Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition

1 King William Island, 29 June 1981

King william island is one of the most desolate places in the world, a virtually featureless polar semidesert of limestone and mud interspersed with ice-water lakes. Located in the Canadian Arctic archipelago, separated from the north coast of the North American continent by Simpson Strait, the island is large—5,244.5 square miles (13,111 sq km)—but indistinct, rising to a maximum elevation of only 450 feet (137 metres). Yet the indifference of the landscape stands in stark contrast to the island’s dramatic history.

For it was here, in 1848, that the finely outfitted and trained British Arctic expedition commanded by Sir John Franklin ended in extraordinary tragedy. Not one of the 129 men came out of the Arctic to tell of their accomplishments or suffering, and both of the expedition’s ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were lost, as were whatever written accounts of the journey that had existed. British and American searchers grasping to understand the disappearance were confounded by what little remained of the expedition. Sketchy stories told by the native Inuit, some artefacts, human remains and one tragic note found by nineteenth-century searchers are all that historians have been able to rely on for their reconstruction of events.

Walking along the gravel and sand beaches on a blustery and near freezing June day in 1981, members of an archaeological team from the University of Alberta surveyed a spit of land near Booth Point, on the south coast of King William Island, for human skeletal remains. They hoped their research would uncover clues to the events of the expedition’s agonizing final days. They knew that some of the last survivors had crossed from here to a place on the mainland known as Starvation Cove, where the tragedy had reached its inevitable conclusion. The researchers were following the lead of one of the early Franklin searchers, an American explorer named Charles Francis Hall, who in 1869 recorded an Inuit account of a grave belonging to a member of the lost expedition:

The first day of survey work in 1981 failed to turn up anything. It was on the second morning, 29 June, that field assistant Karen Digby walked up to forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie and archaeologist James Savelle clutching what looked like a broken china bowl in her right hand. “I think this is something important. Is it human?” Digby asked as she handed the white skull bone to Beattie.

It was the first major discovery of their fieldwork, representing the starting point of Beattie’s forensic investigation. Having marked the location of her find, Digby led the rest of the crew to the spot. Still visible in the sandy soil was the depression where the human skull fragment had rested, and, placing the discovery back in the depression, the researchers began the process of meticulously searching the finger of land for other remains.

At first, only a few fragments of bone were found. But after six hours of careful survey work, in which every inch of ground was covered, the researchers had discovered, photographed, mapped and then collected thirty-one pieces of human bone. Most of the remains were found exposed on the surface, others were hidden by occasional pockets of vegetation or had been nearly swallowed by the sand.

The texture of the bone illustrated the severity of the northern climate. Exposed portions were bleached white, and powdery flakes of the outer bone surface cracked and fell off if handled too roughly. Sharing the exposed surfaces were small and brightly coloured colonies of mosses and lichens, anchored firmly on the sterile white of the bone as if braced for another harsh winter. By contrast, the ivory-brown undersides of the bones, never exposed to the sun or elements, were found to be in extremely good condition, with all anatomical detail preserved. The researchers also discovered several artefacts at the site, including a shell button common in the early and mid-nineteenth century and a clay pipe stem like those carried on the Franklin expedition. The skeletal remains and artefacts were found over a 33- by 50-foot (10- by 15-metre) area, at the centre of which lay the remnants of what had been a stone tent circle.

One of the first and most important questions that forensic anthropologists ask when examining human remains is, “How many individuals are represented?” Carefully studying the remains, Beattie was able to determine that there were no duplications of bones or anatomical features and that the size and characteristics of the bones supported the theory that they belonged to a single individual.

The shape of the skull’s frontal bone and characteristics of the eye socket revealed the remains to be likely of European ancestry. Heavy brow ridges and well-developed muscle markings on the skull and limb bones identified the skeleton as male. The skull sutures (the joints between the various bones of the skull that slowly disappear as an individual grows older) were still clearly visible, indicating that the individual was only twenty to twenty-five years of age at the time of his death.

To many, skeletal remains of a Franklin sailor would serve only as an intimation of a distant Arctic disaster. But to Beattie, the discovery of the Booth Point skeleton was as if one of the last of Franklin’s crewmen to die had come forward through time to answer his questions. For there was evidence of metabolic stress, suggestive of serious dietary problems, in porous lesions on the orbital roofs of the skeleton. (Such lesions are associated with various anaemias, but most particularly with iron deficiency anaemia.) There was also the first physical evidence ever discovered that supported the long-held belief among historians that expedition members suffered from the debilitating effects of scurvy during their final months. Areas of shallow pitting and scaling on the outer surfaces of the bones were like those seen in documented cases of vitamin C deficiency, the cause of scurvy. Bone changes due to inflammation (called periostitis) of the thin, parchment-like skin adhering tightly to the surface of living bone, were also easily identified. Other bone changes showed the effects of haemorrhaging between this thin skin and the long bone surfaces. With scurvy, these subperiosteal haemorrhages and resulting bone remodelling can occur even during the physical stresses and strains of everyday activities.

The tremendous impact of scurvy was felt throughout much of the period of European expansion and maritime exploration, which started in the sixteenth century. The diet of the mariners of the age, who endured long voyages without fresh fruit and vegetables, made them particularly susceptible to the ravages of the disease. More Royal Navy charges succumbed to this scourge than died in battle in the eighteenth century. When British commodore George Anson led a squadron into the Pacific in the 1740s to raid Spanish shipping routes, for instance, he lost thirteen hundred men out of his entire two thousand complement to scurvy. In his account of that voyage, Anson’s expedition chaplain, Richard Walter, provides a grisly inventory of the symptoms, including ulcers, rictus of the limbs, spontaneous haemorrhages in almost all parts of the body—and a bloom of gum tissue that enveloped what teeth had not already fallen out, producing a terrible odour. Walter also noted strange sensory and psychological effects. The smell of lotus blossoms wafting from the shore caused men to writhe in agony; the sound of a musket firing could be fatal to patients with advanced cases. The sailors also found themselves crying inconsolably at the slightest provocation and swept by hopeless longings.

