[[Image:Franklin's lost expedition map.png|thumb|300px|right|Map of the probable routes taken by Erebus and Terror during Franklin's lost expedition Disko Bay (5) is about 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) from the mouth of the Mackenzie River (6).]]
Franklin's lost expedition was a doomed British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin that departed England in 1845. A Royal Navy officer and experienced explorer, Franklin had served on three previous Arctic expeditions, the latter two as commanding officer. His fourth and last, undertaken when he was 59, was meant to traverse the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage. After a few early fatalities the two ships became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. The entire expedition complement, including Franklin and 128 men, was lost.
Pressed by Franklin's wife and others, the Admiralty launched a search for the missing expedition in 1848. Prompted in part by Franklin's fame and the Admiralty's offer of a finder's reward, many subsequent expeditions joined the hunt, which at one point in 1850 involved eleven British and two American ships. Several of these ships converged off the east coast of Beechey Island, where the first relics of the expedition were found, including the graves of three crewmen. In 1854, explorer John Rae, while surveying near the Canadian Arctic coast southeast of King William Island, acquired relics of and stories about the Franklin party from the Inuit. A search led by Francis Leopold McClintock in 1859 discovered a note left on King William Island with details about the expedition's fate. Searches continued through much of the 19th century.
In 1981, a team of scientists led by Owen Beattie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, began a series of scientific studies of the graves, bodies, and other physical evidence left by Franklin crew members on Beechey Island and King William Island. They concluded that the crew members whose graves had been found on Beechey Island most likely died of pneumonia and perhaps tuberculosis and that lead poisoning may have worsened their health, owing to badly-soldered cans held in the ships' food stores. However, it was later suggested that the source of this lead may not have been tinned food, but the distilled water systems fitted to the expedition’s ships. Cut marks on human bones found on King William Island were seen as signs of cannibalism. The combined evidence of all studies suggested that hypothermia, starvation, lead poisoning and disease including scurvy, along with general exposure to a hostile environment whilst lacking adequate clothing and nutrition, killed everyone on the expedition in the years following its last sighting by Europeans in 1845.
After the loss of the Franklin party, the Victorian media, notwithstanding the expedition's failure and the reports of cannibalism, portrayed Franklin as a hero. Songs were written about him, and statues of him in his home town, in London, and in Tasmania credit him with discovery of the Northwest Passage. Franklin's lost expedition has been the subject of many artistic works, including songs, verse, short stories, and novels, as well as television documentaries.
In 1804, Sir John Barrow became Second Secretary of the Admiralty, a post he held until 1845, and began a push by the Royal Navy to complete the Northwest Passage over the top of Canada and to navigate toward the North Pole. Over the next four decades, explorers including John Ross, David Buchan, William Edward Parry, Frederick William Beechey, James Clark Ross, George Back, Peter Warren Dease, and Thomas Simpson made productive trips to the Canadian Arctic. Among these explorers was John Franklin, second-in-command of an expedition towards the North Pole in the ships Dorothea and Trent in 1818 and the leader of overland expeditions to and along the Arctic coast of Canada in 1819–22 and 1825–27. By 1845, the combined discoveries of all of these expeditions had reduced the relevant unknown parts of the Canadian Arctic to a quadrilateral area of about . It was into this unknown area that Franklin was to sail, heading west through Lancaster Sound and then west and south as ice, land, and other obstacles might allow, to complete the Northwest Passage. The distance to be navigated was roughly .
Barrow, who was 82 and nearing the end of his career, deliberated about who should command the expedition to complete the Northwest Passage and perhaps also find what Barrow believed to be an ice-free Open Polar Sea around the North Pole. Parry, his first choice, was tired of the Arctic and politely declined. His second choice, James Clark Ross, also declined because he had promised his new wife he was done with the Arctic.
at 378 tons (bm) and at 331 tons (bm) were sturdily built and were outfitted with recent inventions. The steam engine of Erebus came from the London and Greenwich Railway and that of Terror was probably from the London and Birmingham Railway. They enabled the ships to make on their own power. Other advanced technology included bows reinforced with heavy beams and plates of iron, an internal steam heating device for the comfort of the crew, screw propellers and iron rudders that could be withdrawn into iron wells to protect them from damage, ships' libraries of more than 1,000 books, and three years' worth of conventionally preserved or tinned preserved food supplies. Unfortunately, the latter was supplied from a cut-rate provisioner, Stephen Goldner, who was awarded the contract on 1 April 1845, just seven weeks before Franklin set sail. Goldner worked in haste on the order of 8,000 tins, which were later found to have lead soldering that was "thick and sloppily done, and dripped like melted candle wax down the inside surface".
