December 29, 2014 • 25 mins
On September 1, 2014, a team of searchers discovered artifacts from the Franklin Expedition. Over the course of seven dives, additional artifacts from the Erebus were recovered. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I think
the thing we got the most email about from listeners
this year was about the discovery of one of the
(00:23):
Franklin Expeditions lost ships. Uh, we got a ton of
email about it, and especially because that story continued to
develop after they found one of the ships. So now
that we're into our year in unearthing season who is
it's a little longer this year than normal because there
are some things that are there's a lot to talk about. Uh.
(00:44):
It seemed like a good time to update our previous
episode because we already had one in the archive about
the Franklin expedition. So that episode is from the Katie
and Sarah era of the podcast. For those of you
who have not already heard the story, what we're gonna
do is, first we're into replay that Katie and Sarah
episode to let them tell you about Franklin's efforts to
(01:05):
find the Northwest Passage and what likely happened to him
and his crew. Then we will come back and Holly
and I will talk about the discoveries from and we'll
we'll have our regular listener mail and all of that.
If you have already heard this episode from Katie and
Sarah and you don't want to listen to it again,
you can skip ahead. It is approximately fourteen minutes long.
(01:31):
We keep getting emails requesting more about Canadian history, and
I have something close to Canadian history today, spooky 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
(01:53):
was absolutely sure that was his destinate from a young age.
So he entered the Royal Navy at fourteen, where he
had a buried 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
(02:17):
to eighteen twenty two he conducted an overland expedition from
Hudson Bay to the Arctic, I think, and surveyed part
of the coast, parts that people had never seen before,
a large swap 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.
(02:41):
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
(03:02):
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.
(03:24):
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 decided
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
(03:46):
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
(04:07):
sixty and he said, no, no, I'm nine. Let's 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,
(04:28):
they have three years worth of canned food on board,
which partly ends up being a problem, but we'll get
to that. So they dock in Greenland in July and
they send 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
(04:52):
well from there 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 answer that exact question, because two years was
(05:14):
too long. 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
(05:36):
about the 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
something like thirty expeditions to find them. They each came
back with a little pieces. So by in eighteen forty
(05:59):
five to six they winter at Beechey Island and three
crewmen died there and they started with twenty nine people.
The numbers are are dwindling slowly. In eighteen forty six,
these ships, which are named Erebus and Terror, not a
good name for ships, leave Beechy Island and they sailed
(06:22):
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 forty seven saying
(06:43):
that things were okay, you know, it was 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 are actually has
Arctic experience. And things get bad then because that's when
(07:05):
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 eighty eight and decide to
(07:29):
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
(07:49):
resorted to cannibalism and a lot of them were addled
by what later looked like lead poisoning um. And some
people say the lead poisoning as a result of poorly
tinned foods. Right, the foods were apparently supplied by kind
of a cut rate dealer, and lead was supposed to
(08:11):
have actually dripped into the cans from the soldering. But
an author of Ice Blank Scott Cookman, actually has a
different fury 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
(08:32):
on the ice, not on the ship, on the ice
when they were away from reliable cooking sources, because proper
heating will that kills the cluster dam spores. But if
they don't have a stove, if you're head on the ice,
and maybe you have a dinky little stove or not
a stove at all, and so he kind of thought
(08:53):
that explained why they all die out there and not
on the ship. And there were there was also evidence
of scurvy, which is what happens when you don't get
enough vitamin C, 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 day life.
(09:13):
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 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,
(09:39):
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 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
(10:01):
a lot of delay, and one of the reasons is
when ships were over there looking at Peel Sound where
the boats went, it seemed impossible 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
(10:24):
that area. The early searches turned up some accounts from
Inuit who had seen the explorers and had stories about
starving men. There was even one account that was taken
much much later from an Inuit in saying that, uh,
some of the boats were remainned, and they knew of
(10:48):
large vessels that lay on the other side of the island,
basically far away from where they're supposed to have been.
