Port Leopold felt cold even by High Arctic standards. The air temperature was around 2°C when we launched the sea kayaks near the entrance of the bay, and there was very little softness in the landscape. Somerset Island rose around us in shades of grey and brown, the water was dark and cold, and ahead lay the tiny remains of North Somerset House, one of the most atmospheric relics from the search for Sir John Franklin.
We had the wind behind us, so rather than battling into it we enjoyed a wonderful downwind run towards the historic site. The kayaks moved quickly across the bay, pushed along by the Arctic breeze, and for a while it was one of those wonderfully simple paddles where you can relax slightly, use the following wind and watch the landscape slide past.
There was wildlife around us too. Red-throated loons were out on the bay, their elegant shapes sitting low on the water, while sanderlings worked along the shoreline. Even in a place dominated by stories of nineteenth-century exploration, the modern Arctic was very much alive around us.
Then, once again, a polar bear appeared. It was walking along the shore ahead of us, and that immediately changed the plan. Whatever historical site you may be hoping to reach, a polar bear always has priority. Our journey towards North Somerset House had to be cut short. It was another reminder that in the Canadian High Arctic history and wildlife are constantly overlapping. We had come to Port Leopold because of the Franklin story, but we were paddling through polar bear country. There was something rather appropriate about plans being changed by circumstances beyond our control, because that is exactly what happened here during the winter of 1848–49.
Imagine deliberately sailing a wooden ship into the Canadian Arctic and allowing it to become frozen into the sea ice for the winter. Temperatures would eventually fall towards -40°C. The sun would disappear for weeks. Once the ice had closed around the ship, there would be no possibility of simply changing your mind, turning around and sailing home.
And somewhere beyond the horizon, 129 men from Sir John Franklin’s expedition were missing. That was the situation faced by Sir James Clark Ross and the crews of HMS Enterprise and HMS Investigator when they overwintered at Port Leopold. The bay lies on the northeastern corner of Somerset Island, close to the entrance of Prince Regent Inlet. Today there is no settlement here, only tundra, cliffs, cold Arctic water and the remains of the small stone structure known as North Somerset House. More than 175 years ago, however, this remote harbour became an important base in one of the earliest major searches for Franklin. By 1848, concern in Britain about Franklin was becoming serious. He had sailed from England in May 1845 aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror with the aim of completing the Northwest Passage. The ships entered Lancaster Sound that summer and spent their first winter at Beechey Island. After that, they disappeared. Nobody in Britain knew that Franklin had died in June 1847. Nobody knew that Erebus and Terror had become trapped in the ice farther south near King William Island. Nobody knew that the surviving men would eventually abandon the ships and attempt to travel south on foot. From the Admiralty’s perspective, Franklin and 128 other men had simply vanished into the Arctic. Someone had to go looking for them.
One of the men chosen to lead that search was among the most experienced polar explorers alive: Sir James Clark Ross. Ross already had an extraordinary Arctic career behind him. As a young man he had travelled repeatedly into the north with his uncle, Sir John Ross, and with William Edward Parry. During one expedition he located the position of the North Magnetic Pole. He then turned his attention to Antarctica. Between 1839 and 1843, Ross commanded one of the greatest voyages of Antarctic exploration, sailing aboard HMS Erebus accompanied by HMS Terror. Those names, of course, would later become inseparable from Franklin. Ross took the two ships farther south than anyone had previously travelled by ship and mapped enormous areas of Antarctica. The Ross Sea, Ross Ice Shelf and Ross Island still bear his name, while Mount Erebus and Mount Terror were named after the ships themselves. So when those same vessels disappeared under Franklin, Ross was an obvious choice to help find them. In 1848 he sailed north aboard HMS Enterprise, accompanied by HMS Investigator. His second-in-command was Edward Bird. Their task was to enter Lancaster Sound and search the likely routes Franklin might have taken. But in the Arctic, plans are often subordinate to ice.
Ross attempted to move deeper into the region, but worsening conditions restricted the expedition’s progress. Eventually Enterprise and Investigator entered Port Leopold. Then the sea froze around them. For modern visitors arriving here during summer, it is difficult to imagine what overwintering must have felt like. We spent a relatively short time paddling across Port Leopold with a fully equipped expedition ship nearby. Ross’s men spent months here, locked into ice. As winter developed, the ships effectively became two small wooden islands in a frozen ocean. The sun disappeared. Temperatures fell. Outside the hulls was darkness, snow and ice. Keeping the crews healthy was a constant concern. Scurvy remained a threat, as did frostbite and other cold injuries. But there was another challenge too: keeping more than a hundred men mentally occupied through a winter when there was nowhere to go.
