The North West Passage – Franklin and Rae
Arctic Exploration - the Historical Background
Lecture for the John Rae Society, 29 September 2025
Good evening. It is wonderful to be back in Orkney at last! I do see some familiar faces, but for those in the audience whom I have not had the pleasure of meeting before, perhaps I should introduce myself:
I am indeed, as it says on the tin, you might say, a Franklin descendant, though not directly from Sir John, who only had one daughter, by his first marriage. My three-greats-grandfather was Sir Willingham Franklin, an elder brother of Sir John, who joined the Indian Civil Service and became a Puisne Judge in the High Court in Madras. He and his wife both died within weeks of each other in a cholera epidemic and their orphaned infant daughter Catherine, my great-great grandmother, became the ward of her uncle Sir John.
That is really my only qualification for being here today! I am very grateful therefore to your Society and to Andrew Appleby for giving me this opportunity to return once again to Orkney, and for making all the necessary arrangements.
*
While it is of course Dr. John Rae who is the raison d’être for this gathering, he will not appear this evening but is waiting patiently in the wings until tomorrow.
*
In order to put Rae’s great achievements into context, I would like to talk today about the background history of Arctic exploration in general and the search for a north-west passage in particular.
As a preamble therefore, I would like to quote briefly from the Preface to Peter Whitfield’s New Found Lands – Maps in the History of Exploration, in the edition republished by the Folio Society in 2000.
He writes:
“European exploration, during what we may call its classic period between 1500 and 1900, is the story of the growth of knowledge, geographical knowledge that was recorded, centralised and used as never before. But discovery is a relative and misleading term… since the lands discovered were of course inhabited or known for centuries before Europeans arrived… Newly-discovered routes… invariably represented knowledge simply borrowed from native peoples.”
Whitfield goes on to make the point that,
“The European discoverer of a certain land, or the route to it, may have been simply the first to record his discovery and incorporate it into the body of European knowledge. In order to do this, he had obviously to find his way home again, therefore the first duty of an explorer was to survive…”
Indeed. And this is where Dr. John Rae succeeded, but Sir John Franklin and the crew of his last expedition tragically did not. The paradox is that because Franklin and his ships and crews disappeared without trace after they sailed from Stromness in 1835, the mystery of their disappearance has captured the imagination of the public ever since. Everybody loves a good mystery.
While Rae eventually discovered the fate of Franklin’s crew, as we shall hear in the second of these talks, it is only in the very recent past, thanks to the melting of the ice and to modern technology that we have learned the fate of his ships and their exact location under the ice.
There is a great deal more to be discovered, and I greatly regret that I probably will not live long enough to hear the end of the story. What if the log-books of either Erebus or Terror have survived, preserved by the low temperatures under the ice, and can be deciphered? THAT would be stupendous!
***
So, to return to the background. The furtherance of the growth of geographical knowledge was just one reason for the discovery, exploration and the mapping of unknown lands. It was seldom the only motive. There were other motives, less disinterested.
Annexation of territory and its subsequent exploitation for the benefit of the nation making the discovery was another, even if not overtly declared. Or evangelisation perhaps –saving the souls of the savages by converting them to Christianity. A respectable veneer for land-grabbing. One of the most powerful motives of all however was probably trade.
*
The dream of discovering a navigable northern sea route from Europe to the Indies, has a very long history. It is something of a ‘spicy story’.
Highly prized spices, such as cloves mace and nutmeg, were imported to Europe in antiquity, but it was at the height of the Roman Empire, when the Pax Romana made it less hazardous, that the trade in spices really took off. Spices arrived in the Mediterranean via three overland routes: through Central Asia, through the Middle East via the Red Sea, and up from the Horn of Africa. For over a thousand years this trade depended on Indonesian sailors, who carried the spices from the Spice Islands to the Malay Peninsula, Java and Sumatra, whence they were distributed by Indian and Arab sailors across the rest of the Indian Ocean, and through the Red Sea to Alexandria or via the Persian Gulf to ports in the Levant, whence Venetian traders took them on to the European markets.
Where the spices came from remained a very closely guarded secret until the early 1500s. It was only after the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama had discovered the sea route to India and South-East Asia via the southern tip of Africa, that the source of supply of these valuable products, the so-called ‘Spice Islands’, was revealed. As soon as the cat was out of the bag, the Portuguese Viceroy of India lost no time in despatching ships to these islands, where the crews hastened to fill the holds with priceless cargoes of cloves, nutmegs and mace.
