Into the Northwest Passage

After six years of searching, one of the lost ships of the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition has been discovered in the Canadian Arctic. Here, Noah Richler follows the fabled route of explorer John Franklin and the unforgettable experience its grandeur brings

After the shock of checking in at five in the morning, the 100-odd passengers joining Adventure Canada’s Into the Northwest Passage fortnight boarded Toronto’s CanJet flight 81 bound for Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.

Aboard the MV Sea Adventurer, constructed for expeditions to remote reaches, we would travel for six days, making stops along the west coast of Greenland before crossing the Davis Strait to Canada, continuing along the north side of Baffin Island and along Lancaster Sound and then through the Bellot Strait past the Boothia Peninsula, the northernmost point of the continental North American land mass, into Queen Maud Gulf and past the estuary of the Coppermine River to Kugluktuk.

That was the plan, anyway – this, the Arctic journey that the fabled English explorer John Franklin sought to travel in 1845 with his ships, HMS Terror and Erebus, before they were locked into the ice, subsequently disappearing and providing Canada one of its great mysteries and foundation myths. A barometer of our excitement, even in the newness of the gentler Greenland Arctic landscape – trees absent, gravel in abundance and hotels and schools made of pre-fabricated containers – everything and anything appeared auspicious.

At the Kangerlussuaq harbour, once an American military base, the Sea Adventurer was visible offshore, while on the muddy beach was the carapace of a derelict barge going nowhere. Its muddy rusted innards open to the elements looked like the fleshless rib cage of some long-deceased whale. And as we would come to see, Inuit and their Thule predecessors imitated exactly the body of a whale when, willing Jonahs, they built their sod houses, brilliantly managing to make home of an incomparably inhospitable land with scant materials, the ribs of whales their two-by-fours.

After a breathtaking passage through the Kangerlussuaq  Fiord, the Sea Adventurer entered the rougher waters of the Davis Strait, passengers accustoming to the rolling of the ship, the new sounds of clinking chains and groaning decks, and the shove and shake of waves knocking against the ship’s hull and playing it like a drum. Come 6 a.m., the voice of the trip’s expedition leader, Chris Dolder, making the first of his early (and some very early) morning wake-up calls, could be heard over the ship’s PA. “Good morning, good morning, good morning,” said Dolder, offering up, as he would daily, details of the ship’s position, the plans for the day – weather conditions permitting. And then the only semi-comic warning, “This is not a holiday.”

In Sisimiut, renowned for its kayaks made in the traditional fashion (though using cloth and resins rather than sealskins for the hull), we walked the well-kept town and visited the local co-op for “country food” – whale, seal, Greenland halibut and other hunted prey. Then an Inuk in an exquisite kayak of his own paddled to the side of the ship and demonstrated a series of techniques for rolling in different Northern situations – with his paddle to the side, behind his back or in one hand and even paddling flipped upside-down and underwater for several lengths as a hunter might have to do when faced with otherwise impassable pack ice or a polar bear or both.

But the highlight of the Greenland start to the Northern journey could not but be Ilulissat, where the viewing of icebergs – some as small as a house, others the size of 20 city blocks – is without compare. Beyond the small pretty village, with its restaurants and “butiks” an example of what the settlements of Canada’s own North could one day be, an immaculately maintained boardwalk allows trekkers to reach observation points along the shore without trampling the delicate, spongy muskeg surface of the Greenland Arctic meadow that is in itself a moving landscape.

As if heralding our entrance into Canada, an immense tabular glacier larger than anything we had seen in Greenland waters was situated in the glorious day to the ship’s port. Likely a piece of the Ellesmere ice sheet, its visible eighth stood some 60 metres high, and the ship’s captain, Sergei Nesterov, estimated the flank we were passing to measure more than two nautical miles, the immense and exquisite piece of some 4.6 nautical miles squared in its entirety.

So much, in journeys like these, comes out of the unexpected or even from what might otherwise seem like failure. On another day, after winds had whipped up and made a planned landing at the foot of a glacier foolhardy, a call in hushed tones – a state of awe is a frequent condition – was issued from the bridge: “Polar bear!” came the excited announcement, one having been spotted walking back and forth along the brim of an enormous iceberg in the shape of a top hat. (Later, a first for me, we would spot a polar bear in the middle of lunch, pulling apart the body of a seal, the blood on the floe beside him like the tomato-red stain of an enormous pizza.)

