On November 15, 1866, a statue of the explorer Sir John Franklin was unveiled
in Waterloo Place before a large crowd of well-wishers. When they heard that
“to all future times the name of Franklin would be treasured among the
greatest and bravest of those naval heroes of whose glory and memories
England was so justly proud”, there was enthusiastic applause.
For many of those present, a statue would have seemed like a natural choice to
commemorate someone who had died in the Arctic. It was popularly assumed
that being frozen to death was a gentle way to go, swaddled by snow and
glazed over by ice, and that it left the corpse majestically unchanged by
time, to become one of the “statues sculptured in the icy rock” Dickens
refers to in his 1857 prologue to The Frozen Deep. For Franklin’s grieving
widow, however, the ceremony represented a monumental full stop. After two
decades of campaigning, first to rescue her husband, after his ships Terror
and Erebus disappeared in 1845 while attempting to discover a navigable
route over the top of North America, and then to rescue his reputation once
it became clear that he was dead, here at last was tangible proof of
Franklin’s heroic stature. In life a podgy, balding man of middling height,
in death he was transformed into a firm-jawed figure eight feet tall,
perched on top of an imposing granite plinth, and surrounded by railings to
protect him from the sticky fingers of “mischievous boys and others”.
The statue put Franklin at the heart of those restless, rummaging Victorian
attempts to subdue the wild edges of the world to some kind of order. On the
base of the plinth, his men are depicted in a relief panel standing in
pious, disciplined rows as he is buried, and a motto asserts their claim to
have discovered the final piece in the navigational jigsaw puzzle of the
Northwest Passage: “They Forged the Last Link with their Lives”. That was at
best wishful thinking, but their status as national heroes relied less on
what they had achieved than on what they had come to represent. In
discovering man’s physical limits, they had also demonstrated that no
environment was hostile enough to destroy the toughest fibres of his moral
being, such as courage, duty and loving fellowship. In sacrificing
themselves for the greater good, they had discovered a greater idea of
goodness.
The problem with this heart-warming version of Franklin’s last expedition is
that it bears little relation to what really happened. “From concept to
motto”, argues Andrew Lambert in his revisionist biography, “the monument
was a lie”. The truth was far nastier. According to a scribbled note left in
a cairn on the remote northwest corner of King William Island, Franklin had
died on June 11, 1847, after his ships had been frozen in the pack ice for
nine months. On April 22, 1848, with no prospect of a thaw, the surviving
officers decided to abandon their icy wooden coffins and lead more than a
hundred men on a march towards the distant Great Fish River. Weakened by
hunger and scurvy, they may have known that there was no realistic prospect
of reaching it. Even dragging sledges weighing up to 1,400 pounds, they
could only carry enough supplies for around forty days, less than half of
what they needed to survive. It was a death march.
As they inched their way across a bleached landscape of thrusting cliffs and
greedy crevasses, Franklin’s men dropped dozens of small memorials: watches,
cutlery, books, still-loaded guns. For Captain Francis McClintock, one of
the many would-be rescuers encouraged by the indefatigable Lady Franklin,
they were at once clues and relics. However, as he quickly discovered, any
attempt to retrieve some kind of meaning from this scattered trail was
complicated by the other objects that studded the landscape: the men’s
corpses. Some had simply been abandoned, like the skeleton still dressed in
a neckerchief neatly tied in a “loose bow-knot”, who had “fallen on his face
in the position in which we found him”. Others had not been entirely left
behind. Near two skeletons found in a boat was a scattering of human bones
that had been cut with steel knives. Despite some nervous attempts to blame
the local Inuit population, not least by Dickens in a shrilly racist article
published in Household Words, the evidence was clear: whether through choice
or necessity, the survivors had turned to cannibalism.
“These men were hungry”, Lambert writes with some relish, “and they did not
waste anything.” The fingers were defleshed, the larger bones were cracked
open to get at the marrow, and the skulls of the skeletons in the boat were
missing, indicating that they had been carried off so that the nutritious
brains could be consumed later, a grotesque form of takeaway. Lambert
estimates that forty or fifty sailors were eaten by their comrades. As he
points out, “We do not know if they killed the living, picking out the weak,
the young and the expendable, or whether they confined their attentions to
the dead”. Either way, such scenes are far removed from those shown on the
base of Franklin’s statue. If anything they are closer to another artwork
inspired by the expedition, Edwin Landseer’s painting “Man Proposes, God
Disposes”, which depicts the fragments of civilization surrounding an icy
wreck (a tattered uniform here, a battered telescope there) and a polar bear
crunching contentedly on a human ribcage. The only difference between this
scene and the real events is that the savage side of nature turned out to be
inside Franklin’s men all along. Their voyage into the sunless Arctic winter
had become a real-life version of Heart of Darkness.
