The Bones Of The Northwest Passage

The archaeology of the Franklin Expedition, shipwrecks, cairns and Inuit mythology

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea
-Stan Rogers

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Like many people I watched the AMC horror-drama The Terror with a mixture of awe, admiration and great sadness. The show, adapted from Dan Simmons’ novel of the same name, follows Sir John Franklin’s ‘lost expedition’ to the Arctic and depicts the suffering and bravery of the crew in great detail. If you haven’t seen it, I will mark for spoilers, but the general outline of the tragic exploration is widely known. The struggle to chart a route through the brutal sea lanes of the north, to link the Atlantic with the Pacific, is one of the West’s most epic undertakings. To my mind it stands alongside the conquest of Everest, reaching the South Pole and circumnavigating the globe - genuinely heroic accomplishments which have all but vanished today. Franklin was not the first to attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the ice, but the disappearance and troubling circumstances of the ship’s fates have always made it one of the more romantic and widely known tales.

A Brief History of the Northwest Passage (~980 to 1845)

The Arctic has long attracted explorers and adventurers of all kinds. The Viking colonisation of Greenland, and later North America, is underappreciated for the almost superhuman levels of endurance and grit those sailors must have needed to travel around Baffin Island, the Hudson Strait and the coast of Labrador in 10th century boats.

Mapped routes of the known Viking voyages through the Arctic to North America

In 1497 Henry VII commissioned John Cabot to find a Northwest passage to Asia, which he did not achieve, although Cabot did land in Newfoundland. Hot on his heels was Estêvão Gomes, sent by Charles V, which spurred another English expedition in 1576. Captain Martin Frobisher sailed the Gabriel to ‘Little’ Hall Island, where a group of Inuit cautiously made contact with him. Unfortunately, the gifts and mutual peace was broken when the Inuit kidnapped five members of Frobisher’s crew - the men were never seen again, although several rescue efforts were made over many years. Frobisher returned with a captive Inuit man who died soon after arriving in London, despite the best efforts of a local apothecary. He was buried in St Olave’s Church, Hart Street.

The Inuit did not take kindly to these intrusions. In fact, the Inuit did not take kindly to any intrusions or contact with strangers. According to the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson:

Nothing is more ingrained in the real Eskimo and nothing pervades more thoroughly his traditions and folklore than the idea that strangers are necessarily hostile and treacherous. Every Eskimo group always believes that wicked Eskimos are to be found on the other side of the mountains or down the coast at a distance

While this sounds like a colonialist slur against a poor marginalised group, there is plenty of historical evidence to support this idea. The resource poor territories the Inuit occupied drove them into zero-sum confrontations with their neighbours, including the Athabaskans, Algonquins and even northwest coast people like the Tlingit. Border regions such as the Chipewyan Coppermine River or the stone quarry near Peel River saw regular battles between groups. The Athabaskans often feared what they perceived as witchcraft and nefarious magic emanating from the Inuit, whilst the Inuit saw materials like copper, stone, fish, wood and hunting grounds as strategic locations to control and exploit. Warfare between the various Eskimo and Inuit peoples and their neighbours was often brutal and harsh:

The surprise raid as a first strategy; the firefight, or "rain of arrows," in open battle; and the use of bludgeoning and cutting weapons in one-on-one combat to the death. Battle tactics were similar on both sides of Bering Strait. Attackers relied on the element of surprise to destroy their enemies, entering a village or camp when everyone was asleep or gathered together in the com munity house, sealing the doors, and then shooting arrows through the smoke holes until all were dead…

The immediate objective of Alaskan Eskimo warfare was complete destruction of the enemy, including all men, women, and children. Some times one person might be left alive to inform other groups of the attack and its outcome, thereby spreading terror among other potential enemies. Alaskan Eskimo seldom took prisoners. On the few occasions when captives were taken, they were kept alive in order to carry booty, or, in the case of female prisoners, to cook and sew on the journey home. They were put to death when their usefulness was over. It was not uncommon for captured women to be tortured before being killed. "Among the Yup'ik, mutilation of enemy bodies was common, although not inevitable. [Severing] the heads and genitals of the corpses ... might have been related to the Yup'ik belief that to finally kill an opponent, especially one believed to have supernatural powers, the victor must sever the body of the vanquished at the joints." Asian Eskimos tended to take more prisoners, nearly always women who were later sold as slaves…

For the vanquished, surrender was not an option, because of the practice of not taking prisoners. The apparent determination of the Baffin Islanders at Bloody Point in 1577 to fight to the death, and their suicidal leaps into the sea when the battle turned against them, may have been the result of belief that capture would inevitably lead to an even more painful death.

