The Arctic Grail by Pierre Berton

Author:Pierre Berton [Berton, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67362-4
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2001-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

4 Failed heroes

The eleven-year search for the lost ships elevated Sir John Franklin to the pantheon of Arctic sainthood. To the New York Times, he was “one of the ablest, oldest and bravest men who had trodden that perilous path” (the Passage). The newspaper praised the Franklin expedition and the search that followed as being “as noble an epic as that which has immortalized the fall of Troy or the conquest of Jerusalem.”

“There is hardly a man of this generation,” the Times declared, “whom the noble story of Arctic exploration has not moved to the depths of his soul.…” It wrote of “unheard of fortitude,” “religious heroism,” “courageous endeavour,” and “devotion to duty” in the face of “appalling perils” – typically Victorian phrases that were always brought out and dusted off whenever another quixotic adventurer went to his death attempting to plant his country’s flag in one of the uncharted corners of the world.

It was the impossible quest that captured the imagination; and the Franklin debacle exactly fitted that ideal. “Our age,” the Times wrote, “is the age of chivalry. The march of Christian civilization may have turned the fire which precipitates a murderous shock, but it has fed the calmer and nobler heroism, which, for duty’s sake, supports the hardest strain, and the fiercest struggle, and the sorest trial, not for an hour, or for a day, but for weeks, and months, and years.”

In its editorial, the American newspaper championed the English credo – that victory must not be achieved too easily. It was hard struggle that counted, not the final achievement. The spectacle of able seamen working like dray-horses to drag their heavy sledges across the frozen wastes was more appealing than that of a native dogteam threading its way through hummocks of ice. The British especially had a warm spot in their hearts for gallant losers; they preferred them to easy winners, as a bewildered Roald Amundsen would discover more than sixty years later, when he beat Robert Falcon Scott to the Pole and was shunned for it by Englishmen.

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