Franklin's Lost Expedition

After he joined the Navy at 14, Sir John Franklin traveled the world and eventually became the governor of Tanzania. In 1846, he set off to explore the Arctic -- and never returned. Learn more about the mystery in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and joining me today is Sarah Dowdy.
How are you, Sarah. I'm good, Katie good. We keep
getting emails requesting more about Canadian history and I have

(00:24):
something close to Canadian history today, kooky Arctic mystery. So
we're gonna go ahead and say that counts. We're talking
about Sir John Franklin's Lost Expedition. John Franklin was one
of twelve kids and his parents wanted him to become
a clergyman, but he loved the sea and he was
absolutely sure that was his destiny from a young age.

(00:44):
So he entered the Royal Navy at fourteen, where he
had a varied career. He took part in expeditions to Australia,
he fought in the Battle of Trafalgar, and he commanded
the Trent on an eighteen eighteen Arctic expedition in an
attempt to reach the North Pole. And from eighteen eighteen

(01:05):
to eighteen twenty two he conducted an overland expedition from
Hudson Bay to the Arctic. I think and surveyed part
of the coast, the parts that people had never seen before,
a large swath of the coast, and published a book
about it, the Narrative of a Journey to the Shores
of the Polar Sea, and did another narrative a few
years later after a second overland expedition in the same region.

(01:29):
And during this time it was post Napoleonic Wars. The
British Navy really needed something to do, basically, and they
needed a purpose. Yeah, And so largely thanks to Sir
John Barrow, they decided their purpose was going to be
to navigate the Northwest Passage. And the Northwest Passage has

(01:49):
been an idea floated around since Elizabethan times even but
it was essentially that there was a way to take
a ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific, going above Canada,
and they knew it was there somewhere, they just didn't
know where. Somewhere in all that ice between all those islands,

(02:12):
they knew there was a way, but it took a
very long time to find it, and even longer to
actually navigate it. So in eighteen forty five they decide
they're going to launch another expedition, and Franklin is not
their first choice. Because he's older. He's fifty nine, and
they think that might be too old for someone who's

(02:34):
going to be in such strenuous conditions. Yeah, it's basically
seemed like his naval career was over. He's been the
governor of Tasmania for several years, he's been knighted. It
doesn't seem like he's the man to choose for your
Arctic expedition. But he's convinced that he's the right one.
And I think someone said something to him about being

(02:55):
sixty and he said, no, no, I'm fifty nine, with
to make that clear. So it's a go, and Franklin
is their choice. And the ships they were going to
take were state of the art at the time. They
had iron reinforced halls and steam engines. They were very
well equipped. Yeah, they have three years worth of canned

(03:18):
food on board, which partly ends up being a problem,
but we'll get to that. Um. So they dock in
Greenland in July of eight and they sent home a
few men and a batch of letters. If you were
one of the men to be sent home there, you
were very lucky because things didn't go well from there

(03:41):
on out. The last sighting of them is by British
whalers north of Baffin Island at the entrance to Lancaster
Sound in July of eighteen forty five, and then they
disappear and go completely off the map. So what happened?
Search parties were sent in eighteen forty seven to and
through that exact question, because two years was too long.

(04:02):
They should have heard something by now, and the searches
keep going. Yeah, by eighteen fifty as many as fourteen
ships were in the area at the same time looking
for them. This turned out to be kind of the
romantic adventure of the age searching for Franklin and his
lost crew, and consequently a lot of information about the

(04:24):
Northwest Passage was discovered during these rescue attempts. But we're
going to kind of give the overview of what happened
to Franklin and his men during this time. This was
all pieced together over years and years. But I'm something
like thirty expeditions to find them. They each came back
with a little pieces. Yeah. So by in eighty five

(04:48):
to six they winter at Beechey Island and three crewmen
die there and they started with a dred and twenty
nine people. Yeah, so the numbers are are dwindling slowly. Yeah.
In eighteen forty six, these ships which are named Erebus
and Terror not a good name. Four ships leave Beechy

(05:08):
Island and they sail down Peel Sound to King William Island,
and then by September of eighteen forty six, the ships
get trapped in the ice off of King William Island
in Victoria Street, um and so they winter there. And
there's a note that was found later, uh from May

(05:29):
forty seven saying that things were okay, you know, they
were stuck in the ice still, but it was going
all right. But on June eleven, eighteen forty seven, as
close as we can tell, Franklin died. And he is
the head of everything of the whole expedition, and he's
one of very few men and the crew who actually
has Arctic experience. And things get bad then because that's

(05:53):
when the ice from the winter should have thought and
they should have been able to move on, and it doesn't,
so they winter again on King William Island. Obviously, there
are questions of food that are going to come up soon,
so they have to start making difficult decisions in the
next year about what they're going to do, and they
abandoned their ships on April eighteen forty eight and decide

(06:17):
to try to make a go of it, and in
a note that was later found um, by April four
men had died and the survivors were marching south to
the Black River, and things got very messy there. Uh
they resorted to cannibalism and a lot of them were