-In Order To Live Untroubled: Inuit of the Central Arctic 1550-1940 (2001) Renee Fossett

That people all over the world engage in warfare should not be a great surprise, but the intensity and regularity of Arctic warfare is perhaps a shock to many readers. Inuit fighters would make use of both armour and shields. Overlapping pieces of walrus ivory or bone could be stitched together to make effective breastplates.

Inuit armour plating, from Native North American Armor, Shields, and Fortifications by David E. Jones

Shields were made from wood or sealskin, and warriors used spears, bows-and-arrows, daggers, slings, clubs and harpoons. When facing an advancing enemy, the Inuit might construct temporary fortifications - using snow and long pieces of animal hide to obstruct their vision. Platforms for throwing spears or firing arrows might be made, and tunnels secretly dug between igloos and houses to prevent families being captured. Sharpened caribou bones and pieces of stone were often hidden in the snow, to slice through the boots of their opponents.

It was into this world that the first European explorers had ventured, and they were shocked and alarmed to often be attacked first without warning or provocation. As Basque fishing trips and other European expeditions for metals, seafood and a route to Asia began to become more frequent, bad blood developed on both sides. During Frobisher’s second voyage another opportunity for peace was lost, as the English discovered the clothing of their lost comrades and took several Inuit prisoner aboard their ships. In response the Inuit gathered over 100 men and drove them away with volleys of arrows.

Between 1570 and 1670 huge advances were made in mapping and claiming northern territories. To the discoveries made by Frobisher were added: Newfoundland by Sir Humphrey Gilbert; Cumberland Sound and Davis Strait by John Davis; the Saint Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier; the Hudson Strait by George Weymouth and the Hudson River and Bay by Henry Hudson. Alongside these came many attempts to find the elusive Passage, many of which ended in disaster. John Knight led an expedition in 1606, during which he vanished, presumed to have been killed by local Inuit. Henry Hudson was famously set adrift in James Bay by his mutinous crew, never to be seen again. The list of names of those who attempted but were sent home by the ever present ice also grew - Sir Thomas Button, William Gibbons, Robert Bylot and Jens Munk. This sparkling period of exploration, set in the backdrop of the emerging scientific revolution, the development of opera and of Baroque art, unfortunately coincided with the peak of the Little Ice Age - possibly the worst time in the last few centuries to begin investigating the Arctic.

One of France’s most indomitable adventurers - René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle - was next in line to make an attempt. Rather than try to find a passage through the ice-shut sea straits, Cavelier instead opted to explore the Great Lakes. Whilst this was a failure his life hardly stopped there, and he canoed down the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, helping lay the foundations for French North America. The rise of the fur traders, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the wars between Britain, France and their respective Native American allies (King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War) put an end to the search for the passage temporarily. In 1719 a Hudson’s Bay Company director named James Knight set sail on two ships, the Albany and Discovery, north out in another attempt. They were shipwrecked without ever leaving the bay, on Marble Island:

he and his men were trapped by an early winter and thick ice. They were never heard from again. In 1722, the Hudson's Bay Company ship Whalebone, passing by Marble Island, landed and discovered the ruins of a house built by Knight's expedition, a medicine chest, ice poles and parts of a ship's mast, but no trace of the men. In 1767, the HBC ship Success also landed on the island and discovered the by then forgotten site of Knight's tragedy. Returning the following year, the HBC men dug up graves on the island and questioned the local Inuit, who reported that some of Knight's men had survived to at least 1720. The last two survivors "frequently went to the top of an adjacent rock and earnestly looked to the South and east, as if in expectation of some vessels coming to their relief. After continuing there a considerable time together, and, nothing appearing in sight, they sat down close together, and wept bitterly. At length one of the two died, and the other's strength was so far exhausted, that he fell down and died also, in attempting to dig a grave for his companion."

