25th April 1848 HM Ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April 5 leagues NNW of this having been beset since 12th Sept. 1846. The Officers & Crews consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain F.R.M. Crozier landed here.… Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers & 15 men.
Last message from Franklin’s doomed expedition
On April 25, 1848, three British naval officers sat composing the above message in a windblown tent on the ice-covered shores of King William Island, one of the most remote and bleakest places on earth. They had accomplished much, mapped new lands, described new animals and plants, and filled in the last one hundred kilometres of the fabled Northwest Passage. But they were close to the end. They had been in the Canadian Arctic for three years. Their vessels were still intact, but the fearful pack ice had not released them the previous summer. They still had food left, but men were dying at an alarming rate. Scurvy, the dread of all exploring parties, was widespread. They were more than a thousand kilometres from the closest help. They were doomed. They would keep on struggling to survive, some for perhaps another two years, but none of the three officers or their 102 companions would ever see home again.
Before the ice finally trapped them. The ill-fated Erebus and Terror at sea.
Back on May 19, 1845, the day they sailed from England, it was overcast, but there was a festive mood in the air as the ships cast off from the Greenhithe dock at 10:30 that morning. For many it was an adventure they greeted with almost schoolboy enthusiasm. They expected to be gone only a year, and some even hoped for a minor delay so that they could spend more time in the mysterious Arctic. An added bonus was that, like all men on “Exploration Service,” they would collect double pay as long as they were at sea. As the ships cast off that May morning, a dove alighted on the masthead of one. Surely this was an omen of good fortune.
How could an expedition which began with such unbridled optimism have gone so wrong? The officers in the tent didn’t know, and people are still arguing about it today, but the three men probably agreed that the turning point had been June 11 of the previous year – the day their commander, Sir John Franklin, died.
John Franklin was not the first choice to command the new Arctic venture. The first choice had been James Ross, who had just returned from his circumnavigation of the Antarctic continent. But Ross was a new husband and father, and his young bride, with an attitude starkly in contrast to that of Jane Franklin, had asked him to remain at home and not to undertake any more long and dangerous voyages.
Sir John Barrow, who had been the driving force behind almost every Arctic expedition since Franklin first went north with Buchan in 1818, favoured James Fitzjames, a rising young star in the Royal Navy who had seen service in the Middle East and China. But Fitzjames had never been to the Arctic and lacked experience in ice navigation.
So, at the third go around, the choice fell to Franklin. He had all the qualifications except one. He was old. Almost fifty-nine is old to undergo the rigours of nineteenth-century Arctic travel, but who else was there? And Franklin was keen. Edward Parry was asked if he thought Franklin should be given command. He replied: “He is a fitter man to go than any I know, and if you don’t let him go, the man will die of disappointment.”
The selection of second-in-command was no easier. Again Barrow wanted Fitzjames, but the post was offered to a Captain Stokes. When Stokes declined, it was given to Francis Crozier, Ross’s second-in-command in the Antarctic and the would-be suitor to Sophia Cracroft.
Crozier should have been an obvious choice for leader of the expedition. He had more ice navigation experience than any of the others and had proven himself reliable and thorough on innumerable occasions. He was also only forty-eight, but he had one huge handicap: He was not socially acceptable. He was Irish and Protestant, and not a member of the elite English aristocratic club. Thus he was suited for work but not command. With Crozier as second-in-command, Fitzjames was finally taken on as third-in-command.
Although the expedition was organized on short notice, no expense was spared. Ross’s ships, the Erebus and Terror, were specially strengthened and had steam engines added for navigation in ice. The ships were supplied with desalinators to distill fresh water from seawater and a steam heating system. Food for three years included 61,986 kilograms of flour, 29,132 kilograms of salt beef and pork, 4,286 kilograms of chocolate, 16,747 litres of concentrated spirits, 4,218 kilograms of lemon juice, 91 kilograms of pepper, and almost 8,000 cans of meat. The ships’ libraries contained 2,900 books, including technical manuals, the reports of previous explorers, and the works of Dickens. The infant art of photography was represented by an early daguerreotype apparatus, and each ship was equipped with a hand-organ capable of playing fifty different tunes. This was the ultimate expression of Franklin’s idea that you should take everything with you. The 129 men who sailed into Lancaster Sound aboard the Erebus and Terror would live as closely as possible to the way they did at home, at least until things began to go wrong.
