“…Dr. Richardson came in to communicate the joyful intelligence that relief had arrived…poor Adam was in so low a state that he could scarcely comprehend the information…But for this seasonable interposition of Providence, his existence must have terminated in a few hours, and that of the rest probably in not many days.”
Franklin’s Narrative, November 7, 1821
Franklin’s venture along the coast began inauspiciously. For one-and-a-half days he had to sit in a wind-battered tent while strong winds whipped the sea into a frenzy. Finally, at noon on July 21, the elements calmed, and with less than fifteen days supply of food and enough powder and shot for one thousand charges, John Franklin set off into the unknown.
The hazards of mapping an unknown coast. Landing in a storm, 1821.
At first the coast was smooth and the going easy, but soon it became more rugged and ice threatened to trap them against the shore. On July 24 they killed a caribou and feasted. Two days later they narrowly escaped being crushed rounding Cape Barrow. Ice, wind, and fog slowed them frustratingly and game was scarce. Slowly they ate into their meagre preserved supplies. Meticulous mapping of the tortuous coastline around Arctic Sound, Bathurst Inlet, and Melville Sound cost them days, and each time they ended up almost back where they had begun. Franklin’s hope of speeding through to Hudson Bay that season vanished.
One of Franklin’s problems was that he had two conflicting tasks to perform. First, he was to map the unknown coast. Second, he was to ascertain the orientation of the coast between the Coppermine River and Hudson Bay. To do one, he had to carefully map each indentation in the coastline. To do the other, he had to skip across the mouths of inlets and hurry east as fast as he could. Being the first to travel that way, he had no way of knowing, when the coast turned and began to trend south, whether this was another inlet, or the main coast. Was the blur of land in the distance an island or the mainland where it swung back? The only way to find out was to go and see, and that took time.
On August 15, with only three days’ food left and no contact made with the Inuit, Franklin made a decision. They would struggle on until the coast trended eastwards or for four days, whichever came first. On August 18, Franklin, Richardson, and Back left the canoes and walked on for twenty kilometres. The coast ahead appeared to trend to the east. Franklin named the spot Point Turnagain and began his disastrous retreat to Fort Providence. They had mapped over one thousand kilometres of coastline for a gain of little more than two hundred as the crow flies.
The way back along the coast would be easier, since it was known ground and they could cut across the mouths of previously mapped inlets and bays. After being held up by gales for four days, they managed to reach the mouth of Hood River in another four, a journey that had taken them more than two weeks in the other direction. Here Franklin made another decision – one that, combined with the problems of supply and local ignorance that had been compounding almost from the beginning, sealed the fate of over half his party.
Franklin knew that there was precious little game along the coast back to the Coppermine. He also knew that their hunting had been quite good at Hood River. He decided to cut across country back to Fort Enterprise. On the map, the route didn’t look too bad, 240 kilometres in a straight line, but Franklin ignored one thing – the Yellowknife people avoided the barren lands as much as possible, sticking close to rivers and lakes in their travel. This local knowledge should have carried more weight with someone who was low on supplies, late in the season, and facing more than two hundred kilometres of barren lands travel.
The reason Akaitcho’s people avoided the barren lands soon became apparent. The rough ground was torture on the feet of men carrying heavy loads and wearing only thin moccasins. Rivers and lakes obstructed their journey causing detours and delays and almost killing them during crossings. Nothing broke the force of the cruel, wind-driven snow as it whipped against the starving men. At a snail-like pace, the weak, overburdened men struggled through the snow, one agonizing step at a time. They could not remove their frozen clothes at night. They slept on top of their boots so the boots would not freeze and could be worn for the next day’s gruelling march. During the day, they paused only to collect Tripe de Roche, a lichen that grows on the bare rocks north of the tree-line. The lichen was their main source of food and, for working men, it was hopelessly inadequate. Apart from lacking nutritional value, Tripe de Roche often produces violent stomach cramps. One of Franklin’s party, midshipman Robert Hood, was so badly afflicted that he could eat nothing and weakened rapidly.
On September 10 one of the hunters shot a muskox. “This success infused spirit into our starving party. To skin and cut up the animal was the work of a few minutes. The contents of its stomach were devoured upon the spot, and the raw intestines, which were next attacked, were pronounced by the most delicate amongst us to be excellent.”
