July 16, 2021 • 22 mins
The demise of the Franklin Expedition remains the most compelling puzzle in Arctic exploration. Sir John Franklin was a veteran of three previous polar voyages, recognized for his bravery and resourcefulness, and admired for his grit. The British Admiralty chose him to lead what it hoped would be its last stab at finding the Northwest Passage. In 1845, two lavishly provisioned ships with 129 crew members entered Lancaster Sound, the pathway toward solving the mystery of the Passage. Then, they seemed to vanish into the Arctic labyrinth.
Not a single person survived.
What catastrophe had befallen Britain’s best-prepared polar expedition? And what tantalizing clues are still being uncovered? That’s what we’ll explore in this special bonus episode of The Quest for the North Pole.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. The midnight sun rises
over the vast expanse of ice as a group of
Royal Navy sailors loads supplies onto a sledge. Food, tents
and fuel for eight men are lashed down. While the
(00:23):
men receive last minute instructions for their journey, they're preparing
to leave their ships. The Erebus and Terror beset in
solid ice off King William Island. They've been trapped there
since the previous September, preventing the cruise from continuing their
search for the Northwest Passage. The expedition, under leader Sir
(00:45):
John Franklin, now bids farewell to the party consisting of
Commander Graham Gore, Lieutenant Charles Frederick de Vaux, and six
additional men. They are to scout the coast to the south.
If the admiralties actions are correct, the last missing link
in the passage should be a couple hundred miles to
the southwest. Historian Richard Syriacs believed Gore and the men
(01:10):
aimed to find out and claim the long sought prize
for their country. Before setting off, Gore has handed a
metal cylinder containing an Admiralty form and instructed to leave
it on shore as a record of the expedition. They
travel towards land over high hummocks of broken ice. They
likely go some distance to the south along the windswept coast,
(01:33):
hoping to confirm that Victoria's straight to the west of
King William Island connected to Simpson straight to the southwest
and proving the existence of the Northwest passage. On May,
the men gather stones from the beach into a tall
cairn before placing the metal cylinder and note in it.
(01:54):
Gore records the Arabis and Terror's progress thus far and
adds Sir John Inankland commanding the expedition all well. Two
weeks later, Franklin is dead. The sea refuses to release
the ships that summer. By April, the Terror's captain, Francis Krozer,
(02:18):
makes the fatal decision to abandon the ships. The demise
of the Franklin expedition remains the most compelling puzzle and
Arctic exploration. What catastrophe had befallen Britain's best prepared polar
expedition and what clues are still being uncovered from mental
(02:44):
floss and I Heart radio you're listening to the Quest
for the North Pole. I'm your host, Cat Long, science
editor at Mental Floss, and this bonus episode is the
Arctic's biggest mystery. In a few episodes of the Quest
(03:09):
for the North Pole, we looked at the life and
career of Sir John Franklin, the most famous of nineteenth
century polar explorers. We mentioned how Franklin captained one of
two British ships sent towards the North Pole to navigate
a short cut to Asia through the alleged open Polar
Sea in eight He didn't get very far. The ships
(03:32):
ran into storms and had to turn back, but that
was just the beginning of his polar career. The following year,
the Admiralty put Franklin in charge of a grueling overland
expedition in northern Canada. They mapped much of the region
but ran out of food. They survived by eating lichen
and their own leather boots. Multiple people were murdered, and
(03:56):
there were suspicions of cannibalism. Only nine of the twenty
members returned alive. You think Franklin would have been exiled
after such a catastrophe. Instead, he became a hero the
public celebrated him as the tough and resourceful man who
(04:16):
ate his boots. His account of the three year expedition
was an instant bestseller, and his bosses at the Admiralty
actually sent him back to Northern Canada for another more
successful trip. By almost all of the purported Northwest Passage
had been charted. All that remained unknown was a relatively
(04:39):
short stretch west of Cape Walker, where Lancaster Sound turned
into Barrow Street. Sir John Barrow, the outgoing Second Secretary
of the Admiralty, and polar veterans like William Edward Perry
and James Clark Ross, believed it was only a matter
of time until the mystery of the passage would be solved.