However, it was not enough to know the source of supply. The precious spices had to be transported to the market.
It was a long and hazardous journey from Europe to the Far East via the Cape of Good Hope. From the middle of the sixteenth century, abortive attempts to find a north-east passage to China and Indonesia, in part to avoid the Spanish and the Portuguese who monopolised the southern route. were made by, among others, Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor (who both ended up in watery graves), Stephen Borough and other English navigators.
Henry Hudson, of whom we shall hear more in a moment, also made a couple of unsuccessful expeditions during this period, and much later in 1818, while still only a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, John Franklin, in company with Commander David Buchan tried to reach the Bering Strait by way of Spitzbergen but they were stopped by ice before they got very far.
During the time when the Low Countries were under the jurisdiction, of the Spanish Crown, and following the Spanish interdiction of trade with Portugal, the Dutch also sent out expeditions. Willem Barents, the best known of the Dutch navigators, led three expeditions. On the third attempt he succeeded in rounding the north point of the island of Novaya Zemlaya only to become icebound for the whole winter and having to abandon his ship. He died a week later as a result of his prolonged exposure to the rigours of the Arctic winter. His posthumous consolation was to have the sea to the east of Spitzbergen, which he had successfully navigated, named after him.
Various Russian expeditions at different times charted the entire north coast of Russia, but it was not until 1878/9 that the whole length of the north-east passage was successfully navigated. Meanwhile the focus of attention was turned towards the west. The eastern route to the north of Russia having been found impracticable, what about seeking a north-western passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific and reaching the Far East from the opposite direction?
The Italian Giovanni Caboto, anglicised to John Cabot, about 1450 to 1498, most probably the Captain of a merchant ship trading to the Levant, is said on one of his voyages to have visited Mecca and been amazed by the market in spices and silks which he found there. He learned that these spices were transported overland by caravan from Asia.
Cabot, with an eye to the main chance, conceived the notion that it might be possible to open up a sea route across the western ocean to Cathay for the purpose of bringing these luxury items to Europe. Having found the European Courts unreceptive to this idea he brought his family to England and tried to persuade the merchants of Bristol to finance an expedition in search of such a route.
While this was being organised, the news came through that Christopher Columbus, (usually considered also to be Italian, but in fact possibly a Spanish Sephardic Jew), sailing west, had reached the West Indies. This news galvanised the English establishment, and Henry VII granted Cabot letters patent to undertake a voyage to the west in the hope of finding a navigable route to Cathay via the north west. He set sail in the Mathew, a small vessel with a crew of only 18 men in May 1497 and on 24th June sighted one of the northern capes of Newfoundland, promptly taking possession in the name of the King, of what he was convinced was an island off the coast of Cathay. Quite by chance on the return voyage they sailed over what are now known as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland where they had only to lower buckets over the side to catch huge quantities of cod. This accidental discovery led directly to the foundation of the Newfoundland cod fishing industry.
That expedition marked the beginning of the serious search for a navigable northern sea route to the markets of the far east, though it was still to be a few years before it was realised that Newfoundland was not an island, but part of a very large continent blocking the route, and that Cathay was many thousands of miles still further to the west.
What eventually was to prove the catalyst which prompted more concentrated efforts to find as soon as possible a navigable sea route to the sources of such potential wealth, was the completion of the conquest of the entire eastern Mediterranean by the Ottoman Empire. The overland caravan trade routes over which the products of the East, including the precious spices, had been brought to Europe for centuries were thus cut off.
*
In 1493 Pope Alexander VI (on whose authority one might ask?) drew a line 370 leagues, (a league at sea being roughly three nautical miles) to the west of Cape Verde on the westernmost point of Africa, and awarded all newly discovered lands to the west of this line to Portugal and to the east to Spain.
As far as Britain was concerned, in view of the ongoing hostilities with Spain and Portugal, the use of the sea routes through the Magellan Strait in Chile, and the Cape of Good Hope to the south of Africa, were no longer available and it now became even more important to find a navigable sea route for the increasingly lucrative trade in spices. The north east route having proved impracticable, perhaps a route could be found to the west or north-west?
*
Here our story really begins.
