Episode 22: Trapped in the icy waters of the Northwest Passage

For centuries, the Northwest Passage, the long-sought sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through northern Canada, was a holy grail of Arctic exploration. Even now, sailing through it isn’t guaranteed. Mark Synnott, a National Geographic Explorer, writer, and adventurer, attempted to sail his own boat through the Northwest Passage to retrace the doomed 1845 expedition of British explorer Sir John Franklin. None of the Franklin expedition’s 129 men made it home, but what exactly happened remains a mystery.

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TRANSCRIPT

PETER GWIN (HOST): All right. So, look, I know we're going to get into the whole journey. But let's start with—tell me about the moment on this journey when you felt the most scared.

MARK SYNNOTT (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER): Hoo, OK. That's a good one. Um

GWIN: This is Mark Synnott. He’s a longtime National Geographic Explorer, mountain climber, and pretty much all-around adventurer. His phone calls usually start with something like, “Hey man, I’ve got a crazy idea.” And over the last few years, those phone calls have led to stories about looking for a famous lost climber on Mount Everest, interviewing the king of a remote Himalayan kingdom, and searching jungle cliffs in Guyana for new frog species.

Mountains are often part of the equation, but a couple years ago, Mark called about a completely different adventure: a gnarly sailing voyage through the Canadian Arctic.

SYNNOTT: The moment when I was the most scared—we got caught in the ice in a place called Pasley Bay. The whole thing about doing this in a fiberglass boat is no matter what, don't let your boat get caught in the ice.

GWIN: Ice. It’s the bane of Arctic explorers, and Mark knew exactly what could go wrong. You see, he was following in the footsteps of Sir John Franklin, a British sea captain who led a disastrous expedition in the 1840s. Franklin was looking for the Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Canadian Arctic that would open a lucrative shortcut to Asia. Instead Franklin vanished, along with two ships and 128 men. Even though we’ve found clues and eventually located the sunken ships, modern explorers are still trying to solve the mystery: what exactly happened to Franklin? One thing we do know is that the trouble started when the ice closed in.

SYNNOTT: And we made a bad decision. We had a bit of bad luck. We did get caught in the ice, and it was endless fire drills to keep the boat from getting crushed in the ice or pushed up onto the land. On the ninth day, when we woke up in the morning, the free water that existed between the floes of ice had frozen. And I came on deck and our friend who is kind of our local guide, a guy named Jacob Keanik, who's a Inuit who lived amongst the ice for his whole life—and he’s very taciturn, and he didn't say much usually, but he turned to me and he said, “Winter is coming.”

GWIN: It was turning into a race against time. The longer Mark waited, the greater the chance the ice would trap his boat in the Arctic forever.

SYNNOTT: It suddenly—it hit me kind of like a punch, you know, to the gut: Wow. I can't believe this is happening. This is what happened to Franklin. We are actually being frozen in for the winter.

GWIN: I’m Peter Gwin, editor at large at National Geographic magazine. And this is Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world.

This week: National Geographic tries to solve one of the great Arctic mysteries—what happened to the Franklin expedition? The answer could lie in the captain’s tomb, which has never been found. Also, what happens when your sailboat gets trapped in ice at the top of the world?

That’s all coming up. But first, fuel your curiosity with a free one-month trial subscription to National Geographic Premium. You’ll have unlimited access on any device, anywhere, ad-free with our app that lets you download stories to read offline. Explore every page ever published with a century of digital archives at your fingertips. Check it all out for free at natgeo.com/exploremore.

GWIN: This story really starts with the history, and you were following the trail of a famous polar explorer named John Franklin. So how did you learn about him, and tell me, what was he trying to do?

SYNNOTT: I guess my introduction to all of this lore of Arctic exploration was through a book called The Arctic Grail. It's an incredible piece of work written by this guy Pierre Berton. And there are so many epic stories about these adventures and explorations that these people went on. But there's really—none of them are as epic as the Franklin story. The really brief synopsis is that they set off in 1845 with these two, like, really burly, state-of-the-art ships. There were 129 guys, including Franklin. And essentially what happened is they just disappeared. And that had never happened before. There had never—you know, it's like just a disaster in the largest scale possible, really, for the time. I mean, if you look at the history of exploration, there's not really too many stories where that many people just vanished into the ether.

