The Discovery Of Slowness (29 page)

Eleanor died a few days after John Franklin and his companions had boarded the ship in Liverpool. He heard the news months later in Canada, after he had written her several comforting and cheering letters. He was hardly surprised by the sad news.

‘She died for the cause of Arctic exploration,' wrote the newspaper. ‘Of course she died,' Elliott commented. ‘But she lived for literature.' Mr Sharp was annoyed about this. ‘She has proved her greatness. It matters little whether one sacrifices oneself for the Arctic, for Greek freedom, or for literature.' Miss Tuttle could listen no longer: ‘She loved him. That's all that matters.' Quickly they found themselves embroiled in a quarrel in which each was sure what it was all about. They missed Eleanor – the old, laughing Eleanor who at once dispelled each disagreement by talking loudly and enthusiastically about herself. Oh, how quickly everything turns into the past!

The second land journey, from 1825 to 1827, was as easy and happy as a child's dream during school holidays.

Now they knew how to do everything and learned to do more. Franklin had good boats specially built for the river journey and the coastal exploration. Supplies were plentiful, connections with the fur-trading posts uninterrupted. The only danger might come from hostile Eskimos. But it was the greatest good fortune of this expedition that they came only upon tribes responding in kind to their offerings: fearlessness and good will. Franklin recorded and learned whatever he was able to see and to hear, for one thing was sure: the Eskimos could live here, and if one lived as they did, one could, too. Augustus joined them again and translated everything – important as well as seemingly unimportant matters. Franklin converted his new way of looking at things into a new way of questioning the Eskimos. He discovered that it made no sense to ask ‘leading questions' which had to be answered with yes or no: out of a sense of misguided and misleading courtesy, they always answered them with yes. Franklin's most important word therefore became ‘how'.

His notebook filled up: ‘
Erneik
is the harpoon with the seal bladder,
angovak
the big spear,
kapot
the little spear,
nuguit
the slingshot used to shoot birds.' Each implement had its purpose, and if one wanted to use it, one had to learn still another thing: the concentration without which one could neither see nor hunt
anything in this terrain. And failure in hunting was equivalent to death.

It was their further good fortune that Back at last understood what was important. Perhaps he had grown up; perhaps he had simply learned that discovery and slow observation belonged together, and even more: ‘If we have the advantage of intelligence and rifles over the Eskimos, intelligence consists in getting along without rifles' – a sentence written by George Back, Lieutenant, Royal Navy, if you please.

Eskimo dress: drawers made of the padding of little auks' feathers, trousers of fox or bear fur, stockings of rabbit fur, beds made of the coats of musk oxen – nothing froze on them.

Although they took their boats, the whites learned how to make good boats of split walrus skin and bones. They also noted how to make a sled by packing furs and meat supplies into bundles and letting them freeze hard. The weight saved made it easier for the dogs. With wooden knives they carved bricks out of the snow and built igloos, which conserved warmth better than any army tent. Much of the stuff Europeans drag along on their travels soon appeared to them only as a life-threatening encumberance.

At one point Franklin noted in his diary: ‘Actually we couldn't be happier.'

Learning increased in a geometrical progression, and they felt an overwhelming enthusiasm for seeing and knowing which worked on them like an intoxicant. When, after waiting for hours, Back harpooned his first seal, which had stuck its nose through the ice hole from below for only a moment, he danced with joy on the ice; he slipped, landed on his back, and called out, beaming, ‘I can do it!' He had tried it so often, but until now without success. How was it possible that he had been able to learn it? Could one become faster than one was by nature, after all? Franklin had his fixed look for emergencies, but that look conferred speed through the selection of the object, not through a faster reaction. ‘How did you do it, Mr Back?' he asked. ‘It's very simple, sir. You mustn't think of anything except that one thing.' ‘I can do that,' said Franklin, ‘but if I concentrate on one simple
thing, it just goes round and round in my thoughts until my head knows it precisely.' ‘But that's not what this is,' Back countered. ‘Only a small part of the brain must be affected, the part that has to do with punching the seal. Try it some time.' Franklin hesitated. ‘I first have to think through precisely whether it works. Then I'll try it,' he answered. He knew he would never be able to bag a seal. But what he had just heard preyed on his mind.

