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• Format Paperback | 185 pages
• Dimensions 133 x 203 x 12.7mm | 181.44g
• Publication date 29 Jun 2017
• Publisher New Vessel Press
• Language English
• Edition Statement Translation
• ISBN10 1939931452
• ISBN13 9781939931450
• Bestsellers rank 693,912

The greatest show in the Arctic: The American exploration of Franz Josef Land, 1898-1905.

By P. J. Capelotti.
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
ISBN 978-0-8061-5222-6

Reviewed by William Barr.


The American contribution to the exploration of Franz Josef Land, the Russian archipelago north of the Barents Sea, occurred during what were effectively three separate expeditions – the expeditions which are the focus of Capelotti’s book – over the period 1898-1905. The aim of all three expeditions was to reach the North Pole; ironically, however, none of them attained any significant distance north of Rudolf Island, the northernmost island of that archipelago. The irony was that during this same period a party from the Duke of the Abruzzi’s expedition, led by Cagni Umberto and starting from Rudolf Island, reached the record high latitude of 86° 34’N (Amedeo of Savoy 1903)! On the other hand the Americans did contribute significantly to the exploration of the archipelago.  The first of these expeditions, in 1898-99 was that of journalist Walter Wellman.  He had previously mounted an attempt at the Pole from Svalbard, using sledges and aluminum boats in 1894; it, however came to grief when the expedition ship Ragnvald Jarl was wrecked by the ice off Waldenøya north of Nordaustlandet.

Undaunted by this, in 1898 Wellman tried again, this time from Franz Josef Land.  This time he headed north in a chartered steamer, Frithjof, from Tromsø. Incomprehensibly, he had made no arrangements for a relief vessel to come to retrieve the expedition members the following year,  assuming simply that a Norwegian  sealing or whaling vessel might visit Franz Josef Land in 1899 and that its captain could be persuaded to take him and his men back south.  He sent a message to his brother by the returning Frithjof to make the necessary arrangements. Wellman’s team consisted of both Americans and Norwegians. Second-in-command was Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, an employee of the U.S. Weather Service, with no previous Arctic experience.

After calling at Cape Flora on Northbrook Island, where one of the buildings left by the earlier British expedition of Frederick George Jackson  (Jackson 1899) was dismantled and loaded  aboard to act as the expedition’s main base,  Fritjhof probed the south coasts of the archipelago but was everywhere blocked by ice.  Wellman therefore decided to establish  his main base at Cape Tegetthoff at the southern tip of Hall Island; it was named Harmsworth House. Once the base was established Wellman remained there, dispatching Baldwin with a sledge-and-boat party consisting of three Norwegians, Paul Bjørvig, Bent Bentsen and Emil Ellefsen to head north as far as possible, preferably to Rudolf Island, in order to establish an advance base. They travelled with 48 dogs, two sledges, a wooden boat and a canvas boat. At Cape Frankfurt, at the eastern tip of Hall Island they found that the ice in Austrian Sound had broken up completely.  While Wellman himself remained comfortably at Cape Frankfurt he ordered the Norwegians to make repeated trips (a total of eight) in their small oared boats across the potentially dangerous open waters of Austrian Sound – and this on extremely limited rations.

Ultimately, with Baldwin they reached Cape Heller at the northwest end of Wilczek Land and there built a stone hut which they named Fort McKinley.  This was to be the advance base. Relations between Baldwin and the Norwegians were by this time  almost at breaking point.  Baldwin then returned south to the relative comfort of Harmsworth House from which Wellman had still not stirred, leaving Bjørvik and Bentsen to spend the winter at Fort McKinley with most of the dogs. Bentsen fell ill and died on January 1899. Bjørvik complied with his wishes that his body not be moved outside where it might be  molested by foxes or bears and thereafter Bjørvik shared his sleeping bag with the frozen corpse for the rest of the winter.  He was relieved by a party led by Wellman on 27 February 1899.  Once Bentsen had been buried Wellman and party continued north and by 21 March had reached the eastern end of Rudolf Island.  At this point Wellman caught his leg in a crack in  the ice and fractured his shin.  Unable to walk he abandoned his polar attempt; by 9 April 1899 the party was back at Harmsworth House.

As if to compensate for this failure on 26 April Baldwin set off with four Norwegians to explore the eastern boundaries of the archipelago. On 4 May the party reached a large unknown island which was named Graham Bell Land.  They skirted around its eastern and northern sides before returning to Harmsworth House.  On 27 July 1899 the surviving expedition members were picked up by the sealing vessel Capella and by 20 August they were back in Tromsø.  By 8 October Wellman was back in New York.

