The Arctic Grail
The Quest for the North West Passage
and the North Pole, 1818-1909
Pierre Berton
(McClelland & Stewart, 1988)
672 p.
Canada is a northern country, but perhaps non-Canadians don’t know that most of our population lives along a ribbon a few hundred kilometers wide that hugs the southern border with the US. North of that there’s a whole lot of north, inhospitable much of the time, and mostly empty. There are people who live there, and have for centuries, but until the Europeans arrived there were no maps, and little long-distance travel through those wastes.
Pierre Berton’s book attempts to narrate the history of how those lands were explored by European and American explorers, and how the elusive path across North America above the Arctic circle — the famous North West Passage — was searched for and finally found, and then of how a few groups of intrepid men made attempts to reach the North Pole.
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The history of European exploration of the north began in the Elizabethan age. In the 1570s Frobisher made three voyages in search of a possible route to the Pacific, though without much success. Some years later John Davis led an expedition that discovered Greenland. In 1610 Henry Hudson was the first to sail into Hudson’s Bay (though he didn’t make it out again). In 1616 an Englishman named William Baffin piloted a ship that went 300 miles further north than any previous vessel, and he discovered the island that now bears his name.
After that initial flurry of activity, though, there was a lull. To be sure, in the 1700s Samuel Hearne made an overland journey in which he followed the Coppermine River north to the Arctic Ocean. But no sailing expeditions were organized, and in time even some discoveries that had been made were forgotten: by the early 1800s all that remained on the maps were Hudson’s Bay and part of Baffin Island.
Arctic exploration began again in 1818, and the burden of Berton’s book (try saying that three times fast) is to narrate, in detail, the many expeditions that went north between that year and 1910, when both the North West Passage and, it was believed, the North Pole had been conquered. It is a remarkable story with many twists and turns, many eccentric personalities, and, unfortunately, many dead explorers.
I’m not going to attempt anything like a thorough review of all that Berton describes; it’s far too plentiful and intricate a tale. But I would like to sketch out the basic shape that the exploration took, and then to highlight some of my favourite stories from this long Arctic saga.
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What kickstarted Arctic exploration in 1818 was, perhaps surprisingly, Napoleon. More specifically, it was Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. The wars were over, and Britain ruled the seas. The trouble was, there was nothing for the Royal Navy to do. Naval command decided that sending a few expeditions to search out the hypothetical North West Passage would keep its men busy, provide (if successful) an economic boon, and foster national pride as well. “It would be somewhat mortifying if a naval power but of yesterday should complete a discovery in the 19th century which was so happily commenced by Englishmen in the 16th,” wrote the Admiralty.
For the next forty years, Britain dominated exploration of the Arctic. Those early expeditions were characterized by a lack of preparedness for the cold; the Navy’s men just wore their issued uniforms, augmented by wool and flannel. They never constructed a purpose-built vessel for Arctic exploration — one designed for ice-breaking, for instance. They were strangely impervious to learning from whaling crews who operated in the north, and especially from the native Inuit whom they began to encounter. For them, exploration was a sideshow, not their main business, and when it came to clothing, shelter, and food, they did it the Navy way.
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Among the most important Arctic explorers of the nineteenth-century, and almost certainly the best known, was John Franklin. He went north in 1819 on an expedition that mapped the northern coastline of North America west of Hudson’s Bay. It was in most respects a disaster; Berton calls it “probably the most harrowing overland journey in Arctic history.” Eleven of his twenty men died, and there were suspicions of murder and cannibalism. Franklin himself testified that he had to eat his own boots to stay alive, and this little detail made him rather famous upon returning to England.
But his most famous expedition, the most famous in the annals of Arctic exploration, was his fourth (and decidedly final) expedition of 1845. Indeed, this expedition — usually just “the Franklin expedition” — is in many ways the centerpiece of the whole history of Arctic exploration. His two ships, manned by 128 officers and crew, left England with “all the accoutrements of nineteenth-century naval travel: fine china and cut glass, heavy Victorian silver, testaments and prayer books, copies of Punch, dress uniforms with brass buttons and button polishers to keep them shiny, mahogany desks, slates, arithmetic books…”, were seen by a whaling ship in Baffin Bay, but then simply disappeared, never to be seen again.
The reason why the Franklin expedition was so important for Arctic exploration was not, then, on account of what it accomplished. It accomplished very little. But the search for Franklin consumed vast resources, involving many subsequent expeditions over the next decade, and resulted in a huge area of the Arctic being explored and mapped.
