‘The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no man can tell Lord Franklin alone with his sailors do dwell.’
FROM ‘LADY FRANKLIN’S LAMENT’
THIS STORY STARTS with the opening of a coffin.
But not just any coffin.
This was a coffin perfectly preserved in ice. It was buried in the permafrost of an island in the Canadian Arctic called Beechey Island. Inside was a corpse. It belonged to Petty Officer John Shaw Torrington, who died on 1 January 1846.
You’d expect, after more than 150 years, that his body would have rotted away to leave just a skeleton. But this body had been deep frozen. Mummified by the ice. The skin on its face was blotched with black and yellow, but was otherwise perfectly preserved. Its lips were slightly curled back to reveal tombstone teeth, fully intact. A mass of curly hair surrounded the frozen head. In most respects, John Torrington’s body was almost exactly as it had been the day he died.
And he had died badly.
The body was frozen so hard that the team who dug it up had to thaw it with water before they could examine it properly. Torrington was desperately thin. His ribs stuck out against his meagre, waxy skin. He had been close to starving at the time of his death. He’d also been very ill. Cutting open the body, they found that his lungs were horribly scarred, the ravages of tuberculosis.
His brain had turned into a thick, yellow ooze. He was riddled with lead poisoning, which can drive a man insane.
Petty Officer John Torrington was one of 129 members of an audacious seafaring expedition that took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, led by the Royal Navy officer and explorer Sir John Franklin.
And what is most remarkable about Torrington’s corpse is not how perfectly preserved it was – rather, that it is one of only a handful of bodies of those 129 ever found.
What happened to the rest of his companions is a mystery. A mystery that endures to this day.
(Although, as a side note, on an expedition I led to the Northwest Passage a few years back, we discovered what we believe might potentially have been the remaining corpses, but that’s all another story! See: www.fcpnorthwestpassage.com.)
But here’s the thing: even though Petty Officer John Shaw Torrington clearly met his end in a miserable way – thousands of miles from home, frozen, poisoned and diseased – the chances are that he was one of the lucky ones.
*
In 1845 the Holy Grail of exploration was the Northwest Passage.
The Northwest Passage is a route through the Arctic Sea, along the northern coast of Canada. A century and a half ago the frozen seas stretching up to the North Pole were solid with ice, but it had long been thought that a navigable route existed.
Whoever found it would have untold glory and wealth heaped on them, because such a passage would supply a new (and much faster) link between the Atlantic and the Pacific. A short cut from Europe to Asia would be a very profitable trade route, especially for Britain.
Nowadays, huge exploration ice breakers have been able to plough their way through these ice-bound seas. Back then, you needed to be both brave and mad even to contemplate exploring this part of the world.
Temperatures could easily reach –50°C, and, combined with freezing sea spray and huge storms, the hazards of cold-weather endurance were amplified: frostbite, hypothermia, dehydration, snow blindness and muscle wastage.
Plus, of course, there was the sheer scale of the Arctic: thousands and thousands of square miles of desolate, ice-bound, blizzard-swept wasteland, with any open water being a swirling cauldron of floating icebergs.
In short: the Arctic, uncharted, unexplored, in wooden ships, with no communications, no maps or GPS, and with limited, substandard rations, was not a fun place to endure.
And if an iceberg could rip a hole in the hull of an ocean liner like the Titanic several decades later, imagine what it could do to the timber frames of HMS Terror and HMS Erebus.
These were the two ships Sir John Franklin commissioned to take him on what everyone in England fully expected to be a gloriously successful mission to locate that elusive Northwest Passage.
Terror and Erebus. One named for fear, the other for a Greek god of the Underworld. The names were strangely prophetic, though nobody knew it yet.
Because surely nothing, not even nature, could withstand the might of the Royal Navy when all its wealth of resources and most determined officers were thrown at such an endeavour.
The discovery of this elusive Northwest Passage was a prized jewel, destined to be uncovered by the British Empire.
*
Sir John Franklin was a seafaring hero. Not only had he fought at the Battle of Trafalgar at the age of 18, he was also the grizzled veteran of some unbelievably brutal expeditions to the Arctic.