All they had to do was navig gate this blank
(05:01):
space and link the known areas to the west with
those to the east, then the Northwest Passage could finally
be claimed. Barrow devised a plan that would allow Britain
to close the book on its Arctic quest. Two ships,
HMS Arabis and HMS Terror were fixed up for another
(05:21):
round of polar service. Three years worth of provisions were ordered,
including more than thirty six thousand pounds of ship's biscuit
thirty two pounds of beef and pounds of scurvy averting
lemon juice for the cruise comfort. There were custom made
wolfskin blankets, a full library for each ship, religious volumes
(05:46):
donated by various Bible societies, and a hand organ that
played fifty different songs. And Sir John Franklin, Arctic Hero,
would lead them to victory. According to history Rian Richard Syriacs,
the expedition was the best equipped that the Admiralty had
ever sent to the polar regions. Let's take a break here,
(06:09):
We'll be right back. Franklin was to sail south and
west from Cape Walker and chart a navigable route towards
bearing Straight. If he found himself blocked by permanent ice
or land, he was to sail northwest through Wellington Channel,
(06:31):
around Cornwallis Island, and toward Alaska. Barrow expected Franklin's expedition
to emerge triumphantly in Bearing Straight in a year, maybe
even less. There can be no apprehension of loss of
ships or men. Barrow wrote confidently to the Admiralty lords.
(06:51):
I confess this expedition is an object I have long
had at heart, and the present time of bringing it
forward appeared to be a suit of but one a
time of profound peace and the finances of the country
in a flourishing state. The Admiralty having done so much,
it would be most mortifying and not very creditable to
(07:13):
let another naval power complete what we had begun. On May,
the Arabis and Terror left green hythe Kent and sailed
towards Baffin Bay before entering Lancaster Sound, the eastern end
of the supposed northwest passage. Franklin's men met two whaling vessels. Then,
(07:37):
as far as the Admiralty and their loved ones knew,
the Franklin expedition vanished. The Arabis and Terror failed to
show up in bearing straight. By early eighty Franklin's old
friend John Ross began arguing for a rescue mission, but
the Admiralty wasn't worried. They had sent the expedition off
(07:59):
with at least three of provisions and everything they need
for success. Ross's nephew, James Clark Ross, said there was
no cause for concern because he and his uncle had
once spent four years in the Arctic and survived. But
by November, with no further chance of receiving, news that year,
Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Franklin, began pushing for a search party.
(08:22):
Three squadrons of rescuers approached the missing piece of the
passage from the east, South and west, sanguine that they
would locate the Arabis and terror. All three returned within
two years having found no trace of Franklin's men. Lady
Jane Franklin didn't give up. She wrote letters and asked
(08:44):
the advice of polar experts and whalers, including William Scoresby Jr.
She buttonholed members of Parliament and her correspondence soliciting donations
was published in newspapers. She got Charles Dickens to lend
his support. She even enlisted supernatural help. Lady Jane met
with a shipbuilder from Northern Ireland who claimed that the
(09:06):
ghost of his three year old daughter Louisa, had spoken
from beyond the grave to indicate Franklin's location. Little Wheezy,
as she was called, supposedly drew, among other things, the
initials P, R, I and b S on the wall
of her sister's bedroom. The logical message was that Franklin
(09:26):
was lost somewhere around Prince Region Inlet and Barrows Strait,
and finally, Lady Jane was not above publicly shaming the
Admiralty lords into action. It worked, according to historian Pierre Burton,
between eighteen forty eight and eighteen fifty nine, more than
(09:47):
fifty expeditions set out to search for Franklin. They attacked
the icy maze of islands and channels from every navigable direction,
dispatching dozens of sledge teams to search every whole in hummock.
Some of the ships sank or were abandoned. Men died
of scurvy and exhaustion. Many times the rescuers had to
(10:09):
be rescued themselves, but slowly they began to unearthed clues.
By eighteen fifty, searchers discovered Franklin's camp on Beechey Island,
a tiny speck on the north side of Barrow Strait.
