15. The failure of the 1848 retreat.

The expedition failed because of a series of catastrophes. The first of these was when both ships were trapped in the open ice of the Victoria Channel without a winter harbour on 12th September 1846 (1848 Record). The second catastrophe was the abnormally cold winter of 1847/48 when the ships were not released by the ice. In the first summer of 1845 the weather was good and enabled the expedition ships to explore Wellington Channel and sail around Cornwallis Island before wintering behind Beechey Island. The next summer of 1846 was also good and the ships were able to sail down Peel Sound between Prince of Wales and Somerset Islands to reach the northern end of King William Island. However the weather became abnormally cold in winter 1846-47 and there was no summer in 1847, so the caribou did not arrive and the ships were not released from the ice. The cold spell was described by Too-koo-li-too – Hall’s interpreter and friend:
Too-koo-li-too’s testimony – two abnormally cold winters (Nourse, 1879, p.589):
‘the two winters the two ships were at Neitch-ille were very cold. The Inuit never knew such cold weather – there was no summer between the two winters – could catch no seals or kill any reindeer at most of the usual places where they were most accustomed to find them’.
This is an interesting comment because it appears to describe 1846-1848 when the ships were trapped. Summer 1848 is also known to have been a poor summer as James Clark Ross lead two rescue ships into Lancaster Sound but could not get through because of heavy ice everywhere. The following summer that ice broke up and carried Ross and his ship back into Baffin Bay, so that he decided to return home. There is more testimony describing poor hunting in the vicinity of the ships collected by Charles Francis Hall. This testimony with Hall’s spelling follows:
Ook-bar-loo’s testimony – poor hunting in the area of the ships (Nourse, 1879, p. 591):
‘that two annatkos (conjurors) of Neitchille ankooted so much, that no animal, no game whatsoever would go near the locality of the two ships, which were in the ice near the Neitchille many years ago. The Innuits wished to live near that place (where the ships were) but could not kill anything for food. They (the Innuits) really believed that the presence of the Koblunas (whites) in that part of the country was the cause of all their (the Innuits’) trouble’.
The above two testimonies suggest that the Inuit were aware of the two ships trapped in the ice but the hunting there was too poor to sustain them. This was before the 1848 retreat.
There is no written record of the 1848 retreat. The last communication from the lost expedition is a message dated 25th April 1848 stating that 105 men would next day start a retreat towards Back’ Great Fish River. 9 officers and 15 men had already died. Captain Crozier made the decision for the retreat to go south. The aim was to get to the south part of King William Island where lush summer vegetation attracted thousands of birds and caribou and the sea and lakes teemed with fish. They probably hauled four large boats on sledges with smaller sledges loaded with 40 days short rations and camping equipment. The boats had been specially lightened, oars cut down to paddles, each carried 50 fathoms of line for towing up rivers. It was 1,200 miles to the nearest Hudson’s Bay Company outposts. Chantry Inlet or Estuary was an Inuit favourite area for summer fishing. If the crews could reach the areas of good summer hunting, they could regain their health and strength. Next, after the thaw, they could sail and tow their boats to a Hudson’s Bay outpost.
What happened on the retreat is suggested by the remains of two camps and two boats in Erebus Bay, a camp in Terror Bay of uncertain age and remains in Douglas Bay. There is no Inuit testimony of meeting with the retreating crews in 1848. But there was a meeting with Inuit during the 1850 retreat that is well described. This encounter serves to illustrate the details of how the men were organised and how they retreated. For the 1848 retreat, each ship probably provided two large boats and two teams of men. The boats (as seen in two examples found in Erebus Bay) had been specially lightened and placed on sledges. Oars had been cut down to paddles and each carried a 50 fathom line for pulling the boats up rivers. Traces were attached to the sledges for man hauling them, and each carried a sail to assist travel. Additional sledges carried food and camping gear. The boats followed the smoother ice close to the shore and each was led by an officer and an armed marine. The officers each carried a telescope and a shotgun for shooting birds. The latter were hung along the gunwales of the boats.
It is not difficult to imagine the shock and fear of the men at their abrupt change of fortune and at the prospect of abandoning the safety of their ships and setting out on a journey of around 1200 miles to the nearest Hudson’s Bay Company outposts. They did not possess fur clothing but were unsuitably dressed in their best uniforms and leather boots with screws driven through the soles to grip the ice while hauling the boats. The ships were abandoned on 22nd April 1848 and the retreat probably carried supplies for 40 days. Lieutenant Hobson of the 1859 McClintock expedition searched King William Island during the same month and wrote of the weather:
‘We left King William Island on the 31st May, after having been a month on its most inhospitable coast. In no part of the world have I ever experienced such a continuation of bad weather. From the 8th, the day we left Cape Franklin, to this date I scarcely saw the sun. It snowed almost incessantly. The wind held almost continuously from the NW varying in force from a strong breeze to a hard gale. The force of the wind was generally sufficient to raise snow drift.’