GWIN: So what's so special about the Northwest Passage? I mean, for Franklin and the other explorers, you know, what made this the holy grail?

SYNNOTT: The Northwest Passage originally was seen as something that could be used as a trade route. It didn't take that long before they realized that it just wasn't feasible and that even if it did exist, that it wasn't going to be practical to use it. But then it turned into almost like a quest, you know, of the Knights of the Round Table type of thing, where it was a last great problem of exploration, and there were a few different ones. The North Pole was also one, the South Pole, and Mount Everest. Just epic quests of exploration.

GWIN: All right so, Mark, they disappear. How long before any clues start emerging about what actually happened to the two ships?

SYNNOTT: Well, it takes a long time. They didn't find anything until 1850 when they discovered a cairn and some graves on a place called Beechey Island. And there were three graves there for Franklin sailors, and they figured out that that's where they had spent the first winter. The big discovery was in 1854 by a guy named John Rae, and he was doing some surveying and exploration and looking for evidence of Franklin when he met an Inuit who told him a story about 35 or 40 kobluna, which is the Inuit word for “white man,” who died near the mouth of a great river. And there was—this Inuit, whose name was In-nook-poo-zhe-jook, also reported that there were signs of cannibalism in the camp. So Rae came back to England and reported that, and it didn't go over well in British society. You know, this was really the first news of the Franklin expedition. Franklin's wife, Lady Jane, had been tirelessly launching these expeditions and kind of rallying people to try to find her husband and his men, and now here comes this guy who's saying basically that they ate each other.

GWIN: Not polite British upper crust behavior.

SYNNOTT: What's interesting is that Charles Dickens in particular, he was friends with Lady Jane, so he published some articles where he pretty thoroughly threw Rae under the bus for this characterization. And in the process of that, he also threw the Inuit under the bus, and based on my analysis of all of it, that's one of the main reasons that more stock was not put into the Inuit testimony. And there's quite a bit of it that talks about interactions with Franklin's men and gives us a level of detail about what might have happened to them that we wouldn't know otherwise.

GWIN: OK, what are the remaining questions here? I mean, what is it that people are still trying to understand and looking for in regards of, you know, the next chapter in the story?

SYNNOTT: Well, what drew me in was when I learned that there were people who are out there, still, actively today trying to solve the Franklin mystery.

GWIN: And what do you mean by that, “the mystery?” Like, what's the mystery that's still left? I mean, the ships have been found now just in the last, you know, 10 or 15 years. Clearly nobody survived. What can we still learn, I guess, about this?

SYNNOTT: So a captain in the British Royal Navy like Franklin is going to keep a detailed record. Imagine a journal where you write down what happens every day. Hundred percent that Franklin did that. That book has never been found. If you could find written records, you could start to piece together everything that happened in between. We know they all died, but we don't know the details. We don't know why. We don't know where they all are. There were 129 guys. The remains and the graves of about 30 have been found. So where the heck did the rest of them go?

Some of the Inuit testimony includes stories about a burial vault that some Franklinites believe could be Franklin's grave. And so the purpose of our expedition was to try to find Franklin's tomb. If you could find Franklin's tomb—well first of all, I mean that would be kind of an electrifying discovery—but there's also the possibility that these records I was talking about would have been buried either with him or somewhere nearby. And so that's kind of the holy grail of the Franklin expedition.

GWIN: OK, so here's the thing. I mean, you could search for Franklin and his tomb without actually having to sail through the Northwest Passage. Why was it important for you to actually put yourself in the same shoes of, you know, this, you know, 19th century explorer who got frozen in the ice?

SYNNOTT: Yeah, a lot of people have asked that question because, yeah, I could have just gone to King William Island. You know, I could have just flown there in a plane from home. I've been to the Arctic a number of times before this expedition on climbing trips, and it's pretty much the most magical place on earth. So when I started thinking about the Franklin story and about, you know, the possibility of me maybe adding like a little mini chapter to it of my own, I just immediately thought, I've got to go all in, full immersion. I wanted to sail in the same waters that they sailed in. I wanted to anchor in the same places. I wanted to battle with the ice and the weather. The idea of standing on my own ship and looking out and seeing the same things that those guys saw was really compelling for me. I knew that it was going to be possibly the most epic adventure of my life. And I mean, someday maybe I'll get to the point where I'm so old and crusty and I don't do that, and I have to just sit at home and do research, you know, and books and that kind of thing. But while I can still go, I want to be in these stories, like as deep as I can get.