Unknown until 1917 was the root cause: Scurvy is the result of a deficiency of vitamin C (ascorbic acid), which today can be effectively cured within twenty-four hours with the intake of large doses of the vitamin. In 1753, Scottish physician James Lind published his classic A Treatise on the Scurvy, in which he advanced the plausibility of such a treatment by providing experimental proof of the benefits of citrus juice as an antiscorbutic. The Royal Navy, which one critic would later damn as “a hierarchy as soul-chilling, as rigorous, as iron-bound, as any Brahmin caste,” initially failed to reform dietary regimens, however, with the result that the disease continued to wreak havoc. Only in 1795 did the Royal Navy heed decades of advice and begin enforcing the consumption of lime juice on its ships (giving rise to the term “limey”).

While slow to enforce the benefits of lime juice, the Royal Navy nevertheless moved swiftly to embrace a technology that it was convinced also had powerful antiscorbutic properties: tinned food. Prior to the 1810 introduction of tinned meats and vegetables, expeditions were reliant on dry foods that could be stored for long periods of time, such as salt beef and salt pork, biscuits, pemmican and flour. However, spoilage, insects and rodents played havoc with such stores—none of which had antiscorbutic properties. Therefore, the discovery of the value of preserving food in airtight metal containers offered a liberation of sorts. In theory, expeditions of ever-greater duration might now be planned, knowing that there would be a reliable onboard source of meats, vegetables, fruits and soups that would maintain their nutritive value throughout an expedition. It was this simple invention, tinned meats and vegetables, together with the navy’s success with lime juice, that convinced the Admiralty that lengthy Arctic discovery voyages such as Franklin’s were possible.

Yet, though tinned foods enjoyed a great reputation for warding off scurvy, their antiscorbutic benefits had not been proven, and, in fact, were grossly overrated. The nature of the canning process of the day, which required that tins be nearly immersed in boiling water or saltwater, destroyed any ascorbic acid they may have contained, so that their tinned meats, vegetables, soups and even fruits were virtually useless as antiscorbutics. Still, received opinion held that scurvy could be staved off on Arctic voyages by liberal diets of tinned meats and vegetables, along with a daily allotment of lime juice.

The skeleton found near Booth Point by the University of Alberta researchers in 1981 proved otherwise. It left little doubt that, during the final year of the Franklin expedition (and probably earlier), scurvy was a factor in the declining health of the crews and an important contributor to the expedition’s disastrous outcome.

Other findings also preyed upon the minds of the researchers, however: the unusual distribution of the bones near the entrance of the tent circle, the fact that certain bones were present yet others were missing and the discovery of cut marks on the skeleton’s right femur. Also noted by Beattie were the angularity of the cranial fragments and the identifiable convergence of fracture lines, indicating that the skull was forcibly broken. He paused over the evidence before him and briefly considered the possibility that this young sailor had suffered an end far more terrible than that described in the historic Inuit accounts—that Franklin’s crew “fell down and died as they walked along.” Was this the first physical evidence found to support another Inuit claim: that in their final days, the sailors had been reduced to cannibalism?

The discovery of the bones at Booth Point would prompt, over the next five years, three further scientific expeditions into the Canadian Arctic. With each of these investigations, new leads would be pursued and unravelled, culminating in the exhumation of the preserved corpses of three of Franklin’s sailors on Beechey Island in 1984 and 1986, allowing Beattie and his colleagues an unprecedented look into a world very different from our own. By opening this window into the past, they became the first to piece together accurately the events that led to the destruction of the greatest enterprise in the annals of polar exploration.

2 A Subject of Wonder

“The discovery of a north-west passage to India and China has always been considered as an object peculiarly British.” With these words, John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, announced that, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain was to embark on a great age of polar discovery. For in the nineteenth century, the greatest epoch of geographic exploration ever known, a primary British aim was to establish the existence of a Northwest Passage (the successful navigation from the Atlantic to the Pacific around America’s northern extremity); another was to reach the North Pole. In a little over five decades, from 1818 to 1876, dozens of Royal Navy ships would reach the polar sea. In the process, the Arctic archipelago, that vast labyrinth of land and ice that lies to the north of America, was made almost entirely known.

In most respects, this age of marine exploration was a triumph of geographic and scientific advancement. Yet, despite an enormous investment of resources and manpower, the Royal Navy failed to achieve the two goals set for it by Parliament. When the last official British Arctic expedition returned in 1876 to newspaper headlines proclaiming “The Polar Failure,” no ship had succeeded in navigating the Northwest Passage and no one had yet reached the North Pole. Those prizes were left for others. It was not until 1905 that Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, would complete the first successful navigation of the Northwest Passage; in 1909, the North Pole was claimed by Robert Peary, an American.

Is it possible that the forensic investigation of human remains from that era, specifically the Franklin expedition disaster of 1845–48, would provide some insight into this larger failure? Certainly the terrible fate of Sir John Franklin’s expedition marked the nadir of Arctic exploration: a disappearance of two ships with all 129 of their men, which preyed strongly upon the British mind. Alongside the Franklin disaster, though, were numerous more routine exploration failures that, whilst lacking the sheer melancholic grandeur of the Franklin disaster, were just as frightful and inexorable. For one word appears time and again in their expedition narratives, a word that represents none of the usual suspects: neither ice traps nor perpetual darkness, marauding polar bears nor the minus 50°F (-46°C) cold—but simply, “debility.”

