“To us,” John Ross declared, “the sight of ice was a plague, a vexation, a torment, an evil, a matter of despair.” The depth of this despondency is further revealed in his journal, where he confided: “I confess that the chances are now much against our being ever heard of.” He was faced with a critical decision: risk sitting out the following spring in the hope that by summer the ice would finally give way and the Victory would be freed, which seemed unlikely, or abandon the Victory and undertake a 300-mile (480-km) overland trek north while snow remained on the ground, allowing for sledge travel. Ross elected for the latter. His destination would be Fury Beach on Somerset Island, where there was a store of provisions left by Parry on an earlier expedition and the greater likelihood of open water. From there, Ross believed he could use the ship’s small boats to make a dash for Baffin Bay, to rendezvous with the summer whaling fleet.
Sledges were fashioned to haul the small boats loaded with provisions, and the captain ordered advance parties to establish a string of caches en route. Then, on 29 May 1832, the expedition abandoned the Victory and, in sub-zero temperatures and on two-thirds rations, headed north. But off Fury Beach, where open water had been expected, the ice had also failed to clear and the men were forced to endure a fourth winter in the Arctic. They barricaded themselves in a house of wood and snow they hurriedly constructed. It was little better than an igloo, yet Ross gave it a pompous name—Somerset House—and enforced rigid delineations of rank. It was a snow house divided. On one side, ordinary seamen were crammed together in their rank furs, muttering obscenities; the structure’s other half was segregated quarters for the officers, where John Ross continued to be waited upon hand and foot like the country squire he aspired to be. Ross grimly speculated whether “it should be the fortune of any one to survive after another such year as the three last.” But he maintained a stiff upper lip, and not only because of the cold.
To make matters worse, the men’s provisions were inadequate. Ross ordered half-rations, but by now, these consisted mainly of preserved meat and tinned turnip and carrot soup from the stores left by Parry. The crew’s only fresh meat came from the few Arctic foxes, and fewer hares, they could snare, with roast fox served on Sundays. The expedition surgeon made note of the deteriorating conditions: “we had scarcely any animal food… The development of severe scurvy at once served to heighten our misery, and to show how poor a defence a [tinned] vegetable regimen is… ” It was, he wrote, “during our stay at the Fury’s stores that the worst form of the disease appeared.” The ship’s carpenter died of the illness in February 1833. John Ross was also suffering the effects of the dread disease: ancient wounds long-healed began to open as scar tissue dissolved. The captain wondered whether, “I might not be ultimately able to surmount all the present circumstances.”
Yet survive he did, and, in late summer, a lane of open water appeared into which, on 15 August 1833, the men launched their boats with a fine westerly breeze. Having “almost forgotten what it was to float at freedom on the seas,” they made 72 miles (116 km) on 17 August alone. Propelled by the wind when it blew, they rowed on amongst the icebergs when it dropped—once for a stretch of twenty hours without rest. After nine days heading east, they finally spotted a sail in the distance. The men desperately rowed towards the vessel, but after several hours a wind came up and the ship moved off to the southeast. Soon another sail was sighted, but that ship too sailed on. Wrote John Ross: “it was the most anxious moment that we had yet experienced, to find that we were near to no less than two ships, either of which would have put an end to all our fears and all our toils, and that we should probably reach neither.” But an hour later the wind dropped, and they again began to close on one of the ships. Finally, they saw it lower a boat that rowed over to meet them. Stunned, the mate in command assured Ross that he couldn’t be who he said he was, as Ross was known to have died two years earlier. That conclusion, Ross replied, had been “premature.” They were unshaven, filthy, “dressed in the rags of wild beasts,” gaunt and starved to the bone. But they were definitely alive.
That John Ross is not celebrated today as one of the epic heroes of polar exploration is remarkable. Perhaps his all-too human failings militated against such a reputation, for John Ross was the antithesis of what one might expect in a hero: corpulent, irritable and overly solicitous of class. In contrast to Parry, who did his best to provide for the comfort of his men, Ross held in contempt the entire notion of the importance of creature comforts in maintaining morale. While still aboard the Victory, for instance, Ross had reduced the heat each winter to lessen the effects of condensation. He then responded to complaints from the freezing crew by bragging loudly about his unusual capacity for generating body heat. No one ever got close enough to him to notice. There was something improbable, even absurd, about John Ross. And he paid a terrible price for his haughtiness when a disgruntled underling later helped publish an unofficial account of the expedition: a remarkable rant called The Last Voyage of Capt. John Ross—vilifying Ross’s character and mocking his physical attributes. More damaging still was the book’s inventory of his alleged shortcomings as a leader, culminating in a declaration that while “the men were conscious that they owed him obedience; they were not equally convinced that they owed him their respect and esteem.”
Such criticisms aside, the expedition’s return was a triumph of human ingenuity and survival. Its success was due to one simple measure: Ross’s emulation of the Inuit, the Earth’s hardiest survivors, who eke out a living on the margins of the habitable world and yet who do so without any trace of scurvy. The Inuit treat the contents of a caribou’s stomach and the testicles of the musk-ox as delicacies, for example, food sources that have since been proven to be powerful antiscorbutics. And whilst unwilling to consume these igloo specialities, John Ross had his men eat a diet of fresh meat and salmon, concluding that “the large use of oils and fats is the true secret of life in these frozen countries.” Where possible, therefore, he replaced supplies such as salt beef and tinned foods with fresh meat, resulting in a “very salutary change of diet to our crew.” By doing so, Ross also solved the mystery of Arctic survival. Through contact with the locals, he correctly surmised that their diet of fresh meat had antiscorbutic properties, observing that “the natives cannot subsist without it, becoming diseased and dying under a more meager diet.” As he wrote in his log, “The first salmon of the summer were a medicine which all the drugs in the ship could not replace.” The Inuit had saved John Ross’s hide and those of his crew, and he knew it, though his praise was tempered by characteristic pomposity. They were, he said, “among the most worthy of all the rude tribes yet known to our voyagers, in whatever part of the world.” It was only in his fourth winter, after he had lost contact with the Inuit and moved north to Somerset Island, where game was scarce and the expedition became dependent upon tinned foods, that scurvy had made a run at the expedition.
UNFORTUNATELY, Captain George Back, on his 1836–37 Arctic expedition, failed to learn from Ross’s example. A veteran of three expeditions across the barren lands of northern Canada, two of them under the command of John Franklin, R.N., George Back was by turns ambitious, conceited and utterly charming. An inveterate womanizer, dandy and accomplished watercolourist, Back was a knowingly Byronic figure who dabbled in poetry and possessed a certain élan, having spent five years as a prisoner of war in Revolutionary France.
Back sailed for the Arctic on 14 June 1836, with orders to travel to Repulse Bay, beyond the northwestern reaches of Hudson Bay, then to send sledge parties across the isthmus of the Melville Peninsula (an arm of the American continent) to explore its western coast. The expedition was an appalling failure. Back’s ship, the Terror, like the Victory, was caught in the Arctic’s thrall of relentless ice. At one point it was hurled 40 feet (12 metres) up a cliff face, only to be mauled by an iceberg. Wrote Back: “To guard against the worst I ordered the provisions and preserved meats, together with various other necessaries, to be got up from below and stowed on deck, so as to be ready at a moment to be thrown on the large floe alongside.” Men slept in their clothes, ready to abandon ship at a moment’s notice. On some nights, the ice could be heard gently caressing the hull, on others it wailed and pounded