John Franklin

John Franklin

For the American historian, see John Hope Franklin

Sir John Franklin, FRGS (April 15, 1786 – June 11, 1847) was an English sea captain and Arctic explorer, who disappeared on an expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. The entire crew was lost and its fate remained a mystery for fourteen years.

Franklin was born in Spilsby, He was one of twelve children of a family which had prospered in trade, and one of his sisters became the mother of Emily Tennyson (wife of the poet).

Although his father initially opposed him, Franklin was determined to have a career at sea. Reluctantly, his father allowed him to go on a trial voyage with a merchant ship. This hardened young Franklin's resolve, so at the age of 14, his father secured a Royal Navy appointment on HMS Polyphemus. Franklin was later present at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. Following this he went on an expedition to explore the coast of Australia on the HMS Investigator with his uncle, Captain Matthew Flinders. Following that expedition, he returned to the Napoleonic Wars, serving aboard HMS Bellerophon at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In 1815, he was at the Battle of New Orleans.

Franklin first travelled to the Arctic in 1818, as a lieutenant under the command of John Ross, and became fascinated by it. On a disastrous overland expedition into the Northwest Territories of Canada along the Coppermine River in 1819-1822, Franklin lost 11 of the 20 men in his party. Most died of starvation, but there was also at least one murder and suggestions of cannibalism. The survivors were forced to eat lichen and even attempted to eat their own leather boots. This gained Franklin the nickname of "the man who ate his boots".

In 1823, after returning to England, Franklin married a poet, Eleanor Porden. She died of tuberculosis in 1825, shortly after persuading her husband not to let her ill-health prevent him from setting off on another expedition to the Arctic. This expedition, a trip down the Mackenzie River to explore the shores of the Beaufort Sea, was better-supplied and more successful than his last.

In 1828, he was knighted by George IV and in the same year married Jane Griffin, a seasoned traveller who proved indomitable in the course of their life together. He was appointed Governor of Tasmania in 1836, but was removed from office in 1843, partly because of his attempts to reform the penal colony there.

Franklin was still obsessed with finding the Northwest Passage. Having succeeded in raising the necessary finance from the British Admiralty, he set off with a party of 128 men in May, 1845, in two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. They never returned.

After two years and no word from the expedition, Lady Franklin urged the Admiralty to send a search party. This was the largest group they had ever lost. But the crew carried supplies for three years, so the Admiralty waited another year before launching the search and offering a £20,000 reward for success. Not only was this a huge sum for the time, but Franklin's disappearance had captured the popular imagination. At one point, there were ten British and two American ships headed for the Arctic (ironically, more ships and men were lost looking for Franklin than in the expedition itself). Ballads telling of Franklin and his fate became quite popular. Lady Franklin composed the lament Lord Franklin for her husband.

In the summer of 1850, several of the ships converged on Beechey Island, in Wellington Channel, where the first relics of the Franklin expedition were found: the graves of three men who had died from natural causes in 1846. But no messages had been left there by the Franklin party to provide further clues for the searchers. The bodies of the explorers had been preserved in the frozen ground, and autopsies showed they had died of tuberculosis.

In 1854, explorer John Rae discovered further evidence of the Franklin party's fate. Rae was not searching for Franklin at all, but rather exploring the Boothia Peninsula on behalf of the Hudson Bay Company. On this journey, Rae met an Inuit who told him of a party of 35 to 40 white men who had died of starvation near the mouth of the Back River. The Inuit also showed him many objects that were identifiable as having belonged to Franklin and his men.

The note found by McClintock on King William Island in 1859, detailing the fate of the Franklin expedition.

Lady Franklin commissioned one more expedition under Francis Leopold McClintock to investigate Rae's report. In the summer of 1859, the McClintock party found a document in a cairn on King William Island left by Franklin's second-in-command, giving the date of Franklin's death. The message, dated April 27, 1848, also reported that the ships had been trapped in the ice, that many others had died, and that the survivors had abandoned the ships and headed south towards the Back River. McClintock also found several bodies and an astonishing amount of abandoned equipment, and heard more details from the Inuit about the disastrous end of the expedition.

There are several things that contributed to the loss of the Franklin expedition. Franklin was of a breed of imperial officers who believed in the subjugation of nature by civilization. He and his men carried silver plates, crystal decanters, and many extraneous personal effects with them. They attempted to haul much of this heavy gear along with them even after abandoning the ships. They were unwilling or unable to learn survival techniques from the natives. Their ships were locked in the ice for two winters running as a result of an unsually cold period that did not allow the icebound passages to melt in the summer of 1846. The party's morale and cohesion was damaged by psychological effects of lead poisoning from the solder that sealed their tinned food supply. This has been confirmed by lead found in both skeletal and soft tissue remains of expedition sailors. They also were weakened by internal bleeding from scurvy after the first two years when the preventive lemon juice they carried lost its potency. The Inuit witnesses had reported that crew members exhibited the blackened mouth and bruised skin typical of that disease. There is evidence of cut marks found on bones from some of the crew, that suggests conditions were so dire that some resorted to cannibalism. In the end, it was likely a combination of poor planning, bad weather, poisoned food, and ultimately starvation that killed them.

List of Franklin Search Expeditions

• 1848–1849, James Clark Ross in Investigator and Enterprise

• 1848–1851, John Richardson and John Rae overland expedition

• 1848–1851, Plover and Herald via Bering Strait

• 1850–1854, Robert McClure in Investigator via Bering Strait

• 1850–1855, Richard Collinson in Enterprise via Bering Strait

• 1850–1851, William Penny in Lady Franklin and Sophia

• 1850–1851, Horatio T. Austin in four-ship Royal Navy expedition

• 1850–1851, Sir John Ross in private expedition

• 1850, Charles Codrington Forsyth in Prince Albert, financed by Lady Franklin

• 1850–1851, Edwin J. De Haven in first Grinnell expedition

• 1851–1852, William Kennedy and Joseph René Bellot in Prince Albert, financed by Lady Franklin

• 1852–1854, Sir Edward Belcher in a five-ship Royal Navy expedition

• 1852, Edward A. Inglefield in Isabel, financed by Lady Franklin

• 1853–1855, Elisha Kent Kane in second Grinnell expedition

• 1853–1854, John Rae on behalf of the Hudson Bay Company

• 1857–1859, Francis Leopold McClintock in Fox, financed by Lady Franklin

• 1864–1869, Charles Francis Hall

• 1878–1880, Frederick Schwatka, sponsored by the American Geographical Society

References

• Frozen In Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, Owen Beattie and John Geiger
• The Arctic Grail, Pierre Berton

External links

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Works by John Franklin at Project Gutenberg