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
(11:10):
to there were sufficient British men, the Royal Navy men
exactly in the process of the search the Northwest Passage
is actually completed, although it's by several ships and fled.
It's not completed by the way one ship until the
twentieth century, I believe UM. But in eighteen fifty nine
(11:34):
there is a very important search mission sent out. The
Royal Navy was effectively done with this after getting looking
for years, 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
(11:54):
to receive the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society
because of everything she done to organize the expeditions. She
was determined that they would at least find some concrete
proof that the men were dead. So she hires Captain
Francis Leopold McClintock, who had actually been on several earlier
(12:14):
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 and helped prepare future
Arctic explorers for conditions. And he was very effective because
he used all of these other resources and his crew
(12:38):
found skeletons of the Franklin expedition. I think only four
of them. But most importantly he finds that note um,
which has the first 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
(13:03):
stones on the ice the island. It's very creepy, it is,
and we'll never know entirely what happened. These are just
again what historians and 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's definitely cannibalism
when they can tell from the bones. But some of
(13:24):
it will never quite know. And very strange thing to
think of today is uh icebreaker luxury cruises go right
up by 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
(13:48):
in two thousand seven enough if 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 circumnavigable for the first time in hundred and
twenty five thousand years. That doesn't sane. See, that's why
we need your green knowledge on the podcast. And I'll
(14:11):
end with the 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's soul
aren't passing online. Happier voyage now towards the earthly Pole.
And you had mentioned a rather ironic fact that happened
from that memorial poem. Yeah, another ill fated polar explorer,
(14:33):
the American Adolphus really became fascinated by the Arctic by
a visit to London where he read those rooms. So Holly,
before we get into what they found about this expedition
in let's take a brief word from a sponsor that
sounds grant, and now we will get back to Franklin's expedition.
(14:57):
Although the searches for frank Glenn's expedition actually started way
back in eighteen forty eight, when nobody had heard from
them for about three years, the effort that found the
Arabis actually started in two thousand and eight and was
headed up by Parks Canada uh the X. The expedition
that found the ship is called the Victoria Straight Expedition
(15:18):
and there are a lot of people, departments and agencies,
both public and private involved in it. The Canadian Hydrographic
Service is using multi beam sonar to map the sea floor,
and that's a project that would have gone on regardless
of the search for the expedition since it's important to
nautical safety. The Canadian Coast Guard helps support the search
(15:39):
teams overall while also working to protect the local communities
in ecosystem. The Russian ship Academics Sergey Vavlov acted as
a platform for an underwater survey vehicle. Otherwise, the four
primary ships in this expedition are the Canadian Coast Guard
CCGs Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Royal Canadian in Navy's h
(16:01):
MCS Kingston, the Arctic Research Foundation's research vessel Martin Bergmann,
and One Ocean Expeditions one Ocean Voyager. There are also
some smaller survey vessels involved along with a Canadian made
underwater autonomous vehicle, and satellite imagery is involved also from
Canadian Space Agency's Radar SAT to satellite on September one,
(16:27):
a team of three searchers headed by archaeologist Doug Stanton,
discovered a couple of artifacts from the Franklin expedition on
Hat Island, and that's in the territory of Nunavut, not
far southwest of King William Island. These were an iron
fitting and what appeared to be a wooden plug, and
we're called quote the first artifacts found in modern times.
(16:49):
Then on September seven, the Underwater Autonomous Vehicle, which had
been acquired pretty recently by Parks Canada, spotted what was
definitely one of Franklin's two ships in the waters of Victoria,
straight just off of King William Island. And this matched
Intuit oral history as well as testimony taken from Intuit
witnesses in the late eighteen forties which put one of
(17:12):
Franklin's ships sinking to the west of King William Island,
with the other sinking farther to the south. In other words,
it was where the indigenous population had said it would
be all along well linked to some sites that have
pictures in the show notes, because it's pretty incredible how
much detail is in the sonar images that technology has
(17:33):
come in an enormously long way in the last few decades,
and without those improvements it would have been basically still
impossible to find a ship. So congratulations and praise rolled
in from Prime Minister Stephen Harper as well as from
Queen Elizabeth. Overall, the wreckage that was found on the
seventh looks to be in fantastic condition, with minimal damage
(17:53):
to the deck and only a little damage to the hull.