GWIN: What's it like to sail in the Arctic?

SYNNOTT: One thing that hadn't been impressed upon me, you know, as strongly as it could have been, is that ice and fog go together like peanut butter and jelly. Sailing in fog when there's ice in the water was terrifying. I wouldn't know that in the visceral way that I do if I hadn't gone and done it myself. And of course, I thought about those guys, you know, Franklin and all the other explorers because they didn't have radar. But the crazy thing about it is that, you know, there's different kinds of ice. You have icebergs, you know, which are big chunks of frozen glaciers. They're made out of fresh water. They stick up out of the water pretty far, and they show up on radar. But then there's pack ice, and pack ice is the frozen ocean. And it's like flat pans of ice. The ones we saw were generally around six feet thick, and guess what? They don't show up on radar. They don't stick up far enough. And wherever they are, they cool the surface down so much that fog forms right over the ice. And so we dealt with that a lot. And it was—well let's put it this way. I definitely don't really need to go and do that again. I don't need to experience that all over.

GWIN: So when you're trapped like that, Mark, and you know all this history, I mean, did you find yourself kind of putting yourself in Franklin's shoes? I mean, did you start having Franklin dreams?

SYNNOTT: The thing that kept going through my head was, “Be careful what you wish for lest it come true.” And I know that's cliché, but never has that saying been more true, because I wanted to immerse myself in the Franklin story. I wanted to experience what they did. And then it got a little too real. All told, we were trapped in the ice for nine days. Franklin was trapped in the ice for years. Years. And so I really feel kind of wimpy making sort of a big deal out of it, you know?

GWIN: You did get to King William Island and you were able to do an overland search for Franklin's tomb. You met up with this guy, Tom Gross, and another guy named Jacob Keanik. So tell me about those guys and how you guys went about looking on land for Franklin.

SYNNOTT: Well, Tom Gross is a Franklinite, who—I think he did his first Franklin search expedition in 1994, and the guy's dedicated, like a huge chunk of his life and, you know, his personal finances to try to find Franklin's tomb. And he's basing it all on an Inuit testimony. And in 2015, he was up there flying, doing an aerial reconnaissance, and he looked out the window of the plane and he saw what he has described as a stone house. It was the type of thing that an Inuit would never build. They don't build things like that. And to this day, he is convinced that what he saw was Franklin's tomb. I mean, this next part's a little bit embarrassing, but in the excitement of the moment, he and his co-pilot somehow failed to hit the button to mark the waypoint on their GPS. And ever since, he's been hunting for this stone house. And Jacob is kind of like Tom's guide. He's a legendary hunter and guide and just survivalist.

GWIN: When I think about the Arctic, you know, my mind immediately goes to sort of, you know, white, ice snowscape. But in the summertime, you know, what does King William Island look like? And so when you guys are searching, what's the land like that you're covering there?

SYNNOTT: So it's completely flat and homogenous. It reminded me of the American prairie. Picture a chunk of the American prairie the size of Connecticut covered with thousands of lakes and ponds, all interconnected with little streams with these wild, like, gravel ridges that run in between. And it's and it's really difficult to get around because in between the gravel ridges, there's all these grasslands, and most of it is mud bog. I mean at one point I had my bike stuck in literally up to the handlebars

GWIN: So you’re talking about—these are ATVs, right? You guys are in four-wheelers?

SYNNOTT: Yeah I call them—you know, Jacob calls them bikes and we were calling them bikes, but yeah, four-wheel ATVs. One of the coolest things about it was that there would be these Inuksuks, which are Inuit cairns, and Jacob told me that they were built by the Thule, like 800 to 1,000 years ago. But the wildest part about the interior of King William Island is that it's one of the world's largest breeding grounds for geese. And there were thousands and thousands and thousands of geese everywhere, so the air was filled with their feathers. They were flying everywhere, and then honk, honk, honk, honk from all these geese. And, you know, there was a lot of game, and it made me think, like, there must have been times when Franklin and his men were doing OK. Like if they got a muskox, if they got a caribou—and there's Inuit testimony about how they did just that—there probably were times where they were well-fed and they must have thought, you know, “We've got a chance. We've got to get out of here.” You can't help but put yourself in their shoes and imagine, how would I have tried to survive?

