Franklin's lost expedition - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Franklin's lost expedition was a doomed British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin

John Franklin

Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin KCH FRGS RN was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. Franklin also served as governor of Tasmania for several years. In his last expedition, he disappeared while attempting to chart and navigate a section of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic...

that departed England in 1845. A Royal Navy officer and experienced explorer, Franklin had served on three previous Arctic expeditions, the latter two as commanding officer. His fourth and last, undertaken when he was 59, was meant to traverse the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage

Northwest Passage

The Northwest Passage is a sea route through the Arctic Ocean, along the northern coast of North America via waterways amidst the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans...

. After a few early fatalities the two ships became icebound in Victoria Strait

Victoria Strait

Victoria Strait is a strait in northern Canada that lies in Nunavut off the mainland in the Arctic Ocean. It is between Victoria Island to the west and King William Island to the east. From the north the strait links the M'Clintock Channel and the Larsen Sound with the Queen Maud Gulf to the south...

near King William Island

King William Island

King William Island is an island in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut and forms part of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In area it is between and making it the 61st largest island in the world and Canada's 15th largest island...

in the Canadian Arctic. The entire expedition complement, including Franklin and 128 men, was lost.

Pressed by Franklin's wife and others, the Admiralty

Admiralty

The Admiralty was formerly the authority in the Kingdom of England, and later in the United Kingdom, responsible for the command of the Royal Navy...

launched a search for the missing expedition in 1848. Prompted in part by Franklin's fame and the Admiralty's offer of a finder's reward, many subsequent expeditions joined the hunt, which at one point in 1850 involved eleven British and two American ships. Several of these ships converged off the east coast of Beechey Island

Beechey Island

Beechey Island is an island located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago of Nunavut, Canada, in Wellington Channel. It is separated from the southwest corner of Devon Island by Barrow Strait...

, where the first relics of the expedition were found, including the graves of three crewmen. In 1854, explorer John Rae

John Rae (explorer)

John Rae was a Scottish doctor who explored Northern Canada, surveyed parts of the Northwest Passage and reported the fate of the Franklin Expedition....

, while surveying near the Canadian Arctic coast southeast of King William Island, acquired relics

Rae-Richardson Arctic Expedition

The Rae-Richardson Polar Expedition of 1848 was an early British effort to determine the fate of the lost Franklin Polar Expedition. Led overland by Sir John Richardson and John Rae, the team explored the accessible areas along Franklin's proposed route near the Mackenzie and Coppermine rivers...

of and stories about the Franklin party from the Inuit

Inuit

The Inuit are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic regions of Canada , Denmark , Russia and the United States . Inuit means “the people” in the Inuktitut language...

. A search led by Francis Leopold McClintock

Francis Leopold McClintock

Admiral Sir Francis Leopold McClintock or Francis Leopold M'Clintock KCB, FRS was an Irish explorer in the British Royal Navy who is known for his discoveries in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.-Biography:...

in 1859 discovered a note left on King William Island with details about the expedition's fate. Searches continued through much of the 19th century.

In 1981, a team of scientists led by Owen Beattie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, began a series of scientific studies of the graves, bodies, and other physical evidence left by Franklin crew members on Beechey Island and King William Island. They concluded that the crew members whose graves had been found on Beechey Island most likely died of pneumonia

Pneumonia

Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...

and perhaps tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

and that lead poisoning

Lead poisoning

Lead poisoning is a medical condition caused by increased levels of the heavy metal lead in the body. Lead interferes with a variety of body processes and is toxic to many organs and tissues including the heart, bones, intestines, kidneys, and reproductive and nervous systems...

may have worsened their health, owing to badly solder

Solder

Solder is a fusible metal alloy used to join together metal workpieces and having a melting point below that of the workpiece.Soft solder is what is most often thought of when solder or soldering are mentioned and it typically has a melting range of . It is commonly used in electronics and...

ed cans held in the ships' food stores. However, it was later suggested that the source of this lead may not have been tinned food

Canning

Canning is a method of preserving food in which the food contents are processed and sealed in an airtight container. Canning provides a typical shelf life ranging from one to five years, although under specific circumstances a freeze-dried canned product, such as canned, dried lentils, can last as...

, but the distilled water systems fitted to the expedition’s ships. Cut marks on human bones found on King William Island were seen as signs of cannibalism

Cannibalism

Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy...

. The combined evidence of all studies suggested that hypothermia

Hypothermia

Hypothermia is a condition in which core temperature drops below the required temperature for normal metabolism and body functions which is defined as . Body temperature is usually maintained near a constant level of through biologic homeostasis or thermoregulation...

, starvation, lead poisoning and disease including scurvy

Scurvy

Scurvy is a disease resulting from a deficiency of vitamin C, which is required for the synthesis of collagen in humans. The chemical name for vitamin C, ascorbic acid, is derived from the Latin name of scurvy, scorbutus, which also provides the adjective scorbutic...

, along with general exposure to a hostile environment whilst lacking adequate clothing and nutrition, killed everyone on the expedition in the years following its last sighting by Europeans in 1845.

The Victorian media portrayed Franklin as a hero despite the expedition's failure and the reports of cannibalism. Songs were written about him, and statues of him in his home town, in London, and in Tasmania credit him with discovery of the Northwest Passage. Franklin's lost expedition has been the subject of many artistic works, including songs, verse, short stories, and novels, as well as television documentaries.

Background

The search by Europeans for a northern shortcut by sea from Europe to Asia began with the voyages of Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...

in 1492 and continued through the mid-19th century with a long series of exploratory expeditions originating mainly in England. These voyages, when to any degree successful, added to the sum of European geographic knowledge about the Western Hemisphere, particularly North America, and as that knowledge grew larger, attention gradually turned toward the Canadian Arctic. Sixteenth- and 17th-century voyagers who made geographic discoveries about North America included Martin Frobisher

Martin Frobisher

Sir Martin Frobisher was an English seaman who made three voyages to the New World to look for the Northwest Passage...

, John Davis

John Davis (English explorer)

John Davis , was one of the chief English navigators and explorers under Elizabeth I, especially in Polar regions and in the Far East.-Early life:...

, Henry Hudson

Henry Hudson

Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator in the early 17th century. Hudson made two attempts on behalf of English merchants to find a prospective Northeast Passage to Cathay via a route above the Arctic Circle...

, and William Baffin

William Baffin

William Baffin was an English navigator and explorer. Nothing is known of his early life, but it is conjectured that he was born in London of humble origin, and gradually raised himself by his diligence and perseverance...

. In 1670, the incorporation of the Hudson's Bay Company

Hudson's Bay Company

The Hudson's Bay Company , abbreviated HBC, or "The Bay" is the oldest commercial corporation in North America and one of the oldest in the world. A fur trading business for much of its existence, today Hudson's Bay Company owns and operates retail stores throughout Canada...

led to further exploration of the Canadian coasts and interior and of the Arctic seas. In the 18th century, explorers included James Knight, Christopher Middleton

Christopher Middleton (navigator)

Christopher Middleton was an English naval officer and navigator. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 7 April 1737....

, Samuel Hearne

Samuel Hearne

Samuel Hearne was a an English explorer, fur-trader, author, and naturalist. He was the first European to make an overland excursion across northern Canada to the Arctic Ocean, actually Coronation Gulf, via the Coppermine River...

, James Cook

James Cook

Captain James Cook, FRS, RN was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer who ultimately rose to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy...

, Alexander MacKenzie, and George Vancouver

George Vancouver

Captain George Vancouver RN was an English officer of the British Royal Navy, best known for his 1791-95 expedition, which explored and charted North America's northwestern Pacific Coast regions, including the coasts of contemporary Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon...

. By 1800, their discoveries showed conclusively that no Northwest Passage

Northwest Passage

navigable by ships lay in the temperate latitudes between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans.

In 1804, Sir John Barrow

Sir John Barrow, 1st Baronet

Sir John Barrow, 1st Baronet, FRS, FRGS was an English statesman.-Career:He was born the son of Roger Barrow in the village of Dragley Beck, in the parish of Ulverston then in Lancashire, now in Cumbria...

became Second Secretary of the Admiralty

Admiralty

The Admiralty was formerly the authority in the Kingdom of England, and later in the United Kingdom, responsible for the command of the Royal Navy...

, a post he held until 1845, and began a push by the Royal Navy to complete the Northwest Passage over the top of Canada and to navigate toward the North Pole. Over the next four decades, explorers including John Ross

John Ross (Arctic explorer)

Sir John Ross, CB, was a Scottish rear admiral and Arctic explorer.Ross was the son of the Rev. Andrew Ross, minister of Inch, near Stranraer in Scotland. In 1786, aged only nine, he joined the Royal Navy as an apprentice. He served in the Mediterranean until 1789 and then in the English Channel...

, David Buchan

David Buchan

David Buchan was a Scottish naval officer and Arctic explorer.-Exploration:In 1806, Buchan was appointed as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and from about 1808 to 1817 he operated in and around Newfoundland...

, William Edward Parry

William Edward Parry

Sir William Edward Parry was an English rear-admiral and Arctic explorer, who in 1827 attempted one of the earliest expeditions to the North Pole...

, Frederick William Beechey

Frederick William Beechey

Frederick William Beechey was an English naval officer and geographer. He was the son of Sir William Beechey, RA., and was born in London.-Career:...

