Lost Beneath the Ice: The Story of HMS Investigator

By Andrew Cohen

The story of the bold voyage of HMS Investigator and the modern-day discovery of its wreck by Parks Canada’s underwater archaeologists.

When Sir John Franklin disappeared in the Arctic in the 1840s, the British Admiralty launched the largest rescue mission in its history. Among the search vessels was HMS Investigator, which left England in 1850 under the command of Captain Robert McClure. While the ambitious McClure never found Franklin, he and his crew did discover the fabled Northwest Passage.

Like Franklin’s ships, though, Investigator disappeared in the most remote, bleak and unknown place on Earth. For three winters, its 66 souls were trapped in the unforgiving ice of Mercy Bay. They suffered cold, darkness, starvation, scurvy, boredom, depression and madness. When they were rescued in 1853, Investigator was abandoned.

For more than a century and a half, the ship’s fate remained a mystery. Had it been crushed by the ice or swept out to sea? In 2010, Parks Canada sent a team of archaeologists to Mercy Bay to find out. It was a formidable challenge, demanding expertise and patience. There, off the shores of Aulavik National Park, they found Investigator.

Lost Beneath the Ice is a tale of endurance, daring, deceit, courage, and irony. It is a story about a tempestuous crew, their mercurial captain, cynical surgeon and kind-hearted missionary. In the end, McClure found fame but lost his ship, some of his crew and much of his honour. Written with elegance and authority, illustrated with archival imagery and startling underwater photographs of Investigator and its artifacts, this is a sensational story of discovery and intrigue in Canada’s Arctic.

Andrew Cohen is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. Among his books are While Canada Slept, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, The Unfinished Canadian, and Extraordinary Canadians: Lester B. Pearson. He writes a nationally syndicated column for The Ottawa Citizen and comments regularly on CTV. A professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University, he is founding president of the Historica-Dominion Institute. He has twice received Queen’s Jubilee Medals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Nov 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781459719514

Andrew Cohen

Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, and founder of the global non-profit EnlightenNext and its award-winning publication EnlightenNext magazine. After the collapse of EnlightenNextin 2013, Cohen took several years off from public teaching. In 2020, he and a group of collaborators launched Manifest Nirvana, a sanctuary for deep transformation, where 21st- century spiritual explorers and integral pioneers will find their home. The author of several books, including Evolutionary Enlightenment, he lives in India.

Book preview

Dated October 8, 1850, this dramatic painting by Lieutenant Gurney Cresswell shows Investigator trapped in ice and dwarfed by massive floes.

C O N T E N T S

Part I: Investigator Lost

Trapped in Ice

The Age of Arctic Exploration

Investigator’s Journey

Getting There

Getting Stuck

Getting Home

Part II: Investigator Found

The Initial Discovery

A Closer Examination

Bibliography

Historical Images

Contemporary Images

Credits

P A R T   O N E

INVESTIGATOR LOST

TRAPPED IN ICE

SEPTEMBER 9, 1852. WITH SUMMER NOT YET OVER and autumn not yet begun, the ice — that awful, damnable, imperishable ice — had still not relented, relaxed, or retreated. It had held HMS Investigator fast in its grip for a year. By all laws of decency, it should have released Her Majesty’s Ship and its sixty-six embattled souls some time ago. Had nature been so inclined, they would have been on their way home by now to England, the impossibly green isle they had left so hopefully two years, eight months, and eleven days ago.

But here they remained, fixed in the ice, inert and useless, precisely where they had been since September 1851. For twelve hard months, they had been held captive on the shores of the Polar Sea: latitude 74 degrees north, longitude 117.54 degrees west. When they sailed into this sheltering cove, where Captain Robert McClure had decided to spend the winter — a decision questioned by officers then and historians now — he named it Bay of God’s Mercy, in grateful acknowledgement of the Lord’s wonderful help.

To be sure, Mercy Bay, as it became known, had delivered them from the dangers of the murderous ice pack in the open sea. But a year later few saw this bleak, grey footprint of frozen water, with its long sandbar, as merciful. In fact, it represented instead a cruel irony. Alexander Armstrong, the ship’s surgeon, bitterly recalled: "It would have been a mercy had we never entered it." By September 1852, Investigator had not only been paralyzed for a whole year, but it was becoming clear — given the advancing calendar, the gathering cold, and the swelling ice — that it would be here for another winter. Mercy Bay? For this misbegotten ship, bad enough that a refuge had become a prison. Now, in the jaws of another deep freeze, it threatened to become its grave.

For Captain McClure and his crew, this was the critical moment in their long, unprecedented voyage through the Arctic Ocean. Having wintered here successfully, surviving the long, dark, cold days in relatively good cheer, they had expected that the ice would break up, the sea would open, and they would sail east. This was a reasonable expectation, even in the Arctic. Even here, spring does follow winter, albeit grudgingly, and summer does follow spring, usually.