The masks had been sheered away, but researchers were really
hope full that much of the ship's contents would be
found intact. The first dive to the site took place
on September seventeen, and seven dives took place over the
course of two days. Thanks to the work of divers,
sonar imagery, high resolution photos and videos, and examination of
(18:16):
the artifacts, researchers were able to definitively conclude that the
ship was the Erebus on septem Among the artifacts, the
ship's bell was found intact during the very first dive.
It was brought up to the surface during the last
dive down to the vessel, and then it was sent
to the Parks Canada Archaeological Conservation Laboratory in Ottawa. It
(18:39):
had to stay wet the entire time so that it
wouldn't deteriorate on the way. The conservation efforts on the
bell are expected to take about eighteen months, and as
of when we recorded this, the terror has not been
located as a total. Side note, one of the other
jobs of this expedition and was re entering remains that
(19:03):
had been exhumed for research purposes previously, so I thought
that was an interesting side point. Do you have a
listener mail? Uh. We got several comments and emails following
our episode on the Verreaux Brothers, which was actually one
that Holly researched and did all of the outlining for.
But a lot of the commentary we were getting was
(19:25):
stuff I said off secript, which was basically that I
found it particularly horrifying and terrible that a couple of
people dug up a man from his recently interred grave
and then taxidermied him. Were an animal, right, So they're
(19:46):
sort of a selection. The first is from Katie, and
Katie says, I just finished the podcast on the Verreau Brothers,
and I agree with the injustice and distaste of applying
taxidermy to a human, particularly when there was no consent. However,
I've also wondered about this in the context of mummies
found it ain't Egypt. I acknowledge that these are different situations,
but the subject reminded me of it. We know a
(20:07):
significant amount about Egyptian sceneial practices and beliefs. It is
clear that they did not want their remains disturbed, but
I've never heard of anyone having qualms about displaying them.
It just seems to be accepted as standard. Of course,
I'm not against archaeological digs and artifact recovery, but the
actual display of the remains seemed to go far past
the normal ideas of respect for the dead. Anyway, I
(20:28):
just wondered what your thought was on the issue here.
I have been enjoying the podcast for several years now,
and thank you all for the great work that you do. Uh.
The next comment was actually from when we put the
show notes post on our Facebook, and it started with
a comment from Lee. Lee says, I was surprised that
no mention was made of the current Body World's exhibit
(20:49):
with the real human bodies treated in plastic scene. They
donated their bodies to science, but they are still real
form of humans on display. His body. Worlds are more immoral.
I know Botswada Man didn't volunteer to be displayed, but
then again, I've seen real mummies displayed at a museum
which were definitely gray robbed, but I didn't hear any
mention of how immoral that was. As length of time
(21:09):
dead the key to whether or not it's okay to
display dead bodies. I kind of responded to that, and
then one of the responses that I got to that
response was, I'm not sure I see the difference between
this gray robbing and a mummy. I think that the
display of mummies is gray robbing. How the body was
prepared for burial or interment is irrelevant. The point is
that the person and the person's family and friends intended
(21:32):
the body to remain where it was, so sort of
address all of this at once. There is actually a
lot of discussion about whether it's appropriate to display mummies
and museums. If you like google mummy ethics, yeah, you'll
get lots of discussion about that. I think that is
a worthwhile thing to talk about and a worthwhile thing
(21:53):
to consider. Like even the entire field of archaeology, there's
a lot of discussion about like what is archaeology, what
is grave robbing? Where is that line? Uh? I don't
know if I can come to a real decision about
how I feel about that particular aspect of it. There's
just a lot going on in terms of uh, everything
(22:15):
from colonialism to genuinely educating people about the past. So
what I do want to say is that that is
completely different in in the sense of scale from to
be totally blunt white people digging up an African person
(22:37):
and treating him as though he were an animal and
putting that in a museum as would be done with
animals like that is not the same thing. The mindset
there was kind of look at this exotic specimen and
it was not even this is a human necessarily right.
