Arctic Solitaire by Paul Souders

Author:Paul Souders
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680511055
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2018-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

THE NEW YEAR

A brief historical digression is perhaps in order.

When the smoke cleared at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, England ruled the seas, but the Admiralty found itself at loose ends. They were in charge of the most powerful naval force the world had ever known, but they needed something to keep that Navy’s men and officers occupied until the next war came along. They looked around for small bits of colonial housekeeping to attend to, like finding the long-sought Northwest Passage. Navy lieutenant John Franklin was one more demobilized officer in need of a ship, scraping by on half pay. He had been lucky in battle, fighting with Nelson at Trafalgar and later at the Battle of New Orleans. And he must have felt fortune’s smile to be plucked from obscurity and awarded command of a survey expedition deep into the Canadian wilderness. Pudgy and unfit even in the prime of youth, he wasn’t anyone’s picture of an intrepid explorer.

His mission was to travel from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s settlement at York Factory to the high Arctic, and begin mapping the continent’s unexplored northern coastline. The expedition was cobbled together in a few months and suffered from poor planning and worse luck.

From the start, nothing went right. Supplies, boats, and men were all in short supply, and the locals took a dim view of the greenhorn and his half-baked plans. His team of four naval officers and their small band of voyageurs were barely out of sight of York Factory before, woefully overloaded, they had to abandon much of their food, including seven hundred pounds of bacon, along the Hayes River’s banks. How those lost rashers must have haunted his dreams in the long miles to come.

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