“When I arrived on the maindeck…there was not a single man standing the whole way from the mainmast forward,…I hastened down the fore ladder to the lower deck and felt really relieved to find someone alive.”
Midshipman on HMS Monarch
at the Battle of Copenhagen
John Franklin grew up in Spilsby in Lincolnshire, the descendant of a long line of country gentlemen. His father, Willingham, was not an adventurous man, quite happy to spend his life as a respectable Spilsby merchant. Willingham married a farmer’s daughter, Hanah Weekes, and most of the excitement in his life stemmed from helping to raise the couple’s twelve children. John was number nine, the youngest of five boys.
One boy died in infancy, but as the others grew, it became clear to Willingham that none of the children would follow him into business. The wars against Napoleon and the expanding British Empire offered young men amazing opportunities to seek glory, wealth, and adventure in the far-flung corners of the globe. Despite the dangers of an early death from disease or violence, a merchant’s life in Spilsby paled in comparison.
The oldest Franklin boy, Thomas Adam, went off to raise a regiment of volunteer cavalry and became its colonel. In 1807, after a disastrous financial speculation in which he lost all his own and much of his father’s money, Thomas committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. Willingham’s namesake attended Oxford, became a lawyer, went to India, was knighted, and became a Supreme Court Judge in Madras. He died of cholera in 1824 when he was forty-five. James, who was only three years older than John, joined the Indian army and served with distinction in the Pindari War. He was also a surveyor, mapmaker, and author of a geology text. James lived to be fifty-one. All these were common – and with the exception of Thomas’s final disgrace, respectable – occupations for the young sons of the middle class in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and they influenced John.
Franklin was also very close to his seven sisters, and it was from them that he derived the gentleness that marked his life. The letters where he discusses personal matters are all addressed to his sisters, not to his parents or brothers. He wrote to them all, but his favourite was Isabella. She married Thomas Cracroft, and their daughter, Sophia, was to be an element in Franklin’s later life.
At ten, young John was sent to board at Louth Grammar School, twenty-four kilometres north of Spilsby. The school was typical of the educational institutes of its day. Students were given a basic classical education. Learning to read the Greek and Roman poets in their original languages and practising discipline, teamwork, and proficiency at sports were the highest goals of education – much more important than studying science and mathematics. The author Thomas de Quincy called schools like Louth, “the peculiar glory of England,” credited them with developing “superior manliness, generosity, and self-control,” and claimed they got rid of “meanness, pusillanimity, or indirectness.”
Certainly, Franklin aspired to manliness, generosity, and self-control, but whether he got these qualities from his time at Louth is unknown. In contrast to de Quincey’s glowing testimonial, the poet Alfred Tennyson, who attended Louth early in the 1800s, said, “How I did hate that school! The only good thing I ever got from it was the memory…of an old wall covered with wild weeds opposite the school windows.” Whatever John Franklin thought of Louth, it was from there that he set out on his life’s journey.
When he was eleven years old, Franklin and some school friends travelled the fourteen kilometres from Louth to the village of Saltfleet on the coast. It was the first time John had seen the sea, and the effect was electrifying. The vastness of the dark, rolling North Sea, the mystery of what lay over the flat horizon, and the apparent confidence with which the white-sailed British men-of-war tacked up and down the coast exerted a pull on Franklin that he was never to overcome.
Watching his older brothers go out into the world and struggle, successfully or not, to better their social position and expand their horizons, had taught John that he did not want to settle down in his father’s grocery shop. Nor, despite being a pious young man, did he want to fulfill Willingham senior’s wish that he enter the clergy, but it wasn’t until he saw the sea that he knew which direction he would go.
At the first school holidays, Franklin rushed home and enthusiastically informed his father that he was going to be a sailor.
“I would rather follow you to the grave than the sea,” a horrified Willingham responded.
But John perservered. In his mind he pictured “both the hardships and pleasures of a sailor’s life” and was so certain that it was the life for him that no other course was possible. And there was a family connection to the sea that John could cite as precedent. An aunt had married the explorer Matthew Flinders.
Fortunately for the youngest Franklin boy, Willingham was not an unreasonable man. He realized that outright opposition to John would alienate him and cause a family rift, so he tried a more subtle approach. When John turned thirteen, he booked him passage on a merchantman sailing from Hull to Lisbon. Since the journey would traverse the Bay of Biscay, a stretch of water notorious for its storms and rough sea conditions, Willingham reasoned that this would cure his son of any romantic longings he harboured for the nautical life. The plan backfired. John returned even more determined than ever to become a sailor.
Showing remarkable wisdom and enlightenment for the times, Willingham bowed to the inevitable and obtained for John a position as first-class volunteer on HMS Polyphemus, a two-decked, sixty-four-gun man-of-war under the command of Captain Lawford. John Franklin joined his first ship on March 9, 1800, a month before his fourteenth birthday. A year later and only two weeks before his fifteenth birthday, Franklin’s desire for adventure was fulfilled.
In early 1801, Britain’s war against Napoleon was not going well. Austria had been defeated the year before, and Russia, Sweden, and Denmark had formed the League of Armed Neutrality to challenge Britain’s right to intercept and search merchant ships bound for French ports. As a response, Britain sent a fleet of eighteen battleships to attack the Danish fleet at Copenhagen.