Most of the crew were Englishmen, many of them from the North Country, with a small number of Irishmen and Scotsmen. Aside from Franklin and Crozier, the only other officers who were Arctic veterans were an assistant surgeon and the two ice-masters.
Over the next 150 years, other expeditions, explorers, and scientists would piece together what happened next. Franklin's men wintered in 1845–46 on Beechey Island, where three crew members died and were buried. Terror and Erebus became trapped in ice off King William Island in September 1846 and never sailed again. According to a note dated 25 April 1848, and left on the island by Fitzjames and Crozier, Franklin had died on 11 June 1847; the crew had wintered on King William Island in 1846–47 and 1847–48, and the remaining crew had planned to begin walking on 26 April 1848 toward the Back River on the Canadian mainland. Nine officers and fifteen men had already died; the rest would die along the way, most on the island and another 30 or 40 on the northern coast of the mainland, hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of Western civilization.
Many joined the search. In 1850, 11 British and 2 American ships cruised the Canadian Arctic. Several converged off the east coast of Beechey Island, where the first relics of the expedition were found, including remnants of a winter camp from 1845–46 and the graves of John Shaw Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine. No messages from the Franklin expedition were found at this site. In the spring of 1851, passengers and crew aboard several ships observed a huge iceberg off Newfoundland which bore two vessels, one upright and one on its beam ends. The ships were not examined closely. It was suggested that the ships could have been Erebus and Terror, though it is more likely that they were abandoned whaling ships.
In 1854, John Rae, while surveying the Boothia Peninsula for the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), discovered further evidence of the lost men's fate. Rae met an Inuk near Pelly Bay (now Kugaaruk, Nunavut) on 21 April 1854, who told him of a party of 35 to 40 white men who had died of starvation near the mouth of the Back River. Other Inuit confirmed this story, which included reports of cannibalism among the dying sailors. The Inuit showed Rae many objects that were identified as having belonged to Franklin and his men. In particular, Rae bought from the Pelly Bay Inuit several silver forks and spoons later identified as belonging to Fitzjames, Crozier, Franklin, and Robert Osmer Sargent, a mate aboard Erebus. Rae's report was sent to the Admiralty, which in October 1854 urged the HBC to send an expedition down the Back River to search for other signs of Franklin and his men.
Next were Chief Factor James Anderson and HBC employee James Stewart, who traveled north by canoe to the mouth of the Back River. In July 1855, a band of Inuit told them of a group of qallunaat (Inuktitut for "whites") who had starved to death along the coast. Lady Franklin, failing to convince the government to fund another search, personally commissioned one more expedition under Francis Leopold McClintock. The expedition ship, the steam schooner Fox, bought via public subscription, sailed from Aberdeen on 2 July 1857.
, King William Island, detailing the fate of the Franklin expedition]]
In April 1859, sledge parties set out from Fox to search on King William Island. On 5 May, the party led by Royal Navy Lieutenant William Hobson found a document in a cairn left by Crozier and Fitzjames. It contained two messages. The first, dated 28 May 1847, said that Erebus and Terror had wintered in the ice off the northwest coast of King William Island and had wintered earlier at Beechey Island after circumnavigating Cornwallis Island. "Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All well ", the message said. The second message, written in the margins of that same sheet of paper, was much more ominous. Dated 25 April 1848, it reported that Erebus and Terror had been trapped in the ice for a year and a half and that the crew had abandoned the ships on 22 April. Twenty-four officers and crew had died, including Franklin on 11 June 1847, just two weeks after the date of the first note. Crozier was commanding the expedition, and the 105 survivors planned to start out the next day, heading south towards the Back River. This note contains significant errors; most notably the date of the expedition's winter camp at Beechy Island is incorrectly given as 1846–47 rather than 1845–46.