GWIN: OK, so you guys are looking for, you know, this—as you described it, electrifying discovery if you found Franklin's tomb—you've got this tantalizing, you know, story from Tom about seeing what looks like, you know, a stone house that, you know, seems like that could be the place he's buried. You think you've got it narrowed down to a reasonable search location. Did you find it?

SYNNOTT: We set up a camp and we went to this inlet where Tom thinks that Franklin brought the ships in. And there's a map that's based on some of this Inuit testimony. And he figured out where he thought that map was based. We rode out on this little peninsula sticking out into this inlet, and I saw some strange-looking rocks. I looked down. I started finding all of these items on the ground, and I realized that it was an Inuit, an old Inuit camp.

And then I found this brass fitting. And the brass fitting, it didn't match up with the other stuff that was there in the camp, and so we think that we found a piece of the engine from either one of those ships in the place where Tom thought we would find a camp. So that was day one! It was like one of those things where within 45 minutes of the search, we found an important clue. There was a lot of excitement and we thought, We're about to find it. We're about to find the camp, and then once we find the camp, then we're going to find the burial vault. And we couldn't find it. And Tom was pulling his hair out because he was sure that this was the year that we were going to find it.

GWIN: When you get to the end of an expedition like this and there's so much expectation and you've got such a big goal and you don't find the thing you're looking for, how do you process that?

SYNNOTT: Well when I go into these trips, I know that it's a long shot. It's definitely, like, there's some hubris involved, like, Oh, we're going to solve the Franklin mystery. But I also love this whole kind of idea of like a transcontinental narrative where you have your own first-person tale of following in the footsteps of these, you know, epic explorations. And when your own personal journey is, you know, 112 days and 5,877 nautical miles from southern Maine to Nome, Alaska, like that could easily be its own story. But then you add in this really cool history and some, you know, new bits and pieces that are unique that we help to add to the fabric of this story. I think you end up with something that's pretty cool, even when you didn't solve the mystery. I mean, I also have a GPS track that covers 500 miles, you know, with Jacob Keanik, a local Inuit. And I mean, the guy's quiet, but as I got to know him better and better and better and more and more, you know, he opened up to me, and we had times when we were out in the land in the rain and him telling me stories from his family, from his great-grandmother. Lore that has been passed down over the generations in his family. And I mean that alone—like if that's all I got out of it—I would consider it one of the best experiences of my life.

GWIN: So you guys search the land and then you get back on your sailboat, and you're in the middle of the Northwest Passage and it's late in the year. I mean, are you thinking at that point like it may be too late to try to make it all the way through? I mean, you're kind of like, you have to either go backward or you have to keep going. So what made you decide, you know, what to do?

SYNNOTT: Well first we had to get out of the ice. And Jacob basically said in so many words, like, We're toast. Like, we're here for the winter. In the morning, I was like, This is it. I'm losing my boat. It's going to get frozen in. It’s going to get crushed. In the afternoon, the wind finally died. The sun came out, and it was like the ice came alive. There was heat, and all the ice was crashing and breaking. And we just went for it ‘cause we had no choice, and we made it out. And that was, you know, on the one hand, one of the biggest, you know, feelings of relief that I've ever had in my life. But then on the other, we still had 2,300 miles to go, I think. And it was now late August. And so then it just turned into kind of like a race to escape the Northwest Passage.

GWIN: So you finally pull your boat into the harbor at Nome, Alaska, and you've completed the Northwest Passage. I mean, this is an epic achievement, you know, even in 2023. I mean, having read all about— this is what Franklin was trying to achieve and here you were able to do it—what did that feel like?

SYNNOTT: On the one hand, it's like when you're doing something that's really epic and uncomfortable and cold and scary and all that, you know, there's going to be a part of you that wants it to end. You're going to be homesick, you know? Like, I have a nice situation, you know, at home with my family, and my bed is super comfortable and all that. So there's part of me that really wanted to be home and wanted it to be over.

