THE DISCOVERY OF THE DISCOVERIES

Strange title? It is, in fact. But ...Why?

Well, is for all of us known that Robert Falcon Scott used the RSS Discovery ship on his expedition to the South Pole in 1901 in the course of the British National Antarctic Expedition. The flaming ship is still living, not all the exploration ships that beared this name have had the same luck, unfourtunately. She has his home nowadays in Dundee, England and she  is happily working as a museum there. If the wikipedia doesn´t lie, this good boy was one of the last traditional ship, (if not the last), built in England, the last of a saga, the last of the old explorers, a survivor.

 

RSS Discovery. From: Wikipedia



 But, Did you know that there were other ships named "Discovery"? others that sailed in icy waters more than three hundred years before?

The RSS Discovery used the name of her predecessor, even she worn some of its main features. Her mother, the HMS Discovery was a refurbished whaler. Her original name was Bloodhound and she was built on 1873. Soon she was kept away of the blood of her poor victims and was destinated to  cleaner and gallant purposes. Under the command of George Nares, the recently bought ship put her bow towards the North Pole with the intention of reaching it through the Smith Sound in 1875.

 

HMS Discovery 1873. From: Wikipedia



The Discovery decided to winter at the sadly known Lady Franklin Bay (stage of the disastrous play performanced by the Adolphus Greely expedition) and finding impossible to go further the ship returned home with her collegue the HMS Alert in 1876. After this expedition the ship served as a storeship till she was finally sold to D. Murray in 1901. Wikipedia finish here, the end of the poor HMS Discovery used by Nares is unknown, at least for me and for the moment, but we will see.

But, yes, there were more Discoveries which did actually more discoveries. If you think on it for a moment, It is not a strange thing using this name to christen a ship, it is almost natural, but they had different lives.  It is Glyn Williams, through his superb book, "Arctic Labyrinth",  which shows me the way.

It was in 1791 when another Discovery took on board at the explorer George Vancouver and carried him towards the west shores of the north coast of America in an expedition that last four years. This time the ship was a Sloop converted again in an explorer ship:

HMS Discovery 1789. From: Wikipedia

But after this long and restless work the duty of this ancient ship didn´t finished, she was converted in a bomb vessel to fight in the battle of Copenaghen in 1798. After, as a kind of retirement, she worked as an Hospital ship, and after as a prison ship. A long life for an indefatigable ship. Again, her name honour her antecesor, the Discovery ship that was commanded by no other than James Cook in his third voyage.

So, then, we have another Discovery, the fourth, sailed by James Cook from 1776 to 1780. This ship was originally a brig named Diligence. She participated on the other two expeditions of Cook. After  the dead of Cook the ship was took under the command of John Gore, the grandfather of the poor Graham Gore, lost with the rest of the crew of the Erebus and Terror ships during the last Franklin expedition.

HMS Discovery 1776. From: Wikipedia

She spent her last days near the docks of Woolwich serving as a transport, and finished her days being broken in 1797. Is sad that these historical ships ended their final days in such a dramatic way, likely, nowadays we would have  preserved them till the end of this days, till their  fatigated wooden frames had been able to resist.

But the saga doesn´t end here, till now the history is more or less known, but there were others, others which names perhaps could have passed unadvertingly for us.

It was in 1741 when another Discovery ship together with the HMS Furnace sailed till Churchill in the Hudson Bay. I haven´t been able to find any representation of the ship, at this point is not easy to find them, but I found a graffitti made by their commanders in the shores of Churchill which is located in the west coast of the Hudson Bay (the picture found, by the way, is in a very interesting blog "Ancientshore" which I recommend to take a look). This Discovery was a 150 ton collier and it was commanded by William Moor cousin of Christopher Middleton the actual commander of the expedition and chief of the Furnace, her mate ship. Both sailed into the Hudson Bay to explore the western coast. It was on this voyage when Middleton discover the later famous piece of shore called Repulse Bay. Both ships returned to England in 1742.



Procedency: http://ancientshore.com/2012/06/24/18th-century-graffiti-at-churchill/
Graffiti found in Churchill in the Hudson Bay.

 Before this ship, there was another one, one Discovery which would be sadly known, a forty ton sloop, used by the expedition of James Knight which disapeared in the west coast of Hudson Bay in 1719 together with the Albany ship. THis expedition finished its days on a similar way as happened to the Franklin expedition 126 years after. All the men died, likely in the Marble Island as it seems to demonstrate the remains  of a shipwreck discovered there and some other remains.

