Figure 4 Facsimile of the “Victory Point” record, Harper’s Weekly, 29 October 1859. Collection of the author.
It is perhaps the most evocative document in the long history of the Western exploration of the Arctic regions: a single sheet of paper, a pre-printed form with two handwritten messages written not quite a year apart. The first, full of pride and high spirits, describes the Franklin expedition’s achievements through May 1847, including its circumnavigation of Cornwallis Island, and ends with the forceful line “Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All Well.” The second, written in a tight scrawl around the margins, tells of the death of Franklin (only weeks after the first record was made) and many other officers and men, the abandonment of his ships, and a desperate plan to trek overland to the Back River.
A facsimile of this record, brought back from the Arctic by Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, was reproduced in the Illustrated London News and Harper’s Weekly, and a fold-out facsimile was included in all early printed editions of his book, The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas, in 1859. A few years later, this book reached the hands of a ten-year-old boy by the name of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski – a boy who would grow up to be the novelist Joseph Conrad. Late in life, he vividly recalled this book, and this document, as the spark that launched his career, both as navigator and writer:
The last words unveiling the mystery of the Erebus and Terror expedition were brought home and disclosed to the world by Sir Leopold M’Clintock in his book, The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas. It is a little book, but it records with manly simplicity the tragic ending of a great tale. It so happened that I was born in the year of its publication. Therefore I may be excused for not getting hold of it till ten years afterward. I can only account for it falling into my hands by the fact that the fate of Sir John Franklin was a matter of European interest, and that Sir Leopold M’Clintock’s book was translated into every language of the white races. My copy was probably in French. But I have read the book many times since. I have now on my shelves a copy of a popular edition got up exactly as I remember my first one. It contains a touching facsimile of the printed form filled in with a summary record of the two ships’ work, the name of “Sir John Franklin, commanding the expedition,” written in ink, and the pathetic underlined entry “All Well.” It was found by Sir Leopold M’Clintock under a cairn, and is dated just a year before the two ships had to be abandoned in their deadly ice-trap and their crews’ long and desperate struggle for life began. There could hardly have been imagined a better book for letting in the breath of the stern romance of polar exploration into the existence of a boy whose knowledge of the poles of the earth had been till then of an abstract, formal kind, as the imaginary ends of the imaginary axis upon which the earth turns. The great spirit of the realities of the story sent me off on the romantic explorations of my inner self; to the discovery of the taste for poring over land and sea maps; revealed to me the existence of a latent devotion to geography which interfered with my devotion (such as it was) to my other school work.
For those who read it – and McClintock’s book was an instant best-seller, far outpacing rivals such as George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss – it was conceived of as the end of the story. As things turned out, it was only to be the beginning.
In the years since it was first published for all the world to see in 1859, this single document has been the subject of more speculation and analysis than any other piece of documentary evidence this side of the Zapruder film, and yet it is far from yielding up all its secrets. With its ambiguities and contradictions, and its encapsulation of the pride that goeth before a fall, it has come to represent – depending on the reader – the very essence of Arctic heroism in the face of extraordinary odds, or a sad and pathetic commentary on the ill-preparedness of Franklin’s men to endure the environment that awaited them outside the shelter of their ships.
