Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes – with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign.
In the long course of human history, there are any number of people who have become lost, whose ships have sunk in uncharted waters, whose tombs have been buried by desert sands or jungle undergrowth, or who, perhaps, just stepped outside one day to take an afternoon walk and never returned. When explorers, themselves charged with venturing into the unknown and unearthing its secrets, become lost, we feel their disappearance more keenly, and if, despite all our efforts, we find no trace of them, our confidence in our human knowledge and capabilities is profoundly shaken. We know we live on the edge of an abyss – of time, of space, of our own all-too-brief individual existence – but we dislike being reminded of it.
And so it is that, long after any hope of relief or recovery has passed, there will still be some who refuse to stop looking for the lost: in the South Pacific, searchers arrive each year to comb the coast of Nikumaroro Island looking for traces of Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed Model 10 Elektra; the Norwegian Navy still trolls the depths of the Barents Sea for Roald Amundsen’s Latham 47 seaplane; and amateur scientists pore over Google Earth views of the Amazon rainforest seeking evidence of the Lost City of Z and Percy Fawcett, the man who vanished searching for it. And, of all the explorers who have ever gone missing, none has inspired so long, so persistent a search as has Sir John Franklin, whose final Arctic expedition was last seen off the coast of Greenland in the summer of 1845.
Figure 1 Franklin expedition food tins. Courtesy of Doug Wamsley.
Thoreau, though he admonishes us to seek rather our own interior “higher latitudes,” was doubtless following news of the Franklin search in the Boston Evening Transcript; it may be that he also saw an illustration depicting the stack of empty food tins left behind on Beechey Island, the site of Franklin’s first winter camp, which had just been discovered. In his journal for 23 March 1852, we can find an earlier draft of the sentiments he expressed in the closing chapter of Walden: “As I cannot go upon a Northwest Passage, then I will find a passage round the actual world where I am. Connect the Behring Straits and Lancaster Sounds of thought; winter on Melville Island, and make a chart of Banks Land; explore the northwest-trending Wellington Inlet, where there is said to be a perpetual open sea, cutting my way through floes of ice.” From this, we can see that Thoreau did, in fact, wish he could go upon an Arctic journey; but since he could not, he sought instead a symbolic voyage through similar straits. His metaphorical map, certainly, demonstrates close familiarity with narratives of Arctic exploration: Melville Island (charted by William Edward Parry in 1819); Banks Land (first sighted by William Beechey on Parry’s expedition); and Wellington Inlet, the channel up which, it was then speculated, Franklin might have sailed in search of an Open Polar Sea (a chimerical but then widely sought goal of Arctic explorers).
And Thoreau was not alone in seeking to travel, mentally and spiritually, alongside Franklin and those who searched for him; Emily Dickinson dubbed a central corridor of her Amherst home the “Northwest Passage”; in her poetic hands a “polar expedition” became a “polar expiation,” an “Omen in the bone / of Death’s tremendous nearness.” Back home in Britain, Charles Dickens, too, closely followed the search for Franklin, leaping to the defence of his widow, Lady Franklin, when stories came home of cannibalism among his men; in 1857 he and his protégé Wilkie Collins produced a play, The Frozen Deep, as a memorial to their shared Arctic heroes. In France, Jules Verne based the protagonist of the first of his Voyages Extraordinaires, Captain Hatteras, on Franklin, while, a few years later in Poland, young Józef Korzeniowski found in the narrative of Franklin’s disappearance – which he read in French – the inspiration for both the literal and figurative voyages that would eventually bring him to England as the novelist Joseph Conrad.
One reason for the fascination of all these writers with Franklin, surely, is simply that it took so long to find any trace of him. Aside from his first winter camp, discovered in 1850, it was not until 1859 – fourteen years after he had sailed down the Thames in command of the Erebus and Terror – that any definite record was found. And, when even that final note proved inadequate as an explanation for the loss of both his ships and all 128 of the men he had commanded, the air of uncertainty that surrounded his fate settled in as a sort of permanent state. Being lost, it would seem, is not so much a physical condition as a cultural one; it’s the not knowing that matters. And the longer the public does not know, the greater the aura of uncertainty; at some point, after the practical value of rescue has dwindled to zero, it becomes a mythical quest into the nature of loss itself.
The Arctic has long been a special stage for this kind of loss; its hazards include the freezing not simply of bodies but of time. Arctic snows, like desert sands, are lone, level, and stretch far away, reducing the glory of imperial ambition and human hubris to a small gathering of bones. More than any other sort of disaster, death amidst the ice discloses, in its purest form, the utter indifference of nature to human striving. Tales of such a death possess a terrible beauty that can never quite be contained, resolved, or even represented. And as the search for Franklin has continued over the past century and a half, the scattered artifacts and human remains brought back by searchers have themselves formed, in a mournful and melancholy manner, a kind of strange museum of this loss.
Somehow, without quite realizing why, we’ve inherited a fixation with this same scene of civilization and its technology come to naught, and it troubles the edge of our sense of ourselves as powerfully as it did our Victorian forebears. As the twenty-first century has dawned, it’s brought a renewed fascination with the Franklin story – for in the mirror of his fate we behold our uncanny double, a figure whose motives and gestures darkly figure forth our own, though whether to mock us or to warn us we know not. I think that’s the only explanation for the way in which Franklin continues to haunt us, inspiring more than two dozen novels, three documentaries, various plays, poems, and radio dramas, an Australian musical, and a German opera – all within the past twenty-five years. We’re looking, collectively, for something we truly have lost, and trying to grasp the secret nature of that loss – and the finding of one of Franklin’s ships will not dissolve that desire but redouble it.
