Franklin was now an old man by the standards of the day. The Admiralty was doubtful, but the explorer’s old Arctic comrade from an overland expedition, Dr. John Richardson, offered to sign a medical certificate indicating that his health was sound enough for any journey through frozen channels. Franklin admitted that he was too plump for overland travel but pointed out that the entire voyage would be by ship. His superiors sympathized, and in the end the Arctic explorer got the job because his friends felt sorry for him.
In February, Franklin’s appointment was confirmed. The Erebus and the Terror would be the first ships in Arctic records to operate using adapted railway locomotive engines of twenty horsepower each and screw propellors. On board would be ample provisions for three years, which, Franklin claimed, could be stretched to five if necessary. There was no attempt to plan for unforeseen emergencies. No relief expeditions were contemplated since Franklin feared if they were the Admiralty might scrap the whole idea.
In the exuberance that marked the venture only two critical voices were raised. Old John Ross, the crusty Arctic survivor, wondered why so many men were needed to trace the Passage. This was the largest expedition so far to invade the polar world—134 men on two big ships. Ross thought one smaller steam vessel would be cheaper and more efficient, and he was right. When the Passage was finally conquered just over half a century later, Roald Amundsen succeeded with a single small schooner and only seven men. Ross urged Franklin to leave depots of provisions and perhaps a boat or two at various points, should he be trapped or wrecked, a sensible piece of advice that Franklin dismissed as an absurdity.
An eccentric surgeon-naturalist, Richard King, who had written a book on the Arctic coast, also had his reservations. The best way to find the Passage, he insisted, was to take a party of no more than six men overland along the coastline from the mouth of the Great Fish River. But King was ignored by the naval hierarchy who were committed to cumbersome sea voyages in large ships—the larger the better.
On May 19, 1845, the expedition set off. Aboard the Erebus, John Franklin’s daughter by his first marriage, Eleanor, noticed that a dove had settled on one of the masts. “Everyone was pleased with the good omen,” she told her stepmother, “and if it be an omen of peace and harmony, I think there is every reason of its being true.”
Jane Franklin’s niece, Sophy Cracroft, was beside her aunt on the pier to wave one last goodbye as Franklin signalled his farewell with a handkerchief. His only worry was his wife. Could she endure his absence? From Sophy he had extracted a promise: that she would stay by her side until he returned. For the next thirty years the faithful niece rarely let her aunt out of her sight, travelling in her footsteps from Hong Kong to Sitka, Alaska, and rejecting all suitors who might have interfered with what she considered a higher cause.
Sir John Franklin as he looked at the height of his fame.
And so they waited, spending their winters in England, expecting news from the Arctic, and their summers abroad: in France (whose government listed Franklin’s name at the Rouen Customs House as among the world’s most famous navigators), and in the West Indies and the United States, where Lady Franklin performed her usual round of inspecting hospitals, schools, factories, and other institutions and also managed to climb Mount Washington.
In spite of this hectic itinerary she could not take her mind off the Arctic. “We have now given up all expectation of hearing from Papa this year,” Eleanor wrote to a friend. “In October or Novr next I trust we shall either see or hear from him.”
To old John Ross, Jane wrote, “I dare not be sanguine as to their success—indeed the very thought seems to me presumptuous, so entirely absorbed is my soul in aspirations for their safety only.” And, if they didn’t come back as planned, would Ross be the man to go in search of them?
Ross, whose earlier skepticism in 1844 had caused him to promise Franklin that he would mount a search if needed, wrote to the Lords of the Admiralty that if Franklin hadn’t managed to reach Bering Strait by this time, his ships must be imprisoned in the ice. He wrote again the following month suggesting that it was time to take steps for relief; but the Admiralty fobbed him off, declaring that they would offer rewards to Hudson’s Bay traders and whalers to be on the lookout for the expedition, and that was all.
In June, the difficult Dr. King again entered the picture. He asked the Colonial Secretary for permission to follow the Great Fish River and guide members of the missing expedition who might have, he thought, been forced to abandon their ships, to depots of food. King, not being a navy man and considered a bit of a nuisance, which he was, got nowhere. “I do not desire that he be the person employed,” Jane Franklin told Ross, who had volunteered to lead a rescue expedition that the government was belatedly considering. At the very least, she hoped, the government would authorize the Hudson’s Bay Company “to explore those parts which you … cannot immediately do.” As Ms. Woodward has argued, if King’s experience and Jane’s instinct had been immediately followed, some of Franklin’s men might have been rescued.
Sir John Franklin in middle age, an old man by the standards of his day.
But though time was running out, the navy dawdled. Franklin had three years’ supplies when he sailed for the Arctic in 1845. Belatedly, in January 1848, the little supply ship Plover set off for Bering Strait carrying more supplies for the missing ships, only to be delayed for a year in transit. With Plover went a letter from Jane, who warned her friends not to write anything “that can distress his mind.… Who can tell whether they will be in a state of body or mind to bear it.” The letter was returned as were the others she dispatched over the next several years. Meanwhile, Sir John Richardson was heading off on an overland expedition to examine the north coast of the continent from the Mackenzie estuary to the Coppermine. She wanted to accompany him but was dissuaded from that venture. “It would have been a less trial to me to come after you,” she wrote to Franklin in a letter that was returned, “as I was at one time tempted to do, but I thought it my duty & my interest to remain, for might I not have missed you & wd it have been right to leave Eleanor—yet if I had thought you to be ill, nothing should have stopped me.” Instead, she put up her own money—three thousand pounds—as a reward to any whaler who might find the lost expedition.
In May 1848, the government’s own search expedition—two big ships, Enterprise and Investigator—finally set off under the overall command of James Clark Ross, who had reversed his firm decision never to go north again. As usual it carried a letter from Jane: “My dearest love, May it be the will of God if you are not restored to us earlier this year that you should open this letter & that it may give you comfort in all your trials.… I try to prepare myself for every trial which may be in store for me, but dearest, if you ever open this, it will be I trust because I have been spared the greatest of all.…”
For all of 1847 she had made no entries in her journal; the next year her comments were entirely bound up in the search. She was now a public figure, a state she accepted in spite of her shyness. As Francis Spufford writes, “Knowledge of her name established rules for conversation with her; it stipulated an attitude of reverent attention to her story.” By November, the faithful Sophy Cracroft found her “much out of health & in deep despondency.” The nation, caught up in the drama and suspense of her vigil, felt for her. New Year’s Day opened with public prayers in sixty churches for all absent in the Arctic.
But the new year also brought its own measure of discord. Eleanor was in love and wanted to marry the Reverend Philip Gell, whom she had met in Van Diemen’s Land. Jane had considerable property from Franklin’s first wife, but her husband had made no provision for his daughter. Jane held his power of attorney. With the two young people about to be married, she arranged for a settlement, which, for them, was not enough; Franklin was almost certainly dead, but his wife stubbornly refused to acknowledge that lamentable fact. For the first time she had to think about money: she would need funds to support her continui
ng search for Erebus and Terror. Thus was opened a breach in the family at what was also the worst time in her life.
She lived in hope. In April, she wrote to the president of the United States, Zachary Taylor, pointing out that the Admiralty was now offering a reward of twenty thousand pounds to any ship of any flag that brought help to the missing vessels. “I am not without hope that you will deem it not unworthy of a great and kindred nation, to take up the cause of humanity which I plead, in a national spirit, and thus generously make it your own.…”
The letter, which suggested that by helping in the search the Americans might get credit for discovering the Northwest Passage, was “the most admirable letter ever addressed by man or woman,” in the words of a British member of parliament. As a result, the American secretary of state wrote to her pledging “all that the Executive government of the United States in the exercise of its constitutional powers can effect.”
She went back to the Admiralty, which she felt had not made much effort to carry the search into those regions where the missing expedition was likely to be found. Franklin’s orders had been to sail west and south from Cape Walker and, if blocked by ice, to explore Wellington Channel to the north. Neither of those areas had been given much attention. What the Navy wasn’t prepared to do Jane Franklin was willing and ready to attempt.
She had learned that two suitable vessels—dockyard lighters—were available and that “with some alterations in the rigging, would be well adapted for my purpose, and being very strong, they could soon be made ready for me.” Now she asked the board of the Admiralty to either lend her the two ships or sell them to her outright. “I cannot attempt to conceal from the Board, that it is only by the sacrifice of all my private property … and by the additional aid of borrowed capital, that I shall be able to effect my object, if unassisted.”
The Admiralty was less than enthusiastic. They had sent a supply ship, the North Star, to support Ross’s expedition, and that was enough. In the suite of rooms she had taken in Spring Gardens because it was close to the Admiralty, Jane saw a steady stream of visitors, anyone who might have a clue or suggestion about the missing ships. She even went so far as to visit a clairvoyant, and later that year there was the curious case of “Little Weasy,” a four-year-old child who had died of gastric fever and kept “appearing” to his brothers and sisters, once, apparently, with a vision of the missing expedition from which he scrawled a crude map of the search area. Poor Lady Franklin, whom a friend described as in “a restless excited state of feeling,” was reduced to grasping at straws.
She did not give up. In the summer of 1849, she and Sophy travelled north to the Shetlands to meet the whalers returning from the Arctic, hoping for news of the lost ships. En route she consulted William Scoresby, an acknowledged Arctic expert, and took tea with the mother of John Rae, the Hudson’s Bay trader and explorer. She was becoming an Arctic expert herself and at Stromness in the Orkneys talked to the member of a whaling crew who claimed to have seen her husband and his ship that year. Her hopes rose but were quickly dashed when the tale was discredited.
Back in London, she found that both Richardson and James Clark Ross had returned to report they had found no trace of the missing ships. For Jane Franklin, this was a body blow. All her hopes had been centred on Ross, whose early confidence had buoyed her up. But she persevered. She wrote to an acquaintance in New York, Silas Burrows, to assess the possibility of raising funds in America “so as to enable me to send a small vessel or 2 small vessels of not above 100 tons each, with boats to those especial parts where I am persuaded the lost ships and crews are most likely to be found.” She would be happy to come to the United States, she told him, to outline her views to any group of “sturdy young adventurers” ready to join in the search.
She had written to the czar of Russia for help, and he had replied by announcing an expedition to search for Franklin on the north coast of Siberia. It was unlikely that Franklin had got that far; nevertheless, the Admiralty was already planning to send the Enterprise and Investigator on a second expedition in that very direction—westward to Bering Strait. She herself leaned toward the eastern Arctic as the most fruitful setting for the search, and in that she was right. To John Rae, whom the British government had sent to Wollaston and Victoria Lands, she made a tentative suggestion: “I do not know whether you consider that the mouth of the Great Fish River should be examined.…” Nobody had bothered to examine it and here was a bitter irony. When in 1854 Rae came upon the first clues to the fate of the Franklin expedition, the Inuit indicated that many of his men had died at the mouth of the Great Fish River.
By 1850, the mystery was tantalizing the public. No fewer than six expeditions—fifteen ships—were sent off that year to probe the frozen channels of the Arctic archipelago. Enterprise and Investigator got off in May. Their captains, Richard Collinson and Robert McClure, would be out of touch with the world for four and five years respectively.
Most of the activity that fevered year was the direct result of Jane Franklin’s campaign. She had brought in a seasoned whaling captain, William Penny, to command her own expedition in spite of the Admiralty’s objection to a non-naval officer and then convinced the Admiralty to underwrite the entire cost of the enterprise. They had no choice, for by this time public opinion was solidly behind her. She got her way when in April the two ships, appropriately named Lady Franklin and Sophia, set sail for the Arctic. Her impassioned pleas to Sir George Simpson also brought dividends. The Felix and the Mary, which sailed a week after Penny under the command of the seventy-three-year-old John Ross, were financed by Simpson’s Hudson’s Bay Company and by public subscription. The following month, the British government mounted the biggest expedition of all—four ships under Captain Horatio Austin, followed shortly by an American expedition with the unofficial support of Congress and the financial backing of Henry Grinnell, a prosperous New York shipping merchant who had become obsessed with the search because of Jane Franklin’s appeal to President Taylor. At Jane’s behest he bought two ships and turned them over to the U.S. government so that they might be placed under naval discipline.
The last ship to sail to the Arctic that year, in June, was the ninety-ton ex-pilot boat Prince Albert, which had belonged to another of Jane’s friends, the Cowes shipbuilder Robert White. It was equipped by Jane herself and some of her friends, and its captain, Charles Forsyth, was ordered to probe the section of the Arctic that had been ignored by others and, she believed, was the likeliest spot of all for the search. But when September came, to her despair none of the searchers had returned.
That fall by way of carrier pigeon she had some sketchy news. Austin reported evidence of a Royal Navy encampment on Beechey Island at the entrance to Wellington Channel. Penny revealed the presence of the graves of three of Franklin’s men on the same spot.
Apart from this, nothing seemed to be going right. She had squandered her savings outfitting the little Prince Albert, but when it came back in October the captain had little to report. Charles Forsyth had not taken the search where she had asked him. Disobeying her instructions, he had ignored Peel Sound, believing it to be blocked by ice, and turned west and north. It was generally believed that Franklin had gone west and north. But Jane Franklin knew her husband better. He was a stickler for detail, and if it were at all possible, he would have followed his orders.
The Investigator, commanded by Robert McClure, trapped in the ice pack north of Banks Island during the Franklin search. The expedition failed to find any clues.
The Prince Albert made a second search, the only ship to set off for the Arctic in 1851. Lady Franklin spent the first five months of that year reorganizing the expedition. To replace Forsyth, she chose a tough Canadian mixed-blood, William Kennedy, son of a Cree woman and a Hudson’s Bay Company factor. He had come to London on his own as had his twenty-four-year-old second-in-command, Joseph René Bellot, who jeopardized his career in the French marines to dedicate himself to Jane’s service. He
was her favourite, and she called him her “French son,” insisting that the French flag be hoisted beside the Union Jack. When Prince Albert finally sailed in June, he was so overcome he sobbed like a child. “I must supply your mother’s place,” she had told him. “Well, then,” he wrote in his journal, “I will be for you a son and the inexhaustible devotedness of a son who is in search of his father.”
Where had Franklin gone after Beechey Island? He had left no written clue, but five of the eight Arctic authorities asked to predict his route believed he would be found north of Wellington Channel—in direct opposition to the orders he had been given and tragically, as it turned out, opposite to his own inclinations. Thus, when a new expedition—three sailing ships and two steamers under Sir Edward Belcher—was mounted the following year, it set off again in the wrong direction. A report from John Rae confirmed this error when he discovered two pieces of wood, almost certainly from the Franklin ships, on Victoria Island. That was a long way from Wellington Channel and in the opposite direction from Belcher’s vain search.
These tantalizing clues served to spur Jane Franklin on. In spite of recurring illnesses, she renewed her efforts to push for further searches. She wrote anonymous letters to the press and appealed to the French and the Russians as well as her benefactor Henry Grinnell, trying to revive the flagging interest in the United States. The correspondence she received was voluminous and much of it ridiculous, such as the offer from a Mr. Henry Moore of Pennsylvania, who said he could tell her how to save her husband if she would introduce him to Queen Victoria and send him seventy-five pounds. And there was verse, too:
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