So what can we learn from this record? Well, we can learn the direct information it conveys as to the location of the ships and the disposition of the crew, and so forth. But we can also glean a great deal more. Just two examples will suffice. First, as William Battersby has noted, the note is entirely in the handwriting of James Fitzjames; this is unusual, since Franklin would ordinarily have written – or at least signed – such notes himself; a note tossed overboard earlier in the expedition was signed by him. We may infer from this that, for some reason, Franklin must have been unable to sign the note himself; that he died only a few weeks later suggests that illness may have been the cause. Second, the years of the expedition’s wintering at Beechey Island are given as 1846–47, which is certainly in error; from the headboards of the graves at Beechey we know it was the winter of 1845–46. Why would Fitzjames have made such an elementary mistake, and made it in both the Victory Point document and in a second, identical form left a few miles away at Back Bay? This suggests that Fitzjames’s memory was clouded, which has been seen by some as a potential sign of lead poisoning. Those in the early stages of this condition have problems with forming lasting short-term memories, which progresses to difficulty with accurate recollection of the mid-range past. As Colin Field, an Australian pathologist with whom I’ve consulted on this problem, notes:
I can imagine a situation where members of the expedition, and in particular the officers, will begin to show gradual problems with memory for recent information, as well as subtle but progressive deficits of organizational function. They begin to make subtle errors; forgetting where they have put things, or whether or not they have issued certain orders. As things progress they become more and more forgetful for events of the recent past. One of the earliest signs of memory deficit is the loss of ability to update, on a daily basis, the current day and date. Failure to be able to name the current day, month and year, and in some cases the current whereabouts, is one of the most telling early signs of all organic dementias, and it is for this reason that mental status examinations always include these orientation questions.
At the same time, lead poisoning would have no immediate effect on what’s known as “habitual” memory, including things such as how to tie one’s shoes or ascertain one’s position with a sextant. And, in fact, we find in the second part of the note that the location where the record was deposited – “Lat. 69°37′42″ Long. 98°41′” – is reasonably accurate.
But it’s the second, marginal note that gives us some of the most suggestive information about the fate of the crews, and the cause of their distress. There is a lengthy aside about how Sir James Clark Ross’s cairn was not found where it was thought to be, and a new cairn erected at the site – a curious waste of precious ink and time – perhaps another possible sign of mental difficulties. The date of death of Franklin, 11 June 1847, is given, but no cause of death or indication of his burial site – another odd omission. For the rest of the officers, we hear only of John Irving and Graham Gore; Gore we now know to have received a field promotion, since he is referred to as “Commander” – and also to have died, being referred to as “late.” This has given rise to speculation that Gore, who was in command of the party that left the original paper, must have reached Simpson’s cairn at Cape Herschel, returning with the news just in time to be promoted by Franklin as a reward. Of course, it is entirely possible that he was simply promoted as a matter of course after Franklin’s death when Fitzjames became captain. With Lieutenant Irving, his name comes up only in the context of the description of the search for Ross’s cairn – and yet here lies a further mystery, for a body believed to be Irving’s was found not far from this very spot by Lieutenant Schawtka’s searching expedition years later. How could Irving, who was well enough to be scouting about in 1848 at the start of the southward march, have died near the very place where it began? Could it be a sign of an attempted return to the ships at a later date?
Next, there are the overall casualty figures for the crews: 9 officers and 15 men. There were 24 officers on the two vessels, including the ice masters, and 105 men; this gives an officer casualty rate of 37 per cent as opposed to only 14 per cent among the ordinary seamen and marines – a remarkable ratio. Why did more than twice as large a proportion of officers die? If we assume that lead poisoning was a key factor, we may attribute this to the officers’ consuming more of something – tinned food, or the water distilled aboard ship – which impaired their health significantly. Alternatively, it’s been proposed that a large party rich in officers – perhaps a burial detail – was lost in some accident, skewing the overall ratio. Whatever the cause, the difference seems far too large to be accounted for by random chance.
Finally, we have the enigmatic, and entirely unsatisfactory addendum in Crozier’s hand – “and start on tomorrow 26th for Back’s Fish River.” Was this the destination of the entire body of men who abandoned the ships? Or was it, as David Woodman has argued, simply a large detachment of men gone in search of food and possible Inuit contact to aid their less able comrades? Having reached that area, was the plan to ascend the river – a perilous journey filled with rough portages that Back, a famously able Arctic traveller, condemned as one of the most difficult journeys of its kind – or rather to track to the southeast in the direction of Repulse Bay, in hopes of meeting with Inuit or whalers? On this, the record is silent.
These, then, are the central questions raised by the Victory Point record, and which may never be completely resolved until some further record or evidence is found. Even in all its ambiguity, it continues to be a rich source of fascination, and the terrible irony between its two messages will always evoke what Conrad called “the tragic ending of a great tale.”
