SIR JOHN FRANKLIN
THE ARCTIC EXPLORER Sir John Franklin had been missing for a decade when, in 1854, the Admiralty officially declared him dead. The few personal effects that were in its possession were sent to his daughter, Eleanor Isabella Gell. They included his dress coat from his time as governor of Van Diemen’s Land, a few paintings and portraits of relatives and naval acquaintances, and a dozen or so books. Among the latter was Hugh Clapperton’s journal of his second, and fatal, expedition to Africa. If Franklin read it, one wonders if it had given him pause that his own career as an explorer might end in a similarly tragic fashion.1 For that is what happened: by the time Eleanor Gell received her father’s effects, he had in fact been dead for seven years. He and his 128 men had given their lives to the quest for the Northwest Passage, in what was by far the worst disaster in the history of British Arctic exploration. Franklin was thus a failure on a monumental scale, but he nonetheless became one of the greatest Victorian heroes.2
Thirty-three when he served on his first Arctic voyage in 1818, Sir John Franklin made a late start to his polar career. But he was by that point a very experienced naval officer who during the Napoleonic Wars had fought at Copenhagen and Trafalgar and had been wounded at New Orleans in 1815. (See Figure 16.) After the war ended, he found himself stuck at the rank of lieutenant, so he saw polar service as a means to promotion. He returned from his first Arctic journey, an effort to reach the North Pole via Spitzbergen, eager for more, and the Admiralty, at the peak of its enthusiasm for discovering the Northwest Passage, was happy to oblige. In 1819, Franklin was dispatched on an expedition to complement Edward Parry’s first foray. While Parry pushed by sea into Lancaster Sound, Franklin would lead an expedition by land to map the northern coast of Canada, on the premise that identifying where the Northwest Passage was required determining where the North American mainland was not. He was ordered to follow the Coppermine River downstream to its mouth and then map the coast around it.
Departing in September 1819 from York Factory on the southwest shore of Hudson Bay, Franklin’s eleven-man party circled west so that they could maintain contact with the fur-trading posts strung out along the Hayes River. They wintered at Cumberland House, a Hudson’s Bay Company post 100 miles (160 km) west of Lake Winnipeg, and then in March went on to Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca. They had completed 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of their trek to the coast, but still had 600 miles (960 km) to go. As there was little game close to the coast, there were no more fur-trading posts further north, so they would have to build their own shelter in which to spend the winter. They also had to carry their own supplies, which required the size of the party to increase to twenty: Franklin, the doctor and naturalist John Richardson, the midshipmen George Back and Robert Hood, the seaman John Hepburn, and fifteen Métis of mixed American Indian and European ancestry, whose usual occupation was selling furs to the trading companies. (Franklin was forced to offer them twice their usual rate of pay to convince them to join the expedition.) More men meant more mouths to feed, a problem that was compounded when several of the Métis’ wives and children came along as well. Even though the Métis carried nearly 100 pounds (45 kg) of supplies each, they could not bring sufficient food for the entire journey, so the party had to rely on the indigenous Yellow Knife Indians to supplement their stock. As they had little sustenance to spare, their relations with Franklin’s party grew increasingly fractious.
In the spring, Franklin’s party descended the Coppermine, reaching the coast on 18 July. Even though it was midsummer, the seawater was full of ice, making it difficult to carry out their surveying work by canoe. Instead of the coast leading them east towards Hudson Bay, where they hoped they might meet up with Parry, it turned south into a narrow inlet. Reaching its end, they turned around, but by now it was August, and the season for exploration was drawing to a close. They continued until the coast finally turned east, but it was too late to follow it now. In a rare outburst of humour – Arctic nomenclature was usually reserved for prominent politicians and wealthy patrons – they named the spot Point Turnagain. Then, with their food supplies dwindling, they headed south. On the return journey, their only two remaining canoes were destroyed, forcing them to proceed on foot and slowing their pace considerably. When their food ran out, they ate moss, lichens, scraps of skin and bone and, eventually, the leather from their shoes. But throughout, Franklin demonstrated the fortitude and faith expected of a British explorer. ‘We were now almost exhausted by slender fare and travel, and our appetites had become ravenous,’ he wrote in his journal on 15 September. ‘We looked, however, with humble confidence to the Great Author and Giver of all good, for a continuance of support which had hitherto always been supplied to us at our greatest need.’3 By the time the journey ended two months later, nine of the twenty men had died, some at the hands of the others, who were so desperate for food that they resorted to cannibalism.
