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  Taking his father’s words to heart, Kane not only shook off his lethargy, but began the study of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He had no sooner graduated when the elder Kane’s influence was exercised once again. Aware of his son’s desire for both travel and adventure and the sad probability that his life would not be a long one, Judge Kane, without consulting his son, contacted the secretary of the navy and asked that Elisha be granted a commission as a naval surgeon. At the same time, knowing that the granting of naval commissions took considerable time, the judge arranged for Elisha to serve as a physician on a diplomatic mission to China that was about to depart. It was the turning point in Elisha Kane’s life. From that time on until his death, Kane’s life was characterized by travel and adventure. It was filled with something else as well: continual risk taking, motivated by what his friends were convinced was the result of his knowing that his days were numbered.

  IN CHINA, KANE PRACTICED MEDICINE on a hospital ship in Whampoa (a district in present-day Guangzhou) for several months before returning home in 1845 through India, Egypt, Athens, and Paris. It was only the beginning. Now fully commissioned, he set off again, spending the next two years in the far corners of the world—the Mediterranean, Brazil, the African coast, the interiors of India and China. As historian Pierre Berton observed, he “explored the catacombs of Thebes, stood at the entrance to the pass at Thermopylae, walked across the Peloponnesus, and once hung suspended from a bamboo rope attached to a two-hundred-foot crag over a volcanic crater in the Philippines.” During these travels he battled several serious illnesses, including cholera in China, typhoid in Egypt, and bacterial infection in Africa. Still, he kept going.

  By the time Kane returned home again, his appetite for adventure had, if anything, intensified. The Mexican-American War was now fully under way and, in October 1847, he traveled to Washington, seeking “assignment to a duty more stimulating than ship’s doctor.” He got his wish—the dangerous task of carrying an important message to General Winfield Scott, the commander of all the American forces in Mexico, was assigned to him. In early January 1848, soon after his arrival in Mexico, Kane and a group of Mexican contra-guerrillas hired to accompany him headed for Scott’s headquarters in Mexico City. Four days into their trek, near the tiny village of Nopaluca, the party suddenly encountered a company of Mexican soldiers commanded by Brigadier General Antonio Gaona.

  In the battle that followed, one in which Gaona’s troops were badly beaten, Kane received a lance wound. Even more seriously injured was General Gaona’s son, a major in the Mexican army. In spite of his wound, Kane was able to keep the mercenaries from executing the general. Then he turned his attention to the younger Gaona. What happened next became the subject of newspaper reports that would soon be pouring into the United States. Typical was the article that appeared in the Pennsylvanian of October 24, 1847, which concluded by stating, “As soon as the old general was rescued, he sat down by the side of the major, his son, to comfort his last painful moments. When [Kane] observed that the individual was bleeding to death from an artery in the groin, he made an effort in his behalf. With the bent prong of a table-fork he took up the artery and tied it with a ravel of pack thread, and the rude surgical operation was perfectly successful.” It was the public’s introduction to Elisha Kane. What no one could have known was that far greater adventures and far greater fame lay ahead.

  At the same time that Elisha Kane was performing his heroics in Mexico, a much different type of adventure was being played out in a very different part of the world. Beginning in 1818, under the impassioned leadership of Second Secretary to the Admiralty John Barrow, England had begun a renewed effort to discover the fabled Northwest Passage through the Arctic to the riches of the East. In 1845, after the British had launched a series of unsuccessful expeditions to the frozen north, Barrow sent out the world’s most famous explorer, Sir John Franklin, and some 280 men in the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror— the two most sophisticated and well-equipped ships of their day—in the hope of at last securing the prize.

  A PORTRAIT OF SIR JOHN FRANKLIN, ca. 1830, fifteen years before he set out for his fateful Arctic voyage.