Royal Navy polar expeditions therefore developed remarkably structured shipboard routines. Scientific observations were made. Equipment was maintained. Men exercised. Books were read. Lessons and entertainments could be organised. Preparations were made for the sledging journeys that would begin once daylight returned. Because Ross had not come north simply to sit in a frozen harbour. As soon as spring conditions allowed, he intended to search.
One of the fascinating differences between nineteenth-century Arctic exploration and our own journey is the way sea ice changed the landscape. For us, open water creates a route for the kayaks. For Ross, frozen water could create the route. Once the light returned in spring 1849, sledging parties left Port Leopold and travelled across the sea ice towards the northern and western coasts of Somerset Island. These journeys were extraordinary feats of endurance. Men hauled heavily loaded sledges containing food, tents, clothing, fuel and equipment across kilometres of frozen ocean. Progress could be painfully slow. Pressure ridges created walls and rubble fields of broken ice. Temperatures remained dangerously low. Snow could hide cracks and changes in the surface beneath them. Yet Ross and his men covered substantial distances, exploring hundreds of kilometres of coastline and searching for anything that might indicate Franklin had passed through the area. They found nothing.
That is one of the most frustrating elements of the Franklin story. Ross was searching in broadly the right part of the Canadian Arctic, but the distances involved were enormous. Franklin’s ships were much farther south, trapped near King William Island. Without radios, satellites or aircraft, Ross had no way of knowing that. Information could travel only as fast as a person, a sledge or a ship. A search party might pass comparatively close to a significant location and never realise it. A route that looks straightforward on a modern map could be completely closed by ice. Whole sections of coastline could remain inaccessible for a season. Ross also had to consider another possibility. What if Franklin’s men were still alive and reached Port Leopold after the search expedition had left? That possibility led to the construction of North Somerset House. The small stone building was erected on the shore and stocked with supplies for Franklin’s men or any other expedition in distress. More than 175 years later, its remains still stand.
From the water it is tiny. That struck me particularly strongly as we paddled towards it. Against the scale of Somerset Island, North Somerset House is barely a mark on the shore. Yet in 1849 it represented hope. If starving and exhausted men had somehow travelled across the Arctic and reached this place, the supplies stored there could potentially have saved their lives. Franklin’s men never came. When summer returned, Ross faced another problem. He expected Enterprise and Investigator to be released from the ice so the search could continue, but Port Leopold remained blocked. The crews eventually began the enormous physical task of cutting and blasting a passage through the ice towards open water. It must have been exhausting work. Eventually the ships escaped, but Ross was unable to continue the search as extensively as he had hoped and returned to Britain later in 1849. Franklin remained missing.
The search was only beginning. Over the following decade, expedition after expedition entered the Canadian Arctic. Some were sent by the British government. Others were privately funded. American expeditions joined the effort, while Lady Jane Franklin campaigned relentlessly for further searches to discover what had happened to her husband. Ironically, the unsuccessful search for Franklin contributed enormously to European mapping of the Canadian Arctic. Ships explored previously poorly mapped channels. Coastlines were surveyed. Islands were charted. Cairns were constructed and messages left behind. The geography of huge areas of the Arctic Archipelago became much better known to Europeans because hundreds of people were looking for 129 missing men. But there is an important qualification to that story. European explorers were not searching an unknown or empty landscape. Inuit already knew it.
Inuit hunters travelled widely across the region and possessed generations of accumulated knowledge about sea ice, currents, wildlife, coastlines and travelling routes. They also encountered evidence of Franklin’s expedition. People saw ships. They found equipment. They encountered groups of European men and knew where men had been seen travelling or where bodies had been found. In 1854, the Scottish explorer John Rae gathered Inuit testimony describing starving European survivors farther south. The accounts included reports that some of the men had resorted to cannibalism. Victorian Britain reacted with outrage. Charles Dickens was among those who attacked the credibility of Inuit testimony. Yet much of the information Inuit witnesses provided proved remarkably accurate. More than 150 years later, Inuit knowledge would again play a vital role when researchers finally located the wrecks of Erebus and Terror. That is an increasingly important part of the Franklin story for me as we travel through Nunavut.