, James Clark Ross

James Clark Ross

Sir James Clark Ross , was a British naval officer and explorer. He explored the Arctic with his uncle Sir John Ross and Sir William Parry, and later led his own expedition to Antarctica.-Arctic explorer:...

, George Back

George Back

Admiral Sir George Back FRS was a British naval officer, explorer of the Canadian Arctic , naturalist and artist.-Career:...

, Peter Warren Dease

Peter Warren Dease

Peter Warren Dease was a Canadian fur trader and arctic explorer.-Early life:Peter Warren Dease was born at Michilimackinac on January 1, 1788, the fourth son of Dr. John Dease, captain and deputy agent of Indian Affairs, and Jane French, Catholic Mohawk from Caughnawaga...

, and Thomas Simpson made productive trips to the Canadian Arctic. Among these explorers was John Franklin, second-in-command of an expedition towards the North Pole in the ships Dorothea and Trent in 1818 and the leader of overland expeditions to and along the Arctic coast of Canada in 1819–22 and 1825–27. By 1845, the combined discoveries of all of these expeditions had reduced the relevant unknown parts of the Canadian Arctic to a quadrilateral area of about 181300 km² (70,000 sq mi). It was into this unknown area that Franklin was to sail, heading west through Lancaster Sound

Lancaster Sound

Lancaster Sound is a body of water in Qikiqtaaluk, Nunavut, Canada. It is located between Devon Island and Baffin Island, forming the eastern portion of the Northwest Passage. East of the sound lies Baffin Bay; to the west lies Viscount Melville Sound...

and then west and south as ice, land, and other obstacles might allow, to complete the Northwest Passage. The distance to be navigated was roughly 1670 kilometres (1,037.7 mi).

Command

Barrow, who was 82 and nearing the end of his career, deliberated about who should command the expedition to complete the Northwest Passage and perhaps also find what Barrow believed to be an ice-free Open Polar Sea

Open Polar Sea

The Open Polar Sea was a hypothesized ice-free ocean surrounding the North Pole. This unproven theory was once so widely believed that many exploring expeditions used it as justification for attempts to reach the North Pole by sea, or to find a navigable sea route between Europe and the Pacific...

around the North Pole. Parry, his first choice, was tired of the Arctic and politely declined. His second choice, James Clark Ross, also declined because he had promised his new wife he was done with the Arctic. Barrow's third choice, James Fitzjames

James Fitzjames

James Fitzjames was a British naval officer who participated in two exploratory expeditions, the Euphrates Expedition and the Franklin Expedition to the Arctic. He was illegitimate, and during his life and after his friends and relatives took great pains to conceal his origins...

, was rejected by the Admiralty on account of his youth. Barrow considered George Back but thought he was too argumentative. Francis Crozier

Francis Crozier

Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was born in Ireland at Banbridge, County Down and was a British naval officer who participated in six exploratory expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic...

, another possibility, was of humble birth and Irish, which counted against him. Reluctantly, Barrow settled on the 59-year-old Franklin. The expedition was to consist of two ships, HMS Erebus

HMS Erebus (1826)

HMS Erebus was a Hecla-class bomb vessel designed by Sir Henry Peake and constructed by the Royal Navy in Pembroke dockyard, Wales in 1826. The vessel was named after the dark region in Hades of Greek mythology called Erebus...

and HMS Terror

HMS Terror (1813)

HMS Terror was a bomb vessel designed by Sir Henry Peake and constructed by the Royal Navy in the Davy shipyard in Topsham, Devon. The ship, variously listed as being of either 326 or 340 tons, carried two mortars, one and one .-War service:...

, each of which had seen Antarctic service with James Clark Ross. Fitzjames was given command of Erebus, and Crozier, who had commanded Terror during the Antarctica expedition with Ross in 1841–44, was appointed the executive officer and commander of Terror. Franklin received his expedition command on 7 February 1845, and his official instructions on 5 May 1845.

Ships, crew and provisions

at 378 tons (bm

Builder's Old Measurement

Builder's Old Measurement is the method of calculating the size or cargo capacity of a ship used in England from approximately 1720 to 1849. It estimated the tonnage of a ship based on length and maximum beam...

) and at 331 tons (bm

Builder's Old Measurement

) were sturdily built and were outfitted with recent inventions. The steam engine of Erebus came from the London and Greenwich Railway and that of Terror was probably from the London and Birmingham Railway. They enabled the ships to make 7.4 km/h (4 kn) on their own power. Other advanced technology included bows reinforced with heavy beams and plates of iron, an internal steam heating device for the comfort of the crew, screw propellers and iron rudders that could be withdrawn into iron wells to protect them from damage, ships' libraries of more than 1,000 books, and three years' worth of conventionally preserved or tinned preserved food supplies. Unfortunately, the latter was supplied from a cut-rate provisioner, Stephen Goldner, who was awarded the contract on 1 April 1845, just seven weeks before Franklin set sail. Goldner worked in haste on the order of 8,000 tins, which were later found to have lead

Lead

Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed...

soldering that was "thick and sloppily done, and dripped like melted candle wax down the inside surface".

Most of the crew were Englishmen, many of them from the North Country, with a small number of Irishmen and Scotsmen. Aside from Franklin and Crozier, the only other officers who were Arctic veterans were an assistant surgeon and the two ice-masters.

Lost

The expedition set sail from Greenhithe

Greenhithe

Greenhithe is a town in Dartford District of Kent, England. It forms part of the civil parish of Swanscombe and Greenhithe.Greenhithe, as it is spelled today, is located where it was possible to build wharves for transshipping corn, wood and other commodities; its largest cargoes were of chalk and...

, England, on the morning of 19 May 1845, with a crew of 24 officers and 110 men. The ships stopped briefly in Stromness Harbour in the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, and from there they sailed to Greenland

Greenland

Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...

with HMS Rattler and a transport ship, Barretto Junior.

At the Whalefish Islands in Disko Bay

Disko Bay

Disko Bay is a bay on the western coast of Greenland. The bay constitutes a wide southeastern inlet of Baffin Bay.- Geography :To the south the coastline is complicated with multiple waterways of skerries and small islands in the Aasiaat archipelago...

, on the west coast of Greenland, 10 oxen carried by the transport ship were slaughtered for fresh meat; supplies were transferred to Erebus and Terror, and crew members wrote their last letters home. Letters written on board told how Franklin banned swearing and drunkenness. Before the expedition's final departure, five men were discharged and sent home on Rattler and Barretto Junior, reducing the ships' final crew size to 129. The expedition was last seen by Europeans in early August 1845, when Captain Dannett of the whaler Prince of Wales and Captain Robert Martin of the whaler Enterprise encountered Terror and Erebus in Baffin Bay

Baffin Bay

Baffin Bay , located between Baffin Island and the southwest coast of Greenland, is a marginal sea of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is connected to the Atlantic via Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea...

, waiting for good conditions to cross to Lancaster Sound

Lancaster Sound

.

Over the next 150 years, other expeditions, explorers, and scientists would piece together what happened next. Franklin's men wintered in 1845–46 on Beechey Island

Beechey Island

Beechey Island is an island located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago of Nunavut, Canada, in Wellington Channel. It is separated from the southwest corner of Devon Island by Barrow Strait...

, where three crew members died and were buried. Terror and Erebus became trapped in ice off King William Island

King William Island

in September 1846 and never sailed again. According to a note dated 25 April 1848, and left on the island by Fitzjames and Crozier, Franklin had died on 11 June 1847; the crew had wintered on King William Island in 1846–47 and 1847–48, and the remaining crew had planned to begin walking on 26 April 1848 toward the Back River

Back River

The Back River , is a river in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada...

on the Canadian mainland. Nine officers and fifteen men had already died; the rest would die along the way, most on the island and another 30 or 40 on the northern coast of the mainland, hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of Western civilization.

Early searches

After two years had passed with no word from Franklin, public concern grew and Lady Franklin—as well as members of Parliament

Parliament of the United Kingdom

The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom, British Crown dependencies and British overseas territories, located in London...

and British newspapers—urged the Admiralty to send a search party. In response, the Admiralty developed a three-pronged plan put into effect in the spring of 1848 that sent an overland rescue party, led by Sir John Richardson

John Richardson (naturalist)

Sir John Richardson was a Scottish naval surgeon, naturalist and arctic explorer.Richardson was born at Dumfries. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and became a surgeon in the navy in 1807. He traveled with John Franklin in search of the Northwest Passage on the Coppermine Expedition of...

and John Rae

John Rae (explorer)

John Rae was a Scottish doctor who explored Northern Canada, surveyed parts of the Northwest Passage and reported the fate of the Franklin Expedition....