From this one can imagine the misery of wearing woollen clothing that soon became encrusted in ice. The poor insulation of leather boots would have caused frost bite on feet as well that on hands and faces. Most days the march would have been sheer misery. At night many men slept in the boats with a canvas cover, but others slept in tents pitched on ground clear of ice and snow as heavy ground sheets were not carried.
Graves of seven men and wood and wood shavings in Douglas Bay, some 60 km further along the coast of King William Island from Terror Bay may mark the greatest distance achieved by the 1848 retreat. Sadly the position of the remains at the head of the bay indicates the retreating party was heading north in the wrong direction. This was probably because they were blinded by a snowstorm or fog in a place where the magnetic compass would not work being close to the magnetic pole. Interestingly Dr. Doug. Stenton (2018, his site 22) considers the amount of wood fragments and variety of debris to be insufficient to mark the site of where a boat or sledge might have been cut up.
Sadly the sick men lefts at camps in Erebus and Terror Bays were soon to die as the expected summer hunting was to fail (as indicated by a paucity of animal bones found at the campsites in Erebus Bay). An abnormally cold snow-filled summer reduced the summer plant growth, so that the normal summer migration of the caribou was disrupted. Captain David Woodman (pers com. 2019) has suggested that the camp at Terror Bay described in detail by the Inuit, formed in 1850, possibly when a remanned Terror was in Terror Bay. The Roobol (2019) interpretation suggests she was the remanned HMS Erebus.
Roobol (2019) has estimated that from the skeletal remains at Erebus and Terror Bays, that about a half of the men returned to Erebus. The ship was evidently release by the ice for her wreck has been found some 230km away in Wilmot and Crampton Bay. There is a hint that the release occurred very soon after the ship was remanned. This is because a four foot high pile of winter clothing was found at Crozier’s Landing. It seems there might not have been time to fully prepare the ship from the depot camp at Crozier’ Landing and the spare clothing was left behind. Later testimony describes the reoccupied Erebus as having a crew of ‘black men’. Their black oil-soaked clothing probably resulted from their hunting seals and cooking over blubber stoves but without any changes of clothing. This experience was repeated by Earnest Shackleton’s men on the 1914 Endurance expedition after their ship was crushed in the ice and sank.
The weather at the time of the 1848 retreat can be atrocious with snow storms and strong winds from the NW that picked up the snow. Woolen uniforms would become encrusted in ice and the men frostbitten on hands faces and feet. They barely got 100 miles. The two boats, probably from Erebus, were halted in Erebus Bay only some 60 miles from the shore camp at Crozier’s Landing. The other boats may have reached Terror Bay some 100 miles from the shore camp and one of the boats moved on a further 37 miles (60 km) to reach Douglas Bay.
At this stage around a half of the men were immobile and could neither continue forward nor go back. A major cause of this immobility was probably frost bite. After the 1850 retreat there is Inuit testimony of an overturned boat at Starvation Cove on the mainland of the American continent beneath which six bodies were found some with hands severed at the wrists. In the area Terror’s Assistant Surgeon Alexander Stanley’s snowshoes were found. It is possible that in order to keep these men alive, Surgeon Stanley had amputated frozen hands. When the 1848 retreat was halted at least three camps were set up, two in Erebus Bay and one in Terror Bay and the sick placed in them. Men were left in charge of these camps with shotguns for hunting. A facial reconstruction of a skeleton found in a 28 foot long pinnace in Erebus Bay by Captain Leopold McClintock suggests that Ice Master James Read of Erebus remained with one of the camps of sick in Erebus Bay. About a half of the men got back to Erebus. Those left in the camps starved to death when the hunting failed (as indicated by the paucity of animal bones at these sites) and there was some cannibalism.
Apart from the ‘death camps’ the 1848 retreat did not produce the trail of graves that formed during the 1850 retreat. Evidently the progress was so slow with the bad weather that it became apparent that the 40-day supply of food carried would run out long before the retreat achieved 10% of its 1200 mile objective. The order would have been given for the able bodied to return to the ships.
A third catastrophe that affected the expedition was an illness. This has been ascribed to botulism from poorly canned foods or to scurvy after the lime juice ran out after three years. Of a small party of four survivors from the 1850 retreat found and fed by Too-shoo-ar-thar-i-u, one died of an illness.
QUESTION: Why did the retreat cover only 100 miles of a journey 1200 miles long?