Franklin’s expedition was also one of the final chapters in a much longer
story of the struggle to subdue that bleak corner of the world, not only by
mapping it accurately – conquest through cartography – but also by filling
it with meaning. For centuries the Arctic had been a blank sheet of paper on
which different themes could be written. Its emptiness made it a good
laboratory for testing imported cultural ideas of purity and the sublime,
but it was most hospitable to stories that blurred where fact ended and
fantasy began. The published accounts of explorers were especially
susceptible to romance, even when they had spent months doing nothing more
exciting than recording scientific data and eating dried biscuits. Perhaps
appropriately for an environment where the boundary between ice and water
was always shifting, even the most stolid of these accounts frequently came
close to dissolving into myth.
The most persistent myth of all was the existence of the Northwest Passage, a
trade route that it was hoped would act as a short cut between the North
Atlantic and the North Pacific, and lead to fame and fortune for whoever
discovered it. In the end it turned out that there were several ways through
an unpredictable maze of channels, although they were only navigable for a
few weeks of the year, and so not commercially viable before the arrival of
ice-breakers, which allowed sailors to smash their way through obstacles
rather than carefully navigate around them. Until then the Northwest Passage
was an invitation to dream and scheme, although the practical difficulties
did not prevent earlier explorers from fighting their way north in wooden
sailing vessels which, when they became trapped, proved to be as vulnerable
as a walnut shell in a vice. Nor did it prevent them from peddling their own
brand of wishful thinking, such as the theory that the further north one
travelled, the warmer the sea became.
The nineteenth century was an especially rich period for such stories, as the
Arctic settled into the public mind as a place that was both otherworldly
and somehow strangely British, the natural home of the stiff upper lip.
Franklin’s expedition alone produced such poetic responses as Chandos
Abrahall’s Arctic Enterprise (1856), Erasmus Brodie’s Euthanasia (1857),
Swinburne’s “The Death of Sir John Franklin” (1860), and an epitaph written
by Tennyson for Franklin’s Westminster Abbey monument, which turned him into
a contemporary Ulysses who had striven, sought, found, and still not
yielded:
Not here! The white North has thy bones; and thou
Heroic sailor-soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now
Toward no earthly pole.
Some of these cultural responses were as artificial as Arctic Roll: the
Franklin Gallery, for example, a central part of the Royal Naval Exhibition
at Chelsea Hospital in 1891, featured a house-sized “iceberg” complete with
fake polar bears and twinkling electric lights designed to replicate the
aurora borealis. But even as cartographers continued to chip away at the
map’s remaining blank spaces, few people were prepared to acknowledge that
the real unknown lay closer to home. Franklin’s men did not have to eat each
other to discover how whisper-thin the veneer of civilization was. (Darwin
might have appreciated the name of the tug chosen to tow their transport
ship out to sea: HMS Monkey.) Even expeditions that started off with the
intention of bringing culture to this chilly wilderness – amateur dramatics
for the officers, education for the ranks, and compulsory religious services
for all – found themselves limping home, disfigured by frostbite and haunted
by the screams of men driven mad by darkness and solitude.
The search for the Northwest Passage concentrated such disappointments,
because as Glyn Williams points out in his superb history of the quest for
this aquatic prize, “No episode in the history of oceanic enterprise offers
a greater contrast between anticipation and disillusionment”. One explorer
after another had his hopes raised and then dashed. During the 1570s, Martin
Frobisher brought back 1,250 tons of rocks containing material that
“altogether sparkled, and glister in the Sunne like Gold”. The result of
this “madcap treasure hunt” was a series of expensive furnaces built at
Dartford, and a large pile of iron pyrites, or “fool’s gold”, which was
eventually used to build walls and repair roads. It can still be seen
glinting mockingly in the Kent sun. Worse yet was to come. In 1716, James
Knight examined some Chipewyan Indians, and convinced himself that they knew
of a river on whose banks lay “Great Quantitys of pure Virgin Copper lumps
of it so bigg that three or 4 Men cant lift it”. Instead, he and his crew
ended up in a place the Inuit renamed “Dead Man’s Island”.
This was far from being the only disaster commemorated on the Arctic map.