In his 1836–37 voyage of discovery, for instance, Captain George Back complained of the “languor,” “incoherency” and “debility” suffered by his crew. In 1848–49, Sir James Clark Ross similarly reported that many of his men were made “useless from lameness and debility.” Five years later, in 1854, Captain George Henry Richards also wrote of a “general debility” afflicting his crew; four years after that, in 1859, all members of Captain Leopold M’Clintock’s expedition aboard the Fox were struck down by “debility.”

It is an endless catalogue strung together by one simple word.

AT THE OUTSET, the Admiralty’s John Barrow believed that the Northwest Passage was easily navigable and predicted this would be achieved in a matter of months. There was simply no conception of the impediment an ocean of ice would pose to Britain’s exploration ambitions. Those hopes would first be set back in 1818, when Captain John Ross sailed into Lancaster Sound—the true entrance of the passage—only to adjudge it a bay, then compounded his blunder by naming the “bay” in Barrow’s honour. Then in 1819, Barrow dispatched twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant William Edward Parry with two ships, the Hecla and Griper, and a youthful crew to do that which, in Barrow’s words, “Ross, from misapprehension, indifference or incapacity, had failed to do.”

Parry entered Lancaster Sound and, with a stiff wind behind him, bore westward. A vast, unexplored channel lay open before the two ships. The masts were crowded with officers and men the entire day. Parry, every bit the Regency gentleman, sought to conceal his own excitement, but did remark upon the “almost breathless anxiety… now visible in every countenance.” The Hecla and Griper blew past the precipitous cliffs and stratified buttresses of Devon Island to the north and, to the south, passed a series of channels to which Parry assigned names: Navy Board Inlet, Admiralty Inlet and Prince Regent Inlet. He saved for Barrow a particular distinction: naming the channel that lay due west after him. Thus, Lancaster Sound gave way to Barrow Strait.

Parry had blind luck on his side. His ships pushed rapidly west, cruising through a channel normally closed fast by ice, even in summer. When ice did finally obstruct his progress, he opted to overwinter at Melville Island, a rugged outcrop of 1,200-foot (370-metre) cliffs that he named for Viscount Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty. Parry fully expected the ice to clear from the remainder of the passage the following summer. In fact, he had unknowingly breached the dominion of ice, a possibility that dawned on him during the depths of the polar winter, when the temperature outside plunged to minus 55°F (-48°C). He realized that he had taken an incalculable risk and secretly began to craft an escape, titled “Plan of a Journey from the North coast of America towards Fort Chipewyan, should such a measure be found necessary as a last resource.” He doubtless realized it would have been an exercise in futility. The nearest white men, Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders, were more than 700 miles (1,130 km) away across some of the bleakest, coldest terrain on earth.

Parry, however, did just about everything right in the circumstances. It was 1 October, and he “immediately and imperiously” set about securing the ships and stores for the onset of the polar winter, a responsibility that had, he wrote accurately if immodestly, “for the first time devolved on any officer in his majesty’s navy, and might, indeed, be considered of rare occurrence in the whole history of navigation.” Most particularly, Parry determinedly set about defending against scurvy. He sent out hunting parties and enforced a ruling that “every animal killed was to be considered as public property; and, as such, to be regularly issued like any other kind of provision, without the slightest distinction between the messes of the officers and those of the ships’ companies.” In addition, Parry diligently seized upon two dietary reforms that had only recently been introduced by the Royal Navy: The lime juice—prepared from fresh fruit—he carried onboard was dispensed daily in the presence of an officer to ensure that the bitter concoction was consumed by reluctant sea-hands; also distributed were the stores of “embalmed provisions”—tinned meats, vegetables and soup. So new was the technology that no one had yet invented the can opener; the cans had to be cleaved open with an axe. (The Royal Navy had begun conducting trials with tinned foods in 1813.)

Parry had yet another plan: to keep his men so thoroughly occupied that they had no time to consider their predicament. Their days were filled with activities, but Parry’s most useful tool for staving off monotony was a barrel organ for singalongs and bimonthly polar melodramas put on by officers in petticoats. His second officer even produced a newspaper called the North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle, filled with bad puns and abominable poesy, but which had the “happy effect of… diverting the mind from the gloomy prospect which would sometimes obtrude itself on the stoutest heart.”

Despite Parry’s best efforts, however, the living conditions the men were forced to endure were appalling. On 3 November, the sun disappeared below the horizon and did not return until 84 days later, just before noon on 3 February 1820, when a crewman spotted it from the Hecla’s maintop. By then, the temperature inside the ships was so cold that the theatrical performances could not be enjoyed by anyone, but most particularly by the cast of female impersonators. Large patches of skin were left behind any time the men touched a metal surface. Wrote Parry: “We found it necessary, therefore, to use great caution handling our sextants and other instruments, particularly the eye-pieces of telescopes.” The lime juice froze and shattered its glass containers. Even the mercury froze in the thermometers.

Rations, at least, were better than the more experienced hands were used to, as “a pound of Donkin’s preserved [tinned] meat, together with one pint of vegetable or concentrated soup, per man” replaced salt beef weekly. Yet despite this measure and the daily allotment of lime juice, the first case of scurvy was reported on 1 January 1820. Parry tried to conceal it from the crew, and set about curing the victim by starting a tiny garden of mustard and cress on the warm galley pipes of the Hecla. The measure worked. Nine days later, the man boasted that he was fit enough to “run a race.”

