34. The looted cairns.

The Franklin expedition built cairns and left records in many places. But most of these were found by the Inuit who had no use for paper with writing but valued the containers. Some feared the writing as they knew it conveyed messages to the strangers in their land. 

1) The lost message at Cape Felix.

            See-pung-er told Hall that another Inut had visited Cape Felix before him had found there a tin case with papers in it.  He had also found there the bodies of three white men. In 1949 Inspector Larsen found the remains of a single skull in the same area. It was identified as that of a young white man of slight build, aged about twenty five years.

     In 1859 Lieutenant Hobson of the Fox expedition found a magnetic/hunting camp near Cape Felix.  There was a cairn there and the group took it apart and dug beneath it.  They also dug a trench around it at a distance of ten feet.  But no records were found. Within the cairn a folded white sheet of paper was found, but even under the microscope no traces of writing appeared. Two broken bottles (corked) lay amongst the loose stones which had fallen off the cairn, and these may perhaps have contained records.

2) Lost messages at Crozier’s Landing.

     Crozier’s Landing may have been one of the most important Franklin sites and was probably used on several occasions for different purposes, so that several messages may have been left there. The site as visited by Lieutenant Gore and his party in May 1847 as it marked the start of the unknown section of the North-West Passage that he mapped. The party visited it again on their way back to the ships in June 1847. The 13 tent camp might have been built there  mainly by Captain Crozier and the crew of HMS Terror in 1847, if Terror was throw over at that time.  It was used in April1848 as the assembly and start point for the 1848 retreat. It probably also had a role to play for the survivors of the retreat as they returned to the ships.        

     From the visit of Captain Leopold McClintock in 1859, some Inuit learned that there were valuable items to be picked up on the coast of north-west King William Island. See-pung-er and his uncle travelled there and found more valuable things than they were able to take away. See-pung-er told Charles Francis Hall that he and his uncle had spent a night at what has become known as Crozier’s Landing and slept wrapped in clothing from the large pile there. Nearby he reported a skeleton that was found in 1879 by the Schwatka expedition and identified as that of Lieutenant Irving.  He and his uncle found nearby a monument which they broke open and found a small tin ‘cup’ with a tight metal lid.  It was thickly and tightly wrapped up and tied together. Inside the tin was full of paper with writing just like that on which Hall was recording the interview. The papers were given the children to play with and were destroyed. Later See-pung-er gifted the ‘tin cup’ to Hall’s interpreter Too-koo-li-too (Nourse p.259).

     The 1847 and 1848 records on a single sheet of naval message form were found at Crozier’s Landing by Lieutenant Hobson in 1859.  He also found a second copy of the 1847 message at Gore Point some eight miles further south. The much longer destroyed message was probably a record of the history of the expedition, new territories discovered and the results of the survey carried out by Lieutenant Graham Gore and his party in 1847. It may also have given directions to the unmarked site where the scientific specimens and reports were buried. 

3) A lost message near Chantrey Inlet.

    Dorothy Eber (2008, p. 107) records testimony given by Matthew Tiringaneak that had been handed down in his family. An ancestor went hunting caribou to the east of Chantrey Inlet. There he found an inukshuk (stone cairn with form of a man) that he had not seen before. In it he found a leather pouch containing white and light-brown colored papers with writing on them that were wrapped in something shiny. The ancestor became very afraid that the papers had been cursed by a spirit, and if he did not destroy them, either he or his family might become sick and die. So he tore the papers into small pieces and let the wind scatter them. Then he took down the inukshuk until nothing remained. 

       So there was another record lost. A Franklin survivor or survivors reached Chantrey Inlet and set off to the east towards the Melville Peninsula.  But soon after leaving Chantry Inlet they cached a leather bag of records.  It is know that some of the last survivors, a small group of three hunters, set out for the Melville Peninsula but only two reached the area. Perhaps the last few despaired of worrying about the expedition records and gave them up to concentrate on their own survival. 

4) The lost messages at Cape Herschel.

   One of the biggest cairns in the area was built at Cape Herschel by Simpson and Dease in 1839 (Dease and Simpson, 1841). The cairn marked the southern end of the unknown section of the North-West Passage to be mapped by the party led by Lieutenant Graham Gore in 1847.  Gore should have left one of the sealed message cylinders that he carried there to prove he had mapped the unknown section. 

    When McClintock’s sledge party arrived at Cape Herschel, in 1859, the cairn was opened and much broken down. McClintock (1959, p.277) wrote:

   ‘…I ascended the slope which is crowned by Simpson’s conspicuous cairn.  The summit of Cape Herschel is perhaps 150 feet high, and about a quarter of a mile within the low stony point which projects from it, and on which there was considerable ice pressure and a few hummocks heaped up, the first we had seen for three weeks. Close round this Point, or by cutting across it as we did, the retreating parties must have passed; and the opportunity afforded by the cairn of depositing in a known position – and that too, where their own discoveries terminated, including the discovery of the North-West Passage – some record of their own proceedings, or, it might be, a portion of their scientific journals, would scarcely have been disregarded.

      Simpson makes no mention of having left a record in this cairn, and nothing was found at what remained of the once ‘ponderous cairn’ that was only four feet high; the south side had been pulled down and the central stones removed, as if by persons seeking for something deposited beneath.’

    McClintock (1859, facing p. 277) shows a drawing of Simpson’s cairn as he found it. His men dug down into the cairn and with a pick axe into the frozen ground beneath, but found nothing from either Simpson or the Franklin expedition. So it would seem that the Inuit had broken into the cairn sometime in the 11 years since the Gore party visit.

5) Farley Mowat’s wooden box. 

   In 1948, popular Canadian author Farley Mowat and a companion, found the remains of a hardwood box with dove-tailed edges. He describes the find in his humorous book ‘Never cry wolf’. It was inside a very ancient cairn not of the type constructed by the Inuit.  Who built the cairn and deposited the box, presumably with a message inside, is unknown. But there are rumours with the Inuit in the area that two of Franklin’s men were there between 1852 and 1856.

       The location is on the Kazan River on the south side of Baker Lake in central Keewatin.  The location on an extension of Chesterfield Inlet and is near a junction where Inuit trade routes between Churchill and the Arctic coasts converge.  The possibility exists that the two men were a part of the 1848 Franklin retreat. These men might be the few who reached Chantrey Inlet where they left weak companions under the shelter of an overturned boat. If so then the location suggests that the men had not followed Back’s Great Fish River, but had instead followed an overland trade route heading from Baker Lake to Chesterfield Inlet, north of Fort Churchill.