, down the MacKenzie River

Mackenzie River

The Mackenzie River is the largest river system in Canada. It flows through a vast, isolated region of forest and tundra entirely within the country's Northwest Territories, although its many tributaries reach into four other Canadian provinces and territories...

to the Canadian Arctic coast. Two expeditions by sea were also launched, one entering the Canadian Arctic archipelago

Archipelago

An archipelago , sometimes called an island group, is a chain or cluster of islands. The word archipelago is derived from the Greek ἄρχι- – arkhi- and πέλαγος – pélagos through the Italian arcipelago...

through Lancaster Sound, and the other entering from the Pacific side. In addition, the Admiralty offered a reward of £20,000 (£1.56 million in 2009 money) "to any Party or Parties, of any country, who shall render assistance to the crews of the Discovery Ships under the command of Sir John Franklin". After the three-pronged effort failed, British national concern and interest in the Arctic increased until "finding Franklin became nothing less than a crusade." Ballads such as "Lady Franklin's Lament

Lady Franklin's Lament

"Lady Franklin's Lament" is a broadside ballad indexed by George Malcolm Laws commemorating the loss of Sir John Franklin's British Arctic Expedition of 1845...

", commemorating Lady Franklin's search for her lost husband, became popular.

Many joined the search. In 1850, 11 British and 2 American ships

First Grinnell Expedition

The First Grinnell Expedition of 1850 was the first American effort, financed by Henry Grinnell, to determine the fate of the lost Franklin Polar Expedition. Led by Lieutenant Edwin De Haven, the...

cruised the Canadian Arctic, including the HMS Breadalbane, and her sister ship, the HMS Phoenix

HMS Phoenix

Sixteen vessels and two shore establishments of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Phoenix, after the legendary phoenix bird.The earliest example of the use of HMS as an abbreviation is a reference to HMS Phoenix in 1789....

. Several converged off the east coast of Beechey Island

Beechey Island

Beechey Island is an island located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago of Nunavut, Canada, in Wellington Channel. It is separated from the southwest corner of Devon Island by Barrow Strait...

, where the first relics of the expedition were found, including remnants of a winter camp from 1845–46 and the graves of John Shaw Torrington

John Torrington

Petty Officer John Shaw Torrington was an explorer and Royal Navy stoker. He was part of an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, but along with the rest of the crew, including the leader, Sir John Franklin, mysteriously died early in the trip. His preserved body was exhumed in 1984, to try to...

, John Hartnell, and William Braine. No messages from the Franklin expedition were found at this site. In the spring of 1851, passengers and crew aboard several ships observed a huge iceberg off Newfoundland which bore two vessels, one upright and one on its beam ends. The ships were not examined closely. It was suggested that the ships could have been Erebus and Terror, though it is more likely that they were abandoned whaling ships.

Overland searches

In 1854, John Rae

John Rae (explorer)

John Rae was a Scottish doctor who explored Northern Canada, surveyed parts of the Northwest Passage and reported the fate of the Franklin Expedition....

, while surveying the Boothia Peninsula

Boothia Peninsula

Boothia Peninsula is a large peninsula in Nunavut's northern Canadian Arctic, south of Somerset Island. The northern part, Murchison Promontory, is the northernmost point of mainland Canada, and thus North America....

for the Hudson's Bay Company

Hudson's Bay Company

(HBC), discovered further evidence of the lost men's fate. Rae met an Inuk

Inuit

near Pelly Bay

Kugaaruk, Nunavut

-Culture:The historical inhabitants were Arviligjuarmiut. Kugaaruk is a traditional "Central Inuit" community. Until 1968, the people followed a nomadic lifestyle. The population is approximately 97% Inuit and most people self-identify as Netsilik Inuit. The residents blend a land based lifestyle...

(now Kugaaruk, Nunavut) on 21 April 1854, who told him of a party of 35 to 40 white men who had died of starvation near the mouth of the Back River

Back River

The Back River , is a river in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada...

. Other Inuit confirmed this story, which included reports of cannibalism among the dying sailors. The Inuit showed Rae many objects that were identified as having belonged to Franklin and his men. In particular, Rae bought from the Pelly Bay Inuit several silver forks and spoons later identified as belonging to Fitzjames, Crozier, Franklin, and Robert Osmer Sargent, a mate

Mate

Mate may refer to one of the following meanings based on the generic dictionary definitions of the word:* One of a pair of animals involved in mating* Mate , a colloquialism used to refer to a friend* A naval officer:...

aboard Erebus. Rae's report was sent to the Admiralty, which in October 1854 urged the HBC to send an expedition down the Back River to search for other signs of Franklin and his men.

Next were Chief Factor James Anderson and HBC employee James Stewart, who traveled north by canoe to the mouth of the Back River. In July 1855, a band of Inuit told them of a group of qallunaat (Inuktitut for "whites") who had starved to death along the coast. In August, Anderson and Stewart found a piece of wood inscribed with "Erebus" and another that said "Mr. Stanley" (surgeon aboard Erebus) on Montreal Island

Montreal Island (Nunavut)

Montreal Island is located in Chantrey Inlet, Nunavut, Canada. The island has an area of and a perimeter of .Sir George Back visited the island in 1824 during one of his expeditions to map the arctic coast. He left a cache of supplies on the island, which was found in 1829 on a later arctic...

in Chantrey Inlet

Chantrey Inlet

The Back River reaches the Arctic Ocean at Chantrey Inlet on the east side of Adelaide Peninsula, Nunavut, Canada. Montreal Island is contained within the Inlet, while King William Island shelters the Inlet. It is long and wide at its mouth...

, where the Back River meets the sea.

Despite the findings of Rae and Anderson, the Admiralty did not plan another search of its own. Britain officially labeled the crew deceased in service on 31 March 1854. Lady Franklin, failing to convince the government to fund another search, personally commissioned one more expedition

McClintock Arctic Expedition

The McClintock Arctic Expedition of 1857 was a British effort to locate the last remains of the lost Franklin Arctic Expedition. Led by captain Francis Leopold McClintock aboard the steam yacht Fox, the expedition spent two years in the region and ultimately returned with the only written message...

under Francis Leopold McClintock

Francis Leopold McClintock

. The expedition ship, the steam schooner

Schooner

A schooner is a type of sailing vessel characterized by the use of fore-and-aft sails on two or more masts with the forward mast being no taller than the rear masts....

Fox, bought via public subscription, sailed from Aberdeen on 2 July 1857.

In April 1859, sledge parties set out from Fox to search on King William Island

King William Island

. On 5 May, the party led by Royal Navy Lieutenant William Hobson found a document in a cairn

Cairn

Cairn is a term used mainly in the English-speaking world for a man-made pile of stones. It comes from the or . Cairns are found all over the world in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops, near waterways and on sea cliffs, and also in barren desert and tundra areas...

left by Crozier and Fitzjames. It contained two messages. The first, dated 28 May 1847, said that Erebus and Terror had wintered in the ice off the northwest coast of King William Island and had wintered earlier at Beechey Island after circumnavigating Cornwallis Island. "Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All well ", the message said. The second message, written in the margins of that same sheet of paper, was much more ominous. Dated 25 April 1848, it reported that Erebus and Terror had been trapped in the ice for a year and a half and that the crew had abandoned the ships on 22 April. Twenty-four officers and crew had died, including Franklin on 11 June 1847, just two weeks after the date of the first note. Crozier was commanding the expedition, and the 105 survivors planned to start out the next day, heading south towards the Back River. This note contains significant errors; most notably the date of the expedition's winter camp at Beechy Island is incorrectly given as 1846–47 rather than 1845–46.

The McClintock expedition also found a human skeleton on the southern coast of King William Island. Still clothed, it was searched, and some papers were found, including a seaman's certificate for Chief Petty Officer Henry Peglar (b. 1808), Captain of the Foretop, HMS Terror. However, since the uniform was that of a ship's steward, it is more likely that the body was that of Thomas Armitage, gun-room steward on HMS Terror and a shipmate of Peglar, whose papers he carried. At another site on the western extreme of the island, Hobson discovered a lifeboat containing two skeletons and relics from the Franklin expedition. In the boat was a large amount of abandoned equipment, including boots, silk handkerchiefs, scented soap, sponges, slippers, hair combs, and many books, among them a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield

The Vicar of Wakefield

The Vicar of Wakefield is a novel by Irish author Oliver Goldsmith. It was written in 1761 and 1762, and published in 1766, and was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels among Victorians...

. McClintock also took testimony from the Inuit about the expedition's disastrous end.

Two expeditions between 1860 and 1869 by Charles Francis Hall

Charles Francis Hall

Charles Francis Hall was an American Arctic explorer. Little is known of Hall's early life. He was born in the state of Vermont, but while he was still a child his family moved to Rochester, New Hampshire, where, as a boy, he was apprenticed to a blacksmith. In the 1840s he married and drifted...

, who lived among the Inuit near Frobisher Bay

Frobisher Bay

Frobisher Bay is a relatively large inlet of the Labrador Sea in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Canada. It is located in the southeastern corner of Baffin Island...

on Baffin Island and later at Repulse Bay

Repulse Bay, Nunavut

Repulse Bay is an Inuit hamlet located on the shore of Hudson Bay, Kivalliq Region, in Nunavut, Canada.-Location and wildlife:The hamlet is located exactly on the Arctic Circle, on the north shore of Repulse Bay and on the south shore of the Rae Isthmus. Transport to the community is provided...

on the Canadian mainland, found camps, graves, and relics on the southern coast of King William Island but none of the Franklin expedition survivors he believed would be found among the Inuit. Though he concluded that all of the Franklin crew were dead, he believed that the official expedition records would yet be found under a stone cairn. With the assistance of his guides Ebierbing and Tookoolito

Tookoolito

Tookoolito known as "Hannah" among whalers of Cumberland Sound, was an Inuk woman who served as translator and guide to Charles Francis Hall, an Arctic explorer involved in the search for Franklin's lost expedition in the 1860s and 1870's...

