The skulls of some of Franklin’s missing men were found on King William Island.
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IN MAY 1860, LADY FRANKLIN was delighted to receive the Royal Geographical Society’s Founders’ Gold Medal. It was awarded to acknowledge Sir John Franklin’s discovery of the Northwest Passage. To her, and to her close relatives, it was a fitting epitaph for her long-dead husband.
The Gold Medal was a well-deserved honour, but unfortunately, in the last few decades, Sir John Franklin has not been dealt with kindly by many writers, often being depicted as a bumbling failure. There is no doubt that he sometimes failed, but most of the time he was just plain unlucky. The North Pole expedition of 1818 has been cited as an example of his incompetence, but he was not the man in charge. His first overland journey to the Arctic lost nine men, mostly due to starvation. Those tragic deaths went against Franklin’s record, but during that expedition he charted the courses of rivers and filled in significant gaps in maps of the Arctic coastline, coming close to solving the riddle of the Northwest Passage. His second overland expedition added much more to Britain’s knowledge of the Arctic coast west of the Mackenzie River. Franklin’s six-year sojourn as governor of Van Diemen’s Land could not be judged a success; clearly, he was not a politician. Franklin’s final expedition, a huge undertaking for the time, was planned and organized by Sir John Barrow. Sir John Franklin was the figurehead and leader; as far as we know, he proved his worth in that capacity. Although the expedition was lost in the Arctic ice, Franklin did achieve part of the expedition’s goals: he discovered one of the routes through the Northwest Passage.
Sir John Franklin was popular with most of his officers and men while at sea and on his arduous overland journeys. He was articulate and kind, a skilled navigator and fearless of personal danger. When his accomplishments and character are all considered, he should be remembered as a fine man, a determined leader and an explorer worthy of the name.
In the two or three decades following McClintock’s grim news in 1859, occasional expeditions studied the known sites on King William Island. None found anything new until the early 1930s, when pilot Walter Gilbert saw a few artifacts from the Franklin expedition on the northwest coast of King William Island. A year later, William Gibson of the HBC located more human bones and artifacts on the south shore of the island. In 1993, a team of explorers and archaeologists from Canada returned to the boat on the northwest shores of King William Island. Under the surrounding snow, they found more grisly evidence of what had befallen at least some of Franklin’s men. Around the boat and its sledge cradle were the remains of 14 other men. These once strong men, or their remains, had not fallen victim to marauding polar bears or other animal predators. The bones showed clear signs that the flesh had been carved off with knives.
The skulls of some of Franklin’s missing men were found on King William Island.
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Other traces of the lost expedition have been found, some considerably farther south. But no signs have ever been found of the two ships, other than scraps of wood picked up by Inuit. Franklin’s final note, as placed in the cairn by Lieutenant Gore, was explicit as to the location of the two vessels just before he died. That position placed them 23 miles (37 kilometres) from shore. The second note, left by Crozier a little less than a year later, did not give precise coordinates for the ships. Instead, it stated that the ships were abandoned five leagues north-northwest of the cairn. A league can represent anywhere from two and a half to four and a half miles (four to seven kilometres). Therefore, five leagues equates to somewhere roughly between 12 and 22 miles (20 and 36 kilometres) from the cairn. That would have placed them close to the confluence of today’s McClintock Channel, Franklin Strait, Victoria Strait and James Ross Strait—certainly, at the farthest extremity, not far from the coordinates given by Franklin. It is possible that the ships had drifted closer to the shores of King William Island with the slow current.
Arctic ice, however, moves in relentless fashion with the seasons. The ships could have been crushed where they were last seen, or they could have been carried away, separately or together, to drift with the ice for hundreds of miles before the relentless pressure consumed them. Their shattered timbers could rest anywhere.
In 1992, the still unknown site of Franklin’s ships was named HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site of Canada. Beginning in 2008, Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeological Service embarked on a three-year expedition to determine the locations of Franklin’s ships. Working in collaboration with the Canadian Hydrographic Service, the Canadian Coast Guard and the Government of Nunavut, in 2008 and 2010, the expedition surveyed over 77 square miles (200 square kilometres) of water north of King William Island. The surveys continued in 2011, this time with the additional collaboration of the University of Victoria’s Ocean Technology Laboratory and the Canadian Ice Service. Although results to date have failed to find the ships, the search will continue.
