His voyage was unquestionably one of the most remarkable in the whole history of Arctic exploration. In a sailing ship of none too good a quality he succeeded in covering a distance within the Arctic circle which has only once been excelled, and that by a steamer, the Vega. He came within fifty-seven miles of completing the North-West Passage, the nearest approach on record; and of all the Government expeditions sent out he came nearest to bringing the Franklin search to a successful conclusion. His name ought to rank high in the annals of Arctic travel, and it is to be feared that he has never really received his just due.
CHAPTER XVI
BELCHER AND THE FRANKLIN SEARCH
We now come to one of the strangest chapters in the whole history of the Franklin search. That Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition, the last, and in every way the most complete equipped by the Government, was a fiasco it is quite impossible to deny. At the time public feeling ran very high about it, and Belcher became the object of much opprobrium, more, probably, than he actually deserved. The fact, however, that five valuable ships had been abandoned, apparently unnecessarily, that not a single trace of Franklin had been found, and that the search was given up, although its field had been so narrowed down that the direction which the missing expedition had taken was practically a matter of certainty, naturally rankled in the breasts of the British taxpayers. Belcher himself, too, added fuel to the fire by writing a singularly fatuous account of his travels which is largely composed of stories illustrative of his own preternatural sagacity.
We do not propose to dwell at very great length upon Belcher’s monumental work, much of which, indeed, is absolutely unintelligible to the average mind; but it contains one or two gems which ought to be preserved.
He imagined himself to be the happy possessor, among other things, of a marvellous gift of prophecy, very nearly, as he naïvely remarks, approaching to sorcery. In support of this claim he mentions the following incident in his diary.
“To-day I felt so perfectly satisfied that a sledge was due from Kellett (if he existed), that I fully intended when the master reported noon, to desire him to send a person to look out on the hill. It escaped me, being then engaged on other matters; but my clerk coming in, reporting, ‘A dog sledge nearly alongside, sir!’ my reply, instigated by what was then passing in my mind, was very short, and without emotion, ‘I know it,’ which somewhat astonished him.” Parenthetically, we may remark that this is a very fair example of the author’s style as well as of his gift of prophecy.
Here, too, is a delicious passage which contains several bulls of the finest dimensions. “I ascended the hill, where I had ordered a cairn to be built; possibly it was deemed too steep for younger blood; we built three, one was a house, the two others were constructed by myself—the last being on the inaccessible summit of True Star Bluff—and unattended. I must say that I would not have ordered it to be done by any but a volunteer.” The italics are our own; the English, however, is entirely Sir Edward Belcher’s.
But we must return to the expedition itself, resisting the temptation to quote further examples of its leader’s unconscious humour. The Government was evidently disposed to leave no stone unturned to make it as complete as possible. The active work of the search was to be pushed on from four ships, the Assistance, Commander G. H. Richards; the Resolute, Captain Henry Kellett; the Pioneer, Lieutenant Sherard Osborn; and the Intrepid, Commander F. L. M’Clintock. In addition to these, the expedition was provided with a depôt ship, the North Star, commanded by Lieutenant Pullen. The plan of campaign was to be as follows: On reaching the western end of Lancaster Sound the squadron was to divide into two parts. The Assistance and its tender, the Pioneer, were to devote their attention to Wellington Channel, while the Resolute with its tender, the Intrepid, was to visit Melville Island and explore the Parry Islands. For some reason known only to themselves, the Arctic committee had decided that it would be useless to pursue the search south of these regions.
The rendezvous at Beechey Island was reached without misadventure, and the two divisions immediately set off in their several directions, leaving the North Star behind. Kellett, with the Resolute and Intrepid, sailed direct for Winter Harbour, which he had intended to make his headquarters. He was disappointed, however, to find it entirely blocked with ice, and he was compelled, in consequence, to moor his ships in a bay between Dealy Island and the mainland, which was found to answer his purpose admirably. No sooner were the preparations for the winter completed than the work of sending out sledge parties began. He was fortunate in having several excellent officers under his command, among them being Lieutenants Mecham, Bedford Pim, and Hamilton, the mate, Mr Nares, who commanded the great Polar expedition of 1875, and De Bray, a French volunteer. The brief autumn days were spent not in the serious work of the search, but in forming depôts of provisions at points where it was thought that they would be most useful on the long spring journeys, and it was during one of these that Mecham visited Winter Harbour and found the paper that M’Clure had left there during the spring of the same year, recording the detention of the Investigator in Mercy Bay and the discovery of the North-West Passage.
The winter passed uneventfully enough, but as soon as the first signs of the advent of spring appeared, the ship was alive with preparations for the sledge journeys. One of the first to be sent out was that which Lieutenant Bedford Pim conducted in search of the Investigator, but as we have already dealt with that, it is unnecessary to dwell upon it again here. Nor is there very much to be said concerning the parties led by M’Clintock of the Intrepid, and Mecham and Hamilton of the Resolute. By exploring the Parry Islands thoroughly they added greatly to the world’s store of knowledge concerning those regions, but one sledge journey in the Arctic regions bears a very strong family likeness to another, and these differed from their predecessors in no important essentials. Some idea of the vigour with which the work was pushed forward, however, may be gathered from the following figures. During the autumn and spring M’Clintock, the greatest of all Arctic sledgemen, covered 1661 miles in 145 days, Mecham, 1375 miles in 117 days, Roche, 1039 miles in 79 days, Nares, 980 miles in 94 days, Domville, 739 miles in 77 days, and De Bray, 642 miles in 62 days. Altogether, the various parties covered about 8558 miles, most of which had never been traversed by a white man before.