There was, it turns out, a second record found on King William, one similar in every respect (save the fateful addendum in the margins) to its brother. Both had been filled out by James Fitzjames aboard HMS Erebus, and both repeated the same mistake (the year of the ships’ wintering there is misstated as 1846–47 rather than 1845–46). This other record was recovered at what became known as “Gore Point,” the tip of the peninsula that forms the western side of Collinson Inlet. The location is consistent with the idea of Gore having commanded a party sent out to survey the western coast of King William Island, with the presumed goal of reaching Simpson’s cairn on the shores of Washington Bay; such a party would have skirted the coast, taking advantage of the still land-fast new ice for smooth travel. On the Gore Point record, the only significant difference is that the phrase “All Well” was not underlined.
At first glance, this second record adds little to our understanding. Yet, having been deposited just eight miles – possibly one day’s march – south of the Victory Point record, it strongly suggests that Gore had been instructed to leave a record frequently, perhaps daily, on his southward trek. One might reasonably expect, then, that several other such records were left along the coast, and might yet be recovered. The most important of these, of course, would have been at Simpson’s cairn, but, since by the time McClintock reached it, it had been opened, this record will probably never be found. It would certainly be worth looking for the others – a surviving record would be far more significant than, say, a toothbrush.
It is tantalizing to think that Gore may have achieved the long-sought dream of linking the eastern and western surveys of the Northwest Passage – it seems hard to imagine he would have missed his goal, only a few days’ march south of where he deposited the record. We know that he must have returned alive to the ships, since his promotion to commander could not have been made after his death. We also know that, at some point between his return to the ships in 1847 and the depositing of the 1848 record, he died, but of the cause of his death, or the unusual casualty rate among officers generally, the note is mute. For now, unless some new documents are recovered from the Franklin ship discovered by Parks Canada in 2014, we have only one other documentary source written by a member of the Franklin expedition – a packet of papers so strange, so inscrutable, and so singular that they make the “Victory Point” record seem as plain and unambiguous as a grocery-store receipt.
The sight was truly a melancholy one. In the words of Francis Leopold McClintock: “Shortly after midnight of the 25th May, when slowly walking along a gravel ridge which the winds kept partially bare of snow, I came upon a human skeleton, partly exposed, with here and there a few fragments of clothing appearing through the snow. The skeleton, now perfectly bleached, was lying upon its face; and it was a melancholy truth that the old Esquimaux woman spoke when she said, that they fell down and died as they walked along.”
This skeleton bore with it one of the most enigmatic documents in the whole Franklin mystery. In the words of Allen Young, who published his separate account in the Cornhill Magazine in 1860, “the Captain’s party found a human skeleton upon the beach as the man had fallen down and died, with his face to the ground; and a pocket-book, containing letters in German which have not yet been deciphered, was found close by.”
Whose was this skeleton? And what were these letters? As it turns out, they were not written in German, although the mistake was understandable, given the frequent occurrence of strange words such as “Meht,” “Kniht,” and “Eht.” On further examination, it was discovered that they were in fact in English, only written backwards (that is, with the letters in backwards order, not mirror-backwards). Why this would have been done is a difficult question – for my part, I can only suppose that there was some desire to conceal the contents of a sailor’s letters from his shipmates, whose rudimentary literacy would have made transposing the letters a daunting task.
Figure 5 Cape Herschel on King William Island, site where the “Peglar” body was found. Collection of the author.
