The Franklin Conspiracy Read online

  As for the possibility of a strait through the peninsula, James Clark Ross knew the testimony of the Inuit would not be enough. His first priority (after the Pole) should have been to see for himself. Instead, he chose to visit King William Island. Why?

  We cannot escape the feeling that he went there because he expected to find something — something more important than the Magnetic Pole or the Northwest Passage. He went there looking for something and, more importantly, he knew precisely where to look. The northwest coast of King William Island. Victory Point. The exact same place where the Franklin expedition would meet its end. The exact same.

  But how did he know?

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Fury Vanishes

  Is he in heaven? – Is he in hell?

  That demmed, elusive Pimpernel.

  Baroness Orczy,

  The Scarlet Pimpernel

  PARRY’S DISASTROUS THIRD VOYAGE

  Clearly, if it is true that James Clark Ross went to King William Island expecting to find something there, the next question we must ask is: how did he know that something was there to be found?

  It makes sense, then, to consider the expedition which preceded this one — the last navy expedition to be sent in search of the Northwest Passage, after which the government suddenly decided no more should be sent out and cancelled the twenty-thousand-pound reward. We must consider William Edward Parry’s disastrous third expedition.

  Parry also thought there might be a strait through Boothia and Somerset. With his second expedition, he had tried to reach this passage from the south by way of Hudson’s Strait and the Foxe Basin, only to find himself defeated by ice in Fury and Hecla Strait. Now he was prepared to try to find it from the north again, using Prince Regent Inlet.

  In May 1824, Parry set sail with the two ships he had used on his earlier expedition, the Hecla and Fury. The expedition reached Baffin Bay a month later and by mid-July it was already in trouble. Due to the “quantity, magnitude, and closeness of the ice” the two crews were “constantly employed in heaving, warping, or sawing through it”.1 On August 1st, a storm closed in and caused the grinding ice pans to pile atop one another. The terrible pressure of the heaving ice forced the Hecla on her beam ends with such relentless strength that Parry was convinced no normal vessel could have survived the onslaught. Nevertheless, by September they were clear and they passed into Lancaster Sound, miraculously almost ice-free. Still, it was merely the lull before the storm.

  It was now late in the season; ice gradually formed around the ships and a three-mile-per-hour current forced them steadily backward. Only gradually did they make up the lost ground, before turning south down into Prince Regent Inlet. Unable to proceed farther, they found a suitable wintering spot on the east coast of the inlet, rather than on the west coast as they had hoped. There they spent a bleak, lonely winter, sending out several exploratory missions by sledge to the south, north and east.

  Ten months later, the ice floe that had blocked their harbour broke apart and they again set sail, this time determined to reach the coast of Somerset across the inlet, and to find out whether a strait through it existed or not. But no sooner had they reached the opposite shore than the Hecla found herself mired in grinding ice and, after wrecking two ice anchors, they had no choice but to drift for two days to where the pack took them. From then on things got worse, as a storm struck the Fury and forced the ship up onto the cliff-lined shore of Somerset Island. The crews floated her free, but then both ships were driven aground by the merciless ice. Again they were floated free, but by now the Fury was leaking badly and required the constant use of pumps to stay afloat. Again ice forced her onto the shore, with the Hecla barely escaping a similar fate.

  On surveying the damage done to the Fury, it was decided that she would have to be repaired. The crews set about building a basin for her where she would be sheltered by icebergs from the worst of the storm, but once she had been unloaded and moved into the basin the storm blew away the sheltering ice. Quickly she was loaded up again and floated out into open water, but no sooner had she cleared the harbour than the ice delivered the coup de grace, forcing her onto the beach for the final time.

  Parry later wrote, “Every endeavour of ours to get her off, or if got off, to float her to any known place of safety, would be at once utterly hopeless in itself, and productive of extreme risk to our remaining ship.”2 Her provisions were offloaded in the hopes they might be useful to future expeditions (as, in fact, they were to John Ross) and the battered Fury was left there on the beach, which was now, fittingly, given the name Fury Beach. The Hecla returned to England alone.

  THE COMMON FACTOR

  Ever since Parry’s brief side trip in 1819, no ship had passed down Prince Regent Inlet until the Fury and Hecla’s ill-starred voyage. After Parry, the next to do so would be John Ross. Is there a connection between the two expeditions? Is there any reason to think the course of one was determined by the other? On first glance, if there is a common factor it is well hidden. Parry’s expedition was proposed and carried out as a naval venture. Ross’ expedition was privately sponsored precisely because the Admiralty didn’t want him going there. There was certainly no love lost between the two men; Parry had made a fool of Ross and Parry was the favourite of the Admiralty while Ross was an outcast. And yet, there does remain one tantalizing link between the two voyages.