The McClintock expedition also found a human skeleton on the southern coast of King William Island. Still clothed, it was searched, and some papers were found, including a seaman's certificate for Chief Petty Officer Henry Peglar (b. 1808), Captain of the Foretop, HMS Terror. However, since the uniform was that of a ship's steward, it is more likely that the body was that of Thomas Armitage, gun-room steward on HMS Terror and a shipmate of Peglar, whose papers he carried. At another site on the western extreme of the island, Hobson discovered a lifeboat containing two skeletons and relics from the Franklin expedition. In the boat was a large amount of abandoned equipment, including boots, silk handkerchiefs, scented soap, sponges, slippers, hair combs, and many books, among them a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. McClintock also took testimony from the Inuit about the expedition's disastrous end.
Two expeditions between 1860 and 1869 by Charles Francis Hall, who lived among the Inuit near Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island and later at Repulse Bay on the Canadian mainland, found camps, graves, and relics on the southern coast of King William Island but none of the Franklin expedition survivors he believed would be found among the Inuit. Though he concluded that all of the Franklin crew were dead, he believed that the official expedition records would yet be found under a stone cairn. With the assistance of his guides Ebierbing and Tookoolito, Hall gathered hundreds of pages of Inuit testimony. Among these materials are accounts of visits to Franklin's ships, and an encounter with a party of white men on the southern coast of King William Island near Washington Bay. In the 1990s, this testimony was extensively researched by David C. Woodman, and was the basis of two books, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery (1992) and Strangers Among Us (1995), in which he reconstructs the final months of the expedition.
The hope of finding these lost papers led Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka of the U.S. Army to organize an expedition to the island between 1878 and 1880. Traveling to Hudson Bay on the schooner Eothen, Schwatka, assembling a team that included Inuit who had assisted Hall, continued north by foot and dog sled, interviewing Inuit, visiting known or likely sites of Franklin expedition remains, and wintering on King William Island. Though Schwatka failed to find the hoped-for papers, in a speech at a dinner given in his honor by the American Geographical Society in 1880, he noted that his expedition had made "the longest sledge journey ever made both in regard to time and distance" of 11 months and 4 days and , that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the whites relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit, and that it established the loss of the Franklin records "beyond all reasonable doubt".
Although the trek found archeological artifacts related to 19th-century Europeans and undisturbed disarticulate human remains, Beattie was disappointed that more remains were not found. Examining the bones of Franklin crewmen, he noted areas of pitting and scaling often found in cases of Vitamin C deficiency, the cause of scurvy. After returning to Edmonton, he compared notes from the survey with James Savelle, an Arctic archeologist, and noticed skeletal patterns suggesting cannibalism. Seeking information about the Franklin crew's health and diet, he sent bone samples to the Alberta Soil and Feed Testing Laboratory for trace element analysis and assembled another team to visit King William Island. The analysis would find an unexpected level of 226 parts-per-million (ppm) of lead in the crewman's bones, which was 10 times higher than the control samples, taken from Inuit skeletons from the same geographic area, of 26–36 ppm.
In June 1982, a team made up of Beattie; Walt Kowall, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Alberta; Arne Carlson, an archeology and geography student from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and Arsien Tungilik, an Inuk student and field assistant, were flown to the west coast of King William Island, where they retraced some of the steps of McClintock in 1859 and Schwatka in 1878–79. Discoveries during this expedition included the remains of between six and fourteen men in the vicinity of McClintock's "boat place" and artifacts including a complete boot sole fitted with makeshift cleats for better traction.