The ownership of the letters poses yet another question. Because among them was the seaman’s certificate of one Harry Peglar, they have been dubbed the “Peglar Papers” for years, and the name has stuck. McClintock’s description of the body, however, almost certainly rules Peglar out; on its being turned over, the uniform was found to be better preserved on the side that had faced the ground; his neckerchief was tied in the distinctive manner of a ship’s steward – something Peglar, a senior seaman with the title of “Captain of the Foretop,” would never have done. McClintock added that “in every particular the dress confirmed our conjectures as to his rank or office in the late expedition – the blue jacket with slashed sleeves and braided edging, and the pilot-cloth greatcoat with plain covered buttons.” The assumption now is that this must have been a steward, likely a friend of Peglar’s, carrying letters home for his since-deceased shipmate. An excellent candidate has been proposed in Thomas Armitage, who was the gun-room steward (servant of the junior officers) aboard HMS Terror and had served alongside Peglar on an earlier voyage aboard HMS Gannett from 1834 to 1838. More recent research by Glenn M. Stein has shown that, at least as of 1826, Armitage was illiterate, although since shipboard schools were a feature of Arctic voyages, he could have acquired or improved his literacy there. Stein suggests William Gibson, a subordinate officer’s steward aboard the Terror, who had served with Peglar more recently aboard HMS Wanderer; both his and Armitage’s height and hair colour (brown) are consistent with McClintock’s description of the body.
Backwards writing, it turns out, is only one of many problems facing anyone who tackles these documents – the paper is blotched and foxed, and has heavy folds, along which in many places bits of the pages have broken off. At some point, an attempt to darken the ink with a re-agent damaged much of the writing on the seaman’s certificate, perhaps irretrievably. Most frustratingly of all, where they can be made out, the papers consist mostly of a sailor’s reminiscences of warmer climes, particularly in Cumana, Venezuela, a source no doubt of pleasure while trapped on board an ice-bound ship in the Arctic zone, but of little value in solving the Franklin mystery, and offering scant insight into the state of mind of Franklin’s men. That the Gannett, with both Peglar and Armitage aboard, called at Cumana would seem to corroborate the body’s identity.
Nevertheless, scattered about in these letters are passages that are highly suggestive of events on board the ships. Like many writers with limited literacy, Peglar (or Armitage, if some or all of the writings were his) added asides about current events in the midst of the old stories he was recounting. Thus we have phrases such as “brekfest to be short rations,” “whose is this coffee,” and “the Terror camp clear,” which – if only we could know more of their context – would seem to have enormous potential significance. Mixed in with these, we have ample shares of doggerel verse, including a mildly obscene parody of the poet Barry Cornwall’s well-known ditty “The Sea,” accounts of tropical parties and turtle soup, and a paean to someone’s dog.
The most intriguing passage of all is one identified early on by David Woodman and other researchers as possibly having some reference to life on the ships just prior to their abandonment: “We will have his new boots in the middel watch . . . as we have got some very hard ground to heave a . . . shall want some grog to wet houer wissel . . . all my art Tom for I dont think for . . . r now clozes should lay and furst mend 21st night a gread.” The “new boots” are assumed to be boots such as those found by McClintock and other searchers, which had been modified onboard by the addition of nails or cleats – these were clearly meant for the sledge-haulers. “Hard ground to heave” may be a reference to hauling sledges – or perhaps to digging graves (one thinks of the sailor buried by Parry near Igloolik, in the clearing of whose grave six pickaxes were broken on the frozen gravel). The “21st night a gread” is most tempting of all; might this be 21 April 1848, four days before the amended record was left near Victory Point?
Richard Cyriax, the founding father of Franklin studies, spent considerable time studying these papers and wrote an article on them for the Mariner’s Mirror, a draft transcript of which accompanies them in their archival box at the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I myself have spent countless hours going over the original papers, which have been covered in archival gauze to preserve the fragile material, but have rarely been able to improve on Cyriax’s readings; indeed, some of the text readable to him has since faded away. It may be possible someday, by use of ultraviolet light or computer-enhanced imagery, to recover something of what’s now illegible, but even then, the enigmatic quality of these papers is likely to remain. Their writer never imagined that they would be among the very few written materials ever recovered from the expedition, and there are uncertainties in their contents that will probably never be resolved. Nevertheless, they add a further sense of wonder to the larger mystery of the final fate of Franklin’s men.