Once it was realised that the earth is not flat but is in fact a sphere, it was assumed that if one sailed from Europe far enough to the west one would eventually reach the shores of Cathay and the fabled East. The discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus, a Genoese adventurer, put paid to the notion of a westward route. That left the remaining option – a route to the north of the continent of America via the Arctic.
*
Columbus, in quest of Japan, in 1492 had first discovered the islands of the Bahamas, which he took to be India, therefore naming the natives, ‘Indians’, and on discovering shortly thereafter the island of Cuba he assumed that as it looked so unlike Japan, it must be an outlying promontory of China. On a second voyage, financed by the Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, he discovered several other Caribbean islands, and revisited Cuba, still convinced that it was a promontory of China.
A third voyage of exploration brought the realisation that the main land mass he had discovered was not Asia at all, as he had at first been convinced. He attempted to find a passage through the area of Panama, as he had been informed by natives that there was another ocean not far away, but of course until the Panama Canal was built there was no such passage. He was credited with the discovery of America nonetheless, though what is now the USA still remained unknown to Europeans. (A few years later another Florentine merchant adventurer called Amerigo Vespucci laid claim to having been the first European to reach the mainland of the continent named after him, but the veracity of his claim has been considered doubtful.)
*
The race was now on. The principal actors were the English and the Dutch. Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1555 petitioned Queen Elizabeth I to support an attempt to find a passage to Cathay via a northern route, which, equating America with the lost continent of Atlantis, he was convinced, from his reading of Plato, Aristotle and other ancient writers, must exist.
The Queen was evidently sceptical, since nothing came of his petition, though a letter from Sir Humphrey to his brother Sir John Gilbert postulating the existence of a commercially feasible route to the east, a letter which remained in circulation for ten years before it was published, probably helped to promote the idea of seeking such a passage. Gilbert seems to have had a bee in his bonnet on the subject, though he was not the only one – Richard Hakluyt, something of an armchair traveller in the 16th century, seems equally to have been obsessed with the idea, and quoting the accounts of a number of hopeful explorers made an imaginary voyage to Cathay via a north-west route.
In spite of the failure of all these voyages of discovery,akluyt, the contemporary geographer, among other armchair explorers, maintained, quoting dubious and circumstantial evidence of various kinds, that a north-west passage not only existed, but had been successfully navigated by assorted ‘inverted commas’ Indians. the interest remained, and in the last quarter of the sixteenth century the search for the fabled north-west passage really began in earnest.
Martin Frobisher made three voyages, in 1576, 1577 and 1578, reaching a sizeable inlet in the southeast corner of Baffin Island. Here he discovered, on his second voyage, what he took to be gold. With a fleet of no less than fifteen vessels he undertook a third voyage in 1578 in order to recover the ‘gold’ he had discovered and therewith make his fortune. He was doomed to disappointment, as the ‘gold’ turned out to be iron pyrites, or ‘fool’s gold’.
Frobisher was followed in 1585, 1586 and 1587 by John Davis, who penetrated a little further north, discovering the strait which divides western Greenland from Baffin Island later named after him.
The English navigator and freelance explorer Henry Hudson now appears on the scene. In 1607 he made two unsuccessful attempts to find a sea route to China. The first attempt was to be made via the North Pole but having got no further than Spitzbergen before being blocked by ice, he attempted to find a north-eastern route, via the Barents Sea, but was once again prevented by ice. Undeterred, at the end of the following year he accepted a commission from the Dutch East India Company to seek for a passage to China by either a north-east or north-western route. His attempt to find an eastern route being foiled again by impenetrable ice in the Barents Sea, he talked his already mutinous crew into crossing the Atlantic and trying to find a route via a north-west passage.
Making landfall in North Virginia in August 1609 he entered New York Bay and sailed northwards for some 150 miles up the river subsequently named after him, proving that it was not a strait as had previously been thought.
On his return to England, not surprisingly, he was forbidden thenceforward to offer his future services to the Dutch.
Undeterred by his failure so far to locate it, Hudson was still convinced of the existence of a north-west passage, and the following year once again set sail in the 55-ton aptly named Discovery. Leaving Harwich on 1st May 1610, he sailed north to Orkney, on the same course which would be set two centuries later by Sir John Franklin.
Passing the Faroe Islands, the expedition anchored in a thick fog off Iceland, where according to the account of the voyage given by Abacuk Pricket, the navigator, they caught a large quantity of cod and ling while waiting for a favourable wind and for the fog to clear.
