Northwest Passages Read online

  From We Did Not All Come Back

  His path was set. He threw over his legal studies, to the anger of his father and the dismay of his mother, and waited anxiously for further word of Symmes’s glorious venture. How could anyone fail to be moved by such passion, such selfless determination, such a quest for knowledge that would surely be to the betterment of Mankind?

  Yet no expedition was forthcoming. Symmes’s words had, it seemed, fallen on the ears of people too deaf to hear, too selfish to abandon their petty lives and transient pleasures. Wallace had fully expected to be a part of the glorious expedition; now, faced with its failure, he cast round for something that would enable him to dedicate his life—or a large part of it—to those Polar realms which now haunted him, in preparation for the day when Symmes’s vision would prevail, and he could fulfil the destiny which awaited him.

  He became a printer, for it seemed that his only connection with that region which so fascinated him was through words; so words would become his trade. He found work with a printer willing—for a consideration—to employ him as an apprentice, and learned the trade quickly and readily. When he was not working he was reading, anything and everything he could to prepare himself. He read Scoresby’s two volume Account of the Arctic Regions and found, for the first time, pictures of that region of snow and ice, and of the strange creatures living there, seals and whales and the fearsome Polar Bear and, strangest of all, the Esquimaux who, in their furs, resembled not so much men as another type of animal. It was true that Scoresby scorned the idea of a “hollow earth”; yet he was only a whaling captain, and could not be expected to appreciate, embrace the ideas of someone like Symmes, a man of vision, of thought. Wallace expected more from Parry, that great explorer, and was heartened to find that the captain believed firmly in the idea of an Open Polar Sea, although he, like Scoresby, declined to accept a hollow earth.

  Wallace knew that it existed, knew with his whole heart and soul that such a thing must be; those who denied it, even those who had been to the North, were either wilfully blind, or jealous that they had not yet managed to discover it, and thereby accrue to themselves the glory which belonged to Symmes. When Symmes came to Richmond on a speaking tour Wallace obtained a ticket to the lecture and sat, enthralled, while Symmes and his friend Joshua Reynolds preached their doctrine, hanging on to every word, eyes greedily devouring the wooden globe which was used by way of illustration, and displayed the hollows in the earth at the Polar extremities which led to a fantastic world of pale beings and weak sunlight.

  In 1823 he heard that Symmes’s friend, the businessman James McBride, had submitted a proposal to Congress, asking for funding to explore the North Polar region expressly to investigate Symmes’s theory. Here at last was his opportunity; and he waited in a fever of excitement for the passing of the proposal, the call to arms, the expedition, the discovery, the triumphant return, the vindication.

  The proposal was voted down.

  He has been living thus for so long that his body now works like a thing independent of his mind, an automaton. The seal meat is still red, but no longer warm; the strips are hardening, freezing. He must . . . what must he do? Build a snow house for the night; yes. And then he must load the seal meat on to his sledge, in preparation for the next day’s travel. In which direction that will be he can not say. He does not know what lies ahead, what awaits, and it frightens him as much as it elates him; he does know what lies behind, what awaits there, and that frightens him even more, with no trace of elation whatever.

  Following Symmes’s death in 1829 his theory largely fell out of favour, as a wave of Polar exploration failed to find any evidence of a “hollow earth”. Symmes’s adherents gradually deserted him, or turned their attentions elsewhere; Joshua Reynolds successfully lobbied Congress for funding for a South Seas expedition which would also, as an aside, search for any traces of a “Symmes hole”, as it came to be known, in the Antarctic. Although no sign of such a hole was found, the voyage did have far-reaching literary consequences, inspiring both Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Poe published an article in praise of Reynolds, and the South Sea expedition, in the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1837; a reply to this article, penned by Wallace, appeared in the March 1837 issue. Wallace commends Poe on his “far-sighted and clear-headed praise of what will surely be a great endeavor, and one which promises to answer many of the questions which, at present, remain beyond our understanding”, but laments the abandonment of American exploration in the North. “A golden opportunity is slipping through our fingers; for while the British Navy must needs sail across an ocean and attack from the east, through a maze of channels and islands which has defied all attempts and presents one of the most formidable barriers on Earth, the United States need only reach out along our western coast and sail through Bering’s Strait to determine, for once and all, the geography of the Northern Polar regions.”

  Elsewhere in the article Wallace writes of the Arctic as “this Fearsome place, designed by Nature to hold and keep her secrets” and of “the noble Esquimaux, who have made their peace with a land so seemingly unable to support human existence, and who have much to teach us”. These references make it clear that Wallace had, by 1837, already spent time in the Eastern Arctic, a fact borne out by the logbook of the whaling ship Christina, covering the period 1833–5. On board when the ship left New London in May 1833 was one “Wm. H. Wallace, gent., late of Richmond” listed as “passenger”. In late August the log notes starkly that “Mr. Wallace disembarked at Southampton Island.” Where he lived, and what he did, between August 1833 and March 1837 remains a mystery; Wallace left behind few letters, no journals or diaries that have been discovered, and did not publish any accounts of his travels. It has been assumed that he, like later explorers such as Hall and John RAE (q.v.), spent time living among the Inuit people and learning their way of life; if so, it is unfortunate that Wallace left no account of this time, as his adoption of the traditional Inuit way of life, in the 1830s, would mark him as one of the first white men to do so.

