Not here:
The white North has thy bones, and thou
Heroic Sailor Soul
Art passing on thy happier voyage now
Toward no Earthly Pole.
Tennyson’s epitaph to Franklin, Westminster Abbey
The young Lieutenant Irving was one of those who returned to the ships in the summer of 1848. We know this because he was alive at Victory Point when the note was written in April and Crozier led his command south. In the 1870s, a skeleton in a shallow grave was found at Victory Point. Shreds of clothing indicated that it belonged to an officer. Beside the skull was a medal for mathematical achievement from the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth. It had been presented in 1830 to John Irving. Even in their last extremity, the survivors took the trouble to bury their friends surrounded by their most prized possessions.
Irving’s skeleton was returned to Britain and, amidst widespread grief, was buried in his hometown of Edinburgh. His is the only named grave of any of the 129 men of the Franklin expedition.
Despite Jane’s best efforts, John Franklin’s grave was never found. However, monuments to him sprang up all around the world. A statue of Franklin announcing the discovery of the Northwest Passage to his men stands to one side of Waterloo Place in London. The statue is 2.4 metres high, and the plinth on which it stands bears a bronze scene of Franklin’s funeral, a map, lists of all the officers and men of the Erebus and Terror, and the scars of a German bomb that exploded in Waterloo Place during the blitz in 1940. A marble monument in Westminster Abbey was unveiled by George Back in 1875, mere weeks after Jane Franklin died. There is a bas-relief in Greenwich, a statue, apparently a very good likeness, in the Market Place of Spilsby, stained glass windows in Gravesend, a monument in Hobart, Tasmania, and a marble tablet on Beechey Island. In addition, many points in the Canadian Arctic are named for Franklin and his companions.
John Franklin was gentler and less arrogant than many of his contemporaries, but his cultural blinkers were just as firmly in place. In structured environments where there was a clear chain of command, he excelled. In situations where the structure was fluid and flexibility and imagination were called for, he did less well. Yet he spent much of his life actively seeking those very situations.
Why he should have sought out dangerous, unstable situations, in which it was extremely unlikely that he would excel, is a mystery. Perhaps he had a distorted view of his own talents. Perhaps he saw his own weaknesses and attempted to overcome them. If the latter, then he failed.
Most likely, Franklin did not really question his situations. The early nineteenth century was not, after all, a time of great self-analysis. Franklin did what he did at each moment of his life because, at that time, there were obvious reasons for taking a specific course. He undertook exploration because Flinders had trained him well in navigation and because it was the fastest way to advance his career. He pushed the limits too far on his first expedition because not to have done so would have finished his career. He eagerly sought leadership of his third expedition because he longed for the straightforward life of an explorer after the years of political infighting in Van Diemen’s Land.
But for all that, there was a part of Franklin that craved the solitude and hardship of remote places on the edge of the known world. To satisfy that craving he was perfectly prepared to risk his own and his companions’ lives.
Maybe Franklin would have been better off staying at home and taking over the family business in Spilsby. But that was never really possible. John was a traveller. Two of his brothers sought their fortunes in India, but even India would not have been enough for John. He went to extremes. Few ventured as far as he did both in the far north and the far south. He pushed the limits of the known.
Franklin achieved much during his life. His expeditions mapped more than 12,735 kilometres of previously unknown coastline; his scientific discoveries contributed a great deal to an understanding of the ecology of the Arctic lands; and his men discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage.
Ironically, however, Franklin’s greatest contribution to exploration and geography was his mysterious death. The navy had no shortage of keen young officers who could have led Franklin’s first two expeditions as well as he. What was unique to Franklin was his death off the shores of King William Island. That event and attempts to explain it triggered one of the largest and most intense bursts of exploration the world has ever seen. What happened in the twelve years after Franklin died defined the Canadian North and set the scene for the sovereignty we now enjoy.
The North has always loomed large in the Canadian consciousness, and Franklin’s tragic death has assumed the aura of a Canadian myth. The countless songs, stories, and poems written about him have extended his journey long past his own lifetime. Rudy Wiebe won the Governor General’s Award for A Discovery of Strangers, his novel set around Franklins first expedition. Stan Rogers’ song, Northwest Passage, with its haunting images of “lonely cairns of stones” and “the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea,” was considered the ultimate Canadian song by CBC listeners.
We owe John Franklin a lot. He was a man of his time who failed to rise above that. He failed as much as he succeeded, but his final failure was so magnificent that it ensured him a lasting place in the history of Canada and in the minds of all Canadians.
Finding Remains of Skeletons in a Boat. Reprinted from E.V Blake, Arctic Experiences (1874). Two of Franklin’s men after they became part of the myth.