Soon, however, illness gained a firmer hold: a quarter of the ninety-four-strong crew fell ill, half of them from scurvy—though even as the symptoms appeared, the worst of the crew’s hardships were behind them. By May, ptarmigan were seen, and soon a brace or two were bagged daily for the sick. It was, wrote Parry, “of the utmost importance, under our present circumstances, that every ounce of game which we might thus procure should be served in lieu of other meat.” During the expedition’s twelve months on Melville Island, the men would consume 3 musk oxen, 24 caribou, 68 hares, 53 geese, 59 ducks, 144 ptarmigans—totalling 3,766 pounds (1,710 kg) of fresh meat. To cap it off, when the snow melted, Parry noticed that sorrel grew in abundance around the harbour, and the men were sent out every afternoon to collect it: “Of the good effects produced upon our health by the unlimited use of fresh vegetable substances, thus bountifully supplied by the hand of Nature, even where least to be expected, little doubt can be entertained, as it is well known to be a never-failing specific for scorbutic affections.” In the end, Parry lost just one man to scurvy during his seventeen-month voyage. Relative to what might have been expected in such circumstances, the achievement was, wrote Parry, “a subject of wonder.”

Parry’s expedition had become the first to overwinter in the Arctic archipelago. He also came closer to completing the Northwest Passage than any other person would come for the next three decades. He was tempted to push on to the Pacific. But, facing an impermeable barrier of multiyear ice, with depleted stores and the very real risk of being forced to spend a second winter in the region, he relented.

The expedition had encountered no Inuit during its long winter at Melville Island, but on its homeward journey, the crew finally met some natives on Baffin Island; one of those meetings would be laden with irony. One of the Inuit elders was, Parry noted, “extremely inquisitive” and observed gravely as a tin of preserved meat was opened for dinner: “The old man was sitting on the rock, attentively watching the operation, which was performed with an axe struck by a mallet.” When the tin had been opened, the man “begged very hard for the mallet which had performed so useful an office, without expressing the least wish to partake of the meat, even when he saw us eating it with good appetites.” Parry, however, insisted the man try some: “[He] did not seem at all to relish it, but ate a small quantity, from an evident desire not to offend us.”

Unfortunately, the elder’s distaste for tinned foods was not shared by British authorities. After Parry’s return, expedition surgeon John Edwards praised such supplies as “acquisitions of the highest value.” C.I. Beverley, the assistant surgeon on Parry’s expedition, also produced a glowing endorsement of the expedition’s tinned provisions, ascribing to them both the preservation of the general health of the officers and crew and the eventual recovery of one man who had been “attacked by the scurvy.” This assessment ended with a statement that encouraged ever-greater reliance on tinned goods: “I have every reason to believe that the anti-scorbutic quality of the vegetable is not injured in its preparation.” Yet this notion—that tinned foods retained powerful antiscorbutic properties—was entirely anecdotal. The comparative immunity enjoyed by Parry’s men might, with hindsight, have been more accurately attributed to other factors, not the least of which was the amount of game shot and wild sorrel collected. Unfortunately, no mention of these measures was made. The British were enamoured of technology, and, after Parry’s successful overwintering in the Arctic, the antiscorbutic benefits of tinned foods became accepted wisdom in the Royal Navy, a premise that would go untested and unchallenged for much of the next century. Indeed, starting with William Edward Parry’s voyage of 1819–20, British Arctic expeditions used tinned foods first as a supplement, then, by the time of George Back’s 1836–37 voyage, as a critical component of their food stores.

STILL, NOT EVERY SHIP captain shared the navy’s enthusiasm for tinned provisions. In fact, the privately financed 1829–33 expedition of Captain John Ross was a feat of physical endurance and survival precisely because Ross sought to avoid reliance on preserved foods.

Following his 1818 maritime blunder, when Barrow rained such derision upon him that he never again received a Royal Navy command, Ross had been forced into semi-retirement at half-pay. He watched from the sidelines as his rival, Parry, undertook two further polar expeditions (in 1821–23 and 1824–25), at the end of which, Barrow conceded that knowledge about the Northwest Passage was “precisely where it was at the conclusion of his [Parry’s] first voyage.” Parry had even managed to lose one of His Majesty’s ships, the Fury, which was nipped by an iceberg in Prince Regent Inlet. Ross seized on the opening. He raised a private expedition and found a wealthy gin merchant, Felix Booth, to underwrite a voyage to complete the Northwest Passage aboard the Victory, a second-hand steamer that Ross refitted with state-of-the-art technology and manned with 23 officers and men.

It appeared at first that Ross would succeed. In Greenland, he received reports that it was an unusually warm summer. On 6 August 1829, the expedition entered Lancaster Sound, the site of his 1818 humiliation. Believing Prince Regent Inlet would eventually reveal an opening to the west, Ross tacked south, calculating correctly that the land mass, which had been named Somerset by Parry, was an island. He pressed further into these waters than any European before him, but missed Bellot Strait, the only opening to the west, and with time concluded that the western shore of Prince Regent Inlet was not an island but a peninsula, which he named Boothia, for his sponsor. By then it was too late to continue. With conditions deteriorating, the expedition established winter quarters at a place Ross called Felix Harbour. From here, the expedition embarked on the first of four winters in the Arctic, a harrowing saga that is remarkable—in equal measure—for the courage and endurance needed to survive it.