The humbling in the North is permanent. Travelling the Arctic is an exercise in fascinating humility, the ephemeral nature of being human driven home, first of all, by the sheer scale of things massively large but also wondrously small.

For scale works at both ends and, as we would experience time and again, we were taught the fleetingness of our existence not only by spectacular fiords, mountains, cliffs and the ice formations that created them but also by the amazing tenacity of tiny plants finding resilient ways to overcome the extraordinary challenges of Arctic living – and to mark their place with beauty, too.

Kaidloo’s simple words elucidated the truth of what so many qallunaat – white men – subsequently found to be true of the North, which is just how excruciatingly hard it is to survive there. The failed RCMP post at Dundas Harbour, where at least one of the stationed officers committed suicide; the remains of the HBC post at Fort Ross, now a shelter voluntarily stocked by travellers and visitors such as ourselves, for others that might pass through in worse straits; the graffiti-inscribed erratic boulder at Port Leopold, carved by 19th-century visitors searching for Franklin’s remains and, above all, the graves of three members of the tragic British explorer’s crew and one of a rescue searcher at Beechey Island all serve to demonstrate just how tenuous even today is our grip upon the North.

Dundas Harbour is a strikingly moving site. A small cemetery sits at the high end of a slope behind the RCMP post, where it meets the foot of the mountain. Four graves are enclosed within a simple white picket fence there, and the dilapidated state of the old RCMP building by the water allows the visitor to see just how feeble were the walls of the house that divided the officers, in their 20s, from the monsters of weather, polar bears and loneliness.

At Fort Ross, decayed as Dundas Harbour is, the two-bedroom house of the Hudson’s Bay Company factor has a coal-burning stove, a couple of gutted armchairs, handsome wooden trim and built-in cabinets that were once glass-fronted and great gouges in the wallpaper peeling and flapping in the breeze indicating where a polar bear (or two) had a go at the empty building.

At Port Leopold, the Hudson’s Bay Company quarters were clearly visible upon the low-lying flats of the crescent-shaped beach hazardously open to winds, as was the erratic engraved E & I 1849 by the sailors of Cmdr. James Clark Ross and E.J. Bird’s ships, HMS Enterprise and Investigator, who overwintered here that year in their attempt to find Franklin’s ships and unravel the mystery of what had happened to them.

And then the impasse that, in the way of singular journeys, also provided our adventure’s climax: south of Fort Ross lies the Bellot Strait, the narrow channel that, a mere nautical mile in width, divides the Boothia Peninsula from Somerset Island and cuts through to Peel Sound. This short cleft in the continent was the linchpin of the Northwest Passage. In the 19th century, it was the element of the passage that Franklin and many others did not find. For our own expedition, a century and a half after it was discovered, the Strait was still key.

The next day, the ship proceeded toward Beechey Island, site of the Franklin graves. A National Geographic-sponsored vessel had been in contact with the Sea Adventurer earlier in the week and had judged the pack ice accumulated around Beechey Island impassable, subsequently abandoning its attempts to land there. Nevertheless, the Sea Adventurer was going to attempt to bring us in. Capt. Nesterov, a Russian rising to the challenge, manoeuvered the Sea Adventurer through large pans of pack ice and was able to find a broad strip of clear water in the gently arcing cove of Beechey Bay.

Thrilled passengers landed in the Zodiacs and, so close to history, admired the graves in silence as others headed to find Franklin’s Cairn at the top of the bluff. Then the whole ensemble walked along the lightly snow-covered shore to the ruins of Northumberland House, where the grave of Joseph René Bellot and several tributary plaques left at the site by visiting Coast Guard and troop ships are located.

It was an exciting, fitting end to a singular journey – and it included, one of the North’s goodbyes, the sight of a playful Arctic fox frolicking upon the pack ice grounded on the shore, as if to say, “Come back! Come back and join me! It’s not all Franklin’s gloom and doom. It’s fun up here!”

A month or so later, back in the busy South, I ran into my pal Charles Spearin, a musician from Broken Social Scene and my cabin mate on the unforgettable trip. We had a drink and talked like melancholy sailors about not being in the Arctic and the extraordinary effects the trip had upon us. Charles told me he’d enrolled in a community art class and was learning how to sculpt.