, Hall gathered hundreds of pages of Inuit testimony. Among these materials are accounts of visits to Franklin's ships, and an encounter with a party of white men on the southern coast of King William Island near Washington Bay. In the 1990s, this testimony was extensively researched by David C. Woodman, and was the basis of two books, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery (1992) and Strangers Among Us (1995), in which he reconstructs the final months of the expedition.
The hope of finding these lost papers led Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka

Frederick Schwatka

Frederick Gustavus Schwatka was a United States Army lieutenant with degrees in medicine and law and a noted explorer of northern Canada and Alaska.-Early life and career:...

of the U.S. Army to organize an expedition to the island between 1878 and 1880. Traveling to Hudson Bay on the schooner Eothen, Schwatka, assembling a team that included Inuit who had assisted Hall, continued north by foot and dog sled

Dog sled

A dog sled is a sled pulled by one or more sled dogs used to travel over ice and through snow. Numerous types of sleds are used, depending on their function. They can be used for dog sled racing.-History:...

, interviewing Inuit, visiting known or likely sites of Franklin expedition remains, and wintering on King William Island. Though Schwatka failed to find the hoped-for papers, in a speech at a dinner given in his honor by the American Geographical Society in 1880, he noted that his expedition had made "the longest sledge journey ever made both in regard to time and distance" of 11 months and 4 days and 4360 km (2,709.2 mi), that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the whites relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit, and that it established the loss of the Franklin records "beyond all reasonable doubt". The Schwatka expedition found no remnants of the Franklin expedition south of a place known as Starvation Cove on the Adelaide Peninsula

Adelaide Peninsula

Adelaide Peninsula , ancestral home to the Illuilirmiut Inuit, is a large peninsula in Nunavut, Canada. It is located at south of King William Island....

. This was well north of Crozier's stated goal, the Back River, and several hundred miles away from the nearest Western outpost, on the Great Slave Lake

Great Slave Lake

Great Slave Lake is the second-largest lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada , the deepest lake in North America at , and the ninth-largest lake in the world. It is long and wide. It covers an area of in the southern part of the territory. Its given volume ranges from to and up to ...

. Woodman wrote of Inuit reports that between 1852 and 1858 Crozier and one other expedition member were seen in the Baker Lake

Baker Lake, Nunavut

Baker Lake , is a hamlet in the Kivalliq Region, in Nunavut on mainland Canada. Located inland from Hudson Bay, it is near the nation's geographical centre, and is notable for being the Canadian Arctic's sole inland community...

area, about 400 km (248.5 mi) to the south, where in 1948 Farley Mowat

Farley Mowat

Farley McGill Mowat, , born May 12, 1921 is a conservationist and one of Canada's most widely-read authors.His works have been translated into 52 languages and he has sold more than 14 million books. He achieved fame with the publication of his books on the Canadian North, such as People of the...

found "a very ancient cairn, not of normal Eskimo construction" inside which were shreds of a hardwood box with dovetail joint

Dovetail joint

A dovetail joint or simply dovetail is a joint technique most commonly used in woodworking joinery. Noted for its resistance to being pulled apart , the dovetail joint is commonly used to join the sides of a drawer to the front....

King William Island excavations (1981–82)

In June 1981, Owen Beattie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta

University of Alberta

The University of Alberta is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta and Henry Marshall Tory, its first president, it is widely recognized as one of the best universities in Canada...

, began the 1845–48 Franklin Expedition Forensic Anthropology Project (FEFAP) when he and his team of researchers and field assistants traveled from Edmonton

Edmonton

Edmonton is the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta and is the province's second-largest city. Edmonton is located on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Capital Region, which is surrounded by the central region of the province.The city and its census...

to King William Island

King William Island

, traversing the island's western coast as Franklin's men did 132 years before. FEFAP hoped to find artifacts and skeletal remains in order to use modern forensics to establish identities and causes of death among the lost 129.

Although the trek found archeological artifacts related to 19th-century Europeans and undisturbed disarticulate

Disarticulation

In medical terminology, disarticulation is the separation of two bones at their joint, either naturally by way of injury or by a surgeon during amputation....

human remains, Beattie was disappointed that more remains were not found. Examining the bones of Franklin crewmen, he noted areas of pitting and scaling often found in cases of Vitamin C deficiency, the cause of scurvy

Scurvy

. After returning to Edmonton, he compared notes from the survey with James Savelle, an Arctic archeologist, and noticed skeletal patterns suggesting cannibalism

Cannibalism

Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy...

. Seeking information about the Franklin crew's health and diet, he sent bone samples to the Alberta Soil and Feed Testing Laboratory for trace element

Trace element

In analytical chemistry, a trace element is an element in a sample that has an average concentration of less than 100 parts per million measured in atomic count, or less than 100 micrograms per gram....

analysis and assembled another team to visit King William Island. The analysis would find an unexpected level of 226 parts-per-million

Parts-per notation

In science and engineering, the parts-per notation is a set of pseudo units to describe small values of miscellaneous dimensionless quantities, e.g. mole fraction or mass fraction. Since these fractions are quantity-per-quantity measures, they are pure numbers with no associated units of measurement...

(ppm) of lead

Lead

in the crewman's bones, which was 10 times higher than the control

Scientific control

Scientific control allows for comparisons of concepts. It is a part of the scientific method. Scientific control is often used in discussion of natural experiments. For instance, during drug testing, scientists will try to control two groups to keep them as identical and normal as possible, then...

samples, taken from Inuit skeletons from the same geographic area, of 26–36 ppm.

In June 1982, a team made up of Beattie; Walt Kowall, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Alberta; Arne Carlson, an archeology and geography student from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and Arsien Tungilik, an Inuk student and field assistant, were flown to the west coast of King William Island, where they retraced some of the steps of McClintock

Francis Leopold McClintock

in 1859 and Schwatka

Frederick Schwatka

Frederick Gustavus Schwatka was a United States Army lieutenant with degrees in medicine and law and a noted explorer of northern Canada and Alaska.-Early life and career:...

in 1878–79. Discoveries during this expedition included the remains of between six and fourteen men in the vicinity of McClintock's "boat place" and artifacts including a complete boot sole fitted with makeshift cleats for better traction.

Beechey Island excavations and exhumations (1984 and 1986)

After returning to Edmonton in 1982 and learning of the lead-level findings from the 1981 expedition, Beattie struggled to find a cause. Possibilities included the lead solder

Solder

used to seal the expedition's food tins, other food containers lined with lead foil, food colouring, tobacco products, pewter

Pewter

Pewter is a malleable metal alloy, traditionally 85–99% tin, with the remainder consisting of copper, antimony, bismuth and lead. Copper and antimony act as hardeners while lead is common in the lower grades of pewter, which have a bluish tint. It has a low melting point, around 170–230 °C ,...

tableware, and lead-wicked candles. He came to suspect that the problems of lead poisoning compounded by the effects of scurvy could have been lethal for the Franklin crew. However, because skeletal lead might reflect lifetime exposure rather than exposure limited to the voyage, Beattie's theory could only be tested by forensic examination of preserved soft tissue as opposed to bone. Beattie decided to examine the graves of the buried crewmen on Beechey Island

Beechey Island

Beechey Island is an island located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago of Nunavut, Canada, in Wellington Channel. It is separated from the southwest corner of Devon Island by Barrow Strait...

After obtaining legal permission,Beattie (1987), pp. 86–87 Beattie's team visited Beechey Island in August 1984 to perform autopsies on the three crewmen buried there. They started with the first crew member to die, Leading Stoker John Shaw Torrington

John Torrington

. After completing Torrington's autopsy and exhuming and briefly examining the body of John Hartnell, the team, pressed for time and threatened by the weather, returned to Edmonton with tissue and bone samples. Trace element analysis of Torrington

John Torrington

's bones and hair indicated that the crewman "would have suffered severe mental and physical problems caused by lead poisoning". Although the autopsy indicated that pneumonia had been the ultimate cause of the crewman's death, lead poisoning was cited as a contributing factor.

During the expedition, the team visited a place about 1 km (0.621372736649807 mi) north of the grave site to examine fragments of hundreds of food tins discarded by Franklin's men. Beattie noted that the seams were poorly soldered with lead, which had likely come in direct contact with the food. The release of findings from the 1984 expedition and the photo of Torrington, a 138-year-old corpse well preserved by permafrost

Permafrost

In geology, permafrost, cryotic soil or permafrost soil is soil at or below the freezing point of water for two or more years. Ice is not always present, as may be in the case of nonporous bedrock, but it frequently occurs and it may be in amounts exceeding the potential hydraulic saturation of...

in the tundra

Tundra

In physical geography, tundra is a biome where the tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons. The term tundra comes through Russian тундра from the Kildin Sami word tūndâr "uplands," "treeless mountain tract." There are three types of tundra: Arctic tundra, alpine...

, led to wide media coverage and renewed interest in the lost Franklin expedition.