The following summer, the ice freed the Victory, allowing 3 miles (5 km) of hope before it closed in again and held the ship fast, trapping it for a second winter. In 1830, Ross’s young nephew, Commander James Clark Ross, led a sledge journey far to the west. He named the farthest place he reached Victory Point, and the adjoining territory was claimed in the name of King William IV. Unaware that he had crossed an ice-covered strait on his journey, Ross named the territory King William Land. In fact, it was King William Island. James Ross also noted an accumulation of pack-ice off the northwest coast, the “heaviest masses that I had ever seen in such a situation.” His sledge journey was a remarkable achievement in itself. The pièce de rèsistance, however, was his subsequent discovery of the North Magnetic Pole, which “Nature,” he wrote, “had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers.” With that, the expedition became a triumph. “Nothing now remained for us but to return home and be happy for the rest of our days,” the younger Ross wrote. But by the summer of 1831, the Victory had been allowed only another 4 miles (6.5 km) of passage before the impenetrable ice barrier returned.

“To us,” John Ross declared, “the sight of ice was a plague, a vexation, a torment, an evil, a matter of despair.” The depth of this despondency is further revealed in his journal, where he confided: “I confess that the chances are now much against our being ever heard of.” He was faced with a critical decision: risk sitting out the following spring in the hope that by summer the ice would finally give way and the Victory would be freed, which seemed unlikely, or abandon the Victory and undertake a 300-mile (480-km) overland trek north while snow remained on the ground, allowing for sledge travel. Ross elected for the latter. His destination would be Fury Beach on Somerset Island, where there was a store of provisions left by Parry on an earlier expedition and the greater likelihood of open water. From there, Ross believed he could use the ship’s small boats to make a dash for Baffin Bay, to rendezvous with the summer whaling fleet.

Sledges were fashioned to haul the small boats loaded with provisions, and the captain ordered advance parties to establish a string of caches en route. Then, on 29 May 1832, the expedition abandoned the Victory and, in sub-zero temperatures and on two-thirds rations, headed north. But off Fury Beach, where open water had been expected, the ice had also failed to clear and the men were forced to endure a fourth winter in the Arctic. They barricaded themselves in a house of wood and snow they hurriedly constructed. It was little better than an igloo, yet Ross gave it a pompous name—Somerset House—and enforced rigid delineations of rank. It was a snow house divided. On one side, ordinary seamen were crammed together in their rank furs, muttering obscenities; the structure’s other half was segregated quarters for the officers, where John Ross continued to be waited upon hand and foot like the country squire he aspired to be. Ross grimly speculated whether “it should be the fortune of any one to survive after another such year as the three last.” But he maintained a stiff upper lip, and not only because of the cold.

To make matters worse, the men’s provisions were inadequate. Ross ordered half-rations, but by now, these consisted mainly of preserved meat and tinned turnip and carrot soup from the stores left by Parry. The crew’s only fresh meat came from the few Arctic foxes, and fewer hares, they could snare, with roast fox served on Sundays. The expedition surgeon made note of the deteriorating conditions: “we had scarcely any animal food… The development of severe scurvy at once served to heighten our misery, and to show how poor a defence a [tinned] vegetable regimen is…” It was, he wrote, “during our stay at the Fury’s stores that the worst form of the disease appeared.” The ship’s carpenter died of the illness in February 1833. John Ross was also suffering the effects of the dread disease: ancient wounds long-healed began to open as scar tissue dissolved. The captain wondered whether, “I might not be ultimately able to surmount all the present circumstances.”

Yet survive he did, and, in late summer, a lane of open water appeared into which, on 15 August 1833, the men launched their boats with a fine westerly breeze. Having “almost forgotten what it was to float at freedom on the seas,” they made 72 miles (116 km) on 17 August alone. Propelled by the wind when it blew, they rowed on amongst the icebergs when it dropped—once for a stretch of twenty hours without rest. After nine days heading east, they finally spotted a sail in the distance. The men desperately rowed towards the vessel, but after several hours a wind came up and the ship moved off to the southeast. Soon another sail was sighted, but that ship too sailed on. Wrote John Ross: “it was the most anxious moment that we had yet experienced, to find that we were near to no less than two ships, either of which would have put an end to all our fears and all our toils, and that we should probably reach neither.” But an hour later the wind dropped, and they again began to close on one of the ships. Finally, they saw it lower a boat that rowed over to meet them. Stunned, the mate in command assured Ross that he couldn’t be who he said he was, as Ross was known to have died two years earlier. That conclusion, Ross replied, had been “premature.” They were unshaven, filthy, “dressed in the rags of wild beasts,” gaunt and starved to the bone. But they were definitely alive.

That John Ross is not celebrated today as one of the epic heroes of polar exploration is remarkable. Perhaps his all-too human failings militated against such a reputation, for John Ross was the antithesis of what one might expect in a hero: corpulent, irritable and overly solicitous of class. In contrast to Parry, who did his best to provide for the comfort of his men, Ross held in contempt the entire notion of the importance of creature comforts in maintaining morale. While still aboard the Victory, for instance, Ross had reduced the heat each winter to lessen the effects of condensation. He then responded to complaints from the freezing crew by bragging loudly about his unusual capacity for generating body heat. No one ever got close enough to him to notice. There was something improbable, even absurd, about John Ross. And he paid a terrible price for his haughtiness when a disgruntled underling later helped publish an unofficial account of the expedition: a remarkable rant called The Last Voyage of Capt. John Ross—vilifying Ross’s character and mocking his physical attributes. More damaging still was the book’s inventory of his alleged shortcomings as a leader, culminating in a declaration that while “the men were conscious that they owed him obedience; they were not equally convinced that they owed him their respect and esteem.”