  Franklin left with the expectations of all England sailing with him. But when two years went by and not a word had been heard from him or any member of the expedition, expectations turned first to fear and then to dread. John Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, was a remarkable woman, far ahead of her time. Her wealth and considerable influence had played a major role in her husband’s obtaining command of the 1845 expedition. Now she devoted all of her time to pleading with, cajoling, and even threatening the admiralty and other British agencies to launch searches for Sir John and his men. Eventually she would also use her considerable fortune to purchase and equip her own ships and send them out to seek her husband.

  A MAP FROM THE 1870s shows the circumpolar area and the supposed open polar sea, thought to contain the Northwest Passage.

  In April 1849, after the earliest of the British searches for Sir John failed to turn up even a trace of his expedition, Lady Franklin took her case beyond British shores. Writing to the new president of the United States, Zachary Taylor, she pleaded with him to launch an American search. “I am not without hope,” she wrote, “that you will deem it not unworthy of a great and kindred nation to take up the cause of humanity . . . and thus make it generously your own.” Humanitarianism aside, Lady Franklin pointed out, America’s help in finding her husband might also lead to the United States, not England, finding the coveted Northwest Passage. “I should rejoice,” she told President Taylor, “that it was to America we owe our restored happiness.”

  Eight months later, in December 1849, the relentless Lady Franklin wrote to the president again, once more urging him to launch a rescue effort. This second plea could not have come at a more opportune time. The noted American scientist Matthew Fontaine Maury, a man destined to become known as the father of modern oceanography, had recently captured attention by proclaiming that—based on studies of Arctic currents and the migration of whales in these waters—he was convinced of the existence of a Northwest Passage.

  This time President Taylor acted, urging Congress to finance a rescue mission. But although most of the legislators were in favor of the endeavor, what promised to be lengthy debate broke out concerning how to appropriate the needed funds. At this point, New Bedford native Henry Grinnell, owner of a highly prosperous New York shipping firm, stepped in and offered to provide and provision two ships for the mission if Congress would place them under the control of the U.S. Navy. In May 1850, Congress accepted Grinnell’s offer.

  Two months earlier, having heard that Congress was seriously considering an Arctic mission, Elisha Kane had sent a letter to the secretary of the navy requesting a posting on the expedition. On May 12 he received a telegram telling him to report for duty at the New York Naval Yard as soon as possible. He arrived at the facility on May 22, greeted by the sight of the two ships of the Grinnell expedition: the 144-ton Advance and the 82-ton Rescue. Also there to greet him was Lieutenant Edwin De Haven, who had been chosen commander of the expedition. It was an interesting pairing—the quiet, modest De Haven and the energetic, limelight-seeking Kane. Although no one could have foreseen it at the time, they were about to begin a voyage that would endow hero status not on the skillful, dedicated De Haven but on his thirty-year-old medical officer.

  THE ADVANCE AND THE RESCUE sailed for the Arctic in July 1850. Although Kane had traveled much of the world, he was totally unprepared for what he encountered from the moment the expedition entered the still largely uncharted Arctic. The ice formations astounded him. Writing in a style that would eventually make him one of America’s most widely read authors of his time, he proclaimed to his journal, “An iceberg is one of God’s own buildings, preaching its lessons of humility to the miniature structures of man.”

  The ice formations were indeed magnificent, but he soon learned that they were terrifying as wel
l. After having crossed Melville Bay, a body of water that earlier British explorers had felt was a key to finding both the Northwest Passage and traces of John Franklin, Kane described the area as a “mysterious region of terrors.” He was referring to the ever-moving ice floes, some more than a mile across, furiously smashing against one another with extraordinary speed and effect. “Tables of white marble,” he wrote, “were thrust into the air, as if by invisible machinery.”

  Less than a month into the search, he experienced his first Arctic mirage. In his journal, which became the basis for a best seller, he described what he experienced more vividly than any of his Arctic predecessors had been able to articulate. “There is a black globe floating in the air about three [degrees] north of the sun,” he wrote. “Is it a bird or balloon? . . .

  THIS ENGRAVING WAS BASED ON A SKETCH Kane drew in 1853 while sailing past “God’s own buildings.” The engraving appeared in Kane’s best-selling book Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55 (1856).