-Across the Top of the World. The Quest for the Northwest Passage (1999) James Delgado

The British admiralty were becoming increasingly concerned that the French would find the elusive Passage first, and they increased the resources needed to find the entrance. Hudson’s Bay was the obvious starting point, but so far not a single inlet had been found which could lead them out. Politicians such as Arthur Dobbs criticised the Hudson’s Bay Company for their lack of initiative and for ‘sleeping at the edge of a frozen sea’. Christopher Middleton and William Moor (1741-47) sailed several expeditions, but failed to find an exit from the bay. Any future attempts would have to start further north.

Expeditions of Samuel Hearne

Another company man, Samuel Hearne, seems to be the first man to find a section of the true Passage - although he didn’t realise it at the time. His explorations following the Coppermine River were ostensibly to look for metal deposits. However, he helped show that it was necessary to avoid Hudson’s Bay to follow the shoreline, as he reached the mouth of the river and witnessed the sea ice mark the entrance to the polar waters. Hearne was guided downstream by a group of Chipewyan and Dene locals. As they went he recorded that the bands of Dene were growing larger and he realised the adventure was an excuse to launch an unprovoked attack on their old enemy - the Inuit. At midnight on July 17th, 1771, the Chipewyans and their allies massacred around 20 Inuit men, women and children sleeping in their tents near a waterfall that Hearne dubbed ‘Bloody Falls’.

To travel into deep Arctic territory, much more intelligence and knowledge of the polar regions was needed. Not travel journals or tales swapped with old officers, but rigorous, scientific information. Sir Constantine Phipps and Admiral Skeffington Lutwidge shouldered the burden of the first planned expedition to the North Pole for its own sake. 1772 had seen Captain Cook dispatched to find Terra Australis, and in 1776 Cook would again be sent around the Pacific, this time to approach the Northwest Passage from the other direction. Phipps’ expedition ended trapped in ice around Svalbard. At that time it was believed that salty seawater did not freeze, and that a ring of ice from freshwater rivers encircled a hypothetical ‘Open Polar Sea’. Such an open sea might of course allow for passage into the Pacific, should it exist. Further explorations in North America from Alexander Mackenzie, George Vancouver and Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra had ended in failure, but the map was being rapidly filled in on both sides of the Passage.

The years between 1779-1815 were very busy for the British and French navies, and again, war interrupted the quest for the by-now almost mythical Passage. The next few expeditions however would prove the most fruitful in centuries. In 1818 the Royal Navy dispatched four ships to traverse the east and west coasts of Greenland: David Buchan and John Franklin took the east, John Ross and Edward Parry took the west. Ross sailed up the Greenlandic coast through Baffin Bay and rounded the tip of Devon Island. For whatever reason, Ross stopped at the entrance to the Lancaster Sound, reporting a mirage of mountains, but he went no further - a decision that would cost him his reputation. Parry’s next voyage in 1819 pushed further and was notable for the strategy and tactics used for overwintering the ship and crew through the long polar night. The deck and rigging were converted into tents with the use of heavy canvas and snow piled up against the hull for insulation. A combination of good provisions, discipline and morale-boosting through music, drama, an onboard newspaper and such saw the sailors through to that first glimpse of sunlight. A huge sandstone boulder and plaque mark the spot today, one of many Arctic landmarks to this era of exploration and hardship.

Ross and Parry’s Expeditions 1818-1823

Parry’s almost superhuman powers of curiosity, endurance and good cheer drove several more expeditions, in 1824 he sailed HMS Fury to the Prince Regent Inlet, but had to abandon ship when it was damaged by bad weather. Parry established a great rapport with the local Inuit, who were intrigued and delighted by the exchange of musical instruments, food, pencil-and-paper and the new gadgets of these foreign sailors. Parry was open-minded enough to adopt and adapt, purchasing Inuit sledges and clothing to move quickly through the landscape. Meanwhile, Franklin had attempted an overland expedition from Hudson Bay to the edge of the continent (1819-1822), a truly brutal and grueling experience which foreshadowed his later travails. Poor planning, suspected sabotage and bad weather combined to produce a retreat home complete with starvation, murder and cannibalism.