By any standard, the expedition was a disaster, but the struggle and privation it had endured made for a sensational story. Franklin became ‘the man who ate his boots’. The first quarto edition of his journal, published by John Murray in 1823, sold out immediately.4 Franklin’s story was so popular because it abounded in pain and suffering underlain with fortitude and resolution.5 In his Neptune’s Heroes; or, The Sea-Kings of England (1860), William Henry Davenport Adams described the Coppermine expedition as a ‘splendid display of those noble qualities which seem particularly distinctive of the Saxon race’, with ‘results obtained which greatly enlarged the boundaries of geographical knowledge’.6
In 1825, Franklin was sent back to the Arctic to explore the Mackenzie River and the Great Bear Lake, which lay to the west of the territory he had mapped on his previous expedition. This time, he ensured that both a large supply of pemmican and a sturdy fort in which to spend the winter awaited his arrival. He also commissioned special boats designed to be able to handle the rivers of the Canadian Arctic and brought a team of British sailors, so that he did not have to depend on the Métis. His foresight made for both a safer journey – there were no fatalities this time – and a more successful one. Franklin mapped 1,600 miles (2,560 km) of coastline, an impressive geographical accomplishment, and a sharp contrast to the mere 350 miles (560 km) he had mapped on the Coppermine expedition. But this expedition did not capture the public’s imagination in the way that the previous one had done, because it lacked the compelling elements of privation and desperation; Sir John Barrow, second secretary to the Admiralty, dismissed the published version of Franklin’s journal as ‘a very dull book’.7
As a reward for his Arctic exertions, Franklin was given a knighthood in 1829. He was now in his mid-forties, and it seemed likely that his career as a polar explorer was over. He was given a cushy post commanding a frigate in the Mediterranean, and he got married, for a second time, to Jane Griffin, the daughter of a London silk merchant.8 In 1836, he became the governor of Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania), a penal colony inhabited by eighteen thousand convicts and a handful of free settlers. He was not popular with the latter, who resisted his efforts to modernize the colony and to enact policies that were sympathetic to the island’s aboriginal inhabitants. Their complaints led to his recall in 1843.
Although unexpected and undesired, his return to Britain proved timely, as the Admiralty had decided to dispatch an expedition to survey the small sector of the Canadian Arctic that remained unmapped, and at least to identify the Northwest Passage even if the mapping could not be completed. After other, younger Arctic explorers declined the job, it was offered to Franklin, who, eager to make up for the damage done to his reputation by his unsuccessful tenure in Tasmania, readily accepted. He was fifty-nine, but the expedition was to proceed by sea rather than land, so physical stamina was not thought to be a primary requirement.
To ensure the expedition’s success, Franklin was given the Erebus and Terror, two reinforced bomb ships that were thought to be invincible.9 They were equipped with the most up-to-date technology, including railway steam engines that drove screw propellers rather than vulnerable paddle wheels and steel rudders that could be detached in icy waters to prevent damage. A steam-heating system kept the men warm, while a desalinization system provided fresh water. Forty-five tons of canned food ensured that the men would not lack for proper sustenance.10
Involving 130 men, the expedition represented a massive effort, intended to overwhelm the Arctic with sheer numbers. Many experts felt that smaller expeditions were better suited to the spartan environment, but optimism abounded: only a few hundred miles separated Montreal Island, the easternmost point reached by two explorers from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1839, from the westernmost point reached by Sir John Ross in the Gulf of Boothia in 1831. Surely an expedition on the scale of Franklin’s could link the two? This would at last be the moment when the Northwest Passage was discovered. ‘The name of Franklin alone is … a national guarantee,’ declared Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society.11
The Erebus and Terror set sail from England on 19 May 1845. On 2 July, they anchored at Disko Island off the west coast of Greenland. From there, Captain James Fitzjames, the expedition’s first officer, wrote an optimistic letter to Sir John Barrow: ‘We are all in good humour. In fact there is one incessant laugh from morning to night. We are most comfortable and happy – plenty to do, observing all sorts of things all day and good dinners into the bargain … We bounded along merrily shaking hands with ourselves and making imaginary short cuts thro’ America to the Pacific … We hear that this is supposed to be a remarkably clear season.’12 Franklin’s instructions called for him to cross Baffin Bay, enter Lancaster Sound and the Barrow Strait, then sail south from there to the coast of the North American mainland, where he would turn west, eventually emerging in the Bering Strait and into the Pacific Ocean. Nothing could be simpler. But the plan ignored the fact that 500 miles (800 km) of the voyage were unmapped, meaning that the actual distance that a ship needed to travel might prove much longer as it picked its way through ice and the Arctic archipelago. This had not mattered in the imaginations of the journey’s planners. But now, in the Arctic, the scale of the task that lay before the travellers became very clear. On 26 July, a whaler saw Franklin’s ships moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound, waiting for the ice to clear. And then they vanished: they were neither seen nor heard from in 1846 or 1847. Initially, there was no particular reason for alarm, as they had sufficient food to last them three years. But, by 1848, concern was mounting. If Franklin had managed to get through, he would have been heard from by now; it was thus likely that he was trapped in the ice somewhere, with dwindling food supplies.
