Franklin Expedition Lost
In 1845 a British naval expedition under Sir John Franklin sailed into the Canadian Arctic to complete the Northwest Passage, a sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of North America. Neither ship returned, and all 129 men perished. The disaster became one of the most famous catastrophes in the history of exploration, and it shaped both Arctic geography and Victorian public memory.
The search for the passage had been a British ambition for centuries, and after the Napoleonic Wars the Royal Navy revived it with energy. Franklin was a veteran of earlier Arctic overland expeditions, which he had survived in the 1819-22 journey at terrible cost to his men, and he had later served as governor of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). Aged about 59, he was given command of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, both sturdy ships with experience in polar waters. They were fitted with auxiliary steam engines and stocked with supplies for several years. The expedition left England in May 1845, and was last seen by Europeans in Baffin Bay in the summer of that year.
When no word came, concern grew, and from the late 1840s a series of search parties was dispatched by the Admiralty, Lady Jane Franklin, and others. These efforts mapped much of the Arctic archipelago. The first firm evidence came from the 1850 discovery of Franklin's first winter camp on Beechey Island, with three graves. A key find came in 1859, when a search led by Francis Leopold McClintock recovered a note in a cairn on King William Island. It indicated that the ships had been trapped in ice off the island's coast since 1846, and that Franklin had died in June 1847. The surviving crew, under Francis Crozier, abandoned the ships in April 1848 and set out south on foot.
The precise causes of the deaths remain debated. Cold, starvation, scurvy, and illness such as tuberculosis probably all played a part, and lead poisoning from food tins or water systems has been proposed, though its importance is disputed. Inuit accounts collected by explorers such as John Rae, and later physical remains showing cut marks on bones, suggest that some survivors resorted to cannibalism, a claim that outraged many in Britain at the time.
The expedition's legacy is large. The searches produced significant geographic knowledge, and Franklin was officially credited, somewhat controversially, with discovering the passage. Inuit oral history proved valuable in later research. The wrecks were located in the twenty-first century: Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016, both in Canadian waters, opening a new chapter of archaeological study.