They arrived at York Factory on July 14, 1822. Thus ended "our long, fatiguing and disastrous travels," Franklin wrote. They had encompassed, on land and water, some 5,500 miles, and an even longer journey into the darkest depths of despair ever found in the human heart.

-Across the Top of the World (1999) James Delgado

Further voyages by Franklin, Lyon and Beechey continued to make strides. At this point Britain was leagues ahead in the search for the Passage, and the Arctic landscape from Alaska to Greenland was dotted with wrecks, stores, caches, cairns, flagpoles, buried letters and the bones of the unfortunate. If the Passage existed, it would have to be within an uncharted quadrilateral region on the map of around 70,000 square miles. The grit of the navy somehow endured, and Ross returned in 1829. They made contact with friendly Inuit on the Boothia peninsula, who had never seen Europeans before and were astounded to witness men living inside ‘hollow trees’ held together with iron - the two materials they craved the most. During this expedition Ross’ nephew - James Clark Ross - led an interior trip to discover the magnetic North Pole, a huge achievement in and of itself. Like Parry, JC Ross was not above adapting Inuit technologies and accepting their help, he good made use of sledges, dogs and fur clothing as well as learning their language.

Several further efforts were made in the 1830’s, but attention had shifted to Antarctica, where JC Ross took the two Arctic ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror and charted much of the continent’s coastline. One final push was suggested. The navy went down the list of names: JC Ross, Parry, Francis Crozier, James Fitzjames, George Back. The final candidate was 59 year old John Franklin. Erebus and Terror were refitted for the journey and captained by Fitzjames and Crozier. They set sail in 1845, never to be seen again.

The Lost Franklin Expedition (1845-1848)

The fate of the two ships and her crews is now the stuff of legend. Having overwintered on Beechey Island the ships made their way south to King William Island, spending another two winters on the ice. In 1847 Franklin died. We only know this because Crozier and Fitzjames placed a note detailing their situation within a stone cairn on the island. The note was recovered in 1859 during the McClintock expedition to search for the ships. Faced with unending ice, the two captains decided they should abandon the mission and attempt to head south towards rescue. The journey from the island to Back River is around 350km.

Given that no member of the crew survived to tell their tale, all knowledge of their fate has been derived from a combination of Inuit observation and expeditions to search for objects and bodies, as well as attempting to locate the wreckage of the two ships. Almost immediately there were calls to locate the lost ships, which contained veterans of the Arctic. Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, kept up a tireless campaign of pressure on the Admiralty to send rescue parties. The Royal Navy eventually, after two years, offered £20,000 to anyone assisting members of the Expedition and £10,000 for uncovering what happened. A total of 13 ships went to-and-fro, scouring the area for any clues. Sir Erasmus Ommanney first discovered the over-wintering camp at Beechey Island in 1850, including a large stone cairn. The surgeon John Rae went on three expeditions, effectively filling in the remaining blank sections of the map as he surveyed the western edge of the Boothia peninsula. He also encountered several Inuit families who confirmed the tragic demise of the crew. Four winters prior they had personally witnessed:

"about forty men . . . travelling in company southward over the ice, and dragging a boat and sledges with them" on the western shore of King William Island. The Inuit, through sign language, learned that the men's "ship or ships had been crushed by ice, and they were then going to where they expected to find deer to shoot. From the appearance of the men—all of whom, with the exception of an officer, were hauling on the drag-ropes of the sledge, and were looking thin—they were then supposed to be getting short of provisions. . . . the officer was described as being a tall, stout, middle-aged man."