Pricket gives a graphic description of the topography of the west coast of Iceland as they continued the voyage, passing the most active volcano in Iceland, Mount Hecla, which was ‘spitting out much fire’ a sign, he wrote, indicating bad weather to come. A hot spring was found on the shore, wherein the crew bathed, even though the water was apparently so hot that it would “scald a fowl”.
At the beginning of June 1610, the expedition raised Greenland but were unable to land because of the ice. Pricket gives a graphic description of the ice-fields they had to negotiate, and the icebergs or “islands of ice” one of which they observed overturn – a salutary warning not to approach too close. A quantity of whales was seen, one of which, passing right under the ship, frightened the life out of the crew, who expected to be capsized at any moment. To their chagrin they failed to despatch a polar bear spotted on an ice floe, which had they succeeded in bagging it, would have been a welcome addition to the shipboard diet.
Fortunately for the bear, the ice floe floated it away out of range. In due course the Discovery entered the strait between Baffin Island and Nunavut, later named after Hudson, and on 3rd August entered what we now know as Hudson Bay. The next two months were spent investigating and charting the shores of the Bay, Hudson assiduously naming the various bays, islands and prominent features after members of the Royal family and the nobility. Eventually the ship became ice-bound and had to over-winter in the south-west corner of the Bay.
Hudson then convened a ‘council of war’ with the whole crew and producing a chart, demonstrated to them that they had already reached a point 100 leagues further than any Englishman hitherto had ever sailed, and asked whether once free of the ice they should continue to seek the north-west passage, or give up the expedition and sail for home. Opinion was divided, and there was, Pricket implies, already an ominous undercurrent of grumbling.
No decision was therefore reached, but the first task in any case was to extricate themselves from the ice. This they did succeed in doing after much labour but the hardship and privations the crew had had to endure finally led to open mutiny. The ringleader was Hudson’s ne’er-do-well protégé, one Henry Greene. Hudson was tied up and with his teenage son, the sick members of the crew and several others was forced at gunpoint into the shallop or tender, cast adrift and abandoned to his fate.
The remainder of the crew set sail for home on 22nd June 1611, but not before Greene and several others were killed in a fight with the Inuit. Several more died before the ship reached England in September. The survivors, including Pricket were tried and sent to prison.
The eventual fate of Hudson and his fellow castaways remains unknown to this day.
Further expeditions were undertaken by William Baffin who in the course of five voyages between 1612 and 1616, reached as far as the northern end of the bay dividing Baffin Island and Greenland, which was subsequently named after him, and further expeditions led by Luke Fox and Thomas James established only that there was no passage through the western shore of Hudson Bay.
One result of all this was however the creation of the Hudson’s Bay Company, established to exploit the lucrative trade in furs. By the terms of is charter the Company was bound to continue the search for a viable route from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the north of their territory, and they came in for considerable criticism for failing to do so. To silence that criticism various rather half-hearted sea voyages around Hudson Bay were undertaken, but without result.
Various overland journeys were also organised, the most important being that led in 1771 by Samuel Hearne, who discovered the Coppermine River, which was later to become the route of one of Franklin’s early expeditions. A few years later Sir Alexander Mackenzie discovered the river named after him, to the west of the Coppermine. Captain James Cook, in the course of his third circumnavigation explored western Alaska, and via the Bering Strait reached what he named Icy Cape at the north-western extremity of the peninsula.
The general outline of the North American continent was now bit by bit gradually taking shape. *
Apart from the expeditions I have just mentioned, which followed the period of the greatest discoveries in the 17th century, interest in discovering a polar route then fell into the doldrums for a couple of hundred years.
***
It was not until the 19th century, following the industrial revolution and the huge expansion in international trade, that it became increasingly important to determine whether or not a navigable north-west passage did actually exist between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, through the chain of islands by the most direct route to the north of British North America, as it still was at the time. (As you may well already know, the Dominion of Canada, being the amalgamation of the Provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, was not created until the passing of the British North America Act in 1867).
*
Ship-building, navigation and naval discipline, were all considered to have improved enormously since the search for the elusive North West Passage had been abandoned almost two centuries earlier. By the 19th century, the period we are now concerned with, the discovery of a viable north-western sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific was not any longer so much a question of trade, as of national pride.