The Search
Back in Britain, the disappearance of 130 men reawakened the public to the alluring dangers of the Arctic. Newspapers and periodicals devoted numerous articles to speculation about Franklin’s fate, while churches all over the country held special services to pray for his safe return and clairvoyants reported seeing ghostly images of ships frozen in the ice.13 Lady Jane Franklin became the embodiment of wifely devotion as she crisscrossed the country drumming up support for a rescue expedition. In 1848, the Admiralty dispatched the first public relief effort; a reward of £20,000 was offered to entice private ventures into the field as well. (See Figure 17.) Over the next decade, a total of thirty-eight public and private expeditions from Britain, the United States and Russia would search for Franklin.14 In 1850 alone, thirteen ships (eleven British and two American) traversed the Arctic looking for the lost expedition. They found the first clue: the remains of an encampment on Beechey Island in the Wellington Channel, along with grave markers inscribed with the names of three of Franklin’s men, all dated between January and April 1846. There was no message, however, to suggest where the expedition had gone next.
By now, it was extremely unlikely that any of Franklin’s men were still alive, but even so, many people continued to believe that British seamen could endure any conditions. ‘There is stuff and stamina in 120 [sic] Englishmen,’ declared Sir Edward Parry, ‘that somehow or other they would have maintained themselves as well as a parcel of Esquimaux would.’15 The British public thus would not allow the search to be abandoned. The Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trader William Kennedy, who led a rescue expedition in 1851, wrote that ‘nothing is more common in conversation, and in the statements of the daily press, and even in publications of higher pretensions, than to find plans and proposals brought forward for the relief of our absent countrymen’.16
As the search for Franklin intensified, the objective of discovering the Northwest Passage receded; as John Brown, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, declared in 1858, it was finding Franklin, not the Northwest Passage, that was now a matter of ‘the nation’s honour’.17 (See Figure 18.) It was the degree of effort, rather than success, that served as the yardstick against which the relief efforts were measured. In 1860, James A. Browne, bandmaster of the Royal Artillery, asserted that a failure to strive to the utmost to find Franklin would suggest that the English national character had diminished over the centuries: ‘Englishmen love to engage in enterprise, and, notwithstanding the many failures they have ever experienced, and the disasters they have often suffered for its sake, their efforts have generally, in the end, been crowned with success; they would, therefore, seem to lack the courage of their ancestors were they not to continue that desire for the progress of discovery which so nobly characterized their forefathers for upwards of four centuries.’18 Those who were deemed not to have exerted sufficient effort were harshly judged. In 1851, Lieutenant Sherard Osborn led an expedition that searched for Franklin on Prince of Wales Island. As they attempted to reach Cape Walker across a frozen bay, his men were caught in a vicious storm:
Our gallant fellows … with faces averted and bended bodies, strained every nerve to reach the land, in hopes of obtaining more shelter than the naked floe afforded from the hipping effects of the cutting-gale. Every moment some fresh case of frost-bite would occur, which the watchful care of the officers would immediately detect. The man would fall out from his sledge, restore the circulation of the affected part, generally the face, and hasten back to his post. Constant questions of ‘How are your feet?’ were heard on all sides, with the general response, ‘Oh! I hope they are all right; but I’ve not felt them since I pulled my boots on.’19
Despite these exertions, Osborn was criticized for not trying hard enough: ‘Our self-importance as Arctic heroes of the first water received a sad downfall when we were first asked by a kind friend, what the deuce we came home for? … and why we deserted Franklin?’20 Similar disparagement met the return of Captain Horatio Austin’s expedition in 1851, as the Nautical Magazine attested:
