A month ago, most people had never heard of Sir John Franklin. Hardly surprising, as he hasn't been seen for 170 years. Now he's in the news all over the world. For me, though, the discovery of his ship (by Canadian marine archaeologists) is something of a disappointment. It's like seeing a favourite author suddenly shoot to fame from obscurity. What was a private pleasure is now public property, with all the cheapening that the bright lights tend to bring.
If my personal interest in Franklin is complicated, at least the history is easy to map. Context: the search for a trade route to the Far East over the top of Canada – the famous Northwest Passage. The Victorians' brashest effort (two customised ships, the Erebus and Terror, carrying 129 men) went up there in 1845, with Navy hero Franklin commanding, and was never heard from again. Despite dozens of search expeditions, it was a decade before any definitive trace was found. That was on a remote island in the Canadian archipelago – a brief note mentioning Franklin's death and both ships' abandon. Also, a trail of possessions and bodies along an overland route taken south, as the starving sailors attempted to reach the North American mainland. In none of the debris found then or since did anything adequately explain the debacle of abandon, hunger, and even cannibalism – the last resort of those desperate men.
If that tale retains a peculiar charisma, I found the story of those who went looking for Franklin more intriguing again. My novel, The Surfacing, is set on one of those search ships, that went deep into an Arctic still mostly unmapped. Mile by mile, inlet by inlet, island by island, for years they blindly felt their way through the maze, and for years found nothing remotely worth their pains. Hard not to sympathise with futility on such a grand scale. With so many men going so ill-equipped and ill-informed to such desolation, with such confidence. Hard not to be jealous of the swagger that sent and sustained them.
Most of the officers were volunteers, and I wondered why they went. There’s a photograph of one of them taken in a London photographer’s studio, dressed in furs, holding a prop harpoon. The landscape, of course, is mere painted backdrop. It’s a picture of a man in a heroic posture, in an imagined – heroic – space, rather than a very definite (and hostile) space which happens to have a man in it. No doubt a sneak preview of the role he saw himself playing, up there. Certainly that’s the case with my main character, Morgan, as he sails north. In fact, he hopes to find a refuge in such a setting, strange as that may seem. To trade the relentless concessions and complications of home for the simple, brave choices of the Far North. It’s splendidly presumptuous, and no better place than the Arctic, I thought, to find such a man out.
I certainly liked learning that many of the search ships themselves got trapped in the ice. And I liked the way they lived when they did. Driven as far north as possible, most then remained frozen in for 10 or 11 months of the year, and could only navigate during the short few weeks the “summer” thaw allowed – if the thaw came at all. In the meantime, they organised a reassuring routine and familiar comforts on board, in deliberate defiance of the inhospitable world without. They printed their own newspaper (and filled it with nonsense). They performed plays (always farce). They did their daily gymnastics, and in the evenings the officers ran a school for the men. Christmas was celebrated lavishly, Guy Fawkes outrageously, and every year on her birthday they made sure to toast the Queen. A simulation of blithe domesticity – an all-male version, naturally, with shades of barracks or boarding-school dorm more than hostile wasteland. (It was that hostility returned, of course, with insolent restraint. It was a cravat in the Congo heat. In such an environment, it asserted more than any planted flag.) But I wondered how that self-satisfied arrangement might be troubled, if you suddenly dropped a woman into the middle of it?
If the arrival of that woman (Kitty) proves more problematic than any hardship, it's because the novel's main character, Morgan, is a man with a crippling instinct for self-protection. Hence the appeal of such a strictly marshalled situation, depending as it does on inflexible hierarchies, well-defined roles, and relentless self-abnegation. To his cripple, those are a crutch. All a roundabout way, perhaps, of saying that in The Surfacing my interest is not primarily in the Franklin history, or the period, or even the Arctic. Nor the historical nor the geographical so much as the psychological space they move in. The layer of ice which both supports and retains the ship, the vast invisible forces of pressure and displacement continually at work beneath, the ever-present threat of total collapse or crush, the ever-growing distance from civilisation and the chance of rescue, the meagre means by which they must survive – they're all just objective correlations of Morgan's emotional life and landscape, and symptomatic of an attritional process by which his own reserve and resistance, thanks to Kitty's unexpected presence, might be gradually worn down.
Of course, Morgan himself seems entirely unaware of that process for much of the book. He’s still playing to the gallery in his head – posturing before an image of heroism he’s been waiting so long for the opportunity to emulate. But when finally they do go out from the cramped ship onto the ice, it is no release, but relentless slog, because of the punishing conditions, and the useless equipment, and blaring distances, and blank maps. Sledging efforts and arrangements seem pointless, goals arbitrary or ill-defined. Any sense of achievement seems sure to wilt even as it flowers, at 10 and 20 and 30 degrees below the freezing point. Watching them resist or insist, we suspect naiveté as much as fortitude. Because in the end, we know, weather and landscape must win.
I liked it that even then Morgan and his kind seemed determined to make things hard(er) for themselves, by refusing local savvy out of hand, fully confident in their own “civilised” techniques and technologies, and – above all – in their ability to endure. The kind of thing we’re familiar with from the Polar explorers those Franklin searchers inspired, Shackleton and Scott. It’s certainly an attractive notion, and a terrible liability – the resolve to rely on self-sacrifice rather than smarts. Yet that seemed an integral part of the thinking that permitted – encouraged? – so many men to go to the Poles, North and South: the fact that the Poles can’t be “conquered” meant the explorers treated it as a neutral space, a bare stage, where they could put themselves in the spotlight, and be tested. This was not land-grab but pilgrimage, where the goal matters less than what one learns – and reveals – about oneself along the way.
Perhaps Scott’s last writings are the most famous – and most blatant – example of that attitude, which we expect all Polar exploits to share:
“...for my own sake I do not regret the journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.”
Many have admired both the sentiment and the style, but it reeks of a headmaster’s lecture to me. Perhaps all example-setting does. Perhaps that’s why the story of the Franklin debacle and the Franklin searchers appealed so much. I couldn’t resist the chance to have such wilful sacrifice go wrong.
The Surfacing by Cormac James is published by Sandstone Press, priced £8.99