Among the remains of buildings and empty food cans, they
(10:31):
found the graves of three young crew members who had
died in January and April eight placing Franklin's expedition on
the island during their first winter, but there were no
notes to reveal where they had gone. The next big
break came in eighteen fifty one, when Hudson's Bay Company
(10:52):
surveyor John Ray found pieces of a ship on the
west coast of Victoria Strait. The possible area of Franklin's
fate narrowed again in eighteen fifty four when Ray met
Inuit carrying silver spoons and other relics from the Arabis
and terror. One of them told Ray that about forty
(11:12):
white men had died on King William Island four years earlier.
Ray relayed this information to the Admiralty, writing, from the
mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents
of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen
had been driven to the last dread resource cannibalism as
(11:34):
a means of prolonging existence. The Admiralty leaked his letter
to the press, shocking Lady Jane, Charles Dickens and the
rest of Victorian England. Dickens even suggested, without a hint
of evidence, that the Inuit had murdered the men. The
findings seemed to prove that Franklin and all of his
(11:55):
men had perished in the Arctic, but it didn't explain
what caused the disaster. Lady Jane was bent on finding out.
She bought a steam yacht called the Fox. She hired
naval Captain Leopold McClintock, a sledging champ and veteran of
three earlier Franklin search expeditions, and Lieutenant William Hobson as
(12:17):
his second in command. They left Britain in July eighteen
fifty seven with orders to inspect the last parcel of
land that hadn't been thoroughly searched by the dozens of
earlier efforts, the shores of King William Island. By September
eighteen fifty eight, sledge parties fanned out from the ship
anchored on the Boothia Peninsula. McClintock and Hobson headed south
(12:41):
to King William Island, then split up, with hobson covering
the north and west side and McClintock's team continuing to
the east and south. It wasn't long before Hobson stumbled
upon the truth. At Victory Point, he found the metal
cylinder left by Gore's party back in May eighty seven,
(13:02):
with the crew all well, but a second note, dated
April had been written around the first and told a
much darker story. Terror and Arabis were deserted on the
twenty April five leagues north northwest of this having been
beset since twelve September eighteen forty six, The Arabis's Captain
(13:26):
James fitz James wrote John Franklin had died on June eleven,
eighty seven, just two weeks after Gore left the original note.
In total, nine officers and fifteen men had died, and
the remaining one five crew under Captain Crozer's command, were
(13:47):
headed to the mouth of Back's Fish River on the mainland.
Finally the voices of the lost expedition had been heard.
Then Hobson discovered Skeleton's bow and previous camps. McClintock came
upon other remains, identifiable by their uniforms and the papers
they carried near backs Fish River, confirming the expedition's route
(14:11):
described in fitz James's note. Both officers returned home in
September eighteen fifty nine with concrete evidence of the expedition's fate,
but the mystery didn't end there. In the eighteen seventies,
American explorers like Charles Francis Hall, Elisha Kent Cain, and
Frederick Schwatka, with the Inuit guides Tukulit took Pyrvic and
(14:35):
many others combed the last known roots of the Franklin Expedition.
They found numerous relics and recorded testimony from Intuit who
knew of the expedition's demise from their oral histories. Following
Schwatka's findings, explorers lost interest in mounting long and arduous
expeditions to find further clues to an old disaster. Instead,
(14:58):
they turned their attention to the national race for the
North Pole. We'll be right back. The next glimpses into
the Franklin mystery were gathered by Danish explorers Canude Rasmussen
and Peter Freakin in the nineteen twenties. They traveled from
(15:19):
their base camp at the Tuley Trading Post in Greenland,
just across Baffin Bay from Lancaster Sound to the Inuit
communities in Arctic Canada. Though his purpose was ethnographic research,
Rasmussen's expedition did collect further Intuit accounts of Franklin. By
the nineteen eighties, modern science met up with the Franklin Expedition.
(15:42):
Canadian physical anthropologist Owen Beatty and a team from the
University of Alberta applied forensic investigative techniques to the mystery.
