by Owen Beattie
By the autumn of 1850, a fleet of ships was combing the Arctic’s waterways for a sign of the missing explorers. The British Admiralty alone sent three expeditions consisting of a total of eight ships into the Arctic. One of the search expeditions, made up of the HMS Enterprise and HMS Investigator under the command of Captain Richard Collinson and Commander Robert McClure, was sent through the Bering Strait; Captain Horatio Thomas Austin, with second-in-command Captain Erasmus Ommanney, was ordered to take four ships into Lancaster Sound, while the third expedition, led by Arctic whaling master Captain William Penny, was sent north into Jones Sound.
As early as February 1849, Jane, Lady Franklin travelled to Hull, a port from which whalers sailed to Baffin Bay, “with a view to plead her anxieties and distresses and to animate the commanders to her cause.” She was among those active in the race to save her husband and his men, and with the help of supporters sent a ship to join in the search. As well, the United States Navy Department assisted New York merchant Henry Grinnell, who outfitted two ships under Lieutenant Edwin J. De Haven, while aging explorer Sir John Ross led an expedition funded by the Hudson’s Bay Company and public subscription.
The Hudson’s Bay Company also sent John Rae, an expert in Arctic survival, to assist with what would be his second search. Rae, who travelled overland and by boat to Victoria Island, would discover two pieces of wood on the southern shore of the island, wood that could only have come from a ship. Yet there was no proof that the debris was from either the Erebus or Terror, and his survey ended on the southeastern corner of the island, where the ice that clogged Victoria Strait prevented him from crossing to nearby King William Island.
View of the spot on Cape Riley, Devon Island, where in 1850 Captain Ommanney of the HMS Assistance found evidence of a Franklin expedition encampment.
Finally, on 12 October 1850, the Illustrated London News was able to report: “some faint gleams of hopeful light have at last been thrown upon the gloom of uncertainty which hangs over the fate of Sir John Franklin and his companions.” For on 23 August 1850, Captain Erasmus Ommanney and some of the officers of the search ship HMS Assistance found signs of Franklin’s expedition at Cape Riley, on the southwest shore of Devon Island. After two years of disappointments, the Royal Navy at last had leads in the search for the missing men. Ommanney recalled:
I had the satisfaction of meeting with the first traces of Sir John Franklin’s expedition, consisting of fragments of naval stores, ragged portions of clothing, preserved meat tins, &c… and the spot bore the appearance of an encampment.
But those relics told only of a brief stop, perhaps for magnetic observation early in the expedition, and gave away nothing in regard to Franklin’s whereabouts.
Ommanney pushed on, combing the shoreline for clues, until a large cairn was spotted high up on the headland of a nearby islet named Beechey Island. Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, commander of the steamship HMS Pioneer, which was also part of the Royal Navy search expedition under the overall command of Captain Horatio Thomas Austin, painted a dramatic picture of the men rushing towards the “dark and frowning cliffs… too steep for even [a] snow-flake to hang upon”:
A boatful of officers and men proceeded on shore. On landing, some relics of European visitors were found; and we can picture the anxiety with which the steep slope was scaled and the cairn torn down, every stone turned over, the ground underneath dug up a little, and yet, alas! no document or record found.
Osborn was undeterred; he still held great hope that more discoveries would follow: “[The cairn] seemed to say to the beating heart, ‘follow them that erected me!’ ”
A flotilla of search ships converged on the area, among them the Lady Franklin under Captain William Penny. The gritty Scot swore to scour the area “like a blood-hound” until answers to the mystery were found. More traces of Franklin’s crew were discovered on Devon Island, this time at nearby Cape Spencer. Penny found the remains of a hut built of stones, artefacts that included scraps of newspaper dated September 1844, a fragment of paper with the words “until called,” more food tins, torn gloves—and that was all. Then, on 27 August, a breathless sailor brought Penny startling news: “Graves, Captain Penny! Graves! Franklin’s winter quarters!”
Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, ship’s surgeon under American searcher Edwin De Haven, was present when the news arrived and described what happened next:
Captain De Haven, Captain Penny, Commander Phillips, and myself… hurried on over the ice, and, scrambling along the loose and rugged slope that extends from Beechey to the shore, came, after a weary walk, to the crest of the isthmus. Here, amid the sterile uniformity of snow and slate, were the head-boards of three graves, made after the old orthodox fashion of gravestones at home.
The tombs lay side by side in a line with the headboards facing Cape Riley. Two of the grave mounds were “neatly paved round” with limestone slabs. Their inscriptions, chiselled into the headboards, read:
Sacred
to the
memory of
William Braine, R.M.,
h.m.s. Erebus
Died April 3d, 1846
aged 32 years
‘Choose ye this day whom ye will serve’
Joshua, ch. xxiv., 15.
The second was:
Sacred to the memory of
John Hartnell, A.B. of H.M.S.
Erebus,
died January 4th, 1846
aged 25 years.
‘Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways.’
Haggai, i., 7.