Opinions of parties who appear to be ill-informed on this subject have been freely delivered, condemning Captain Austin’s proceedings, and producing an impression on the public mind highly unfavourable to that officer … The expedition under Captain Austin has been proclaimed a failure – the fairest expedition which ever left this country has been declared ineffective, because its leader adopted a course under circumstances that he considers to be the most proper one, but which does not appear to be understood by these writers … It is asked why did not Austin proceed up the Wellington Channel? For this plain reason we may answer, because he saw that unhappily there lay a stout barrier of ice between him and the open sea beyond it of some twenty or thirty miles extent, which not only was it impossible for his ships to penetrate, but in all probability had been equally fatal to the progress of Sir John Franklin’s.21
Francis Leopold McClintock, one of Austin’s officers, learned his lesson well: as he prepared to return to the Arctic on Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition of 1852, he wrote to the famous polar explorer Sir James Clark Ross that ‘we are duty bound to do more than has hitherto been done; we must work hard indeed’.22
One by one, however, the rescue expeditions failed to find evidence of what had befallen Franklin’s men after they left Beechey Island. Ann Ross, the wife of Sir James Clark Ross, wrote to Eleanor Gell in November 1849 that ‘these excited hopes and weary silences are sadly trying every way, bodily, mentally and spiritually’.23 The Admiralty, meanwhile, met with a barrage of proposals as to how to find Franklin. (See Figures 19 and 20.) Suggestions included the use of steam-powered ‘ice-hammers’, ‘ice-saws’ and other machines ‘for breaking the ice in navigating the polar regions’; the release of ten thousand pigeons carrying instructions to Franklin’s men in parchment bags; the construction of a steam railway engine and carriages that were ‘adapted to travelling over fields of solid ice’; the launching of balloons, rockets or ‘small India-rubber balls’ high in the air bearing messages to Franklin’s men and directing them ‘to places where they might find provisions’; the fitting of ships’ boats with carriage wheels that would be propelled across the ice by small steam engines; and the blasting of the ice with explosives.24
None of these ideas, however, seemed to offer a serious solution to the mystery of Franklin’s fate. After 1851, the Admiralty, aware that Franklin and his men were almost certainly dead, became reluctant to send out further search expeditions. The British public, however, was not yet ready to give up hope, and the Admiralty found itself besieged by petitions demanding further efforts. Some of these entreaties came from family members of the lost men, while others came from scientific and learned societies, such as the Manchester Athenaeum, or from the residents of particular cities and towns. The pleas arrived from all corners of the Britain Isles: Stromness in the Orkney Islands, which had long been connected to Arctic exploration via its whaling industry, sent one, as did Dublin, Belfast and Armagh in Ireland.25 With pressure coming from so many directions, the Admiralty opted to fund one last search expedition, led by Edward Belcher, in 1852. It was a disaster: four of its five ships became frozen in the ice and had to be abandoned.26 Two private expeditions funded by Lady Franklin, the previously referenced one led by William Kennedy in 1851 and another by Edward Augustus Inglefield in 1852, also found nothing.
But if the dozens of search expeditions failed to locate Franklin, they did discover something else: the Northwest Passage. In September 1850, Commander Robert McClure, whom the Admiralty had dispatched in HMS Investigator to sail east through the Bering Strait, found the Prince of Wales Strait, which connects to the Parry Channel and is thus one route of the Northwest Passage.27 Two years later, Kennedy’s expedition discovered a passage linking Prince Regent Inlet and the Victoria Strait. The passage, named the Bellot Strait in honour of Kennedy’s second-in-command, the Frenchman Joseph-René Bellot, provides an exit out of the lower end of Prince Regent Inlet and is thus the key to the southernmost route through the Northwest Passage.28 But geographical discovery, Kennedy conceded, was ‘not our object’: ‘Important, as under other circumstances such would doubtless have been, ours was indeed a far nobler one, – to rescue, or solve the fate of our long-absent countrymen.’29 (Italics in the original.)