(23:00):
They really treated him as a subspecies, like a species
lesser than them, after they had just attended his funeral. Yeah,
a lot of the same issues and ideas are present
in both things. Like a lot of the removal of
mummies done from Egyptian pyramids was done by white people,
(23:23):
and there are elements of race and colonialism and sort
of feeling entitled to just take artifacts from a place
like That's there are definitely elements of those two things.
But it's like, to me, unquestionably worse for uh, somebody
to dig up a person recently buried and then treat
(23:43):
him as though he were an animal, especially given the
greater context of race in the world. So we are
not ignorant of mummies. There's definitely a whole, huge, separate
discussion or argue meant to have about mummies and and
what the ethics are of that. Uh. It is just
(24:05):
not the same thing as the racist horror of mounting
a black person as though he were an animal. And
that is my rant about that. So I completely understand
why people would connect it with mummies, but it's it's
just a different it's a far cry. So if you
(24:29):
would like to write to us, perhaps to yell at
me about what I just said or something else I
don't know, you can write to us for a history
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(24:49):
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If you would like to learn a little more about
what we talked about today, come to our arrant company's website,
which is how stuff works dot com. Plunk the words
Franklin Expedition into the search bar you will find ten
true stories of survival cannibalism. You can also come to
(25:11):
our website where we're gonna definitely in the show notes
for this link up some awesome pictures of what this
ship looks like under the water. We also have an
archive of every episode and that is at missing history
dot com. So you can do all that stuff and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or miss in history dot com. For more on this
(25:34):
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. I think
the thing we got the most email about from listeners
this year was about the discovery of one of the
(00:23):
Franklin Expeditions lost ships. Uh, we got a ton of
email about it, and especially because that story continued to
develop after they found one of the ships. So now
that we're into our year in unearthing season who is
it's a little longer this year than normal because there
are some things that are there's a lot to talk about. Uh.
(00:44):
It seemed like a good time to update our previous
episode because we already had one in the archive about
the Franklin expedition. So that episode is from the Katie
and Sarah era of the podcast. For those of you
who have not already heard the story, what we're gonna
do is, first we're into replay that Katie and Sarah
episode to let them tell you about Franklin's efforts to
(01:05):
find the Northwest Passage and what likely happened to him
and his crew. Then we will come back and Holly
and I will talk about the discoveries from and we'll
we'll have our regular listener mail and all of that.
If you have already heard this episode from Katie and
Sarah and you don't want to listen to it again,
you can skip ahead. It is approximately fourteen minutes long.
(01:31):
We keep getting emails requesting more about Canadian history, and
I have something close to Canadian history today, spooky 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
(01:53):
was absolutely sure that was his destinate from a young age.
So he entered the Royal Navy at fourteen, where he
had a buried 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
(02:17):
to eighteen twenty two he conducted an overland expedition from
Hudson Bay to the Arctic, I think, and surveyed part
of the coast, parts that people had never seen before,
a large swap 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.
(02:41):
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
(03:02):
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.
(03:24):
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 decided
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
(03:46):
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
(04:07):
sixty and he said, no, no, I'm nine. Let's 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,
(04:28):
they have three years worth of canned food on board,
which partly ends up being a problem, but we'll get
to that. So they dock in Greenland in July and
they send 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
(04:52):
well from there 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 answer that exact question, because two years was
(05:14):
too long. 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
(05:36):
about the 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
something like thirty expeditions to find them. They each came
back with a little pieces. So by in eighteen forty
(05:59):
five to six they winter at Beechey Island and three
crewmen died there and they started with twenty nine people.