It took years, and great effort, to gradually piece together what had happened to them. Nothing at all was known for several years. A few artifacts — buttons, spoons — were found in the possession of Inuit groups, who related tales about white men walking south. But not until 1859 was the first, and still only, written evidence about the fate of the expedition found. A note had been left in a rock cairn at Victory Point, King William Island, and it told a mysterious tale. The first part of the document, dating from 1847, gave an account of their first two years sailing, and professed them “all well”; the expedition was frozen into the ice for the winter, as expected, and was looking forward to the thaw. An addendum, written in 1848, stated that Franklin had died and that the decision had been made to abandon the ships. But that was all.
Subsequently a sledge was discovered nearby, complete with several skeletons. The sledge was a monstrous thing, weighing 650 lb, loaded with a boat and all kinds of supplies, including novels (“The Vicar of Wakefield”). It gave a clue to what might have happened to the men.
Gradually more evidence was found: buried corpses, more physical artifacts here and there. The fate of the men seems to have been various. Autopsies have revealed that they were suffering both from scurvy and from lead poisoning, the latter likely due to substandard soldering of their tinned food supply. There were fragments of testimony from the Inuit claiming that small groups of men had been seen trekking southward, apparently for years afterward. But none of them ever reached safety. The last days of the Franklin expedition, writes Berton, gave us “a picture of inadequately clothed, badly nourished men, dragging unmanageable loads down the bleak coast of an Arctic island.”
(There is an addendum: Franklin’s two ships were discovered only in the last decade, both sunk off Prince William Island, and diving expeditions are currently underway to explore them. We may learn more in coming years.)
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Franklin’s ships were frozen into the ice through the winter; this was a common occurrence during expeditions to the north. The ice would typically set in around October, and would not thaw until July or August, which made for a short exploration season. Indeed, sometimes, as in the case of Robert McClure’s expedition of 1851, the ice did not thaw at all, so that the sailors were confined to the ship and its immediate environs for years on end, much of it in darkness, of course. “A few fluttering candles, rationed carefully to one inch a day, flickered wanly in the polar night to mark the one point of civilization that existed in a frozen realm almost as large as Europe.” Good captains planned ahead, and had their men stay occupied with games, dramatic productions, and even the publishing of newspapers during the long winter months. Bad captains didn’t, and the men, reasonably enough, suffered terribly from loneliness and idleness. Isaac Hayes, an American who went north in 1860, wrote evocatively of the silence he experienced while frozen in the ice through the winter:
“an endless and fathomless quiet … Silence has ceased to be negative … I seem to hear and see and feel it. It stands forth as a frightful spectre, filling the mind with the overpowering consciousness of universal death … Its presence is unendurable…”
It’s easy to imagine how this experience, coupled with darkness and isolation, would be psychologically difficult for many people. And it was.
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The search for the North West Passage continued in the wake of the loss of the Franklin expedition, and the existence of a passage was eventually confirmed in 1850 by Robert McClure who, instead of sailing into the Arctic from the east as most had done, sailed all the way around the Cape of Good Hope in order to approach from the west. Although he couldn’t make it through the ice, he got far enough to reach waters that had previously been visited from the east, thus confirming that a passage existed and was navigable, even if it had not been navigated end-to-end.
The first complete traversal of the (or a, as there are more than one) North West Passage was done in 1903-1906 by none other than our old friend Roald Amundsen. I had forgotten that he was one of the big achievers in Arctic exploration. In a purpose-built vessel he successfully navigated through, east to west, without any significant problems. He was good at what he did. It was over 30 years before another managed the same feat.
Berton sums up the quest for the Passage, and Amundsen’s achievement, in this way:
For more than three centuries, since Martin Frobisher’s day, the North West Passage had defied the efforts of the world’s best seamen, to become a graveyard of broken ships. John Barrow had once thought it could easily be conquered in two seasons. But eighty-eight years had gone by since John Ross, glimpsing a phantom range of mountains, had failed to penetrate the mysterious archipelago at the top of the world. Parry had almost made it in 1819 — only to be blocked by an implacable wall of ice. Franklin’s men had actually located the Passage, only to die before they could reach it. McClure had managed to get through — but only by sledge. For three decades, since Allen Young’s last failed attempt in 1875, the Arctic had been silent and the Passage remained unchallenged. Now, through careful planning, some luck, great common sense, and, perhaps more important, the example of the Eskimos, Roald Amundsen had snatched the prize of centuries from the greatest navy in the world.