Beatty's team traveled to King William Island in n and
discovered numerous skeletal fragments likely belonging to Franklin's crew. They
(16:02):
showed pitting and scaling, indicating scurvy, as well as parallel
knife marks suggesting cannibalism. Lab tests revealed that they also
contained extremely high levels of lead. Beat He believed the
preserved food supplied to the expedition may have absorbed lead
(16:24):
from the cans, fatally poisoning the crew, but to really
confirm his theory, he'd need to analyze soft tissue in
His team began exhuming the three frozen bodies of Franklin
crew members John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Brain buried
(16:45):
on Beechey Island. Autopsy results showed super high lead levels,
supporting Beattie's theory. However, recent molecular research has thrown the
lead can theory into question. A twenty sixteen analysis of
John Hartnell's nails found that for much of the expedition,
(17:06):
his lead levels were within a normal range, but he
had a severe zinc deficiency, which might have come from
poor preservation of the food the crew was eating. The
high lead levels may have emerged as Hartnell was dying.
His body may have released lead he had absorbed throughout
his life, making it seem as though he had been
(17:26):
exposed to massive amounts of the element. Two of the
biggest Franklin expedition relics were still missing when Beattie was
doing his work. No one knew exactly where Franklin ships,
the Arabis and Terror had sunk, or if they'd been
crushed to pieces by ice. Beginning in the early two thousands,
(17:47):
the government agency Parks Canada and Inuit organizations and knowledge
holders renewed efforts to locate the ships. To guide their search,
They used Inuit testimony collected by Hall and Schwat in
the nineteenth century, plus oral history is gathered by Inuit
historian Louis Camucock and others on the ground. Investigations were
(18:09):
limited to a few weeks each summer when the sea
was clear of ice. For several years, the team combed
underwater areas with sidescans, sonar, and surveyed the coast, but
came up empty. Like the Franklin search parties of the
eighteen fifties, they succeeded in discovering where the ships weren't,
(18:30):
which narrowed their target to an area south of King
William Island, and Innok had told Charles Francis Hall that
a ship had sunk there. By early September, a chance
discovery of some parts from a British naval ship on
shore allowed the team to zero in on an area
about eighty miles south of King William Island, where sidescans
(18:54):
Sonar revealed the final resting place of the h M
s arabis Lar vitually intact and preserved by the icy environment,
and just two years later, a local hunter named Sammy
Kovic led the archaeologist to another site in a sheltered
bay where he'd seen wood sticking through the sea ice.
(19:15):
When they dropped an r o V into the water,
it's sent back the first full images of the HMS
Terror the world had seen in more than one hundred
and fifty years. Since then, Parks Canada and Intuit partners
have made detailed surveys of the shipwrecks and retrieved hundreds
of naval and personal artifacts, from the arabiss bell to
(19:38):
a hair brush with hairs still in it. For now,
the recks raise more questions than they answer about the
Franklin mystery. Unfortunately, the COVID nineteen pandemic canceled this summer's
dive season, but more research is expected next year. One
of the most exciting scientific discoveries happened this past May.
(20:00):
For the first time, skeletal remains excavated from King William
Island were identified through DNA and genealogical analyzes. Since archaeologist
Douglas Stenton and his team have been creating DNA profiles
of bones excavated from King William Island and asking anyone
(20:21):
who might be related to a Franklin crew member for
a DNA sample. They announced the first match in May,
identifying a set of bones as belonging to John Gregory,
an engineer on the Arabas, confirmed through his direct descendant,
Jonathan Gregory's DNA. The researchers are hopeful that this is
only the beginning the biggest mystery, and Arctic exploration continues
(20:46):
one hundred and seventy six years after the Arabis and
terror left England. While professional archaeologists and Inuit guardians investigate
the physical evidence, amateur archivists are pouring over manuscripts and
library collections, literally piecing together clues. Franklin is long gone,
(21:07):
buried at sea or resting in an unmarked grave, but
his legacy lives on. The Quest for the North Pole
(21:32):
is hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched
and written by Me, with fact checking by Austin Thompson.