On his return to the United States Baldwin resigned his position with the U.S. Weather Service but negotiated a special contract to write up the meteorological and auroral results from the year on Franz Josef Land.  But he became fascinated by the fate of Salomon Andrée the Swede who, with two companions had disappeared in the Arctic in an attempt to reach the North Poole in a hydrogen balloon Ornen in 1897, and became obsessed with the idea of mounting a search for Andrée and his companions, in combination with a further attempt of his own from Franz Josef  Land, clearly undismayed by his earlier failure.  By pure luck he was able to interest a well-heeled sponsor in this idea: William Ziegler a multi-millionaire who had initially made his fortune in the Royal Baking Powder Company.  By October 1900 Ziegler had committed himself to funding another polar attempt.  Baldwin chartered the Dundee whaling ship, Esquimaux which he renamed America. Under a Swedish sailing master, Carl Johanson, and with a Swedish crew, it sailed from Dundee on 28 June 1901, initially to Tromsø; there it made rendezvous with another vessel, Belgica which had been chartered to establish a depot on northeast Greenland in case Baldwin returned south by that route. On board America were 15 Americans and double that number of men of other nations.  At Honningsvaag  America was joined by a third vessel, Frithjof, also laden with a vast quantity of expedition equipment, supplies and provisions.  First the two ships called at Arkhangelsk where they took aboard 428 dogs, 15 ponies  and 6 Russian dog-drivers and pony handlers. From there the two vessels headed north to Franz Josef Land.

Although Baldwin had hoped to establish his base as far north in the archipelago as possible, he found all the channels between the islands blocked with ice and elected instead to establish his base on Alger Island, one of the most southerly islands, which America reached on 18 August.  Unloading from both ships proceeded immediately; the base was named Camp Ziegler.  Frithjof then returned south. Baldwin then procrastinated for two months, allegedly hoping to take America further north, but allegedly blocked by ice on each attempt; he prevaricated by establishing a second base, West Camp Ziegler on Alger Island and making further trips east to the south end of Austrian Channel, which was still blocked with ice.  America then became frozen in off Alger Island.

Frictions between Baldwin and sailing master Johanson, who considered himself the ship’s captain, and indeed between Baldwin and almost every member of the expedition, rapidly developed over the winter.  However they all optimistically assumed that he was still serious about trying to reach the North Pole.  The first sledge party, using dogs and ponies, left East Camp Ziegler on 3 April 1902, bound for a halfway station, Kane Lodge on Greely Island, almost in the center of the archipelago.  Then in April Baldwin established a further depot on Coburg Island and finally, on 3 April managed to reach Rudolf Island, where the northernmost depot was established just short of Cape Auk on the west coast of the island. On 3 May Baldwin tried to reach Teplitz Bay, the site of the Duke of the Abruzzi’s main base in 1898-99, but was stopped by open water.  Thus his depot at what Baldwin called Boulder Depot would be the most northerly point reached by the Baldwin-Ziegler expedition. Baldwin started back south on 5 May.  From Kane Lodge he made a side-trip west to Jackson Island where he found the primitive stone hut in which Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen had “hibernated” over the winter of 1895-96 after they had left the icebound Fram in an attempt to reach the North Pole (Nansen 1897).  He found a message which Nansen had left before continuing south to a fortunate encounter with Frederick Jackson at Cape Flora.  During this side-trip and on the final lap south to Alger Island Baldwin did make a useful contribution to unraveling the complex geography of the central part of the archipelago.  He was back on board America by 21 May 1902.

On 25 June the ice around America began to break up and the ship drifted away from Alger Island.  For two weeks the ship tried to fight clear of the ice and during one bout of ice pressure on 15 July there were serious fears that the ship would be crushed and/or lose its rudder, already damaged in the ice.  On the 18th the ship broke out of Aberdare Channel.  Inexplicably Baldwin then proposed heading west to Cape Flora.  Ice pilot Magnus Arnesen and engineer Henry Hartt disobeyed his order to this effect and turned the ship south.  It emerged into open water on 28 July and, with less than two tons of coal left, reached Honningsvaag, northern Norway on 1 August.

As the American members of the expedition returned to the United States assorted newspaper articles began to appear, revealing the almost total failure of the expedition in terms of its stated objective. Summoned to Ziegler’s office on his return to New York Baldwin was raked over the coals by the multi-millionaire.  What particularly enraged Ziegler was that Baldwin had forced eight of the men to stay for the winter at Camp Ziegler, while he returned south (a plan which he quickly abandoned) and worst of all, had made them sign a contract of service to him personally rather than to Ziegler.  This was the last straw and Ziegler relieved Baldwin of command of the expedition. He replaced him as leader of yet another attempt at reaching the North Pole, starting in 1903, with the photographer from the previous expedition, Anthony Fiala (Fiala 1906). On 23 June 1903, under the command of Edward Coffiin, an experienced American whaling captain, and with Henry Hartt again in charge of the engines, America put to sea from Trondheim, where  it had been undergoing repairs.  After calling at Tromsø and Arkhangelsk the ship finally sailed from Vardø on 10 July with 39 men, 218 dogs and 30 ponies on board.  This time Ziegler’s agent, William Champ, had made arrangements for a relief vessel to call at Cape Flora in the summer of 1904.

