THE POLAR GARDEN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 81

Figure 6.6. A dashing portrait of Captain William Edward Parry on his triumphant return to England,
having reached Melville Island and over-wintered in the Arctic in 1819-20, the first expedition ever
to achieve these feats. Parry's first voyage stands as the greatest unqualified success in the history of
nineteenth-century British polar exploration. When, in 1826, the Bronte children received a box of toy
soldiers around which they were to build their elaborate fictional kingdom, eight-year-old Emily, future
author of Wuthering Heights , named her favorite “Edward Parry.” (© National Portrait Gallery, London.)
Barrow arranged Franklin's first expedition on the cheap. Critically under-resourced, and
with no experience in Arctic conditions, Franklin's overland trek across the Canadian north
in 1819-22 quickly descended into a mobile purgatory of starvation, insanity, murder, and
cannibalism. Franklin and his ever-dwindling band of men wandered the snowy tundra for
months on end like living skeletons, subsisting on mossy lichen and burnt leather. Whatever
distress the nation felt at the news of Franklin's Arctic disaster, however, quickly gave way to
pride. At last, in Franklin, the nation might welcome a worthy naval successor to Lord Nel-
son. After all, the man had eaten his own boots for king and country. Franklin's wife, the poet
Eleanor Porden, had published some jingoistic verses on the eve of his first expedition with
Buchan. As she eerily foresaw in her 1818 poem “The Arctic Expeditions,” her beloved Frank-
lin would “furnish tales for many a winter night” for the British public to feed upon “with
strange delight.” 27 When presented with the choice between Parry's wholesome sociability on
the ice and the horrors of Franklin, the people chose horror.
When Franklin returned to the Arctic a final time in 1845, he commanded two vessels
laden with tinned food, fine china, chandeliers, and a complete gentleman's library. The Ad-
miralty wished, it seemed, to make amends for the scant provisioning of his earlier tour. This
time, he would preside over a miniature maritime empire while floating serenely through
the northwest passage. But in Lancaster Sound—where, a quarter-century earlier, Parry had
sailed clear through Croker's Mountains—Franklin's expedition ran into a wall of ice. Hope-
lessly trapped and disoriented, they eventually abandoned their ships. Of the 128 crew on
Franklin's mission, not a single man returned. The indigenous people of the Arctic looked on
in wonderment and sorrow as bands of ghostlike men wandered over the ice, hauling their
china and topics with them. Some succumbed to lead poisoning from their tinned provisions,
the rest to hypothermia and starvation. In their extremity, they resorted to feeding on their
dead messmates. Franklin himself was spared the worst, being one of the first to die. 28