Sea battles in the days of wooden ships and before explosive shells were brutal affairs. It is very difficult to sink a wooden ship by punching holes in it with round shot. A lucky shot might set off an explosion or start a fire, but these rarely happened. More commonly, ships simply pounded away at each other for hours until they were little more than floating, mastless hulks filled with horribly mutilated bodies. The aim of attacking a ship became not to sink it but to kill so many of its crew that the survivors could not continue the fight, either because they were too few or because they had had enough and gave up.
When a solid round cannonball weighing fourteen kilograms went through a ship, it destroyed everything in its path. Ships’ timbers and masts were shattered and wood splinters flew around like shrapnel. Human flesh did not even slow these projectiles down. In addition, when two ships were close enough, they fired grapeshot, clusters of small round shot designed to kill men on exposed decks, and chain shot, which had the dual purpose of destroying a ship’s rigging and cutting in half any men in its way. Sharpshooters sat in the upper rigging and picked off sailors on the opposing ship’s decks.
On the morning of Thursday, April 2, the British attack squadrons, under the command of Horatio Nelson, lay off Copenhagen harbour. The decks of the Polyphemus were scenes of tense activity. In the deepest levels of the ship the surgeons laid out their instruments in preparation for the gruesome work to come. Since they were below the waterline, they were relatively safe from the cannon shot, yet this was where the scenes of greatest horror occurred. Many of the surgeons and their assistants were barely trained butchers who could do nothing but hack off mutilated limbs and dig inexpertly for embedded musket balls and assorted pieces of wood and metal. The floor around them would soon be running with blood and the dark, cramped space echoing with the sound of the sailors’ screams as the surgeons carried out their grisly tasks without the aid of anesthetics. If you were wounded, your chances of coming out of this hellish place were slim. No wonder some of the wounded refused to be taken below.
On the gun decks above the surgeons’ heads, the gun ports were being swung up and secured. Each sweating, six-man gun crew laboured to roll their immensely heavy weapon out and make sure it was ready. Hawsers as thick as a man’s arm were tied around the gun so that, when it fired, the recoil would not throw the tons of iron back across the deck to crush men and punch a hole in the ship’s side. The powder monkey, a boy even younger and smaller than the teenage Franklin, stood nervously to one side with nothing to do until the battle began. Then his job would be one of the most dangerous. He would have to run through the ship to the powder magazine and fetch the charges for his gun. Carrying a bag of unstable explosives, he would have to negotiate wildly tilting decks, running, screaming sailors, cannonballs, and musket shot. If he failed, not only would there be very little left of him to find, but the resulting fire could put the entire ship in danger.
On the exposed upper decks, anything loose was stowed away. Marines with primed muskets took positions behind stacks of tightly rolled hammocks. On the quarterdeck, the officers strolled around, overseeing the activity and attempting to keep the tension under control by assuming an air of nonchalance. This was where young John Franklin stood, scared and wondering if life at sea was quite as attractive as he had imagined it. On the other hand, he was thrilled by the imposing spectacle of a battle fleet sailing to war, and he was excited by the adventure of it all.
At 10:30, the ships weighed anchor and sailed towards the Danish fleet. Polyphemus was second in line, and at 11:20, she and another ship, the Isis, anchored beside two Danish ships – one of seventy-four and the other of sixty-four guns – and commenced firing. As the ship’s log briefly described it, “At noon a very heavy and constant fire was kept between us and the enemy, and this was continued without intermission until forty-five minutes past two, when the 74 abreast of us ceased firing.… We ceased firing and boarded both ships and took possession of them.”
This clinical description gives no sense of the carnage wrought on board both the Danish and British vessels. Polyphemus got off lightly, having just six men killed and twenty-four wounded, although one of the dead was James Bell, a midshipman and a messmate of Franklins. Other ships suffered much worse. In total the British lost 350 killed, and the Danes 6,000 killed, wounded, or prisoner.
Copenhagen is famous for Nelson’s response to his Commander-in-Chief’s flagged signal to break off the fight. When he was informed of the order, Nelson replied, “I have only one eye – I have a right to be blind sometimes.” Then, putting his telescope to his blind eye, he turned towards the flagship and said, “I really do not see the signal!”
The story became part of Nelson’s myth, but the battle turned out to have been unnecessary. On March 24, even before the battle was fought, the mad Czar Paul of Russia was assassinated. Since he was the force behind the League of Armed Neutrality, it fell apart and would have done so without the bloodshed of April 2. Copenhagen was not the last pointless battle Franklin would fight in.
The Battle of Copenhagen made a strong impression on the sensitive boy of fourteen. Young Franklin, like other young people of his time, regarded war as glorious and battle as adventurous, but watching men being dismembered around him was an experience he never forgot. In later years he vividly recalled the sight of the large number of both British and Danish dead that he viewed through the clear water of Copenhagen harbour. Such an experience would have hardened some people, but in Franklins case it left him with a desire to minimize suffering – an ironic consequence given the horrors which attended many of his later ventures.
A way station on a journey to the other side of the world. A prison hulk at Portsmouth filled with convicts awaiting transport to Australia.