Real explorers don't eat quiche

By Bill Taylor

Toronto Star, 22 June 1993

Owen Beattie figured the bears had to be the biggest threat when he and John Geiger led a six-man expedition to Marble Island just off Rankin Inlet in Hudson Bay.

"There had been polar bear sightings and polar bears are a very definite danger so we camped on the highest part of the island," says Beattie, professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta.

"You don't associate the Arctic with thunderstorms but they can be quite frequent.

"We don't want to sound like a couple of village idiots picking the highest point because there was a nice view. It was a question of measuring the risks and the polar bears seemed to be worst."

Then the thunder and lightning started.

"There we were in a raging storm in tents with metal poles," Beattie says. "It was totally terrifying."

Historical investigator Geiger says thunderstorms have horrified him ever since. "It's like shell-shock."

"The lightning was striking very close to us," Beattie says. "We moved our camp the next day. Suddenly, the bears became a secondary risk."

It was an illustration, the two men say, of how vulnerable early explorers were.

"They put themselves right on the edge," Beattie says. "As vulnerable as could be. You still get a sense of that now.

"If the weather is bad, you can't get out. You can't get a helicopter or a boat in. It's a transitional vulnerability. It doesn't last forever, but you can still be totally isolated for several days at a time. You get an idea of what it must've been like."

The explorer Beattie and Geiger were interested in was James Knight. He took two ships and 40 men into Hudson Bay in 1719 seeking a Northwest Passage and the gold he believed lay beyond.

They were never seen again. But their ships lie, remarkably well preserved, beneath the waves off Marble Island - known to the Inuit as Dead Man's Island.

"If I can put it this way, Knight was a politically correct explorer in the sense that he saw a landscape through the eyes of the indigenous people, rather than disregarding them," Geiger says.

"There was this expanded field of vision, if you will. Questioning them and learning from their opinions and experience."

Beattie and Geiger made their reputation as Arctic sleuths a decade ago when they exhumed the bodies of three Victorian sailors from the doomed Franklin expedition - also in search of the Northwest Passage.

Their book Frozen In Time, which linked the fate of the Franklin expedition to lead poisoning, was a bestseller around the world.

Their new book, Dead Silence (Penguin, $29.99) is subtitled The Greatest Mystery In Arctic Discovery.

"There are really only two expeditions where no one survived," Geiger says.

"But you couldn't give that 'mystery' title to Franklin," Beattie adds. "Knight is much more intriguing."

The world knows now what happened to the Franklin expedition, Geiger says.

"And we've come as close as anyone to getting to the root of the Knight mystery," he says. "But still we don't know exactly what happened or why. We don't know why they simply didn't sail out to safety."

He and Beattie examined historical documents, conducted archeological digs and did forensic analysis on human remains found on the island. They discovered that at least some of Knight's group escaped to the mainland, the forbidding Barren Lands. And there they must have perished.

"They did leave the site. There's no doubt about that," Beattie says. "And as soon as you leave the site . . . it's so vast.

"In a coastal situation you can look and eventually you will find. But if you look at the vastness of the Barren Lands, how would you ever find them?

"We know they didn't sail away. The ships are there."

He and Geiger visited Marble Island four times between 1989 and last year.

"You go in by boat in July," Beattie says. "The weather starts to turn by August so you've got a sort of four-week window of opportunity. Three weeks was our longest stay."

Geiger has "vivid memories of all the Canada geese flying south for winter and we couldn't get off. I started to think that maybe we'd be the next victims.

"I had hypothermia. I had to stay in bed for 12 hours. There was rain, high humidity. You can't dry anything out. And it was cold."

Beattie says the ideal temperature is 5 Celsius.

"That's nice. The mosquitoes tend to drop to the ground at that point. But we had lots of rain.

"I remember waking in the middle of the night and cutting a hole in the bottom of the tent to let the rain out."

After all their efforts, are they frustrated that they'll probably never know exactly what happened to James Knight and his followers?

"No," Beattie says. "Even with the best archeological site you know you're going to miss things. You're never going to be able to explore everything. You take for granted there will be things you won't be able to understand."

Geiger likes the idea of the mystery remaining.

"There's a romance to things that aren't solved," he says. "A true mystery story like this will have a very long life and fascination.

"The landscape is such an important element. You couldn't have a Knight expedition along the West Coast or around Miami. It wouldn't have the same impact. This landscape lends itself to mystery."

To mystery and to danger. The men have talked about polar bears and lightning but what about the underdone burgers?

"Well, a couple of years ago, a couple of people out there died of hamburger disease," Beattie says. "It's something you have to be very aware of and careful about. You have to watch what you eat and how it's cooked."

Hamburger disease, or hemolytic uremic syndrome, can be caused by bacteria from partially cooked ground meat.

Both men are having hamburgers for lunch.

Geiger wants his "well done, very well done."

Beattie orders his "pink in the centre," ignoring Geiger's muttered comment: "Owen likes to live on the edge."

But he decides it's a little too rare for comfort and sends it back to the kitchen.

"If there's a burger on the menu, that's what we eat," he says.

"Yeah," Geiger says. "Real explorers don't eat quiche."