Such criticisms aside, the expedition’s return was a triumph of human ingenuity and survival. Its success was due to one simple measure: Ross’s emulation of the Inuit, the Earth’s hardiest survivors, who eke out a living on the margins of the habitable world and yet who do so without any trace of scurvy. The Inuit treat the contents of a caribou’s stomach and the testicles of the musk-ox as delicacies, for example, food sources that have since been proven to be powerful antiscorbutics. And whilst unwilling to consume these igloo specialities, John Ross had his men eat a diet of fresh meat and salmon, concluding that “the large use of oils and fats is the true secret of life in these frozen countries.” Where possible, therefore, he replaced supplies such as salt beef and tinned foods with fresh meat, resulting in a “very salutary change of diet to our crew.” By doing so, Ross also solved the mystery of Arctic survival. Through contact with the locals, he correctly surmised that their diet of fresh meat had antiscorbutic properties, observing that “the natives cannot subsist without it, becoming diseased and dying under a more meager diet.” As he wrote in his log, “The first salmon of the summer were a medicine which all the drugs in the ship could not replace.” The Inuit had saved John Ross’s hide and those of his crew, and he knew it, though his praise was tempered by characteristic pomposity. They were, he said, “among the most worthy of all the rude tribes yet known to our voyagers, in whatever part of the world.” It was only in his fourth winter, after he had lost contact with the Inuit and moved north to Somerset Island, where game was scarce and the expedition became dependent upon tinned foods, that scurvy had made a run at the expedition.

UNFORTUNATELY, Captain George Back, on his 1836–37 Arctic expedition, failed to learn from Ross’s example. A veteran of three expeditions across the barren lands of northern Canada, two of them under the command of John Franklin, R.N., George Back was by turns ambitious, conceited and utterly charming. An inveterate womanizer, dandy and accomplished watercolourist, Back was a knowingly Byronic figure who dabbled in poetry and possessed a certain élan, having spent five years as a prisoner of war in Revolutionary France.

Back sailed for the Arctic on 14 June 1836, with orders to travel to Repulse Bay, beyond the northwestern reaches of Hudson Bay, then to send sledge parties across the isthmus of the Melville Peninsula (an arm of the American continent) to explore its western coast. The expedition was an appalling failure. Back’s ship, the Terror, like the Victory, wasycaught in the Arctic’s thrall of relentless ice. At one point it was hurled 40 feet (12 metres) up a cliff face, only to be mauled by an iceberg. Wrote Back: “To guard against the worst I ordered the provisions and preserved meats, together with various other necessaries, to be got up from below and stowed on deck, so as to be ready at a moment to be thrown on the large floe alongside.” Men slept in their clothes, ready to abandon ship at a moment’s notice. On some nights, the ice could be heard gently caressing the hull, on others it wailed and pounded against the ship’s sides. At one point the ice reached up alongside to form a cradle, then, after holding the ship tight in the air, the floe let go its grasp and the vessel plunged into the sea. Back was astonished to glimpse in those moments a mould of the ship “stamped as perfectly as in a die in the walls of ice on either side.” Next, a huge square mass of ice of many tons collapsed, throwing up a wave 30 feet (9 metres) high that rolled over the stricken Terror. George Back:

Compounding the desperate situation, there had been a sudden, serious and—to the expedition’s captain and medical officer—inexplicable onset of illness aboard the Terror within a fortnight of the last live domestic animal being slaughtered on board. Six months into the expedition, Back complained in his journal on 26 December that the crew had been inflicted by “perverseness,” “sluggishness” and “listlessness.”

As his men began complaining of debility, Back concluded they were suffering from scurvy. Yet he made no serious attempt to secure fresh meat. Instead, he increased the provision of tinned meat, soup and vegetables, as well as lime juice and other alleged antiscorbutics. But on 13 January 1837, one of the men died. As well, ten of the ship’s crew of sixty—both officers and men—were now sick, complaining of “languor” and “shooting pains or twitches betokening weakness” in the ankles and knees. One, named Donaldson, “evinced a disposition to incoherency.” Another was suddenly “seized with syncope,” or dizziness. The provision of canned meat and “anti-scorbutics of every kind” failed to help. While Back had suffered through horrific privations before—scurvy and starvation amongst them—during previous overland expeditions, he was unnerved by the disease eating away at the Terror’s crew: “Who could help feeling that his hour also might shortly come?” He felt utterly helpless, that the situation was “beyond our comprehension or control.” At one point, he wondered if the cause might not in fact have been an illness carried aboard by one of the crew, at another he mused about the influence of the dank, hothouse atmosphere inside the ship and the freezing dry cold without.

Donaldson, the man who had shown signs of incoherency and who remained in a “drowsy stupor,” died on 5 February. On 26 April, he was followed by a Royal Marine named Alexander Young who, before dying, had requested that he be autopsied. The ship’s surgeon found Young’s liver enlarged, water in the region of the heart and the quality of his blood “poor.” When Back demanded in an official letter to the surgeon, Dr. Donovan, “his opinion of the probable consequences if the ship were detained another winter in these regions,” Donovan’s answer was that “it would be fatal to many of the officers and men.” And so, when the Terror was finally released by the ice after ten months, Back ordered the ship, badly leaking, to make for home. With a hull bound round with chain cables to seal the cracks caused by the ice and “in a sinking condition,” the Terror somehow limped across the Atlantic. Even then, in July, Back watched in impotent fury as the disease continued to spread: “The whole affair, indeed, was inexplicable to the medical officers as we had the advantage of the best provisions.” As the Terror made towards Ireland, the “apprehension of sickness had induced most of the men to go without food.” Back himself remained an invalid for six months after the dreadful voyage.