Recent research has suggested that another potential source for the lead may have been the ships' fresh water systems rather than the tinned food. K.T.H. Farrer argued that “it is impossible to see how one could ingest from the canned food the amount of lead, 3.3 mg per day over eight months, required to raise the PbB to the level 80 μg/dL at which symptoms of lead poisoning begin to appear in adults and the suggestion that bone lead in adults could be ‘swamped’ by lead ingested from food over a period of a few months, or even three years, seems scarcely tenable.”. In addition, tinned food was in widespread use within the Royal Navy at that time and its use did not lead to any significant increase in lead poisoning elsewhere. However, and uniquely for this Expedition only, the ships were fitted with converted railway locomotive engines for auxiliary propulsion which required an estimated one tonne of fresh water per hour when steaming. It is highly probable that it was for this reason that the ships were fitted with a unique water distillation system which, given the materials in use at the time, would have produced large quantities of water with a very high lead content. William Battersby has argued that this is a much more likely source for the high levels of lead observed in the remains of expedition members than the tinned food.

A further survey of the graves was undertaken in 1986. A camera crew filmed the procedure, shown in Nova

NOVA (TV series)

Nova is a popular science television series from the U.S. produced by WGBH Boston. It can be seen on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, and in more than 100 other countries...

s television documentary, Buried in Ice in 1988. Under difficult field conditions, Derek Notman, a radiologist and medical doctor from the University of Minnesota, and radiology technician Larry Anderson took many X-ray

X-ray

X-radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz and energies in the range 120 eV to 120 keV. They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma...

s of the crewmen prior to autopsy. Barbara Schweger, an Arctic clothing specialist, and Roger Amy, a pathologist, assisted in the investigation.

Beattie and his team had noticed that someone else had attempted to exhume Hartnell. In the effort, a pickaxe had damaged the wooden lid of his coffin, and the coffin plaque was missing. Research in Edmonton later showed that Sir Edward Belcher

Edward Belcher

Admiral Sir Edward Belcher, KCB , was a British naval officer and explorer. He was the great-grandson of Governor Jonathan Belcher. His wife, Diana Jolliffe, was the stepdaughter of Captain Peter Heywood.-Early life:...

, commander of one of the Franklin rescue expeditions, had ordered the exhumation of Hartnell in October 1852 but was thwarted by the permafrost. A month later, Edward A. Inglefield

Edward Augustus Inglefield

Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield was a Royal Naval officer who led one of the searches for the missing Arctic explorer John Franklin during the 1850s. In doing so, his expedition charted previously unexplored areas along the northern Canadian coastline, including Baffin Bay, Smith Sound and...

, commander of another rescue expedition, succeeded with the exhumation and removed the coffin plaque.

Unlike Hartnell's grave, the grave of Private William Braine was largely intact. When he was exhumed, the survey team saw signs that his burial had been hasty. His arms, body, and head had not been positioned carefully in the coffin, and one of his undershirts had been put on backwards. The coffin seemed too small for him; its lid had pressed down on his nose. A large copper plaque with his name and other personal data punched into it adorned his coffin lid.

NgLj-2 excavations (1992)

In 1992, a team of archeologists and forensic anthropologists identified a site, which they referenced as "NgLj-2", on the western shores of King William Island

King William Island

. The site matches the physical description of Leopold McClintock's "boat place". Excavations there uncovered nearly 400 bones and bone fragments, as well as physical artifacts ranging from pieces of clay pipes to buttons and brass fittings. Examination of these bones by Anne Keenleyside, the expedition's forensic scientist, showed elevated levels of lead and many cut-marks "consistent with de-fleshing". On the basis of this expedition, it has become generally accepted that at least some groups of Franklin's men resorted to cannibalism in their final distress.

Wreck searches (1992–93)

In 1992, Franklin author David C. Woodman, with the help of magnetometer expert Brad Nelson, organized "Project Ootjoolik" to search for the wreck reported by Inuit testimony to lie off the waters of Adelaide Peninsula. Enlisting both a National Research Council and a Canadian Forces patrol aircraft, each fitted with a sensitive magnetometer, a large search area to the west of Grant Point was surveyed from an altitude of 200 ft (61 m). Over 60 strong magnetic targets were identified, of which five were deemed to have characteristics most congruent to those expected from Franklin's ships.

In 1993, Dr. Joe McInnis and Woodman organized an attempt to identify the priority targets from the year before. A chartered aircraft landed on the ice at three of the locations, a hole was drilled through the ice, and a small sector-scan sonar was used to image the sea bottom. Unfortunately, due to ice conditions and uncertain navigation, it was not possible to exactly confirm the locations of the holes, and nothing was found although hitherto-unknown depths were found at the locations that were consistent with Inuit testimony of the wreck.

King William Island (1994–1995)

In 1994 Woodman organized and led a land search of the area from Collinson Inlet to (modern) Victory Point in search of the buried "vaults" spoken of in the testimony of the contemporary Inuit hunter Supunger. A 10-person team spent 10 days in the search, sponsored by the Canadian Geographical Society, and filmed by the CBC "Focus North." No trace of the vaults was found.

In 1995, an expedition was jointly organized by Woodman, George Hobson, and American adventurer Steven Trafton – with each party planning a separate search. Trafton's group travelled to the Clarence Island to investigate Inuit stories of a "white man's cairn" there but found nothing. Dr. Hobson's party, accompanied by archaeologist Margaret Bertulli, investigated the "summer camp" found a few miles to the south of Cape Felix, where some minor Franklin relics were found. Woodman, with two companions, travelled south from Wall Bay to Victory Point and investigated all likely campsites along this coast, finding only some rusted cans at a previously unknown campsite near Cape Maria Louisa.

Wreck searches (1997–2010)

In 1997, a "Franklin 150" expedition was mounted by the Canadian film company Eco-Nova to use sonar to investigate more of the priority magnetic targets found in 1992. Senior archaeologist was Robert Grenier, assisted by Margaret Bertulli, and Woodman again acted as expedition historian and search coordinator. Operations were conducted from the Canadian Coast Guard Icebreaker Laurier. Approximately 40 square kilometers were surveyed, without result, near Kirkwall Island. When detached parties found Franklin relics, primarily copper sheeting and small items, on the beaches of islets to the north of O'Reilly Island the search was diverted to that area but poor weather prevented significant survey work before the expedition ended. A documentary, Oceans of Mystery: Search for the Lost Fleet, was produced by Eco-Nova about this expedition.

In 2000 James Delgado of the Vancouver Maritime Museum

Vancouver Maritime Museum

The Vancouver Maritime Museum is a Maritime museum devoted to presenting the maritime history of Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Canadian Arctic. Opened in 1959 as a Vancouver centennial project, it is located within Vanier Park just west of False Creek on the Vancouver waterfront. The main...

organized a re-enactment of the historic St. Roch passage westward through the NW Passage using the RCMP vessel Nadon

RCMP vessel Nadon

The RCMP vessel Nadon is a patrol vessel operated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.She normally patrols the Georgia Strait off Vancouver, British Columbia and Victoria, British Columbia. In 1999, she was staffed by volunteers who recreated the historic 1940-42 transit of the Northwest Passage...

supported by the Canadian Buoy Tender Simon Fraser

CCGS Simon Fraser

The CCGS Simon Fraser is a buoy tender once operated by the Canadian Coast Guard.She was built, in 1960, at the Burrard Dry Docks, in Vancouver, British Columbia.She was modernized in 1986, at Versatile Marine, Montreal, Quebec....

. Knowing that ice would delay the transit in the area of King William Island he offered the use of the Nadon as a search vessel to his friends Hobson and Woodman, and using the Nadon's Kongsberg/Simrad SM2000 forward-looking sonar the survey of the northern search area around Kirkwall Island was continued without result.

Three expeditions were mounted by Woodman to continue the magnetometer mapping of the proposed wreck sites, a privately sponsored expedition in 2001, and the Irish-Canadian Franklin Search Expeditions of 2002 and 2004. These made use of sled-drawn magnetometers working on the sea ice and completed the unfinished survey of the northern (Kirkwall Island) search area (2001), and the entire southern O'Reilly Island area (2002 and 2004). All high-priority magnetic targets were identified by sonar through the ice as geological in origin. In 2002 and 2004 small Franklin artifacts and characteristic explorer tent sites were found on a small islet northeast of O'Reilly Island during shore searches.

In August 2008, a new search was announced, to be led by Robert Grenier, a senior archaeologist with Parks Canada

Parks Canada

Parks Canada , also known as the Parks Canada Agency , is an agency of the Government of Canada mandated to protect and present nationally significant natural and cultural heritage, and foster public understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment in ways that ensure their ecological and commemorative...

. This search hopes to take advantage of the improved ice conditions, using side-scan sonar

Sonar

Sonar is a technique that uses sound propagation to navigate, communicate with or detect other vessels...

from a boat in open water. Grenier also hopes to draw from newly published Inuit

Inuit

testimony collected by oral historian Dorothy Harley Eber

Dorothy Harley Eber

Dorothy Harley Eber, is a Canadian author and one of the first people to transcribe and publish oral histories of Inuit people in Nunavut in both English and Inuktitut. She has devoted much of her life to preserving the history of the Inuit people. In the 1970s, she was one of the first writers to...

. Some of Eber's informants have placed the location of one of Franklin's ships in the vicinity of the Royal Geographical Society Island

Royal Geographical Society Island

Royal Geographical Society Island is an island in Victoria Strait, within the Queen Maud Gulf, in the north Canadian territory of Nunavut.It has an area of ....

