Resolute (19 page)

THE BELCHER RESCUE FLEET
makes its way through the crowded Royal Navy anchorage known as the Nore. The second ship from the left is the
Resolute.
To her left is the
Intrepid.
The fifth ship from the left is the
North Star.
At the center of the illustration is the
Assistance.
The vessel to the far right is the
Pioneer.

Worst of all, unlike Parry, James Clark Ross, M'Clintock, Rae, or so many of the other northern venturers, Belcher had no enthusiasm for the mystique of the Arctic. “I shall proceed with our monotonous voyage,” he wrote, “but really…I cannot flatter myself that bergs, floes, sailing ice, etc. will greatly interest anyone.” More ominous yet, he had little faith in the effort he was about to lead. He was doing so only as a further advancement of his career.

Fortunately, that was not true of his captains and officers. Henry Kellett, the captain of the
Resolute
, was regarded as one of the navy's most capable senior officers. Respected by all who had served under him, he was passionate in his desire to find Franklin. And despite the fact that he had been the object of one of McClure's earliest deceptions, he was determined to rescue that missing passage-seeker as well. The ultimate story of this latest search for the lost explorers might have been very different if it had been Kellett rather than Belcher who had been chosen to lead it.

Kellett had been wise in his selection of the men who would serve under him on the
Resolute.
George Nares, the man he had chosen to be his second mate, would not only render valuable service but would go on to a career as one of the most distinguished of all Arctic explorers. Another of Kellett's mates, Émile-Frédéric de Bray, was an unlikely member of the
Resolute
crew. A sublieutenant in the French navy, he had volunteered to take part in the search for Franklin. It was ultimately Bray's journal that would provide a highly accurate account of the events that were soon to unfold.

The
Intrepid's
captain was Leopold M'Clintock. During Austin's expedition, he had once again proved to be an invaluable member of the expedition, particularly through his sledging skills. From the beginning, he had looked upon the search for Franklin as the “Great Crusade.” In the end, it would be M'Clintock who would become one of the greatest players of all in one of the greatest mysteries of his era.

According to the Admiralty's plans, the Belcher expedition was really two expeditions in one. As the ships set sail in the spring of 1852, two of the vessels—the
Resolute
and the
Intrepid
—headed directly for Melville Island. Their job, along with searching for Franklin, was to try to find McClure and Collinson. The
Assistance
and the
Pioneer
set course for Wellington Channel, where they were to concentrate on the search for Sir John. The supply ship
North Star
was to remain at Beechey Island as a depot.

The huge sailing vessel
Resolute
and the much smaller steamer
Intrepid were
the first ships since those of Edward Parry to attempt to reach Melville Island. By September I, 1852, they had made it, but not before the
Resolute
had been grounded in a narrow channel near ice-clogged Barrow Strait. Only the power supplied by the
Intrepid's
steam engine in towing the
Resolute
back afloat had averted an early disaster. By now, winter was fast approaching. After briefly visiting Melville Island's Winter Harbor, Kellett found even better shelter thirty-five miles to the east at Dealy Island.

Belcher had also encountered building ice as soon as his squadron reached Lancaster Sound. After anchoring the
North Star
off at Beechey Island, the
Assistance
and the
Pioneer
made their way to Wellington Sound and sailed a few miles north before conditions made it apparent that they, too, needed to seek winter quarters—which they found in Northumberland Inlet on the northeastern point of Devon Island.

The
Resolute
and the
Intrepid
would be beset in the ice for the next eleven months. But that would not interrupt the search. As soon as all the preparations for wintering down were completed, Captain Kellett began to send out sledge parties to look for the missing expeditions. Several of these parties would be gone for as long as three months. All of their journeys would be extraordinarily difficult. To Kellett, a sledging expedition was even more demanding than combat. “I have been a long time at sea,” he later wrote in an account of his Arctic experiences, “and seen varying trying services…but never have seen such labour, and such misery … Men require much more heart and stamina to undertake an extended traveling party than to go into action. The travelers have their enemy chilling them to the very heart and paralyzing their very limbs; the others the very contrary.”

Still, it had to be done. Before Kellett's ships were finally released from Dealy Island, Leopold M'Clintock would sledge more than 1,325 miles in eighty days, while Lieutenant George Mecham of the
Resolute
would journey almost as far, traveling a record 1,150 miles in 71 days. And it would be Mecham who made the first significant discovery.

In early fall 1852, Mecham and his two-sledge party set out from the
Resolute
to search Melville Island. With his sledge flag bearing the motto
Per mare, per terram, per glaciem
(over sea, land, and ice) he reached the island, found no trace of either Franklin or McClure, and was headed back to the
Resolute
when, on October 12, he came upon a great sandstone boulder, about ten feet high and eight feet wide, and more than twenty feet long. Cut into the boulder was this inscription:

Careful not to disturb the small pile of stones that rested atop the boulder, Mecham started to carve his own inscription at the bottom of the rock to indicate that he, too, had been at the spot, when to his surprise a copper cylinder rolled out from beneath the stones.