The Back expedition was an enormous setback for the Admiralty. Still, there was no attempt by British authorities to examine the causes of the illness amongst Back’s crew. Even if there had been, the probable cause—the expedition’s heavy reliance on tinned foods and the absence of fresh meat—would almost certainly have eluded suspicion. Indeed, four years after Back’s return there was a push within the Royal Navy to replace all livestock on expeditions with tinned food. Wrote Captain Basil Hall:

In 1844, Second Secretary to the Admiralty John Barrow argued for one final attempt to complete the Northwest Passage. Barrow wanted to finish what he had started a quarter-century before, fearing that England, having “opened the East and West doors, would be laughed at by all the world for having hesitated to cross the threshold.” Glossing over Back’s setback, Barrow, in his bid for funding, opted to focus instead on a gloriously successful trio of Antarctic cruises undertaken by John Ross’s nephew, James Clark Ross, from 1839–43:

As far as Barrow was concerned, he had the right ships, the Erebus and Terror, and he had the right commander in Ross.

James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition had charted some 500 miles (805 km) of the southern continent’s coastline, discovered the Antarctic ice shelf and sighted a smoking volcano, which Ross named Mount Erebus after his ship (a nearby crater was named Mount Terror after the smaller of the two vessels). When he returned to England in the autumn of 1843, Ross had earned himself the title of the world’s leading polar discoverer. The expert in ornithology and the science of terrestrial magnetism was knighted and presented with the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. He cut quite a dash in Victorian society, and was once said to be “the handsomest man in the Royal Navy,” no small compliment given the preening to which the officer class was prone.

The Erebus and Terror were not nearly so handsome. Royal Navy bomb vessels designed for shore bombardment, they were sturdily built to withstand the recoil of their 3-ton (3.1-tonne) mortars. But the Terror, in particular, had an interesting history. Built in 1813, a ship of that name was engaged the following year in the Battle of Baltimore, which saw British ships of war firing bombs, rockets and cannons at Fort McHenry. The 25-hour barrage failed to dislodge the Americans and gave rise to the U.S. National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, with its reference to “the rockets’ red glare.” The Terror later saw service in the Mediterranean before it was sailed into Hudson Bay under the command of George Back. After its narrow escape from the Arctic, the Terror, together with the Erebus, was reinforced for protection against the ice for Ross’s Antarctic voyages.

Further reinforcements were made for the planned Northwest Passage expedition, set to embark in May 1845, including covering the ships’ bows with sheet iron. Other changes were made to assist the expedition as it made its way through Arctic waters. The ships were fitted with a tubular boiler and steam-forming apparatus, which conveyed hot water in pipes under the decks to warm the men’s berths and all other parts of the vessels. Desalinators were built into the galley stoves. In a revolutionary step, entire steam locomotives with specially adapted screw propellers were also installed, for emergency use. A 25-horsepower locomotive from the London and Greenwich Railway was bought for the Erebus, stripped of its front wheels and installed in the ship’s hold. The engine of the Terror, at 20 horsepower, was placed in the after-hold.

On 12 May 1845, the Times reported:

It was, in short, the most technologically advanced and best-equipped exploration team ever. However, it was not to be commanded by James Clark Ross, who declined due to a promise he had made his wife—to never again undertake a polar expedition—and a rumoured problem with the drink. Instead, the honour fell to an aging navy veteran, Sir John Franklin.

3 Into the Frozen Seas

At fifty-nine, Sir John Franklin was widely considered too 1 old for the command. Lord Haddington, First Lord of the Admiralty, shared the doubts of many about Franklin’s fitness but agreed to interview him. During that meeting, the First Lord told Franklin of his concerns. “You are sixty,” he said. Franklin was nonplussed: “No, my lord, I am only fifty-nine.” Still, the Admiralty was nothing if not an old boys’ club, and William Edward Parry lobbied on Franklin’s behalf, telling Haddington: “If you don’t let him go, the man will die of disappointment.” On 7 February 1845, Franklin was given the job.

Born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 16 April 1786, Franklin entered the Royal Navy when he was fourteen and served in a number of famous battles during the Napoleonic Wars, including the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1814, he would be injured in a disastrous attempt to capture New Orleans. When the Duke of Wellington finally defeated Bonaparte in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Royal Navy was forced to look for new assignments for its best young officers. Arctic exploration was one way for such officers to distinguish themselves in peacetime. And so it was that, in May 1818, Franklin began his polar service as second-in-command of Captain David Buchan’s failed voyage into the Spitsbergen ice.

In 1819 Franklin again headed north, this time in command of an overland expedition ordered by the British Admiralty to travel from Hudson Bay to the polar sea, where he was to map North America’s unexplored Arctic coast. George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company was highly skeptical of Franklin’s qualifications for such a journey:

Franklin succeeded in surveying 211 miles (340 km) of the icy shoreline east of the Coppermine River before a tragic return journey over the Canadian tundra, or “Barren Grounds,” during which expedition members were reduced by starvation to eating an old leather shoe and caribou excrement. Ten men died from the cold and hunger, exacerbated in part by Franklin’s unfamiliarity with northern conditions. Franklin himself nearly succumbed to starvation before relief arrived. Yet when he returned to London, Franklin’s account of heroic achievement marred by murder, cannibalism and his own suffering caught the public’s imagination, and he became known as the man who ate his boots. Promoted to the rank of captain, he then returned in 1825–27 to the Arctic for a well-organized second overland expedition, resulting in the mapping of another 397 miles (640 km) of Arctic shoreline, for which he was knighted. Finally, after a six-year stint as colonial governor of Van Diemen’s Land (today, the Australian state of Tasmania), Franklin was placed in command of the greatest single expedition of discovery Britain had ever mounted.