But, have we finished yet? No, there are more Discovery ships, now we have to travel in the time one hundred years before to the year 1615 and accompany to William Baffin and Rober Bylot to the doors of the Lancaster sound which was actually discovered by him, and if we travel few years before to the year 1610 we learn that Henry Hudson also sailed on another Discovery ship of 70 tons. He traveled westward unaware that his career was going to end abruptly. Hudson, his son and other men were forced to abandon the vessel.

HMS Discovery Replica 1610. From: Wikipedia

This last ship, the Hudson one, was used previously in 1600 by George Waymouth. They had the intention of crossing the Northwest passage to reach China. They didn´t pass further than the mouth of the Hudson strait before returning home.

HMS Discovery 1602. From: Wikipedia

And this all for the moment. Well, as I said before I´ve learnt from "Arctic Labyrinth" that there were so many ships called Discovery which had been main actors of the history of the "discoveries" which besides were responsible of the first steps towards the solution of the Northwest passage enigma. But I never have found a whole account of all of them together in the same web site, perhaps I am the first on doing it, and perhaps (I hope so) this humbly post could serve of inspiration for others more detailed posts done by more prepared authors.
 

References:

http://www.familytreeservice.co.uk/RoyalnavyshipsDiscovery.html



THE INUIT DREAM

I´ve just finished one of the indispensables, the desired book "Unravelling the Franklin Mistery. Inuit Testimony". Of course, there is no need to say that the book is superb. This volume is a compilation of all the Inuit testimonies given by them to the explorers who came near the area of the disaster few years after their disappearance: John Rae, McClintok, Francis Hall, etc.

On this book you can find an elaborated justification about how real could be all the pieces of the story about the last years of the Franklin Expedition narrated between the succesive generations of Inuit families.

This is not an easy task, there is a large amount of Inuit people which were witnesses of different scenes of this tragedy. They were told one hundred and sixty years ago, some of them told into an igloo or into a tent pitched over the snow, in the middle of a complete darkness and in front of a fat burner while a snow gale was blowing with rage outside (this recreation is inorder to create the proper enviroment). The names of this Inuit men are indecipherable for us, the "kabloonas", at least for those who have never had a close relation ship with their culture and traditions, the same happens with the places which were the stages of the worst and more dreadful moments of this terror play.

The collection of testimonies have generated on my head the illusion of a dream, because all of them are told sequentally as separated parts of the same story or as unlinked pieces of different stories.

I imagine black and white scenes on which some hungry men were seen at certain distance walking on the snow dragging a boat with a sail. I can also see short conversations  held during several cold nights between this two so different worlds, the Inuit and the Navy men. In other occasions, I´ve seen desolated camps with tents full of frozen men lying as if they were asleep, really "frozen in time", still wearing their blue clothes, skins, hair and whiskers, I´ve seen isolated graves on lonely shores, boats surrounded of hundreds of strange artifacts. I´ve even seen the ships, ghost ships, trapped on the ice, and I´ve seen them being visited by some of the most bold Inuit men.

I woke up, sweating while the wind was blowing outside my window, knowing that some of these terrifying remains and that some of these narrations would later demonstrate, that in their last days, part of these men were reduced  to resort to drastic solutions to stay alive. These men did things that could prefectly feed a terror novel or movie if you think about them while sitting comfortably warm in your home with your stomach  full, but this things looks on a completely different way when you are seeing how your bones appear under your skin and nearly breaking it, when you have lost all your teeth and eating is a punishment for your gums, when you are at ten degrees celsius below zero and you have to walk on the snow till your knees and at one thousand miles far from any available help.

In my modest opinion, as an amateur on these issues, is that this book is a thorough analysis which tries to rescue and justify the reality of this testimonies before of throwing them to the recycle bin and store them there forever.

There are much more profesional reviews made by Richard Davis on the Arctic Institute of North America here and on the  Manitoba Historical Society  here.

And if finally you are interested on buying it you can find it at least here:

http://mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1439

or here:

http://www.amazon.com/Unravelling-Franklin-Mystery-Testimony-Mcgill-Queens/dp/0773508333

and in a lot of places more.

THE CURSED MOTHER OF THE HMS EREBUS

It was in the year 1826 when the HMS Erebus saw the light for first time and it was nineteen years after, as a rebel teenager, when the HMS Erebus would get out far from her home definetely towards her last trip.