“On opening it,” Mecham recalled, “I drew out a roll folded in a bladder which, being frozen broke and crumbled. From its dilapidated appearance, I thought at the moment it must be some record of Sir Edward Parry, and fearing I might damage it, laid it down with the intention of lighting the fire to thaw it. My curiosity, however, overcame my prudence, and on opening it carefully with a knife, I came to a roll of cartridge paper with the impression fresh upon the seals. My astonishment may be conceived on finding it contained an account of the proceedings of ‘H.M. ship ‘Investigator' since parting company with the ‘Herald' in August 1850, in Bering's Straits. Also a chart which disclosed to view not only the long-sought Northwest Passage, but the completion of the survey of Banks and Wollaston lands.”

The “account” that Mecham had found was, in fact, a journal of Robert McClure's activities from the time he had encountered Kellett and the
Herald
in 1850 until he had found a winter refuge. It ended by stating:

It was an astounding find. McClure and the crew of the
Investigator
had not been heard from in two years and here was news of them that was less than six months old. And, if the journal portion of the note was true, the Northwest Passage had been found. Most important, Mecham now knew where the
Investigator
in all probability still was. He had the exact location. And according to his quick calculations it was less than 170 miles from where the
Resolute
and the
Intrepid
were lying at Dealy Island.

Mecham could not wait to return to the
Resolute.
The exhilaration that greeted his news, however, was tempered by the fact that the ice in the strait leading between Dealy Island and Mercy Bay was so broken up that to attempt to cross it before the spring thaw—even in a small boat—would be disastrous. Even getting a message across to McClure was impossible.

IT WAS FRUSTRATING;
but it was nothing compared to what the men of the
Investigator
had been going through since they had put into Mercy Bay two years before. Long before the first winter's entrapment was over, most of the ship's crew was suffering from malnutrition and scurvy. An alarmed Dr. Armstrong pleaded with McClure to increase the men's rations. The commander, relying on hunting parties to bring back fresh meat, refused. But party after party returned empty-handed. The perpetual Arctic winter darkness made it impossible to spot any wildlife if, in fact, any animals even existed in the vicinity.

Adding to the misery was the incredible cold. As the first winter dragged on, the temperature fell to 99 degrees below the freezing point—the coldest temperature any passage-seeking expedition had been forced to endure. In order to conserve coal, McClure cut its consumption to eight pounds per day and drastically reduced the amount of oil that was to be used. Now the men were not only freezing; they were forced to live in the dark most of the time. Johann Miertsching, a Moravian missionary who accompanied the party as interpreter to the Inuit, confided in his journal that “as our stock of candles is very small, we therefore pass a great part of our time in darkness.” He added: “Our principal occupations are walking and sleeping; reading and writing are out of the question, as we have hardly light enough for the most necessary duties. Wolves howl around the ship.”

McClure's great hope was that all the problems would be solved when the ice broke up in the spring, or at least the summer, and the
Investigator
would be able to get underway once more. But in 1852, summer never came to Mercy Bay. The pack never thawed and it became clear that they would have to spend yet another winter in the ice. Faced with the real prospect of running out of food, McClure ordered that the food rations be further reduced. Now the men would be asked to survive on one meal a day—half a pound of meat and two ounces of vegetables. “Today the captain summoned the crew on deck, and told them he was now convinced the ice would not break up this year; therefore we must pass another winter here,” Miertsching wrote. “He charged them not to let their spirits sink…In order to make the slender store last till next summer, it would be necessary now to reduce the allowance…but that would suffice for the period of total inactivity…One could see many dismal faces, yet there was nothing could be done but to yield to necessity.”

Necessary it may have been, but by the time that Mecham had returned to the
Resolute
with McClure's note in hand, the situation aboard the
Investigator
had become desperate—so much so that two of the men had gone mad, and one them had tried to kill McClure. With the madmen howling throughout the night and his crew slowly starving to death, the commander knew that something drastic had to be done.

By the spring of 1853, he was ready to announce the plan he had devised. Two parties consisting of the weakest of the crew would be sent out by sledge—one east and the other south—in search of rescue. The twenty strongest crew members would remain on board in the hope that this coming summer would bring a breakup of the ice.

It was a most outrageous plan, even for the ever-devious Robert McClure. He knew full well that by sending his most weakened men—about two-thirds of his crew—out on such a journey he was condemning them to their death. As far as anyone could guess, the nearest places where they had even the most remote possibility of finding rescue were more than five hundred miles away. There was no chance that, in their condition, the sledgers would survive the trip. Dr. Armstrong was absolutely appalled. He already disliked McClure, based in great measure on the fact that throughout the trip he had been the victim of rough horseplay at the hands of some of his fellow officers, and McClure had done nothing about it. Armstrong was also upset over the fact that while the sailors aboard the
Investigator
openly praised his medical work, McClure seemed to place no value upon it.

But all that was minor, Armstrong believed, compared to what McClure was about to do. Putting his feelings in writing on a paper that, should he survive, he intended to present to the Admiralty, Armstrong wrote: “Captain McClure has been fully informed by me on many occasions of the state of the men … Nevertheless I felt called upon again to represent their condition and to express my opinion of their unfitness for the performance of this service, without entailing great and inevitable loss of life.
It had no effect.”