Reaching for the Beaufort Sea: Six things to know about the Franklin Expedition

Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 9:22 AM - You don’t need to be a history buff to get excited over the big news last week that one of the two ships of the fabled, ill-fated Franklin expedition was uncovered in Canada's north.

We don’t know whether the vessel, found in Canadian waters, is HMS Erebus or HMS Terror, but its discovery near King William Island in Nunavut, brings us a little closer to ending one of Canada’s oldest mysteries.

Sir John Franklin’s stab at finding the fabled Northwest Passage is already an incredible story. Here are six things to know.

Franklin was a (young!) expert at Arctic exploration

Franklin first went to sea was as a teenager, and One of his first voyages was aboard a warship in the Napoleonic Wars. While still a young man, he joined an expedition to chart part of the Australian coast, which eventually ran aground and left him and his crew members stranded on a sandbar for six weeks while their captain went for help.

And that’s even before Franklin even got near the game of polar exploration, which he was first tapped for in 1818, as the Royal Navy cast about to give its post-Napoleonic War officers something to do.

The 1818 jaunt wasn’t successful, so his next assignment the following year was to try find the Northwest Passage by trekking from Hudson’s Bay to the Northwest Territory. 

Overland. Often in winter conditions. With little advance notice and little time to prepare.

Incredibly, despite inadequate supplies, not-always-cooperative local fur traders and harsh Arctic climate, he did make it to the Arctic coast, but rough weather hampered his exploration efforts. But by then the strain of the effort had rapidly shortened his temper, which alienated most of his men. 

His group were forced to turn back when supplies ran out and the death toll mounted. They were forced to eat lichen and, on some occasions, their boots to survive. The whole thing was a disaster. 

But Franklin learned from it, and when he set out again in 1825, he was better prepared, more cautious and definitely more respectful of the rigours of the Arctic climate. This time, he made it, charting hundreds of kilometres of mainland Arctic coast before being forced to turn back.

Quite the Arctic resume, and it made him a popular choice when, at 58, he was selected for another seaward stab at the Passage in 1845.

This isn't even remotely a good enough summary of the man’s incredible story up to that point, so we encourage you to pour yourself a cup of coffee and check out this entry’s primary source for the whole tale.

Franklin’s ships were the best around

If there’s a reason for the Franklin Expedition’s failure, the fault certainly didn’t lie with his ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, if this piece in Canadian Geographic is to be believed.

Basically, sending these two ships would have been, in sci-fi terms, like kitting out the USS Enterprise with the finest futuristic gear around, and then adding a whole other USS Enterprise to the deal just for good measure.

The two ships were old, like Franklin veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, and for that reason, they were tough, built to withstand cannon fire. Because history is rife with winding paths, Terror even saw action in the War of 1812, part of the fleet whose bombardment of Baltimore inspired the penning of the U.S. national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The ships’ sturdy hulls were reinforced with iron plates to ward off errant chunks of Arctic sea ice, but their most important innovations were steam engines to give them that extra bit of kick. Common enough by the end of the 19th Century, but a major novelty at the time of the expedition.

The three-year excursion wouldn’t even be the longest they’d spent in polar seas, having already undertaken a four-year mission to Antarctica.

And aboard the ships, soon to house 128 men in addition to Franklin, were enough provisions to keep the crew comfortably fed and watered for the duration.

The explorers would dine on 24 tons of meat, 35 of flour, 20,000 pints of soup, and lemon juice to ward off scurvy. To keep out the chill – and to help unwind, we presume – there were two tons of tobacco (TONS, we said) and an astonishing 7,500 litres of alcohol.

We’re not sure whether the crew’s literacy levels would have been really adequate to make the most of it, but it seems their were also around 1,200 books in the ships’ libraries.

These were the incredible vessels that vanished into history, last seen by whalers in Lancaster Sound, north of Baffin Island, in 1845.

So what went wrong?

With no survivors, researchers have only been able to piece together the details of the ships’ doom through discoveries made here and there in the Arctic wastes by search parties.

We know the expedition successfully overwintered in a sheltered cove at Beechey Island the first year. Three crew members died during the pause, and were buried there. You can visit their graves.

Then, once the ice receded in the summer, they set out again, but found themselves icebound as winter approached. They were stranded off King William Island, deep in the Canadian Arctic archipelago, but actually not far from the mainland.

Then here’s where the weather comes into play. Even with today’s advancing state of global warming, the extent of Arctic sea ice melt varies somewhat from season to season. And that season, what little summer warmth penetrated that far north was not sufficient to melt the ice well enough to free Terror and Erebus.

Sometime in 1847, Franklin himself died, never having seen the Northwest Passage. The survivors of the crew left the trapped ships and set out for the mainland. All are believed to have died by 1848.