The numbers are are dwindling slowly. In eighteen forty six,
these ships, which are named Erebus and Terror, not a
good name for ships, leave Beechy Island and they sailed
(06:22):
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 forty seven saying
(06:43):
that things were okay, you know, it was 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 are actually has
Arctic experience. And things get bad then because that's when
(07:05):
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 eighty eight and decide to
(07:29):
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
(07:49):
resorted to cannibalism and a lot of them were addled
by what later looked like lead poisoning um. And some
people say the lead poisoning as a result of poorly
tinned foods. Right, the foods were apparently supplied by kind
of a cut rate dealer, and lead was supposed to
(08:11):
have actually dripped into the cans from the soldering. But
an author of Ice Blank Scott Cookman, actually has a
different fury 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
(08:32):
on the ice, not on the ship, on the ice
when they were away from reliable cooking sources, because proper
heating will that kills the cluster dam spores. But if
they don't have a stove, if you're head on the ice,
and maybe you have a dinky little stove or not
a stove at all, and so he kind of thought
(08:53):
that explained why they all die out there and not
on the ship. And there were there was also evidence
of scurvy, which is what happens when you don't get
enough vitamin C, 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 day life.
(09:13):
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 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,
(09:39):
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 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
(10:01):
a lot of delay, and one of the reasons is
when ships were over there looking at Peel Sound where
the boats went, it seemed impossible 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
(10:24):
that area. The early searches turned up some accounts from
Inuit who had seen the explorers and had stories about
starving men. There was even one account that was taken
much much later from an Inuit in saying that, uh,
some of the boats were remainned, and they knew of
(10:48):
large vessels that lay on the other side of the island,
basically far away from where they're supposed to have been.
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
(11:10):
to there were sufficient British men, the Royal Navy men
exactly in the process of the search the Northwest Passage
is actually completed, although it's by several ships and fled.
It's not completed by the way one ship until the
twentieth century, I believe UM. But in eighteen fifty nine
(11:34):
there is a very important search mission sent out. The
Royal Navy was effectively done with this after getting looking
for years, 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
(11:54):
to receive the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society
because of everything she done to organize the expeditions. She
was determined that they would at least find some concrete
proof that the men were dead. So she hires Captain
Francis Leopold McClintock, who had actually been on several earlier
(12:14):
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 and helped prepare future
Arctic explorers for conditions. And he was very effective because
he used all of these other resources and his crew
(12:38):
found skeletons of the Franklin expedition. I think only four
of them. But most importantly he finds that note um,
which has the first 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
(13:03):
stones on the ice the island. It's very creepy, it is,
and we'll never know entirely what happened. These are just
again what historians and 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's definitely cannibalism
when they can tell from the bones. But some of
(13:24):
it will never quite know. And very strange thing to
think of today is uh icebreaker luxury cruises go right
up by 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
(13:48):
in two thousand seven enough if 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 circumnavigable for the first time in hundred and
twenty five thousand years. That doesn't sane. See, that's why
we need your green knowledge on the podcast. And I'll
(14:11):
end with the 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's soul
aren't passing online. Happier voyage now towards the earthly Pole.
And you had mentioned a rather ironic fact that happened
from that memorial poem. Yeah, another ill fated polar explorer,
(14:33):
the American Adolphus really became fascinated by the Arctic by
a visit to London where he read those rooms. So Holly,
before we get into what they found about this expedition
in let's take a brief word from a sponsor that
sounds grant, and now we will get back to Franklin's expedition.