After obtaining legal permission, Beattie's team visited Beechey Island in August 1984 to perform autopsies on the three crewmen buried there. They started with the first crew member to die, Leading Stoker John Shaw Torrington. After completing Torrington's autopsy and exhuming and briefly examining the body of John Hartnell, the team, pressed for time and threatened by the weather, returned to Edmonton with tissue and bone samples. Trace element analysis of Torrington's bones and hair indicated that the crewman "would have suffered severe mental and physical problems caused by lead poisoning". Although the autopsy indicated that pneumonia had been the ultimate cause of the crewman's death, lead poisoning was cited as a contributing factor.
During the expedition, the team visited a place about north of the grave site to examine fragments of hundreds of food tins discarded by the Franklin's men. Beattie noted that the seams were poorly soldered with lead, which had likely come in direct contact with the food. The release of findings from the 1984 expedition and the photo of Torrington, a 138-year-old corpse well preserved by permafrost in the tundra, led to wide media coverage and renewed interest in the lost Franklin expedition.
Recent research has suggested that another potential source for the lead may have been the ships' fresh water systems rather than the tinned food. K.T.H. Farrer argued that “it is impossible to see how one could ingest from the canned food the amount of lead, 3.3 mg per day over eight months, required to raise the PbB to the level 80 μg/dL at which symptoms of lead poisoning begin to appear in adults and the suggestion that bone lead in adults could be ‘swamped’ by lead ingested from food over a period of a few months, or even three years, seems scarcely tenable.”. In addition, tinned food was in widespread use within the Royal Navy at that time and its use did not lead to any significant increase in lead poisoning elsewhere. However, and uniquely for this Expedition only, the ships were fitted with converted railway locomotive engines for auxiliary propulsion which required an estimated one tonne of fresh water per hour when steaming. It is highly probable that it was for this reason that the ships were fitted with a unique water distillation system which, given the materials in use at the time, would have produced large quantities of water with a very high lead content. William Battersby has argued that this is a much more likely source for the high levels of lead observed in the remains of expedition members than the tinned food. Under difficult field conditions, Derek Notman, a radiologist and medical doctor from the University of Minnesota, and radiology technician Larry Anderson took many X-rays of the crewmen prior to autopsy. Barbara Schweger, an Arctic clothing specialist, and Roger Amy, a pathologist, assisted in the investigation.
Beattie and his team had noticed that someone else had attempted to exhume Hartnell. In the effort, a pickaxe had damaged the wooden lid of his coffin, and the coffin plaque was missing. Research in Edmonton later showed that Sir Edward Belcher, commander of one of the Franklin rescue expeditions, had ordered the exhumation of Hartnell in October 1852 but was thwarted by the permafrost. A month later, Edward A. Inglefield, commander of another rescue expedition, succeeded with the exhumation and removed the coffin plaque.
Unlike Hartnell's grave, the grave of Private William Braine was largely intact. When he was exhumed, the survey team saw signs that his burial had been hasty. His arms, body, and head had not been positioned carefully in the coffin, and one of his undershirts had been put on backwards. The coffin seemed too small for him; its lid had pressed down on his nose. A large copper plaque with his name and other personal data punched into it adorned his coffin lid.
In 1993, Dr. Joe McInnis and Woodman organized an attempt to identify the priority targets from the year before. A chartered aircraft landed on the ice at three of the locations, a hole was drilled through the ice, and a small sector-scan sonar was used to image the sea bottom. Unfortunately, due to ice conditions and uncertain navigation, it was not possible to exactly confirm the locations of the holes, and nothing was found although hitherto-unknown depths were found at the locations that were consistent with Inuit testimony of the wreck.
In 1995, an expedition was jointly organized by Woodman, George Hobson, and American adventurer Steven Trafton – with each party planning a separate search. Trafton's group travelled to the Clarence Island to investigate Inuit stories of a "white man's cairn" there but found nothing. Dr. Hobson's party, accompanied by archaeologist Margaret Bertulli, investigated the "summer camp" found a few miles to the south of Cape Felix, where some minor Franklin relics were found. Woodman, with two companions, travelled south from Wall Bay to Victory Point and investigated all likely campsites along this coast, finding only some rusted cans at a previously-unknown campsite near Cape Maria Louisa.