The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang. The
supervising producer is Dylan Fagin. The show is edited by
Dylan Fagan. For transcripts, a glossary, and to learn more
(21:52):
about this episode, visit Mental flaws dot com slash podcast.
The Quest for the North Pole is a product of
I Heart Radio and Mental Flaws. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more
(22:21):
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. The midnight sun rises
over the vast expanse of ice as a group of
Royal Navy sailors loads supplies onto a sledge. Food, tents
and fuel for eight men are lashed down. While the
(00:23):
men receive last minute instructions for their journey, they're preparing
to leave their ships. The Erebus and Terror beset in
solid ice off King William Island. They've been trapped there
since the previous September, preventing the cruise from continuing their
search for the Northwest Passage. The expedition, under leader Sir
(00:45):
John Franklin, now bids farewell to the party consisting of
Commander Graham Gore, Lieutenant Charles Frederick de Vaux, and six
additional men. They are to scout the coast to the south.
If the admiralties actions are correct, the last missing link
in the passage should be a couple hundred miles to
the southwest. Historian Richard Syriacs believed Gore and the men
(01:10):
aimed to find out and claim the long sought prize
for their country. Before setting off, Gore has handed a
metal cylinder containing an Admiralty form and instructed to leave
it on shore as a record of the expedition. They
travel towards land over high hummocks of broken ice. They
likely go some distance to the south along the windswept coast,
(01:33):
hoping to confirm that Victoria's straight to the west of
King William Island connected to Simpson straight to the southwest
and proving the existence of the Northwest passage. On May,
the men gather stones from the beach into a tall
cairn before placing the metal cylinder and note in it.
(01:54):
Gore records the Arabis and Terror's progress thus far and
adds Sir John Inankland commanding the expedition all well. Two
weeks later, Franklin is dead. The sea refuses to release
the ships that summer. By April, the Terror's captain, Francis Krozer,
(02:18):
makes the fatal decision to abandon the ships. The demise
of the Franklin expedition remains the most compelling puzzle and
Arctic exploration. What catastrophe had befallen Britain's best prepared polar
expedition and what clues are still being uncovered from mental
(02:44):
floss and I Heart radio you're listening to the Quest
for the North Pole. I'm your host, Cat Long, science
editor at Mental Floss, and this bonus episode is the
Arctic's biggest mystery. In a few episodes of the Quest
(03:09):
for the North Pole, we looked at the life and
career of Sir John Franklin, the most famous of nineteenth
century polar explorers. We mentioned how Franklin captained one of
two British ships sent towards the North Pole to navigate
a short cut to Asia through the alleged open Polar
Sea in eight He didn't get very far. The ships
(03:32):
ran into storms and had to turn back, but that
was just the beginning of his polar career. The following year,
the Admiralty put Franklin in charge of a grueling overland
expedition in northern Canada. They mapped much of the region
but ran out of food. They survived by eating lichen
and their own leather boots. Multiple people were murdered, and
(03:56):
there were suspicions of cannibalism. Only nine of the twenty
members returned alive. You think Franklin would have been exiled
after such a catastrophe. Instead, he became a hero the
public celebrated him as the tough and resourceful man who
(04:16):
ate his boots. His account of the three year expedition
was an instant bestseller, and his bosses at the Admiralty
actually sent him back to Northern Canada for another more
successful trip. By almost all of the purported Northwest Passage
had been charted. All that remained unknown was a relatively
(04:39):
short stretch west of Cape Walker, where Lancaster Sound turned
into Barrow Street. Sir John Barrow, the outgoing Second Secretary
of the Admiralty, and polar veterans like William Edward Perry
and James Clark Ross, believed it was only a matter
of time until the mystery of the passage would be solved.
