The Search for the Northwest Passage
The Franklin expedition
In 1819-22, John Franklin (1786-1847), a former naval officer who had sailed under Nelson at Trafalgar and Copenhagen, explored the Arctic region. He returned in 1825 for a further two years. Despite Franklin’s experience at sea, both expeditions were carried out largely on foot. Then, in 1845, at the age of almost 60, Franklin (who had been knighted for his earlier journeys) made his last, ill-fated voyage to conquer the far north.
It was the largest and best-equipped expedition ever, a monument to Victorian self-confidence. It set sail with 128 officers and crew in two ships – the Erebus and the Terror – which had heated cabins for the crew's comfort and engines and iron-reinforced bows to break through the ice.
Even the food supplies were revolutionary: huge numbers of tins were carried, along with pickles and lemon juice to ward off scurvy (a deadly condition brought about by lack of vitamin C).
The ships were last seen by other Europeans on 26 July 1845, in Baffin Bay. Then, the entire expedition vanished.
Looking for Franklin
By 1848, the alarm had been raised. Three search parties set out: ships approached the area from the east and from the west (through the Bering Strait), while an overland party came from the south. Initially, nothing was found.
Then, five years after the disappearance, graves were discovered on tiny Beechey Island, just off Devon Island, which bore the names of three members of Franklin's crew. Nearby was a pile of tins that had once contained beef stew, but there was no account of why the sailors had died.
There followed more than 40 attempts to find Franklin – or just to discover clues about what had happened. One, led by Robert McClure (1807-73) between 1850 and 1854, started from the Bering Strait in the west and identified the last link in the elusive Northwest Passage. McClure was awarded the British Parliament’s financial prize for the discovery of the route. However, because he did not complete the voyage in his own ship (the Investigator had been caught in the ice and McClure and his crew had had to be rescued by another vessel), it was reduced by half to a still substantial £10,000.
Also in 1850, an American expedition led by Edwin J DeHaven set out with two ships, the Advance and the Rescue. Accompanying it was ship’s doctor Elisha Kent Kane, who would lead a second, equally unsuccessful search party three years later. Kane’s journal – The US Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A personal narrative – sold 65,000 copies in the first few months after publication, more than any other book except the Bible.
All these expeditions, although they failed in their primary object of finding Franklin, added enormously to our knowledge about the geography of the far north.
Lady Franklin
The wife who bid Franklin farewell at the dock in 1845 was his second and something of an intrepid traveller herself. Born Jane Griffin in 1791, she had spent much of her youth travelling in Europe. She had first met Sir John in the early 1820s, when he was already married.
She had met him again after his first wife died, and they were wed in 1827. She continued to travel, now in the company of her husband, and in 1836 went with him to Australia, where he had been appointed lieutenant-governor of the huge penal colony of Van Dieman's Land (now called – at Jane’s suggestion – Tasmania). They remained there for six years.
When Sir John's expedition vanished, Lady Franklin began to campaign for rescue expeditions, eventually financing four herself.
The first set out in 1850, led by Charles Codrington Forsyth. It was followed the next year by another, led by William Kennedy and Joseph-René Bellot. In 1852, Edward Augustus Inglefield set out on the hunt, sponsored by both public subscription and Lady Franklin. He reported – wrongly – that Franklin had been murdered by Greenland Inuit.
Lady Franklin's lament
The loss of the Franklin expedition caught the public imagination, and a song about it became popular. Usually sung to an old Irish folk tune, it runs along these lines (there are a number of versions):
We were homeward bound one night on the deep.
Swinging in my hammock, I fell asleep.
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin, and his gallant crew.
With 100 seamen he sailed away,
To the frozen ocean in the month of May,
To seek a passage around the pole,
Where we poor sailors do sometimes roll.
Through cruel misfortune they vainly strove,
Their ships on mountains of ice was drove,
Where the Eskimo with his skin canoe,
Was the only one who ever came through.
In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish blow,
The fate of Franklin no man may know.
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell,
Lord Franklin among his seamen do dwell.
And now my burden gives me such pain,
For my long lost Franklin I would cross the main,
Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To know that on earth my Franklin do live.
The search continues
In 1859, Lady Franklin financed Francis M'Clintock's expedition – and discovered that her husband had been dead for 12 years.
On King William Island, 350 miles south of Beechey Island where the graves had been found, M'Clintock found an expedition log in a cylinder hidden in a cairn. It recorded that, in 1846, Franklin had sailed his ships down the treacherously unpredictable Peel Sound, between Somerset and Prince of Wales islands. Then:
25th April 1848 – HM's ships Terror and Erebus were abandoned on 22nd April, 5 leagues NNW of this, having been beset [by ice] since 12th September 1846 … Sir John Franklin died on 11th June 1847 …
James Fitzjames, Captain, HMS Erebus
F R M Crozier, Captain and senior officer
Start on tomorrow, 26th, for Back's Fish River.
The expedition – or part of it – had apparently attempted to cross King William Island on foot, but then (given that M'Clintock found the boat they must have dragged facing towards the place where the ships had been abandoned) had turned back. A trail of remains across the island pointed to the men's fate.
At this point, the official search for Franklin was abandoned.
Eyewitnesses
To the Victorians, it was a mystery. How could such a grand expedition not only fail, but vanish altogether? Clues would come from an unexpected source – eyewitnesses.
In 1853, the Scottish explorer Dr John Rae (1813-93), of the Hudson's Bay Company, was the first to report the claim of the local Inuit people (then called Eskimos). They had said that the Franklin expedition had resorted to cannibalism in an attempt to survive. The British public – and not least Lady Franklin – was too shocked to believe this, and Rae was ostracised, his discoveries ignored.
The American Charles Hall travelled in the region in the 1860s and also talked to the Inuit, who told him of 40 men travelling over the ice, desperately short of food. They also described how one of their hunters had found white men aboard a single, ice-bound ship off King William Island. These Europeans had warned him to avoid a second camp in a tent nearby. This report supported Rae's fears, and modern analysis of remains found on the island suggests that cannibalism did, indeed, take place.
In a final, intriguing report, Inuit hunters told of seeing four white men on the ice in 1851. They had sheltered them for the winter, after which the Europeans had left, never to be seen again. It is assumed that they died shortly after.
Why Franklin failed
So why did such a well-equipped expedition founder?
First, analysis of the bodies on Beechey Island showed evidence of lead poisoning, probably from the solder used in the food tins – a relatively new form of food preservation. The poisoning would have been debilitating, if not fatal in itself.
We also now know that the expedition coincided with a succession of cold summers that left Franklin’s ships icebound not for months but for years. Food would have begun to run out, while the lemon juice that the captain had brought would have become ineffective in preventing scurvy.
Last, the expedition had been just too large, and the men too lacking in skill, to survive in the Arctic. Fewer men might have eked out a living by hunting, as the Inuit did, and the raw meat would, some authorities believe, have warded off scurvy.
As for the intensely loyal Lady Franklin, she spent much of the rest of her life travelling throughout the world. She died, aged 78, in 1875.
