The Man Who Ate His Boots

It might be said of Sir John Franklin, as of the unlucky Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, that "nothing became his life like the leaving of it." Had Franklin succeeded in finding a navigable Northwest Passage, he would have gone down in history merely as a notable navigator; instead, by vanishing, he has ascended to the firmament of Arctic mythology, as much a fixture of that sky as the Aurora Borealis. His death, and the mystery surrounding it, has inspired dozens of poems and novels, attracting writers from Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad and Margaret Atwood; any number of poignant ballads (among them Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage,' which has become almost a second Canadian national anthem), and (to date) four plays, six documentary films, a German opera, and an Australian musical.

The search to rescue, and then to discern the fate of, Sir John Franklin and his men was the very first mass-media disaster. For more than a decade, it dominated the popular press on both sides of the Atlantic; writers such as Dickens, Collins, Swinburne, Thoreau, Eliot, Verne, and Conrad were enthralled by its dark mysteries; clairvoyants from Scotland to India had visions of Franklin's ships, and more than thirty vessels were dispatched, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars in today's money, to seek him out. Stage plays, moving panoramas, and lantern shows depicted the wild loneliness of the "Frozen Zone"; lecturers equipped with maps, charts, and Esquimaux artifacts opined on his likely location, and his wife/widow Lady Jane Franklin became a dominating figure of the day, lauded by The Times of London as "Our English Penelope." Alas, for her, there would be no returning Odysseus! But loss and death draw down to deeper springs of human feeling, perhaps, than happy returns and loving embraces. And when, finally, the specter of the "last dread alternative" -- cannibalism -- was cast over the affair, it drove its tincture of admiration and revulsion deep down into the British psyche.

Even after the recovery of the expedition's final "Victory Point Record" by Francis Leopold McClintock in 1859, there was continued interest in discovering anything further about his final fate. The American eccentric and erstwhile newspaper publisher Charles Francis Hall led two search expeditions in the 1860's; in the 1870's, the U.S. Army dispatched Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka on a new seach for paper records or artifacts that might help clarify the last days of the Franklin exedition. Individual searchers returned to the area periodically from the 1880's through to the 1980's, among them the great explorer Knud Rasmussen, who in the 1902's heard stories of Franklin's ships from the grandsons of the men who had seen them perish, stories almost exactly the same as those collected by Hall more than half a century earlier. Forensic expeditions -- Owen Beattie in the mid-1980's, and Anne Keenleyside in the early 1990's -- collected the bones, and analyzed the bodies, of known Franklin remains, finding evidence of lead poisoning, scurvy, and tuberculosis. Most significantly, historians such as David C. Woodman and Dorothy Harlan Eber have collected and gathered Inuit testimony, comparing numerous accounts with the hope that a common narrative thread could be found. Woodman has traveled to the Arctic numerous times, searching for the ships in the places the Inuit described.

But it wasn't until 2014 when the first of Franklin's ships -- HMS "Erebus" -- was finally found. It was located by Parks Canada's underwater archaeologists only a few kilometers from where Woodman had searched, right where the Inuit had said it would be. Dives on "Erebus" have netted several remarkable objects, including the ship's bell, several china plates, brass buttons, and the hilt of a naval sword. Many of those, such as myself, who had followed the search for years, thought that finding one ship was already beating the odds -- and then, in 2016, the second ship "Terror" was found, again thanks to Inuit accounts (though in this case that of a contemporary witness, Sammy Kogvik). Although suspended for the past two seasons, new dives are planned for the summer of 2022, and many more to come -- who knows what secrets these wrecks may disclose? Meanwhile, land-based archaeologists have not been idle; earlier this year Doug Stenton announced that he'd been able to use DNA to identify one of the better-known skulls as that of John Gregory, who'd been hired to operate the steam engine installed in Erebus.

