Voyaging Out of the Northwest Passage last September with Adventure Canada.
Day 3: Simpson Strait

“I expect to find human remains.” So said Marc-Andre Bernier this morning in response to a question about diving on the Erebus. “Most likely bones, skeletons.” He noted that Inuit testimony speaks of at least one body on what would appear to be Erebus, and added that he had seen flesh on bones before. Many artifacts on Erebus are covered in sediment, he said, “and if sedimented, the remains could be very well preserved.” Bernier cited the example of a wreck from 1770, the HMS Swift, which researchers located in Patagonia: “They found a complete skeleton in uniform.”
Since discovering the Erebus in 2014, Bernier said, Parks Canada has conducted more than 250 hours of diving – “open water, through the ice, and now we’re setting up to dive from a barge.” That barge arrived recently in Gjoa Haven. The top of the Erebus is just 10 feet below the surface of the water, and that has facilitated the initial exploration of the ship.
“Some of the deck planks are gone,” Bernier said, “and in some instances we have been able to peek inside to the lower decks.” Using state-of-the-art technology and computerized graphics, the underwater archaeologists have been able to create a three-dimensional, grid-system map of the wreck. From the headquarters of the Royal Marines, they have recovered shoes, ceramic pestles, and medicine bottles reused as shot glasses. Parks Canada has established a protected zone, a national historic site 10 kilometres square, around the Erebus. The Inuit guardians at the site, where yesterday three tents blew down, were being evacuated today.
The Erebus is not badly preserved, Bernier said, but the Terror – discovered just last year – “is in phenomenal condition.” There, researchers have identified a ship’s boat, a 23-foot cutter, sitting on the ocean floor directly under the davits designed to release it. They also identified two outhouses sitting on the top deck. To laughter, he said: “Imagine all the DNA samples in there.” He noted that the window over the officer’s mess is partly open. So far, the team has collected about ten hours of video, and the next step will be to introduce Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) into the ship.Just before lunch, many passengers went out on the top deck to stand in the wind – still gale force – and gaze out at King William Island. Those men who, in the late 1840s, abandoned Terror struggled along this coastline. On his 1857-59 expedition,
Leopold McClintock found the skeleton of one of the men who died here, and identified him as Thomas Armitage. After experiencing those winds, nobody with any sense harbored dreams of going ashore.
Late in the afternoon, with the wind still wailing at more than 20 knots, Matthew James made it official: we would attempt no landing. The sun came out and the Ocean Endeavour set off eastward through Simpson Strait, bound for Gjoa Haven. Passengers crowded onto the top deck and marvelled at the nearness of the shore, the narrowness of the strait.

As a rule, when we sail in the Northwest Passage with Adventure Canada, I end up writing the "official" logbook that goes out to passengers as an illustrated booklet. Towards the end of the year, I like to post a few excerpts. It gets me remembering . . . and excites me about next year.

