The announcement of the discovery of Franklin’s flagship, HMS Erebus, on 9 September 2014 was surely the most extraordinary news in the entire history of the search for Franklin. At a stroke, the Parks Canada team accomplished something that no one, in the nearly 170 years since Franklin was last seen, had managed: they had found his ship, in whose captain’s cabin he had died, and brought to the surface the ship’s bell, dated 1845, the very one that had tolled the mournful news of his demise. There’s no question that work on this discovery is just beginning; given the short window of time each year for diving, the care needed in exploring a wreck that has not yet been fully mapped or assessed for structural stability, and the care with which any artifacts obtained will have to be treated – both on their discovery and in the slow process of conservation – will surely be the work of many years. In that process, some of the history told in this book will inevitably be rewritten – and yet, at the same time, these new histories will still be incomplete. The story of what happened to the men after they left the ships is still only partly understood, and the work of those who have laboured to understand all the pieces of the puzzle is also ongoing.
To begin with, there are some larger questions that have never been properly investigated at all. Might there be some trace of a Franklin party on the Melville peninsula, say at a camp on Crown Prince Frederik Island? No one, so far, has looked. The human remains at the Todd Islets, which Louie Kamookak has shown to dozens of different historians and adventurers over the years, have still never had a proper archaeological study. Neither has the supposed site of “Starvation Cove,” where, precisely because of the mud and silt, it’s possible that organic matter might still be found, even human remains (one thinks of the bog bodies, such as Tollund Man, almost perfectly preserved by the low oxygen content of the bog and the acidity and tannin-rich water).
Figure 33 Franklin expedition skull, near the Todd Islets. Photo by Tom Gross, used with permission.
The Erebus Bay sites – NgLj-1, NgLj-2, and NgLj-3 – have recently been re-examined by old Franklin hands Anne Keenleyside and Doug Stenton; they found the reburial consistent with the one described by Schwatka. Encouraged by the three relatively intact human crania at the site, they’ve been working on possibly identifying individuals using either their DNA or facial reconstruction, or both. This could also be attempted with other remains; partial DNA has even been extracted from Neanderthals, so other Franklin expedition bones, despite having spent more than 160 years in mostly subzero conditions, may well be identified this way.
And there are additional sites on land that have received only cursory examination; the original campsite south of Cape Felix, recently re-located by Tom Gross, was missed by most post-1859 searchers and has never been excavated. Beechey Island may yet have secrets to tell – no record was ever found there, although Franklin almost certainly deposited one. Then there’s Matty Island off the eastern coast of King William, near which Inuit testimony suggests a ship may have foundered, as well as nearby Qiqiqtarjuaq Island, on whose shores television personality Bear Grylls and his crew claimed in 2010 to have located and photographed graves that might date to the Franklin era. The possibility exists that searches here may, indeed, discover the wreck of the Terror, whose route – if both ships were remanned after the 1848 abandonment – is unknown. Might the two ships, against their general orders, have separated in the hopes that at least one would manage to find its way to safety? There’s Inuit evidence, collected by Dorothy Eber, that one ship may have tried the eastern route. In any case, I have a feeling that the Terror is unlikely to be found anywhere near its original location as given in the Victory Point record.
Beyond all this, there’s a wealth of physical evidence that’s never been properly looked at. An enormous number of Franklin relics, including nearly all those recovered by Rae, McClintock, and Schwatka, are in storage off-site at the National Maritime Museum; most have not been on public display since the Royal Naval Exhibition of 1891. There, in a building designed on the outside to resemble an enormous iceberg, the public was last treated to a complete look; many of the artifacts still bear the tags that were attached to them for that exhibit. There are hairbrushes containing human hair (and thus also DNA); canisters and tins that might be checked for traces of their contents; utensils whose provenance and scratched initials are imperfectly documented; pieces of wood and rope that have never been analyzed for what they can tell. There are also dozens of books – who knows what stories they might contain, in their annotations, dog-eared pages, or notes, and the “Peglar Papers,” which still have never been examined with modern imaging techniques.
This last omission is perhaps the most striking, since the technology available to recover text from such manuscripts has advanced in remarkable ways. When David Livingstone, who, living in the town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, lost all contact with the “Western” world for six years, he resorted to writing his field journals in berry juice on old newspapers, the only paper available to him. Not only were these journals written crosswise to the print, but the berry juice faded over time, leaving only faint traces half-obscured behind the bars of print, unlikely – or so it seemed – to ever be readable. However, in 2010–11 these diaries were finally published, after a years-long project of imaging and analysis undertaken at UCLA. This new process scanned the originals with reflected light of several different visible (and invisible) ranges of the spectrum, then merged the resulting imagery into a multilayered digital image that could be tweaked and retweaked to amplify the faded ink and fade away the lines of newsprint. Such a system has yet to be tried on the “Peglar” manuscript but could doubtless make many currently illegible passages readable once more.
Of course, even imagining any number of “friendly millionaires,” and any number of willing hands, there’s no way to completely “solve” the Franklin mystery. The best that we might hope for is to assemble a rough timeline and connect each known set of human remains to the likely routes the men took. It remains possible that some written records might be recovered from a cache on land; as David Woodman has noted, a letter left by Willem Barents at Ice Haven on Novaya Zemlya in 1595 was recovered in 1871, more than 250 years later, and it was still intact and legible. Written materials may also be recovered from the Erebus, and between them these two sort of records might at last give us a more complete sense of how the final years and months of the Franklin disaster unfolded. Surely, though, each man and group of men endured their own individual dramas, and of these we will never know the tale; our jigsaw puzzle will never have all its pieces, and some will remain orphaned, disconnected from the rest.
As long as even the slightest portion of the unknown remains, we will have searchers. One of the most persistent of these is surely Hay River resident Tom Gross, a member of several of David Woodman’s Project Supunger teams. To this day, he’s returned each year on his own to continue the search. Gross has set his sights high – he hopes to find Franklin’s grave, and with it a cache of other materials, including documents, that he feels confident must have been deposited there. Having searched the area along the coast near Victory Point, Gross is now convinced that the features described by Supunger aren’t to be found there. He points out that there were at least two places with the large piles of abandoned goods, the second on the shores of Erebus Bay; the large cook-stoves would make more sense there – the ships may well have been just a short distance offshore, and reachable by open water (thus the boats).
There are difficulties with this view: Su-pun-ger clearly stated that the site was farther north, near the tip of the island – but, as Gross notes, he was only about seventeen at the time and may have mistaken the long shore of Erebus Bay for the northern coastline. Gross also doubts that Su-pun-ger had ever seen something like a white man’s map. A few years back, Gross heard a fascinating account from an Inuk in Gjoa Haven who described how his father told him about finding a “house of stone” a ways inland from Erebus Bay, one that answers in many respects to Su-pun-ger’s description. This house was made with large, smooth stones, had a stone “doorway,” and was built into the side of a natural ridge. It’s possible that, despite the many searches closer along the coast, somewhere farther inland this stone house still stands.
It’s a possibility Tom Gross is willing to stake his time and money on. And so, each summer, he returns to search again. I think we should all wish him luck.