 

Pemborke dock_Milford Haven from: http://www.naval-history.net/

 

Her mother, the Pembroke dock shipyard, located in Pemborkeshire in Wales, had its origin in 1757, when the Admiralty sent a delegation to the private shipyard of Jacobs situated on Milford Haven with the intention of manage it. Time after,  George, the Prince regent instead his insane father George III, took it under the control of the Navy. This happened in October of 1815, soon after the Waterloo battle against Napoleon.

 

The Pembroke Shipyard was a modest and specialized one, it had only a dry dock but it had a prolific production. Pembroke produced other famous arctic ships. Besides the HMS Erebus, the Alert was also built in 1856 and was the ship on which Nares wintered in Floeberg Beach in 1875 at a very high latitude.

 

Reading the detailed biograhy of this place on the link above, we realized that in some sense this shipyard was doomed, a lot of its "children" died by the effect of the fire, were wrecked or simply were lost forever in the arctic or in the middle of the ocean. Reading its history one only can wonder if the poor men of the HMS Erebus were victims of some kind of gnarled hex.

 

Some paintings of the docks are available here (links below). They were made on the nineteen century, one of them in 1851, while perhaps some men of the Franklin expedition were still struggling for their lives.

 

It is shocking, if you take some minutes to think on it, how strange is the contrast between the peace and tranquility which this pictures inspire and the horrid moments which were happening thousand of miles northwest of this place in the well known, for much of us, place of the shores of King William Island.

 

Watching this paintings you never could have imagined that this site would be the origin of so much suffering and mistery:

 

http://www.peoplescollectionwales.co.uk/Item/13125-pembroke-dock-yard-artist-unknown-etching-pub

 

http://www.peoplescollection.org.uk/Item/13122-the-royal-dockyard-pembroke-dock-artist-unkno

 

http://www.peoplescollectionwales.co.uk/Item/13124-pembroke-dock-yard-by-newman-amp-co-etching-1

ARTICT LIVING HAZARDS

The arctic is a dangerous place, the main enemies you can find are the weather conditions, the extreme cold, strong gales and winds, icebergs, the tramps  of ice  for ships in the straits, etc. but,  other dangers walk and run over the ice floes and over the ground and have been also, a lot of times,  a cause of tragedy since the beginnings of the exploration.

Reading the book writen by Frederick William Beechey "A voyage of discovery towards the North Pole", about the expediton towards the North Pole commanded by David Buchan, it is curious how he mention an accident, or a tragedy depending on the point of view, which happened to William Barents during his second voyage near Nova Zembla.



Frederick William Beechey : From the wikipedia.

 In this narration, which have captivated me since the moment on which I read the first pages, Frederick tells how the crew of Barents were attacked by a polar bear. In the course of an exploration party in order to find some "diamond like" stones, two of the men were lying on the ice resting, then a polar bear appeared and caught one of them by the neck. The poor man, unaware of that he was being attacked by a huge polar bear shout: "Who is it that pulls me so by the neck?"· that were his latest words, a moment after the polar bear bit his head. The other mate run away and the rest of the men on the ice, twenty in total, came to his aid.

 

Though they carried their charged weapons and their pikes prepared, they were attacked by the bear which caught another man. The death of this second man is lively described by Barents as follows "...which she (the bear) tore into pieces", an awful death. The men run away after this attack.

Barents and other mates which were on the ships, took a boat and tried to encourage the crew to try to kill the bear, only four of them were brave enough to fight against her. They shot in her forehead between the eyes, and hit her with axes several times. The bear had the corpse of the man still on her claws, not was until a man hit strongly into her snout, that the bear finally fell and released the dead man.

Crew of the Barents´s expeditions against the Polar bear_From the wikipedia.

Numerous times we have heard about attacks or threats of this big, brutal, agressive but also strong, brave,  elegant and magnificient animals to the humans, even while Jhon Geiger  and Owen Beattie and were in Beechey Island a polar bear approach inadvertenly to the camp. The expedition of the Ingeneer Andree was supossed to be attacked by another bear, Nansen dealed with them several times in the course of his trip towards the North Pole.

Polar Bear_From the wikipedia.

In the end, the arctic is its natural place to live, we, the Kabloonas, are no more but invaders which from the point of view of the Polar Bear are no more than fresh, original and strange food which with no doubt must be of a remarkably bad taste. I think that they had all the rights to eat us if they consider it appropiate for the occasion.