Day 2: The Erebus Site
We sailed into a blizzard at around 1530 hours. The timing seemed fortuitous. Marc-Andre Bernier, manager of underwater archaeology for Parks Canada, was halfway through a presentation on The Search and Discovery of Sir John Franklin’s Lost Ships. Suddenly we could see for ourselves the kinds of conditions the Franklin expedition encountered in the mid-1840s in relatively tiny, wooden ships. We could see and hardly fail to understand.
Bernier planned to remain with the Ocean Endeavour for the next three days. He would lead us to the site of the wreck of the Erebus and proceed to Gjoa Haven. While outside a gale-force wind gusted to upwards of 50 knots, Bernier talked about Parks Canada search operations over the past eight years. His presence on board – and that of four other federal government agency representatives – emerged as part of a new partnership between Adventure Canada and Parks Canada.
In this first of three presentations, Bernier highlighted the importance of Inuit accounts as relayed through such explorers as John Rae, Charles Francis Hall, and Frederick Schwatka, who relied on interpreters William Ouligbuck, Tookoolito, and Ebierbing. He noted that these accounts “gave us an area, but did not establish a location.” That is why the search required so much time and energy. It consumed eight years, covered an area equal to 215,686 soccer fields, required 322 person-days of field work, and entailed the consumption, roughly speaking, of more than 500 litres of coffee.
The storm continued unabated into the late afternoon, as passengers sat entranced through an Inuit ceremony of welcome. Led by Susie Evyagotailak (who lit the kudlik/ qulliq), John Houston, Louee Okalik and Derek Pottle, it involved no fewer than eight culturalists (all speakers of Inuktitut), and was highlighted by Jennifer Kilibuk, who charmed passengers by combining a song with a drum dance.
The day had begun with an archaeological briefing by Dr. Latonia Hartery, who explained guidelines for visiting any sites or features more than 50 years old, and a talk by the resource historian (yours truly) based on Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage.
Through the afternoon, the blizzard raged. And at evening briefing, what had seemed fortuitous in the morning stood revealed as foreboding: we would not, after all, be visiting Erebus. Expedition leader Matthew James Swan (MJ) laid it on the line. The weather had gotten worse instead of better. On land near the wreck, Parks Canada had built a five-tent campsite that would enable visitors to warm up after snorkeling. Marc Andre Bernier took the microphone to reveal that “three of those tents have been blown off.”
Bernier and his team had also arranged for a Twin Otter to fly in from Gjoa Haven, bringing Inuit historian Louie Kamookak and several elders to interpret the site. But while that plane could handle the expected winds of 35 to 40 knots, the pilot needed at least 1,000 feet of visibility. And the Inuit guardians on the spot said that, engulfed by fog, they had no visibility whatsoever.
Finally, the thought of putting zodiacs into the water when the winds were blowing at more than 25 knots . . . and sending passengers out in what, because of the ship’s location, would be a 40-minute zodiac ride each way . . . no, MJ couldn’t see it: “The zodiacs would just flip.” What about waiting in the vicinity for a couple of days? Bernier explained that, by stirring up sediment, the storm had already rendered that a non-starter. Nobody would be able to see a thing in the water – not for days.
Our leaders were unanimous, their decision ineluctable. We would not be visiting the Erebus site. Like the explorers themselves, as host David Newland suggested, we would have to swallow this disappointment and sail on. And for the first of many evenings, Newland did yeoman service, singing us into the night with The Northwest Passage in Story and Song.
[Pix: Jennifer & Susie, and Marc-Andre Bernier by Sheena Fraser McGoogan; and a favorite image I used in Dead Reckoning: Frederick Schwatka crossing Simpson Strait . . . together with those unsung heroes, Tulugak and Ebierbing.]

