Full interview with Dorothy Eber
Dorothy Eber is a journalist and author of a series of books based on Inuit oral history, including Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers, published in 2008.
Lyle Dick and Julie Perrone - Interview Dorothy Eber relating to her knowledge and interpretations of the missing last expedition of Sir John Franklin.
1) When and how did you first hear of the missing last expedition of Sir John Franklin?
DE: Well, I grew up in England and Sir John’s disappearance and the disappearance of the ships was, even in my childhood, it was talked about a lot, I’m sure more than it probably would have been in Canada. So, my grandmother would talk about it and I learned about it that way initially.
LD: Fascinating. I’m just curious, where in England did you...
DE: Well, it was mostly in Wales, sometimes in Birkenhead. But, my mother came from England from Wales and she married my father a Canadian. So later on I lived in Ontario and Nova Scotia and I finally ended up here in Montreal.
LD: But you didn’t grow up in the ancestral birthplace of Sir John Franklin, it was a different part of Britain?
DE: Oh, definitely. I think the English never forgot this extraordinary disappearance.
LD: Remarkable. And you brought this interest with you to Canada.
2) What happened to Franklin's party?
DE: After I began to work in the North, I did hear stories about Franklin. Now, I heard more stories about other expeditions, because other expeditions the Inuit had more contact with them. Sir John Ross, for instance, who spent four winters in the Arctic and got his men home. Now Franklin, they didn’t appear to have had a great deal of contact with. But they did know about terrible death scenes, so I did hear a certain amount about Franklin. I gathered from the stories they told me- and they could be interpreted in many ways of course- but my own interpretation was that one ship sank on the west side of King William island and one ship sank to the east of King William Island. I had a really marvelous interpreter there and his grandparents had worked with Rasmussen. So I think some of the stories that I heard were stories that Rasmussen had heard too. Now, on King William Island, and that’s a lode source for Franklin stories I think because the ships first were marooned above King William Island and then lower down a little bit further to the south on the west side. But some of the people that I’ve met believed that one ship had gone south. Oh, well of course at first they were abandoned, but it’s assumed they were re-manned when the ice finally did melt. One ship is thought to have sail, I did hear, around the Royal Geographical Society Islands, and then another ship, I heard, sailed across the top of King William Island and round to the east side that way. There’s always been a lot of speculation that one ship ended up in a group of islands on the east side. But I believe the ship has been… and remains have been sighted in many places. Hudson’s Bay Company people say, well there’s always been a lot of comment about a ship being on the east side and someone called Pat Lyle who’s a senior Inuk from a well-known Inuit family, he thought there might be a ship in Josephine Bay which is on the east side.
3) Why did they fail?
DE: One of the things that I’ve read in the literature, but I also heard it from people on King William Island, that when the white men left their ships, they didn’t seem to be right. The Inuit thought they might be sick. They would scream and yell and didn’t seem to want to be helped. I have read that it’s thought that they might have been poisoned by some of the meat in the tin cans onboard ship. So I always thought that was quite an element in why they failed: that they weren’t well. And there had been quite a lot of deaths before the ships were abandoned and half the officers had already died.
LD: I talked to Professor Andrew Lambert just a few months ago in London and in that regard he surmised that there might have been extensive respiratory illness, perhaps a virulent strain of tuberculosis that had already played havoc with their health. Do you have some thoughts on that as well?
DE: Well I didn’t think specifically of TB but I did think that very possibly they were ill. And it is quite remarkable really that there so little record of them because, as I mentioned, actually Sir John Ross, he had to spend four winters in the North, he had to abandon his vessel and he got all his crew back safely to England, except for I think one or two people who died of natural causes. The great majority, all in fact, I think, except three people all returned to England in moderately good health. One thing also, I was struck by the fact that they didn’t seem to eat seal meat and tried to live from the land. So I wondered if reliance on these provisions that they brought with them had really been a major factor in their ill health.
LD: And you mentioned that your research told you that there was comparatively little contact between Franklin’s party and Inuit. Did that have a bearing then on potentially why they failed?
DE: I imagine it did. They were fairly far to the west and many of the people who met them hadn’t met Inuit before. There are some stories about Inuit sinking a ship and this may have been a factor. On the other hand, apparently, according to my interpreter, they weren’t very receptive to offers of help.
LD: And this could in turn explain why they got into a situation of dire straits?
DE: Yes I think so. And if it’s true that Inuit did sink one of their ships, of course that would be pretty devastating. In general, I’ve assumed that the ice really did wreck their ships.
LD: So the story of the Inuit sinking their ships, does that story imply possible strife between Inuit and Franklin’s party?
DE: Well, the people that told me this story, they were from Cambridge Bay- Cambridge Bay elders - and the person who had known full details of the story had died a little while before. That’s one of the difficulties in collecting these stories: you’re always just a little bit too late. You would always have done better had you been just a little earlier. There were stories of Inuit sinking a ship and there might have been even a battle between Inuit and qallunaat [white people], though I didn’t really collect stories that bore that out. But I did hear, perhaps from the literature, that some stories of that sort being found.
LD: So you think that’s a possibility?
DE: It’s a possibility but I didn’t find anything that bore it out. I did hear stories of Inuit sinking a ship.
4) Where are the ships?
DE: The ship that sank on the west side- I do think that a ship sank somewhere on the west side. Pieces were discovered and assumed to come from the Franklin wreck by the Finlayson Island, that is down below. These islands are sort of below Cambridge Bay I think. And when they were taken back to England, it was assumed that they did come from a Franklin ship. But the other ship, the second ship, I heard from people that one ship had gone around the North over the top of the island, of King William Island, and had ended up on the east side and there certainly are rumours that have been around for many many years that a ship has been sighted at different places on the east side near the Boothia Peninsula. And the last specific place I heard was that a possible ship had been sighted in Josephine Bay, which is about thirty miles above the Matty Islands.