  From We Did Not All Come Back

  Even when Symmes died, and his theory looked set to die with him, Wallace kept faith. There would, he now knew, be no government-backed venture in search of the hollow earth; it would be up to one man of vision, daring, resolve to make his own way north. That man, he swore, would be William Henry Wallace, whose name would ever after ring down the annals of history.

  Yet it was not fame, or the thought of fame, which spurred him on; rather, it was the rightness of the cause, the opportunity to prove the naysayers wrong, and a chance to break truly free from the shackles of his life and upbringing and venture, alone, to a place which was shrouded in mystery, to see for himself the wonders which were, as yet, no more than etchings in books, tales told by travellers. He had lived frugally, not touching the allowance still provided by his father, who hoped that the Prodigal Son would one day return to the family home; and with this he set out, early in 1833, for New England, where he persuaded a reluctant—until he saw the banknotes in the stranger’s pocketbook—whaling captain to let him take passage on board his ship. Only when the Christina had set sail for the north did William Henry Wallace, for the first time in many years, know a kind of peace.

  But it was a restless peace, short-lived. He spent the days pacing the deck with anxious feet, eyes ever northward, scanning the horizon for any signs of that frozen land for which he longed. When the first icebergs came in sight he was overcome with their terrible beauty, so imperfectly captured in the drawings he had pored over until he knew their every detail as well as if he himself had been the artist. Soon the ice was all around, and while captain and crew kept a fearful eye on it always, Wallace drank in its solemn majesty, and rejoiced that each day brought him closer to his goal.

  When the Christina left him at Southampton Island he was oblivious to the crew’s concern for a man whom they obviously thought mad. Yet they
did not try to dissuade him; they had business to attend to, and only a short time before the ice closed in and either forced them home or sealed them in place for long, dreary months. The captain did try, on one occasion, to stop Wallace; but after a few moments he ceased his efforts, for the look in the other’s eyes showed that no words the captain could muster would mean anything. At least the man was well provisioned; whatever qualms the captain might have about his mental state, his physical well-being was assured for a time. And once off the ship he was no longer the captain’s concern.

  Wallace had studied well the texts with which he had provided himself. In addition to clothing and food and tools, he had purchased numerous small trinkets—mirrors, knives, sewing needles, nails—and they paid handsome dividends amongst the Esquimaux, who were at first inclined to laugh at the kabloona come to live among them, but soon learned that he was in earnest about learning their ways. Before long Wallace had shed the outward garb of the white man and adopted the clothing of the Esquimaux, their furs and skins so much better suited to the land than his own cotton and wool garments. Their food he found more difficult, at first, to tolerate; it took many attempts before his stomach could accept the raw blubber and meat without convulsing, but little by little he came to relish it. His first clumsy attempts at building a snow house, or igloo, were met with good-natured laughter, but before long he was adept at wielding the snow knife, a seemingly delicate instrument carved from a single piece of bone which ended in a triangular blade of surprising sharpness. He learned to judge the snow needed for blocks, neither too heavy nor too light, and fashion the bricks so they were tapered where necessary. He learned to make windows of clear ice, and of the importance not only of a ventilation hole at the top of the structure, but of ensuring that it was kept free of the ice that formed from the condensation caused by breath and body warmth, lest the shelter become a tomb for those inside.

  The casual way in which the Esquimaux men and women shared their bodies with each other shocked him, at first; after a time he came to see the practicality of sleeping, unclothed under furs, in a group, but he remained aloof from the women who plainly showed that they would welcome him as a partner. In all other ways he admired the natives of that cold land: what other travellers remarked on as their cruelty he saw as a necessity. Illness or frailty in one could mean death for all; there was no room in that place for pity, or sentiment, and he abandoned without regret the last traces of those feelings within his own soul.

  He became skilled at traversing the fields of ice and snow, and would often set out alone. The Esquimaux, who only ventured across the ice when necessity compelled them in search of food, were puzzled by his expeditions, which seemed to serve no purpose. In reality he was searching, always searching, for any indication that he was drawing closer to the proof he sought, the proof that would vindicate Symmes, and his own life. He did not mark, in that realm of endless snow, how long he searched; but eventually he realised that he would not find the answers he was seeking in this place of maze-like channels. Symmes had been correct when he said that the answer lay from the west, not the east; and if he had been correct in this, why should he not be correct in much else?