Some were massively successful – on his third trip there he succeeded in mapping 1,200 miles of coastline, recording valuable geological information and taking notes on more than 600 new species of plants.
Others weren’t.
Take the Coppermine expedition of 1819, which gave Franklin a fair idea of just how abominable the Arctic region could be.
Franklin and his men had set out to explore the northern coast of Canada, where they expected to receive help from friendly indigenous people, and then sustain themselves by living off the land and the sea. But the indigenous people were far from friendly, and the weather conditions so harsh that hunting for food became impossible.
Close to starvation they were forced to retreat, with only lichen to eat. And then, in desperation, they also resorted to eating the leather off their shoes. This earned Franklin the nickname ‘the Man who Ate his Boots’.
If the story is true, then his boots saved his life. Of the twenty men that set out on the Coppermine expedition, eleven died. Franklin was one of the nine survivors.
But he had the soul of an adventurer, which meant his longing for exploration would not be dampened by minor inconveniences such as starvation, hardship and the death of his comrades.
Franklin’s enthusiasm was undimmed.
When he was offered the opportunity of one last crack at the Northwest Passage, he jumped at the chance.
At the age of 59 he was desperate to make sure his name would go down in those history books.
Many others signed up to sail with him. Franklin was a hero. To join him on his greatest, most ambitious expedition, would be a chance to walk straight into the same history books with him.
And it was. Just not as any of them intended.
Franklin certainly had everything going for him – not least, two of the most advanced ships of the day. HMS Terror and HMS Erebus had steel-coated prows to help them grind through the ice.
Although they were sailing ships, they were also fitted with steam-powered motors and supplied with enough coal to break through the ice for twelve days. And they carried sufficient supplies to last for three years, including 8,000 tins of food.
Remember those tins of food. They’ll be important later on.
They set sail from Kent in May 1845. At the end of July the ships were spotted by the captain of a whaling ship near Baffin Island, off the Canadian coast and at the edge of the Northwest Passage.
And then, just like that, the two ships lost all contact with the outside world.
It’s easy to forget, in these days of satellite phones and navigation, how an expedition like this meant entirely cutting yourself off from civilization. Nowadays you can tweet from the space station. Back then, a voyage of exploration meant being out of touch for years. Literally.
So, back in England, nobody was surprised that they hadn’t heard from Franklin and his men for six months.
Or a year.
Or even two.
But by 1847 people started to worry. The first of many rescue parties was sent out to the Arctic to try to locate HMS Terror and Erebus.
It found no trace of them.
More and more rescue parties followed.
It was as if they had vanished from the face of the earth.
*
For the next century and a half, hundreds of people would try to piece together what happened to Franklin and his crew.
Gradually, a picture has emerged of gruesome, lingering deaths in that most inhospitable of regions. And it seems likely that their problems started with those 8,000 tins of food they had so carefully stashed in their stores.
The tins, it transpired, had been cheaply made by an unscrupulous supplier. They contained an unusually high amount of lead. This meant that, from the moment the first one was cracked open, the sailors were being slowly but surely poisoned.
Lead poisoning is a nasty thing. It leads to blinding headaches, vomiting and diarrhoea. It makes you hallucinate and suffer from delirium and insomnia. It makes you depressed, and robs you of your ability to make clear-headed decisions.
All in all, it’s not what you want on a lonely, demanding expedition across the frozen Arctic, or to sustain you through the long, cold, dark Arctic winters.
Despite these symptoms, the explorers did not turn back. As they pushed further and further into the ice-strewn passage they still believed that it was worth enduring the suffering for the ultimate prize.
We now know that they overwintered on Beechey Island, a bleak, unfriendly chunk of rock and ice in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. It was on Beechey Island that the body of John Torrington was exhumed more than 150 years later. He and two others perished that first winter, and, as described above, lead poisoning and tuberculosis played a significant part in his death.
The remaining men were also in very poor shape as they sat out the winter.
But they didn’t turn back. They determined to carry on.
Franklin and his men set sail from Beechey Island at the end of that harsh winter. For several months they vainly probed and sailed the frozen labyrinth of the archipelago, desperately trying to find a way through. But they couldn’t.