The prospect of Russia, already claiming sovereignty over Alaska, getting there first and thus gaining control of northern access to the Pacific, was viewed with considerable alarm at the British Admiralty, and a series of Polar expeditions was therefore launched as a matter of some urgency, in the hope that if such a passage did exist, Britain should be the first in the field. *
A further consideration was that after the victory of Waterloo in 1815, which abruptly ended the Napoleonic Wars, the British Admiralty had on their hands a large pool of experienced and battle-hardened naval officers, many of them at a loose end and on half-pay. So, more for reasons of national prestige and scientific knowledge than from any serious thought of finding a new navigable route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, My Lords of the Admiralty once again turned their attention to the still unresolved question of discovering a North-West Passage.
Captain John Ross, uncle of James Clark Ross of Antarctic fame; William Parry, who led three expeditions, and others penetrated further west and filled some of the blanks on the charts of the complex Arctic archipelago, but none of them actually got far enough west to reach the Bering Strait.
William Parry, who took part in or led more than one of these expeditions, apparently studied the Inuit way of life, the way they dressed, travelled and hunted, but unfortunately failed to draw the conclusion that European explorers in the Arctic might do well to copy the native way of life. This John Rae was to do so successfully in after years.
*
From 1818 to 1859, a very lengthy stretch of the north coast of North America, filling in the gaps between the earlier land-based expeditions, had been mapped. This work was achieved mainly by British explorers including among others, John Ross, William Parry, who was an hydrographer, and James Ross (nephew of John).
John Franklin had also made two perilous overland expeditions, one of them via the Coppermine River, as mentioned earlier, and a third, rather unsatisfactory voyage by sea, during the process making further discoveries; charting a very considerable additional part of that coast and establishing in the process the strong probability (rather than the wishful thinking of earlier times) of a navigable sea route from east to west. Franklin and his companions endured terrible hardships and privations. (They might have suffered less if like John Rae, they had learned and adopted the Inuit survival techniques).
Polar exploration had now become a hot topic, and by 1844 there remained just a short stretch of coastline unexplored. The race to discover that last link was on. Apart from the danger of Russia getting there first, the credit for the discovery of such a link would be an enormous feather in the cap of the nation responsible. Sir John Barrow, promoted to First Secretary at the Admiralty, now aged eighty and about to retire, was very keen to crown his career with the credit for discovering the missing link - the Holy Grail of Polar exploration – the fabled North-West Passage.
However, the British Government, which under Barrow’s aegis had already invested so much in Polar exploration, took some persuading to invest yet more money in this elusive project. And this, even though James Clark Ross’s highly successful expedition to the Antarctic from 1839 to 1843 had given a boost to the official appetite for Arctic exploration. Towards the end of 1834 however, after much vacillation on the part if the British Government, Barrow was at last successful in persuading them to finance one last push.
All naval expeditions were traditionally undertaken in two ships, and this last attempt on the north-west passage was to be no exception. Her Majesty’s Ships Erebus and Terror, sturdy ‘bomb ships,’ veterans of the Napoleonic Wars and recently returned from Ross’s Antarctic expedition, were the obvious choice of vessels and the burning question was then, who should lead such an expedition?
The names of various tried and trusted veterans of Arctic exploration were considered. There was no shortage of interested parties, much intriguing and jockeying for position, and many hopefuls bent the ears of those with influence.
At that time, who you knew rather than necessarily what you knew, was of the utmost importance. Influence was all. Even though nothing was definitely known, rumours abounded, and a good deal of intrigue was going on behind the scenes. One who felt that he had a good chance of being appointed to lead such an expedition if it should go ahead, was James Fitzjames, who though young and relatively untried, was a great friend of Sir John Barrow’s son. Another possible candidate was the Arctic veteran Sir Francis Crozier.
After 1815 Captain John Franklin, as he now was, had been one of the experienced half-pay naval officers I mentioned a moment ago, cooling his heels in England without a command. He had, from the Battle of the Nile to that of Trafalgar, been in the thick of all the major naval engagements of the war against Napoleon, as well as enduring the subsequent hazards of Arctic exploration, and had thus far miraculously escaping unscathed, even though he had had some very narrow squeaks in the course of his overland journeys in the frozen wastes of North America. Following his last land expedition during which starvation loomed for all his crew, Franklin became notorious in the popular imagination as ‘the man who ate his boots.’