  On a sudden, it changes shape . . . It is a grand piano . . . Presto, it had made itself duplicate—a pair of colossal dumbbells. A moment! And it is the black globe again.”

  De Haven was steering a course for Smith Sound, another area where it was hoped traces of Franklin would be found, but when the two ships came upon it, it was completely frozen over. Undaunted, De Haven headed for Barrow Strait, hoping there would be channels open enough for passage. There were, and soon they reached a limestone projection of land that had been named Cape Riley.

  They had come to discover, and it was here that they made their first find, albeit a secondhand one. As the lookouts aboard the Advance and the Rescue scanned the shoreline, they spotted two cairns, stone enclosures in which captains sailing in remote areas traditionally left messages describing where they had been on their voyage and where they were next headed. Immediately, a small party from each vessel was sent ashore. Inside one of the cairns, they found a note dated just two days before. Written by Captain Erasmus Ommanney, an officer aboard one of four British search vessels in an expedition commanded by Horatio Austin, the note revealed that here, at Cape Riley, the first discovery in the long and agonizing search for Franklin and his men had been made. “I had the satisfaction,” Ommanney had written, “of meeting with the first trace of Sir John’s expedition, consisting of fragments of stores and tagged clothing and the remains of an encampment.”

  Austin and his men were not the only other party searching in the area, and as the Advance and the Rescue made their way across from Cape Riley to Beechey Island, they were joined by two British vessels under the charge of a whaling captain named William Penny and three more commanded by famed naval hero and explorer John Ross. Shouting across the water at one another, De Haven, Penny, and Ross decided to meet on the island’s shore to discuss how each of their vessels could best be deployed in the next stage of the rescue attempt. They had just begun conferring when one of Penny’s sailors came racing down one of the island’s hills, shouting, “Graves, Captain Penny, graves!”

  Each of three captains had brought several of their men ashore with them, and now all of them, including Kane, rushed up the hill. Reaching the top, they encountered an agonizing sight. There before them were three mounds of earth, each topped by a weather-beaten grave marker. A quick reading of the markers revealed that underneath the mounds lay two of Franklin’s sailors from the Erebus and one from the Terror.

  Sobered by what they had discovered, De Haven, Penny, and Ross then ordered a search of the entire island. The crewmen soon found remains of a blacksmith’s forge, charred areas where fires had been built, an enormous pile of some six hundred cans that had contained preserved meat, fragments of rope, scraps of paper, and other articles that had obviously belonged to the Franklin expedition.

  It was the first indisputable evidence of where Sir John and his men had once been and what had happened to at least three of them. But there was deep frustration as well. Early in the search, one of the groups scouring the island had come across what promised to be the most rewarding discovery of all. It was a large cairn, and surely it contained a message from Franklin informing anyone who found it where he was heading after leaving Beechey Island. But to the amazement of its discoverers, it was completely empty.

  No one was more surprised than Elisha Kane. In his journal he wrote,

  The cairn was mounted on a high and conspicuous portion of the shore, and evidently intended to attract observation; but, though several parties examined it, digging around in it in every direction, not a single particle of information could be gleaned. This is remarkable; and for so able and practical an Arctic commander as Sir John Franklin, an incomprehensible omission.

  It was both a mystery and a disappointment. A message left behind on Beechey Island would have been the most important indication in what had now become a six-year search of where the explorer and his men, if still alive, might be found. One clue, however, as to where the Franklin party may have gone after leaving the island was discovered. Again, taking to his journal, Kane wrote, “In a narrow interval between [Beechey Island’s] hills . . . the searching parties of the Rescue and Mr. Murtaugh of the [Advance] found the tracks of a sledge clearly defined and unmistakable both to character and direction. They pointed to the eastern shores of Wellington Sound.”

  THE GRAVES OF THREE FRANKLIN CREWMEN on Beechey Island; this engraving is based on a drawing by Kane, for his book Arctic Explorations.