Given all that, though, it’s remarkable what we can learn. To begin with, it’s worth noting that much – perhaps all – of the papers consist of real or apparently real correspondence. That many of the sheets were meant to be entrusted to the post can be inferred by their folding, by the remaining bits of red-sealing wax, and the presence of addresses on the outside corner or flap of several – although, since these too were written backwards, they would doubtless have caused some consternation had anyone tried to mail them. Still more puzzlingly, the documents themselves have none of the elements of a personal letter; there are no salutations, no signatures, nor any other such niceties. The assumption has been that papers – most of them light-hearted stories, songs, and reminiscences of travel – were writings the sender composed in his idle hours aboard ship and simply wished to forward to his friends or family. Whatever their purpose, the fact that there are addresses offers at least a glimmer of hope that learning something about their intended recipients might shed light on the larger mystery.
The most sensible, and – as it turns out – verifiable address is the notation “In care of Mr. Heaithfield, a Squier, no 10 Pelmell West, London” – Cyriax and Jones readily identified this from a London directory for 1845 as William Eames Heathfield, a chemist whose shop was at 10 Pall Mall; he thus has the honour of being the only definitely identified correspondent of Peglar or Armitage. And, as it happens, he turned out to be readily traceable; by using online resources unavailable in Cyriax’s day such as Google Books, I’ve been able to find out a good deal more about Heathfield. He was mentioned in a lawsuit in 1851 against one Robert Nelson Collins, a bankrupt drug wholesaler; by this time his address had changed to “Princes Square, Wilson Street, Finsbury.” The quality of his preparations having evidently been challenged, he was defended by several eminent colleagues in the pages of The Chemist in 1853, and in 1856 he was party to another bankruptcy suit listed in the London Gazette. More notably for our purposes, in 1863 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a rather unusual honour for a chemist, at a meeting presided over by the eminent geologist Sir Roderick Murchison. This suggests that he must have had some knowledge of, or connection with, Arctic exploration, but there is nothing in these records that gives us anything more specific. For a person such as the author of these “Peglar Papers,” Heathfield was certainly an unusually distinguished correspondent, although since the direction on the letter was “in care of,” it may be that they were meant for someone he knew through him, rather than Heathfield himself.
Another seemingly valid address is “Mr John Cowper, No. 47 John St., Commercial Road, London,” but here there is considerable ambiguity – according to Cyriax, there were no fewer than six John Streets in London’s East End, as well as two Commercial Roads, and in any case no John Cowper is listed as residing in any of them. One alternative reading of the name – as “Cooper” – is attractive but yields far too many matches. Another address of which the ambiguities are difficult to resolve is also written backwards: “IM E.q Evarglleb Raauqs, Ocilmip, West.” Here it’s the name that is ambiguous; while “Bellgrave Squaar, Pimlico, West” is certainly valid, the other letters are far less clear. They might very well be someone’s initials; the “M” might be a “W,” “I” may be “F,” and the whole phrase might or might not be backwards; one possible reading (if forwards) is “F.W., Esq.” Cyriax tried out all of these, and apparently there was no match for any in the 1845 directory.
One further scrap of paper bears a legible address, which Cyriax reads as “Mr Heather sen . . . City . . . ation, Abberdeen, Lond . . .” – the temptation is to link this to William Heather, a private in the Royal Marines who served on HMS Terror, the same ship as Peglar. By chance, the records of Heather’s career are a bit more detailed than for the other Marines; we know that he was born in Battersea and served on HMS Prince Regent and HMS Castor, aboard which he participated in in the siege of Bilbao in 1835. And, although the address “Abberdeen, Lond” may seem contradictory, there was an Aberdeen Road in London in 1845, along with an Aberdeen Place, Aberdeen Mews, and Aberdeen Park. None of these addresses are near Battersea, and all are in relatively posh neighbourhoods, which makes them very unlikely ones indeed for Heather’s family; the Marines were almost entirely drawn from the poorer and working classes, and since they were ineligible for the double-pay for Arctic service offered to seamen, they were in fact the lowest-paid men on the expedition.