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When the Passage was achieved, attention turned to reaching the North Pole. For me this is the more attractive prize, and I was surprised to learn how long it took for serious efforts in that direction to be launched. Expeditions to achieve a “farthest north” had had a certain caché in the nineteenth-century, but not until late in the century did they take center-stage. The British never really made serious effort in that direction, and initially it was Scandinavians who made the greatest progress, often with unconventional ideas.
In 1893, a Dane named Fridtjof Nansen, for instance, instead of considering the ship-confining ice as an impediment decided to use it to his advantage. There is no solid land around the North Pole, and the ice moves because of ocean currents. Nansen sailed north in the Fram with the intention of getting frozen in and letting the ice carry him wherever it would. His plan worked: he was carried by the ice for 3 years before the ice released him, but in the process he achieved a new record for “farthest north”: 86°13.6′N.
A few years later Salomon Andree, a Swede, had the curious idea to launch a hydrogen balloon and sail it over the North Pole. His crew of three men launched from the Norwegian Svalbard islands on July 11, 1897. They disappeared over the horizon, and their disappearance sadly turned out to be of long duration. Thirty years later three skeletons were discovered on Franz Josef Land, along with journals. The balloon, the journals revealed, had flown, badly and bumpily, for just three days, covering about 200 miles, before it collapsed. The three men had tried to walk back across the ice, but had run out of food before they could reach civilization.
In 1900, Umberto Cagni of the Italian Royal Navy established a new “farthest north” by reaching latitude 86° 34′N. Berton doesn’t describe this effort for some reason, so I can’t say more about it. But, regardless of the details, the Pole remained as an outstanding challenge.
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It was in 1907 that two separate expeditions made an attempt on the Pole, and both claimed victory, though both are open to doubt. The expeditions were led by Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, respectively, both Americans.
Cook claimed to have reached the Pole in 1908. He was an accomplished Arctic explorer who had trekked across Ellesmere Island, a journey that Berton describes as having “no parallels in polar annals”. He passed one winter at Cape Sparbo, living off the desolate land, “a masterpiece of Arctic survival”. Earlier in life he had achieved fame as the first to summit Mount McKinley, North American’s highest peak.
Cook failed to document his claim on the Pole. When he returned home, he came without journals, papers, or any supporting evidence, saying that he had left them behind with an Inuit friend for safe-keeping. Later he claimed that this was a ruse to prevent them being stolen, but that he couldn’t produce them because he intended to donate them to a university archive in Scandinavia. When he did give papers to the university they were judged wholly inadequate to support his claim: no instrument readings, no journals, just a typewritten story about what he claimed to have done. His claim itself was implausible, as his alleged speed of travel over the ice was judged unreasonably fast. Meanwhile he was on the lecture circuit making money as the putative first to reach the Pole. In time several men came forward claiming he had hired them to forge documents to support his claim, and his star fell.
As the controversy swirled, evidence was produced that he had also faked his summit of Mount McKinley. It is now generally accepted that his claim on the Pole was a false one, and it’s a shame. His real achievements are overshadowed by his lies.
Robert Peary, who claimed to have reached the Pole in 1909, fared better initially but not latterly. He was an Arctic veteran who had made several failed attempts on the Pole before his alleged success. He was a difficult man; of all those with a claim to fame in the north there was, says Berton, “no other as ruthless, as arrogant, as insensitive, or as self-serving”. In the public square his claim was favoured over Cook’s; for a long time he was credited with being the first to reach the Pole. Even Roald Amundsen believed him; he cancelled his scheduled attempt in 1910 and went to the South Pole instead in 1911.
But Peary’s claim, too, is riddled with problems. Peary’s expedition was organized such that a large group of people set out, but in stages sub-groups turned back, and only a few men, Peary included, covered the last leg to the Pole. It is the last leg, the last 300 miles or so, that is at issue. During this stage he claimed to have travelled at three times his normal pace. He took with him only men who were unable to use the instruments for calculating longitude and latitude. His journal for the days surrounding the claimed success is empty; he recorded no data that would have allowed him to calculate his position. Even the route he claimed to have followed was implausibly direct, given the usual hazards and obstacles encountered on the Arctic ice. These details, Berton concludes, “pose unanswerable questions” about his claim to have reached the Pole.