America reached Cape Flora on 12 August and from there fought its way north through ice-infested British Channel.  It passed Cape Auk and Teplitz Bay on the evening of 30 August but was finally brought to a halt by heavy polar pack at 82° 13’ 50”N – the highest north latitude reached during any of the three expeditions.  Fiala then retreated to Teplitz Bay.  Coffin recommended that the ship winter at Coburg Island but Fiala overruled him and insisted that the ship winter in dangerously exposed Teplitz Bay. Ponies, dogs,  and cargo were unloaded and the vast quantity of pemmican and provisions previously hauled north to Boulder Depot was retrieved while a large tent was erected on shore and named Camp Abruzzi and a stable for the ponies raised next to it.  The expedition then settled down for the winter with the 15 members of the expedition (scientists and support staff) in Camp Abruzzi, and the ship’s crew on board America, locked in the fast ice about 1500 m offshore. But in the early hours of 12 November the ship was severely damaged by the ice and was finally crushed and abandoned on the 21st, although still supported by the ice.  The entire crew and all the expedition personnel were then housed on shore at Camp Abruzzi.  During a storm on 22 January 1904  the ship, along with a large cache of coal and half the expedition’s provisions which had been left on the fast ice, disappeared.  There were barely 60 bags of coal left.

Nonetheless Fiala planned for a sledge expedition to the Pole involving 26 men, 16 ponies and nine dog teams, which would leave on 20 February, later postponed to 1 March.  The expedition finally set off on the morning of the 7th, but, having reached only Cape Fligely, only some 7 miles away, on 8 March Fiala ordered the expedition back to Camp Abruzzi, allegedly due to five or six men being disabled.   A smaller group which set out on 24 March attained barely a mile north from Cape Fligely before having to turn back, defeated by chaotic pressure ice.

On the evening of 1 May 1904 some 25 members of the expedition, including Fiala, began a retreat south to Cape Flora, arriving there on the 16th.  There they found abundant supplies left by Frederick Jackson and by the Duke of the Abruzzi; the party settled down in Elmwood, Jackson’s main building and in one of his subsidiary buildings.  As prearranged Champ chartered Frithof  and over the summer that vessel made two attempts to reach Cape Flora but on each occasion was blocked by ice, in one case only 40 miles south of that cape. . Resignedly the occupants of Cape Flora and Camp Abruzzi settled down to spend a second winter in the Arctic. Interpersonal frictions, already widespread and serious, and a general dislike or even contempt for Fiala became exacerbated.  But, allegedly with a view to making a final attempt at the pole, leaving 23 men at Cape Flora, on 27 September 1904 Fiala started back north for Camp Abruzzi; due to various delays he did not arrive there until 20 November.  He set off on his forlorn final attempt at reaching the Pole on 17 March 1905. He turned back, thwarted by a wide lead, on 23 March at 81° 55’N, with Rudolf Island still plainly in sight. He and his party were back at Camp Abruzzi by 1 April.  That base was then abandoned and its occupants headed south to Cape Flora.  Champ arrived on board Terra Nova and evacuated the entire expedition on 1 August; Champ brought with him the news that Ziegler had died on 24 May 1905.  With that the bizarre history of the American attempts at reaching the North Pole from Franz Josef Land, inevitably came to an end. Despite the vast amounts of money which had been invested in them, not one of the various sledge expeditions , optimistically aiming for the North pole, had advanced more than a few kilometers north of Rudolf Island  On the plus side, however,  the vast island of Graham Bell Island had been added to the map of the archipelago and, particularly due to the efforts of Russell Porter, the complexities of the geography of the center of the archipelago had been largely unraveled.

The above summary represents just the bare bones of the story of the three expeditions to Franz Josef Land and barely hints at the bizarre decisions and procrastinations of the leaders, especially Baldwin and Fiala, at the complexities of the interpersonal frictions, and at the endless to-ings and fro-ings within the archipelago.  The frictions, of course, are carefully concealed in the published works of the leaders such as those of Wellman (1899) and Fiala (1906). By dint of his usual painstaking research, based on the journals and papers of at least four of the individuals involved, housed in three different repositories, plus one collection in private hands Capelotti has uncovered the remarkable intricacies of the less-than-admirable behaviour and the often incomprehensible decisions made by all three leaders.