All they had to do was navig gate this blank
(05:01):
space and link the known areas to the west with
those to the east, then the Northwest Passage could finally
be claimed. Barrow devised a plan that would allow Britain
to close the book on its Arctic quest. Two ships,
HMS Arabis and HMS Terror were fixed up for another
(05:21):
round of polar service. Three years worth of provisions were ordered,
including more than thirty six thousand pounds of ship's biscuit
thirty two pounds of beef and pounds of scurvy averting
lemon juice for the cruise comfort. There were custom made
wolfskin blankets, a full library for each ship, religious volumes
(05:46):
donated by various Bible societies, and a hand organ that
played fifty different songs. And Sir John Franklin, Arctic Hero,
would lead them to victory. According to history Rian Richard Syriacs,
the expedition was the best equipped that the Admiralty had
ever sent to the polar regions. Let's take a break here,
(06:09):
We'll be right back. Franklin was to sail south and
west from Cape Walker and chart a navigable route towards
bearing Straight. If he found himself blocked by permanent ice
or land, he was to sail northwest through Wellington Channel,
(06:31):
around Cornwallis Island, and toward Alaska. Barrow expected Franklin's expedition
to emerge triumphantly in Bearing Straight in a year, maybe
even less. There can be no apprehension of loss of
ships or men. Barrow wrote confidently to the Admiralty lords.
(06:51):
I confess this expedition is an object I have long
had at heart, and the present time of bringing it
forward appeared to be a suit of but one a
time of profound peace and the finances of the country
in a flourishing state. The Admiralty having done so much,
it would be most mortifying and not very creditable to
(07:13):
let another naval power complete what we had begun. On May,
the Arabis and Terror left green hythe Kent and sailed
towards Baffin Bay before entering Lancaster Sound, the eastern end
of the supposed northwest passage. Franklin's men met two whaling vessels. Then,
(07:37):
as far as the Admiralty and their loved ones knew,
the Franklin expedition vanished. The Arabis and Terror failed to
show up in bearing straight. By early eighty Franklin's old
friend John Ross began arguing for a rescue mission, but
the Admiralty wasn't worried. They had sent the expedition off
(07:59):
with at least three of provisions and everything they need
for success. Ross's nephew, James Clark Ross, said there was
no cause for concern because he and his uncle had
once spent four years in the Arctic and survived. But
by November, with no further chance of receiving, news that year,
Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Franklin, began pushing for a search party.
(08:22):
Three squadrons of rescuers approached the missing piece of the
passage from the east, South and west, sanguine that they
would locate the Arabis and terror. All three returned within
two years having found no trace of Franklin's men. Lady
Jane Franklin didn't give up. She wrote letters and asked
(08:44):
the advice of polar experts and whalers, including William Scoresby Jr.
She buttonholed members of Parliament and her correspondence soliciting donations
was published in newspapers. She got Charles Dickens to lend
his support. She even enlisted supernatural help. Lady Jane met
with a shipbuilder from Northern Ireland who claimed that the
(09:06):
ghost of his three year old daughter Louisa, had spoken
from beyond the grave to indicate Franklin's location. Little Wheezy,
as she was called, supposedly drew, among other things, the
initials P, R, I and b S on the wall
of her sister's bedroom. The logical message was that Franklin
(09:26):
was lost somewhere around Prince Region Inlet and Barrows Strait,
and finally, Lady Jane was not above publicly shaming the
Admiralty lords into action. It worked, according to historian Pierre Burton,
between eighteen forty eight and eighteen fifty nine, more than
(09:47):
fifty expeditions set out to search for Franklin. They attacked
the icy maze of islands and channels from every navigable direction,
dispatching dozens of sledge teams to search every whole in hummock.
Some of the ships sank or were abandoned. Men died
of scurvy and exhaustion. Many times the rescuers had to
(10:09):
be rescued themselves, but slowly they began to unearthed clues.
By eighteen fifty, searchers discovered Franklin's camp on Beechey Island,
a tiny speck on the north side of Barrow Strait.