The third grave, representing the earliest death, was not as carefully finished as the others, but Kane felt “its general appearance was more grave-like.” The headboard was inscribed:
Sacred
to
the memory of
John Torrington
who departed
this
life January 1st,
A.D. 1846,
on board of
H.M. ship Terror
aged 20 years
Osborn noted that some seashells from the bay had been collected and “prettily arranged… by some old messmates.” The orderly arrangement of what Kane called the “isthmus of the graves” reminded Osborn of a parish cemetery.
… it breathes of the quiet churchyard in some of England’s many nooks… and the ornaments that nature decks herself with, even in the desolation of the frozen zone, were carefully culled to mark the seaman’s last home.
The searchers hoped the discovery of the expedition’s winter campsite and the graves of its first three victims would somehow point to Franklin’s whereabouts. The dates inscribed on the headboards showed that the doomed expedition had passed the winter of 1845–46 nestled in a small bay on the east side of Beechey Island, and there was more.
The three Franklin expedition graves on Beechey Island. Drawn from a sketch by Dr. E.K. Kane
Searchers sweeping the windblown island during the shortening days of late summer found other signs, including the remains of tenting sites, an armourer’s forge, a large storehouse, a carpenter’s house and a few other, smaller structures. Deep ruts left by sledges were found on the gravel terraces of Devon Island, leaving Osborn to observe “how little Franklin’s people were impressed with the importance of rendering their travelling equipment light and portable.” A polar bear killed by one of the searchers revealed an earlier bullet wound. The bullet was retrieved from the beast’s flesh and identified as having been fired from a weapon like those supplied to Franklin. Kane found “inexpressibly touching” the discovery of a little garden scraped into the gravel, with anemones still growing. Wrote Kane: “A garden implies a purpose either to remain or to return: he who makes it is looking to the future.” This discovery on Beechey Island, especially moving to a nation of gardeners, inspired a verse by Charles Dickens:
O then
Pause on the fo
otprints of heroic men,
Making a garden of the desert wide
Where PARRY conquer’d and FRANKLIN died.
Another large cairn was discovered, this one made of more than 600 discarded food tins filled with gravel, but nowhere was there a message telling where Franklin and his crews had sailed. Why these empty cans had been stacked 7 feet (2.1 metres) high in such a manner was unclear. It was usual for Arctic expeditions to leave messages under cairns describing their current status and plans—but here there was no note. Such was the scale of popular interest in each development during the Franklin searches that even this peculiar discovery—a cairn of tins built without apparent purpose—found its way into another literary work, Walden, where Henry David Thoreau asked, “Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him?”
Wrote Thoreau: “Explore your own higher latitudes with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign.” But a sign of what in this case? What did it mean? With each discovery the Franklin mystery only seemed to deepen. As well, the trail that began at Cape Riley on Devon Island seemed to end on Beechey Island, just 1.25 miles (2 km) away. Osborn expressed the mood of the searchers this way: “Everyone felt that there was something so inexplicable in the non-discovery of any record, some written evidence of the intentions of Franklin and Crozier on leaving this spot… ”
Although death was expected on expeditions of discovery through accident or illness, three deaths during the first winter was still considered unusual. The suggestion that the graves at Beechey Island could represent problems with the expedition’s food supply was discussed by the searchers and publicly stated by Ommanney in evidence given to the British government in 1852: “We know that 3 of their men (young men) died the first year, from which we may infer they were not enjoying perfect health. It is supposed that their preserved meats were of an inferior quality.”
Ommanney was referring to the possibility that some of the canned food was spoiled, or in his words, represented a “putrid abomination.” Sherard Osborn also noted angrily that “their preserved meats were those of the miscreant, Goldner.” Tinned-food supplier Stephan Goldner had had quality control problems with provisions supplied to later expeditions. In January 1852, it was reported that an examination at Portsmouth of a consignment of Goldner’s preserved meat (delivered fourteen months earlier), revealed that most of the meat had putrefied. According to the Times: “If Franklin and his party had been supplied with such food as that condemned, and relied on it as their mainstay in time of need, the very means of saving their lives may have bred a pestilence or famine among them, and have been their destruction.” Even before the Franklin expedition had sailed, Commander Fitzjames expressed concern that the Admiralty would buy meat from an unknown supplier simply because he had quoted a lower price. Indignation over the spoiled meat led to an inquiry, however it concluded that Goldner’s meat had been satisfactory on previous contracts. Wrote one Admiralty official: “From that period (1845) Goldner’s preserved meats have been in constant use in the navy, and it is only, I believe, latterly that they have been found to consist of such disgusting material.”
Dr. Peter Sutherland, surgeon on Penny’s expedition, believing some important clues to the health and the fate of Franklin’s expedition might be harboured within the graves, proposed their exhumation:
It was suggested to have the graves opened, but as there seemed to be a feeling against this really very proper and most important step, the suggestion was not reiterated. It would have been very interesting to have examined into the cause of death; it is very probable there would be no difficulty in doing this, for the bodies would be found frozen as hard as possible, and in a high state of preservation in their icy casings.
