Resolute by Martin W. Sandler Read Free Book Online Page A

would recall what he saw:
    At half past two, (when I went off to dinner), there were some hopes of its clearing, and I left orders to be called on the appearance of land or ice ahead. At three, the officer of the watch, who was relieved to his dinner by Mr. Lewis, reported, on his coming into the cabin, that there was some appearance of its clearing at the bottom of the bay; I immediately, therefore, went on deck, and soon after it completely cleared for about ten minutes, and I distinctly saw the land, round the bottom of the bay, forming a connected chain of mountains with those which extended along the north and south sides. This land appeared to be at the distance of eight leagues; and Mr. Lewis, the master, and James Haig, leading man, being sent for, they took its bearings which were inserted in the log; the water on the surface was at temperature of 34. At this moment I also saw a continuity of ice, at the distance of seven miles, extending from one side of the bay to the other, between the nearest cape to the north, which I named after Sir George Warrender, and that to the south, which was named after Viscount Castlereagh. The mountains, which occupied the center, in a north and south direction, were named Croker’s Mountains, after the Secretary of the Admiralty.
    Immediately upon spotting what he believed to be an impenetrable barrier, Ross ordered his crew to halt the
Isabella.
Declaring that to continue would be fruitless, he not only ordered that the ship be turned around and sailed back through the sound, but commanded that it should continue on directly back to England. If there were indeed mountains blocking his way, and if Ross had continued sailing toward them only to find that they were impassable, his decision to abort the voyage through Lancaster Sound would seem justified. But to abandon the search for the passage altogether? As Parry would later point out, there were enough provisions on both ships to permit the explorers to winter down and then resume the search after the spring thaw.
    Even more inexplicable was the fact that not only had Ross decided not to sail further to determine if the mountains were indeed impenetrable, but no one else on either ship had seen the mountains. The answer was quite simple. They were not there. The Croker Mountains existed only in Ross’s imagination. He had suffered his most serious mirage.
    As the
Isabella
sailed back past him, the astonished Parry had no choice but to follow his commander. He, and most of the other men, were angry and disappointed. Their feelings were dramatically expressed by the
Alexander’s
purser, William Hooper. “Thus vanished our golden dreams, our brilliant hopes, our high expectations,” he wrote in his journal, “and without the satisfaction of proving these dreams to be visionary, these hopes to be fallacious, those expectations to be delusive! To describe our mortification and disappointment would be impossible, at thus having our increasing hopes annihilated in a moment, without the shadow of reasoning appearing.”
    Why did John Ross turn tail and head for home? Perhaps, as was the case with so many others who would follow him, his struggles through the Arctic, although relatively brief, simply proved too much for him. Perhaps he never really believed that there was Northwest Passage, and despite Barrow’s orders, felt that his real objective was to rediscover Baffin Bay. It remains a puzzle, one of the first of many mysteries that would be so much a part of nineteenth-century polar exploration.
    Ross and Parry arrived back in England on November 11, 1818, and within a few days made their reports to the Admiralty. Barrow had been deeply disappointed with Buchan and Franklin’s failure to reach the North Pole, but his feelings had been tempered by his understanding that they had encountered conditions beyond their control. He was absolutely furious with Ross. He would never forgive him for not checking