The tall man has often been presumed to be Crozier, clutching his telescope. The Inuit had returned in the spring and found around thirty bodies, many having been chopped up or cut into pieces. The Inuit remarked that they had eaten one another. Rae attempted to keep this news a secret when he returned home, but the Admiralty foolishly released a statement to the public about his findings. The entire moral indignation of Victorian British society came crashing down on Rae, who was attacked from all quarters, including by Charles Dickens. He died unrecognised and without the fanfare given other explorers of his stature.

In 1854 the expedition crew were declared dead. Further recovery efforts identified the report in the cairn, tins of food, clothing, bones, tools, wood and other detritus. Around fifty expeditions in total have been launched in the 150 years since, many at great personal cost, the powerful obsession with the Northwest Passage having been transferred onto Franklin and his ships. As Margaret Atwood wrote:

For many years the mysteriousness of that fate was the chief drawing card. At first, Franklin’s two ships, the ominously named Terror and Erebus, appeared to have vanished into nothingness. No trace could be found of them, even after the graves of Torrington, Hartnell and Braine had been found. There is something unnerving about people who can’t be located, dead or alive. They upset our sense of space—surely the missing ones have to be somewhere, but where? Among the ancient Greeks, the dead who had not been retrieved and given proper funeral ceremonies could not reach the Underworld; they lingered in the world of the living as restless ghosts. And so it is, still, with the disappeared: they haunt us. The Victorian age was especially prone to such hauntings, as witness Tennyson’s In Memoriam, its most exemplary tribute to a man lost at sea.

In 1981 an anthropology professor, Owen Beattie, founded the Franklin Expedition Forensic Anthropology Project (FEFAP), which aimed to use modern archaeological and forensic techniques to try and understand what happened to the expedition. He and his team were able to recover many human remains, including the frozen bodies of Petty Officer John Torrington, Able-bodied Seaman John Hartnell and Royal Marine William Braine, from Beechey Island. The preservation of the soft tissue meant that they could be tested for lead poisoning. The near total survival of the bodies meant that coal particulates in the lungs and hair from different parts of their bodies could be examined. Beattie reported that Torrington’s bones displayed an elevated amount of lead of 110–151 parts per million, and his hair exceeded 600 parts per million (healthy individuals will have around 5-10 ppm). This dangerously acute lead poisoning would have come with severe consequences for him and others in a similar condition - not only physically, but mentally. Insomnia, convulsions, paranoia, delirium and hallucinations are all known symptoms. Torrington died of pneumonia in 1845, weakened by the lead and the endless Arctic night. He was buried in a wooden coffin, complete with an inscribed headboard.

The confirmation of lead poisoning opened up the possibility that the expedition had not been defeated by the Arctic, but by poorly designed food provisions which ultimately cost the crew and officers their health and cognitive faculties.

Amongst the 1,000 books, dried meat and even live cattle onboard the ships, were 8,000 tins of food. These had been hastily supplied by one Stephen Goldner, who was given the contract seven weeks before Franklin set sail. Canned food was a new technology, and the sloppy and inconsistent lead solder used both inside and outside the tins proved to be the undoing of the voyage. The lead leached into the food, and many were so poorly constructed that the food spoiled. The pathogenic bacteria was so virulent that Beattie was able to culture it from Braine’s mummified intestines. Along with the lead poisoning was also scurvy, “areas of shallow pitting and scaling on the outer surfaces of the bones” testifying to a lack of vitamin C. The metabolic stress of starvation, anemia, malnutrition and heavy metal poisoning was evident on the bones of the sailors.

After Beattie’s groundbreaking work the archaeological evidence began to pile up, supporting Inuit testimony and adding more scientific details to the investigation:

In 1992, a previously unrecorded site of Sir John Franklin’s last expedition (1845–1848) was discovered on King William Island in the central Canadian Arctic. Artifacts recovered from the site included iron and copper nails, glass, a clay pipe fragment, pieces of fabric and shoe leather, buttons, and a scatter of wood fragments, possibly representing the remains of a lifeboat or sledge. Nearly 400 human bones and bone fragments, representing a minimum of 11 men, were also found at the site. A combination of artifactual and oxygen isotope evidence indicated a European origin for at least two of these individuals. Skeletal pathology included periostitis, osteoarthritis, dental caries, abscesses, antemortem tooth loss, and periodontal disease. Mass spectroscopy and x-ray fluorescence revealed elevated lead levels consistent with previous measurements, further supporting the conclusion that lead poisoning contributed to the demise of the expedition. Cut marks on approximately one-quarter of the remains support 19th-century Inuit accounts of cannibalism among Franklin’s crew.

