Dr. Richardson later admitted to eating the dead Hood’s buffalo robe, but neither Hepburn nor Richardson – the only survivors of their party – ever mentioned what else they might have eaten in the next week of arduous trekking during their return to Fort Enterprise.
At Fort Enterprise, Franklin and his party were too weak to stand or walk. Richardson and Hepburn seemed strong in comparison.
He might be the man who had eaten his shoes, but John Franklin had never…
“Cook is preparing roast beef tonight, my darling. Your favorite. Since she’s new – I am certain that the Irish woman was padding our accounts, stealing is as natural as drinking to the Irish – I reminded her that you insist that it must be rare enough to bleed at the touch of the carving knife.”
Franklin, floating on an ebbing tide of fever, tried to formulate words in response, but the surges of headache, nausea, and heat were too great. He was sweating through his undershirt and still-fixed collar.
“Admiral Sir Thomas Martin’s wife sent us a delightful card today and a wonderful bouquet of flowers. She’s the last to be heard from, but I must say the roses are beautiful in the foyer. Did you see them? Did you have much time to chat with Admiral Martin at the reception? Of course, he is not that important, is he? Even as Controller of the Navy? Certainly not as distinguished as the First Lord or First Commissioners, much less your Arctic Council friends.”
Captain Sir John Franklin had many friends; everyone liked Captain Sir John Franklin. But no one respected him. For decades, Franklin acknowledged the former fact and avoided the latter, but he now knew it to be true. Everyone liked him. No one respected him.
Not after Van Diemen’s Land. Not after the Tasmanian prison and the botch he had made of that.
Eleanor, his first wife, had been dying when he left her to go on his second major expedition.
He knew she was dying. She knew she was dying. Her consumption – and the knowledge she would die from it long before her husband would die in battle or on expedition – had been with them like a third party at their wedding ceremony. In the twenty-two months of their marriage, she had given him a daughter, his only child, young Eleanor.
A small, frail woman in body – but almost frightening in spirit and energy – his first wife had told him to go on his second expedition to find the North-West Passage, this trip by land and sea to follow the North American coastline, even while she was coughing up blood and knowing that the end was near. She said that it would be better for her if he were elsewhere. He believed her. Or at least he believed that it would be better for himself.
A deeply religious man, John Franklin had prayed that Eleanor would die before his departure date. She hadn’t. He left on February 16, 1825, wrote his darling many letters while in transit to Great Slave Lake, posted them in New York City and Albany, and learned of her passing on April 24, at the British Naval station at Penetanguishene. She had died shortly after his ship left England.
When he returned from this expedition in 1827, Eleanor’s friend Jane Griffin was waiting for him.
The Admiralty reception had been less than a week ago – no, just precisely a week ago, before this confounded influenza. Captain Sir John Franklin and all his officers and mates from Erebus and Terror had attended, of course. So had the civilians on the expedition – Erebus’s ice master, James Reid, and Terror’s ice master, Thomas Blanky, along with the paymasters, surgeons, and pursers.
Sir John had looked dashing in his new blue swallow-tailed coat, blue gold-striped trousers, gold-fringed epaulettes, ceremonial sword, and Nelson-era cocked hat. The commander of his flagship Erebus, James Fitzjames, often called the handsomest man in the Royal Navy, looked as striking and humble as the war hero he was. Fitzjames had charmed everyone that night. Francis Crozier, as always, had looked stiff, awkward, melancholic, and slightly inebriated.
But Jane was wrong – the members of the “Arctic Council” were not Sir John’s friends. The Arctic Council, in reality, did not exist. It was an honorary society rather than a real institution, but it was also the most select Old Boys club in all of England.
They’d mingled at the reception, Franklin, his top officers, and the tall, gaunt, grey members of the legendary Arctic Council.
To gain membership to the Council, all one had to do was command an expedition to the farthest arctic north… and survive.
Viscount Melville – the first notable in the long receiving line that had left Franklin uncharacteristically sweating and tongue-tied – was First Lord of the Admiralty and the sponsor of their sponsor, Sir John Barrow. But Melville was not an old arctic hand.
The true Arctic Council legends – most in their seventies – were, to the nervous Franklin that night, more like the coven of witches in Macbeth or like some cluster of grey ghosts than like living men. Every one of these men had preceded Franklin in searching for the Passage, and all had returned alive, yet not fully alive.
Did anyone, Franklin wondered that evening, really return alive after wintering in the arctic regions?
Sir John Ross, his Scotsman’s face showing more sharp facets than an iceberg, had eyebrows leaping out like the ruffs and feathers of those penguins his nephew Sir James Clark Ross had described after his trip to the south arctic. Ross’s voice was as rough as a holystone dragged across a splintered deck.
Sir John Barrow, older than God and twice as powerful. The father of serious British arctic exploration. All others there that night, even the white-haired septuagenarians, were boys… Barrow’s boys.
Sir William Parry, a gentleman above gentlemen even when among royalty, who had tried four times to force the Passage only to watch men die and his Fury squeezed and smashed and sunk.
Sir James Clark Ross, newly knighted, was also newly wed to a wife who made him swear off any more expeditions. He would have had Franklin ’s job of commander of this expedition if he’d wanted it, and both men knew it. Ross and Crozier stood slightly separate from the others, drinking and talking as softly as conspirators.
That confounded Sir George Back; Franklin hated sharing sirdom with a mere midshipman who once served under him, and a womanizer at that. On this gala night, Captain Sir John Franklin almost wished that Hepburn hadn’t taken the powder and shot out of the dueling pistols twenty-five years earlier. Back was the youngest member of the Arctic Council and seemed happier and smugger than any of the others, even after suffering the battering and near-sinking of HMS Terror.
Captain Sir John Franklin was a teetotaler, but after three hours of champagne, wine, brandy, sherry, and whiskey, the other men began to relax, the laughter around him grew stronger and the conversation in the grand hall less formal, and Franklin began to feel calmer, realizing that all this reception, all the gold buttons, silk cravats, gleaming epaulettes, fine food, cigars, and smiles were for him. This time, it was all about him.
So it was a shock when the older Ross pulled him aside almost abruptly and began to bark questions at him through the cigar smoke and the glint of candlelight off crystal.
“ Franklin, why in hell’s name are you taking one hundred and thirty-four men?” rasped the holystone across rough wood.
Captain Sir John Franklin blinked. “It’s a major expedition, Sir John.”
“Too bloody major, if you ask me. It’s hard enough to get thirty men across the ice, into boats, and back to civilization when something goes wrong. A hundred thirty-four men…” The old explorer made a rude noise, clearing his throat as if he was going to spit.