John Franklin

British Arctic explorer

• Born: April 16, 1786
• Birthplace: Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England
• Died: June 11, 1847
• Place of death: Near King William Island, British Arctic Islands (now in Nunavut Territory, Canada)

Franklin commanded three exploratory expeditions to the northern parts of Canada and the Arctic and died proving the existence of the long-sought Northwest Passage. He is remembered for his upright character and the disasters that accompanied his adventures.

Early Life

The ninth of twelve children of Willingham Franklin and Hannah Weekes, John Franklin attended prep school in St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, England, and grammar school in Spilsby. While living in Spilsby, which is only ten miles from the North Sea, Franklin grew fascinated with the sea from a young age. Although his parents hoped his education would lead him into the church, he preferred to imagine a life at sea. In an effort to cure him of this fantasy, his parents sent him aboard a merchant ship to Lisbon, Portugal, and back. However, the experience merely convinced Franklin that a life in the navy was for him. In 1800, at the age of fourteen, he joined the Royal Navy, in which he rose quickly through the ranks because of his enthusiasm and skill.

Franklin joined the navy at the time of Great Britain’s long war with Napoleonic France. During his first six months in the service, he saw action in the Battle of Copenhagen. In 1801, his uncle Captain Matthew Flinders made him a midshipman on HMS Investigator, which became the first ship to circumnavigate Australia. During the voyage, Franklin was noted for his skill in astronomical observations; when the ship reached Sydney, he acted as an assistant in an observatory.

After returning to England, Franklin was appointed to HMS Bellerophon, on which he served during the epic Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. On February 11, 1808, he was promoted to lieutenant while serving aboard HMS Bedford, on which he was slightly wounded at New Orleans. After the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, Franklin went on half pay until 1817, when John Barrow, the second secretary of the British admiralty, reopened the question of finding the Northwest Passage and began organizing naval expeditions to the far north. Franklin was chosen to be part of the first exploratory foray into Arctic waters in 1818, and his career of northern exploration began.

Life’s Work

Franklin’s Arctic career began inauspiciously, as his first two expeditions were complete failures. In 1818, he was appointed to command the Trent, the second ship of a two-ship expedition under Commander David Buchan of the Dorothea. Franklin was instructed to penetrate an ice pack in the eastern Arctic and explore westward. However, the two ships encountered a terrible storm off the coast of Greenland and were forced to return home without even reaching North America.

Despite that setback, Franklin was appointed to another northern adventure shortly after his return home. He was given command of a small overland expedition of navy men and Canadian voyagers to survey the mouth of the Coppermine River and the Arctic coastline adjacent to it. This expedition, too, was fraught with troubles. The birchbark canoes used to navigate the treacherous Coppermine River and the choppy Arctic Ocean waters constantly needed repairs. The Canadians did not know or follow naval protocol, and food was continually in short supply. By the late summer of 1821, the explorers found themselves critically short of provisions on their trek back to winter quarters at Fort Enterprise, and the party was overcome with hunger, fatigue, and dissension. Eleven of the twenty men perished—nine from hunger, and a naval officer and another man from violence. The survivors existed by eating rotted carcasses of animals they found, their own clothing, and tea that they made from a semipoisonous lichen. They were eventually rescued by hunters of the Yellowknife people, who nursed them back to health.

When Franklin returned to England in 1822, he was surprised to learn that he had been promoted to the rank of commander during the previous year. He was also elected a member of the Royal Society and was feted in London’s fashionable drawing rooms as “the man who ate his boots.” Publication of his journal of the expedition, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819, 20, 21, and 22 (1824), laid the basis for his long-term popularity. The book was a best seller of its time and fueled the growing British enthusiasm for Arctic exploration.

In the years between his first and second overland expeditions Franklin enjoyed personal success as well as tragedy. On August 19, 1823, he married Eleanor Anne Porden, a poet and socialite. Franklin was often away from London laying plans for his second overland expedition, however, and was absent for the birth of his only child, Eleanor Isabella, on June 3, 1824. He left England for his second command on February 16, 1825. His wife died six days later. While traveling with the surviving officers of his 1819–1822 expedition—Captain George Back and Dr. John Richardson—Franklin explored the coastlines around the lower Mackenzie River in northwestern Canada and returned to England in 1827.

After returning home, Franklin found civilian life again good to him. In 1828, he married Jane Griffin, and on April 29, 1829, he was knighted. Between 1830 and 1833, he served in the Mediterranean Sea, where he was the senior British naval officer in Greece during that country’s war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. In 1836, he was appointed lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land, as Australia’s island of Tasmania was then known. During his tenure there, he and his wife attempted many social and institutional improvements. Though he was popular among the colonists of Van Diemen’s Land, his tenure as a colonial administrator was ultimately unsuccessful, mostly because of his guilelessness in the face of hidden political agendas in the British Colonial Office. He was not invited to renew his post after 1844.

