Franklin, Sir John

Franklin, Sir John (1786–1847), British naval officer and Arctic explorer, who was born at Spilsby, Lincolnshire. He experienced warfare at sea at the battles of Copenhagen in 1801 and Trafalgar in 1805. In between he served under his cousin Matthew Flinders in the Investigator where he showed his ability as a surveyor. In 1818 he was chosen to command the Trent in which Captain David Buchan tried to reach the North Pole. Between 1819 and 1827 he led two overland expeditions to the far north of the American continent which gained new knowledge of the coastline. During this time he was promoted post-captain and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1829 he was knighted. He served as governor of Tasmania between 1836 and 1843 and on 19 May 1845, in command of the 372-ton bomb ketch Erebus, he set out with another bomb ketch, Terror, to discover a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After being sighted on 26 July at the head of Baffin Bay, the two ships were never heard of again.

In 1850 the Admiralty launched a search for the missing ships. The camp where the expedition overwintered in 1845–6 was found on a small island, as were the graves of three sailors. Modern autopsies on the bodies revealed a high level of lead in them which almost certainly came from the expedition's tinned food and would have had a disastrous effect on the entire crew. In 1859 the expedition sent in the steam yacht Fox, which had been purchased by Lady Franklin to discover the fate of her husband, found a cairn on the island. This contained the expedition's diaries, the log book, and a letter which established the date of Franklin's death as June 1847. The cache also revealed that just as the ships were on the point of discovering a passage through Peel Sound in September 1846 they became fast in the ice. In April 1848, the last entry in the expedition's diary, the ships were abandoned and their crews tried to march to safety, but none survived.

Later expeditions—and there were many of them—learnt from the local Inuit that Franklin and his men died on or near King William Island, probably from starvation. A number of articles were recovered from the Inuit who also mentioned cannibalism, and this was supported by a modern autopsy on some of the bodies found later. More bodies, some of them in the remains of the ships' boats, were recovered by further expeditions in the 19th century and by ones mounted by archaeologists during the last half of the 20th century. Scientific investigations into the tragedy were still ongoing in 2004.

Bibliography

Beattie, O. , ‘Franklin Expedition Graves’, in James P. Delgado (ed.), The British Museum Encyclopedia of Underwater and Marine Archaeology (1997).
—— and Geiger, J. , Frozen in Time (1993).
Lamb, G. F. , Franklin (1956).
McClintock, F. , The Voyage of the Fox (1859).