Bellot decided it would be safer if they returned to the shore. But suddenly, a lead opened up and Bellot and two of his four companions found themselves trapped on a drifting, hummocky ice floe. The three castaways proceeded to erect a tent, and settled down for the night.

  In the morning, the men were still adrift and thoroughly frightened they might not get back alive. Bellot, to encourage his companions, assured them, “If God protects us, not a hair of our heads will fall to the ground.”6 Then he left the tent to see how far they had drifted. Four minutes later, one of the other men followed Bellot out. To the man’s astonishment, Bellot was nowhere to be seen. The two men searched the ice floe, but the French officer was never found.

  It was concluded that he had somehow been blown into the water. And yet, no cry for help had been heard, nor a splash. On a small ice floe, surrounded by water, Joseph-René Bellot simply vanished. As one searcher said, “The rest is mere conjecture.”7

  PART IV

  In Whose Land Ye Dwell

  And always keep a hold of Nurse

  For fear of finding something worse.

  Hillaire Belloc,

  Jim

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Mock Suns and Other Northern Lights

  You common people of the skies,

  What are you when the moon shall rise?

  Sir Henry Wotton,

  On his Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia

  THE AGE OF REASON

  “Ever since the old [John] Ross’ disastrous sighting of the ‘Croker Mountains’,” observed Roderic Owen, “it had been a curious chance that observations made in this one corner of the Arctic should continue to produce false conclusions.”1 And observations there were, of many shapes and sizes, colours and lights.

  Perhaps nowhere on the face of the planet was there a geographic region more prone to the production of inexplicable sightings (and less prone to the asking of questions) than the eastern Arctic. Whether it be the sighting of solid land where there should be no land, or hissing lights in the Hyborean sky, Arctic explorers took it all in stride, coolly jotting it all down with an astonishing equanimity which might leave modern readers shaking their heads in wonder. The explanation for this remarkable resilience in the face of bizarre phenomena can be summed up in one word: dioptrics.

  The nineteenth century was the age of reason. In an astonishingly short time, it seemed, science had succeeded in unravelling mysteries that had existed since the dawn of civilization. The scientists of the Renaissance — Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Hooke — had all looked upwards and outwards to the heavens, charting the elliptical paths of the planets, or gazed inward, fashioning new mathematical techniques and the laws of physics. But the worthies of the nineteenth century turned their attention to the earth itself, seeking to explain the miracles sitting under their very noses.

  It was the era of museum collections, when science largely involved going out and shooting whatever you could find, preferably several hundred of them, just to be certain. Fossils were no longer “sports of nature”, whimsically placed in the ground by God to fool gullible humans; they were the evidence of past worlds, fantastic but now well within the realm of scientific understanding. Charles Lyell published his landmark Principles of Geology; Charles Darwin unleased The Origin of Species. The term “Natural History” itself implied progress and scientific achievement, dominion over the earth; it rang with the sort of state-of-the-art high-tech importance which a later age would accord to terms like “quantum mechanics” and “bioengineering”.

  And yet, it was a curious irony that the century which ushered in our own era of scientific reason, also begat the first wave of seances and spirit mediums. Still, here too, science took it all in stride. Scientists studied the famous Fox sisters as they might a pair of finches on the Galapagos Islands, soberly listening to the sound of spirits rapping out their messages from the grave (never guessing the one sister was merely cracking the knuckle of her toe). Even ghosts, they felt, could be fit into a niche somewhere in the grand edifice of Natural History — along with the newly discovered gorilla, perhaps.

  In this climate of progress, inevitable and unrelenting, it should hardly surprise us that visitors to the Arctic realms so easily accepted all that they found there. Dioptrics was the key: the study of light refraction. No explorer entered the Arctic ice without first hearing of the astonishing way warm air layers or suspended ice particles could bend and warp light, creating an infinite variety of mirages and illusions, phantom mountain rang
es and lights in the sky. The explorers were assured before even setting out from England: if they witnessed ships suspended in the air, it was just the refracted image of some unseen whaler hidden over the horizon. It might not look like a whaler, but that was because the image might be squeezed, upside down, or otherwise distorted. Other shapes seen hovering over the chill waters were likewise ascribed to the distorted images of mountaintops or icebergs, again hidden over the horizon.

  None of this is to dispute the reality of light refraction; images are indeed refracted through layers of air. But the problem with the science of dioptrics was that it was too successful at explaining away just about anything without any way of proving that the explanation itself was valid in any particular case. Those nineteenth century explorers might have watched a B-52 bomber passing low over the Arctic floes and calmly recorded the observation as yet one more curious “refractive phenomenon”.

  If we were to try to categorize those things seen by the northern explorers, we might divide them into two main groupings. The first group might be titled: “phantom geographical features”. More properly, these were the fata morgana.

  THE FATA MORGANA

  Into this category falls all those strange islands, land barriers, and mountain ranges seen and sworn to by experienced explorers, yet which had mysteriously vanished by the time the next expedition happened along. John Ross had seen his “Croker Mountains”; Kennedy and Bellot had seen land across the bottom of Peel Sound. In 1909, Robert Peary, on his way to the North Pole, sighted “Crocker Land” north of Ellesmere Island. He swore it was a mountainous island, “not a small island but something that filled the horizon — clear and unmistakably icy peaks rising against the northern sky.”2 But unmistakable or not, in 1913, another expedition found neither hide nor hoar of Peary’s island. There was President’s Land, Petermann Land, Keenan Land, and King Oscar Land, which all vanished when later expeditions happened through. Were these mere tricks of the light?