Every delay at a river crossing or detour around a lake cost the starving men precious time. Their trail became marked by discarded scientific specimens and equipment. At the end of September they reached the Coppermine River, only sixty-four kilometres from Fort Enterprise. Their canoe had long since been abandoned, so John Richardson, the expedition naturalist, attempted to swim a line through the frigid waters of the rapids. Halfway over, he lost all feeling in his arms and legs and sank from view. Hauling frantically, his companions pulled him back, more dead than alive. They stripped him, wrapped him in blankets and laid him before the fire. Richardson recovered, but it was several months before feeling returned to the left side of his body. The rapids on the Coppermine cost them nine days.
Midshipman George Back and three of the strongest men went ahead to Fort Enterprise to secure supplies. The rest struggled on as best they could. The weakest fell behind and froze to death. No one was strong enough to help them. Eventually Hood became so weak he couldn’t continue. Richardson and Able Seaman Hepburn set up a camp and stayed with him while Franklin pushed on. For four of Franklin’s companions, the effort was too much, and they turned back to Richardson’s camp. Only one of them, Michel, arrived.
On October 11, Franklin saw Fort Enterprise in the distance. It was silent. There was no activity around the fort, no smoke from the chimneys, and no sign of George Back. With a horrible sense of foreboding, Franklin stumbled on. The fort was deserted. Even worse, there were none of the promised supplies. The whole party broke down in tears.
Unable to continue or to go back, Franklin and the other survivors managed as best they could. On the evening of October 29, Richardson and Hepburn staggered into the bleak camp. They had a tale of unspeakable horror to tell.
Michel had arrived back alone and apparently worked hard to hunt and supply Richardson, Hood, and Hepburn with food. On one occasion he presented them with some wolf meat. But his behaviour became increasingly erratic. On Sunday, October 20, Richardson and Hepburn heard a musket shot. When they went to investigate, they found Hood dead. He had been shot at close range from behind and Michel could not explain how it had happened. Richardson and Hepburn became convinced that Michel had murdered Hood. They also began to suspect that the “wolf meat” was human flesh, cut from the frozen bodies of the others who had left Franklin’s party and who Michel had murdered. It became obvious that Michel was planning to kill them. Richardson and Hepburn determined to act first.
Worried that they were so weak that they would not be able to resist an attack by Michel, they decided that their only hope was in killing the stronger man. Hepburn volunteered to carry out the execution, but Richardson knew that, as senior officer, it was his responsibility. The two men waited for their chance. It came when Michel dropped behind to hunt. Richardson met him as he returned and “put an end to his life by shooting him through the head with a pistol.”
After Richardson and Hepburn arrived at Fort Enterprise, the health of the party continued to decline. They often saw game close to the fort, but rarely had the strength to hunt. The most meagre success was greeted with rejoicing: “Hepburn having shot a partridge, which was brought to the house, the Doctor [John Richardson] tore out the feathers, and having held it in the fire a few minutes, divided it into seven portions. Each piece was ravenously devoured by my companions, as it was the first morsel of flesh any of us had tasted for thirty-one days, unless indeed the small gristly particles which we found occasionally adhering to the pounded bones may be termed flesh.”
On November 1, two more men died of starvation. Now only Franklin, Richardson, Hepburn, and one other man clung to a precarious flicker of life, dreaming of food and arguing pointlessly about nothing.
By November 7, Richardson and Hepburn heard the musket shot that signalled salvation. Eleven of the twenty who explored the coast were dead. Slowly the survivors headed south. On December 3 they had the “indescribable gratification” of changing the tattered clothes they had worn solidly since the end of August. In the spring of 1822 they boarded a ship for home.
It was an ordeal of epic proportions, and Franklin was very lucky to survive. But was he to blame? Certainly there were factors beyond his control. The British navy had no experience organizing overland expeditions. Self-contained seaborne expeditions were its forte, and the navy did not fully understand problems of travelling overland. The preparation time was too short to iron out all the problems. Franklin could have objected, but given his personality and the times, he was unlikely to. Franklin was a gentle, calm man, capable of being firm when he thought it necessary, but not one to make waves with higher authority. In addition, in 1819 there were hundreds of out-of-work junior naval officers, any one of whom would jump in eagerly if Franklin were seen as being a problem and were pushed aside.
The timing too was unfortunate. The rivalry between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company was at its height. In their attempts to control the incredibly lucrative fur trade, both companies had no qualms about supplying whisky to the native hunters, destroying the opposition’s trading posts, traplines, and caches of supplies, and ambushing – sometimes even killing – opposing voyageurs. Both companies agreed to help Franklin, but the circumstances, added to the diseases sweeping the First Nations’ hunting population, meant that even traders with the best will in the world could do little to help. They were having a hard enough time feeding their own men.