(06:41):
addled by what later looked like lead poisoning um. And
some people say the lead poisoning as a result of
poorly tinned foods. The foods were apparently supplied by kind
of a cut rate dealer and lead was supposed to
have really dripped into the cans from the soldering. But

(07:04):
an author of ice Blank Scott Cookman, actually has a
different theory and he thinks that botuli is um in
the cans caused all of the mental and physical issues
that happened and was responsible for why these men died
on the ice, not on the ship, on the ice
when they were away from reliable cooking sources, because proper

(07:29):
heating will that kills the cluster dam spores that if
they don't have a stove head on the ice, and
maybe you have a dinky little stove or not a
stove at all, and so he kind of thought that
explained why they all die out there and not on
the ships. And there were there was also evidence of scurvy,
which is what happens when you don't get enough vitamin C,

(07:49):
and scurvy and lead poisoning lead to the same kinds
of weakness that make you unable to do the hard
work that's necessary to do. And they weren't. They weren't
adopting Inuit ways of dealing with the weather, and they
were carrying lots of unnecessary supplies with them, so it

(08:13):
was not they weren't equipped for an overland expedition. The
list of their supplies I wish I had it on
me is just so strange. It wasn't at all survival stuff.
It was things like books. Silver, Yes, you don't need
silver if you're trapped in the Arctic, for future reference
for all our listeners, don't bring the silver. The first

(08:34):
search for Franklin goes out in eighteen forty seven. The
first official search isn't until eighteen forty eight, and over
the years a lot of the expeditions get very close
to where Franklin ships were actually abandoned, but there's a
lot of delay, and one of the reasons is when
ships were over there looking at Peel Sound where the

(08:57):
boats went, it seemed impos possible that they could have
gone in that direction because the ice cover was so heavy,
so they just skipped over it. And of course there
was a huge cold snap going on in the Arctic
at this time too, so these weren't normal conditions for
that area. The early searches turned up some accounts from
Inuit who had seen the explorers and had stories about

(09:22):
starving men. There's even one account that was taken much
much later from an Inuit in nine saying that, uh,
some of the boats were remainned, and they knew of
large vessels that lay on the other side of the island,
basically far away from where they're supposed to have been.

(09:43):
And they also said that because the winter was so cold,
they too were having a really hard time finding food
and hunting. So if the crew was depending on the
locals for food, they didn't have any to give well,
and it's likely that the crew wouldn't ask for help
to they there were sales sufficient. British men and the
Royal Navy men exactly in the process of the search,

(10:06):
the Northwest Passage is actually completed, although it's by several
ships and led it's not completed by the way one
ship until the twentieth century, I believe. UM. But in
eighteen fifty nine there is a very important search mission
sent out. The Royal Navy was effectively done with this

(10:29):
after getting looking for years. Yeah, and then they felt
like they had gotten a gotten back enough information about
the men. But Franklin's widow wasn't satisfied. Jane Lady Franklin,
was the first woman to receive the Founder's Medal of
the Royal Geographical Society because of everything she'd done to
organize these expeditions. She was determined that they would at

(10:50):
least find some concrete proof that the men were dead.
So she hires Captain Francis Leopold McClintock, who had actually
been on several earlier search missions UM and during some
of those had really developed the art of sledging across
the land and learned a lot of the Inuit customs

(11:15):
and helped prepare future Arctic explorers for conditions. And he
was very effective because he used all of these other
resources and his crew found skeletons of the Franklin expedition.
I think only four of them. Yeah, But most importantly
he finds that note UM, which has the first message

(11:38):
message saying that everything is okay, and then the later
message abandoning ship, lots of people dying were walking. Um
finds it in a pile of stones on the icy island.
It's very creepy it is, and I we'll never know
entirely what happened. These are just again what historians and

(12:01):
scientists are able to piece together from the evidence that
they had. So there are things were sure of, like
there was too much lead in the bodies, there was
evidence of scurvy. There was definitely cannibalism from what they
can tell from the bones. But some of it will
never quite know. And very strange thing to think of
today is um icebreaker luxury cruises go right up by

(12:24):
the island where they all died. Now, Um, it's strange
to think how accessible all that is. And actually the
Northwest Passage is open. Uh. It first opened in two
thousand seven enough ice had melted that it was considered
fully navigable, and it happened again in two thousand eight
along with the northeast passage, which made the North Pole

(12:48):
circumnavigable for the first time in hundred and twenty five
thousand years. That's insane. See, that's why we need your
green knowledge on the podcast. And I'll end with a
memorial by Tennyson, who was a kinsman through marriage to Franklin.
And he said, not here the white North has thy bones,
and the heroic sailor soul aren't passing online happier voyage

(13:11):
now towards no earthly pole. And you had mentioned a
rather ironic fact that happened from that memorial poem. Yeah,
another ill fated polar explorer, the American Adolphus Greely, became
fascinated by the Arctic by a visit to London where
he read those words. So does it happens when you
were mentioning tragedy? So if you like to learn more

(13:35):
about survival, we've got all kinds of survival articles on
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(13:57):
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