While announcing the 2019 Arctic Return Expedition, which will follow in the footsteps of Arctic explorer John Rae, team leader David Reid spoke of yearning to do something about the dilapidated condition of Rae’s birthplace in Stromness, Orkney: the Hall of Clestrain. “Clestrain stands as an example of something once proud, dignified, and strong,” he said. “The passing years have not been kind to it.” He and his fellow travelers are hoping that this expedition will inspire the funding of a restoration – indeed, a transformation.
Clestrain was built in 1769 by Patrick Honeyman, whose family had been prominent in Orkney for more than a century. The architect is unknown, but Clestrain bears a notable resemblance to Gayfield House in Edinburgh, built five years earlier for the Earl of Leven by Charles and William Butter. According to architect Leslie Burgher, Clestrain was “the first Palladian Villa and the first significant building in Georgian style in the far north of Scotland.” It became one of a handful “of buildings of national quality and importance in the Northern Isles.”
Patrick Honeyman’s son William (1756-1825) became a Session Court judge: Lord Armadale. He married a lady, Mary McQueen, who became the subject of a 1790 painting by Alexander Nasmyth: Lady Honeyman and her family. Later that decade, a storm blew the roof off Clestrain and Honeyman had to replace it.
Early in the 1800s, with properties in Edinburgh, Sutherland, Lanarkshire, and Lothian, Honeyman appointed a factor to oversee his holdings in Orkney. That factor, John Rae Senior, moved with his family into Clestrain. And there, John Rae was born (in 1813) and raised, eventually to become one of the greatest explorers of the 19th century. That story figures in Dead Reckoning, but I tell it most fully in Fatal Passage.
In August 1814, Sir Walter Scott visited the Standing Stones of Stennis with Rae Sr., and wrote later that “the hospitality of Mrs. Rae detained us to an early dinner at Clestrain.” Scott drew on this visit to Orkney for his novel The Pirate, and Rae’s older sisters are said to have inspired his fictional characters Brenda and Minna. John Rae grew up in and around Clestrain, hunting and fishing and sailing small boats.
Flash forward to 1925, when a farming family, the Craigies, acquired the estate and moved into Hall. They occupied it until 1952, when a devastating gale blew off the slate roof, forcing the family to move into a new farmhouse. Since then, Burgher writes, “the house has suffered a slow decline.” The Craigies replaced the roof with corrugated sheeting and used Clestrain as an outbuilding for farm animals.
Since 1990, several local bodies have tried and failed to raise enough money to restore the Hall – the Orkney Heritage Society, the Orkney Building Preservation Trust, the Orkney Islands Council, the Friends of the Orkney Boat Museum. In 2004, Clestrain showed well in a Britain-wide BBC Restoration Programme, but could not win out over buildings in more populous areas.Late in 2007, backers of the boat-museum idea secured a Heritage Lottery Planning Grant, but their proposal went no further, rejected in 2009 as artificially appended to the site. The Landmark Trust showed interest in 2010, but bailed out late in 2012 after a downturn in the market for “large holiday lets.”
In 2013, the John Rae Society took up the challenge . It’s a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organization bent on increasing knowledge about Rae’s achievements, and on advancing arts, heritage, culture and science while fostering friendship between “the people of Orkney, and those in Canada,” particularly in those areas associated with Rae. More urgently, with the Hall deteriorating -- windows broken, chimneys decaying, water damage -- the Society is striving to raise funds to salvage and restore Clestrain, and to turn it into the heart of an international John Rae Centre -- a World Heritage site for exhibitions, lectures, research, and scientific study.
Society patrons include the Earl of Orkney (Winnipeg-based professor Peter St. John), writer and broadcaster Ray Mears, author-historian Ken McGoogan (yours truly), and, most recently, actor Michael Palin,best-known for his work in Monty Python. Last month, a Scottish woman living in Canada donated 40,000 pounds to the cause -- almost $70,000 Cdn!
Still, much more is needed. And David Reid -- who hails from Bishopton near Glasgow, not 300 miles south of Stromness -- is hopeful that the Arctic Return Expedition will inspire donations for both the expedition and the restoration of Clestrain. “It would be wonderful if our expedition could help to breathe new life into the Hall -- not just for the people of Orkney, but for people from around the world.”

“A snow storm of great violence raged during the whole of [April] 14th, which did not prevent us from making an attempt to get forward; after persevering two and a half hours, and gaining a mile and a half distance, we were again forced to take shelter.” -- John Rae on his 1854 expedition