Finally, the weather was against him. His first winter at Fort Enterprise was relatively benign. The second, which caught his party exposed on the barrens just as they were beginning their retreat from the coast, was harsh, and it set in abruptly, weeks earlier than usual. The early onset of winter drove away what game there was and seriously weakened the travelling men.
Although Franklin’s personal luck remained intact and ensured his survival, overall, his first expedition was an unlucky venture. Nevertheless, it should not have been the disaster it was. Franklin’s biggest mistake was in ignoring the supply problems around him. From the beginning, things did not go as planned and there was a shortage of food. Franklin saw the problems and appreciated that they were not going to improve, putting his party at risk during the summer of exploration when margins for error were at their slimmest. Whether he naively believed things would somehow work themselves out, or whether he, like Scott at the South Pole ninety years later, was driven on past the point of rationality by a desire to accomplish great things and perform his duty, is not known. Certainly Franklin was a product of his time in that he had a high regard for authority and believed in the early nineteenth-century ideals of Honour, Courage, and Nobility. It is difficult from our more cynical perspective almost two centuries later to appreciate how strongly Franklins class felt these things. People were willing to die for Honour. In 1821, Franklin very nearly did.
Given his supply problems, Franklin had to rely very heavily on the local native population and the voyageurs. The problem here was that he was culturally incapable of understanding or appreciating their advice. Useful though these people were for carrying loads, chopping firewood, and hunting, they were lesser beings without the refined tastes or religious convictions of an upper class Englishman. This didn’t mean that Franklin was a racist, he felt much the same way about a poverty-stricken millworker from Birmingham, and he had no wish to hurt anyone. More accurately, his attitude was an arrogant paternalism. Given the right circumstances and enough time, these people might one day achieve something close to the great cultural benefits Franklin himself enjoyed. The problem in the short term was that Franklin’s attitude made him think less of the locals’ opinions than his own or those of his fellow officers, despite the fact that British sailors could know nothing of the land in which the voyageurs and Akaitcho and his people lived and thrived.
Franklin’s cultural arrogance is not one of his most endearing characteristics and illustrates his great weakness, an inability to stand outside his cultural prejudices, even when circumstances obviously demanded it. In his narrative of the journey, Franklin describes his party’s arrival at the Arctic coast. He ridicules the voyageurs’ expressions of concern over the suitability of the canoes for sea travel, the quantity of available food, and the dangers of travel over the barren lands. Franklin wrote this months after the canoes proved unsuitable, food could not be obtained, and travel over the barren lands had killed half his party. Even when lesser mortals were dramatically and tragically proved correct, a man of Franklin’s class and culture could not afford to acknowledge that they had been right. What is remarkable is not that the voyageurs let Franklin down as he asserts in his narrative, but that they stayed by him so long and helped him get as far as he did in the face of his overbearing attitude.
Had Franklin somehow managed to slip the constraints of his cultural heritage, what could he have done? Short of abandoning virtually everything an Englishman of his day knew and believed in and mounting a small, rapidly moving, live-off-the-land-like-the-locals-do expedition a century ahead of its time, his only option in the circumstances he faced was to abandon the exploration goals and return home. He was not about to do that. Failure without the evidence of having nobly struggled forward to the last extremity would have spelled disaster for his career. Whispers that he was not made of the “right stuff” would have doomed him to retirement on half pay if not outright disgrace. The Royal Navy was John Franklins life; he would be a broken man without it. What was the risk of death for him and his companions compared to that?
After the horrors of the barren lands, the return trip to England was easy. It was slow, as the sick men gradually recovered their strength, but largely uneventful.
When Franklin returned to Britain in 1822 he was greeted with jubilation. The public had a hero. A rather embarrassed Franklin was held up as a cultural ideal; the noble explorer winning through incredible hardships despite the weaknesses and treachery of the savages and half-caste voyageurs around him. Of course, the fact that the “half-caste voyageurs” had done all the hard work, that nine of the eleven voyageurs in the exploration party had died, and that the entire expedition would have died without the food supplied by the “savages” was conveniently forgotten. That didn’t fit with the burgeoning imperial world view.
Paradoxically, the fact that the expedition had relied heavily on local food sources and local manpower to supply hunting skills and workers was held up as a serious flaw. The next expedition to the Canadian North, and most subsequent ones that century, would rely on the muscles of the sturdy British sailor to supply strength, and the intelligence and skill of the plucky British officer to supply leadership and hunting skills. Unfortunately, this worked so well on Franklin’s second expedition that it entrenched the idea firmly and not even the horrific disaster of his third expedition dislodged it.
The returning hero who won Eleanor Porden’s heart. Portrait of John Franklin.