In the summer of 2010, a Parks Canada expedition discovered the wreck of McClure’s HMS Investigator in Mercy Bay on the north side of Banks Island. That important find has renewed interest in the possibility of eventually discovering the remains of either HMS Erebus or HMS Terror.
The last resting place of Sir John Franklin is as much a mystery as the location of the two ships he so ably commanded. After sliding through a hole in the ice cut by his shipmates in June 1847, the great explorer’s weighted body, draped in the Union Jack, settled to the sea bed, there to reside for eternity. There is no record of the latitude and longitude of the burial site.
In addition to the location of the ships, there was another important question. Why did so many officers and men die before abandoning the ships when there should still have been so much food available on board? Perhaps the answer to that question was closer to home. Admiralty records show that the Franklin expedition was supplied with canned food by Goldner’s of Houndsditch, in east London. These were the cans found on Beechey Island many years later. Modern analysis of the cans’ construction and contents has revealed some stark and horrifying truths. The cans were substandard and almost certainly caused lead poisoning in those who ate from them. While not necessarily fatal, the ingestion of lead would certainly have created severe medical problems for a crew of men who needed to be able to work hard to keep the expedition on course. Most significant of those medical problems would have been chronic fatigue and lethargy. In addition to lead, the contents of the cans, supposedly meat in some and vegetables in others, were found to have significant traces of Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism, still a serious disease in the modern world. In the 19th-century Arctic, with limited medical facilities or drugs on the ships, botulism would have usually proved fatal. Botulism shows its presence early, anywhere from a few hours to a day or two after the toxin is ingested, with gastrointestinal problems including nausea and stomach cramps. These are followed by neurological disorders. Muscle weakness gives way to paralysis and can lead to respiratory failure. If untreated, sufferers can die within three days of exhibiting the first symptoms.
The most important players in 19th-century Arctic exploration faded one by one into history in the years following Franklin’s disappearance. Sir John Barrow died in November 1848. Sir John Ross followed him in London in 1856, and Sir James Clark Ross in 1862. Dr. John Richardson hung on until 1865. Lady Jane Franklin passed away ten years later in 1875 at the age of 83. Sir George Back went on to achieve fame as an admiral and as president of the Royal Geographical Society, which he served for over 20 years. He was never popular but appeared to be oblivious of that fact. He died in June 1878. Dr. John Rae lasted until July 1893, when he died of pneumonia in London. Francis Crozier, one of the most experienced of polar explorers, left his bones somewhere on the horrific foot-slog from the northwest shore of King William Island to the mouth of Back’s Fish River, presumably sometime in late 1848 or early 1849.
Sixty years after the Franklin expedition disappeared, the consummate Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and a crew of six took a 70-foot-long (21-metre) herring boat, Gjoa, from east to west through the Northwest Passage between 1903 and 1906 using the southern route through Dolphin and Union Strait, Queen Maud Gulf and Rae Strait. This first successful transit was led by a man who, as a boy, had considered Sir John Franklin his hero. Even then, no one knew the full story of what had happened to the Franklin expedition. Most of that complicated riddle was not solved until the late 20th century.
Dutch-Belgian long-distance sailor Willi de Roos was the first small-boat skipper to complete a transit of the Northwest Passage. He sailed from east to west in the 43-foot (13-metre) steel ketch Williwaw in 1977. The author of this book failed in a solo attempt on the passage from west to east in Audacity, a small powerboat, in 1984. Since then many others have attempted the passage—some failed; some won through. In more recent years, the Arctic ice has melted enough each summer that more and more small vessels have been able to transit the passage in one season.
The ice continues to freeze the Northwest Passage in winter. In the short northern summer it releases its grip and allows intruders to explore its difficult coastlines. Yet no matter how many adventurers challenge the historic passage, it is unlikely that any will achieve the fame of the expedition led by the Lion of the Arctic. Today, 167 years after Erebus and Terror vanished in the Arctic seas, the fascination with the fate of Franklin, his officers and men, as well as the two ships, continues unabated.