Before setting out on his final polar expedition in 1845 and creating one of history’s more intriguing and enduring maritime mysteries, Sir John Franklin had served in three wars, surveyed Australia, and mapped unexplored areas of Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Throughout his five-decade career in the British Navy, Franklin had developed a hard-earned appreciation for suffering and perhaps an undeserved reputation for failure.
Franklin’s expeditions had provided him with an intimate understanding of hardship and deprivation. He survived extreme cold for months on end. He lived in cramped quarters with his crew and a rapidly spreading respiratory disease. And when food supplies became exhausted, men from two of his expeditions had turned to cannibalism.
Yet despite his accomplishments, Sir John Franklin is most well known for leading an ill-fated expedition that disappeared for nearly 170 years.
Like most explorers of his era, Franklin got his start in the British Royal Navy. He received his appointment in 1801 at the age of 14. He quickly adapted to a sailor’s life of toil and living in extremely tight quarters with up to 150 of your best friends and worst enemies for months at a time.
Franklin’s inaugural cruise in 1802 was aboard the survey ship HMS Investigator which completed the first circumnavigation of Australia during its 18-month voyage.
Rising through the ranks, Franklin served as a signals officer on the HMS Bellerophon at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
He also fought in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, and although he was not wounded, he did suffer from permanent hearing damage.
By 1818, Franklin had reached the rank of lieutenant and was in command of his first ship, the HMS Trent. The Trent was part of a two-ship expedition that attempted to sail from over the North Pole to find the Northwest Passage to Asia. Although violent weather and Arctic pack ice made Franklin turn back and the mission a failure, he was still commended for his enthusiasm and bravery.
The following year, Franklin was appointed to lead the Coppermine expedition, a three-year overland trek to map the area from Hudson Bay to the north coast of Canada and the Coppermine River delta on the Arctic Ocean.
This expedition was doomed from the start.
Poor logistical planning and lukewarm support from the local indigenous peoples and fur trading companies quickly put the party in a precarious position. Although the expedition eventually covered 500 miles to reach the Arctic coast, they ran out of supplies, and their bark canoes fell apart.
They had no choice but to turn back.
With the onset of winter, game was scarce, forcing the men to eat lichen, which they nicknamed tripe de roche, and boiled leather from their spare boots to survive.
On their return, Franklin decided the best course of action was to split the party, leaving the weakest men behind at camp and sending the fittest men ahead to return with supplies. Franklin, accompanied by the group’s voyageurs (French-Canadian trappers), would follow the lead party at a slower pace.
Only a short distance into Franklin’s trek, four of his voyageurs said they were unable to continue and returned to camp.
Only one voyageur made it, but not before killing and eating his three companions.
When the surviving voyageur was confronted about the suspected murders, he killed one of the camp officers proclaiming the officer’s rifle accidentally went off when he was cleaning it.
The voyageur was later shot and killed by one of the surviving officers.
By the end of Franklin’s first arctic expedition, 11 of the original party of 22 had died.
Mocked by the locals for his poor planning and inability to adapt to the environment, Franklin nonetheless returned to England as a hero and with the appellation of the “man who ate his boots.”
In 1825, three years after the Coppermine Expedition, Franklin was asked to lead a second overland Arctic expedition. In sharp contrast to his first foray, the second was well-manned and supplied.
Starting at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, the expedition used specially designed boats to descend the Mackenzie River and surveyed more than 1,100 miles of coastline along the Beaufort Sea.
Franklin was knighted for his accomplishments in 1829 before returning to war for a third time, commanding the HMS Rainbow during the final years of the Greek War for Independence.
In 1836, Franklin received an appointment to serve as lieutenant governor of the penal colony Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). Although he and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, attempted to improve conditions on the island, he was eventually caught up in political infighting, sacked, and sent back to England in 1843.
When Franklin returned, the Royal Navy was still doggedly pursuing a northwest trade route to connect England to China and India. An expedition was being planned to launch in 1845 under the command of veteran Arctic explorers Sir William Edward Parry or Sir James Clark Ross. Both declined the opportunity, stating they were done with polar exploration.
Parry recommended the 59-year-old Franklin so he might have one last victorious expedition to cap his naval career. Franklin also lobbied for his shot at glory and eventually convinced the Admiralty he was their best choice for traversing the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage.
On May 19, 1845, nearly 20 years after his last arctic adventure, Franklin sailed out of Kent, England, on two specially outfitted ships and a crew of 134 men.
HMS Erebus Named For the Greek Deity Representing Primordial Darkness.
Franklin led from the HMS Erebus while Captain Francis Crozier, a veteran of five expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic, commanded the HMS Terror.
Both ships saw service in James Clark Ross’ 1839-1843 Antarctic expedition, where Crozier had also commanded the Terror.
The Erebus and Terror were retrofitted with iron plating on the hulls and heated crew quarters that were connected by ducts to a stove. The ships were also the British Navy’s first to have steam-powered engines and screw propellers, which could propel them at up to 4 knots.
Erebus and Terror initially saw service as bomb ships, using aft and bow mortars to bombard fixed positions on land. The Terror was used against the United States in the War of 1812 and was part of the British armada that unsuccessfully mortared Fort McHenry. Observing that attack inspired Francis Scott Key to write his “Defence of Fort McHenry” poem that later became known as the “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
With poor prospects of finding a steady supply of food in the Arctic, Franklin had the ships loaded with three years of provisions.