, an area not searched by previous expeditions. The search will also include local Inuit historian Louie Kamookak, who has found other significant remains of the expedition and will represent the indigenous culture.

On July 25, 2010, HMS Investigator

HMS Investigator (1848)

HMS Investigator was a merchant ship purchased in 1848 to search for Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. She made two voyages to the Arctic and had to be abandoned in 1853 after becoming trapped in the ice. Her wreckage was found in July 2010 on Banks Island, in the Beaufort Sea...

, which had become icebound and was subsequently abandoned while searching for Franklin's expedition in 1853, was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay

Mercy Bay

Mercy Bay is a Canadian Arctic waterway in the Northwest Territories. It is a southern arm of M'Clure Strait on northeast Banks Island. The mouth of Castel Bay is less than to the west...

along the northern coast of Banks Island

Banks Island

One of the larger members of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Banks Island is situated in the Inuvik Region of the Northwest Territories, Canada. It is separated from Victoria Island to its east by the Prince of Wales Strait and from the mainland by Amundsen Gulf to its south. The Beaufort Sea lies...

in Canada's western Arctic. The Parks Canada

Parks Canada

team reported that it was in good shape, upright in about 11 metres (36 feet) of water.

Scientific conclusions

The FEFAP field surveys, excavations and exhumations spanned more than 10 years. The results of this study from King William Island and Beechey Island artifacts and human remains showed that the Beechey Island crew had most likely died of pneumonia

Pneumonia

and perhaps tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

, which was suggested by the evidence of Pott's disease

Pott's disease

Pott's disease is a presentation of extrapulmonary tuberculosis that affects the spine, a kind of tuberculous arthritis of the intervertebral joints...

discovered in Braine. Toxicological reports pointed to lead poisoning

Lead poisoning

as a likely contributing factor. Blade cut marks found on bones from some of the crew were seen as signs of cannibalism

Cannibalism

Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy...

. Evidence suggested that a combination of cold, starvation and disease including scurvy, pneumonia and tuberculosis, all made worse by lead poisoning, killed everyone in the Franklin party.

Other factors

Franklin's chosen passage down the west side of King William Island took Erebus and Terror into "... a ploughing train of ice ... [that] does not always clear during the short summers...", whereas the route along the island's east coast regularly clears in summer and was later used by Roald Amundsen

Roald Amundsen

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He led the first Antarctic expedition to reach the South Pole between 1910 and 1912 and he was the first person to reach both the North and South Poles. He is also known as the first to traverse the Northwest Passage....

in his successful navigation of the Northwest Passage. The Franklin expedition, locked in ice for two winters in Victoria Strait

Victoria Strait

was naval, not well-equipped or trained for land travel. Some of the crew members heading south from Erebus and Terror hauled many items not needed for Arctic survival. McClintock noted a large quantity of heavy goods in the lifeboat at the "boat place" and thought them "a mere accumulation of dead weight, of little use, and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews". In addition, cultural factors might have prevented the crew from seeking help as quickly as possible from the Inuit or adopting their survival techniques.
The accusation of cultural arrogance has sometimes been leveled at Franklin and other British explorers of the Arctic during the 19th century, but a case can be made in their defense.

Historical legacy

The most meaningful outcome of the Franklin expedition was the mapping of several thousand miles of hitherto unsurveyed coastline by expeditions searching for Franklin's lost ships and crew. As Richard Cyriax noted, "the loss of the expedition probably added much more [geographical] knowledge than its successful return would have done". At the same time, it largely quelled the Admiralty's appetite for Arctic exploration. There was a gap of many years before the Nares expedition

British Arctic Expedition

The British Arctic Expedition of 1875-1876, led by Sir George Strong Nares, was sent by the British Admiralty to attempt to reach the North Pole via Smith Sound. Two ships, HMS Alert and HMS Discovery , sailed from Portsmouth on 29 May 1875...

and when Nares declared there was "no thoroughfare" to the North Pole, his words marked the end of the Royal Navy's historical involvement in Arctic exploration, the end of an era in which such exploits were widely seen by the British public as worthy expenditures of human effort and monetary resources. As a writer for The Athenaeum

Athenaeum (magazine)

The Athenaeum was a literary magazine published in London from 1828 to 1921. It had a reputation for publishing the very best writers of the age....

put it, "We think that we can fairly make out the account between the cost and results of these Arctic Expeditions, and ask whether it is worth while to risk so much for that which is so difficult of attainment, and when attained, is so worthless." The navigation of the Northwest Passage in 1903–05 by Roald Amundsen

Roald Amundsen

with the Gjøa

Gjøa

Gjøa was the first vessel to transit the Northwest Passage. With a crew of six, Roald Amundsen traversed the passage in a three year journey, finishing in 1906.- History :- Construction :...

expedition effectively ended the centuries-long quest for the Northwest Passage.

Cultural legacy

For years after the loss of the Franklin Party, the Victorian media portrayed Franklin as a hero who led his men in the quest for the Northwest Passage. A statue of Franklin in his home town bears the inscription "Sir John Franklin – Discoverer of the North West Passage", and statues of Franklin outside the Athenaeum

Athenaeum Club, London

The Athenaeum Club, usually just referred to as the Athenaeum, is a notable London club with its Clubhouse located at 107 Pall Mall, London, England, at the corner of Waterloo Place....

in London and in Tasmania

Tasmania

Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...

bear similar inscriptions. Although the expedition's fate, including the possibility of cannibalism, was widely reported and debated, Franklin's standing with the Victorian public was undiminished. The expedition has been the subject of numerous works of non-fiction, including two books by Ken McGoogan

Ken McGoogan

Ken McGoogan is the Canadian author of eight books, including four biographies focusing on northern exploration and published internationally: Fatal Passage , Ancient Mariner , Lady Franklin's Revenge , and Race to the Polar Sea .Born in Montreal and raised in a francophone town, McGoogan has...

, Fatal Passage

Fatal Passage

Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin is a book by Canadian historian and writer Ken McGoogan. It was first published in 2001.- Synopsis :...

and Lady Franklin's Revenge

Lady Franklin's Revenge

Lady Franklin's Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History is a non-fiction book by Canadian historian and writer Ken McGoogan...

.

The mystery surrounding Franklin's last expedition was the subject of a 2006 episode of the NOVA television series Arctic Passage

Arctic Passage

Arctic Passage is the U. S. title of a two-hour TV documentary on the Arctic explorers Sir John Franklin and Roald Amundsen, co-produced by ITN Factual in Britain and NOVA/WGBH in the U.S. ITN Factual handled the production and filming; the film was directed by Louise Osmond, and Harald Gunnar...

, a 2007 television documentary, "Franklin's Lost Expedition" on Discovery HD Theatre, as well as a 2008 Canadian documentary Passage

Passage (2008 film)

Passage is a 2008 documentary film partly based on the book Fatal Passage about Sir John Franklin's lost expedition through the Northwest Passage. The film explores the fate of the doomed mission, including John Rae's efforts to uncover the truth, and Lady Franklin's campaign to defend her late...

. In an episode of the 2009 ITV1 travel documentary series "Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World," presenter Connolly and his crew visited Beechey Island, filmed the gravesite, and gave details of the Franklin expedition.

In memory of the lost expedition one of Canada's Northwest Territories

Northwest Territories

The Northwest Territories is a federal territory of Canada.Located in northern Canada, the territory borders Canada's two other territories, Yukon to the west and Nunavut to the east, and three provinces: British Columbia to the southwest, and Alberta and Saskatchewan to the south...

subdivisions was known as the District of Franklin

District of Franklin

The District of Franklin was a regional administrative district of Canada's Northwest Territories. The district consisted of the Canadian high Arctic Islands, notably Ellesmere Island, Baffin Island, and Victoria Island...

. Including the high Arctic islands, this jurisdiction was abolished when the Territories were divided in 1999.