But by the end of June 1852, as the temperature reached a balmy 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2°C), things were not happening as they should. The ice was seven feet, two inches (2.15 m) thick, which was three inches (8 cm) more than the previous month. A year earlier, the ice depth had been two feet (60 cm) less. By July, the temperature had finally reached 4 degrees (2°C) above freezing, and the falling snow was melting. The land was soaked, a canvas of waterfalls, pools, and rivulets. On July 31, Johann Miertsching, a missionary, noted in his journal that the weather is consistently bad and very foggy; in the cold, dark winter months we had a cloudless sky all the time; now in the summer we have for the most part impenetrable clouds over us instead of sun; also by day a thick mist rises from the land.

This meant that by late summer there was no real thaw, leaving the sailors waiting forlornly for their release. It wasn’t coming. Every day a seaman climbed the 800-foot (250-m) bluff nearby to gaze at Viscount Melville Sound and surveyed the sea, looking for open water. Every day, he returned with the same grim report: No break-up. No movement in the ice.

On board Investigator, conditions were deteriorating. With nothing much to do, the men were bored to distraction. There was little wildlife to hunt anymore; all but the birds had departed. The men were too weak from malnutrition for athletics; Miertsching noted that

Reviews for Lost Beneath the Ice

[rapotter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story of the rediscovery of the wreck of HMS Investigator by Parks Canada in the frozen waters of Mercy Bay in July of 2010 captured the imagination of the world, and evoked the 'heroic age' of Arctic exploration in a way no other recent event has managed. In part, this is due to the way in which a ship, even in its watery grave, evokes the endeavor of exploration with far more gravity and magnificence than any recent discoveries on land have done (last summer's toothbrush, found at Erebus Bay, comes to mind). But it's also due to the fact that the Parks Canada team was uniquely positioned to undertake a thorough on-site survey of the wreck, and to transmit the news and images of their discovery via the Internet and the news media almost as they were happening. And, it should be mentioned, the chief reason that the archaeologists on the site had the kind of support and media access that they did was largely due to the predilection of the then and present Government of Canada for the symbolic significance of the Franklin expedition and those who searched for it, particularly in relation to the issue of Arctic sovereignty. This is not the place to debate the wisdom of that policy -- historians and the public must be grateful for the commitment of any kind of support to archaeological research of this kind -- but still, there is a certain irony surrounding the fact that, outside of Ryan Harris's team who features in this book, Parks Canada's archaeological staff has suffered from significant losses in funding and personnel.That said, this is a glorious book, primarily for its beautifully-printed illustrative materials, which include many of the paintings of Lieutenant Gurney Cresswell, which until now were not readily available together, nor reproduced at such a generous scale. The original Admiralty schematics for HMS Investigator herself are also reproduced as double-page illustrations, along with images of some of the letters sent conveying the news of McClure's eventual rescue, and other materials of the day. The modern photographs, although they don't reveal new findings, are reproduced with excellent resolution, and possess a drama in the hand that's missing when the same images are viewed upon a screen. The overall quality of production is very high, and there's no other book of its kind that so dramatically evokes the hazards of Arctic navigation in the nineteenth century. I certainly can't imagine a more welcome holiday gift for any exploration buffs on one's list.The text, alas, is somewhat less enlightening; while Andrew Cohen has exercised considerable skill in briefly recounting the voyage, the ship's imprisonment in the ice, and eventual abandonment, his lurid patches of language sometimes undercut the story's own intrinsic drama. He's more journalist than historian, which is fine insofar as the book quickly acquaints the reader, in broad strokes, with the history of Arctic exploration in Britain, the reasons the Franklin expedition was dispatched, and McClure's own role in the search for its missing ships. Those deep in the throes of what I like to call 'Franklinomania' will find nothing new, but then, the text isn't really meant for them. They will, however, find the illustrations and photographs as -- or perhaps even more -- valuable than the proverbial thousand words.

[druidgirl_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a story about a ship the HMS Investigator was sent on a mission to find Sir John Franklin who was lost at sea.The Investigator's Captain Robert McClure had his own agenda, he never found Sir John but he did find the Northwest Passage. This book tells the story of the hardships suffered by the Investigators crew and officers, while they were stuck in the ice for three winters.The ship remained a mystery for a century and a half until in 2010 when the Parks Canada sent a team to find it. This was a well told story and the research was excellent.Thanks to Net Galley and Dundurn for allowing me to read this book.

[suniru_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book highlights the 1850 voyage of the Investigator and its 2010 rediscovery on the bottom of Mercy bay in Arctic Canada. The material is interesting and the first section encompasses the search for Franklin, the motivation and ego of the captain as well as the race for the discovery of the northwest passage. The second section is dedicated to the modern effort of locating and exploring the sunken vessel. I found the book to be more of a magazine article than a book. It’s well written but lacks depth. The author mentions several times that the cache of material from the ship left on the island was very important to the Inuit people. This, however, is never explained. All in all a worthy read for those interested in Arctic exploration.