Arctic Drift (Dirk Pitt 20)

“Blasphemous thought,” Perlmutter boomed. “Which reminds me, Dirk, you said your calling involved something more than just fine dining with a dear friend . . .”

“That’s right, Julien. I’m on the hunt for a scarce mineral that made an appearance in the Arctic around 1849.”

“Sounds intriguing. What’s your interest?”

Pitt summarized the importance of ruthenium and the tale of the Inuit ore from the Miners Co-op.

“Adelaide Peninsula, you say? If my memory serves, that’s just below King William Island, dead center in the Northwest Passage,” Perlmutter said, stroking this thick gray beard. “And in 1849, the only explorers in that region would have been Franklin’s party.”

“Who was Franklin?” Loren asked.

“Sir John Franklin. British naval officer and renowned Arctic explorer. Fought at Trafalgar on the Bellerophon as a young lad, if I recall. Though a little past his prime at age fifty-nine, he sailed with two stoutly built ships in an attempt to find and navigate the fabled Northwest Passage. He came within a hair of pulling it off, but his ships became trapped in the ice. The surviving men were forced to abandon the ships and attempt to reach a fur-trading camp hundreds of miles to the south. Franklin and all one hundred and thirty-four men of his expedition party ultimately died, making it by far the worst tragedy in Arctic exploration.”

Perlmutter excused himself to visit one of his reading rooms, returning with several old books and a crudely bound manuscript. Flipping through one of the books, he stopped at a page and read aloud.

“Here we are. Franklin sailed from the Thames in May of 1845 with two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. They were last seen entering Baffin Bay, off Greenland, later that summer. With provisions to last the crew three years, they were expected to winter at least one year in the ice before attempting a path to the Pacific, or else return to England with proof that a passage did not exist. Franklin and his crew instead perished in the Arctic, and his ships were never seen again.”

“Didn’t anyone go looking for them when they failed to appear after three years?” Loren asked.

“Oh my dear, did they! Concern grew by the end of 1847 when no word had been heard, and relief efforts commenced the next year. Literally dozens of relief expeditions were sent in search of Franklin, with vessels prodding both ends of the passage. Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, famously financed numerous expeditions single-handedly to locate her husband. Remarkably, it wouldn’t be until 1854, nine years after they departed England, that the remains of some of the crewmen were found on King William Island, confirming the worst.”

“Di

d they leave any logbooks or records behind?” Pitt asked.

“Just one. A chilling note that was placed in a rock cairn on the island and discovered in 1859.” Perlmutter found a photocopy of the note in one of his books and slid it over for Loren and Pitt to read.

“There’s a notation that Franklin died in 1847, but it doesn’t say why,” Loren read.

“The note raises more questions than answers. They were tantalizingly close to transiting the worst section of the passage but may have been caught by an exceedingly short summer, and the ships probably broke up in the ice.”

Pitt found a map in the book, which showed the area of Franklin’s demise. The point where his ships were presumed abandoned was less than a hundred miles from Adelaide Peninsula.

“The ruthenium found in the region was referred to as Black Kobluna,” Pitt said, searching for a potential geographic clue on the chart.

“Kobluna. That’s an Inuit word,” Perlmutter said, pulling out the crudely bound manuscript. Opening the ancient parched papers, Loren saw that the entire document was handwritten.

“Yes,” Pitt answered. “It is an Inuit term for ‘white man.’ ”

Perlmutter rapped a knuckle on the open document. “In 1860, a New York journalist named Stuart Leuthner sought to unravel the mystery of the Franklin Expedition. He traveled to the Arctic and lived in an Inuit settlement for seven years, learning their language and customs. He scoured the region around King William Island, interviewing every inhabitant he could find who had possibly interacted with Franklin or his crew. But the clues were few, and he returned to New York disillusioned, never finding the definitive answers he was looking for. For some reason he decided against publishing his findings and left his writings behind, to return to the Arctic. He took a young Inuit wife, then ventured into the wild to live off the land and was never heard from again.”

“Is that his journal from his time among the Inuit?” Pitt asked.

Perlmutter nodded. “I was able to acquire it at auction a few years back, picking it up at a reasonable price.”

“I’m amazed it was never published,” Loren said.

“You wouldn’t be if you read it. Ninety percent of it is a discourse on catching and butchering seals, building igloos, and surviving the boredom of the dark winter months.”

“And the other ten percent?” Pitt asked.

“Let us see,” Perlmutter smiled.

For the next hour, Perlmutter skimmed through the journal, sharing occasional passages where an Inuit described witnessing a sledge party on the distant shores of King William Island or noted the two large ships trapped in the ice. Near the very end of the journal, Leuthner interviewed a young man whose story put Loren and Pitt on the edge of their seats.

The account was from Koo-nik, a thirteen-year-old boy in 1849 when he went on a seal-hunting excursion with his uncle west of King William Island. He and his uncle had climbed a large hummock and found a massive boat wedged in a large ice floe.

“Kobluna,” the uncle had said, as they made their way to the vessel.