Back carried his seal to the igloos. They ate the raw liver and learned still more: the hunter gets no part of his quarry; he hunts for the others. That fitted into Franklin's System: at least it was worth some thought.

Although the North-West Passage was not found, the journey was a success nonetheless: a considerable stretch of the coastline was explored and mapped, and their ethnographic notes were numerous and of good quality. From the mouth of the Coppermine river to the Bering Strait, the course of the North-West Passage was now clearly discernible. There remained only the segment from Hudson's Bay to Point Turnagain.

Where was ‘the proudest point of the journey'? Franklin unfolded Eleanor's flag at the estuary of the Great River, which he named after its discoverer: Mackenzie's River.

Franklin wanted to call the report on the second journey into the Canadian north
The Benign Arctic
. His publisher was dead set against it. ‘Nobody wants to hear about a benign Arctic, Mr Franklin. It must be desolate and terrible, so that the discoverers will seem even more heroic.' ‘But that's simply what a discoverer is supposed to do,' responded Franklin. ‘To explore something long enough for him to discover its benign aspects.' ‘Yes, but that should remain between ourselves,' the publisher answered. The book was given the neutral title
Narrative of a Second Journey to the Polar
Sea
, and it sold well. But John Franklin remained famous for the earlier journey. Mr Murray was right. The readers understood only what they already thought they knew from the first book, and it was not a good thing to persuade them otherwise. Time was short, opinions firm, and new ideas remained in hiding.

London was steaming. The accretion in implements, machines, and iron constructions grew daily. This was called progress. Many worked at it, and few reaped its benefits. Most of them stared at it with glassy eyes and said admiringly, ‘Madness.' Progress was madness, but it served England's glory, and even those who didn't make a profit loved their country.

A man named Brunel – John had already heard of him in Portsmouth – had wallowed in the mud with big machines since 1825 in order to dig a tunnel under the Thames. And there were ‘locomotives' now. Although they ran on smooth iron rails, they attained the speed of a good horse and were able to pull as many as three cars. Charles Babbage explained to John his plan to build an enormous calculator, as big as a house, composed of a calculating and a printing part. Working ceaselessly without interruption, it would supply the entire world with logarithmic and nautical tables. The human brain would no longer be burdened with anything that needed to be calculated. Gifted people would again be able to think instead of scribbling numbers. Franklin liked that. Babbage caught fire. He explained the details of how the machine would calculate, how its function would be quite different from that of the human mind, much faster and more reliable. It could produce the most incredible new insights, far beyond the kind of mathematics currently in use, and perhaps, drawing on statistics, could even design Poor Laws and tax laws.

The conversation was not exactly fluent. Franklin had to put on the brakes time and time again in order to understand him. Babbage was impatient, irascible and massive. He loved neither women nor children nor anything else in the world; only his ideas. Franklin thought about all this, staring at the mathematician's old-fashioned breeches in order to keep steady in the face of so much progress. As for himself, he had already begun to wear the new trousers consisting of two long pipes, and was putting on his two-cornered hat not crossways but lengthways, as was now the fashion.

When Franklin managed to understand something, he made it work for him as he saw fit. No, the machine has its limitations, he said, to the inventor's annoyance. It could calculate only
what could be found out in response to ‘leading questions' – to questions, in other words, which could be answered only by yes or no. He told Babbage of the Eskimos and of the impossibility of getting anything new out of them by asking them questions that set up alternatives. ‘Your machine can't be amazed and can't be confused; so it can't discover anything alien to itself. Do you know the painter Westall?'

Babbage passed over the question. ‘For a sailor you think pretty fast,' he said in a subdued voice.