Terror Bay, Starvation Cove, Bloody Fall, Repulse Bay: rarely can such messy
human stories have been squeezed into such a neat set of labels. Nor was the
construction of this map at all straightforward. The title of Williams’s
book compares the search for the Passage to being stuck in a labyrinth, but
labyrinths have solid walls; the key problem with Arctic seas, as Williams
notes, was that the ice unpredictably hardened or melted to slush. Within
days a stretch of open water could become a dead end; a natural harbour
could transform itself from a refuge into a trap.
Franklin might seem an unlikely person to have sought these dangers out. His
first attempt at an overland Arctic expedition in 1819–22 had become a
byword for horror, after he and his men were forced to eat rock lichen and
their own shoe leather in order to survive; having written a bestselling
account of his journey, he became known as “The man who ate his boots”.
There were accusations of cannibalism then, too, although in this case the
offender was shot. In fact, the spectre of cannibalism seems to have trailed
Franklin like a shadow: in 1836 he became lieutenant-governor of Van
Diemen’s Land in Australia, where in 1822 a party of convicts had escaped
into the bush and ended up eating each other. (Two years later one of the
convicts escaped again and ate his companion; this time he was hanged.)
Clearly Franklin was made of strong stuff, but he was also sensitive, modest
and religious – qualities that were not always shared by those around him.
During one factory visit the female convicts showed how boring they found
being preached at by turning their backs, lifting their skirts, and smacking
their bare bottoms at the official party.
Lambert’s biography is good on these details of Franklin’s career, and
generous in showing how they contributed to his public image before he took
up his final, fatal command. In some ways he is too generous. To describe
Franklin as a “Tragic Hero” suggests that he was something more than a man
who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the book does
not give strong grounds for thinking of him as a hero in the familiar tragic
mould. “Franklin’s culture, science and humanity transformed the colony . .
. . Franklin’s enlightened, benevolent and charismatic government . . . .
Franklin’s businesslike work habits, insight and powers of expression”: all
these examples come on the same page, but they speak of a good civil servant
rather than a figure of tragic grandeur.
Of course, overstatement is a natural rhetorical mode for biography,
particularly when the author is attempting to clean off the dust that has
accumulated on his subject over the years, but too often here it leads to
prose so pumped up that arguments are distended out of proportion to the
evidence. Sometimes this is just a matter of slack editing, as when the
scientist Edward Sabine is described as a savant who “was quite literally
forced out of office”, or we are told that the Franklin story “retains the
power to deprive grown men of their wits”, and then a few pages later that
it “has the power to deprive grown men of their reason”. Some ideas are
repeated so often that they take on a strangely self-scrutinizing quality,
as if even the author wasn’t entirely convinced: “There can be no doubt that
magnetic science was the key to the expedition . . . . the key ‘exploration’
task was linked to the magnetic pole . . . . Magnetic science dominated the
genesis and direction of the Franklin expedition . . . . magnetic science
dominated the mission”. Lambert’s stress on the scientific work that
Franklin was asked to undertake is a valuable corrective to the Boy’s Own
narrative that has come to dominate the explorer’s life, but by the time we
reach his conclusion, which is that the heroic myth promoted by Lady
Franklin “warped the mindset of an age” and “transformed the newly
enfranchised working classes into willing cannon-fodder” for the Great War,
the over-writing is sadly symptomatic of a book that has lost its way.
This is especially unfortunate given the book’s powerful opening, in which
Lambert describes a research trip to the “cold hell” of King William Island
(the word “cold” exhausts synonyms as it shivers through his account) during
which he experiences the effort it takes merely to stay alive in such a
desolate place. But for a sense of how other people have responded to the
same environment, his book is far less successful than Glyn Williams’s
wide-ranging and crisply written survey. Williams does not say if he has
experienced the Arctic at first hand, but he is good at choosing passages
that evoke its peculiar mixture of extravagance and dullness. The uniform
whiteness, interrupted by moving human specks and the occasional splash of
blood. The relentless silence, broken only by the creaking of snow and the
howling of dogs. And just out of sight and hearing, the thin snap of ice as
a cruise ship makes its way through a once solid sea, and the passengers
gather on deck to wonder where the polar bears have gone.
Andrew Lambert
FRANKLIN
Tragic hero of polar exploration
405pp. Faber. £20.
978 0 571 23160 7
Glyn Williams
ARCTIC LABYRINTH
The quest for the Northwest Passage
413pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 1 846 14138 6
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford. His book
Victorian Afterlives: The shaping of influence in literature was published
in 2002. He is co-editor (with Seamus Perry) of Tennyson Among the Poets:
Bicentenary essays, 2009.
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