But then when we pulled into Nome and I realized that we had made it and that it was over, there was also a part of me that didn't want it to end. Like this immersion that I was talking about that I had done in the Northwest Passage, it was so deep that there was almost like a primal part of me that didn't want to let go of that and didn't want to leave the boat. You know, the boat had become my home, and it had, like, a personality. I talked to the boat. I loved the boat. Like I loved the boat almost, like, to the level of being a member of my family. So yeah, very much like, you know, a mixed bag as far as all that goes.

GWIN: So do you think Tom Gross is going to find Franklin's tomb? Tom and Jacob?

SYNNOTT: Jacob was with us on the boat, and at one point he said that he knew where Franklin's tomb was located. And this was after we had done the overland expedition. So you can kind of imagine my reaction, sort of looking at him like, “Well, really? Like, you know where it is? How come you didn't say anything when we were out there?” And what he said was that he had—basically he had said something, but that Tom thinks they already looked there. And Tom is going back there this summer to search.

GWIN: You think the tomb's out there, then?

SYNNOTT: I interviewed Tom extensively about what he saw from the air in 2015. That matches up with Inuit testimony about what they saw, and then there's a contemporary Inuit story from 2004. So personally, yes, I believe it's there. And that's part of the mystery. And it's kind of cool, you know, in a way, that we didn't find it. And of course, you know, I think Jacob is perfectly happy with the idea that we’d never find it, you know? And he told me several times in different ways while we were hanging out, It's bad luck to mess around with dead people and their things. And, you know, the longer that it goes without finding it, you know, the more time he's going to be able to be out there exploring and just kind of, you know, communing with that landscape.

GWIN: What's it about the Franklin mystery that has kept it alive? You know, people fascinated by it for almost two centuries?

SYNNOTT: Well, I mean, the thing with a great mystery is usually there are clues, and maybe the clues don't add up in a coherent way. There's Inuit testimony about interacting with Franklin's men in the mid-1850s. If that's the case, if some of them survived that long, they had to have been living with the Inuit and wintering with the Inuit. Like, can you imagine those stories and what that must have been like, and who those people were? And the records that might tell that story, they could exist. There's a very strong chance that they do. I mean, there's people who have dedicated, like, a solid chunk of their lives to this story. And I can say for me personally, it was just an excuse to go on pretty much the greatest adventure that I've ever had.

GWIN: If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That’s the best way to support Overheard. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe.

There’s a lot more to this story that we didn’t have time for. Subscribers can read Mark’s article in the August issue of National Geographic. And you can also follow those heart-pounding moments stuck in the ice in a TV documentary. Watch Explorer: Lost in the Arctic, premiering August 24 on National Geographic and streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.

And for the full story—I mean the whole deal, which is super crazy—look out for Mark Synnott’s upcoming book Into the Ice, coming fall of 2024 from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.

That’s all in the show notes, right there in your podcast app.

CREDITS

This week’s Overheard episode is produced by senior producer Jacob Pinter.

Our other senior producer is Brian Gutierrez.

Our senior editor is Eli Chen.

Our manager of audio is Carla Wills.

Our executive producer of audio is Davar Ardalan.

Our photo editor is Julie Hau.

Hansdale Hsu sound-designed this episode and composed our theme music.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners.

The National Geographic Society is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world and funds the work of National Geographic Explorer Mark Synnott.

Michael Tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling.

Nathan Lump is National Geographic’s editor in chief.

And I’m your host, Peter Gwin.

We also have an update: After 141 episodes of bringing you stories from the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world, Overheard is taking a break. We’re exploring new ideas for audio at National Geographic. So stay tuned for more on that. In the meantime, thank you for listening, and see y’all soon.

SHOW NOTES

Want more? 

Get the inside scoop on Mark’s Northwest Passage voyage and see gorgeous photos in the August issue of National Geographic.

Watch Explorer: Lost in the Arctic, premiering August 24 on National Geographic and streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.

And to go even deeper, Mark will tell the full story in his book Into the Ice, coming fall 2024 from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.

Also explore:

On paper, Sir John Franklin’s expedition seemed to lack for little. There were ironclad ships, steam engines, libraries totaling 2,900 books, and even animal companions—two dogs and a monkey. Here’s how it all went wrong.

Explore another polar expedition gone wrong—Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica aboard Endurance—in the Overheard episode “What the Ice Gets, the Ice Keeps.”