‘No, I think with an effort,' Franklin replied, ‘but I never stop. You know too few sailors.'

They remained friends. It was true that Babbage loved only his ideas, but now and then he took some interest in people, at least insofar as they had the courage to contradict his ideas.

Franklin became engaged to Jane Griffin: first of all because for once she happened not to be abroad, and also because she had already announced her next departure. No one knew travel as she did. She knew all the Channel boats by name, converted European currencies into pounds and shillings at lightning speed, procured special passes which made officials bow in reverence from Calais to St Petersburg, and knew how to make goods which were subject to duty completely invisible by covering them with a few silver coins. ‘You'd be a fine first lieutenant,' Franklin told her.

Jane dominated everything: parties, lovers, her household, all fashionable topics, and changes in facial expression. She was quick, yet retained her sense of loyalty. Franklin's friends said, ‘Now his career can't be stopped.'

When she talked, Jane's eyelids fluttered and she always kept the left eye closed a little more than the right one, which injected a roguish note into everything she said, even condolences. But Franklin was intrigued most by her manner of seeing. She could absorb an astonishing number of simultaneous experiences, for she entered none of them very deeply and so was quickly free for the next impression. But she forgot none of these details. It seemed as though she retained everything just for the sake
of retaining it, as though she were constructing inside her head, on a smaller scale, a panorama true to nature made up of the thousand details her eye had registered. She liked most to sit in a fast-moving coach, looking out and absorbing the landscape with inexhaustible perseverence. John, too, liked riding in coaches, and, though his way of seeing was somewhat different, they enjoyed travelling together.

His fame grew and grew. The populace read the narratives of his expeditions and continued to be thrilled by the intrepid hero of the glacial desert. The dockworkers found him all right, too. ‘He risks his bones and others benefit: he's like us.' Even the gentry praised Franklin: ‘Old English stock. Even if it's rotten, it can't be destroyed. People like that can be sent anywhere.' Thus saith Lord Rottenborough in an after-dinner speech.

Franklin knew where he wanted to be sent and said so. But the prospects for yet another expedition command were slim. Interest in the North-West Passage had decreased noticeably, since it was obviously not very useful for trade. ‘What do you still want in that ice?' the First Lord of the Admiralty asked paternally. ‘We need you for more important tasks.' What could be so important? But for the time being these tasks were slow in coming.

On his own initiative Franklin tried to enter into the service of foreign countries in order to be charged with an Arctic expedition – science was international; there was nothing against it. But success eluded him. In Paris he had to stand through endless receptions, listening to long conversations in French, and even make a speech, because they had given him the gold medal of the Geographical Society. He breakfasted with Baron Rothschild, dined with Louis-Philippe of Orléans. A great deal of interest in his person, but little in further explorations of the Arctic. Indulgent smiles about his experiences with the Eskimos. His hardest task was tea with Madame la Dauphine, whose choice pastries he would have exchanged for
tripes de roche
had he not had to answer her chatty questions.

Jane spurred him on. ‘Too slow? Not any more. Look around: you move at exactly the same speed as all important people when they move among more or less unimportant ones. The King does, too; Wellington and Peel also pause after each word. And if you haven't understood this or that word and have ignored it for that reason, it will only strengthen the impression of majestic dignity.' Still, Franklin didn't enjoy public appearances. He was glad to meet a young geographer from the kingdom of Poland, a Dr Keglewicz, who wanted to be nothing but an explorer and therefore knew the meaning of discovery. He was tight-lipped and surly, yet also eager to learn and ambitious to the point of bursting. In spite of his scrawniness, he reminded John of a powerful and relentless Babbage. John could talk to him for hours without even mentioning humanity, heroism or character, let alone education. That had become rare. In St Petersburg the Tsarina received him and asked what was in his books. And they already existed in Russian. They made him an honorary doctor of jurisprudence at Oxford; in London, the King dubbed him a knight, thus adding a handle to his name: ‘Sir' John Franklin.