Students of maritime history
will be familiar with the Franklin
expedition and its tragic end. What most
people are not aware of are the results of investigations conducted through the
1990s to determine what happened.
The fabled Northwest
Passage that seamen had sought since the days of the Cabots was an
effort by seafarers to find a shorter route to the Orient that avoided the
months-long passage around the tip of South America
for vessels moving from the Atlantic Ocean to
the Pacific. Hampering the success of
finding the new route was the Arctic ice and the inability of shipbuilders to
build vessels capable of withstanding the intense pressure of the sea ice while
forcing passage. Many adventurers made
the attempt using the tools on hand. All
failed and many died. Such were the conditions
of Northwest Passage exploration during the first half of the 19th
century.
In March 2005, Suzanne Haas
of History Television Canada,
revisited the state of shipbuilding in early 19th century Britain and
described a number of major changes that the Admiralty felt would make a new
expedition successful. After some
debate, Sir John Franklin, the former Governor of Tasmania, was chosen as the
team’s leader.
Kathryn Cassidy of Lakehead University, Canada, described the new
advancements that made the expedition possible with a higher probability of
success than that of prior efforts.
“The Franklin Expedition had five years of food
supplies [the planned period of search was only three years], including 8,000 tins (in one-, two-, four-, six- and
eight lb. capacities) of meat, vegetables and soup.
… In addition to the technical innovation of tinned
goods, Franklin’s
vessels Erebus and Terror had cabins which were heated by hot water
piped through the floor. The ships’ bows
were reinforced with iron planks to
help them break through ice. Moreover,
each was equipped with a specially designed screw propeller driven by a wheel-less steam
locomotive from the London
and Greenwich Railway. “
Truly, this expedition was
better equipped than any in the past.
The crew consisted of 134 sailors and officers, all of whom were
experienced explorers and deeply respected Franklin.
As reported by Suzanne Haas
of History Television Canada,
“Franklin’s
direct sailing orders … were to head through Lancaster
Sound and Barrow Straight [sic] … [and] travel southwest as close
as possible to the Bering Strait. The last recorded sighting of the expedition
was on July 26, 1845,
when a group of Europeans spotted the ships approximately halfway between Disko Island,
Greenland, and the entrance to Lancaster Sound.”
The July sightings were by
the crews of two whaling ships, Prince of
Wales and Enterprise in the Davis Strait. Disko
Island (now Qeqertarssuaq Island) can be found on Fig. 1, about
the midpoint on the right edge. Lancaster Sound can be found on Fig. 2, just under Devon Island, about the midpoint just in from the right
edge. Barrow Strait
is due west of Lancaster Sound. Disko
Island and Lancaster Sound are almost opposite of each other across Baffin Bay.
When there was no word from Franklin in 1846, no one
was concerned since it was anticipated that the voyage would be completed at
the end of 1846 with the ships returning in 1847. When 1846 passed into 1847 and neither of the
ships returned nor word was received from Franklin,
it was decided to send a rescue party.
From 1848, over 40 search and rescue crews were dispatched from England and the
United States. In 1859, fifteen years after the expedition
left England,
one of the search vessels reached King William Island
where they found some skeletons and a logbook with entries to April 25, 1848. The log showed that the ships had been
trapped in the ice off the north shore
of King William Island in
September 1846, only months after leaving Beechey Island. King William Island
can be located in the lower left quarter of Fig.2.
According to Suzanne Haas, “By April 1848,
Franklin and 23 other crewmen had died.
On April 22, 1848,
the 105 survivors abandoned ship and took off on foot across the Arctic
mainland in search of rescue.” In fact,
what they thought was the mainland was actually King
William Island. Had they
reached the southern shore of the island, they would have had the added problem
of crossing ice-covered waters to reach the Adelaide Peninsula,
which was the mainland. But, they never
made the southern shore, all dying in the attempt. There were some allegations of the
possibility of cannibalism based on the mutilated condition of the bodies
preserved by the severe cold. For almost
150 years, the story of the Franklin
expedition remained unchanged. Then in
the last decades of the 20th century, advancements in science and
pathology permitted further investigation permitting closure.
After passing the two whalers
in Baffin Bay, Franklin moved into and through Lancaster Sound into Barrow Strait
and set up camp on Beechey
Island, a small island
off the southwestern tip of Devon Island, at
the juncture of Barrow
Strait and Wellington
Channel. While it is not known for
certain, why he chose to spend the winter of 1845 on Beechey Island,
the death of three of the crew suggests that the possible illness of the crew
may have contributed to his decision. During
late 20th century, Canada
authorized the exhumation and autopsy of the three bodies to determine the
cause of death. It was found that all
three died from tuberculosis. In the
spring of 1846, he left Beechey
Island, leaving behind
three storehouses, workshops a number of artifacts and three graves.
From Beechey Island, we know
that he continued west on Barrow Strait, turning south at Peel Sound where he
moved further south between Prince of Wales Island and Somerset Island into the
Franklin Strait, passed Boothia Peninsula on the west, into the juncture of
Victoria Strait and James Ross Strait, to the north shore of King William Island,
where he anchored both vessels. His
ships never left this anchorage. The
reasons for his stay were not known until the 1990s.