(14:57):
Although the searches for frank Glenn's expedition actually started way
back in eighteen forty eight, when nobody had heard from
them for about three years, the effort that found the
Arabis actually started in two thousand and eight and was
headed up by Parks Canada uh the X. The expedition
that found the ship is called the Victoria Straight Expedition
(15:18):
and there are a lot of people, departments and agencies,
both public and private involved in it. The Canadian Hydrographic
Service is using multi beam sonar to map the sea floor,
and that's a project that would have gone on regardless
of the search for the expedition since it's important to
nautical safety. The Canadian Coast Guard helps support the search
(15:39):
teams overall while also working to protect the local communities
in ecosystem. The Russian ship Academics Sergey Vavlov acted as
a platform for an underwater survey vehicle. Otherwise, the four
primary ships in this expedition are the Canadian Coast Guard
CCGs Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Royal Canadian in Navy's h
(16:01):
MCS Kingston, the Arctic Research Foundation's research vessel Martin Bergmann,
and One Ocean Expeditions one Ocean Voyager. There are also
some smaller survey vessels involved along with a Canadian made
underwater autonomous vehicle, and satellite imagery is involved also from
Canadian Space Agency's Radar SAT to satellite on September one,
(16:27):
a team of three searchers headed by archaeologist Doug Stanton,
discovered a couple of artifacts from the Franklin expedition on
Hat Island, and that's in the territory of Nunavut, not
far southwest of King William Island. These were an iron
fitting and what appeared to be a wooden plug, and
we're called quote the first artifacts found in modern times.
(16:49):
Then on September seven, the Underwater Autonomous Vehicle, which had
been acquired pretty recently by Parks Canada, spotted what was
definitely one of Franklin's two ships in the waters of Victoria,
straight just off of King William Island. And this matched
Intuit oral history as well as testimony taken from Intuit
witnesses in the late eighteen forties which put one of
(17:12):
Franklin's ships sinking to the west of King William Island,
with the other sinking farther to the south. In other words,
it was where the indigenous population had said it would
be all along well linked to some sites that have
pictures in the show notes, because it's pretty incredible how
much detail is in the sonar images that technology has
(17:33):
come in an enormously long way in the last few decades,
and without those improvements it would have been basically still
impossible to find a ship. So congratulations and praise rolled
in from Prime Minister Stephen Harper as well as from
Queen Elizabeth. Overall, the wreckage that was found on the
seventh looks to be in fantastic condition, with minimal damage
(17:53):
to the deck and only a little damage to the hull.
The masks had been sheered away, but researchers were really
hope full that much of the ship's contents would be
found intact. The first dive to the site took place
on September seventeen, and seven dives took place over the
course of two days. Thanks to the work of divers,
sonar imagery, high resolution photos and videos, and examination of
(18:16):
the artifacts, researchers were able to definitively conclude that the
ship was the Erebus on septem Among the artifacts, the
ship's bell was found intact during the very first dive.
It was brought up to the surface during the last
dive down to the vessel, and then it was sent
to the Parks Canada Archaeological Conservation Laboratory in Ottawa. It
(18:39):
had to stay wet the entire time so that it
wouldn't deteriorate on the way. The conservation efforts on the
bell are expected to take about eighteen months, and as
of when we recorded this, the terror has not been
located as a total. Side note, one of the other
jobs of this expedition and was re entering remains that
(19:03):
had been exhumed for research purposes previously, so I thought
that was an interesting side point. Do you have a
listener mail? Uh. We got several comments and emails following
our episode on the Verreaux Brothers, which was actually one
that Holly researched and did all of the outlining for.
But a lot of the commentary we were getting was
(19:25):
stuff I said off secript, which was basically that I
found it particularly horrifying and terrible that a couple of
people dug up a man from his recently interred grave
and then taxidermied him. Were an animal, right, So they're
(19:46):
sort of a selection. The first is from Katie, and
Katie says, I just finished the podcast on the Verreau Brothers,
and I agree with the injustice and distaste of applying
taxidermy to a human, particularly when there was no consent. However,
I've also wondered about this in the context of mummies
found it ain't Egypt. I acknowledge that these are different situations,
but the subject reminded me of it. We know a
(20:07):
significant amount about Egyptian sceneial practices and beliefs. It is
clear that they did not want their remains disturbed, but
I've never heard of anyone having qualms about displaying them.