Kennedy was right: the news that the last pieces of the Northwest Passage puzzle had been put into place met with a muted response in Britain, as the public was much more interested in the search for Franklin. The Nautical Magazine published a lengthy article in November 1853, proclaiming that ‘at length the great geographical question of the North-West Passage is solved’, but it admitted that it had devoted so many pages to the story because of ‘the general interest which prevails respecting our absent countrymen in the Arctic Regions’.30 In his popular history of the search for the Northwest Passage, published in 1855, the journalist Peter Simmonds wrote that McClure’s achievements were ‘hardly heeded in the disappointment that nothing has been effected towards settling the business on which the ship was specially despatched. The discovery of Sir John Franklin would be worth the discovery of a North-west Passage a thousand times over.’31
By 1854, the Admiralty had spent £600,000 looking for Franklin and his men, hundreds of millions in today’s money. Some of the rescue expeditions had themselves had to be rescued. There would be no more. Then, just when everyone stopped looking, Franklin was finally found. John Rae, a surgeon for the Hudson’s Bay Company, had learned to live and travel like an Inuit, allowing him to survive in conditions that would have killed other Europeans. He had previously searched for Franklin on an expedition to the coast near Victoria Island between 1848 and 1851. By 1853, he was no longer looking for the missing expedition, as he harboured no illusions about the men’s ability to survive in the Arctic for eight years. He was keen, however, to fill in one of the last remaining blank spaces on the map, the Boothia Peninsula, and in particular to determine whether it was connected to King William Land. In March 1854, Rae was on the shore of Pelly Bay in the southern stretches of the Prince Regent Inlet when he encountered two Inuit. He noticed that one of them was wearing a gold cap-band that looked like it might have come from the uniform of a British naval officer. When he inquired about the band, the Inuit reported that between thirty-five and forty kabloona, or white men, had starved to death four years earlier, ‘west of a large river a long distance off’.32
Rae purchased the band and asked the Inuit to bring any other relics they might have of the kabloona to his winter quarters at Repulse Bay. He then continued on his original mission, which proved that King William Land was in fact an island, and that one route of the Northwest Passage therefore lay between it and the Boothia Peninsula. But, as had been the case with McClure’s and Kennedy’s discoveries, that no longer mattered; the British public would only be interested in what he discovered about Franklin’s fate. On the return journey to Repulse Bay, he met more Inuit, one of whom sold him a silver spoon that was inscribed with the initials ‘F.R.M.C.’ Rae was puzzled by it, and speculated that the ‘R.M.C.’ might stand for ‘Robert McClure’, the commander of the government’s rescue expedition of 1850. Over the winter, however, Rae interviewed other Inuit, and gradually it began to dawn on him that they were talking about Franklin’s men. He realized that ‘F.R.M.C.’ stood for Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, Franklin’s second-in-command. Rae learned that in the spring of 1850 some Inuit who were hunting seal on the western shore of King William Island had seen a group of several dozen emaciated white men dragging a heavy boat. The white men managed to communicate that their ships had been trapped by the ice and that they were heading south in search of food. Not long after, the Inuit found an encampment with some graves and the unburied bodies of around thirty men on the coast of the mainland south of King William Island. Five more bodies were on a nearby island. The boat had been turned upside down to provide shelter. Some of the men must have survived until at least May, because the campsite contained the bones and feathers of geese, which did not arrive in the Arctic until that time in the year. A number of the corpses had been mutilated, and there were pieces of human flesh in cooking pots. This led Rae to conclude that the men had been driven to cannibalism, or what he termed ‘the last dread alternative’.33 He purchased additional relics from the Inuit, including cutlery with the crests or initials of Franklin’s officers, scientific and medical instruments, watches and coins. There were two objects that had belonged to Franklin himself: a silver plate that was inscribed on the reverse ‘Sir John Franklin K.C.B.’, and a bronze star that he had been given when he was made a Knight Commander of the Guelphic Order of Hanover in recognition of his diplomatic services in Greece in the early 1830s.34 Rae decided not to try and find the spot where the bodies lay, which would have required him to wait until spring and then undertake a long and arduous journey. Instead, he sped to London with the news, assuming that others could carry out the work of confirmation later.
By the time he arrived in October 1854, the Admiralty had already received a copy of his report to the Hudson’s Bay Company. As confirmation, Rae produced the relics he had obtained, fifteen of which were emblazoned with the crests or monograms of Franklin and his officers. (See Figure 21.) He also described his discovery of the strait between the Boothia Peninsula and King William Island, but the Admiralty was only minimally interested in that. The day after his meeting with Sir James Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the first stories of Rae’s discoveries appeared in the press. To his surprise, they not only contained the information that he had provided in a carefully worded letter to The Times, but also details that could only be found in his longer report to the Admiralty. These details included the allegations of cannibalism.
The British public did not care that Rae had solved a vital problem in the quest for the Northwest Passage. Instead, they were angry that he had not followed up on the information he had received by travelling to the places the Inuit had described. ‘That Dr Rae should have turned his back on that locality is the more extraordinary,’ cried the anonymous author of The Great Arctic Mystery (1856), ‘as he could have visited it in three or four days, and, by personal examination, assisted by his interpreter, he might have ascertained the fate of the Franklin expedition; but it is abundantly evident that geographical discovery alone influenced him.’35 The claim that Rae could have made it to the site in ‘three or four days’ was a massive exaggeration, but what is more striking about this declaration is its ready dismissal of the importance of ‘geographical discovery’ relating to the last pieces of the Northwest Passage puzzle. The very thing that had driven British polar exploration for decades, and had supposedly motivated Franklin to head back to the Arctic, was now a mere distraction from the more important objective of determining Franklin’s fate.