Search parties seeking the
expedition found a cairn on King William Island
in which had been placed written records dated through April 1848. The cairn papers told of the death of Franklin and 23 crewmen
in 1847. The remaining 105 survivors
abandoned the ships and set off to the south, hoping to reach the
mainland. It appears that they were
under the impression that King William Island
was not an island but an extension of the Adelaide Peninsula.
When the group left the ships, they
loaded all their possessions on a large lifeboat converted into a sled. For reasons that no one can understand, the
lifeboat cargo included items such as silverware, crystal, button polish and
similar items that were not needed for survival. When search parties found the boat many years
later, they weighed the boat and cargo at approximately 7.5 tons. After towing the boat for a distance, exhaustion
dictated abandonment and they went on with what they could carry on their backs,
but even that was too much. The Inuit
reported in interviews conducted years later that the surviving group had
broken into three parties, one party attempted a return to the ships, a second
went off.on their own and the third continued to move south. None survived.
After years of searching by
dozens upon dozens of search parties, no solid information was uncovered nor was
any acceptable theory developed as to why the expedition stayed at the north shore of King William Island through the
spring of 1848 and made no
attempt to sail the ice-free waters. In
the 1990s, the answer was found. The Franklin
Expedition didn’t leave its anchorage on ice-free waters in 1848 because there wasn't any.
Modern vessels conducted
ice-core tests of the area in the 1990s and found that the entire Arctic Archipelago had experienced a five-year period
where there was no melting of the ice – a five-year winter! They reached this conclusion by comparing
their new ice-cores with similar cores taken elsewhere in the arctic where
causative information was well known.
But they still didn’t know why.
Parallel studies of the tides and movement of the ice provided an
answer. They found that slurry of sea
ice and pack ice had moved from the Arctic Ocean
down McClure Sound into Melville Sound where it collected before moving down
M’Clintock Channel and piling up against the west shore of King William
Island where M’Clintock Channel meets Victoria Strait, effectively blocking all passage. This happened in 1845 while the Franklin
Expedition was spending the winter at Beechey Island. When the expedition reached King
William Island, they found their passage through Victoria Strait
blocked by a huge ice mass. They had no
choice but to wait out the spring thaw, which never came. See Figs.2 and 6.
Since the vessels were
carrying sufficient food and supplies to last five years, there was no concern
and no appreciation of the danger they were in.
Morale was high. Before the
vessels left England
Sir John had gone over the manifest with the crew, pointing out the 8,000 tins
of food that ruled out one of the major problems of Arctic exploration,
starvation. And the large supply of
citric juices made scurvy, another major exploration risk, highly
unlikely. The sad truth was that they
were wrong on both counts.
When the Inuit encountered
the crew when they were attempting to walk out, they reported the white men as
having black faces. The first interpretations
of these observations were that the crew, being out in the weather for an extended
period, was suffering from severe frostbite.
Actually, they were all suffering from lead poisoning. The tins of food that were to be there
protection from starvation had been sealed with a lead solder that contaminated
the food. The hundreds of empty cans
found at Beechey Island and at King
William Island confirmed that the canned food was eaten. Spectrographic analysis of bone tissue
confirmed the absorption of lead. The
deposits of lead in the skin, causing the black faces reported by the Inuit,
supported the spectrographic findings.
While the claims of possible cannibalism have not been confirmed,
examination of the mutilated body’s show that the mutilation was not caused by
animals, but from cuts and chop marks primarily at the joints. Though the Franklin Expedition ended in
failure, in that they did not accomplish their mission, it did identify a
number of weaknesses that future explorers could correct, thus setting the
stage for future expeditions.
Elimination of luxury items from the manifest, including items more
practical for use in the arctic – rifles in place of the shotguns -- and learning the necessities of living off the
land, for example. But most important,
the need for an emergency escape plan, complete with special equipment, in the
event of failure of the primary mission.
A perfect example of the application of corrections to the deficiencies of the Franklin Expedition is the expedition of Roald Amundsen who successfully navigated the Northwest Passage in his small steamship Gjoa in 1906.
Amundsen followed the path of
Franklin to King William Island where he avoided Victoria Strait
and made passage on James
Ross Strait
into Rae Strait, between King
William Island and Boothia Peninsula. Unlike Franklin,
Amundsen made friends with the Inuit, spending two winters with them with his
vessel anchored in a sheltered cove on the eastern shore of King
William Island. During his
extended stay, he learned from the Inuit how to live and survive off the
land. This knowledge would serve him
during his polar and other expeditions.
Fig. 8 shows his route to the Beaufort Sea
where he exited in the presence of an American whaler.
Modern passage through the Northwest Passage is shown by the solid white
line. It is interesting to note that the
primary modern passage is closer to what the Franklin Expedition attempted than
the route taken by Amundsen.
Prepared from articles in the
Wayward Navigator March 2005; The
Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org;
Franklin’s
Lost Expedition, http://martechpolar.com;
www.resolutebay.com; www.pbs.org; www.channel4.com;
www.canadiangeographic.ca; and
the National Geographic Society, 1998.
February 2007
LFC
LFC
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