Sutherland went on to speculate on possible causes of death for the three sailors:
The cause of Braine’s death, which happened in April, might have been scurvy supervening upon some other disease. The first two deaths had probably been caused by accidents, such as frost bite or exposure to intense cold in a state of stupor, or to diseases of the chest, where there might have been some latent mischief before leaving England, which the changeable weather in September and October rekindled, and the intense cold of November and December stimulated to a fatal termination.
In August 1852, a squadron of ships returned to Beechey Island, and the searchers resumed their research there, but these further investigations were hampered by the frenzied activity that had taken place at the time of the discovery of Franklin’s first winter quarters two years earlier. Sherard Osborn, in a communication to the Royal Geographical Society, wrote of the destruction of the site:
after a couple of hundred seamen had, in 1850, turned everything topsy-turvy, and carried and dropped things far from where they were originally deposited, those who first visited the place in 1852 can have but little idea of what the place was like when we found it as it had been left by the ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’.
Together, the rescue vessels had traced the first season of Franklin’s voyage from its disappearance into silence down Lancaster Sound in August 1845 until as late as September 1846. At most, searchers had found at Beechey Island only a partial record of the expedition’s first year beyond the reach of civilization. No one knew where to look next.
6. Region of Terror
Ironically, Franklin’s failure launched the golden era of Arctic exploration. More than thirty ship-based and overland expeditions would search for clues as to Franklin’s fate over the course of the following two decades, charting vast areas and mapping the completed route of the Northwest Passage in the process. Whilst many of these search expeditions were funded by the British government in response to public demand that Franklin be saved, others were raised by public subscription following appeals from Lady Franklin. Seamen volunteered for Arctic service in droves. Yet contemporary journals make it clear that many of these searches were also crippled by illness. In this respect, James Clark Ross was not alone.
Indeed, there was a more sinister enemy on board these Arctic voyages than the usual complaints of frostbite and stifling boredom. Where one captain, George Henry Richards, reported the “general debility” afflicting his crew, another, Sir Edward Belcher, abandoned four of his five ships in order to escape the far north after two years, fearing that a third Arctic year would lead to large-scale loss of life. The crew of another ship, the Prince Albert, a privately funded expedition, suffered severely from scurvy during their lone winter, 1851–52. And on the Enterprise, Captain Richard Collinson waged a bitter internecine war with his crew; by the end of his command he had placed, amongst others, his first, second and third officers under arrest. When he was subsequently criticized for his conduct, Collinson blamed “some form of that insidious Arctic enemy, the scurvy, which is known to effect the mind as well as the body of its victims.”
When another ship, the Investigator, commanded by Captain Robert McClure, became trapped at Mercy Bay on Banks Island, several of the men aboard went mad and had to be restrained, their howls piercing the long nights. The crew carried lime juice, specially prepared by the Navy’s Victualling Department, and hunted and gathered scurvy grass in the brief Arctic summers. By these methods, McClure was able to forestall the appearance of scurvy, but by the third winter, illness was widespread: “only 4 out of a total of 64 on board were not more or less affected by scurvy.” Alexander Armstrong, expedition surgeon, described treating sufferers with “preserved fresh meat,” as tinned foods were still considered to have antiscorbutic properties. Even after such interventions, three of the men died. McClure abandoned ship, and his crew were spared only by a fortuitous encounter with yet other search ships. Thomas Morgan, who was seriously ill at the time of this rescue, “sick and covered with scurvy sores,” died on 19 May 1854. He was buried on Beechey Island, alongside the men from the Erebus and Terror.
Yet McClure, who was credited with the first successful transit of the Northwest Passage, even without his ship, was glad for the struggle he had been put through. He, like others of the age, saw self-sacrifice in some noble cause as the pinnacle of human achievement. He captured the spirit of the Franklin searchers this way:
How nobly those gallant seamen toiled… sent to travel upon snow and ice, each with 200 pounds to drag… No man flinched from his work; some of the gallant fellows really died at the drag rope… but not a murmur arose… as the weak fell out… there were always more than enough volunteers to take their places.
By far the worst afflicted, however, were two Franklin search expeditions funded by Henry Grinnell, a wealthy American benefactor. The first, commanded by Lieutenant Edwin de Haven of the U.S. Navy, aboard the Advance and the Rescue, went out in May 1850 and by August was already trapped in winter quarters with temperatures plummeting. Elisha Kent Kane, the ship’s surgeon and the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family, described the appalling living conditions endured by the crew:
… within a little area, whose cubic contents are less than father’s library, you have the entire abiding-place of thirty-three heavily-clad men. Of these I am one. Three stoves and a cooking galley, three bear-fat lamps burn with the constancy of a vestal shrine. Damp furs, soiled woolens, cast-off boots, sickly men, cookery, tobacco-smoke, and digestion are compounding their effluvia around and within me. Hour by hour, and day after day, without even a bunk to retire to or a blanket-curtain to hide me, this and these make up the reality of my home.