While Capelotti clearly has an impressive command of the details of this particular phase of exploration in this area of the Arctic, there are some errors with regard to general geography  and history of the Arctic. With reference to p. 9, para 1, l. 2, the USS Jeannette became beset in the ice just northeast of Wrangell Island, not north of the New Siberian Islands. With reference to p. 12, para 3, l. 2, the Tegetthoff became beset off the northwest coast of Novaya Zemlya not “northeast of  Spitsbergen”.  Also, with reference to p. 12 (para 3, l. 3) that ship’s engineer, Otto Krisch, was buried on small Wilczek Island, not on the much larger Wiczek Land (Payer 1876), although the juxtaposition of these two almost identical names must have confused many over the years, and not just Capelotti.  And finally -- a simple error of arithmetic (p. 89, para 5, l. 4): 600 nautical miles equals 1132 km, not 850 km. Such errors, however are really peripheral to the main themes of the book and do not detract significantly from a thoroughly-researched and well-written study of a previously little-known aspect of Arctic exploration history.


References

Amedeo of Savoy, Luigi. 1903. On the “Polar Star” in the Arctic Sea. London: Hutchinson.
Fiala, A. 1906. Fighting the polar ice. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co.
Jackson, F.G. 1899. A thousand days in the Arctic. London: Harper and Brothers.
Nansen, F. 1897. Farthest north. London: Constable.
Payer, J. 1876. New lands within the Arctic Circle. London: Macmillan
Wellman,W. 1899. The Wellman Polar Expedition. National Geographic 10(12): 481-505.

Franklin’s Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus

By John Geiger and Alanna Mitchell

201 p., illustrations, maps, notes, selected bibliography

HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2015

Reviewed by David C. Woodman


The September 2014 discovery of HMS Erebus, one of two long-lost discovery vessels from the third Arctic voyage of Sir John Franklin, garnered international interest and will undoubtedly count as one of the greatest marine archaeological finds of the century. As the fitting culmination of a six-year effort in difficult conditions by Parks Canada and its partners, this discovery will undoubtedly result in a bookshelf full of new publications concerning its archaeological, historical, and even political implications (full disclosure: I have one in manuscript form). Franklin’s Lost Ship, as the first of these, has the advantage of primacy and immediacy, and serves as a good introduction to the story of the discovery of the wreck and the historical background.

Mr. Geiger, the primary author, after a career as a journalist and author, now serves as CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, a partner in the 2014 search. This book is one result of the Society’s role in the expedition, which was to bring the news of this expedition to the world, and set it in its geographical and historical context. As outlined in a formal contract between the partners, the Society was to engage in promotional and educational efforts and produce “a coffee table book devoted to the discovery.” Geiger, although not personally present at the moment HMS "Erebus" was found, was on one of the ships involved in the northern search area, and thus had ready access to the Parks Canada team that discovered the wreck. Alanna Mitchell, also a renowned journalist and author, assisted as co-author and the combined experience of the writers is reflected in the high quality of the writing throughout.

It's no reflection on his writing skills that Mr. Geiger has had the misfortune of producing two books dealing with the Franklin story that are both more memorable for the photos than for their text. Geiger, as co-author with Dr. Owen Beattie, produced one of the earliest Franklin-related books of the recent literary resurgence. Frozen in Time (1987) detailed the 1980s exhumation and investigation of three of Franklin’s crew who died during the first winter at Beechey Island. The evocative photos of the well-preserved faces of those seamen as they emerged from the permafrost helped to breathe new life into public awareness of the Franklin mystery. Yet unlike Frozen in Time, where the illustrations are remembered mainly for their dramatic impact, here they are used as integral elements to tell the story.

Almost every page features at least one image and many pages consist of nothing else; most are accompanied by informative captions relevant to the adjacent text. The images fall into three categories. The first are exquisitely beautiful Arctic land- and seascapes, which ably help the reader develop a sense of place and the conditions faced by both Franklin and his men and the participants on the modern expedition. Also included are standard images familiar to anyone interested in the Franklin story - maps, the "Victory Point" record, relics, Thomas Smith’s famous painting etc., as well as the expected portraits of Sir John, Lady Franklin, Rae, Hall and others. These assist in illuminating the historical sections of the book. Undoubtedly, the most welcome images are the photos from the 2014 expedition, many never before published. These show the participants at work, the highlights from dives on the Erebus and the relics recovered.