AN ELUSIVE TOMB FOR AN ILLUSIVE EXPLORER

Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado still today is playing one of his final tricks, the alleged first discoverer of the North west passage is trying to elude me.

Course of the expedition of Lorenzo Ferrer maldonado.
http://www.todoavante.es/index.php/Ferrer_de_Maldonado,_Lorenzo

As his biography says Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado died in Madrid, where he lived, in 1625, in a inn in the "Silva" Street and by fullfiling of his will he was buried in the church of the Ntra. Sra. of the parish of San Martín. Which is supossed to be in the Desengaño street.

StMartin(the new) c/Desengaño.

There are confusing information about his history, in some places I´ve read that he was living his final days in an inn and that the family "Henestrosa" (his family) had a chapel in the church of St.Martin the Tours of the Benedictines, which is placed in the text of the biography wrongly in the Desengaño street (wrongly because in that time there wasn´t any St Martin church there as we are going to read after). In other account I´ve read that because his house belongs to the church of St Martin (in that time placed in the St.Martin Square, now "The Descalzas" square) he was buried there.

Yesterday evening I went to the current place where it is the current St.Martin church to look for the covetted tomb, but for my dissapointment (due to my inexperience as researcher I act first, ask after and find nothing) I found nothing. I asked to a nun who was there and she said to me that the original church of St Martin (placed in the Descalzas square) was destroyed by order of Napoleon while Jose I Bonaparte was governing in Spain just to "make room" to new buildings. So, this new church of St Martin only wears the name and the tradition of the original church. This new St Martin  was occupied by this parish in 1836 and built some time before.

But... I am not absolutely sure that Lorenzo was buried in the original church of St Martin (in the Descalzas square) neither, because the inn where he lived his last years was very close to the place in which the new St Martin is but some far distance  from the original St Martin church of 1625 where he was supposedly buried. It could be a confusion if the byographer was refering to the place  of the burial by the name of the current church.

Monastery of the "Descalzas Reales", Descalzas square (before St martin church and square).

And, to complicate more the things, very close to the Silva street is the church of St Idelfonso, a temple constructed as a subsidary of the parish of St Martin from the Descalzas (the original), but...it was built in the years surrounding 1629, four years after his death but this date is not absolutely sure, a pity, it is in fact a good candidate to be the correct place but in this case with an uncorrect name.

The conclusion is that I am still trying to guess where his grave was placed, and if the tomb still exists, that means, if he was buried in the original St Martin church, his remains are likely lost forever or were placed in other site before the demolition, but if he was buried in the place where St Martin is currently situated, he wouldl be lost the same, because that nun said to me that the crypt was emptied in front of a notary after the new parish came to occupy it and that there weren´t any corpse in the crypt. And finally, if St Idelfonso was the place where he was really buried, then Lorenzo premeried a good place to stay forever, though, again the current church isn´t the original, so if this is the real place, the grave could have been lost again. (However I will go there to check it on the spot).

Fourtunately I have a friend specialized in the old Madrid, so I still have a chance to discover the correct place, thanks to him I discovered (more or less) where Lady Franklin slept when he was here in the Puerta del Sol, the missing "Hotel de los Príncipes".

THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BOOTS (THE BOOK)

At last I´ve finished the book of Anthony Brandt, I bought it in London without having read any review about it, (a risk if you consider the large amount of Franklin books available in the market) but the cover captivated me, and I fell into its claws. It has taken me so long read it because I began, soon after  beginning  to read it, reading at the same time "Arctic labyrinth" by Glyn Williams.

In my opinion this is a very good book to make yourself an idea about the different expeditions led by John Franklin and a lot more related. The book is full on transcriptions of the original narrations  of the voyages and, from my modest knowledge of english, it is well written, so that you can follow the neverending secuence of expeditions without being lost and without getting tired. However, I think that it lack of maps, hardly three or four maps in the whole text, helps you to find yourself in the arctic. A lot of geographical names which are mentioned don´t appear in the maps, so  you are unable to identify, without a near laptop to check the places, where exactly you are sailing or dragging a sledge. 

Another good thing is the summary of the expeditions that you can find at the beggining of the book, which also helps to check once and another who was the first on reaching and discovering each place and in what date. And finally, there is an unvaluable chapter called "Sources" on which the author reveals the sources of information of every part of the book which has been narrated, so you can get deep, if you are interested, on a particular part.

