Haunted by Robert McClure

Bestselling author Kaliane Bradley on her obsession with piecing together the patchy life of a Polar explorer

The HMS Investigator trapped in the ice while commanded by McClure, as depicted by the ship's artist Samuel Gurney Cresswell

There’s a line in a letter, written in 1853 from the Polar Sea, that has haunted me for several years.

The letter writer was Robert John Le Mesurier McClure – at this time Commander McClure, but soon to become Sir Robert McClure. He had sailed to the Arctic in 1850, as part of (yet another) attempt to discover the whereabouts and ultimate fate of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition, which had vanished into the ice, taking two refitted warships and 129 men with it. McClure didn’t manage to find any trace of them, but he did find the Northwest Passage, the until-then hypothetical route connecting Europe to Asia via the Canadian Arctic.

The Northwest Passage, which proved too ice-choked and perilous to use as a trade route, was the great white whale of the 19^th century British admiralty. Franklin had been sent out to find it. Multiple expeditions had been sent out after him to find him, and, while they were up there, maybe find the Passage too. It was momentous that McClure found the Passage in October 1850. Unfortunately, his ship wound up trapped in pack ice. It took several more years before a rescue ship found him and his near-starving crew, and he was able to write home.

I’m using Herculean restraint to write this. I’ve been calling this man ‘McClure’. I don’t think of him as McClure. I think of him as Robert, my good friend Robert. At this point I have spent several years getting to know Robert. I’m telling you some private things I’ve learned about my friend Robert. For example, he married young, and, from what scant evidence we have, unhappily.

The letter is addressed to Mary McClure, née Mallors, Robert’s first wife. The fact that she exists at all is already peculiar. Officers of the Royal Navy were discouraged from marrying until they made post-captain (the post after Commander); until then, half-pay salary – the money they received when they were not attached to a vessel – was considered insufficient for supporting a wife and family. But Robert had married when he was in his early 20s and still only a mate.

The letter is five pages long and many of them are cross-written – that is, there is writing across the page horizontally and vertically. There wasn’t much spare stationery up in the Arctic and Robert had to cram in what he could. The last page is a post-script. It begins:

P.S. As the postscript of a Lady’s letter generally contains the greatest information so perhaps this will be considered not the least important part of mine; I have written to Hallet & Robinson what distribution I wish to be made of any money of mine that may accumulate in the event of my never returning to torment you –

I read this line some time in the early spring of 2022, while I was redrafting what would become my debut novel, The Ministry of Time (which stars another polar explorer, Graham Gore, about whom I became a stark raving loony). ‘In the event of my never returning to torment you’ — what sort of man writes this to his wife after three years of silence, absence and agony?

I couldn’t leave the thought alone. I read as much as I could about Robert McClure. Glenn M. Stein’s Discovering the North-West Passage was my close companion. I won’t repeat what you can find in Stein’s excellent book, or from a quick Google. Instead, I will give you a broadly emotional summary of Robert’s early life, which depends as much on the character I’ve made of him as it does on historical accuracy.

Robert, whose father died before he was born, was taken from his mother to live with his godfather John Le Mesurier when he was two years old. (A first abandonment, I sometimes insist.) Le Mesurier, who was childless, had intended Robert as his heir, but after his wife bore two sons in quick succession when Robert was about ten, the boy’s destiny was sharply altered. Sent to Eton and then Sandhurst (a second abandonment, I sometimes insist), he proved so miserable that he ran away to France and was only persuaded to return when his godfather let him join the Royal Navy at the rather late age of 17 (naval officers generally joined as ‘young volunteers’ at 12 or 13). Le Mesurier would later write Robert out of his will. (A third abandonment!)

I have spent hours with Robert in my head. I turn him over and over, as if he is a puzzle I can solve, as if there is an invisible seam somewhere on his body where I can pry him apart to get at his secrets. Biographical research seems to promise a soluble person. One can’t solve the still-living, who careen into a future invisible to analysis, whose interpretation is still open to negotiation, who we only get a single facet on. But with the dead and archived, we have so much more access. I sometimes feel I know Robert better than his either of his wives did, because I get him from beginning to end. I want to redeem him. I think of his unhappiness, his desperation for recognition, those abandonments, every time I’m faced with the hard facts of his ghastly recorded behaviour.

What sort of relationship led him to write to Mary in the event of my never returning to torment you? The letter holds some clues. The cross-written text – the writing on the vertical – is badly faded. Worse still, my only access to it is a scan on the Internet. But after much squinting, I think I can make out the following:

In my dark hours, and many you may suppose I have, I frequently [illegible] over the events of my past existence and through the whole chain how each link is consequential, I trace the [illegible] in every stage the wretchedness I have endured in our early story, [several illegible words] few but yourself knows anything of, and how gradually I have mounted to what I return will be considered a most enviable person, honours and rewards with all probability be lavished on me –

How hopeless, how hopelessly tantalising! What wretchedness? Why ‘our’ and not ‘my’ story? What happened to you, Robert?

It’s not just that this hints at something difficult, or frightful, or shameful, in the genesis of this marriage (which was childless), and we all like a bit of gossip – it’s the beguiling mixture of confession and narration. Robert wanted there to be a reason for his life, for his pain and loneliness to have meant something – for his life to be ‘about’ something. He had writer’s instinct in that regard, and I have a strong sense of fellow feeling for him because of it.

On Robert’s return to England, after spending a very short amount of time in London, he returned to Hastings, and Mary. Two weeks later, he left Hastings and never (as far as we know) saw Mary again. In a letter to Sir James Clark Ross, years later, he said:

[Mary’s] conduct was so unpardonable after my return from the North, that I can never meet her again […] The sins of our youth visit us in our old age, most truly I can say this.

I’ve yet to find any other clues for what happened between them in those two weeks, but I have spent a lot of time imagining how it might have played out. I have a notebook filled with possibilities. I imagine rebuffed attempts at romantic reconciliation, or the admission of some terrible secret. Because I don’t know what might have passed between them, those two weeks take on a dreadful significance. I find myself writing into the gaps, in an ineffectual attempt to solve the ‘mystery’ through a sort of psychic restaging. If I could only get his voice right – If I only had something she wrote, so I could know what sort of woman she was –

I wonder, though, if it’s as simple as a series of scenes and a finale. Perhaps even they didn’t understand why they were so angry with each other. He came home mantled in a story, weirdly aware of his celebrity as he might have been of an itch or a shadow; perhaps it was impossible for him to reach her as a man. Perhaps she stopped making sense in the story he was telling about himself, and he had to find a reason to cut her character.

It's terrible to find yourself in a story. Tell it for long enough and you only have one possible ending: death. So, in a way, Robert’s retelling of his history, and my revisiting of his biography, are a way of handling time. I move back along the timeline, past the Passage, past the marriage, to the lonely and unhappy child, and I try to tell it all over again.

Kaliane Bradley is the author of the New York Times and Sunday Times-bestselling novel The Ministry of Time. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.

You can also listen to Kaliane chat to Editor-at-Large Erica Wagner on the Boundless podcast, over on Apple Podcasts / Spotify