Interest in the Franklin story has continued to grow, both thanks to the discovery of the ships and the the new AMC TV series "The Terror," starring Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin, Jared Harris as Francis Crozier, and Tobias Menzies as James Fitzjames. Based on Dan Simmons's horror novel The Terror, it nevertheless stays largely true to the history of the original expedition, and was meticulously researched and shot. To the historical hazards of scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism, the story adds a mythological Inuit beast, the fearsome "Tunbaq" -- if you don't mind the blood and gore, it's a wonderful re-telling of the Franklin story. You can download individual episodes from iTunes, or get the entire series as a DVD.  Michael Palin's new book on HMS Erebus will doubtless spur still more interest, as many who only know him through the Pythons or his BBC travel shows will get his dramatic take on the ship's history, and his account of re-tracing its routes around the world from Tasmania to the Arctic. Part of this involved visiting Franklin sites in the Canadian territory of Nunavut aboard the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, a voyage on which I was lucky enough to accompany him.

It's been more than 170 years since he went missing, and Sir John Franklin remains a source of seemingly endless fascination -- but why? Is it just the mysterious nature of his disappearance? Or does he symbolize something deeper, something we feel we've lost in these modern times? Have a look at "The Man Who Ate His Boots," and leave your thoughts and comments here.

Exploration and Sacrifice

 

Skull of a member of Franklin's Arctic Expedition in 1845

The French writer Georges Bataille spent the last years of his life on his great but little-known work The Accursed Share.  In this book, Bataille argued that sacrifice or “expenditure” was the one absolute necessity of all human civilizations.  Whatever energy cannot be used in growth, Bataille argued, “must be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”  In his view, war, human sacrifice among the Maya, or the Northwest Coast potlatch – were all forms of sacrifice essential to their respective societies. This idea sounds strange to us today, who have come to believe that, whatever its occasional caprices, capitalism – which demands that all profit be plowed back into maintenance and growth – is the best way for a society, and indeed for the world, to thrive.  And yet, for most of our history, even the wealthiest and most successful civilizations have given sacrifice a sacred status.  We still do so today – for war only – but our awareness of this is muddied by our mixed feelings about the terrors of modern warfare, along with the belief, cultivated by some leaders today, that a modern and “professional” army can wage war successfully without undue sacrifice -- but of course, it can't.

Though we mark the soldier's sacrifice twice annually on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, we're unaccustomed to thinking about exploration as a form of sacrifice. And yet, in a profound sense, it is. We're reminded of that sacrifice at times such as the loss of the space shuttles Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003), but even when space exploration is accomplished, as it is more often today, with unmanned missions such as the NASA's JUNO, there is a monetary sacrifice involved -- in JUNO's case, roughly 1.1 billion dollars, not counting the use of existing infrastructure (NASA's command post, various radiotelescopes, and the sixty or so employees involved in the project). If we define sacrifice as 'expenditure without hope of recompense,' then we have to consider NASA's budget (much shrunken over the past decades, but still running $20 billion a year), and indeed the entire US military budget, currently running near $700 billion. It may be a worthy expenditure, of course -- but money that is put into military hardware returns no funds on the investment. As President Eisenhower once put it, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

But are there not some things worth the sacrifice? Certainly there are, and when the direction of that sacrifice is a peaceful one, there's every reason to celebrate it. In our science-fictional universes, such as the Star Trek franchise, we imagine a world in which explorers will "boldly go where no one has gone before" -- but in our present-day world, manned exploration -- whether of outer space, the deep oceans, or the frozen zone -- is often hampered by the unwillingness of governments to take the risk. But this could, and perhaps should, change. After all, it's a tradition that, as President Reagan noted in his Challenger speech, stretches back to the days of explorers in their wooden ships:

On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete. The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."

See additional links here.

Into the Wild

It's been a site of pilgrimage over the twenty-four years since Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild first told the story of Chris McCandless, a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp -- the abandoned Fairbanks City bus, #142, in the middle of a in a clearing a couple hundred feet off the legendary Stampede Trail in Alaska, a track first blazed by a miner to his claim back in the 1930s. It even appeared on Google Earth, where it was marked "Stampede Trail Magic Bus," a name which invokes another, more mobile bus, a.k.a. "Furthur," aboard which Ken Kesey, Wavy Gravy, and others of the Merry Pranksters embarked upon trips of another kind in the 1960's.