We can be confident, at least, that these papers were written aboard one of Franklin’s ships during the expedition that departed in May 1845. There are no written dates prior to that of the ships’ departure, and the events in Venezuela and Trinidad are consistently described using the past tense, e.g. “a Party wot happened at Trinidad.” Cyriax and Jones found that Peglar and his shipmate Armitage had been on vessels that called on Trinidad and at Cumana, Venezuela, and the recollections are doubtless those of one of these men. Some of the place names, such as “laying in asham Bay,” don’t seem to correspond with any known place, although since “asham” is also the name of a variety of corn flour used in Caribbean cuisine, “laying in asham” might simply be glossed as “taking on grain.” There is also a reference to “Comfort Cove,” which might be taken to refer to a graveyard on Ascension Island where sailors who had died while quarantined on the island for illness were buried; though that was its name in the 1830s and 1840s, it is now known as Comfortless Cove. Cyriax found that Peglar and Armitage had been on ships that had called at Ascension, so this name could be what was meant – but, importantly, the recollection of this place could have been the cause for a sailor’s newly applying the name to a place in the Arctic, perhaps a graveyard adjacent to an onshore sick camp for Franklin’s men (this possibility will be examined in a moment).
There are other lines that self-identify as having been written while on the expedition, such as the date “September 1846” or the inscription “Lines writ on the North” – though in both cases these are on the reverse side of pages containing other text, and thus have no contextual information and indeed could have been written before or after the text on the rest of the page. Similarly on its own is a small drawing of an eye with an eyelid, and the words “Lid Bay,” which suggests a place encountered and named on the expedition on account its eye-like shape, though we have no way of being sure of this surmise. Lastly, there is the aforementioned reference to “new boots” and the need to wet one’s “wissel” – which at first seems quite promising, since it’s in the present tense and can be correlated with a known event. Oddly, though, the context of this passage is in the past tense and seems to describe very different events; prior to the “boots” passage there is a reference to someone of whom the writer says, “I think he navil officer,” while the section immediately after carries on about another man who “made his appearence” and “wos a marine by the cut of his big . . .” In both phrases, one has the sense of identifying a stranger by the cut of his clothes or outward appearance, something that would never have happened on the Franklin expedition on which crew members would have known each others’ ship, rank, and branch of service quite well. My best explanation for this is that, as I’ve suggested above, a relatively naive and untutored writer might break into the midst of a past-tense recollection with some present-tense news, then “return” to his story without making any clear division.
But the most significant lines in the entire “Peglar” collection are surely those that begin with the couplet, “O Death wheare is thy Sting / the Grave at Comfort Cove.” These lines are without question part of an account of, or eulogy for, someone who has died and has or is to be buried, since the first phrase is from the Service for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer, an official Church of England text with which every member of the ships’ crews would have been familiar – and a personal copy of which each been supplied prior to the voyage. The mention of a “Grave” makes the meaning quite clear, as do other phrases on this leaf, such as “thy right hand” and the enigmatic but all-important line “[the] Dyer was and whare Traffalgar.” Since Sir John Franklin, the commander of the expedition, had been at the Battle of Trafalgar, we have strong though circumstantial evidence that the burial described was his own.
But who is the “Dyer”? There was no one of this name among Franklin’s men, though there was a William Dyer at the Battle of Trafalgar, aboard HMS Temeraire just astern of Nelson’s Victory. The line remains enigmatic, since the definite article in “The Dyer” would seem odd if it refers to a specific individual; the following word could be either “saw” (if read forwards) or “was” (if backwards). Still more intriguing, a man of that same name – perhaps the same man – was responsible in 1849 for forwarding a packet of letters from Mrs John Peddie, whose husband was acting surgeon on HMS Terror, to James Clark Ross prior to his departure in search of Franklin’s ships. In his “cover letter,” Dyer expresses the hope that “you may very soon have the good fortune” to fall in with the Erebus and Terror and so deliver the letters – but adds no details as to its writer; it survives at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), but the SPRI has no biographical information on this William Dyer. Another suggestion – brilliant in its simplicity – is that the writer, with his limited education, user “dyer” to simply mean the man who had died, that is, the deceased.
The rest of this text comprises a series of riddles, each wrapped within its own enigma – I give here my best transcription of this leaf, in its entirety, with a few new readings, suggested by William Battersby, which I have put in italics to distinguish them from my own; as I will throughout this essay, I’ve also underlined any words not spelled backwards.