In the Canadian Arctic, the month of April means below-zero temperatures, ice-jammed waterways, blinding blizzards and challenging traveling conditions. April is the month, in 2019, when Arctic explorer David Reid will lead a four-person team on a 640-kilometre trek across Boothia Peninsula in the Central Arctic. Travelling on skis and snowshoes, Reid and his team will follow the route Scottish explorer John Rae took in 1854, when with two indigenous companions, he accomplished one of the three most significant expeditions in the history of Arctic exploration.
Together with the Inuk William Ouligbuck and the Ojibway Thomas Mistegan, Rae discovered both the catastrophe that had engulfed the failed Franklin expedition and the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage. On Friday night David Reid, who recently led the first-ever circumnavigaton of Bylot Island on skis, unveiled his next undertaking -- the ARCTIC RETURN EXPEDITION: Discovery, Northwest Passage, John Rae -- while presenting in Toronto at a meeting of the Canadian Chapter of the Explorers Club.His 540 km Bear Witness journey in 2017 around Bylot required 29 days. Reid proposes to complete this longer expedition -- 640 km from Repulse Bay (Naujaat) via Point de la Guiche to Gjoa Haven -- in 35 days. He is now selecting team members, each of whom must be capable, he says, “of hauling a 200-pound sled every day for a month while meeting the mental and physical challenges of travelling in a harsh, cold environment -- one of the most extreme on earth.”
This expedition is his most ambitious yet, the Scotland-born explorer said, because it is not just linear, man against nature, a purely physical test. Certainly it is that, but it also has a significant historical dimension that invites multi-faceted comparison between today and yesterday. Climate? Technology? Culture? Gear and equipment? Communications? All completely transformed since Rae’s time. Not only that, but Reid has also enlisted an experienced co-author -- full disclosure: yours truly -- to write a book about the expedition, one that we hope will give rise to a documentary film.
“This is purpose-driven travel,” Reid said. “And it’s a serious undertaking. It is certainly not lost on me that people die doing things like this, travelling in this part of the world at the time of year Rae did.” Reid notes that for centuries, Inuit have travelled through this area, and “because of blizzards, whiteouts, and other dangers, the reality is some have not made it home.”
Then he asked rhetorically: “Why do it? Why, at considerable personal risk, why try follow in the tracks of John Rae? Well, because historical achievement needs to be recognized, honoured, and celebrated. This expedition is designed to highlight and bring attention to excellence and achievement. It will bear witness in a remote part of Canada where history was made.”
History, he added, is often evoked in bricks and mortar. And that brought him to another motivating factor -- the dangerously run-down condition of Rae’s birthplace in Stromness, Orkney: the Hall of Clestrain. For the past several years, the John Rae Society has been striving to raise funds to purchase, salvage, and restore the edifice, with a view to turning it into an international John Rae Centre -- a World Heritage site for exhibitions, lectures, research, and scientific study. Last month, a Scottish woman living in Canada donated 40,000 pounds (almost $70,000 Cdn.) to the cause.
But much more is needed, and Reid -- who hails from Bishopton near Glasgow, not 300 miles south of Stromness -- is hopeful that the ARCTIC RETURN EXPEDITION will attract funding not just for the undertaking itself, but also for the restoration of the Hall. “Clestrain stands as an example of something once proud, dignified, and strong,” he said. “The passing years have not been kind to it. It would be wonderful if our expedition could help to breathe new life into the Hall -- not just for the people of Orkney, but people from around the world.” Reid would also like to see some private funds go to a youth group based on King William Island -- a group identified as deserving by historian Louie Kamookak, who has agreed to serve as Gjoa Haven consultant.
And the three most significant Arctic expeditions? The first was that of John Franklin, who in 1846 established the existence of an open waterway from Parry Channel as far south as King William Island. The second was that of John Rae, who with Ouligbuck and Mistegan, discovered Rae Strait -- the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage. The third was that of Roald Amundsen, who vindicated both Franklin and Rae when, in 1903-06, he became the first to navigate the Northwest Passage. Of these, the only expedition that did not require a ship was John Rae’s.
And that, in 2019, is the one ARCTIC RETURN will re-enact.

[Potential sponsors should contact David Reid at arcticreturn@gmail.com.]

[Next up here: The remarkable true story of the Hall of Clestrain.]

