Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [23]
From Baffin’s maps and reports, Ross knew of the eponymous Baffin Bay and of three large sounds—Smith, Jones, and Lancaster—in its northwestern reaches. Given wide latitude by Barrow to conduct the expedition as he saw fit, Ross determined to explore those sounds to see if any of them gave out onto the hoped for Northwest Passage. In July, after three months at sea, he and his crew reached Baffin Bay—something of a triumph itself, since Barrow, for one, had openly doubted its existence. After concluding that Smith Sound and Jones Sound were impassable, they turned their attention to Lancaster, which Ross had considered the most promising of the three. When they arrived there at the end of August, however, the sound was socked in by thick fog, and there was nothing to do but wait. Finally, at three o’clock on the afternoon of August 31, an officer knocked on Ross’s cabin door to report that the skies were clearing, and the captain immediately headed for the deck. Shortly thereafter, the fog lifted completely and, Ross wrote in his account of the voyage:
I distinctly saw the land, round the bottom of the bay, forming a chain of mountains connected with those which extended along the north and south sides. This land appeared to be at the distance of eight leagues [about 27 miles]; and Mr. Lewis, the master, and James Haig, leading man, being sent for, they took its bearings, which were inserted in the log…. The mountains, which occupied the centre, in a north and south direction, were named Croker’s Mountains, after the Secretary to the Admiralty.
So Lancaster “sound” was only an inlet. Instead of opening westward onto a waterway out of Baffin Bay and onward to the Pacific, it ended in land—a vast expanse of ice and high peaks. It also ended Ross’s voyage to the Arctic. Disappointed, but having fulfilled the terms of his naval mandate, the commander returned to England.
But something odd had happened. Ross’s second-in-command, one William Parry, had been following at a distance in the other ship, and he hadn’t seen the mountains that Ross claimed blocked the way out of Lancaster Sound. When he got home, he made this fact known to John Barrow. As the backer of the trip and England’s leading champion of the quest for the Northwest Passage, Barrow naturally preferred the idea of the mountains not existing to the idea of their existing. Trusting Parry’s word, he concluded that the commander had been wrong. A cloud of mistrust and derision began to gather around Ross, even though, by most measures, he had achieved the extraordinary. Chief among his accomplishments was navigating a British ship through the treacherous waters of the eastern Arctic and returning it safely home. At the same time, he had verified William Baffin’s previously disputed travel report, opened up Baffin Bay for the British whaling industry, documented the first known encounter between Westerners and the regional Inuit population, gathered important information about tides, ice, and magnetism, and brought back any number of biological and geological specimens. But in the face of the fervor over the Northwest Passage, none of that carried much weight. Ross’s reputation was tarnished, and it was soon to tank. Less than a year after the 1818 expedition returned, Barrow sent Parry back to Lancaster Sound for a second look. This time, Parry did see the Croker range—and then he sailed right through it. The mountains were a mirage.
John Ross had fallen victim to one of the stranger and more fascinating optical phenomena on earth. Anyone who has been in a car on a hot day is familiar with the mirage in which a pool of water seems to cover the highway in the distance but disappears as you approach. This is called an inferior mirage, or sometimes a desert mirage, since the same phenomenon causes nonexistent oases to appear to travelers in hot, sandy lands. But very few of us are familiar with mirages of the kind Ross saw, because the conditions necessary to