By the September of 1846 their ships had become frozen solid in the Arctic ice.
HMS Terror and Erebus, with their crews of 129 men, had become icebound. They would never sail again.
What did the sailors do? How did they spend their days? It seems they had nothing to eat except poisoned food that was sending them gradually mad. The isolation would have made things a hundred times worse. They were lost, trapped, in an unending sea of ice, hundreds of miles from civilization.
And they knew that nobody would be coming to rescue them any time soon.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks into months.
Picture it. Nothing but ice and blizzard, as far as the eye could see; the encroaching certainty that if something didn’t change, the frozen ships that were their refuge would soon become their tombs.
All the time, watching their shipmates deteriorate and die before their eyes.
In May 1847 we know that at least some of the men ventured out from the ships to build a small cairn marker. Here Franklin himself left a small but characteristically plucky note.
It said: ‘All well.’
But all was not well. Because within a month John Franklin, England’s hero of the day, was dead.
And the men he left behind were also gradually dying. One by one, exposure and starvation would have picked them off, gradually but inexorably.
More horrific, solitary months passed. Still no release from the ice or cold. Still no hope of escape or rescue.
Nearly a year later, in April 1848, two of Franklin’s officers left a second note in that cairn. It was reserved and unemotional. It told nothing of the horrors of the solitude and death on those frozen ships. It simply stated that another fifteen men had died. They had made a decision to abandon their ship and trek across the ice in an attempt to reach the coast of Canada.
Even in their lead-poisoned, delusional state, none of them could have ever really believed that they would survive such a bid for freedom.
*
We can only imagine the state of them as they tried to fight their way across the ice to safety.
Poisoned and starving.
Frozen.
Staggering.
Continually battered by the Arctic weather, day and night.
They would have been riddled with scurvy: their gums bleeding, and oozing wounds erupting all over their bodies. Tuberculosis would have infiltrated their lungs and the infection would have spread around their bodies.
They were dead men walking.
Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, was determined to find out what had happened to her husband. She refused to believe that 129 men could simply vanish. She spent her entire fortune paying for search parties, including one led by Captain Leopold McClintock.
McClintock managed to gather tantalizing scraps of information from the local Inuit people who lived among the frozen wastes of the north. They told stories of two ships that had been crushed by the moving ice; of white men staggering across the ice, falling down dead as they walked. The Inuit handed over a small collection of buttons, knives and jewellery that had been worn by members of Franklin’s crew.
Even today, the few indigenous Inuit people who populate that region tell tales handed down to them by their ancestors. They speak of a bedraggled column of men trying to head south. The legends say that their eyes were wild with madness, and I don’t doubt that is true. The lead would have steadily driven them mad, but so too would the desperate solitude and utter hopelessness.
McClintock also found a small whaling boat frozen into the ice. It was full of books and chocolate that had been taken from either the Terror or the Erebus.
It also contained the skeletons of two sailors.
The boat itself was pointing towards, not away from, the location where the ships were thought to have frozen. Were these men trying to sail to safety? Or had they simply resolved to head back to the ships to die with their comrades?
*
Sir John Franklin’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage was the start of the longest search and rescue mission ever launched. The last days of Sir John Franklin and his crew have captivated those with a passion for exploration ever since his ships disappeared.
And they have disappeared. Most likely, the ships were systematically crushed by the shifting, groaning ice. Having lured and then trapped the unfortunate sailors, the Arctic then swallowed their ships down to the icy depths.
The few bodies that have been found have, however, revealed some startling secrets.
Such as the knife scars in their bones, which suggest that in their final, desperate days, some of Franklin’s crew probably resorted to acts of cannibalism. Eating their friends in order to buy themselves a few precious extra days or weeks of hopeless existence.
In terms of survival in the face of overwhelming hardship, hunger, misery and madness, there are few stories that rival the desperate fate of Franklin’s men. But then not all stories of true grit end in triumph. Some – in fact, many – are endured to the grim end with heroism, stoicism and quiet courage.
And to those brave souls: we salute you.