  Acting on this clue, all of the ships anchored off Beechey Island—including all four of Austin’s vessels, which had arrived while the search of the island was taking place—set sail for Wellington Sound. The British captains, experienced in Arctic travel, were aware that winter was fast setting in and they would undoubtedly, once again, have to spend long, dark months locked in the ice. De Haven and Kane, on the other hand, had no such intention. As the snow began to fall and as the ice began to build up at an alarming rate, they agreed that it was time to head for home. Suddenly, however, they became aware that the Rescue was no longer behind them; they had become separated in the storm. If they were to have any chance of escaping the Arctic, they and the others aboard the Advance would have to find their sister ship as quickly as possible.

  They finally found her, but now they were spending most of their time trying to find open channels. “We are literally running for our lives,” wrote Kane. “We are staggering along under all sail forcing our way where we can.” Finally, they were compelled to give up. They could go no farther. They would have to spend the winter locked in the ice at the mouth of Wellington Channel, a prospect made even more dire by their awareness that the nearest British ship, in all probability, would be wintering at least fifty miles away. That distance “in these inhospitable deserts,” Kane later wrote, “was as complete a separation as an entire continent.”

  He had faced death in battle, he had descended into the mouth of a volcano, and he had risked danger throughout the world, but never had Kane lived through what he and the rest of the men of the Grinnell expedition were forced to endure that winter. Even before the worst hardships began, it was determined that the Rescue had been so battered by the ice that it would have to be abandoned. All of the expedition’s thirty-three men would have to winter it out aboard the Advance— a space, noted Kane, no bigger than his father’s library back in Philadelphia.

  It turned out to be one of the coldest winters in Arctic history. Burning hot coffee froze in the crews’ mugs as soon as it was poured. If a man stuck out his tongue, it froze to his beard. Butter and lard had to be cut with an axe and a chisel. Then the Arctic winter darkness set in. Almost twenty-four hours a day it was pitch black. “I long for the sunlight,” Kane wrote in his journal. “Dear, dear sun, no wonder you are worshipped.”

  Just when it appeared that conditions could get no worse, many of the men were stricken with scurvy, some so seriously that any activity caused them to faint. Fortuna
tely, Elisha Kane was a physician far ahead of his time. Although in Kane’s era there was a theory that citrus was claimed to cure or prevent scurvy (a discovery made by Scottish physician James Lind in 1747), citrus was still hotly debated as a scurvy panacea. Many still believed that scurvy could be kept at bay by exercise and hygiene, rather than diet, and scurvy continued to claim the lives of mariners throughout the world. The forward-thinking Kane, however, began forcing the crew to eat potatoes and sauerkraut and to drink lime juice, all rich in vitamin C, which we now know prevents scurvy. Later, De Haven and others credited Kane with having saved the expedition from total disaster.

  By March 1851, the Advance was still frozen in, perched atop two huge mounds of ice. De Haven, in what turned out to be an inspired move, sent men across the ice to where the stricken Rescue lay. There they dug an eight-foot pit around the vessel’s damaged hull and, despite the cold, repaired it. During the first week of April, open stretches of water began to appear, and the Rescue’s crew returned to their ship. On June 5, the long-awaited breakup of the ice took place. The ordeal was over. The Grinnell expedition could, at last, sail for home.

  THE ADVANCE ARRIVED IN NEW YORK on September 30, the Rescue on October 7. The first American expedition to the Arctic had survived. But, like their British counterparts, they had neither found John Franklin nor discovered whether he and his men were still alive. The Grinnell expedition had to report defeat. For Elisha Kane, however, it was a much different story. From the moment that the Advance and Rescue dropped their anchors in New York Harbor, both the public and the press demonstrated an intense curiosity about this first band of Americans who had braved the mysterious Arctic in search of the fabled Sir John Franklin. True to his nature, De Haven, who, as commander of the expedition, should have been its chief spokesperson, was not interested in publicity. After submitting his official report to the secretary of the navy, he faded out of view, leaving center stage to the limelight-loving Kane.