At this point we make the acquaintance of Jane, Lady Franklin, who was to play such an important part in subsequent events. She was born in 1792, the eldest of three daughters of John Griffin, a silk-weaver and liveryman of the City of London, descended from a French Huguenot family. John’s father, so the story goes, had been smuggled into England as a young child, concealed in an armoire.
John Griffin was a man of culture, addicted to travel, a passion which he had the means to indulge, and as a widower, he took his young daughters on extended tours of Europe. This wanderlust he passed on to Jane, who fortunately for posterity kept voluminous diaries of her travels for the rest of her life. These diaries are now held, I believe, in the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. She was herself an inveterate traveller and also a prodigious letter-writer - to her husband when they were apart, to her friends and to members of her family. Many of these letters have been preserved, and my great- great-uncle, Willingham Rawnsley published a Life and selection of Jane’s letters which makes fascinating reading.
Jane, still a spinster in her late thirties, was a friend of John Franklin’s first wife Eleanor Porden, who died in 1825, while Franklin was away in the Arctic on his second land expedition to map the coast of North America. It is evident from Jane’s diaries that she had quite an admiration for the dashing Captain Franklin and following his return from the Arctic she made a dead set for him.
They became engaged to be married, and together they took the unusual step for the time of going together on an adventurous trip to Russia before the nuptials were solemnised. The wedding took place in November 1828, when Jane, six years younger than her husband, was already thirty-nine.
Captain Franklin was knighted the following year for his services to Arctic exploration and after two years ashore without a ship, he was given a new command, spending the next three years with HMS Rainbow on duty in the Mediterranean, mainly keeping the peace in Greece, for which service he was decorated by King Otho.
During his absence he and Jane wrote long and frequent letters to each other, and Jane’s very first letter to her husband after he left for the Mediterranean was full of encouragement for him to engage in another expedition to the Arctic.
“All the world knows what you can do,” she wrote, and “deathless glory” would await him, if he could obtain such a post. Prophetic perhaps? … Poor Sir John,…
Although officer’s wives were not allowed on board ship, the couple managed to spend at least one winter together in Corfu, where Lady Franklin, as she had now become, seems to have experienced more than one earthquake; writing to her sister that she had been awakened by the shaking of her bed to and fro. Then all the church bells started ringing, not caused, she says, by the earthquake, but by the ringers who rushed to raise the alarm. Earthquakes in Corfu did not it seems often do much damage. Nonetheless, she wrote,
“Some days previous to the earthquake, the front wall of our house was cracked and the window of the anteroom to our drawing room fell altogether in and was smashed, but this was owing to the firing upon the esplanade upon the Queen’s birthday.”
***
By Christmas 1833 Franklin was back in Portsmouth at the end of his 3-year commission in the Mediterranean, but his wife, still on her travels, was now in Alexandria, preparing to sail up the Nile. She did not return to England until the end of 1834.
Two years later, and still without a commission, Sir John was offered a six-year contract as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, (as Tasmania was then known), at that time a penal colony. This was a posting for which he was perhaps ill-suited, as later events were to demonstrate, but he accepted it with alacrity, and he and Lady Franklin, accompanied by Sir John’s daughter Eleanor, by then a girl of thirteen, and his niece Sophy Cracroft, set sail for the Antipodes.
Sophy would remain with Lady Franklin as her constant companion and amanuensis for the remainder of Jane’s life.
Franklin was not really temperamentally suited to the life in Tasmania, and as a result of various intrigues against him, was eventually recalled, under something of a cloud, but not before both he and his wife had made many welcome improvements to the lives of the settlers and the convicts in particular.
*
Once more back in England, and presumably again on half-pay, Franklin was, despite his terrible near-death experiences on earlier overland expeditions, keen to return to the familiar and uncomplicated world of the Navy. Once he heard that one last expedition in search of the North-West Passage was in the wind, he was more than anxious to go back to the Arctic in order to complete the task of mapping which he had begun years before.
