Captain John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage.

The loss of Franklin and his men was a huge mystery, how could so many men and two state of the art ships just disappear? Search parties scoured the arctic (and in the process charted most of the up til then unexplored regions of the arctic archipeligo, and McClure even technically made it through the passage in his “search” for Franklin) for more than a decade before any real traces of the expedition turned up. Many other expeditions suffered and lost men in the same era of arctic exploration, but none disappeared completely! To this day, there’s a lot we don’t know about how such a well equipped and large expedition could fail so completely and quickly.

Here’s what we’ve found and what we know at this point: The ships spent their first winter at Beechey Island, and all seemed well. The next summer, they travelled south, and were frozen in near King William Island that Fall. They wintered here, and the next summer the ice failed to melt, trapping them for a second winter on King William Island. This alone is not out of the ordinary for arctic expeditions, many ships were frozen in for several years without a great loss of life.

In the summer between the first and second winters at King William Island, in 1847, the crew leave a note in a cairn on King William Island saying “all is well”. After the second winter stuck in the ice, the note is dug up and in the margins someone writes that 24 men have died, including Franklin, and that the crew is abandoning their ships and marching south towards the mainland of North America. It’s important to point out this second note contained several errors, but we’ll get to that.

The crew’s march is a death march, the local eskimo later report seeing dozens of white men dying in their tracks. Some men may have made it all the way to the mainland, but none survive. By the early 1850s it’s likely that all or almost all of the expedition is dead.

McClintock in 1859 finds the note in the cairn on King William Island, a single skeleton, and finally a life boat with two skeletons in it. The contents of the lifeboat add to the mystery- “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.” The lifeboat was being man-hauled, but was pointing north, not south. A decade later Hall finds more graves and campsites, all on the King William Island. This is pretty much the extent of the evidence known up until contemporary scientific expeditions.

So, the mysteries- Scurvy, starvation, and cold had killed men on previous and subsequent expeditions, but many expeditions had survived much longer than Franklin’s without anything so catastrophic. In all, the Franklin’s men had spent only three winters in the arctic before abandoning their ships. They were equipped for five.

The mysterious contents of the lifeboat and the inconsistencies in the note point to a deteriorating mental situation. Why would dying men man-haul heavy books and silverware? Why was the boat facing north, were the men trying to return to the abandoned ships?

So, what could the ships tell us?

When scientific autopsies were conducted on the bodies on King William’s Island, it was found that lead poisoning contributed to the deaths of those men. It’s believed the solder on the tins of food was the source, but there are other theories- perhaps the ship’s water system was the source. The men also were suffering from TB and Pneumonia.

Finding the ships could finally help resolve the issue, for instance if there are more bodies on or near the ships then we know some men may have turned around from their march and made it back. Plus finding more bodies would inevitably help our understanding of what killed the men. We could also get more insight into why the men were carrying such strange items in their lifeboat, by seeing the things they chose not to take. And obviously examining more of the food tins, as well as the ship’s water system, might better explain the presence of lead.

More than anything, we don’t know exactly what the ships might tell us, but there’s so little we know as it is, it’d be amazing to find any new bits of evidence.

[*History got a little breaking news this morning that one of the ships of the lost Franklin Expedition has been discovered in the Canadian arctic.]

September 9, 2014 | Categories: Arctic Exploration, History, History of Cartography, Human History, North American History, Polar Explorers, Pursuit of Happiness, The Drama Of It All, Weird | Tags: 1845, adventure, Amc, Arctic, Arctic expedition, arctic expeditions, Arctic exploration, arctic explorers, Beechey Island, Boat Place, Britain, British, cairn, Canada, Cannibal, Cannibalism, Captain, Captain Sir John Franklin, Charles Francis Hall, Death, disaster, England, Erebus, exploration, Exploratory expedition, Francis Crozier, Franklin, Franklin's lost expedition, Frederick Schwatka, Goodsir, Greenhithe, Greenland, Grinnell Expedition, historic, Historical, History, HMS Erebus, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, HMS Resolute, HMS Terror, human history, human nature, Human suffering, hypothermia, Ice, indigenous people, Interesting, Inuit, James Clark Ross, James Fitzjames, John Franklin, John Rae, John Richardson, King William Island, King Williams Island, Lady Jane Franklin, lead poisoning, Magnetic poles, Magnetism, Maritime disaster, Northwest Passage, Open Polar Sea, pneumonia, Polar, Polar Expedition, Polar exploration, Polar explorer, Polar explorers, Royal Navy, scurvy, ship, ships, Sir John Franklin, Society, starvation, Starvation Cove, Terror, Terror Bay, The Terror, tuberculosis, Victoria Strait, Victorian, Weird | 1 Comment