Fresh from his unremarkable governorship, Franklin was determined to restore his professional reputation. With the encouragement of his wife, the fifty-nine-year-old Franklin accepted the captaincy of the most ambitious Arctic expedition yet outfitted. Its ships, Erebus and Terror, carried 129 officers and men and were supplied for three years. On May 19, 1845, the ships began what many believed would be the expedition to complete the puzzle of the Northwest Passage, and England eagerly awaited news of the expedition’s success.

When nothing had been heard from Franklin’s expedition by 1847, the Admiralty began to entertain the possibility that it had met with disaster. From 1848 until 1859, more than thirty American and British ships—both public and private—were sent to search for the missing sailors. News of the expedition’s fate first appeared in an 1854 report by Dr. John Rae, a Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor who had interviewed a band of Inuit hunters along the north mainland coast. Their news was tragic: A group of white travelers had been discovered starved to death on an island, after resorting to cannibalism in an attempt to survive.

Though the British Admiralty considered the mystery of Franklin’s fate closed, his widow, Lady Franklin, disagreed. Convinced that her husband had died with honor, she personally outfitted a final search for her husband and his crews in the area delineated by Rae’s report in 1857. In 1859, the question was finally settled on the west shore of King William Island. Lieutenant William Hobson discovered a paper recording Sir John Franklin’s death on June 11, 1847.

The evidence of Franklin’s death in 1847 absolved him from the charge of cannibalism leveled at other members of the expedition, as he had died before the men were forced to abandon their ships. The document found by Hobson also contained a record of the remaining crews’ plans to cross to the mainland and follow the Back River, east of the Coppermine, in hopes of reaching a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost. Although no crew member survived, the record of their intentions was considered conclusive evidence that Franklin’s men had been the first discoverers of a Northwest Passage, which they died crossing in 1847–8.

Significance

Though Franklin was lauded as a hero in Victorian England, his reputation has suffered under the scrutiny of late twentieth century scholarship. Franklin’s sense of naval propriety has often been identified as the sole cause for the disasters of which he was a part, but this assessment ignores his equally recognizable kindness and sense of right, and makes no mention of the pressure Franklin must have been under to succeed: With the alternative of half pay and no prospects for naval officers after the Napoleonic Wars, Franklin no doubt felt compelled to continue his dangerous explorations despite the risks.

Franklin still remains the most recognizable icon of Arctic exploration, whose romantic and quixotic nature his name and history have come to encapsulate. His published journals as well as his disappearance fueled an intense curiosity about the Arctic that continues today. His two published journals were enormously popular in the nineteenth century and established the image of the Arctic explorer as a living hero, while his last expedition still haunts discussions of imperialism, scientific ambition, and exploration.

In 2015, after six years of searching Arctic waters, Ryan Harris, senior marine archaeologist for Parks Canada, and his team discovered and identified the wreck of the Erebus in a shallow seabed in the Queen Maud Gulf. After picking up the wreckage on sonar, Harris and others dove down to examine the ship and used plans from the National Maritime Museum to establish that it was in fact the Erebus. Noting that the ship had been well preserved in the cold and dark Arctic water, Harris was hopeful that he and his team would be able to return to the site in 2015 and explore the ship further, searching for artifacts, possibly documents, and maybe even Franklin's remains. Harris also acknowledged that the ship's confirmed location gives credence to the Inuit explanation of Franklin's disappearance.

By April 2015, divers had begun clearing debris away from the site and exploring the outside of the ship in more detail. After a continued summer search, archaeologists revealed approximately forty artifacts recovered from the wreckage, including plates, tools, a sword hilt, and a boot.

Bibliography

Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Print.

Davison, Janet. "Franklin Expedition: New Photos of HMS Erebus Artifacts, but Still No Sign of HMS Terror." CBC News. Canadian Broadcasting, 28 Sept. 2015. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

Fleming, Fergus. Barrow’s Boys. London: Granta, 1998. Print.

Franklin, John. Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819-20-21-22. Vancouver: Douglas, 2000. Print.

McKie, Robin. "Uncovering the Secrets of John Franklin's Doomed Voyage." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 1 Nov. 2014. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

Traill, Henry Duff. The Life of Sir John Franklin, R.N. London: Murray, 1896. Print.

Woodman, David C. Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony. Kingston: McGill's UP, 1991. Print.

Woodward, Frances. Portrait of Jane: A Life of Lady Franklin. London: Hodder, 1951. Print.