The Fairbanks bus had been towed (along with another now gone) to the site as temporary shelter for workers years before, and had been fitted with box-spring beds and a stove; when the work was done, the bus was -- like so many things in Alaska -- abandoned. Unfortunately, its popularity was also its downfall; Alaska state troopers in Fairbanks say that more than 75 percent of their yearly rescues have been in its vicinity, and in recent years several people have drowned attempting to cross the Teklanika River, which cuts across the route to the bus, including a woman who had just visited the bus with her newly wed husband. Finally, on June 18th 2020, the bus was airlifted off the the site by an Alaska National Guard helicopter to an undisclosed location; rumor is that it may eventually be on display at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

When McCandless's body was found there by moose hunters in September of 1992, his family had not known his whereabouts or even heard from him, for more than two years. A young man full of promise, an A-student with a degree from a top college, no student loans, and a $25,000 start up savings from his parents, he seemed like a young man who had it made. And yet, before he departed on his curious quest, he'd given all that money to charity, burned the cash in his wallet and (soon after) abandoned his car. Changing his name to Alexander Supertramp, he traveled by hitch-hiking, crashing on couches, and working -- apparently hard and well -- at a series of farm jobs. He made friends everywhere he went, and yet at the end, he didn't want anyone to go with him. Krakauer, a journalist for Outside Magazine, was hired to do a story, which he did (it appeared in 1993), but he was still unsatisfied. Tracking down more of McCandless's friends -- some of whom contacted him after seeing the article in the magazine, helped fill out the picture, while Alex's few leavings -- postcards to friends, notes scribbled in the margins of books, and such -- offered the bare outlines of a journey.

Into the Wild, the resulting book, was a huge bestseller, and in 2007 was adapted as a film by Sean Penn.  And yet, despite the book's immense popularity, readers have remained divided: for some, McCandless is a true hero, a voyager of the spirit whose restless trek symbolizes everything great about the human desire to explore the world -- while for others, including quite a few Alaskans, he's just one of the apparently endless stream of inexperienced, foolish, and just plain stupid people who head out into the wilderness without the knowledge, skills, or materials essential to surviving. The debate is not an entirely new one; as Krakauer observes, a similar argument has long raged over Arctic expeditions such as that of Sir John Franklin, which -- though sanctioned by the British Empire and provided with what was though the best equipment -- canned food, two enormous ships, flour, buscuit, and rum -- proved unable to survive in the harsh Arctic climate, even though, a few miles from the stranded ice-bound vessels, Inuit families were enjoying a rich meal of seal meat and muktuk, and bouncing healthy babies on their knees in their snug igloos.

So, as we begin our journey with Chris/Alex, what do we think? Try not to be polarized by the debate which pits McCandless as hero vs. idiot -- but give a read to this thoughtful essay by my friend, the Alaskan Journalist David James. Would you, if you could have, gone to visit the bus? What was it that drew so many to the place? And what now, that the bus is taken away -- what should be done with it? Don't hesitate to speak your mind -- Chris certainly didn't.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a documentary about Chris that includes interviews with his family members; you can also watch an older documentary from 2007 that retraces Chris's route.

Arthur Gordon Pym

We all know Edgar Allen Poe for his brilliant, terrifying, and macabre tales, but his one novel-length work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, is far less familiar. And yet, I would claim it as quite possibly his finest work, a tale whose conceit -- that Poe is merely shaping and refining a narrative given to him by Mr. Pym -- and whose deft evocation of the genre of travel and exploration narratives, were so effective that the London office of Wiley and Putnam was prepared to publish it as "an American contribution to geographical science" -- until they learned that Pym was, in fact, a fiction.