Canadian geologist Francis Manns was prospecting for lead and zinc. The mid-summer day was bright and literally endless -- 24-hour sunlight.
Manns was working his way along the Abbott River in the middle of Cornwallis Island, some distance north of Resolute Bay, when he spotted a cairn on a ridge or pinnacle.
"It was two or three feet high," he told me earlier today. "You couldn't miss it."
Manns went to investigate, picked up a couple of loose rocks, and found three identical pieces of paper. Maybe I should mention that he did this forty-odd years ago, between June 20 and August 20 of 1973.
The high-rag-content pieces of paper had been deposited there, in the middle of Cornwallis Island, in 1851 by a search party from the Felix, under the command of Sir John Ross. The previous year, Ross had been present off Beechey Island during the discovery of the gravesites of the first three men to die from the lost Franklin expedition.
Together with several other captains, Ross had wintered over and resumed searching north up Wellington Channel -- along the east coast of Cornwallis Island. As the Manns discovery shows -- and though I, for one, have not been able to locate the Abbott River -- Ross's men ventured some distance inland during their hunt.
"The paper lasted because it is very good quality," Manns said, "and the Arctic is a desert. The pages were just loosely placed -- gently folded and nestled in the rocks. A high wind blows constantly, and the rain when it comes is sparse and horizontal and dries in minutes. I would guess that the cairn had never been wet inside."
When he got home to Toronto, Manns sent the two other copies he found to the national archives in Ottawa . . . and never heard a word.
"We used to go out in pairs," he recalled at his home in the Beaches, which is where in Toronto all the cool folks live. "A helicopter would put us down and we'd go prospecting and mapping." This was before GPS, of course, but even their compasses were useless. "The North Magnetic Pole was just off Little Cornwallis Island," Manns explained. "It's now a thousand miles away."
One geologist with whom he was working -- Malcolm Wilson -- came upon another cairn on a different traverse. He never said a word about it back at camp, but inside that cairn, he found a piece of paper identical to the three pages Manns had discovered -- only this page had been dated and signed. Wilson published an article about it in a Saskatchewan-based journal called The Muskox. In recent decades, Manns has looked for that article a few times, but has never managed to lay hands on it.

What happened to the Franklin Expedition? Researchers have been debating that since 1847, two years after Sir John Franklin disappeared into the Arctic with 128 men. From the note found at Victory Point on King William Island, we know that in April 1848, 105 men left the two ice-locked ships. The note tells us that already, nine officers and fifteen seamen had died. That represents 37 per cent of officers and 14 per cent of crew members. Historians have wondered: why such disportionate numbers?Researchers have spent vast amounts of time and energy inquiring into the deaths of the first three sailors to die, whose graves remain on Beechey Island. Did lead poisoning kill them? Botulism? Zinc deficiency leading to tuberculosis? But wait. Maybe those three early deaths were anomalies. Perhaps the nine officers and twelve other sailors died as a result of some accident or injury. Some have wondered if the dead men ingested something that others did not.
But nobody, to my knowledge, has publicly invoked the calamitous Munk expedition of the early 1600s, which lost sixty-two men out of sixty-five. In 1619-20, while seeking the Northwest Passage, the Danish-Norwegian explorer Jens Munk wintered in two ships at present-day Churchill, Manitoba. In Dead Reckoning, drawing on Munk’s journal, I detail the unprecedented miseries that ensued. During my research, I had turned up an article by Delbert Young published 44 years ago in the Beaver magazine (“Killer on the ‘Unicorn,’" Winter, 1973). It blamed the catastrophe on poorly cooked or raw polar-bear meat.
Soon after reaching Churchill in September 1619, Munk reported that at every high tide, white beluga whales entered the estuary of the river. His men caught one and dragged it ashore. Next day, a “large white bear” turned up to feed on the whale. Munk shot and killed it. His men relished the bear meat. Munk had ordered the cook “just to boil it slightly, and then to keep it in vinegar for a night.” But he had the meat for his own table roasted, and wrote that “it was of good taste and did not disagree with us.”
As Delbert Young observes, Churchill sits at the heart of polar bear country. Probably, after that first occasion, the sailors consumed more polar-bear meat. During his long career, Munk had seen men die of scurvy and knew how to treat that disease. He noted that it attacked some of his sailors, loosening their teeth and bruising their skin. But when men began to die in great numbers, he was baffled. This went beyond anything he had seen. His chief cook died early in January, and from then on “violent sickness . . . prevailed more and more.”
After a wide-ranging analysis, Young points to trichinosis as the probable killer —a parasitical disease, unidentified until the twentieth century, which is endemic in polar bears. Infected meat, undercooked, deposits embryo larvae in a person’s stomach. These tiny parasites embed themselves in the intestines. They reproduce, enter the bloodstream and, within weeks, encyst themselves in muscle tissue throughout the body. They cause the terrible symptoms Munk describes and, left untreated, can culminate in death four to six weeks after ingestion.
So, back to the Franklin expedition. Could trichinosis, induced by eating raw polar-bear meat, have killed those nine officers and dozen seamen? And galvanized the remaining men into abandoning the ships? And rendered many of them so sick that they could hardly think straight or walk. And made the faces of some look black, so that they had to be quarantined into a separate tent?
In recent years, while visiting Beechey Island with Adventure Canada, more than once my fellow voyagers and I have been driven off by polar bears. We retreat into the zodiacs at first sign of approach. In that same situation, how would Franklin’s men have responded? They would have killed those curious bears and eaten them -- perhaps bringing some of the meat onto the ships. That undercooked polar-bear meat, unevenly distributed among officers and crew, might well have led to the lopsided fatality statistics . . . and to all the rest.
So, anyway, I suggest in Dead Reckoning. Within the next few years, Parks Canada will almost certainly turn up some decisive evidence -- written records or human remains or both -- as divers investigate the Erebus and Terror. Until then, my money is on polar-bear-meat-induced trichinosis.