Franklin’s orders were to proceed through Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait until he reached Cape Walker. Since Parry had found massive amounts of permanent ice to the west, Franklin was told to sail south and west towards the Canadian Arctic coast. He was to take the straightest line he could, given that the huge area on the map was unknown and probably contained as yet undiscovered land. If he found the southern route blocked, he was to try sailing to the north along Wellington Channel in another attempt to find the supposed open Arctic Ocean that had proved elusive in 1818.
On the way, Franklin and his officers were charged with taking magnetic, oceanographic, and meteorological readings, sampling the geology, and examining everything, “from a flea to a whale.” They would sail the Northwest Passage, but they were primarily a scientific expedition.
In keeping with the spirit of scientific innovation, Jane Franklin commissioned two sets of daguerreotype portraits of the officers on the Erebus. The daguerreotype process, a precursor of the negative photography of today, was only six years old. It required over forty kilograms of equipment to fix an image on a silvered metal plate. It also required the subject to remain immobile for several minutes. This, as much as the formality of the day, accounts for the rigid poses of the officers when they sat in the Great Cabin of the Erebus for Mr. Beard, the only licensed daguerreotype practitioner in Britain.
Daguerreotype plates last extraordinarily well and are as sharp today as when they were exposed. The originals, archived in Britain, have an almost ethereal silvery patina, which imparts a magical, poignant feel, considering what we know of the fate of these men. To a modern observer, only Fitzjames and Franklin look at all natural. For his second daguerreotype, Commander Fitzjames discarded his telescope prop and smiled faintly for posterity.
In both of his portraits, although he is dressed in his formal uniform, is wearing his impressive medals, and is carrying his gold baton, Sir John Franklin looks as if he would much rather be somewhere else. Two of his uniform buttons are undone, his face looks pasty, and his eyes puffy. That day, he had a bad case of the flu. He felt horribly unwell, but he had also just had an unnerving premonition.
A couple of nights before the portraits were taken, Franklin was sitting at home by the fire with Jane. He was resting and trying to throw off the flu. She was busy making a silk Union Jack flag for her husband to take with him and raise at the completion of the Northwest Passage. John dropped off to sleep on the couch and, fearing he might be cold, Jane draped the unfinished flag over him. Franklin, the lifetime navy man, awoke to find himself covered in the flag. Jumping up in horror, he said, “There’s a flag thrown over me! Don’t you know that they lay a Union Jack over a corpse?”
It took Franklin some time to recover his composure, but recover he did, and the Erebus and Terror set off for their first stop at Stromness in the Orkney Islands, north of the Scottish mainland. Expectations ran universally high. Sir Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society, stated: “I have the fullest confidence that everything will be done…, that human efforts can accomplish. The name of Franklin alone is, indeed, a national guarantee.” The Times newspaper of London voiced what it perceived as the, “one wish amongst the whole of the inhabitants of this country, from the humblest individual to the highest in the realm, that the enterprise…may be attended with success, and that the brave seamen…may return with honour and health to their native land.”
After a stormy Atlantic crossing, on July 4 Franklin arrived off the island of Disco on the west coast of Greenland and began transferring supplies to his two ships. The process took six days. Before the Erebus and Terror sailed on the tide on July 12, five of the luckiest men in Arctic exploration history were sent home for illness or incompetence, and everyone took the opportunity to write letters to loved ones in Britain. In them, the officers talk of Franklin’s energy, enthusiasm, and leadership.
Setting off exploring once more gave John Franklin a new lease on life. Once he had recovered from his cold, he looked ten years younger and took a great interest in all the voyage’s activities. He regularly dined with his officers, regaling them with tales of his previous exploits, and conducted religious services every Sunday. The young men under his command almost worshipped him. They were in awe of his experience and judgment and treasured his friendship: “We are very happy and very fond of Sir John Franklin, who improves very much as we come to know more of him. He is anything but nervous and fidgety: in fact, I should say remarkable for energetic decision in sudden emergencies.” The Erebus was a new “Franklin’s Paradise.”