The effect was very carefully obtained. Poe had devoured any number of nautical narratives, and always had some navigational manuals, along with the Encyclopedia Brittanica, close at hand. The giving of facetious specifics, such as the name of the ship "Grampus," and the illustrated plates of the strange hieroglyphics, all added to the sense of realism. Most significantly, Poe drew from the hollow-earth theory of John Cleves Symmes, along with the exhortations of Jeremiah Reynolds, both of whom argued that an expedition should be dispatched to investigate the "hole" in the earth at its Southern pole. 

In Britain, the seeming marks of authenticity caused some to mistake it for an actual travel narrative; among those duped was the publisher George P. Putnam, who planned a join publication with his friend David Appleton, declaring that "this man has reached a higher latitude than any European navigator. Let us reprint this for the benefit of Mr. Bull." Putnam later ruefully noted that "the grave particularity of the title and of the narrative misled many of the critics as well as ourselves, and whole columns of these new ‘discoveries,’ including the hieroglyphics found on the rocks, were copied by many of the English country papers as sober historical truth”

Nor everyone, of course, was taken in by the initial ruse; the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine castigated the book, declaring that:

A more impudent attempt at humbugging the public has never been exercised; the voyages of Gulliver were politically satirical, and the adventures of Munchausen, the acknowledged caricature of a celebrated traveller. Sinbad the Sailor, Peter Wilkins, and More's Utopia, are confessedly works of the imagination; but Arthur Gordon Pym puts forth a series of travels outraging possibility, coolly requires his insulted readers to believe his ipse dixit.

Together with this novel, we'll be seeing Peter Delpeut's film Forbidden Quest, which assembles an enormous amount of "found footage" of polar expeditions to lend reality to an equally facetious tale, this time lent an "air" of reality by an elderly Irish ship's carpenter. Like Poe, Delpeut draws from the "hollow earth" theory, using it to explain the presence of Eskimos at the South Pole, as well as his narrator's otherwise miraculous return to civilization.

In the end, both narratives are best enjoyed when the ruse is realized -- for it's only then that we can, unlike other creatures, take pleasure from traveling along the edge of our own deception. But what did you think? Did this feel to you like a real narrative? Or at some point, was the spell, perhaps abruptly, broken? Or perhaps the real magic lies in-between our ideas about fact and fiction ...

Poe's Holes in the Earth

Poe was not much of a seafaring man -- indeed, he made only two journeys by sea, and that was to (and back from) the boarding school his stepfather sent him to in England. And yet, by steeping himself in the lore of the sea, and filling up his head with nautical terminology, he managed to provide all the necessary atmosphere for many stirring sea-tales. First -- and some may say, foremost -- among these was his "A Descent into the Maelstrom." Poe drew here from a number of maritime legends, among them the original malstrøm, an infamous whirlpool off the coast of Norway -- but also on the idea of "Symmes's Hole" -- a crackpot theory of the time originated by John Cleves Symmes. Symmes believed that the earth was hollow, with inhabitants within (which he humbly named Symzonia!), and could be reached via eiher of two holes near the poles of the earth. It sounds quite as crazy as it was, but since neither pole had been reached or explored, it held sway among some serious minds -- indeed, the very first voyage of exploration launched by the U.S. Government -- the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 -- was initially sent to find one (their remit was later changed to more broadly explore the southern ocean). Poe had a direct connection with this scheme, as his friend Jeremiah Reynolds was one of the strongest advocates for the undertaking. Indeed, legend has it that Poe's very last word -- uttered at the end of a night of delirium -- was "Reynolds!"

Poe was not finished with the theme -- he drew from it again in his "MS Found in a Bottle," and, as we will soon see, a more extended version of the idea of a chasm in the southern ocean was the centerpiece -- or perhaps, one should say, the endpiece -- of Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. And, remarkably enough, the idea of a hollow earth with a hole at either end lives on, even though these regions have since been explored thoroughly. There is evidently something captivating about it.