“That’s the man who ate his boots!”
Lieutenant John Franklin is sitting like a pathetic Buddha on the bare wooden boards of an almost-empty room in a makeshift fort thousands of miles from his home. Around him the wind howls unimpeded over a frozen eternity of ice and snow, a barren emptiness that uncaringly kills those who challenge it unprepared. The journey here has been long, but it is almost over. The days are darkening into winter, a winter Franklin cannot survive. Life has apparently fled this harsh landscape – fled to the south where there is food and warmth, or into hibernation where neither is necessary. Franklin cannot flee, he is too weak, and if he sinks into hibernation he will never arise from it.
Perhaps he is dreaming of the friendly fields of his English home and regretting he did not follow his father’s footsteps to become a comfortable provincial businessman. More likely he is dreaming of food, for John Franklin is starving to death. His skin is pale beneath the dirt that has not been washed off for weeks. His clothes are filthy and in tatters and they hang from his skeletal frame as if made for a much larger man. Franklin is only occasionally in touch with reality and is so weak he cannot stand without assistance. His eyes drift in and out of focus as they wander around the room. In the corner lie the bodies of two men. They have been dead for several days and are beginning to smell, but no one living has the strength to drag the dead outside. Beside Franklin lies a third man. He is not dead yet, but it is hard to tell by looking at him. His breathing is so shallow as to be unde-tectable, and the only signs of life are the occasional grunts that he emits in response to whatever fevered dream is passing through his brain. It will be only a matter of hours before he joins the two in the corner.
Although he looks closer to sixty, John Franklin is only thirty-five. It is November 7, 1821, and this is the culmination of Franklin’s first great expedition. Three-and-a-half months before, Franklin, with midshipmen Robert Hood and George Back, doctor and naturalist John Richardson, able seaman John Hepburn, and fifteen voyageurs and hunters, had set off into the unknown from the mouth of the Coppermine River on Canada’s Arctic coast. Since then, they have mapped 1030 kilometres of previously unexplored coastline, but at a terrible cost. Hood has been murdered and Back is missing. One man has been executed, and nine others lie dead of starvation, their bodies scattered in the snow across the Barren Lands. Now the survivors are back where they began, at Fort Enterprise. Perhaps someone will find their records and their frozen bodies next spring.
Richardson and Hepburn are with Franklin. They have managed to drag themselves outside to collect some wood. They do not have the strength to both gather wood for the fire and collect food. It is bitterly cold. The fire takes priority. At least they will die warm.
The wood collecting is painfully slow work. It is nearly impossible for the men to make their starved bodies do what they want. Their joints ache, their limbs are swollen, their gums are bleeding, and their teeth are getting loose. Their skin is covered with sores, and they are beginning to lose touch with reality. Visions of impossible banquet tables laden and groaning with rich foods float before them. They have even begun to steal hungry glances at the bodies of their dead companions. For weeks their meals have consisted of soup made from pounded, putrid deer bones, fried or boiled animal skins, and Tripe de Roche, a lichen scraped off the rocks around them. The skins and bones had been discarded the previous spring and were buried in lime ash, which makes the soup from boiling them so alkaline that it rips the skin from the explorers’ mouths and throats when they drink it. Without enough to sustain them, their bodies are consuming themselves.
Richardson and Hepburn spend the entire day working and have only enough wood for one fire. Hepburn is bending over to pick up a piece of kindling when a faint noise penetrates his befuddled brain. Agonizingly slowly he stands up. Richardson has heard it as well. The two men look at each other, hardly daring to believe what it might mean. There it is again. This time there can be no doubt – it is a musket shot.
George Back has not died in the wilderness. He has completed an epic journey, found a First Nations band only two days previously, and sent three of them back to the fort with a supply of fresh meat.
Richardson and Hepburn, staggering with weakness and excitement, scramble back to tell Franklin -food is on the way. They are saved in the nick of time. Ironically, the very food that saves their lives almost kills them. Unable to stop, they gorge on the rich meat the hunters bring and lie for days in agony. But they do revive, although it is the spring of the next year before they fully recover their strength.
By October 1822, Franklin is back in London, where he is considered a hero. His saga of starvation, murder, and cannibalism captures the public imagination. He is recognized on the street, promoted to Captain, and made a member of the Royal Society. His 180,000-word Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819, 20, 21, and 22, sells briskly. In quick succession, he marries, fathers a child, and discovers that his new wife is ill with consumption.
Given the horrors he has undergone in 1821, the gratifying recognition he receives upon his return, and his initiation into family life, one would not expect Franklin to rush immediately off into the wilds once more. One experience of severe starvation is usually enough. Yet, in February of 1825, leaving his baby daughter and dying wife behind, Franklin once more sets sail for the “shores of the polar sea.”
Why did Franklin jump at every opportunity to risk his life? What pulled him back to the Canadian Arctic, not once but twice, and the second time to his death?
Of the forty-seven years from the time he joined the navy at age fourteen until he died at age sixty-one, John Franklin spent a bare dozen years at home in England. He was a restless man, a traveller who was never content to stay in one place in comfort and security. This characteristic led him to accomplish much, made his name a household word, and, eventually, killed him.
Even after his death, Franklin’s life continues to fascinate writers. He has been presented as a hero, an honourable officer striving nobly against impossible odds. He has also been depicted as a fool, who doomed himself and his expedition through his inflexible, archaic attitude. More than 150 years after his men buried him in an unknown grave in the centre of the land that kept calling him back, there is no agreement on Sir John Franklin. Perhaps the restless traveller will never be laid to rest, the mystery never solved. Perhaps John Franklin’s journey will never end.
John Franklin’s first adventure. The Battle of Copenhagen, 1801.