Franklin himself was happier than he had been in years. At last he was back doing what he loved most; leading a party of energetic and zealous subordinates into the unknown. He wrote to all his friends back in England to make sure they would “comfort and assist” Jane in his absence. He even petitioned God in his “constant prayers” to “bless and support” her. They were the last words she ever received from him.
When nothing was heard of Franklin for three years, people began to be concerned, and one of the largest search operations in history slowly got under way. Over the next decade, thirty-two expeditions went to the Arctic seeking to discover what had happened to John Franklin. In doing so, they mapped vastly more territory than Franklin could ever have hoped to do on his own and joined the Arctic to the map of Canada. But they found precious little hard evidence of Franklin’s fate.
It wasn’t until 1850 that Franklin’s first wintering site was discovered at Beechey Island. Here were the remains of buildings, piles of empty food cans, and three graves, but no message to say which way the expedition had gone. The searchers fanned out but discovered nothing else.
In 1854 John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company returned to England with some relics and a story to tell. The relics, which had been obtained from the Inuit, included the medal Franklin was wearing in the daguerreotype and some officer’s cutlery, but it was the Inuit stories that captured the public’s attention. They told of abandoned boats, starving men, and, least acceptable to Victorian sensibilities, cannibalism. Rae was shouted down by such notables as Charles Dickens for believing the unsubstantiated ramblings of untutored savages, but it was enough evidence for the Royal Navy. They declared Franklin and all his men dead and stopped their double pay.
But the stories were not enough for the indomitable Jane Franklin. She wanted to know what had happened to the husband she had encouraged to go exploring. She badgered the navy mercilessly and, when that didn’t produce the results she wanted, she financed her own expedition. It was led by Francis Leopold McClintock and, in 1859, fourteen years after Franklin had sailed with such high hopes, a sledging party from McClintock’s yacht, the Fox, arrived at Victory Point on King William Island. There they found piles of clothing and supplies and a solitary note, sealed in a tin can and buried beneath a cairn of stones. Along the coast they also found an abandoned ship’s boat and the scattered bones of Franklin’s men.
In the years since, more bones have been discovered and new scientific techniques have been used to explain what happened. The disaster has been blamed on murder, starvation, scurvy, bad food, lead poisoning, and, most recently, botulism poisoning. Some of the theories are wild, and most tell us more about our own fears than they do about Franklin, but it is now possible to piece together a rough outline of what happened.
Franklin led his happy band of explorers through Lancaster Sound in August, 1845. Not being one to disobey orders, he sailed straight on to Cape Walker and tried to turn south. There he met the Beaufort Ice Stream, pouring down from the High Arctic. It was a fearful sight of vast slabs of ice grinding and crashing together – there was no way through. Retreating, Franklin tried the second option in his orders, a northern route. He sailed up Wellington Channel and reached 77 degrees north before ice again stopped him. He returned south, circumnavigated Cornwallis Island, and settled in for the winter at the protected bay beside Beechey Island.
The first winter still felt like an adventure. The men occupied themselves with the scientific work, explored the coastline, and hunted. They built a forge and storage hut on the shore and even attempted to plant a garden in the spring. Three men died – too many deaths in such a short time – but all three had been suffering from consumption, the same disease that had killed Franklin’s first wife. The sick men should never have been in the Arctic in the first place. Everyone else was fit and well.
In the summer of 1846, the ice broke up and Franklin had a piece of good luck. He discovered an open channel to the south down the side of Somerset Island. He could carry out his orders after all.
Hurrying on in the short summer season, the Erebus and Terror used their steam engines in close ice to work down to a position north of King William Island. James Ross had visited King William Island in 1830, and this was the farthest anyone had gone through the Northwest Passage from the east. A mere one hundred kilometres to the south was the cairn built by two Hudson’s Bay Company men – Thomas Simpson and the very same Peter Warren Dease who had been such a help organizing Franklin’s supplies on his second expedition. Only eight years before, they had mapped the coast along from Franklin’s Point Turnagain and visited the south shore of King William Island. Franklin was poised to complete the Northwest Passage.