The book is sensibly laid out in alternating chapters dealing with a narrative of the 2014 expedition interspersed with historical background telling of Franklin’s doomed third expedition. This is a clever way to address the two main, but disparate, audiences for this book. The first audience, already steeped in the lore of Arctic exploration, will primarily want to read about the recent discovery of this important wreck. The second audience, coming to the subject anew and wishing more context than press reports provided, will appreciate the intervening expository chapters. A final epilogue considers the importance of the discovery in light of modern conditions of resource and community development, climate change and sovereignty issues.

The chapters dealing with the actual 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition are ordered in chronological sequence, although with northern and southern search groups operating concurrently there is some overlap. The text is a refreshingly straightforward telling of the main incidents, obviously gleaned from interviews with the participants themselves. It conveys both the difficulties of the long search and the flash of joy and excitement at the eventual discovery. Appropriate and ample credit is given to the Parks Canada, Hydrographic, and Arctic Research Foundation teams, all of whom invested years in the search effort. Other partners, both governmental and private, some of whom luckily joined the team just in time for the discovery, are also extensively covered. Indeed the full list of partners is presented no less than six times, with some lengthy personal and organizational biographical asides.

In an effort to place the Franklin expedition in context the historical chapters cast a very wide and impressive net. Starting with James Knight’s mysterious disappearance in 1719, subject of an earlier Geiger book, almost every expedition sent to find the Northwest Passage in the first half of the nineteenth century is mentioned.  The many Franklin relief expeditions and later efforts to determine his fate are given necessarily brief but informative sketches. The text shows an admirable familiarity with the historical background, and will serve the general reader, who is coming to the subject for the first time, as a welcome introduction. The book also provides brief but illuminating biographies of the main historical protagonists, with diversions into the geopolitical, scientific, and cultural significance of the Franklin expedition to both his contemporaries and to the current world situation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly considering the fact that his earlier book introduced the topic of lead poisoning as a contributory factor to the Franklin disaster, the subject of lead poisoning is repeatedly woven into the fabric of this new book as well. Geiger continues to promote the idea that solder from Franklin’s tinned food is the probable source of the lead, an idea that has been seriously questioned since it was first proposed. In one of the more purple passages of the book Franklin’s retreating crews are portrayed as “frail addled men” with the implication that their mental state had been compromised by lead-poisoning, another idea that has recently been called into question.

Another obligatory Franklin topic, cannibalism, is mentioned as well, although modern forensic work on the subject is ignored. Here the text cannot resist a dip into journalistic sensationalism, picturing the retreating men “likely carrying their comrades’ heads, arms, hands and legs … as a ready supply of calories,” which is, to my knowledge, totally unsupported by any evidence.

Throughout the book Inuit traditional accounts are consistently acknowledged as a primary reason for the discovery of the Erebus. This is true and fitting, however there is no discussion of how the traditions contributed, which is simply offered as a fact. The book also attempts to use other Inuit recollections to augment the history of the Franklin expedition as known from the sparse documentary and physical evidence. The text generally follows the “standard reconstruction” of a single, fatal, abandonment in 1848 and attempts to integrate Inuit remembrances of visits to the ships, of one sinking, of a large joint hunt, and of the “black men” to that traditional scenario. Most of these details are less amenable to the single-abandonment reconstruction and the authors remark that further discoveries on the Erebus , especially if accounts of living white men aboard should be confirmed by physical evidence, may cause a “wholesale rewriting of the history books.”

The technical aspects of the book are good. The page layout of images, text, and white space is well balanced and attractive, and the book itself is solidly printed on heavy, glossy stock.  Notes are used sparingly but sixty percent of them are taken from only five authors. The short select bibliography relies mainly on recently published work with half of the books having been published in the last ten years.

Franklin’s Lost Ship takes the story of the discovery of the Erebus up to the spring dives of 2015. As such it is a timely account for a public interested in that story, but it will not be the last word on this amazing discovery. The authors acknowledge this when they remark that “untold discoveries from this astonishing vessel are still down there,” and indeed Parks Canada’s September 2015 dives revealed new elements and spectacular artifacts that inspire both questions and wonder. Much more will be learned as further work proceeds on the five-year plan developed to properly assess the wreck. But for those of us who hang expectantly on every new development this is a worthy first installment.

Rough Weather All Day: An Account of the “Jeannette” Search Expedition

by Patrick Cahill, edited by David Hirzel

Pacifica, CA: Terra Nova Press.  173 pp., $20.00 USD.

Reviewed by: P.J. Capelotti, Division of Social Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Abington College, Abington, PA 19001, USA. E-mail: pjc12@psu.edu


James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald and the man who had dispatched Henry Morton Stanley to Africa in search of the British missionary Dr. David Livingstone, was equally fascinated with the Arctic. In 1873, Bennett dispatched two reporters to search for the survivors of Charles Francis Hall’s doomed North Pole expedition.  Five years later, he assigned a reporter to an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin sponsored by the American Geographic Society and led by a U.S. Army lieutenant named Frederick Schwatka.