But what really infuriated the British public were the allegations of cannibalism. Rae found himself at the centre of a firestorm of controversy, with a furious Lady Franklin leading the charge against him. His rapid dash to England made it appear as if he were over-eager to claim the £10,000 reward offered by the Admiralty for definitive proof of Franklin’s fate. By relying on Inuit accounts and not going to see the bodies for himself, Rae had left open an easy avenue of attack. The Victorians had long struggled with what to make of Inuit information regarding Franklin’s fate. In 1849, the whaling master Captain John Parker reported that an Inuit had told him of seeing Franklin’s ships in Prince Regent Inlet. In a letter to Eleanor Gell, Ann Ross cast doubt on the veracity of this information: ‘If the account has come in reality from Esquimaux, do you think that if, in hope of gain, they invented a falsity?’ She admitted, however, that she was ‘still building hope upon it’.36 As this last comment indicates, Victorian Britons often accepted Inuit evidence at face value when it concurred with what they wanted to hear. In response to the same information, Eleanor Gell’s friend Rose Beaufort, daughter of the noted hydrographer Sir Francis Beaufort, wrote: ‘The natives gave the intelligence spontaneously … and there is no impossibility in it.’37
Now, however, there was reason to disbelieve the Inuit testimony: the honour of the Royal Navy was at stake. The anonymous author of The Great Arctic Mystery wrote that the Inuit were ‘notoriously addicted to falsehood and deception’.38 There was, of course, the matter of the relics, but some stories in the press claimed that the Inuit must have obtained them from Franklin’s ships after they were beset and abandoned. In her quest to defend her husband’s reputation, Lady Franklin enlisted a number of prominent allies, among them Charles Dickens, the most popular writer of the day.39 In December 1854, he published an essay in his periodical Household Words that staunchly denied the possibility of cannibalism. Instead, he blamed the Inuit, speculating that the ‘sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band’ had been ‘set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves’: ‘It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages, from their deferential behaviour to the white man while he is strong. The mistake has been made again and again; and the moment the white man has appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed and sprung upon him … We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel.’40 The Inuit, according to Dickens, had invented the story they had told Rae in order to cover up their crime. Here, we have a classic statement of the imperialist view of indigenous peoples, at one moment craven and cowardly, and at the next bloodthirsty and violent. Rae swiftly composed a reply, but he lacked Dickens’s sensitivity to the public mood and instead relied on truth, which depended on his ability to make people grasp the nature of an environment utterly alien and incomprehensible to them. Unsurprisingly, it was Dickens’s fiery indignation, rather than Rae’s sober veracity, that triumphed.
Franklin’s expedition, with its reinforced, steam-driven ships and its massive contingent of the best men the Royal Navy could offer, had been a test of British strength and skill. The Victorian public could easily live with, and even embrace, defeat. What they could not accept was that British sailors had failed to withstand privation and hardship with the fortitude that Franklin had displayed on the Coppermine expedition. They had long since become inured to failure in the Arctic, but they expected their vanquished heroes to resign themselves calmly to their fate. A prize poem about Franklin from Repton School in Derby from 1860 provided a model for heroic polar death:
The whispered text, the prayer that conquers death,
Claimed the last accent of their trembling breath:
Their death was calm, hushed the tumultuous roar
On that dread night, along the lonely shore.41
Rae had disturbed this picture by suggesting that they had killed and eaten each other in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Someone had to restore the heroism to Franklin’s failure.
By the mid-1850s, even Lady Franklin had abandoned all hope that her husband was alive, but she continued to press for expeditions to search for definitive proof of his fate, which she insisted Rae had failed to provide. The Admiralty refused to budge, however requiring her to fund any further search expeditions herself. Her continuing ability to do so was complicated by her financial and familial situation. The Victorian public saw her as a noble, grieving widow, but some members of Franklin’s family saw her devotion to her late husband in a very different light. What wealth Franklin possessed had come from his first wife, Eleanor Porden; he enjoyed only a life interest in her fortune. Upon his death, that would pass to Eleanor Gell, his daughter from his first marriage. As early as 1849, Mrs Gell began making inquiries as to the disposition of her father’s estate, and even accused Lady Franklin of being ‘slightly deranged’.42 She was frustrated by her stepmother’s spending of what was now her inheritance on what she saw as pointless search expeditions. Even after the Admiralty removed Franklin’s name from the active list in 1854, however, Lady Franklin continued to insist that it had not been conclusively established that he was dead.43 In 1855, the Court of Chancery was forced to resolve the matter: it determined that the Admiralty’s judgement was conclusive and that his estate now belonged to Eleanor Gell.