Both of these expeditions, therefore, were compromised by “lack of scientific proof, reported excessive speeds over the ice, reluctance to release observations, [and] absence of corroborative witnesses”. My view, on considering the evidence, is that both claims are implausible. Yet Peary, even if he cannot be granted the frozen laurel that he wanted for himself — wanted very badly, as his journals make clear, and needed very badly too, as he was facing bankruptcy if he failed — he nonetheless can be credited with establishing a new “farthest north” (though nobody can be quite sure where exactly he got to) and also with being the first and still the only man to have led an expedition to the Pole that went there (or thereabouts) and back without mechanical aids. (Subsequent expeditions to the Pole have all used air support for supplies and for transport out.)
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Embroidering the main story are numerous tales of Arctic adventures, ill-fated and otherwise, undertaken by a wide variety of explorers. Among the many, I’ll note a couple of my favourites.
In 1871 a ship called Polaris went north under the command of Charles Francis Hall in what was meant to be one of the early attempts on the North Pole. However, Hall died under mysterious circumstances, and before long both discipline and morale had eroded on board. The ship began to return southward, but off the coast of Greenland was beset by ice and crushed, forcing the crew to abandon it. In the confusion, a group of nineteen people were separated from the others on the ice, and then, to their horror, the ice broke free from the pack and began to drift away.
They drifted out of sight of the main party, and continued to drift. Thankfully the floe on which they were stranded was about a mile across, and it so happened that some food supply had been stacked on it when it broke free, so they had rations. Incredibly, the floe drifted south for a distance of nearly 3000 km over the next six months until its stranded passengers were finally rescued off the coast of Labrador. All nineteen souls survived. It’s an almost unbelievable tale.
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Far less fortunate was the ill-fated Greely expedition of 1881, which Berton describes as “the most appalling tragedy since the loss of John Franklin and his men”. Greely had set out for Lady Franklin Bay on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island. His expedition was conceived as a multi-year effort to establish a weather station in the far north, and to attempt a new “farthest north” record. By a series of mischances, however, their resupply ships could not get through to them in 1882 or 1883, and their food supply ran dangerously low. In the fall of 1883 Greely decided to abandon their camp and walk south to pre-arranged depots where food was supposed to have been left for them.
However, the resupply ships had been unable to reach even those more southerly positions, and when Greely and his crew arrived at the cairn in October 1883 they found only enough food for forty days’ rations. With winter bearing down on them, they could travel no more. This small amount of food would have to last at least six months. They faced a long, dark winter of starvation.
Berton quotes from the personal journal of one of Greely’s men, James Lockwood, who through that long winter filled his pages with lists of food:
“… Virginia Indian corn pone, turkey stuffed with oysters, chives with scrambled eggs, pumpkin butter, corn fritters, bacon in cornmeal, oatmeal muffins, sugar-house molasses, fig pie, coffee cake, apricot paste, Maryland biscuit, Boston pilot bread, smoked goose, spiced oysters, leaf dough biscuit, hot porter with nutmeg and sugar, hog’s marrow, blood pudding, cracked wheat with honey and milk, cranberry pie, corn pudding, bannock cake, green tomato pie, macaroni pudding, charlotte of apples…”
I can’t imagine what that must have been like. As it turned out, they were unable to move from their site until they were rescued in June of 1884, after fully nine months of starving. Only seven of the expedition’s 25 men survived the winter, and there is credible evidence that at least one of the crew engaged in cannibalism. It was a horror.
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I’ve struggled for a long time to cultivate an interest in Canadian history. I don’t remember studying it in school, and because Canada has, for as long as I can remember, aspired to be a colourless, odourless space without any real character, its history has seemed hardly worth bothering about. But I know that that can’t really be true. At the very least, our history is rooted in the histories of England and France, which are real places with real substance.
Anyway, it occurred to me that my slightly-back-burner interest in exploration, especially polar exploration, could be a good entry point. Even affiliation with Les Trudeaux cannot entirely smother the national pride one feels on contemplating the vast, desolate landscape that stretches out above us on the map. This year I very nearly had the opportunity to go north myself, to Cornwallis Island, and it was that opportunity that spurred me to tackle this big book at this time. (As it turned out I did not go; maybe next year.)
Whatever the reasons for my taking up the book, I’m glad to have done it. It really is a fascinating story, with an inspiring main trunk and so many intriguing branches. Berton is an excellent historian, and the book, despite its length, reads easily. It was the perfect companion through the darkest days of a Canadian winter.
All Manner of Thing 