On 29 October 2009 a special service of thanksgiving was held in the chapel at the Old Royal Naval College

Old Royal Naval College

The Old Royal Naval College is the architectural centrepiece of Maritime Greenwich, a World Heritage Site in Greenwich, London, described by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation as being of “outstanding universal value” and reckoned to be the “finest and most...

in Greenwich, to accompany the rededication of the national monument to Franklin there. The service also included the solemn re-internment of the remains of Lieutenant Henry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte, the only remains ever repatriated to England, entombed within the monument in 1873. The event brought together members of the international polar community and invited guests included polar travellers, photographers and authors and descendants of Franklin, Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier and their men, and the families of those who went to search for them, including Admiral Sir Francis Leopold McClintock

Francis Leopold McClintock

, Rear Admiral Sir John Ross

John Ross (Arctic explorer)

and Vice Admiral Sir Robert McClure

Robert McClure

Sir Robert John Le Mesurier McClure was an Irish explorer of the Arctic.In 1854, he was the first to transit the Northwest Passage , as well as the first to circumnavigate the Americas.-Early life and career:He was born at Wexford, in Ireland, the posthumous son of one of Abercrombie's captains,...

among many others. The gala was directed by the Rev Jeremy Frost and polar historian Dr Huw Lewis-Jones

Huw Lewis-Jones

Huw Lewis-Jones is a British historian, editor, broadcaster and art director. Formerly historian and Curator of Art at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Dr Lewis-Jones left Cambridge in June 2010 to pursue a number of book and broadcasting projects...

and was organised by Polarworld and the High Commission of Canada to the United Kingdom. It was a celebration of the contributions made by the United Kingdom in the charting of the Canadian North, which honoured the loss of life in the pursuit of geographical discovery. The Navy was represented by Admiral Nick Wilkinson, prayers were led by the Bishop of Woolwich

Bishop of Woolwich

The Bishop of Woolwich is an episcopal title used by a suffragan bishop of the Church of England Diocese of Southwark, in the Province of Canterbury, England....

and among the readings were eloquent tributes from Duncan Wilson, chief executive of the Greenwich Foundation and H.E. James Wright, the Canadian High Commissioner. At a private drinks reception in the Painted Hall which followed this Arctic service, Chief Marine Archaeologist for Parks Canada

Parks Canada

Robert Grenier spoke of his ongoing search for the missing expedition ships. The following day a group of polar authors went to London's Kensal Green Cemetery

Kensal Green Cemetery

Kensal Green Cemetery is a cemetery in Kensal Green, in the west of London, England. It was immortalised in the lines of G. K. Chesterton's poem The Rolling English Road from his book The Flying Inn: "For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen; Before we go to Paradise by way of...

to pay their respects to the Arctic explorers buried there. After some difficulty, McClure's gravestone was located. It is hoped that his memorial, in particular, may be conserved in the future. Many other veterans of the searches for Franklin are buried there, including Admiral Sir Horatio Thomas Austin

Horatio Thomas Austin

Sir Horatio Thomas Austin was a British officer in the Royal Navy, and an explorer of the Canadian arctic. Following the 1849 failure of James Clark Ross's attempt to locate the lost Franklin Expedition, Austin led an 1850 expedition that also attempted to find Sir John Franklin and his crew....

, Admiral Sir George Back

George Back

Admiral Sir George Back FRS was a British naval officer, explorer of the Canadian Arctic , naturalist and artist.-Career:...

, Admiral Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield

Edward Augustus Inglefield

, Admiral Bedford Clapperton Trevelyan Pim

Bedford Clapperton Trevelyan Pim

Admiral Bedford Clapperton Trevelyan Pim, RN, MP, FRGS was a Royal Navy officer, Arctic explorer, barrister, and author...

, and Admiral Sir John Ross

John Ross (Arctic explorer)

. Franklin's redoubtable wife Jane Griffin, Lady Franklin, is also interred at Kensal Green in the vault, and commemorated on a marble cross dedicated to her niece Sophia Cracroft.

Portrayal in fiction and the arts

From the 1850s through to the present day, Franklin's last expedition inspired numerous literary works. Among the first was a play, The Frozen Deep

The Frozen Deep

The Frozen Deep was a play, originally staged as an amateur theatrical, written by Wilkie Collins along with the substantial guidance of Charles Dickens in 1856...

, written by Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. He was very popular during the Victorian era and wrote 30 novels, more than 60 short stories, 14 plays, and over 100 non-fiction pieces...

with assistance and production by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

. The play was performed for private audiences at Tavistock House

Tavistock House

Tavistock House was the London home of the noted British author Charles Dickens and his family from 1851 to 1860. At Tavistock House Dickens wrote Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. He also put on amateur theatricals there which are described in John Forster's Life of...

early in 1857, as well as at the Royal Gallery of Illustration

Royal Gallery of Illustration

The Royal Gallery of Illustration was a performance venue located at 14 Regent Street near Waterloo Place in London, in what was formerly the home of John Nash, designer of Regent Street, Regent's Park, and other urban improvements undertaken at the commission of George IV.From 1855 to about 1876,...

(including a command performance for Queen Victoria

Victoria of the United Kingdom

Victoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India....

), and for the public at the Manchester Trade Union Hall. News of Franklin's death in 1859 inspired elegies, including one by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...

.
Fictional treatments of the final Franklin expedition begin with Jules Verne

Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...

's Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras

Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras

The Adventures of Captain Hatteras is an adventure novel by Jules Verne in two parts: The English at the North Pole and The desert of ice ....

, (1866), in which the novel's hero seeks to retrace Franklin's footsteps and discovers that the North Pole

North Pole

The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is, subject to the caveats explained below, defined as the point in the northern hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface...

is dominated by an enormous volcano. The German novelist Sten Nadolny

Sten Nadolny

Sten Nadolny, is a German novelist. His parents, Burkhard and Isabella Nadolny, were also both writers.-Life:...

's The Discovery of Slowness

The Discovery of Slowness

The Discovery of Slowness is a novel by Sten Nadolny, written under a double conceit: first, as a novelization of the life of British Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, and second as a hymn of praise to "slowness," a quality which Nadolny's fictional Franklin possesses in abundance...

(1983; English translation 1987) takes on the entirety of Franklin's life, touching only briefly on his last expedition. Other recent novelistic treatments of Franklin include Mordecai Richler

Mordecai Richler

Mordecai Richler, CC was a Canadian Jewish author, screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him "the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation" and a pivotal figure in the country's history. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Barney's Version,...

's Solomon Gursky Was Here

Solomon Gursky Was Here

Solomon Gursky Was Here is a novel by Canadian author Mordecai Richler first published by Viking Canada in 1989.-Summary:The novel tells of several generations of the fictional Gursky family, who are connected to several disparate events in the history of Canada, including the Franklin Expedition...

, William T. Vollmann

William T. Vollmann

William Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist and winner of the National Book Award...

's The Rifles

The Rifles (novel)

The Rifles is a 1994 novel by American writer William T. Vollmann. It is intended to be the sixth book in a planned seven-book cycle entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes...

(1994), John Wilson's North With Franklin: The Journals of James Fitzjames (1999); and Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction series, known as the Hyperion Cantos, and for his Locus-winning Ilium/Olympos cycle....

's The Terror

The Terror (novel)

The Terror is the name of a 2007 novel by American author Dan Simmons. The novel is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to the Arctic to force the Northwest Passage in 1845 - 1848...

(2007). The expedition has also been the subject of a horror role-playing game supplement, The Walker in the Wastes. Most recently, Clive Cussler

Clive Cussler

Clive Eric Cussler is an American adventure novelist and marine archaeologist. His thriller novels, many featuring the character Dirk Pitt, have reached The New York Times fiction best-seller list more than seventeen times...

's 2008 novel Arctic Drift

Arctic Drift

Arctic Drift is a Dirk Pitt novel, the 20th of the series and was released on November 25, 2008.-Plot:The plot begins in the year 1847, when the Franklin Expedition becomes stranded trying to find the Northwest Passage. They experience a harsh winter. The men are seemingly going mad...

incorporates the ordeal of the Franklin expedition as a central element in the story, and Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan is a novelist from Tasmania, Australia.-Early life:Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961, the fifth of six children. He is descended from Irish convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land in the 1840s. His father is a survivor of the Burma Death Railway. One of his three...

's Wanting

Wanting (novel)

-Plot summary:Wanting cuts between two stories based on real historical figures under the central theme of 'wanting', and is set in both nineteenth century Tasmania and Britain...

(2009) deals with Franklin's deeds in both Tasmania and the Arctic.

Franklin's last expedition also inspired a great deal of music, beginning with the ballad "Lady Franklin's Lament

Lady Franklin's Lament

"Lady Franklin's Lament" is a broadside ballad indexed by George Malcolm Laws commemorating the loss of Sir John Franklin's British Arctic Expedition of 1845...

" (also known as "Lord Franklin"), which originated in the 1850s and has been recorded by dozens of artists, among them Martin Carthy

Martin Carthy

Martin Carthy MBE is an English folk singer and guitarist who has remained one of the most influential figures in British traditional music, inspiring contemporaries such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and later artists such as Richard Thompson since he emerged as a young musician in the early days...

, Pentangle

Pentangle (band)

Pentangle are a British folk rock band with some folk jazz influences. The original band were active in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a later version has been active since the early 1980s...

, Sinéad O'Connor

Sinéad O'Connor

Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor is an Irish singer-songwriter. She rose to fame in the late 1980s with her debut album The Lion and the Cobra and achieved worldwide success in 1990 with a cover of the song "Nothing Compares 2 U"....

, the Pearlfishers

Pearlfishers

Pearlfishers are a Glasgow-based rock band fronted by singer and songwriter David Scott.Other contributors include drummer Jim Gash, Dee Bahl, Brian McAlpine, Mil Stricevic and Duglas T...

, and John Walsh. Other Franklin-inspired songs include Fairport Convention

Fairport Convention

Fairport Convention are an English folk rock and later electric folk band, formed in 1967 who are still recording and touring today. They are widely regarded as the most important single group in the English folk rock movement...

's "I'm Already There", and James Taylor

James Taylor

James Vernon Taylor is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A five-time Grammy Award winner, Taylor was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000....

's "Frozen Man" (based on Beattie's photographs of John Torrington).