But even after losing control of her husband’s estate, Lady Franklin managed to find the funds for one last search expedition in 1857, led by Francis Leopold McClintock, a naval officer who had served on three previous efforts to find Franklin.44 The expedition spent its first year trapped in the ice of Baffin Bay, but the following summer it passed through the Bellot Strait into Peel Sound. From the local Inuit, McClintock learned more about what had happened to Franklin. They told him that one ship had been crushed, but the other had been pushed ashore on King William Island by pressure from the ice of the Victoria Strait.45 They knew this because they had obtained wood from the wreckage.
The Inuit sold McClintock additional Franklin relics, including silver plates bearing Sir John’s crest like the one Rae had purchased in 1854. They confirmed that the survivors had headed south towards the Great Fish River, and that many ‘fell down and died as they walked along’.46 After the spring sledging season began, McClintock found the body of a young man still wearing his naval uniform and greatcoat on the south shore of King William Island. But what he was really searching for was written evidence, which to this point had proved maddeningly elusive. Finally, at Point Victory, on the northwest coast of King William Island, a sledging party led by Lieutenant William Hobson found a note in a stone cairn. Written by Lieutenant Graham Gore, one of Franklin’s officers, this reported that Franklin had come very close to achieving the Northwest Passage in a single voyage. Enjoying one of the mildest seasons in Arctic history, the Erebus and Terror had sped across Baffin Bay in less than a month and had found Lancaster Sound free of ice. After that, however, they had been blocked by ice in the Barrow Strait, and had turned north to look for a way through. With winter approaching, Franklin had anchored between Beechey and Devon Islands. On Beechey Island, the men built a storehouse, a carpenter’s shop and a forge; this was the encampment that had been found in 1850, with the graves of the three men.47
After leaving his winter harbour, Franklin pushed through the western end of Lancaster Sound until he came to a clear channel, now known as Peel Sound, pointing south, precisely the way that he wished to go. It drew him in, allowing him to steam for nearly 250 miles (400 km) through thin surface ice. He could see King William Island directly in front of him. It was late August, but with open leads and two strong ships, Franklin decided to risk getting through before winter closed in. He could have steamed to the east of King William Island, found the narrow Simpson Strait that separated it from the mainland and from there picked his way along the coast to the Bering Strait and into the Pacific Ocean; in a warm season like the summer of 1846, it would have been just possible. But prior to Rae proving otherwise, his maps would have shown King William Island to be linked to the Boothia Peninsula, so he did not go around it to the east, but to the west. This sent his ships directly into the ice that pours down from the Beaufort Sea, the obstacle that had blocked so many previous efforts to find the Northwest Passage. The limitations of the ships’ puny steam engines now became apparent. Even operating at maximum capacity, they made little headway, and they were rapidly burning through the expedition’s supply of coal. The only possibility was to reach King William Island and find a safe anchorage for the winter. Even this, however, proved impossible. On 15 September, they were beset 25 miles (40 km) from shore. No effort to blast, hack or push themselves free worked. They would have to spend the winter frozen in the pack ice, hoping that it did not crush the ships.
Dated 25 April 1848 and signed by Crozier and Fitzjames, a second note scribbled around the margins of Gore’s first one told of how the ships had been locked in the ice since September 1846. When they had still not been released by the spring of 1848, the men made the difficult decision to abandon them. Nine officers and fifteen men had already died. The former included Gore and Franklin, who had expired from undisclosed causes on 11 June 1847. As Hobson read the second note, he would have understood that for Crozier, now in command, there were two options, both equally daunting. They could head east towards Baffin Bay, a journey of 1,200 miles (1,920 km), where they might encounter a whaling ship. Or they could head south, towards the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post on the Great Slave Lake. That was 850 miles (1,360 km) away, but the intervening terrain offered little sustenance. It did, however, offer the possibility of finding the Great Fish River unfrozen, which meant that they could make part of the journey by boat. They might even encounter Hudson’s Bay Company searchers sent to look for them along the way.
Choosing what appeared to be the best of two desperate options, Crozier decided to head south with the expedition’s 105 surviving officers and men. Dragging the heavy ship’s boats, they moved at a snail’s pace of only a mile a day. Recognizing that their food would run out long before they reached the Great Slave Lake, Crozier split the party in two. The strongest men attempted to go ahead at a faster pace, while the others remained behind to await rescue. Crozier managed to lead the first party to the southern coast of King William Island. They had come 80 miles (128 km) from the ships, less than 10 per cent of the distance they needed to cover. There, Crozier may have realized that he was standing on an island, and that he was therefore looking at the last unmapped stretch of the Northwest Passage. If he did, it is doubtful that he much cared.