Bennett sponsored his greatest Arctic venture in 1879.   A U.S. Navy captain, George Washington DeLong, was ordered to locate the ‘lost’ expedition of the Swede Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld—and then attempt to reach the North Pole itself.  DeLong sailed from San Francisco in the Pandora, a former Royal Navy vessel which Bennett had purchased and renamed Jeannette after his sister.  The navy agreed to man the ship if Bennett paid all the expenses of the expedition.

Even before the Jeannette reached the Arctic, Nordenskiöld and his ship Vega broke through the ice north of Russia and emerged into the Bering Sea.  With no dramatic rescue to report, DeLong continued with his secondary mission and turned north towards Elisha Kent Kane’s chimerical open sea and the North Pole beyond.  The Jeannette was soon beset in the ice north of the New Siberian Islands and, after two grueling years drifting about in the ice, crushed.  DeLong and his men made a desperate retreat in the ship’s small boats to the Lena River delta on the Siberian coast.  Only one of the three boats reached safety, another vanished with all hands, and DeLong’s own small boat made it to shore where he and all but two of his men starved to death as they waited in vain for relief.  To intensify the disaster, a newly-commissioned U.S. Navy vessel sent to find DeLong, the U.S.S. Rodgers, was itself burned to the waterline and blown to pieces.

This interesting volume presents an edited version of the diary of a sailor on board the Rodgers, a thirty-two-year-old Irish-American mechanic named Patrick Cahill.  Cahill was brought to the U.S. as a boy and by his mid-twenties had found work as on a railway in Panama.  In 1880, Cahill joined the U.S. Navy as a Machinist’s Mate and the following year volunteered for service on the Rodgers as the navy sought to learn the fate of DeLong and his ship and crew.

Cahill must have possessed some literary ability in addition to his skills with machinery, as he was contracted by the San Francisco Chronicle to act as a correspondent during the Rodgers search for DeLong.  Cahill’s notes from the cruise never seem to have made it to the Chronicle, but a typescript was later made of them and, combined with interviews he gave in his seventies to the Oakland Tribune, form the source material for this edited volume.

Cahill’s observations make for terrific reading.  He describes his mates as “some pretty rough sailors” (p. 26), many of whom had been north previously and knew to carry a stash of trade goods with which to barter for furs and ivory in the far north.  As Cahill wrote: “We expect to have all kinds of curios when we return” (p. 30).  While the carpenter and cook suffered grievously from sea-sickness, Cahill loves being under sail: “it is grand to look at a big sea just as it comes aboard and dashes all over everything” (p. 31).  When the Rodgers arrived in ‘Port Petropaulovski’ (now Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky) in late July, the officers on board the Russian cruiser Strelok (Cahill called it the 'Straylok') toasted the men of the Rodgers and the Russian Emperor, at which point the Americans who exactly was the emperor since the assassination of the last one.  This quickly ended the celebrations, as the Russians, on the far side of the empire, had not yet learned of the assassination of Alexander II in St. Petersburg more than four months earlier.

By late August, the Rodgers had cleared the Bering Strait and searched at Wrangel Island and along the north coast of Siberian for any trace of the Jeannette.  Finding none, the ship returned southwards and November anchored for the winter in St. Lawrence Bay on the eastern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula on the far eastern tip of Siberia.  There, on November 30th, after the fire pumps had been disconnected to keep them from freezing, a fire in the fore hold broke out.  The crew battled the fire as long as possible while the ship was run aground in about three fathoms.  The ship burned to the waterline, and these are some of Cahill’s most vivid descriptions, as the crew scurried supplies ashore in the small boats before the ship was a total loss.

The entire crew escaped, to face a forced winter amidst four small villages of Inuit who nevertheless shared out what limited stocks of walrus and seal they possessed.  Despite the near-starvation diet that nearly killed him, Cahill maintained his daily observations throughout the winter until a whaler arrived in the spring and took the men off to San Francisco.  There Cahill recovered from his fascinating ordeal, left the navy, and made a career for himself in the city’s cable cars.

The volume is the product of Terra Nova Press, described as a ‘small POD publishing enterprise [that] seeks to bring into print the smaller, less-well-known true stories of polar exploration in the days of the sailing ship.’  The press is the result of editor David Hirzel’s longtime interest in Arctic and Antarctic exploration and, in  particular, the Irish contribution to same, as previous works have covered the life and travels of the ‘Irish Giant’ of the Royal Navy, Tom Crean.

