Free Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler

assorted bonbons especially ordered from Fortnum & Mason. And then on the dark night before they sailed out of Stromness Harbour, in the Orkneys, their last home port, there was the curious case of the assistant surgeon of the Erebus boarding with a cabin boy wearing a silk top hat, the two of them lugging sacks of personal provisions. Six coils of stuffed derma, four dozen koshersalamis, a keg of schmaltz herring and uncounted jars of chicken fat, their pockets bulging with garlic cloves. The assistant surgeon and the cabin boy were jabbering in some guttural tongue, which the third lieutenant, whose watch it was, took to be a German dialect. On inquiry, however, the cabin boy insisted it was a patois that he and the assistant surgeon had picked up on a voyage to the South Seas.
    Concern for Franklin did not surface until 1847. The Admiralty sent out three relief expeditions, unavailingly. By 1850, fleets of ships were searching the Arctic. One of them found three graves marked by head-boards. They were the tombs of two sailors from the Erebus and one from the Terror . The three men had been buried in 1846.
    The quest for Franklin continued. In 1854, John Rae, surveying the Boothia Peninsula, met with a band of Eskimos who told him that Franklin’s party had starved to death after the loss of their ships, leaving accounts of their suffering in the mutilated corpses of some who had evidently furnished food for their unfortunate companions. Rae’s story was published in the Toronto Globe .
    The fact that a Christian would accept the word of the natives on such an insidious matter inflamed not only Lady Franklin, but also other Britons, among them Charles Dickens. The source of these stories, Dickens wrote, was a covetous, treacherous and cruel people, with a proven taste for blood and blubber. Members of the Franklin expedition represented the “flower of the trained English navy,” and, therefore “it is in the highest degree improbable that such men would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.”
    Three years later Jock Roberts joined the continuing search, sailing with M’Clintock on the Fox . In April 1859 M’Clintock reached King William Island, where he found a lifeboat from the Erebus on the western shore, some sixty-five miles from the last position of Franklin’s ships. It lay partially out of its cradle on a sledge and had neither oars nor paddle. M’Clintock calculated the total weight of the sledge to be 1,400 pounds, a ridiculously heavy burden for sailors ridden with scurvy and close to starvation. The only provisions in sight were 40 pounds of tea, a quantity of chocolate, and a small jar of animal fat, probably walrus, that surprisingly enough tasted ofchicken and burnt onions. For the rest, the boat was laden with an amazing amount of dead weight. Towels, scented soap, sponges, silver spoons and forks, twenty-six pieces of plate with Sir John Franklin’s crest, and six books, all of them scriptural or devotional works. Two skeletons lay in the boat, both of them without their skulls. The skeleton in the bow, M’Clintock wrote, obviously considerate of Lady Franklin’s feelings, had been disturbed “by large and powerful animals, probably wolves.”
    A BORN JACKDAW , Jock Roberts had brought back mementos from his long and arduous voyage with M’Clintock. A silk handkerchief, two buttons from an officer’s greatcoat, a hair-comb and, most baffling, a black satin skullcap with curious symbols embroidered on it both inside and out. Clearly the skullcap was not standard Royal Navy issue and was unlikely to have belonged to any member of the expedition. So it was immediately assumed that it had been left behind by native scavengers of the site and was probably the property of a shaman. This, however, led to the intriguing conjecture that, contrary to popular belief, there was at least one