Parry had yet another plan: to keep his men so thoroughly occupied that they had no time to consider their predicament. Their days were filled with activities, but Parry’s most useful tool for staving off monotony was a barrel organ for singalongs and bimonthly polar melodramas put on by officers in petticoats. His second officer even produced a newspaper called the North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle, filled with bad puns and abominable poesy, but which had the “happy effect of… diverting the mind from the gloomy prospect which would sometimes obtrude itself on the stoutest heart.”
Despite Parry’s best efforts, however, the living conditions the men were forced to endure were appalling. On 3 November, the sun disappeared below the horizon and did not return until 84 days later, just before noon on 3 February 1820, when a crewman spotted it from the Hecla’s maintop. By then, the temperature inside the ships was so cold that the theatrical performances could not be enjoyed by anyone, but most particularly by the cast of female impersonators. Large patches of skin were left behind any time the men touched a metal surface. Wrote Parry: “We found it necessary, therefore, to use great caution handling our sextants and other instruments, particularly the eye-pieces of telescopes.” The lime juice froze and shattered its glass containers. Even the mercury froze in the thermometers.
Rations, at least, were better than the more experienced hands were used to, as “a pound of Donkin’s preserved [tinned] meat, together with one pint of vegetable or concentrated soup, per man” replaced salt beef weekly. Yet despite this measure and the daily allotment of lime juice, the first case of scurvy was reported on 1 January 1820. Parry tried to conceal it from the crew, and set about curing the victim by starting a tiny garden of mustard and cress on the warm galley pipes of the Hecla. The measure worked. Nine days later, the man boasted that he was fit enough to “run a race.”
Soon, however, illness gained a firmer hold: a quarter of the ninety-four-strong crew fell ill, half of them from scurvy—though even as the symptoms appeared, the worst of the crew’s hardships were behind them. By May, ptarmigan were seen, and soon a brace or two were bagged daily for the sick. It was, wrote Parry, “of the utmost importance, under our present circumstances, that every ounce of game which we might thus procure should be served in lieu of other meat.” During the expedition’s twelve months on Melville Island, the men would consume 3 musk oxen, 24 caribou, 68 hares, 53 geese, 59 ducks, 144 ptarmigans—totalling 3,766 pounds (1,710 kg) of fresh meat. To cap it off, when the snow melted, Parry noticed that sorrel grew in abundance around the harbour, and the men were sent out every afternoon to collect it: “Of the good effects produced upon our health by the unlimited use of fresh vegetable substances, thus bountifully supplied by the hand of Nature, even where least to be expected, little doubt can be entertained, as it is well known to be a never-failing specific for scorbutic affections.” In the end, Parry lost just one man to scurvy during his seventeen-month voyage. Relative to what might have been expected in such circumstances, the achievement was, wrote Parry, “a subject of wonder.”
Parry’s expedition had become the first to overwinter in the Arctic archipelago. He also came closer to completing the Northwest Passage than any other person would come for the next three decades. He was tempted to push on to the Pacific. But, facing an impermeable barrier of multiyear ice, with depleted stores and the very real risk of being forced to spend a second winter in the region, he relented.
The expedition had encountered no Inuit during its long winter at Melville Island, but on its homeward journey, the crew finally met some natives on Baffin Island; one of those meetings would be laden with irony. One of the Inuit elders was, Parry noted, “extremely inquisitive” and observed gravely as a tin of preserved meat was opened for dinner: “The old man was sitting on the rock, attentively watching the operation, which was performed with an axe struck by a mallet.” When the tin had been opened, the man “begged very hard for the mallet which had performed so useful an office, without expressing the least wish to partake of the meat, even when he saw us eating it with good appetites.” Parry, however, insisted the man try some: “[He] did not seem at all to relish it, but ate a small quantity, from an evident desire not to offend us.”
Unfortunately, the elder’s distaste for tinned foods was not shared by British authorities. After Parry’s return, expedition surgeon John Edwards praised such supplies as “acquisitions of the highest value.” C.I. Beverley, the assistant surgeon on Parry’s expedition, also produced a glowing endorsement of the expedition’s tinned provisions, ascribing to them both the preservation of the general health of the officers and crew and the eventual recovery of one man who had been “attacked by the scurvy.” This assessment ended with a statement that encouraged ever-greater reliance on tinned goods: “I have every reason to believe that the anti-scorbutic quality of the vegetable is not injured in its preparation.” Yet this notion—that tinned foods retained powerful antiscorbutic properties—was entirely anecdotal. The comparative immunity enjoyed by Parry’s men might, with hindsight, have been more accurately attributed to other factors, not the least of which was the amount of game shot and wild sorrel collected. Unfortunately, no mention of these measures was made. The British were enamoured of technology, and, after Parry’s successful overwintering in the Arctic, the antiscorbutic benefits of tinned foods became accepted wisdom in the Royal Navy, a premise that would go untested and unchallenged for much of the next century. Indeed, starting with William Edward Parry’s voyage of 1819–20, British Arctic expeditions used tinned foods first as a supplement, then, by the time of George Back’s 1836–37 voyage, as a critical component of their food stores.
STILL, NOT EVERY SHIP captain shared the navy’s enthusiasm for tinned provisions. In fact, the privately financed 1829–33 expedition of Captain John Ross was a feat of physical endurance and survival precisely because Ross sought to avoid reliance on preserved foods.
Following his 1818 maritime blunder, when Barrow rained such derision upon him that he never again received a Royal Navy command, Ross had been forced into semi-retirement at half-pay. He watched from the sidelines as his rival, Parry, undertook two further polar expeditions (in 1821–23 and 1824–25), at the end of which, Barrow conceded that knowledge about the Northwest Passage was “precisely where it was at the conclusion of his [Parry’s] first voyage.” Parry had even managed to lose one of His Majesty’s ships, the Fury, which was nipped by an iceberg in Prince Regent Inlet. Ross seized on the opening. He raised a private expedition and found a wealthy gin merchant, Felix Booth, to underwrite a voyage to complete the Northwest Passage aboard the Victory, a second-hand steamer that Ross refitted with state-of-the-art technology and manned with 23 officers and men.
It appeared at first that Ross would succeed. In Greenland, he received reports that it was an unusually warm summer. On 6 August 1829, the expedition entered Lancaster Sound, the site of his 1818 humiliation. Believing Prince Regent Inlet would eventually reveal an opening to the west, Ross tacked south, calculating correctly that the land mass, which had been named Somerset by Parry, was an island. He pressed further into these waters than any European before him, but missed Bellot Strait, the only opening to the west, and with time concluded that the western shore of Prince Regent Inlet was not an island but a peninsula, which he named Boothia, for his sponsor. By then it was too late to continue. With conditions deteriorating, the expedition established winter quarters at a place Ross called Felix Harbour. From here, the expedition embarked on the first of four winters in the Arctic, a harrowing saga that is remarkable—in equal measure—for the courage and endurance needed to survive it.
The following summer, the ice freed the Victory, allowing 3 miles (5 km) of hope before it closed in again and held the ship fast, trapping it for a second winter. In 1830, Ross’s young nephew, Commander James Clark Ross, led a sledge journey far to the west. He named the farthest place he reached Victory Point, and the adjoining territory was claimed in the name of King William IV. Unaware that he had crossed an ice-covered strait on his journey, Ross named the territory King William Land. In fact, it was King William Island. James Ross also noted an accumulation of pack-ice off the northwest coast, the “heaviest masses that I had ever seen in such a situation.” His sledge journey was a remarkable achievement in itself. The pièce de résistance, however, was his subsequent discovery