The expedition was stocked with two tons of tobacco, 32,224 pounds of salt beef, 36,487 pounds of biscuits, 3,684 gallons of concentrated spirits, and nearly 5,000 gallons of port and ale. Anticipating potential delays due to pack ice, Franklin included 8,000 tins of preserves, which included pemmican, cooked beef and pork, and soup. There were also 930 gallons of lemon juice on board to prevent scurvy.
Franklin’s primary polar obstacles were the unpredictable weather and pack ice. The sea typically froze in late August and usually, but not always, broke the following spring. This led to an expedition strategy of sprinting through the open seas during the short summer and then enduring long winters with the ships locked in pack ice.
These challenges were most likely at the top of Franklin’s mind as he raced north along the east coast of Baffin Island on July 26 — just weeks before the ocean under his hulls would turn to ice.
It was the last time anyone from the Franklin expedition would be seen alive.
PART 2
There is not much information on what happened from that point onward except for one damning fact: Summer never came to the arctic in 1847.
The pack ice was never going to free the Erebus and Terror.
Franklin’s decision to sail down the west side of King William Island put both ships through a (now) well-known area where the ice is often not clear in the summer. In fact, the first explorer to successfully navigate the passage by ship, Roald Amundsen, did so along the island’s east coast in 1903-1906.
The surviving crew, now under the command of Crozier, spent a third winter locked in the ice as the flow carried them farther off course.
By this point, a dwindling food supply and hostile environment, where temperatures were -30°F by day and could drop to -54°F overnight, were taking their toll.
Many men were suffering the effects of scurvy: loose teeth, bleeding gums, bruising, and shortness of breath. Even though the crew was issued one ounce of lemon juice a day to fight off the disease, it didn’t appear to be working.
Lemon juice’s active ingredient is ascorbic acid (vitamin C), which becomes unstable with prolonged storage. Anthropologists believe the juice likely fermented. To prevent further fermentation, the crew may have boiled the lemon juice, thus destroying the ascorbic acid and negating its effectiveness against scurvy.
By the following spring, nine officers and 15 crew members had fallen ill and died.
A second handwritten notation on Lieutenant Gore’s note, written a year after the first message, indicated that Crozier had made the decision to abandon the ships on April 22, 1848. Gore’s note remains the only known record detailing the crew’s last attempt to survive.
After being trapped in the ice for 19 months and with the original food supply nearly exhausted, Crozier calculated the men’s best option would be a 600-mile overland trek to the south of King William Island. From that point, the remaining 105 crew members would cross the Simpson Strait with hopes of reaching the mouth of the Great Fish River (now the Back River) on the mainland.
Once there, he hoped to find game and get help from a Hudson Bay Company outpost.
Ironically, the mouth of the Great Fish River is approximately 900 miles east of the mouth of the Coppermine River, where Franklin’s first overland expedition ran afoul some 25 years earlier.
The men fashioned sleds out of two lifeboats and packed them with their remaining provisions. The crew dragged the sleds down the icy coast of King William Island and on to the pack ice for their southbound journey, only able to cover 1-½ miles each day in the rugged terrain,
Out of the 105 crew members who started the last trek of the Franklin expedition, evidence indicates only 35-40 made it to the mainland.
The expedition’s disappearance set off a massive 18-year search effort that started in 1848.
Britain officially declared the crew deceased in service on March 31, 1854.
No survivors were ever found.
In 1854, Scottish surveyor and explorer John Rae had reached Repulse Bay (approximately 250 miles east of the mouth of the Back River) and met several Inuit families who had come to trade. Some had objects that belonged to Franklin and his men.
The Inuit told Rae that four winters ago, they came across at least 40 kabloonat (non-Inuits) who were dragging a boat south. Their leader was a tall, stout man with a telescope, who may have been Crozier. The white men communicated by hand gestures that their ships were crushed by ice and that they were going south.
When the Inuit returned the following spring, they found approximately 30 corpses and signs of cannibalism.
If accurate, this means Crozier’s band survived in near-starvation and hypothermic conditions for nearly two years after abandoning the ships and the start of search operations.
Unable to convince the government to sponsor another search for her husband, Lady Jane Franklin personally commissioned one more search expedition in 1857. Under the command of Captain Francis Leopold McClintock, that expedition later discovered Crozier’s sleds on King William Island in 1859 as well the remains of gun-room steward Thomas Armitage.
McClintock noted that there was an abundant supply of heavy goods in the sleds and observed they were “a mere accumulation of dead weight, of little use, and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews.”
In 1992, archaeologists and forensic anthropologists discovered another campsite on the western shore of King William Island. They excavated the remains of what they believed to be part of Crozier’s crew.
Analysis of the bones showed cut marks that were consistent with de-fleshing and pot polishing, which takes place when the ends of the bones rub up against the inside of the cooking pot. This typically occurs during the end stage of cannibalism, “the last dread alternative,” when the marrow is extracted from the bone.
Much of what happened to the Franklin expedition was a mystery until the Erebus and Terror were found after being lost for nearly 170 years.
The remains of the HMS Erebus were discovered in 2014, followed by the HMS Terror in 2016. Both were located near King William Island.
The Erebus’ location, along with its anchor usage, seems to indicate the crew may have attempted to re-man the ship and sail her back to England.
Researchers continue to explore the wrecks and recently found Crozier’s cabin on the Terror to be well-preserved. There is potential for new documents to be discovered that could provide more clues on the expedition’s fate.
Both ships are now within the boundaries of the Wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS National Historic Site with limited access to the public.
Originally published in the summer of 2020 by Danger Ranger Bear. Click here to read the original Part 1 and original Part 2.