Sir John Franklin

Sir John Franklin (born April 16, 1786, Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England—died June 11, 1847, near King William Island, British Arctic Islands [now in Nunavut territory, Canada]) was an English rear admiral and explorer who led an ill-fated expedition (1845) in search of the Northwest Passage, a Canadian Arctic waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Franklin is also the subject of a biography by Sir John Richardson that was originally published in 1856 in the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Franklin entered the Royal Navy at age 14, accompanied Matthew Flinders on his exploratory voyage to Australia (1801–03), and served in the Battles of Trafalgar (1805) and New Orleans (1815). He commanded the Trent on Capt. David Buchan’s Arctic expedition of 1818, which sought to reach the North Pole.

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Exploration and Discovery

From 1819 to 1822 Franklin conducted an overland expedition from the western shore of Hudson Bay to the Arctic Ocean, and he surveyed part of the coast to the east of the Coppermine River in northwestern Canada. After his return to England, he published Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819, 20, 21 and 22 (1823).

On a second overland expedition to the same region (1825–27), Franklin led a party that explored the North American coast westward from the mouth of the Mackenzie River, in northwestern Canada, to Point Beechey, now in Alaska. A second party followed the coast eastward from the Mackenzie to the Coppermine. These efforts, which added new knowledge of about 1,200 miles (1,932 km) of the northwest rim of the North American coastline, were described in Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1825, 1826, and 1827 (1828). Knighted in 1829, Franklin served as governor of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, from 1836 to 1843.

Franklin’s search for the Northwest Passage began on May 19, 1845, when he sailed from England with two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, carrying 128 officers and men. The vessels were last sighted by British whalers north of Baffin Island at the entrance to Lancaster Sound in late July. In 1847, when no word had been received, search parties were sent out. For 12 years, various expeditions sought the explorers, but their fate was unknown until 1859, when a final search mission, sent in 1857 by Franklin’s second wife, Lady Jane Franklin, and headed by Capt. Francis Leopold McClintock, reached King William Island, south and west of Lancaster Sound. Found were skeletons of the vessels’ crews and a written account of the expedition through April 25, 1848.

Having ascended the Wellington Channel, in the Queen Elizabeth Islands, to 77° N, the Erebus and the Terror wintered at Beechey Island (1845–46). Returning southward along the western side of Cornwallis Island, they passed through Peel Sound and Franklin Strait. In September 1846 they became trapped in the ice in Victoria Strait, off King William Island (about midway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans). By April 1848, Franklin and 23 others had perished there. The ships, still gripped by ice, were deserted on April 22, 1848, and the 105 survivors tried to head south across the North American mainland to the Back River, apparently resorting to cannibalism along the way. An old Eskimo woman told McClintock of how the starving men fell down and died as they walked. Franklin himself never proved the existence of the Northwest Passage, but a small party from his expedition may have reached Simpson Strait, which connected with the western coastal waters previously visited by Franklin.

Postmortems conducted in the late 20th century on the preserved bodies of several crew members suggest that botulism, scurvy, and lead poisoning, possibly contracted from eating faultily tinned food, may have contributed to the mental and physical decline of Franklin’s crew. In 2008 an assortment of Canadian government, private, and nonprofit agencies launched a mission to uncover additional archaeological evidence of the Franklin expedition. That search bore fruit in September 2014, when a remotely operated submersible obtained sonar images of a wreck that was later identified as the Erebus on the ocean floor just off King William Island. Two years later the wreck of the Terror was found in Terror Bay, approximately 60 miles (100 km) north of the Erebus site. The ship was remarkably well preserved; researchers explored the wreck with a remotely operated submarine and observed that the Terror’s hull remained intact, evidence that refuted a widely held theory that the ship had broken up in the ice. In addition, most of its hatches had been battened down, suggesting that the crew had prepared the ship for winter before departing.