O Death wheare is thy sting
The Grave at comfort cove
For who has any douat how
Nelson [?] look
The Dyer was and whare Traffalegar
as . . . s . . . Of him
and . . . to . . . frends a. Laitor. a. Cors. [?]
Best
and w . . . . . . addam and eve
a Nother
Death . . . right hands
. . . new [?] grave
I . . . ham . . . to [?] will be a veray
signed . . . me yes and a splended
And
That [m]akes trade Florrish
That way the world
. . . round
Florrish
The conjectural reading “Nelson,” offered by Battersby, is certainly an exciting possibility and if correct amplifies the mention of “Trafalgar” in the following line, which already links the text to that event. Sir John Franklin himself was the only veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar on the Franklin expedition, and a Nelson memorial ring preserved at the National Maritime Museum is his.
Figure 6 Leaf from the “Peglar Papers” describing a possible funeral service. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
The reference to Adam and Eve may also point to these words being part of, or notes on, some eulogy or homily given at a memorial service – they were often mentioned in the context of man’s fall from grace – as does the reappearance of “Death” – and although the reference to Christ sitting “at God’s right hand” would also fit such a source, there is definitely another letter, which seems to give “right hands” a far less specific reference; “rigid hands” is also a possible reading and would make sense in this context. Just after this, the mention of a “new grave” seems promising, but again we are defeated by a series of vague lines with references to something “signed,” something “splended,” and the phrase “That makes trade [or trad.] Florrish,” which seems out of keeping with a memorial service; Battersby has suggested that it refers to how the Royal Navy made trade flourish, but again the tone is wrong. The final few lines, “That the way the world . . . round,” suggests an absent “goes” and the repetition of “Florrish” suggests a “flourish” – perhaps the earlier phrase was meant to stand for “trad[itional] flourish,” which could refer to a showing of swords or (less likely) the blowing of a trumpet or similar instrument in honour of the dead, though neither was a usual part of a naval funeral.
The sum of these lines, I feel, is that they do not constitute in their entirety any kind of funeral poem or oration, although they may have been rough notes taken upon the occasion of hearing such a eulogy; this could explain their fragmentary nature. Perhaps a witness to such a ceremony would have written down just the phrases he liked and added a few notes of his own (several of the words seem to have been added interlineally) as his time and inclination allowed. If that is the case, the funeral most likely was Franklin’s own – there seems no other reason such a service would have mentioned Trafalgar, or Nelson if that reading is correct – but we are left with a view of this service which is very far from satisfactory. And yet, even when compared to the many enigmatic phrases in these curious notes, the roundel on the opposite side of the same leaf is still more confounding.
This, the crux of the papers as such, and the only mention of Peglar outside of his seaman’s certificate, was drawn, or written, over the fold – the paper seems to have been meant as a letter and bears a small fragment of red-sealing wax. A circle was evidently drawn, either by tracing or using a compass, and two texts were then added: the first round about the edge of this circle, and the second in straight lines within it; the circular texts seems to read “any W. bouat the harmonic he I . . . ent wander money a night in” while within the roundel we find:
HMS Erebus
tell The ca . . .
you are [or “and”] peglar
on bord onn hay
The Terror Camp
[is?] clear
Battersby reads this somewhat differently, suggesting “Oh Lord our God” in the place of “on bord onn hay” and “be clear” instead of “is clear” in the final line; he also fills out “Captain” from “ca . . .” in the second line. The header, and the word “tell,” strongly suggest that the roundel was a communication between the crews of the ships, from the Terror to the Erebus, presumably after at least the former ship’s crew was ashore and formed into a “camp.” The exclamation “Oh Lord our God” suggests some horror, and yet the round writing seems a playful and enigmatic device, hardly appropriate for conveying bad news or the transcript of a funeral oration. The shift from “is” to “be” in the last line would seem to make it an example of the concessive or even imperative mood, which, as one period grammar notes, is “a sign of wishing and consequently occurs often in prayer”; so the meaning may be, “Let us hope that the Terror Camp is clear.” This again is consistent with the earlier reference to God, if that’s the reading one adopts.