Sir James Ross had evidently been in touch with him on the subject, and had dropped a hint that the expedition was likely to be approved, as on Christmas Eve 1844 Franklin wrote to Ross:
“I purpose going up to London on Thursday next and will then make a point of seeing Sir John Barrow, Beaufort and Parry, I shall go in fact to them for the purpose of enquiring of them how the question stands as to the Expedition and to let them know that providing you do not go in command of it, I hope to do so… If I find that the Expedition, as your note seems to imply, has been approved by the Admiralty and is in course of preparation, I shall certainly offer myself for the Command of it…
A week later, on 31 December, we learn from Franklin’s letter to his wife, that he had just visited Sir William Parry at the Admiralty, who had informed him that nothing definite had yet been decided.
Rumours however were rife, and journalists had obviously been jumping to conclusions, since Franklin ends the letter by observing that “The Times had a short paragraph alluding to the Expedition and says it is to be offered to Ross, and if he declines, the command falls to me.”
Sir James Ross would have been an obvious choice. He however was very recently married and therefore, as he must have hinted to Franklin. had ruled himself out, Captain Francis Crozier, another Arctic veteran would also be a possibility.
All of this remained speculation or wishful thinking right up to the very last possible minute – as James Fitzjames, who had aspirations himself to command any such expedition, should it be decided upon, wrote on 7th February 1845, somewhat peevishly, to his good friend John Barrow Junior,
My dear Barrow,
“I have been very anxious to hear about the Northern business, which I had hoped would be settled last Wednesday. … I have heard that the command of the expedition has been offered to Sir James Ross who has refused it, and that Captain Stokes was to be appointed if Sir John Franklin refused which looks like Captain Stokes going 2nd if Sir John does go.
“ Now Captain Stokes is a Commander very little senior to me and being in an expedition of the sort I should like to go with such men as Franklin and Ross of known experience in icy affairs or in command myself – for I think I could do as well as Captain Stokes…
“Besides all this, he added,
“If the ships be not commissioned immediately and fitted out as quickly as possible, they will be too late to start this year with advantage…
Jumping to conclusions, he went on,
Franklin’s last expedition should sail on the 20th of April and being towed to the ice by a large steamer should arrive off Lancaster Sound where the work is to begin, on 1st July – not a bit too early…
Fitzjames ends the letter:
“I write this in heaviness of heart, for I have now nearly given up all idea of going. This is a great disappointment to me and will be a sad one to those officers who have been hoping to go with me…”
In the event, on the recommendation of Sir James Ross, Franklin was duly appointed to command the expedition. Misgivings about him had been expressed by My Lords of the Admiralty, because of his age – he was already approaching sixty and might have been excused for preferring to retire gracefully on his reputation, but like so many others before and since, he had got the Arctic ‘bug’ and was very keen to go.
On 8th February he wrote to Sir James Ross:
“I have just received your note and give you many thanks for it. I was in the act of writing to you when your note came, to tell you that I had received a note last evening to tell me that I was to have command of the expedition…”
Captain Crozier, himself an Arctic veteran who might well have been considered, had already intimated to Ross that while he did not feel up to the leadership of the expedition, he would be happy to join it as second-in-command to Sir John Franklin. Ross took the hint, and Crozier was duly appointed to command the Terror. HMS Erebus would be Franklin’s flagship.
From then on, events moved at lightning speed. Since this was likely to be the last chance to find that elusive last link in the fabled North-West Passage, the Admiralty pulled out all the stops, and no expense was spared in fitting out the expedition. The hulls of Erebus and Terror already stoutly built as bomb-ships, to resist crushing by ice should they get locked in during the Arctic winter, were reinforced further with an extra thickness of planking; stores sufficient for a three years’ voyage were taken on board and the officers and crews signed on.
The dockyard at Woolwich was day and night a hive of frantic activity, too frequently interrupted by the hordes of visitors who came see how the work was getting on; and to bid farewell to their loved ones.
The young James Fitzjames was given the rank of Commander and was appointed by the Admiralty as second to Franklin in Erebus, a fortunate choice for posterity as many of the long and entertaining letters to his friends and family which have survived are among the principal sources of information about the fitting out of the ships, the characters of the crew, and so on. Around fifty of these letters have been published in the comprehensive and very moving collection of correspondence to and from members of the expedition, published by McGill University in 2022 under the title, May We be Spared to Meet on Earth.
The fitting out being more or less completed, on 12th May Erebus and Terror, quite low in the water from the weight of stores and equipment, with even the crew’s cabins being crammed with supplies so that the occupants had hardly room left to move, left Woolwich dockyard and moved downstream to Greenhithe. Here the crews, with the addition of a monkey, given by Lady Franklin, a dog and a cat, were able to ‘shake down’ and get to know each other.