LD: To the north?
DE: To the north, yes.
LD: Was that the ship that you had heard stories of it being sunk by the Inuit?
DE: I don’t know which ship.
LD: And when you say that one of the ships you believe sank on the west side, can I ask you to be a little more precise as to where on the west side you think that might have happened?
DE: I really can’t be more precise. I really don’t know. I did hear stories that a ship wintered in the Royal Geographical Society Islands, you know there are two islands and there’s a space in the middle, and I did hear stories that a ship wintered in the middle.
LD: And that’s about midway between the place where the ships were abandoned by Crozier and his party in April 1848, to the north, and you’ve also seen those stories recorded by Charles Francis Hall in his oral history that he conducted with Inuit in the 1860s that some of the Inuit had seen a ship or what they believed was a ship off O'Reilly Island to the south west off the Adelaide Peninsula. So, is that another possibility, or do you have any thoughts on that?
DE: What I took from Charles Francis Hall, and it is a while since I’ve read his book, he also recounted stories of Inuit meeting with the white men and that he even gave names to some of the white men, which is something that Inuit did until very recent times, they would give you a name. My name was “she who asks questions”. Then another reporter arrived in Cape Dorset and she was called “she who asks questions number 2”. However, I thought the fact that there was this conversation with a qallunaat who was called “duck” and another one who was called “he who goes to the bathroom a lot”. My interpreter called him “the great pisser”. But, he also said they called him that because he was sick. So I found those stories interesting and it confirmed my feelings that probably a ship had got stuck in the center of the Royal Geographical Society Islands and that Inuit had approached them there.
LD: So possibly Hall’s informants might have been referring to a ship in that area as opposed to farther south in the O'Reilly area?
DE: Well, the ship left in spring time, according to the Inuit, so it could have gone anywhere.
5) How do you know?
DE: Well, I only know what I’m told. So I recorded stories from people who have stories to tell, and what I learnt came from them. My interpreter, as I mentioned, was remarkably helpful. Tommy Anguttitauruq. He spoke wonderful English and he was the grandson of people who had worked for Rasmussen. His grandparents had worked for Rasmussen. So I thought maybe some of the stories I heard had already been told to Rasmussen. Oh, and one thing that Rasmussen had said- he did say that wherever the ships were eventually they sank under the ice, because the Inuit got so little from them. They did get a certain amount, they got teaspoons, small items and maybe barrel hoops, had been prevalent I heard on the east side. And they did get a certain amount of wood and so forth. But considering what the Inuit got from Sir John Ross’s wreck on the Boothia Peninsula- I mean, it’s even said that people still find things there today. So the fact that so little was found, Rasmussen felt, [this] meant that the ships had been sunk at sea. And I imagine I’ve been influenced by that theory because I do know that, from interviewing people who were descendants of those involved with Sir John Ross’ wreck, which happened much earlier than the Franklin wrecks. I would have expected that there would have been more that the Inuit would have recovered.
LD: You’ve mentioned- you’ve looked at all those other accounts that referenced oral history with Inuit, interviews with Inuit, such as Rasmussen, Amundsen, Hall and so on. So in terms of how you know, it sounds like you are comparing what Inuit told you, in the interviews you carried out, with what their ancestors, their predecessors, told other European, Euro-Canadian observers who were seeking their views and their input. So is that part of the process that went into how you know?
DE: Yes I think it is. I certainly tried to learn everything I could. My chief source of information though was the interviews that I conducted with people on King William Island. And sometimes in other places. People in other places would have stories too.
6) Why do you care?
DE: Well, it is a mystery. It’s become, I think, just something that’s so absolutely fascinating. How could these ships that were the best equipped ever sent to the North at a time when people in England thought that there wasn’t a lot more to discover- how was it that they just disappeared totally? It’s a mystery and one would like to know the answer.
7) What is the significance of Franklin's last expedition?
DE: I think perhaps the significance might be that the North at that time was just an extraordinarily difficult place to explore. They didn’t have climate warming in any way and they didn’t have the means of communication that we have today. And they also seemed to be- for instance Sir John Ross, whom I mentioned, led an unsuccessful, but successful in the sense that he got his men home, trip to the Arctic. He said they should leave cairns along the way saying where they were going and so forth. But his advice was ignored and in one of the books I read, it said he continued to irritate people all through his life. Nevertheless, he was really right: if Franklin had left cairns along the way it would have certainly helped the people who went to look for him. At its peak, I heard that about forty ships were involved in looking for him, unsuccessfully.
LD: Are there lessons to be learned from the Franklin Expedition? Is it a cautionary tale in a sense?
DE: I think it was a cautionary tale back then. I don’t know that it would be a cautionary tale today because conditions are so different- I mean the means of communication are so different.
LD: I’m just curious in terms of the significance, what people can draw away from this mystery, but obviously a tragedy, the suffering and the- all those things that happened to this unfortunate party.
DE: Terrible suffering and pain. Oh, and of course, it was Sir John- no, John Rae who was a Hudson Bay factor who finally met Inuit who told him what had happened. That he’d seen these very sick people, at first alive and then later bodies were discovered, about 40 bodies. They had been eating each other. So the final disaster involved cannibalism. And that horrified the English people that members of the Royal Navy should be committing cannibalism. And John Rae, of all the people that were leaders in finding out what had happened- he’s the only one that never got a knighthood. Because the truth that he told appeared to be just too terrible.
LD: Sometimes the truth is just terrible.