The lack of proper editing does show at times, with errors in punctuation and especially with inconsistencies in the use of italics and/or underlining for the names of ships and the titles of newspapers.  In spite of these, the volume contains fascinating insights into a little-known sideshow of the vast saga of the Jeannette expedition and its aftermath.

Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony

Second Edition

by David C. Woodman

Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015

Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England’s forgotten Arctic Explorer

by P.J. Capelotti

Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013.

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore


Peter Capelotti, anthropologist at Penn State University, archaeologist of human space travel, sometime poet, and writer on many lesser-travelled byways in the exploration and exploitation of the seas, has now written the first biography of Benjamin Leigh Smith (1828–1913), who appears as a shadowy presence in the annals of late-19th-century Arctic exploration—mentioned in passing in the narratives of more famous names—but who is now given centre stage in an account that focuses on his three yachting expeditions to Svalbard and two to Franz Josef Land in the 1870s and 80s.

It doesn’t take long to understand the reason for Leigh Smith’s ghostly absence from the feast of Arctic exploration history, and consequently the challenge that Capelotti set himself. The explorer was such a shunner of public attention—friendly as well as hostile, in print as well as in person—that even medals awarded to him ended up being sent in the post rather than collected. He never wrote (let alone published) accounts of any of his expeditions beyond the bare bones of a ship’s log, and never presented a paper at a meeting or wrote one up for a journal. Even the private correspondence that survives rarely concerns itself with anything beyond the practical arrangements for his voyages, and there is no body of letters from him to other explorers or theorists of the day that might place him as part of the conversation of the time. Most of his letters are to family members and rarely stray beyond the domestic.

The great majority of what we know of him has therefore come from the writings of others. Some of his expeditions resulted in the publication of popular accounts by other participants—of varying quality—and colleagues were also responsible for writing up or analysing the scientific results of his voyages. Most of the rest comes from the dedication of an indefatigable family archivist, Charlotte Moore, without whose work in preserving the documents of her ancestor’s life Capelotti’s task, already difficult, would have been almost impossible.

Benjamin Leigh Smith was the eldest son in a wealthy but socially eccentric family of dissenters that, in the way of such families, produced some groundbreaking and impressive lives; Florence Nightingale was a cousin of the explorer, and the early feminist Barbara Bodichon was a sister. His parents were never married, and only in midlife did he and his siblings discover that their father had sired another family with another unmarried partner who was a few rungs down the social ladder—with the result that, in the stratified society of the time, the two families would never meet and could be kept in ignorance of each other. Capelotti identifies Leigh Smith’s sense of vulnerability to the social stigma of his illegitimacy as one of the drivers behind his reluctance to establish a public profile; his outsider status as a non-Anglican—not unusual among Victorian industrialists but surely rare among Home Counties landed gentry—was no doubt another.

After education at Cambridge and training in law, he coasted without much direction until the death of his father gave him the income to indulge a passion for sailing to the Arctic—something that, like much else in his life, seems to come out of the blue, an almost arbitrary whim for someone with no background in sailing or geographical research beyond an amateur's dabbling. Capelotti gives some possible antecedants for his dream in the voyages of other wealthy yachtsmen to the Arctic, including Lord Dufferin and James Lamont, for both of whom the primary interest had been hunting. This too became the rationale for Leigh Smith’s first expedition, in 1871 in the yacht Sampson, which he had purchased from another landowning huntsman, John Palliser (leader of the British North American Exploring Expedition of 1857–60, though the author notes the name without seeming aware of the identity). If there is more than a touch of self-indulgent vanity in a rich man going hunting in exotically remote locations, Leigh Smith at least avoided hubris: he knew his limitations. All of his voyages were skippered by professional captains and crewed by workaday fishermen and whalers, British or Norwegian, who knew their way around the ropes, and Leigh Smith never seems to have insisted on a dangerous course to prove either his authority or his manliness. Indeed, he made a virtue of his ships’ relative powerlessness against the forces of nature, developing an exploration philosophy that emphasized going with the flow, allowing wind, current, and ice conditions to dictate where the exploring would be done. It’s notable that hard-bitten skippers like the whaler David Gray wrote about him not as a dilettante they tolerated, but as a colleague they genuinely respected.

At a time when no government-sponsored expeditions had been sent to the Arctic from Britain in more than a decade, Leigh Smith’s first voyage showed what patience and modest expectations could accomplish in a much smaller craft than the adapted bomb vessels sent out by the Royal Navy. His target was Svalbard, and in searching to the east of it for Gillies Land (one of many landmasses in Arctic exploration history that turn out to have been mirages) the Sampson became the first ship to reach the easternmost tip of Nordaustlandet—and thus of the Svalbard archipelago as a whole—which was later fittingly named Cape Leigh Smith. Cruising back along the northern coast of the island a lucky run of very late-season fine weather in September allowed them to sail to the northernmost end of the archipelago as well, adding new coastlines and place names to the map. A second expedition to the same area the following year was less lucky with the weather and added only one further name to the map, while a third in 1873 became famous primarily as a humanitarian venture, when Leigh Smith arrived in time to give desperately needed help and supplies to the Swedish North Pole expedition, whose support ships had been frozen in the previous autumn, leaving its leader Nordenskiold with double the expected number of mouths to feed through the winter.