Among the remains of buildings and empty food cans, they
(10:31):
found the graves of three young crew members who had
died in January and April eight placing Franklin's expedition on
the island during their first winter, but there were no
notes to reveal where they had gone. The next big
break came in eighteen fifty one, when Hudson's Bay Company
(10:52):
surveyor John Ray found pieces of a ship on the
west coast of Victoria Strait. The possible area of Franklin's
fate narrowed again in eighteen fifty four when Ray met
Inuit carrying silver spoons and other relics from the Arabis
and terror. One of them told Ray that about forty
(11:12):
white men had died on King William Island four years earlier.
Ray relayed this information to the Admiralty, writing, from the
mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents
of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen
had been driven to the last dread resource cannibalism as
(11:34):
a means of prolonging existence. The Admiralty leaked his letter
to the press, shocking Lady Jane, Charles Dickens and the
rest of Victorian England. Dickens even suggested, without a hint
of evidence, that the Inuit had murdered the men. The
findings seemed to prove that Franklin and all of his
(11:55):
men had perished in the Arctic, but it didn't explain
what caused the disaster. Lady Jane was bent on finding out.
She bought a steam yacht called the Fox. She hired
naval Captain Leopold McClintock, a sledging champ and veteran of
three earlier Franklin search expeditions, and Lieutenant William Hobson as
(12:17):
his second in command. They left Britain in July eighteen
fifty seven with orders to inspect the last parcel of
land that hadn't been thoroughly searched by the dozens of
earlier efforts, the shores of King William Island. By September
eighteen fifty eight, sledge parties fanned out from the ship
anchored on the Boothia Peninsula. McClintock and Hobson headed south
(12:41):
to King William Island, then split up, with hobson covering
the north and west side and McClintock's team continuing to
the east and south. It wasn't long before Hobson stumbled
upon the truth. At Victory Point, he found the metal
cylinder left by Gore's party back in May eighty seven,
(13:02):
with the crew all well, but a second note, dated
April had been written around the first and told a
much darker story. Terror and Arabis were deserted on the
twenty April five leagues north northwest of this having been
beset since twelve September eighteen forty six, The Arabis's Captain
(13:26):
James fitz James wrote John Franklin had died on June eleven,
eighty seven, just two weeks after Gore left the original note.
In total, nine officers and fifteen men had died, and
the remaining one five crew under Captain Crozer's command, were
(13:47):
headed to the mouth of Back's Fish River on the mainland.
Finally the voices of the lost expedition had been heard.
Then Hobson discovered Skeleton's bow and previous camps. McClintock came
upon other remains, identifiable by their uniforms and the papers
they carried near backs Fish River, confirming the expedition's route
(14:11):
described in fitz James's note. Both officers returned home in
September eighteen fifty nine with concrete evidence of the expedition's fate,
but the mystery didn't end there. In the eighteen seventies,
American explorers like Charles Francis Hall, Elisha Kent Cain, and
Frederick Schwatka, with the Inuit guides Tukulit took Pyrvic and
(14:35):
many others combed the last known roots of the Franklin Expedition.
They found numerous relics and recorded testimony from Intuit who
knew of the expedition's demise from their oral histories. Following
Schwatka's findings, explorers lost interest in mounting long and arduous
expeditions to find further clues to an old disaster. Instead,
(14:58):
they turned their attention to the national race for the
North Pole. We'll be right back. The next glimpses into
the Franklin mystery were gathered by Danish explorers Canude Rasmussen
and Peter Freakin in the nineteen twenties. They traveled from
(15:19):
their base camp at the Tuley Trading Post in Greenland,
just across Baffin Bay from Lancaster Sound to the Inuit
communities in Arctic Canada. Though his purpose was ethnographic research,
Rasmussen's expedition did collect further Intuit accounts of Franklin. By
the nineteen eighties, modern science met up with the Franklin Expedition.
(15:42):
Canadian physical anthropologist Owen Beatty and a team from the
University of Alberta applied forensic investigative techniques to the mystery.