The surrounding line, with its phrase “I wander many a night,” seems almost like a snippet from a poem or elegy, and indeed this exact phrase occurs in a translation of Adam Oehlenschlaäger’s Danish work Axel and Valborg: “Here shall I wander many a night alone, / And think upon my darling dream, and on / Thy coming home, and on our cruel fate. / Then shall my heart lift up itself to God / In prayer and holy song.” Unfortunately, the correspondence is chimerical; although Axel and Valborg was published in 1810, this translation was not made until 1874. The other odd word is “harmonic,” possibly part of the phrase “a bouat the harmonic.” It’s an unusual phrase and seems to suggest that the harmonic is what is being wandered (or perhaps wondered) about. The word has musical implications, and it’s been suggested that it refers to the singing of hymns; it’s also a phrase found in scientific treatises about vibrating bodies, though its use there seems far too technical for it to have been used in a note by a writer with student-level literacy. The capital “W” near “bouat” has also been suggested as an abbreviated form of “whale boat,” and this, though promising at first, has no sensible relationship to any interpretation of the rest of the line. Battersby has suggested that the lines constituted a sort of word play or cryptic message between the ships’ captains, and that’s certainly possible, although if so its underlying significance remains unclear. One final, intriguing possibility: since Harry Peglar, William Gibson, and George Henry Hodgson had all served aboard HMS Wanderer in the years just before the expedition, could the “W” or the word “wander” refer to that vessel in some way? It remains at best an enigmatic possibility.
So in terms of what insight these texts give to events during the expedition, or to the state of mind of its writer or writers, we have at best some suggestive but inconclusive observations: that there was a bay dubbed “Lid Bay,” that there was a camp on land where the crew of the Terror lived for some time, perhaps adjacent to a graveyard dubbed “Comfort Cove,” that there was a burial, possibly Franklin’s, at which it’s possible that some of the crew spoke (or else wrote down what others spoke), and that there were “letters” sent from ship to ship. Cyriax also felt, as did McClintock when he first saw it, that the doggerel version of “The Sea,” since it was on the same leaf that bore the date “April 21, 1847,” meant that, at least as of that date, the mood on board the ships was good, and even jovial. Other playful and idle elements on other leaves seem to corroborate this sense; who, if dying of exposure, scurvy, or lead poisoning, would compose ditties about dogs and sea turtles, accounts of bygone parties, and idle references to land-bound matters such as “the grog shop opporsite”? They may well have been composed to fend off boredom in the long winter months, and preserved by the writer’s shipmate as giving some account of the life lived by his deceased companion, long after these idle moments.
There are other aspects – the funeral text, the enigmatic roundel, the references to “new boots” and “hard ground to heave,” which are suggestive of activities – either the abandonment of the ships or perhaps the departure of a burial detail – of a less pleasant nature. There’s nothing, however, that directly speaks of sorrow, no last words to families and loved ones, indeed hardly anything personal at all, unless perhaps “All my art Tom” transcribes a dialect in which initial “h” is silent and can be read as “All my heart, Tom.” Without salutations or signatures, and yet folded as letters and in several cases given London addresses – and even the memo “Paid” – these seem a very strange sort of letters indeed, ones that would no doubt have posed a problem to the Post Office, had they ever reached it. It’s indeed possible that all, or nearly all, were written prior to the very last march of the doomed men, and thus can tell us very little about their state of mind when they realized that, despite their exertions, they were nearing the end of their journey, and their lives. It is to be hoped that, in the near future, the papers might be subjected to the kinds of multi-spectrum scans that have enabled, for instance, the reading of Livingstone’s later journals, which were written crosswise in berry juice upon old newspapers and long defeated decipherment. But even if we had as perfect a transcript as possible, I very much doubt that it would clear up all the cruxes of the fragmentary, half-legible, and cryptic pages that have aptly been dubbed “the Dead Sea Scrolls of the North.”