A few days ago, in the comments section below the Globe and Mail review of Dead Reckoning, I placed a link to my rejoinder. The review's author, Janice Cavell, has responded in that same forum. She says nothing about my two main criticisms, and so apparently concedes -- first, that her review short-shrifted the Inuit, failing to name even a single Inuk, and second, that it suggested white males are interchangeable. Instead, Cavell again takes up the cudgels in defence of the Royal Navy narrative of the Northwest Passage -- a story that does change to suit new information, but that ALWAYS manages to keep those old familiar naval officers front and centre.Ever since Lady Franklin in the 1850s, the defenders of Official History have relied on geographical confusion and misunderstanding to make their case. But check the map attached, taken from the endpapers of Dead Reckoning. As you can see, despite Cavell's contention, Bellot Strait is more than 100 km northeast of King William Island. It played no role whatsoever in the first navigable Northwest Passage, as established by Roald Amundsen in 1903-06. Click on the map and check out the route he took.
Far from denying that John Franklin “discovered” Franklin Strait -- which is simply the southern extension of Peel Sound, south of Bellot Strait -- I argue and show clearly that Franklin sailed directly through that waterway. By so doing, he established a navigable passage through those waters, all the way south to near the top of King William Island (KWI). Whether the coastline was charted is irrelevant. In January 1830, travelling with several Inuit, James Clark Ross had crossed the ice from Boothia to the northern tip of KWI -- but surmised, in snowy conditions, that the waters to the east of that island ended in a bay. The map Franklin carried showed precisely that, which is why he turned west and got trapped in the ice.
In 1854, after travelling overland across Boothia with an Inuk, William Ouligbuck, and an Ojibway, Thomas Mistegan, John Rae determined that what James Clark Ross, and so Franklin, had believed to be a bay was in fact a strait: Rae Strait. Aware of Rae’s discovery, which had been verified by Leopold McClintock, Amundsen followed in the wake of Franklin to KWI, then veered east through Rae Strait to Gjoa Haven, before proceeding onward. So, once more with feeling: Dr. John Rae -- that Orcadian Scot, that Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader, that first great champion of Inuit oral history -- John Rae discovered the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage.