My Franklin dear long has been gone
To explore the northern seas,
I wonder if my faithful John,
Is still battling with the breeze;
Or if e’er he will return again,
To these fond arms once more
To heal the wounds of dearest Jane,
Whose heart is griev’d full sore.
My Franklin dear, though long thy stay
Yet still my prayer shall be,
That Providence may choose a way,
To guide me safe to thee.
In May 1853, two more ships sailed for the Arctic, the Phoenix and the Advance. The second-in-command of the latter was young René Bellot. Lady Franklin was unable to bid her favourite goodbye because his ship sailed one day ahead of schedule. Three months later he was drowned in the Wellington Channel while bringing dispatches to Belcher.
That was tragedy enough, but in January 1854 there was a worse one. The Admiralty informed her that, as of March 31, the names of the officers and men aboard Erebus and Terror would be struck from the books. She was too ill, or more likely too sick at heart, to reply, but she gathered her strength and a week later shot off a blistering letter attacking the decision as “presumptuous in the sight of God as it will be felt to be indecorous, not to say indecent … in the eyes of men.” With that she refused to claim her widow’s pension, and while the rest of the family wore black, she switched from deep mourning to bright colours of pink and green as soon as the Admiralty’s notice was gazetted. As she wrote to her sister-in-law, “it would be acting a falsehood & a gross hypocrisy on my part to put on mourning when I have not yet given up all hope.… Still less would I do it in that month & day that suits the Admiralty’s financial convenience.”
The Arctic Council during the Franklin search. The object of that search is portrayed in a painting in the background.
—THREE—
John Rae was in no sense a Royal Navy man. The Orkney-born physician and explorer for the Hudson’s Bay Company was one of the few people who believed that Franklin had turned south and not north, as the majority insisted. In his view, Franklin was to be found well west of Boothia Felix in the vicinity of King William Land. This was uncharted territory. Nobody knew whether Boothia was an island or a peninsula; the same uncertainty applied to King William Land. In April 1854, Rae led a small party of six in a trek across the neck of Boothia, which turned out to be a peninsula. On the return trip he was able to establish that King William Land was indeed an island. The stretch of water between the two, now known as Rae Strait, was an alternative part of the Northwest Passage, but Franklin would have had no way of knowing that.
On April 21, at Pelly Bay on Boothia, Rae met a party of Inuit who told him a tale that would eventually be worth ten thousand pounds to him and his men. They had heard stories from other natives about thirty-five to forty men who had starved to death some years before to the west of a large river, perhaps ten or twelve days’ journey away. Rae had no idea who the men were, and since his job was to chart the Arctic coast for the Company, he got on with it. But at Repulse Bay that fall, several Inuit gave him more details about the dead men, and Rae soon realized that their bodies must have been found near the mouth of the Great Fish River—the very spot that the persistent Dr. King had argued the Franklin Party would head for and the very spot for which Jane Franklin herself had tentatively but unsuccessfully advocated.
Rae’s report to the Admiralty was a shocker. “I met with Esquimaux in Pelly Bay from one of whom I learned that a party of ‘white men’ (Kabloonans) had perished from want of food some distance to the westward.… Subsequently further particulars were received, and a number of articles purchased, which places the fate of a portion (if not of all) of the then survivors of Sir John Franklin’s long-lost party beyond a doubt; a fate as terrible as the imagination can conceive.…”
Rae would not bring himself to use the word “cannibalism” in his report, but he certainly made it obvious. The Inuit had walked among the bodies and the scattered equipment of the expedition, and “from the mutilated state of many of the corpses, and the content of the kettles, it is evident that our miserable countrymen had been driven to the last resort.…”
Rae did not publicize his findings, but the Admiralty distributed his report to the press. A vast public controversy ensued, with Rae the villain—a clear example of shooting the messenger. The real impact of Rae’s report was that it demolished the universally held image of Arctic explorers as noble and highly moral creatures, unsullied by any human weakness. In Household Words, the periodical that Charles Dickens had launched in 1850, a contributor wrote that the narratives of the naval explorers “supply some of the finest modern instances of human energy and daring, bent on a noble undertaking, and associated constantly with kindness, generosity, and simple piety. The history of Arctic enterprise is stainless as the Arctic snows, clean to the core as an ice Mountain.” He ended his essay with these words: “Let us be glad … that we have one unspotted place upon this globe of ours; a Pole that, as it fetches truth out of a needle, so surely also gets all that is right-headed and right-hearted from the sailor whom the needle guides.”
Rae’s report was based on hearsay evidence, and the public, clutching at that straw, simply refused to believe that Englishmen would eat each other. The Times expressed the prevailing sentiment: “All savages are liars.” Rae was excoriated because he had stood up for the natives, insisting that their stories were believable. The controversy cost him a knighthood. Dickens entered the lists in his own periodical when he described the Inuit as “Covetous, treacherous and cruel … with a domesticity of blood and blubber.” He simply did not believe, could not believe, that “the flower of the trained adventurous spirit of the English navy, raised by Parry, Franklin, Richardson and Back,” had descended to what was the most dreadful crime in the Victorian mind. “It is in the highest degree improbable that such men would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.” But later evidence found on or near King William Island was to establish incontrovertibly that cannibalism had occurred among Franklin’s crew.
John Rae, with the “odious beard” that Lady Franklin decried after Rae’s reports of cannibalism among the Franklin crew brought widespread condemnation.
Rae was still at sea when the controversy was raging. On his return he paid the mandatory visit to Lady Franklin, where the atmosphere was decidedly chilly. She gave vent to her feelings in her journal in what can only be described as a catty attack on the appearance of the explorer that had nothing to do with the subject at hand. She had quite liked Rae before this, but now she wrote, “Dr. Rae has cut off his odious beard, but still looks very hairy & disagreeable.…”
The Admiralty had asked the Hudson’s Bay Company to send a land party down the Great Fish River. Its leader, James Anderson, came back with some scanty remains: part of a snowshoe with “MR STANLEY” on its back and a leather backgammon board which Jane remembered putting on board the Erebus. There was no doubt now that her husband was dead, but for her that did not end the matter; she simply switched the effort that she had expended trying to save him to a new direction.
She intended to make it absolutely clear to the world that he had been the first to discover the Northwest Passage. Anderson had told her that what was needed was a ship from the north from which sledge parties could reach King William Island. “I am about to make a last effort to solve this mystery before the curtain falls forever over their unburied remains,” she declared.
On January 22, 1856, the government announced that Rae and his men would receive the award of ten thousand pounds for establishing the fate of the lost expedition and that Robert McClure and his crew would receive ten thousand for being the first to negotiate the Northwest Passage. As far as the Admiralty was concerned, that search was ended.
Jane was having none of it. In April she dispatched a voluminous letter—25,000 words—to the Admiral
ty contesting both awards. But the Admiralty was obdurate, and in spite of appeals to Parliament, the prizes were approved.
Still she did not give up. “Though it is my humble hope and fervent prayer,” she wrote, “that the Government of my country will themselves complete the work they have begun, and not leave it to a weak and helpless woman to attempt the doing that imperfectly which they themselves can do so easily and well, yet, if need be, such is my painful resolve, God helping me.”
That was laying it on pretty thick. Weak? She who had climbed mountains in South Africa, America, and Australia? Helpless? She who had the ear and the support of the leading figures of the day, including the Prince Consort himself? In June a bevy of famous names was placed on a memorial addressed to Lord Palmerston, pleading for another expedition. One can only conclude that Jane’s appeal to the Admiralty had a whiff of blackmail about it.
Sir Edward Belcher, the least competent of all the Arctic officers during the Franklin search, had foolishly abandoned one of his ships, Resolute, which an American whaler later discovered floating about in Davis Strait. Congress bought her for $40,000, had her refitted, and offered her to the British Admiralty as a hands-across-the-sea gift—or perhaps as a piece of naval one-upmanship. Jane’s friend Henry Grinnell wanted the Admiralty to lend the ship to her for a final expedition. At a speech to the Royal Geographical Society by the American ambassador, she primed the chairman, Sir Roderick Murchison, who in turn primed the speaker, who inspired a round of applause when he referred to Resolute as “a consecrated ship” with the implication that the Franklin quest was commensurate with that for the Holy Grail.
At the same time, the weak and helpless woman was arranging through friends at the Admiralty for Resolute to receive a royal salute. She even arranged for a Resolute party for the officers and crew of the consecrated ship—with gifts for all—with the aim, through the careful behind-the-scenes work of others, of having it reserved for her own expedition. She was moving heaven and earth to get her way. Some of her friends in the Commons pursued the idea while another prepared an approving article for the Illustrated London News. She herself offered a prize of five hundred pounds to whalers who might investigate a rumour that the missing ships had fallen into the hands of the Inuit.
In addition, she arranged to have Henry Grinnell call a meeting in New York and sent yet another address to the Admiralty urging her right to have Resolute. She left nothing to chance, writing the address herself, which she then quoted in a letter of her own to the First Lord with a copy to the Prince Consort. Such was her campaign that even The Times argued that the ship should be placed at her disposal. But all her considerable efforts were in vain. The Admiralty demurred.
Still she did not give up. Foreseeing that refusal, Jane had already asked a friend in Aberdeen to examine the screw schooner yacht Fox, whose owner had just died. When the report was favourable, she bought the Fox for two thousand pounds and put Leopold M’Clintock, an experienced naval man, in charge of her own expedition to explore King William Island, the one corner of the Arctic that had been bypassed.
She gave M’Clintock two objectives: the rescue of possible survivors and the recovery of any records that might confirm the claim that her husband had been the first to discover the Northwest Passage. Time was of the essence; the expedition must sail no later than July 1857, which gave her two short months to organize the expedition, a task that included replacing the vessel’s velvet furnishings and equipping her for the Arctic. To that end she thought nothing of working nights.
She was prepared to spend ten thousand pounds of her dwindling fortune, an outlay that a public subscription reduced by three thousand. M’Clintock and his officers refused to take a penny for the “glorious mission,” which M’Clintock called “a great national duty.” His sailing master, Allen Young, not only served without pay but also contributed five hundred pounds of his own to the public subscription. And when Lady Franklin tried to insist on a deed of indemnity, which would free M’Clintock of all liabilities, he refused it along with the gift of the ship itself, with which she tried to reward him.
Early in July 1857, Fox set off on the final mission to solve the ten-year-old Franklin mystery in the only part of the Arctic that had not received any attention but which the persevering Lady Franklin had more than once urged upon the navy. Fox was half the size of Franklin’s ships and by no means as sturdy. Until April 1858, it was beset for 250 days in the implacable ice of Melville Bay, being pushed 1,385 miles in the wrong direction—an inauspicious start that delayed the expedition for a year.
Leopold M’Clintock, whose successful discovery of Franklin relics on King William Island brought an end to the great search. He is shown here as a rear admiral.
In July 1858, M’Clintock at last reached Beechey Island where the graves of three of Franklin’s men had been found. He erected a suitable stone tablet in their memory and set out to manoeuvre his little yacht down Peel Sound in the direction he was sure Franklin had taken. When a dike of ice barred his way, he headed instead down Prince Regent Inlet, hoping to make his way into the sound through the narrow channel of Bellot Strait. Six times he tried to force his way through; six times the ice pushed him back. In September he got through as far as the western mouth of the strait when another belt of ice blocked his way. He spent the winter of 1858–59 in a sheltering inlet at the eastern end.
That winter he laid out depots for three sledging expeditions. One would explore Prince of Wales Island. Another would scour the delta of the Great Fish River and the western shore of Boothia. The third would search the north coast of King William Island. Somewhere in that chill and treeless region M’Clintock was certain they would find evidence of the lost expedition.
He was right. Tantalizing clues began to turn up—first an Inuk wearing a naval button, then an entire village where the inhabitants had buttons, a gold chain, silver cutlery, and knives fashioned of wood and iron from the wrecked ships. One native had seen the bones of a white man who had died on an island in the delta of the Great Fish River; others recalled a ship caught in the ice to the west of King William Island. M’Clintock and his deputy, Lieutenant William Hobson, were told of two ships the Inuit had seen, one sunk and one badly broken. White men had been seen, too, hauling boats south to a large river on the mainland.
Soon on their sledging forays they came upon further evidence: silver plates bearing the crests of some of the officers and tales of white men who had dropped in their tracks as they headed for the Great Fish River. In late May, M’Clintock came upon a human skeleton, the body face down, as if its owner had stumbled and dropped forward where his bones lay. And finally, there was a note from Hobson, who had discovered the only written record ever found of the lost Franklin expedition.
In a cairn at Victory Point, Hobson had found a message written on a naval form dated May 28, 1847. It showed that the lost ships had indeed gone up the Wellington Channel, circled around, and wintered at Beechey Island. They had been beset in the ice stream just northwest of King William Island. Lieutenant Graham Gore had taken a party ashore and left the message, certain that their ships would shortly be freed to make their way through the Passage.
Scrawled in the margin of this cheery note, a second message, written a year later on April 27, 1848, told a more sober tale. Franklin had died the previous June; the ships had been trapped in the ice for nineteen months; and nine officers, including Gore, and fifteen men were dead. This added to the mystery. No other polar expedition had suffered such a devastating loss.
The survivors had abandoned their ships and were now trying to reach the Great Fish River. Most didn’t make it. On King William Island’s northwest coast, M’Clintock came upon a massive sledge with a pitiful load of useless articles: books, soap, sheet lead, crested silver plate, dinner knives, a beaded purse, watches, and a cigar case, “a mere accumulation of dead weight, but slightly useful and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge crews” in M’Clintock’s descrip
tion. On top of the sledge was an eight-foot boat and inside it, two skeletons. Thus far had they stumbled and no farther.
When they set off in May 1845, Franklin’s two ships had been stocked with three years’ supply of provisions that could easily be stretched to five. What had happened? In the intervening years, three causes have been identified as the roots of the mass disaster: scurvy, lead poisoning, and botulism.
Scurvy, brought on by a deficiency of Vitamin C, had been recognized since the days of Captain Cook. It was traditionally cured by regular doses of lemon or lime juice (which was the reason that Englishmen were universally known as “limeys”). What was not known, however, was that the citrus juice lost its potency after a year or so. Equally important was the lack of fresh meat or fat aboard the navy ships, another source of Vitamin C, which Stefansson learned from the Inuit but which the British, who believed in meat preserved in salt, ignored.
Found on King William Island, this form provided the only written clue to the fate of the Franklin Expedition. The scribbled phrase “all well” was premature.
A second cause of death was indicated when the bodies of three of Franklin’s men were exhumed from their graves on Beechey Island and subjected to scientific investigation. Owen Beattie and John Geiger discovered that all three had suffered from lead poisoning, apparently from badly soldered tins, a suspicion confirmed by some three thousand empty tins surrounding the Franklin camp. The canning process was in its infancy; tins were soldered not by machines but by human hands. The percentage of lead found in the dead men’s bones was four or five times that of a normal Englishman of the day. The three men did not die of lead poisoning; it was probably pneumonia that killed them. Nonetheless, they would probably have suffered the debilitating physical and mental effects that lead can cause had they survived after Beechey.
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