European maps are filled with the names of explorers, admirals and patrons, but the landscapes they were travelling through had already been known, travelled and used by Inuit and their ancestors for generations. Somerset Island has a human history stretching back thousands of years. People understood where seals could be hunted and when whales moved through particular waters. They knew which ice was safe to travel on, where camps could be established and how seasons altered the landscape. Ross was not discovering an empty place. He was arriving in an already known one.
Today the wildlife is another important part of experiencing Port Leopold. The bay lies within the extraordinarily productive marine environment surrounding Prince Regent Inlet and Lancaster Sound. Belugas and narwhals move through the wider region, while ringed seals, bearded seals and walrus may also occur. And, as we discovered rather dramatically, so do polar bears. Anyone visiting a remote Arctic historic site therefore has to remember that an abandoned building, shoreline or patch of tundra may also be occupied by something considerably larger than a sanderling.
Shorelines have to be scanned continuously. So do slopes, rocks, buildings and areas where a bear could briefly disappear from sight. The polar bear walking along the shore at Port Leopold was not an inconvenience in our day. It was part of being there. Red-throated loons on the bay gave the place another very Arctic character, while sanderlings moved busily along the edge of the water. Port Leopold also supports nesting seabirds, including northern fulmars and black guillemots, and nearby Prince Leopold Island – despite the confusingly similar name – holds one of the great seabird colonies of the Canadian High Arctic. All of this wildlife is supported by the productivity of the surrounding sea.
Currents and tides move nutrients through Lancaster Sound and Prince Regent Inlet. During the short Arctic summer, long daylight hours fuel plankton blooms. Fish and marine invertebrates exploit that productivity, and above them come seabirds, seals, whales and ultimately polar bears.
What initially looks like an almost barren landscape is actually part of an extraordinarily rich marine ecosystem. That was certainly how Port Leopold felt from a kayak. At water level the shore and cliffs seemed enormous, while North Somerset House remained incredibly small. It was cold enough at around 2°C to give us some sense, however limited, of the environment Ross and his men were dealing with. Of course, the comparison only goes so far. We were wearing modern drysuits and thermal clothing. We had radios, accurate charts, GPS and satellite communications. We had detailed weather forecasts and an expedition ship nearby. If conditions deteriorated, we could return to the ship. Ross and his men deliberately allowed two wooden sailing ships to become frozen into Port Leopold. When the ice closed around them, they were not visiting for an afternoon. They were staying for the winter.
That is perhaps the image I will remember alongside our own paddle. Not only Port Leopold on the day we saw it, with cold water, red-throated loons, sanderlings and a polar bear on the shore. But Port Leopold in February 1849. The bay completely frozen. Enterprise and Investigator locked motionless into the sea ice. The sun gone. Temperatures far below zero. And somewhere inside one of those ships, James Clark Ross looking at a chart of the Arctic and trying to answer one question. Where was Franklin?
We now know the answer. Franklin himself was already dead. His ships were trapped hundreds of kilometres farther south. The surviving members of the expedition were heading towards disaster. Ross could not possibly have known any of that. All he could do was wait for the light to return, load the sledges and start searching. That is what makes Port Leopold such a fascinating companion to Beechey Island. At Beechey Island, we were close to the place where Franklin himself had spent the winter of 1845–46. At Port Leopold, we were following the people who came looking for him.
North Somerset House remains as a physical reminder of that search and of the hope that Franklin’s men might somehow reach safety. They never did. Our own attempt to paddle all the way towards the building ended for a much happier reason. A polar bear was walking along the shoreline. So we turned away and left it in peace. In a strange way, that seems a fitting ending to a visit to Port Leopold. You can arrive with all the history you want to find, a planned route across the bay and a destination on the shore. But in the Arctic, the Arctic still decides what happens next.
Why not take the opportunity to read our other blogs about Nunavut and the Canadian arctic;
- Beechey Island: Polar Bears, Franklin and Three Graves Beside the Sea
- Kayaking with Arctic Wildlife: Staying Safe Around Polar Bears, Walrus and Whales
- Croker Bay: Paddling Beneath the Glaciers of Devon Island
- Dundas Harbour: Ghosts in the Fog on Devon Island
- Duart Bay: Sea Kayaking into a Scottish Corner of Baffin Island
- Isabella Bay: In the Realm of the Bowhead Whale
- Qikiqtarjuaq: Gateway to the Wild Mountains of Baffin Island
- Prince Leopold Island: Paddling Beneath a City of Seabirds
- Radstock Bay: Paddling Through a Thousand Years of Arctic History