The influence of the Franklin expedition on Canadian literature

Canadian literature

Canadian literature is literature originating from Canada. Collectively it is often called CanLit. Some criticism of Canadian literature has focused on nationalistic and regional themes, although this is only a small portion of Canadian Literary criticism...

has been especially significant. Among the best-known contemporary Franklin ballads is "Northwest Passage

Northwest Passage (song)

"Northwest Passage" is one of the best-known songs by Canadian musician Stan Rogers. An a cappella song, it features Rogers alone singing the verses, with several guest vocalists harmonizing with him in the chorus...

" by the late Ontario folksinger Stan Rogers

Stan Rogers

Stanley Allison "Stan" Rogers was a Canadian folk musician and songwriter.Rogers was noted for his rich, baritone voice and his finely crafted, traditional-sounding songs which were frequently inspired by Canadian history and the daily lives of working people, especially those from the fishing...

(1981), which has been referred to as the unofficial Canadian national anthem. The distinguished Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...

has also spoken of Franklin's expedition as a sort of national myth of Canada, remarking that "In every culture many stories are told, (but) only some are told and retold, and these stories bear examining ... in Canadian literature, one such story is the Franklin expedition." Other recent treatments by Canadian poets include a verse play, Terror and Erebus, by Gwendolyn MacEwen

Gwendolyn MacEwen

Gwendolyn Margaret MacEwen was a Canadian poet and novelist. A "sophisticated, wide-ranging and thoughtful writer," she published more than 20 books in her brief life. "A sense of magic and mystery from her own interests in the Gnostics, Ancient Egypt and magic itself, and from her wonderment at...

that was broadcast on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly known as CBC and officially as CBC/Radio-Canada, is a Canadian crown corporation that serves as the national public radio and television broadcaster...

(CBC) radio in the 1960s, as well as David Solway

David Solway

David Solway is a Canadian poet, educational theorist, travel writer and literary critic of Jewish descent.He is a member of the Jubilate Circle and formerly a teacher of English Literature at John Abbott College...

's verse cycle, Franklin's Passage (2003).
In the visual arts, the loss of Franklin's expedition inspired a number of paintings in both the United States and Britain. In 1861, Frederic Edwin Church

Frederic Edwin Church

Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters...

unveiled his great canvas "The Icebergs"; later that year, prior to taking it to England for exhibition, he added an image of a broken ship's mast in silent tribute to Franklin. In 1864, Sir Edwin Landseer

Edwin Henry Landseer

Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, RA was an English painter, well known for his paintings of animals—particularly horses, dogs and stags...

's "Man Proposes, God Disposes" caused a stir at the annual Royal Academy exhibition; its depiction of two polar bears, one chewing on a tattered ship's ensign, the other gnawing on a human ribcage, was seen at the time as in poor taste but has remained one of the more powerful imaginings of the expedition's final fate. The expedition also inspired numerous popular engravings and illustrations, along with many panoramas, dioramas, and magic lantern shows.

Timeline

1845, May 19: Franklin expedition sails from England
1845, July: Expedition docks in Greenland
Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...

, sends home five men and a batch of letters
1845, July 28: Last sighting of expedition by Europeans (a whaling ship in Baffin Bay
Baffin Bay
Baffin Bay , located between Baffin Island and the southwest coast of Greenland, is a marginal sea of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is connected to the Atlantic via Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea...

)
1845–46: Expedition winters on Beechey Island
Beechey Island
Beechey Island is an island located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago of Nunavut, Canada, in Wellington Channel. It is separated from the southwest corner of Devon Island by Barrow Strait...

. Three crewmen die of tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

and are buried.
1846: Erebus and Terror leave Beechey Island and sail down Peel Sound
Peel Sound
Peel Sound is an uninhabited Arctic waterway in the Qikiqtaaluk, Nunavut, Canada. It is located between eastern Prince of Wales Island and northwestern Somerset Island, while Parry Channel is at the northern opening and Franklin Strait is at the southern opening.There are several named islands...

towards King William Island
King William Island
King William Island is an island in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut and forms part of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In area it is between and making it the 61st largest island in the world and Canada's 15th largest island...
1846, September 12: Ships trapped in the ice off King William Island.
1846–47: Expedition winters on King William Island
1847, May 28: Date of first note, says "All well"
1847, June 11: Franklin dies.
1847–48: Expedition again winters on King William Island after the ice fails to thaw in 1847
1848, April 22: Erebus and Terror abandoned after one year and seven months trapped in the ice
1848, April 25: Date of second note, saying 24 men have died and the survivors plan to start marching south on April 26 to the Back River
Back River
The Back River , is a river in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada...
1850 (?): Inuit board an abandoned ship which is icebound off King William Island
1850 (?): Inuit see 40 men walking south on King William Island
1851 (?): Inuit hunters see four men still trying to head south, last verified sighting of survivors (as reported to Charles Hall
Charles Francis Hall
Charles Francis Hall was an American Arctic explorer. Little is known of Hall's early life. He was born in the state of Vermont, but while he was still a child his family moved to Rochester, New Hampshire, where, as a boy, he was apprenticed to a blacksmith. In the 1840s he married and drifted...

)
1852–1858 (?): Inuit may have seen Crozier and one other survivor much further south in the Baker Lake area.
1854: John Rae interviews local Inuit, who give him items from the expedition and tell him the men starved to death, after resorting to cannibalism
1859: McClintock finds the abandoned boat and the messages on an admiralty form in a cairn
Cairn
Cairn is a term used mainly in the English-speaking world for a man-made pile of stones. It comes from the or . Cairns are found all over the world in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops, near waterways and on sea cliffs, and also in barren desert and tundra areas...

on King William Island

Works cited

—"Franklin Saga Deaths: A Mystery Solved?" (1990). National Geographic Magazine, Vol 178, No 3.
Atwood, Margaret (1995). "Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew," in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198119763.
Beattie, Owen, and Geiger, John (1989). Frozen in Time: Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books. ISBN 0-88833-303-X.
John Brown, F.R.G.S. (1860), The North-West Passage and the Plans for the Search for Sir John Franklin: A Review with maps, &c., Second Edition with a Sequel Including the Voyage of the Fox, London, E. Stanford, 1860.
Berton, Pierre
Pierre Berton
Pierre Francis de Marigny Berton, was a noted Canadian author of non-fiction, especially Canadiana and Canadian history, and was a well-known television personality and journalist....

(1988). The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and The North Pole, 1818–1909. Toronto: McLelland & Stewart. ISBN 0771012667.
Cookman, Scott (2000). Iceblink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Lost Polar Expedition. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-37790-2.
Cyriax, Richard (1939) Sir John Franklin's last Arctic expedition; a chapter in the history of the royal navy. London: Methuen & Co.
Klutschak, Heinrich; Barr, William (1989). Overland to Starvation Cove. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-5762-4.
McGoogan, Ken
Ken McGoogan
Ken McGoogan is the Canadian author of eight books, including four biographies focusing on northern exploration and published internationally: Fatal Passage , Ancient Mariner , Lady Franklin's Revenge , and Race to the Polar Sea .Born in Montreal and raised in a francophone town, McGoogan has...

(2002). Fatal Passage: The True Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0-7867-099-36
McGoogan, Ken (2005). Lady Franklin's Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History. Toronto: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0002006712.
Potter, Russell
Russell Potter
Russell A. Potter is an American writer and college professor. His work encompasses Hip hop culture, popular music, and the history of British exploration of the Arctic in the nineteenth century...

(2007). Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture. Seattle: The University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0295986807.
Sandler, Martin (2006). Resolute: The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen's Ghost Ship. New York: Sterling Publishing Co. ISBN 978-1-4027-4085-5.
Savours, Ann (1999). The Search for the North West Passage. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312223722.
Schwatka, Frederick
Frederick Schwatka
Frederick Gustavus Schwatka was a United States Army lieutenant with degrees in medicine and law and a noted explorer of northern Canada and Alaska.-Early life and career:...

(1965). The Long Arctic Search. Ed. Edouard A. Stackpole. New Bedford, Mass.: Reynolds-DeWalt. .
Simmons, Dan
Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction series, known as the Hyperion Cantos, and for his Locus-winning Ilium/Olympos cycle....

(2007). The Terror. Armonk: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0316017442.
Woodman, David C. (1995). Strangers Among Us. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0773513485.
Woodman, David C. (1992). Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0773509364

External links

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/arctic/NOVA's companion website for Arctic Passage
Arctic Passage
Arctic Passage is the U. S. title of a two-hour TV documentary on the Arctic explorers Sir John Franklin and Roald Amundsen, co-produced by ITN Factual in Britain and NOVA/WGBH in the U.S. ITN Factual handled the production and filming; the film was directed by Louise Osmond, and Harald Gunnar...

]
Franklin biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
The Fate of Franklin (Russell Potter)
The Life and Times of Sir John Franklin
List of artifacts recovered from the Franklin Expedition
Images of artifacts recovered from the Franklin Expedition
Expedition reports for Woodman-involved efforts
The Doomed Franklin Expedition
Llanelli’s Lost Arctic Explorer

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Background

Command

Ships, crew and provisions

Lost

Early searches

Overland searches

King William Island excavations (1981–82)

Beechey Island excavations and exhumations (1984 and 1986)

NgLj-2 excavations (1992)

Wreck searches (1992–93)

King William Island (1994–1995)

Wreck searches (1997–2010)

Scientific conclusions

Other factors

Historical legacy

Cultural legacy

Portrayal in fiction and the arts

Timeline

Works cited

Further reading

External links