  When the Christina put in at Southampton Island in 1836 he had been cut off from his own kind for three years. The captain—the same man who had left him there—was astounded when he recognised, among the natives who crowded to the ship to trade for goods, the figure whom he had long thought dead. He was even more astounded when Wallace indicated—in the halting tones of one speaking a foreign tongue—that he sought passage back to New London. He spoke vaguely of business, but further than that he would not be drawn, except to say, of his time in the north, that he did not know whether he had found heaven on earth or an earthly heaven.

  His igloo is finished. Small as it is, he has had difficulty lifting the last few blocks in to place. He is vaguely surprised that the seal meat, coming as it did to revive him after his body’s stores had been depleted, has not given him more energy. Instead, it seems almost as if his body, having achieved surfeit in one respect, is now demanding payment in another regard. After days, weeks, months of driving his body ever onward, all he can think of now is sleep; of the beauty of lying down under his fur robes and drifting into slumber even as the ice bearing him drifts closer to those unknown regions about which he has dreamed for so long.

  Wallace’s reference, in his article, to the west coast of America and “Bering’s Strait” suggests that he felt an attempt on the Arctic should be made from that side of the continent, and this would have been in keeping with Symmes’s own beliefs. No such formal expedition along the west coast was to be made until 1848, when the first of the expeditions in search of the Franklin party set out, but it is clear that Wallace undertook an informal—and ultimately fatal—journey of his own more than a decade earlier. An open letter from Wallace, published in the Richmond Enquirer in April 1837, states his intention of travelling via Honolulu to Hong Kong and thence to Siberia, “which location is ideally placed as a base for the enterprising Polar traveller, and has inexplicably been ignored as such by successive governments, which have declined to take the sound advice of men such as Mr. Symmes, whose work I humbly continue, and whose theories I shall strive to prove to the satisfaction of all save those who are immune to reason, and who refuse to acknowledge any thing with which they do not have personal acquaintance.”

  Wallace’s letter continues, “I shall be travelling without companions, and with a minimum of provisions and the accoutrements of our modern existence, for I have no doubt that I shall be able to obtain sustenance and shelter from the land, as the hardy Esquimaux do, until such time as I reach my journey’s end, where I shall doubtless be shown the hospitality of those people who are as yet a mystery to us, but from whom we shall undoubtedly learn much which is presently hidden.”

  It is not known when Wallace left Virginia, but the diary of the Revd. Francis Kilmartin—now in the possession of the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu—confirms that he had arrived in the Sandwich Islands, as they were then known, by March 1838, when he is mentioned in Kilmartin’s diary. “Mr. Wallace is a curious mixture of the refined gentleman and the mystic, at one moment entertaining us all with his vivid and stirring tales of life among the Esquimaux, at another displaying an almost painful interest in any news from the ships’ Captains arriving in port from eastern realms. His theories about the Polar region seem scarcely credible, and yet he appears to believe in them with every fiber of his being.” In an entry from April 1838 Kilmartin writes “We have said our farewells and God speeds to Mr. Wallace, who departed this day on board the Helena bound for Hong Kong. While I am, I confess, loath to see him go—for I do not foresee a happy outcome to his voyage—it is also a relief that he has found passage for the next stage of his journey, which he has been anticipating for so long, and which consumes his mind to the exclusion of all else.”

  From We Did Not All Come Back

  He had not wanted to return to Virginia, but there was that which needed to be done, preparations he needed to make, before setting out once more. He was uncomfortable with his parents, although not as uncomfortable as they with him. His father declared, publicly, that he would wash his hands of the boy, as if Wallace were still the feckless lad who had abandoned his studies so long ago; his mother thought, privately, that she would give much to have that feckless lad back once more if only for a moment, for she found herself frightened of the man who had returned from a place she could barely imagine.

  He left Richmond—which he had long since ceased to think of as home—in early summer of 1837, and made his way to the Sandwich Islands, thence to Hong Kong, and thence—but later he could hardly remember the route by which he had attained the frozen shore of that far country about which he had dreamed for so long. He seemed to pass through his journey as one travels through a dream world, the people and places he saw like little more than ghosts, pale and inconsequent shadows. It was not until he st
ood on that northern coast, saw once more the ice stretching out before him, that he seemed to awaken. All that he had passed through was forgotten; all that existed now was the journey ahead, through the ice which stretched as far as his eyes could see.

  The ice moves, obeying laws which have existed since the beginning of time. Currents swirl in the dark depths below, carrying the ice floe upon which he has erected his igloo, carrying it—where? He does not know. It is carrying him onward; that is all he knows.

  Kilmartin’s fears were well founded, for it is at this point that William Henry Wallace disappears from history. What befell him after he left Honolulu is one of the minor mysteries of Arctic exploration, for no further word is heard of him; we do not even know if he successfully reached Hong Kong, and from there north his passage would have been difficult. His most likely course would have been to travel the sea trading route north to the Kamtschatka Peninsula and then across the Gulf of Anadyr to Siberia’s easternmost tip and the shore of the Chukchi Sea, from whence he would have been able to start out across the treacherous pack ice toward the North Pole.