Perhaps Franklin tried to pass down the east coast of King William Island, but it is too shallow there for the deep drafts of his ships, so he would have had to turn back. The only other choice was the west coast. This was not an inviting prospect, for down there ran the extension of the frightening Beaufort Ice Stream. There were no protected harbours on the west coast, so Franklin had to make the best of it, docking his ships for the winter in a stable ice floe in the stream. It was not ideal, but still nothing to worry about. Another winter and the Northwest Passage would be theirs. Then they could sail home along the coast of Canada and return as heroes.
In the spring of 1847, still full of hope, Franklin sent out a sledging expedition to examine the west coast of King William Island and complete the Northwest Passage. Lieutenant Graham Gore from the Erebus succeeded, and for his achievement was promoted by Franklin to Commander. Gore left brief notes in cairns to mark his progress along the coast. As Gore’s commander it was Fitzjames’ duty to write the notes, which were all written before Gore set off and which all ended with the cheery “All well.” It was the last time anyone could say that.
On June 11, 1847, John Franklin died. It was unexpected. He had been fine when Fitzjames wrote “All well” on the 24th of May. Perhaps it was a heart attack or a stroke. Franklin was now sixty-one and, despite the expedition’s good progress so far, Arctic exploration was a hard discipline for a man that age. In any case, his death was a severe blow to morale. Franklin was the leader, the figurehead, and his name was, after all, the “national guarantee.”
Did Franklin have any warning of his end? Did he have a chance to write one last letter to Jane, his other half and the one person who had always believed in and supported him? No one knows. If he did, it was lost with all the rest of the expedition’s papers.
Crozier was now in charge. His first duty was to bury Franklin, either in the ice or at some undiscovered place on King William Island. It must have been a very emotional occasion. Franklin had been almost like a father to many of the young, inexperienced officers on the Erebus, and without him, the whole tone of the expedition changed. Crozier was an efficient, practical man and he would do his best, but he did not have Franklin’s presence. The men knew that even when the ice released them in the summer of 1847, they would sail home with a dark burden.
With Franklin’s death, the expedition’s good luck seemed to evaporate. The expected spring breakup of the ice didn’t happen. The crews waited, keeping watch from the crow’s-nest for the telltale glimpse of an open water lead, but nothing showed. All that happened was that the trapped ships drifted slowly to the south, ever deeper into the ice stream.
Soon they were facing another winter with no guarantee that the summer of 1848 would be any better. Men began dying of scurvy. Lead poisoning from the poorly soldered canned food began to set in. This was a mysterious illness because lead was not known as a poison in the 1840s.
In the spring of 1848, Crozier made a desperate decision. His ships were still undamaged, but he had to find fresh food to stop the scurvy. Other explorers had talked of caribou and birds to the south. After taking their equipment and supplies ashore, Crozier had Lieutenant John Irving retrieve one of Gore’s messages. In the windblown tent, while Fitzjames wrote and Irving corrected, Crozier dictated the expedition’s last message around the margins of the earlier one. Gore’s cheery “All well” appeared horribly ironic now.
After they reburied the message, they headed south. Some men died on the way, dropping in their tracks; others died at a large camp on the south shore of King William Island; some made it onto the Canadian mainland and died beneath an upturned boat at Starvation Cove; a dozen or so died beside a boat on the way back to the ships. A few made it back to the ships and probably sailed one of them south. But scurvy, lead poisoning, starvation, and ice would not let them succeed. These men all died too.
The Inuit tell stories of meeting ragged groups of starving men, of finding camps filled with bodies and the evidence of cannibalism, and, most intriguingly, of three or four men and a dog who survived for several years and reached as far east as the Melville Peninsula. But eventually they too died. Everyone died – often very unpleasantly and after witnessing and living through almost unspeakable horrors. Franklin’s final piece of luck was that he did not live to see the tragedy that his final expedition became.
Journeying after death. Memorial to John Franklin, Waterloo Place, London.