CONCLUSION: In my opinion It is a book recomended, specially if you are beginning in widening your knowledge about the arctic, or if you were captured by the last and lost Franklin  expedition and you want to learn more about his former journeys and to put order in the other main expeditions that forged the discovery of the different Northwest Passages.

LORENZO FERRER MALDONADO THE FIRST MAN ON CROSSING THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

I have to ask sorry again, for the sensationalist title, but it is in order to capture your attention, a more appropiated title would have been "L.F: MALDONADO, LIFE AND MIRACLES".

Now that there are some interesting, very interesting, I would say, discussions about the neverending subject of "Who was the actual discoverer of the Northwest Passage" (NWP for the friends), in the Russell blog or in the Ken McGoogan blog, I´ve taken advantage of this situation to show to all of you a strange and curious story which is intimately relationated with this.

This is the story of a strange man, a Spanish man, who, someday, claimed having crossed the NWP. Yes, folks, and he even deserves a book, I´ve only found a Spanish version, ...and perhaps I can read it when its turn came, likely in the year 2028, year more or year less. The review says that, even today, his trip is being discussed, perhaps this would be a good moment to arise another pugil to the fight, a pugil that had almost three hundred years of advantage.

Well, here comes the story,please stay five minutes to read this and learn something that it is probably completely new for both, for you and me.

It was the day 10th of august of 1557 when Lorenzo was born in Berja, Almería, Spain. Son of a soldier, Lorenzo, at his age of fourteen went as an arquebusier to Barcelona to join the Navy and fight against the Turkish in the Lepanto Battle. After the battle, Lorenzo with fifteen years old stayed in Mesina working to the Micer Joao Martines copying nautical charts and repairing old codices.

With eighteen years old, Lorenzo began his career as merchant in Cartagena together with Micer Martines. Soon after he went to Sevilla where he learn the arts of the navigation from Rodrigo Zamorano, the most important authority of the "La casa de contratación" (contract house) in that moment. He earned there his nautical title and he could go as Captain to the Philipine islands.

After that, he returned to Guadix, the town where the rest of his family were having bad times, he stayed there as a "Jurado", falsified some documents to recover some lands that the Spanish had won to the Moriscos in the previous wars. After this lamentable action, he got married with Isacia de Zafarraya y Montiel  who died when she was given birth a child.

Then Lorenzo, deeply shocked departed in the 21 of march of 1588 on board the nao "Stella" to the arctic to participate in the fur trade. It was this voyage when he, allegedly, crossed the strait of Anian between the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific Ocean, as he told to the king Felipe III. After an eventful life, he died in 1625 and was buried in Madrid in the Desengaño street. ( I promise you to publish a photo of his grave when I can go there to visit it).

There never were any official version about this achievement. His information was inaccurate and full of contradictions and the latitudes and distances impossible.  His voyage was considered false then.

The story is well narrated here, and there are more details about his life here, but in Spanish, I summarize the main points here:

Starting from the port of Lisboa to the Labrador peninsula, he cross the Davis Strait and the Baffin bay, he said get into the arctic islands, gate of the arctic ocean and then changed the course to the southwest after arriving at it. After finding earth, he found the Anian Strait. He said that the sun had been shining all the day and that they had had a fair temperature.

Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, in the illustrated circles was considered  a deceiver because he had offered to the Royal court several fantastic artifices or machines that he never could make indeed. For example, the first fixed compass to navigate or, no less fantastic, the "Salomon clavicle" able to transform any metal in gold.

To tell the truth, this things tell few about his reliability but says much about his fanciful imagination and personality.

His account of the voyage is here, unfortunately only available in Spanish, but as the book is free available because it was written in 1866, I will transcript its content soon for those who are curious.

Here and here we have a thorough analysis that determines the falsehood of their achievement.

Just to plant a seed of doubt, Bauche de la Neuville, in 1789, a greatly known French cartographer, defended in the Science academy of Paris, the veracity of the maldonado voyage. Soon after, Malaspina and Alcalá Galiano went to prove the issue (All of you remember from my old post that Alcala fought in Trafalgar, ship side by ship side, with Franklin and that his son had an affair with Lady Franklin, Isn´t it?),.

If the intention of Bauche, was to provoke a new expedition or if in fact he believed the narration of maldonado, it eludes me. I suppose that if nobody have ever claimed a review of this process is because we have few posibilities to win this battle, a battle of more than a hundred years, but ...Who knows?.  What if this is only the beginning?.