  JAMES CLARK ROSS

  John Ross’ nephew had been a midshipman on both of Parry’s previous expeditions, and was promoted to lieutenant prior to the third one. He sailed aboard the Fury. It is certainly a tenuous link if we are to suggest James Clark Ross visited King William Island during this earlier voyage. After all, according to Parry, that first winter was spent across the strait from Somerset Island and what time was spent on her shores the next year was amply taken up trying to save the two ships. The only sledge trips Ross is recorded as undertaking were on the east side of Prince Regent Inlet, not the west side.

  Is it even remotely possible Ross found time to sledge south down Somerset and across to King William Island during the second summer — perhaps while the crews were fighting to save the beached ships? It would unquestionably have been a difficult and lengthy journey, but no more so than many of the journeys undertaken during the later search for Franklin’s expedition.

  If distance were the only obstacle, we could say it was possible Ross made such a journey. But time is also to be considered. After all, between Parry’s ships repeatedly being tossed up on the rocky shore, refloating them and building a basin to repair the Fury, little time would seem to have remained for Ross to make this trek.

  That is, assuming things happened as Parry claimed they happened.

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO THE FURY?

  One of the assertions of Parry’s story of ice and wind was that he had been forced to unload the Fury’s provisions and abandon his vessel while she was grounded on Fury Beach. Yet, when John Ross reached Fury Beach four years later aboard the diminutive Victory, there was no sign of the Fury. Of course, it is possible that the same ice that had grounded the ship in the first place returned in later years and dragged it into open water, where it assuredly would have sunk. And yet, the provisions left on the beach remained precisely where Parry had placed them — undisturbed.

  Ross also abandoned his vessel on the same coast. Over the years, the Inuit visited this wreck many times and relics from the Victory were found in the possession of Inuit across the eastern Arctic long afterward. Copper from Ross’ vessel was made into Inuit mukluks. In fact, the Inuit referred to the harbour where the Victory was abandoned as qilanartot, meaning “joyful beach”, because of the useful materials to be found there.3 Yet no trace of Parry’s ship Fury was ever discovered, no relic found its way into Inuit hands, and no wreckage washed ashore. It simply disappeared.

  What are we to make of this? Was the Fury simply dragged away by the ice? Or is it possible the Fury was never there to begin with? If not, why would Parry lie?
If the Fury was not abandoned on Fury Beach, what really happened to her?

  Another point: Parry published official accounts for each of his three expeditions. Unlike the accounts of his first two voyages, his written version of this third expedition filled only a slim single volume. “Reading these excerpts from his journal,” commented Pierre Berton, “so much sparser than in previous years — one gets the impression that Parry was growing weary of it all.”4 And perhaps he was. But is it not also possible that this account was shorter for the reason that it was a partial fabrication? In fact, is it not possible that Parry was instructed to make up the story of the Fury’s grounding on Fury Beach, to conceal the true circumstances of its loss?

  But then, what did become of the Fury?

  A MYSTERIOUS WRECK

  In 1929, long after the final resting place of Franklin’s crew had been discovered on King William Island, Major L.T. Burwash gleaned from the natives of Boothia Peninsula what David C. Woodman called, “One of the most unlikely of the Inuit tales.”5 From two Inuit, both about sixty years old, Burwash was astonished to learn that they had “for many years been aware of the fact that the wreck of a large vessel lay submerged off the northwestern extremity of Matty Island.” [see map 6] Matty Island is a small island nestled in between King William Island and the Boothia Peninsula. By the very nature of its position, it is almost impossible to reach by ship. Yet the Inuit claimed that occasionally bits of wood and metal were washed ashore from this wreck and they showed Burwash some of this flotsam, some of which he thought were “ship’s fittings”.6 The two Inuit also claimed that, when they were twenty years old, they had visited a cache of provisions left on an island, supposedly deposited there by the crew of the wrecked ship.

  Map 6

  A Wreck near Matty Island?

  When Burwash heard the story of the wreck in 1929, he knew that almost no ship had ever passed by Matty Island and none had sunk there. But, in 1903, Roald Amundsen had passed by Matty Island while traversing the Northwest Passage for the first time in the Gjoa. Amundsen briefly grounded on the reefs, splintering his vessel’s false keel. He was forced to off-load some provisions to refloat his ship. Noel Wright, in Quest for Franklin, concluded that the Inuit story told to Burwash was just a muddled memory of the near-wreck of the Gjoa. But there are objections to Wright’s conclusion. For one, the Inuit were quite certain there was a wreck “beneath the water”, and told of barrels and fifteen-foot planks which washed ashore from the sunken ship. The Gjoa, after its near disaster, had continued on its course. Another objection, as Woodman pointed out, is that Burwash’s sixty-year-old informants had visited the cache when they were twenty, placing the wreck long before Amundsen’s voyage of the Gjoa.