In 2000 James Delgado of the Vancouver Maritime Museum organized a re-enactment of the historic St. Roch passage westward through the NW Passage using the RCMP vessel Nadon supported by the Canadian Buoy Tender Simon Fraser. Knowing that ice would delay the transit in the area of King William Island he offered the use of the Nadon as a search vessel to his friends Hobson and Woodman, and using the Nadon's Kongsberg/Simrad SM2000 forward-looking sonar the survey of the northern search area around Kirkwall Island was continued without result.
Three expeditions were mounted by Woodman to continue the magnetometer mapping of the proposed wreck sites, a privately-sponsored expedition in 2001, and the Irish-Canadian Franklin Search Expeditions of 2002 and 2004. These made use of sled-drawn magnetometers working on the sea ice and completed the unfinished survey of the northern (Kirkwall Island) search area (2001), and the entire southern O'Reilly Island area (2002 and 2004). All high-priority magnetic targets were identified by sonar through the ice as geological in origin. In 2002 and 2004 small Franklin artifacts and characteristic explorer tent sites were found on a small islet northeast of O'Reilly Island during shore searches.
In August 2008, a new search was announced, to be led by Robert Grenier, a senior archaeologist with Parks Canada. This search hopes to take advantage of the improved ice conditions, using side-scan sonar from a boat in open water. Grenier also hopes to draw from newly published Inuit testimony collected by oral historian Dorothy Harley Eber. Some of Eber's informants have placed the location of one of Franklin's ships in the vicinity of the Royal Geographical Society Island, an area not searched by previous expeditions. The search will also include local Inuit historian Louie Kamookak, who has found other significant remains of the expedition and will represent the indigenous culture.
On July 25, 2010, HMS Investigator, which had become icebound and was subsequently abandoned while searching for Franklin's expedition in 1853, was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay along the northern coast of Banks Island in Canada's western Arctic. The Parks Canada team reported that it was in good shape, upright in about 11 metres (36 feet) of water.
For years after the loss of the Franklin Party, the Victorian media portrayed Franklin as a hero who led his men in the quest for the Northwest Passage. A statue of Franklin in his home town bears the inscription "Sir John Franklin — Discoverer of the North West Passage", and statues of Franklin outside the Athenaeum in London and in Tasmania bear similar inscriptions. Although the expedition's fate, including the possibility of cannibalism, was widely reported and debated, Franklin's standing with the Victorian public was undiminished. The expedition has been the subject of numerous works of non-fiction, including two books by Ken McGoogan, Fatal Passage and Lady Franklin's Revenge.
The mystery surrounding Franklin's last expedition was the subject of a 2006 episode of the NOVA television series Arctic Passage, a 2007 television documentary, "Franklin's Lost Expedition" on Discovery HD Theatre, as well as a 2008 Canadian documentary Passage. In an episode of the 2009 ITV1 travel documentary series "Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World," presenter Connolly and his crew visited Beechey Island, filmed the gravesite, and gave details of the Franklin expedition.
In memory of the lost expedition one of Canada's Northwest Territories subdivisions was known as the District of Franklin. Including the high Arctic islands, this jurisdiction was abolished when the Territories were divided in 1999.