NEXT PAGE: The ugly fate of the lost crew

How hard did they search for Franklin?

When Franklin disappeared, people took it very, very seriously. 

According to the Globe and Mail, there have been six expeditions since 2008 searching for the ships, but that’s not even close to the ridiculous number of excursions that were launched in the wake of Franklin’s failure to return.

The Dictionary of Canadian Biographies says no less than 30 set sail, but the BBC puts it at more like 50. Five expeditions were launched by Franklin’s widow, who instructed the searchers to leave caches of canned food here and there on the ice, in the desperate hope he’d happen on them.

She even put up 5,000 pounds as a reward to whoever could find her husband and his men. The British government put down 20,000 pounds of their own money also.

It’s from these searchers – several of whom died on their quest – that we slowly gleaned many of the details of where the expedition went, and what went wrong.

An 1850 rescue attempt found the spot where Franklin’s crew had overwintered on Beechey Island, along with the graves of the three who didn’t make it through the season.

But an 1859 find was an even bigger boon. Explorers on western King William Island found remains of several of the crew, including a written record of what happened.

From the writings, we know the ships spent two winters trapped in the sea ice near the island. Franklin died on June 11, 1847 (we don’t know how, but he WAS around 60 by then, in a very hostile environment), and on April 22, 1848, his second in command led more than 100 survivors from the trapped ships to the mainland. Those are all the written records we have.

But there’s another, much more disturbing account, recorded in 1854 by explorer John Rae, trading with the Inuit in the area. 

According to the Scott Polar Research institute, it seems the Inuit in the area were aware of Franklin’s men, and had met a large number of them, dragging a boat across the ice. They even had in their possession items belonging to Franklin himself, which Rae bought, and there’s evidence from Inuit accounts that some of the survivors may have doubled back to the ships, which later sank. The Smithsonian says an Inuit hunter may even have witnessed the sinking.

But there’s something else the Inuit told Rae, that no one back home wanted to hear:

In their desperation, the survivors had turned to eating human flesh.

Cannibalism and lead poisoning

The revelation that Franklin’s men would have broken such a deep cultural taboo would have shocked people with Victorian sensibilities, just as it stokes revulsion today.

The Scott Polar Research Institute says Rae’s revelations were controversial among society, not to mention Franklin’s widow, and many doubtless refused to believe it.

If you want the horrible details, you can delve into this review of the research by the Daily Mail in the UK, which says as many as 40 or 50 men may have had their remains cooked and eaten. There’s no way of knowing the circumstances of how that happened.

That account goes even further, saying the Inuit found the men were carrying cooked human flesh with them. Grisly stuff, and it’s understandable why people didn’t want to believe it.

It wasn’t until researchers later found more remains in the north, and examined them, that it became a more widely accepted theory. Many of the bones bore the marks from where knives had cut at them.

There’s another ugly theory about the fate of the expedition: Lead poisoning may have caused a breakdown in sanity among the survivors. Those mountains of provisions packed aboard the ships were preserved in cans, sealed with soldered lead, which may have become infused into the food. 

Three bodies that were later examined were found to have very high levels of lead in the bones, apparently backing up the theory, but it may not have been from the cans. The BBC says the tinned food may not have been acidic enough to case the lead to seep in, so the substance likely came from the ships’ piping systems.

Recent research in Canada, however, suggests it would have taken way longer than the expedition’s three-year lifespan for that amount of lead to have become infused so thoroughly throughout the bones examined. 

As the researcher in the clip below says, if the lead did drive them mad, they’d have been mad long before the ships even left port.

What’s next?

For all the hullabaloo surrounding the discovery of the wreck last week, we don’t actually know whether it’s Erebus or Terror, for starters. 

There’s a dive team headed there next week, according to the National Post, and their job will be to salvage artifacts that could hold a clue to the wreck’s real identity (a Parks Canada ROV already shot this brilliant footage, released last week:)

Aside from artifacts, they hope to find personal effects of the crew, perhaps even their journals, that may still be salvageable. 

Who knows? They may even find Sir John Franklin, whose final resting place remains unknown, although it seems Parks Canada has a “hands off” policy if any bodies are found.

And even once they establish the vessel's identity, there’s still its sister ship, lost beneath the waves somewhere in the Canadian Arctic, although the shortening season means divers only have a few more weeks to safely search the area.

Together, Erebus and Terror are incredible treasures of Canadian heritage, and as it happens, you won’t have to wait long for them to be registered as national historic sites. The government already did that in 1992.

Even though the ships’ final resting place hadn’t been located at that point, their locations are legally “held in abeyance,” although it’ll be awhile before anyone can visit them.

In the meantime, Franklin's story has inspired many stories and works of art. We'll leave you with our favourite, from Stan Rogers:

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