  Burwash himself believed the wreck could only have been that of either the Erebus or the Terror, since these were the only ships known to have met with disaster in the general area. But this too presented problems, for it had long before been ascertained from the Inuit that one of Franklin’s ships had sunk off the west coast of King William Island, and the other had gone aground further south of that point. Woodman agreed with Burwash and, to get around this difficulty, Woodman suggested that Franklin had tried to pass by Matty Island on the east side of King William Island, run aground, off-loaded provisions, then turned around and attempted to get around King William Island on the west side, where he met with ultimate disaster. The “wreck”, Woodman hypothesized, was a ship’s boat that was lost while lightening the ship. While possible, it is hard to imagine how such a small boat could be mistaken for the wreck of a ship, or that it would still be tossing up wood and metal so many years later.

  Noel Wright also rejected Burwash’s theory, but for a different and, from our point of view, very significant reason. Wright observed, “As for the source of the iron said to be washed up by the sea, it has been known for more than a century; for the first mention of it one has to go back to the Narrative of Captain John Ross.”7

  Indeed, during the voyage of the Victory, it was James Clark Ross himself who told how the Inuit showed them “ironstone . . . taken from beneath the water”. The Inuk in question, Poo-yet-tah, told how his brother had discovered the iron the previous summer “on the shores of an islet called Toot-ky-yak, which was a day’s journey to the northwest.” Wright felt this underwater source of “ironstone” combined with the wreck of the Gjoa fully accounted for the story told to Burwash.

  But now let us take a different tack to the problem. Let us assume Burwash’s Inuit informants knew precisely what they were talking about, that there was a shipwreck beneath the water off Matty Island, there was a cache on the shore, and wood and iron pieces were tossed up by the waves over the years. This eliminates the Gjoa since it sailed merrily on its way. Previous to the Gjoa, no other ship sank in that area except the Erebus and Terror. But both these vessels met their ends on the opposite side of King William Island, eliminating them as well. Further, if we suppose the “ironstone” shown to James Clark Ross was actually iron from a shipwreck, this places the wreck even before the Victory’s visit to Boothia Peninsula in 1829.

  The only ship missing at that time was Edward Parry’s Fury.

  The Fury had been lost in 1825, supposedly stranded on Fury Beach, but she was not to be found there when Ross arrived only four years later. Is it possible, then, that the shipwreck off Matty Island was the wreck of Parry’s Fury? If so, we no longer face a problem finding time for James Clark Ross to sledge over to King William Island; instead, we suppose that the Parry expedition actually travelled down Peel Sound, reaching the coast of King William Island, where the Fury foundered on the shoals. From there, Ross could easily have visited King William Island.

  What he may have discovered on that island, we will discuss in time, but whatever he found was of such importance that the Admiralty decided to keep it secret. Parry constructed a false narrative to explain the loss of the Fury, pretending the ice had taken the ship in Prince Regent Inlet, eliminating any mention of the journey to King William Island. As for James Clark Ross, he could hardly have ignored the evidence of the iron shown to his uncle’s expedition but, knowing the iron was from the Fury, he neutrally characterized it as “ironstone” and left it at that.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Never To Return

  I have been one acquainted with the night.

  Robert Frost,

  Acquainted With The Night

  GEORGE BACK AND THE TERROR

  And what of John Ross?

  Why after more than a decade did he decide to return to the Arctic to seek the Northwest Passage? Is it possible that he too had seen something so many years ago, something other than (or even in addition to) a mountain range that wasn’t there? If so, we might imagine that he had wondered himself, all those years, if he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. That was what everyone else said. No doubt he came to believe it. That is, until his nephew James returned and told him what he had seen on King William Island. If John Ross did see something in Lancaster Sound, he could have had no way of connecting it with King William Island, a yet to be discovered island in a totally unexplored region of the Arctic far to the southwest. But with his nephew’s tale to finally confirm his vision, perhaps he decided he had to go there himself.

  But now, suddenly, the Admiralty wanted nothing more to do with trips into this area. Or, at least, it didn’t want private expeditions to try. Though the government cancelled the twenty-thousand-pound-reward to discourage would-be explorers — and John Ross in particular — it did eventually dispatch another naval expedition into the same general area in 1836, three years after John Ross returned. George Back was sent aboard HMS Terror — the same ship Franklin would later employ — to follow the same route Parry had taken during his second voyage: through Hudson’s Strait and then up into Repulse Bay, spending the winter there while exploring by sledge to the west.

  If Parry told the government about discovering something on King William Island, we may assume that they would be i
nterested in following up his discovery. But Back’s voyage certainly couldn’t have been intended to reach the distant island. In order to reach Prince Regent Inlet from the south, he would have had to sail up through Fury and Hecla Strait — the strait that had stopped Parry dead in his tracks during his second expedition. More likely, this was merely by way of preparation for the larger expedition yet to come — an attempt to establish the best route to reach the island by water. If so, Back proved spectacularly that this was not the way to go. The Terror was caught by icebergs, crushed and dumped on her side. By the time she escaped from the ice she was leaking badly, barely making it back across the ocean, where she beached on the coast of Ireland with only hours to spare.

  Just the same, the fact that the Terror returned at all, after weathering the worst the ice could offer, was surely a testament to how well she was built. Before being transferred to the Franklin expedition, she would be refitted and made stronger still.