On 29 October 2009 a special service of thanksgiving was held in the chapel at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, to accompany the rededication of the national monument to Franklin there. The service also included the solemn re-internment of the remains of Lieutenant Henry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte, the only remains ever repatriated to England, entombed within the monument in 1873. The event brought together members of the international polar community and invited guests included polar travellers, photographers and authors and descendants of Franklin, Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier and their men, and the families of those who went to search for them, including Admiral Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, Rear Admiral Sir John Ross and Vice Admiral Sir Robert McClure among many others. The gala was directed by the Rev Jeremy Frost and polar historian Dr Huw Lewis-Jones and was organised by Polarworld and the High Commission of Canada to the United Kingdom. It was a celebration of the contributions made by the United Kingdom in the charting of the Canadian North, which honoured the loss of life in the pursuit of geographical discovery. The Navy was represented by Admiral Nick Wilkinson, prayers were led by the Bishop of Woolwich and among the readings were eloquent tributes from Duncan Wilson, chief executive of the Greenwich Foundation and H.E. James Wright, the Canadian High Commissioner. At a private drinks reception in the Painted Hall which followed this Arctic service, Chief Marine Archaeologist for Parks Canada Robert Grenier spoke of his ongoing search for the missing expedition ships. The following day a group of polar authors went to London's Kensal Green Cemetery to pay their respects to the Arctic explorers buried there. After some difficulty, McClure's gravestone was located. It is hoped that his memorial, in particular, may be conserved in the future. Many other veterans of the searches for Franklin are buried there, including Admiral Sir Horatio Thomas Austin, Admiral Sir George Back, Admiral Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield, Admiral Bedford Clapperton Trevelyan Pim, and Admiral Sir John Ross. Franklin's redoubtable wife Jane Griffin, Lady Franklin, is also interred at Kensal Green in the vault, and commemorated on a marble cross dedicated to her niece Sophia Cracroft.
for the title page of Jules Verne's Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras)]]
Fictional treatments of the final Franklin expedition begin with Jules Verne's Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras, (1866), in which the novel's hero seeks to retrace Franklin's footsteps and discovers that the North Pole is dominated by an enormous volcano. The German novelist Sten Nadolny's The Discovery of Slowness (1983; English translation 1987) takes on the entirety of Franklin's life, touching only briefly on his last expedition. Other recent novelistic treatments of Franklin include Mordecai Richler's Solomon Gursky Was Here, William T. Vollmann's The Rifles (1994), John Wilson's North With Franklin: The Journals of James Fitzjames (1999); and Dan Simmons's The Terror (2007). The expedition has also been the subject of a horror role-playing game supplement, The Walker in the Wastes. Most recently, Clive Cussler's 2008 novel Arctic Drift incorporates the ordeal of the Franklin expedition as a central element in the story, and Richard Flanagan's Wanting (2009) deals with Franklin's deeds in both Tasmania and the Arctic.
Franklin's last expedition also inspired a great deal of music, beginning with the ballad "Lady Franklin's Lament" (also known as "Lord Franklin"), which originated in the 1850s and has been recorded by dozens of artists, among them Martin Carthy, Pentangle, Sinéad O'Connor, the Pearlfishers, and John Walsh. Other Franklin-inspired songs include Fairport Convention's "I'm Already There", and James Taylor's "Frozen Man" (based on Beattie's photographs of John Torrington).
The influence of the Franklin expedition on Canadian literature has been especially significant. Among the best-known contemporary Franklin ballads is "Northwest Passage" by the late Ontario folksinger Stan Rogers (1981), which has been referred to as the unofficial Canadian national anthem. The distinguished Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood has also spoken of Franklin's expedition as a sort of national myth of Canada, remarking that "In every culture many stories are told, (but) only some are told and retold, and these stories bear examining ... in Canadian literature, one such story is the Franklin expedition." Other recent treatments by Canadian poets include a verse play, Terror and Erebus, by Gwendolyn MacEwen that was broadcast on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio in the 1960s, as well as David Solway's verse cycle, Franklin's Passage (2003).
In the visual arts, the loss of Franklin's expedition inspired a number of paintings in both the United States and Britain. In 1861, Frederic Edwin Church unveiled his great canvas "The Icebergs"; later that year, prior to taking it to England for exhibition, he added an image of a broken ship's mast in silent tribute to Franklin. In 1864, Sir Edwin Landseer's "Man Proposes, God Disposes" caused a stir at the annual Royal Academy exhibition; its depiction of two polar bears, one chewing on a tattered ship's ensign, the other gnawing on a human ribcage, was seen at the time as in poor taste but has remained one of the more powerful imaginings of the expedition's final fate. The expedition also inspired numerous popular engravings and illustrations, along with many panoramas, dioramas, and magic lantern shows.
Category:Geography of Canada Category:Maritime history of Canada Category:Arctic expeditions Category:Incidents of cannibalism Category:Exploration of the Arctic Category:1840s
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