After three expeditions in as many years, it seems that Leigh Smith had got it out of his system, but after the disappointing results of Nares’s British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76 (Capelotti is somewhat unfair in branding this a complete failure, with its significant science programme and its new furthest norths for both men and ships), the triumph of Nordenskiold’s first sailing of the North-East Passage in the Vega in 1879, and the loss of the Jeannette north of the Lena, Leigh Smith seems to have reconsidered his retirement to the sidelines, and he returned to the fray on a grander scale than ever, this time having his own yacht purpose-built for Arctic work with an icebreaking bow and a supplementary steam engine. In 1880 in this vessel, the Eira, he made his most successful expedition and one of the most geographically productive single-season voyages in the history of Arctic exploration. Following up on the discovery of Franz Josef Land by Weyprecht and Payer in the year of his last expedition, 1873, he managed to sail more than a hundred miles further west along the archipelago’s southern coast than its discoverers had done, charting coastlines, identifying and naming individual islands and their prominent features, and showing it to be a significant landmass rivalling Svalbard in overall dimensions.

This voyage sealed his acclaim among the geographers of Europe and America, but when he tried to follow it up the next year Leigh Smith had only a couple of weeks of further discoveries in the same area before a misjudgement of ice conditions by the Eira’s skipper led to the book’s eponymous shipwreck at Cape Flora, when the vessel was pinned between fast and moving ice and soon crushed, though before she sank there was time to remove almost all of her supplies and equipment. Like Nordenskiold’s crews, they now faced an unexpected overwintering, but unlike the Swedes they were relatively few in number and very well supplied with food, though they had to improvise a hut from local stone plus canvas and wood from the ship. If one guiltily acknowledges a sense of bathos in reading of the almost complete lack of drama during the winter of 1881–82, it is a tribute to Leigh Smith’s leadership and sense of responsibility for his men that ensured everyone had enough to eat. Again, modest expectations came into play: with no superiors to impress, promotion to gain, or desire for fame, Leigh Smith made no ambitious plans for overland expeditions in the spring that would add to their stock of geographical discoveries before attempting their escape southwards. He was content for everyone to stay as warm, dry, and well-fed as himself. And when the ice broke up in 1882 they made a well-ordered voyage towards Novaya Zemlya in the boats, meeting relief just where they expected to from one of a small flotilla of craft sent out that year from Europe to find them.

Two seasons of significant geographical discovery, and involvement in two overwinterings—once as the reliever, once as the relieved—gave Leigh Smith an almost complete set of classic Arctic exploratory experiences, and even if age and the financial burden of the lost ship had not been factors, perhaps he sensed that his career as an explorer was now complete, for he never went north again. Instead, after the inevitable blaze of publicity had been, as usual, diverted onto the heads of colleagues and companions, he retreated to the domestic concerns of his family and the management of his estate.

Peter Capelotti has done a remarkable job in pulling together the rather slender sources for Leigh Smith’s life and voyages into a coherent narrative that benefits from its author’s deep familiarity with the wider background of exploration, geographical theory, and social history of his subject’s time (I spotted only one minor error, a repeated reference to the Royal Geographic, rather than Geographical, Society). The one serious drawback is not in the writing but in the lack of good maps. Apart from reproductions of 19th-century maps, which really provide only historical interest, there are a small number of modern maps in inconsistent formats, and none of sufficient scale to follow the track in detail or note all of the place names bestowed—and none at all of Franz Josef Land, where the greatest number of these names are found . Instead, we have only Payer’s and Markham’s contemporary maps, which are almost impossible to relate to each other, let alone to the reality on a modern map.

But there is a more central lack than maps, and one that no author could supply if it were not available in the sources: a sense of a subject’s real personality. The few genuinely self-revelatory writings we have by Leigh Smith (in his letters) reveal a character solipsistic and startlingly vindictive in personal relationships. But for a man of his drive and achievements, liked and admired by colleagues, there must have been more, and the lack of writings that would have given a sense of his wider view of the world, and of his activities in it, are a keenly felt absence that no maps could make up for. The contradictory outlines refuse to resolve into a coherent whole, so while the ghostly figure at the feast has been adumbrated, he can probably never be made solid.