Eleven years later, Hobson found Crozier’s last camp, the one that the Inuit had told Rae about in 1854. It contained one of the ship’s boats mounted on a sledge with two skeletons inside; fourteen more bodies were underneath the boat. When he got back to Britain, McClintock astutely did not mention cannibalism. Hobson had been unnerved by the mangled and incomplete condition of one of the skeletons in the boat, but in his report, which was published on 23 September 1859, McClintock described it as merely ‘disturbed, probably by animals’.48 His discretion meant that he enjoyed a very different reception from Rae’s. Showered with the freedoms of cities and honorary degrees, he became a hero. He received a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society, a knighthood from Queen Victoria, a £5,000 reward from Parliament, and a reference on Franklin’s monument in Westminster Abbey as ‘discoverer of the fate of Franklin in 1859’.49 Rae had been right all along, but McClintock got the credit.
The scale of Franklin’s failure had been spectacular. Between 1800 and 1845, of the 1,500 men employed by the British in exploring the Arctic, fewer than twenty had died. Franklin lost 130. Even so, he was transformed into a hero. James Parsons wrote in 1857 that Franklin’s ‘character stood all but alone in zeal, bold daring and in enterprise, for a man to retain at the advanced age of sixty all the boldness and energy of youth, singularly blended with the lofty qualities of religion, is a combination rarely found in one individual; with a mind that had overcome the greatest of difficulties, was a heart as generous as it was brave’.50
Franklin’s story, to be sure, presented its celebrants with challenges. In July 1860, Owen Vidal recited a poem about the expedition in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. He struggled to make a coherent and meaningful story out of what was by any realistic reckoning a debacle. The strategy that he ultimately fixed upon was to place Franklin in the long history of British greatness by reminding the audience that he had fought alongside Nelson at Trafalgar:
He fought beside the seamen,
The heroes of our land,
Whose names upon the splendid page
Of England’s hist’ry stand.
He then cited the deaths of Franklin and his men as one of the periodic sacrifices that were necessary for that greatness to be maintained. At the end of the poem, the Indian Rebellion and in particular Major General Sir Henry Havelock, who had died of dysentery only days after leading the British effort to lift the siege of Lucknow, provided a parallel example of sacrifice for one’s country:
And now the sky is overcast
With rolling clouds of war,
And England pours her sons to fight,
As in the days of yore.
With trumpet-blast the columns march
Adown the shouting streets,
’Mid boom of guns and cheers of men
Forth sail the succouring fleets:
And now the tidings of defeat
Some homeward vessel brings,
And now the name of Havelock
Throughout the island rings.51
The same difficulties in presenting Franklin’s story were apparent in the campaign to erect a public memorial. In 1861, it was decided to commemorate him with a statue in London, paid for with £2,000 of public funds. Five years later, a statue by Matthew Noble was installed at the lower end of Regent Street in what today is Waterloo Place.52 But what exactly was Franklin being commemorated for? His greatest contribution to Arctic exploration was his mapping of the coast of North America, but that was not what had permanently enshrined him as a hero in the minds of the British public. Nor was it enough to satisfy Lady Franklin, and no one was eager to challenge her right to determine the nature of the memorial to her beloved husband. And so it was that the plaque on the base of Noble’s statue proclaimed that Franklin and his companions had ‘sacrificed their lives in completing the discovery of the Northwest Passage’. This claim was based on the thinnest of evidence: that in exploring King William Land in the first year of the expedition, Franklin’s men must have discovered that it was an island; they would therefore have known about the Simpson Strait even if they were unable to reach or sail through it. Since their discovery had been made before McClure’s, they should therefore be given pride of place as the locators of the passage. A duplicate of Noble’s statue that was erected in 1870 in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, made the same claim. So did Charles Bacon’s statue of Franklin that was erected in his birthplace of Spilsby in Lincolnshire in 1861 and Noble’s monument in Westminster Abbey, which was dedicated in 1875. The monument in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital, erected in 1858, did not claim that Franklin had discovered the Northwest Passage, but it did refer repeatedly to the search for it in its inscription, and included a bas-relief of a naval officer intently plotting a course. (See Figure 22.) The Northwest Passage, which had been all but forgotten in the rush to rescue Franklin, was thus suddenly revived so that it could give his heroism meaning. Its original purpose as a route for maritime traffic, however, had been abandoned; it was now merely a venue for the demonstration of British heroism.