Beatty's team traveled to King William Island in n and
discovered numerous skeletal fragments likely belonging to Franklin's crew. They
(16:02):
showed pitting and scaling, indicating scurvy, as well as parallel
knife marks suggesting cannibalism. Lab tests revealed that they also
contained extremely high levels of lead. Beat He believed the
preserved food supplied to the expedition may have absorbed lead
(16:24):
from the cans, fatally poisoning the crew, but to really
confirm his theory, he'd need to analyze soft tissue in
His team began exhuming the three frozen bodies of Franklin
crew members John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Brain buried
(16:45):
on Beechey Island. Autopsy results showed super high lead levels,
supporting Beattie's theory. However, recent molecular research has thrown the
lead can theory into question. A twenty sixteen analysis of
John Hartnell's nails found that for much of the expedition,
(17:06):
his lead levels were within a normal range, but he
had a severe zinc deficiency, which might have come from
poor preservation of the food the crew was eating. The
high lead levels may have emerged as Hartnell was dying.
His body may have released lead he had absorbed throughout
his life, making it seem as though he had been
(17:26):
exposed to massive amounts of the element. Two of the
biggest Franklin expedition relics were still missing when Beattie was
doing his work. No one knew exactly where Franklin ships,
the Arabis and Terror had sunk, or if they'd been
crushed to pieces by ice. Beginning in the early two thousands,
(17:47):
the government agency Parks Canada and Inuit organizations and knowledge
holders renewed efforts to locate the ships. To guide their search,
They used Inuit testimony collected by Hall and Schwat in
the nineteenth century, plus oral history is gathered by Inuit
historian Louis Camucock and others on the ground. Investigations were
(18:09):
limited to a few weeks each summer when the sea
was clear of ice. For several years, the team combed
underwater areas with sidescans, sonar, and surveyed the coast, but
came up empty. Like the Franklin search parties of the
eighteen fifties, they succeeded in discovering where the ships weren't,
(18:30):
which narrowed their target to an area south of King
William Island, and Innok had told Charles Francis Hall that
a ship had sunk there. By early September, a chance
discovery of some parts from a British naval ship on
shore allowed the team to zero in on an area
about eighty miles south of King William Island, where sidescans
(18:54):
Sonar revealed the final resting place of the h M
s arabis Lar vitually intact and preserved by the icy environment,
and just two years later, a local hunter named Sammy
Kovic led the archaeologist to another site in a sheltered
bay where he'd seen wood sticking through the sea ice.
(19:15):
When they dropped an r o V into the water,
it's sent back the first full images of the HMS
Terror the world had seen in more than one hundred
and fifty years. Since then, Parks Canada and Intuit partners
have made detailed surveys of the shipwrecks and retrieved hundreds
of naval and personal artifacts, from the arabiss bell to
(19:38):
a hair brush with hairs still in it. For now,
the recks raise more questions than they answer about the
Franklin mystery. Unfortunately, the COVID nineteen pandemic canceled this summer's
dive season, but more research is expected next year. One
of the most exciting scientific discoveries happened this past May.
(20:00):
For the first time, skeletal remains excavated from King William
Island were identified through DNA and genealogical analyzes. Since archaeologist
Douglas Stenton and his team have been creating DNA profiles
of bones excavated from King William Island and asking anyone
(20:21):
who might be related to a Franklin crew member for
a DNA sample. They announced the first match in May,
identifying a set of bones as belonging to John Gregory,
an engineer on the Arabas, confirmed through his direct descendant,
Jonathan Gregory's DNA. The researchers are hopeful that this is
only the beginning the biggest mystery, and Arctic exploration continues
(20:46):
one hundred and seventy six years after the Arabis and
terror left England. While professional archaeologists and Inuit guardians investigate
the physical evidence, amateur archivists are pouring over manuscripts and
library collections, literally piecing together clues. Franklin is long gone,
(21:07):
buried at sea or resting in an unmarked grave, but
his legacy lives on. The Quest for the North Pole
(21:32):
is hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched
and written by Me, with fact checking by Austin Thompson.
The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang. The
supervising producer is Dylan Fagin. The show is edited by
Dylan Fagan. For transcripts, a glossary, and to learn more
(21:52):
about this episode, visit Mental flaws dot com slash podcast.
The Quest for the North Pole is a product of
I Heart Radio and Mental Flaws. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more
(22:21):
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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