It just seems to be accepted as standard. Of course,
I'm not against archaeological digs and artifact recovery, but the
actual display of the remains seemed to go far past
the normal ideas of respect for the dead. Anyway, I
(20:28):
just wondered what your thought was on the issue here.
I have been enjoying the podcast for several years now,
and thank you all for the great work that you do. Uh.
The next comment was actually from when we put the
show notes post on our Facebook, and it started with
a comment from Lee. Lee says, I was surprised that
no mention was made of the current Body World's exhibit
(20:49):
with the real human bodies treated in plastic scene. They
donated their bodies to science, but they are still real
form of humans on display. His body. Worlds are more immoral.
I know Botswada Man didn't volunteer to be displayed, but
then again, I've seen real mummies displayed at a museum
which were definitely gray robbed, but I didn't hear any
mention of how immoral that was. As length of time
(21:09):
dead the key to whether or not it's okay to
display dead bodies. I kind of responded to that, and
then one of the responses that I got to that
response was, I'm not sure I see the difference between
this gray robbing and a mummy. I think that the
display of mummies is gray robbing. How the body was
prepared for burial or interment is irrelevant. The point is
that the person and the person's family and friends intended
(21:32):
the body to remain where it was, so sort of
address all of this at once. There is actually a
lot of discussion about whether it's appropriate to display mummies
and museums. If you like google mummy ethics, yeah, you'll
get lots of discussion about that. I think that is
a worthwhile thing to talk about and a worthwhile thing
(21:53):
to consider. Like even the entire field of archaeology, there's
a lot of discussion about like what is archaeology, what
is grave robbing? Where is that line? Uh? I don't
know if I can come to a real decision about
how I feel about that particular aspect of it. There's
just a lot going on in terms of uh, everything
(22:15):
from colonialism to genuinely educating people about the past. So
what I do want to say is that that is
completely different in in the sense of scale from to
be totally blunt white people digging up an African person
(22:37):
and treating him as though he were an animal and
putting that in a museum as would be done with
animals like that is not the same thing. The mindset
there was kind of look at this exotic specimen and
it was not even this is a human necessarily right.
(23:00):
They really treated him as a subspecies, like a species
lesser than them, after they had just attended his funeral. Yeah,
a lot of the same issues and ideas are present
in both things. Like a lot of the removal of
mummies done from Egyptian pyramids was done by white people,
(23:23):
and there are elements of race and colonialism and sort
of feeling entitled to just take artifacts from a place
like That's there are definitely elements of those two things.
But it's like, to me, unquestionably worse for uh, somebody
to dig up a person recently buried and then treat
(23:43):
him as though he were an animal, especially given the
greater context of race in the world. So we are
not ignorant of mummies. There's definitely a whole, huge, separate
discussion or argue meant to have about mummies and and
what the ethics are of that. Uh. It is just
(24:05):
not the same thing as the racist horror of mounting
a black person as though he were an animal. And
that is my rant about that. So I completely understand
why people would connect it with mummies, but it's it's
just a different it's a far cry. So if you
(24:29):
would like to write to us, perhaps to yell at
me about what I just said or something else I
don't know, you can write to us for a history
podcast that How Stuff Works dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and
on Twitter at misbin history. Our tumbler is miss the
Mistory dot tumbler dot com. We're also on Pinterest at
pentterest dot com slash missed in History. We have a
(24:49):
spreadshirt store where we can buy these shirts and things,
and that is at misbin history dot spreadshirt dot com.
If you would like to learn a little more about
what we talked about today, come to our arrant company's website,
which is how stuff works dot com. Plunk the words
Franklin Expedition into the search bar you will find ten
true stories of survival cannibalism. You can also come to
(25:11):
our website where we're gonna definitely in the show notes
for this link up some awesome pictures of what this
ship looks like under the water. We also have an
archive of every episode and that is at missing history
dot com. So you can do all that stuff and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or miss in history dot com. For more on this
(25:34):
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
dot com.
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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