-The Final Days of the Franklin Expedition: New Skeletal Evidence (1996) Keenleyside et al.

The last twenty years has seen the results shift from accounting for the fate of the crew to using new DNA and skeletal techniques to identify the individual crew members who have been recovered. Several papers now have used extracted DNA and matched it against known living relatives, including the recent announcement of the identification of Captain James Fitzjames.

Daguerreotype of Commander James Fitzjames, HMS Erebus, taken by Richard Beard, May 1845. Photo courtesy of Sotheby's.

Tragically his skeletal remains show signs of intentional cut marks, consistent with starvation cannibalism. From the paper:

Concrete evidence of James Fitzjames as the first identified victim of cannibalism lifts the veil of anonymity that for 170 years spared the families of individual members of the 1845 Franklin expedition from the horrific reality of what might have befallen the body of their ancestor. But it also shows that neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the final desperate days of the expedition as they strove to save themselves.

I imagine under such circumstances, conditions that few human beings have ever endured, such final acts of sacrifice to help keep comrades and friends alive a little longer were not considered hateful. But it is hard to imagine that these men of good Victorian breeding did not see their situation as one of spiraling into hell on earth.

The Terror - Things on the Ice (Spoilers)

Dan Simmons’ novel The Terror and the AMC television show referenced at the beginning is probably the portal through which many in today’s generation will come to appreciate the struggle to find the Northwest Passage. In the story, the crew do not just suffer the perils of the polar night, but they descend into a paranoid madness induced both by the lead toxicity and by becoming prey to a demonic creature known as the ‘tuunbaq’. Simmons draws on Inuit mythology to create a polar bear-like being which becomes enraged that Franklin’s ships have entered its territory, particularly after a local shaman is accidentally shot and killed. In the novel, the Tuunbaq is a persistant hunter of the Inuit and it consumes their souls. To combat this, the shamans breed a group of special people, the sixam ieau, who bring the Tuunbaq food and promise it that no human being will trespass on its territory. The sixam ieau cut out their own tongues, and are unable to communicate with anyone other than the Tuunbaq. One possible origin story for this monster is the tupilaq, an Inuit spirit-monster made from animal skin, hair, bones, clothes and human body parts. This synthetic object was placed into the sea, whereupon it would attack a particular person, or double-back and kill its own creator. This and other similar creatures in Inuit folklore represent something of the horror which is the flipside to the beauty of the Arctic. Shape-shifters, female beings which attempt to drown children, half-caribou half-human things which live in the dark, monstrous wolves which leave footprint trails up the edge of a water hole in the ice…

It is popular amongst academics today to frame this discourse of Arctic horror as part of a colonial mindset, to consider the polar regions as barbaric wastelands, and those who live in them to be sub-humans. My own reading of Arctic history suggests a more typically human and complex relationship, as both hostility and friendship are constant themes throughout the stories of these polar explorers. The Northwest Passage itself was finally traversed in 1906, by the Norwegian legend Roald Amundsen. His small sloop, the Gjøa, was crewed by only six men, who finished the heroic task started in the late 15th century. As of 2022 only 262 vessels have made the journey, and seven routes are now known. There have been few such sustained manias in human history, and a full tally of the lost souls to the Passage will never be completed. Will there ever be another rival to the Northwest Passage for the full flowering of one of man’s most powerful urges, to explore the unknown?

Ah, Franklin!

To follow you, one does not need geography.

At least not totally, but more of that

Instrumental knowledge the bones have,

Their limits, their measurings.

The eye creates the horizon,

The ear invents the wind,

The hand reaching out from a parka sleeve

By touch demands that the touched thing be.

GWENDOLYN MACEWEN, Terror and Erebus