Many last letters were written and despatched, and the final preparations made for departure. A photographer came aboard at the instance of Lady Franklin and took daguerreotype portraits of Franklin and his officers. Some of these have miraculously survived, and a set was recently sold at auction for £445,000.
On 19th May 1835, just over three months after the decision was made for the expedition to go ahead, HMS Erebus and Terror, fitted out with all the most up-to-date equipment, as well auxiliary steam engines adapted from railway locomotives, finally set sail for the Thames Estuary, in company with the transport ship Baretto Junior.
In spite of contrary winds which slowed their progress, they made quite good time up the east coast with the aid of the steam-powered support vessels Rattler and Monkey. Monkey was however damaged in a gale quite early in the voyage, and was eventually replaced by Blazer, but not until the flotilla reached the latitude of Aberdeen. In fact, the worst weather encountered by the expedition on the whole voyage to Greenland was that experienced on the trip up the east coast of England, when Erebus & Terror due to contrary winds, had ignominiously to be towed most of the way by the indomitable Rattler. After rounding John o’Groats, landfall was eventually made at Stromness, the last port of call in the UK, on 31 May 1845.
The expedition remained at Stromness hardly more than 48 hours, just long enough for the ships to take on final supplementary stores, including some live bullocks, to replace the three which due to the rough weather encountered up the east coast, had died on board. Water was taken on at Logan’s Well. The crew were forbidden shore leave, though it seems possible that Sir John Franklin found the time to go ashore, as tradition has it that he stayed the night with the Hamiltons, John Rae’s sister and brother-in law, and that Rae’s mother was also of the party. (As Bryce Wilson has observed, no doubt Franklin, as a distinguished visitor, would have been showered with invitations during his brief visit to Stromness).
Whether Franklin did indeed take time off ashore to visit the Hamiltons; remains, in the absence of any concrete evidence, an open question. It does however seem rather unlikely that he found time to leave the Erebus at all, in view of all the last-minute paperwork and preparations that he had to deal with before the final departure. If he did indeed dine ashore, it is even more surprising that he did not mention it in the surviving letter to his wife, posted from Stromness.
Never mind – it remains a charming idea!
Last letters were received and despatched, a rousing farewell dinner for the crews was held on board, and early in the morning of June 3rd, 1845, the fleet, consisting of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, with the two steamers Rattler and Blazer and the supply ship Baretto Junior set sail from Stromness for the coast of Greenland. The flotilla must have presented a fine spectacle to those assembled on shore to see them off.
Rattler and Blazer left the expedition’s ships off the island of Rona. The Baretto Junior accompanied Erebus and Terror as far as Whalefish Island, off the west coast of Greenland, where the stores were transferred, and on 12th July the last mailbags were transferred to the supply ship before she left to return to England. In the very last letter, from Charles Osmer to his wife, he wrote:
“At the last moment I have just that time to say God bless you. The transport is now four miles out of the harbour whilst I write these few lines. I shall get on board the Erebus by 12 o’clock tonight. 296 icebergs in sight from the masthead.”
Erebus & Terror with their crews full of hope and optimism for the success of the venture, set off the next day for the Arctic.
Thereafter, apart from a couple of sightings by whalers, the whole expedition disappeared off the face of the earth.
Though of course nobody for a moment considered it a possibility, neither Franklin nor any of his crew would ever see their homeland again.
To begin with nobody at home was too worried as to the lack of communication, since it was likely that the ships would have to overwinter in the ice before they had completed their mission and might well not make it home for at least two years.
The Royal Navy had intimated to the crews that they would accept and endeavour to deliver letters when opportunity afforded.
As the ships had still not returned by January 1848 the first mailbags were sent out with HMS Plover and the North Star. Neither ship found any trace of the expedition and all the letters were accordingly returned undelivered. Later on, letters were despatched with the various search expeditions on the off chance that they might be picked up, but these too were brought back undelivered and were all returned to sender.
In 1845, as was learned much later, Franklin, fortunately for him perhaps, died during the voyage. As a result, although posthumously credited with the discovery of the North-West Passage, he escaped the terrible fate of the remainder of his crew.
So there, as the expedition, full of hope and enthusiasm, disappears into oblivion, we leave them.**
Dr. John Rae awaits us tomorrow.