Royal Navy officers Captain Francis Crozier and Commander James Fitzjames were also appointed to the expedition. The veteran Crozier had served in a number of earlier attempts at finding both a Northwest Passage and reaching the North Pole and had been second-in-command of James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expeditions as commander of the Terror. As for Fitzjames, he had served as mate aboard the first steamer to successfully navigate the Euphrates, and had served on ships operating in the Middle East and China, where he first became interested in the romantic lure of the Northwest Passage.

The days before the Erebus and Terror set sail were filled with social engagements and a general sense of excitement. The confidence of the expedition team was palpable. In a letter to his brother dated 11 April 1845, Harry D.S. Goodsir, the assistant surgeon on the Erebus, wrote: “All the Officers are in great hopes of making the passage and expect to be in the Pacific end of next summer.” Franklin and his officers were entertained at the Admiralty on 8 May. The crews were paid in advance of the sailing, and it can be assumed that at least some of the money was spent at the pubs dotting the docklands along the Thames. On 9 May, the final official inspection of the ships took place, attended by leading civil and naval figures and other specially invited guests. The Illustrated London News reported that “the arrangements made for the comfort of the officers and crews are excellent. The quantity of stores taken on board is considerable.” According to a Times reporter, those stores included “numerous chests of tea, although the crews are not expected to become teetotalers, an ample supply of rum having been provided for their use in the frozen regions.”

Among the food supplies were nearly 8,000 tins of preserved meats (including boiled and roast beef, boiled and roast mutton, veal, seasoned beef and ox-cheek), vegetables (potatoes, parsnips, carrots and mixed vegetables) and soup (of 1-, 2-, 4-, 6-and 8-pound/.5-, 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-kg capacity). They also carried 1,203 pounds (546 kg) of tinned pemmican. Other supplies included 7,088 pounds (3,218 kg) of tobacco, 200 gallons (909 litres) of “wine for the sick” and 9,450 (4,290 kg) of chocolate. Some 9,300 pounds (4,222 kg) of lemon juice were also taken, to be rationed to all during the expedition.

With such vast quantities of provisions and fuel, enough to last three years, the accommodations were congested. Of the living quarters, only Franklin’s cabin on the Erebus was of any significant size. Commander Fitzjames had a cabin less than 6½ feet (2 metres) wide, with the crew of the Erebus berthed in what little space remained (many slung their hammocks alongside one another on the mess deck). Yet despite the cramped quarters, the Erebus had a library of 1,700 volumes, the Terror carried 1,200, including everything from narratives of earlier Arctic expeditions and geographical journals to Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and bound copies of Punch magazine. Each ship also had a hand organ that could play fifty tunes, including ten hymns. There were mahogany writing desks for officers and school supplies for teaching illiterate sailors to read and write. Instruments for research in geology, botany and zoology and for magnetic observation were also taken. The Franklin expedition was also one of the first voyages of discovery to carry that relatively new invention: a camera.

No Arctic expedition had ever been so lavishly outfitted. The same could be said even for the men, who were issued gear for extreme weather, suggesting a greater willingness on the part of British officialdom to adapt and learn from the Inuit than is generally credited. Indeed, Goodsir reported being issued sealskin gloves, a sealskin cap and greatcoat and a pair of “Deer-skin” trousers.

On 5 May, Franklin received his official instructions: essentially to sail to Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound through to the Bering Strait and, in so doing, complete a Northwest Passage—all the while collecting valuable scientific and geographical information. There were no plans for Admiralty assistance or relief should the expedition encounter difficulty or fail to complete its voyage within the three years it had been supplied for. As a cursory precaution, the Hudson’s Bay Company, with its fur-trading outposts at Fort Good Hope and Fort Resolution in what is now Canada’s Northwest Territories, was asked to aid the expedition should word of trouble be received. The company was also instructed to alert native traders to watch for Franklin’s crews.

In the last few days before he sailed, Franklin may have experienced a premonition of his fate. Suffering from the flu, he was resting at home with his wife, Jane, who had just finished sewing a silk Union Jack for him to take. Concerned about his illness, she draped the flag over his legs for warmth. He sprang to his feet: “There’s a flag thrown over me! Don’t you know that they lay the Union Jack over a corpse?” But on Sunday 18 May, the eve of his departure, with his wife and daughter present, the profoundly religious Franklin read Divine Service for the first time to his crews. And when the expedition sailed from the Thames the next morning, carrying 134 officers and men, most felt the Franklin expedition could not fail. Franklin’s only child, Eleanor, wrote to an aunt:

The expedition was already out of view when the Times trumpeted:

One week later, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Murchison, summed up the public mood in a speech: “The name of Franklin alone is, indeed, a national guarantee.” Besides, the geographical obstacles were by now judged to be not all that great: The cumulative discoveries of preceding Arctic expeditions—Parry, John Ross, George Back, and Franklin’s among them—had resulted in the mapping of much of the southern Arctic archipelago. By 1845, stretches of less than 62 miles (100 km) remained to be explored, and it was to close those gaps that Franklin sailed.

After calling briefly at Stromness Harbour on the island of Orkney, the expedition left Britain for the last time. A transport vessel, the Barretto Junior, laden with stores such as ten live oxen, accompanied the ships to the Whalefish Islands in Disco Bay on the west coast of Greenland, where the oxen were slaughtered for fresh meat and supplies transferred to the Erebus and Terror. Harry Goodsir wrote to his uncle from Greenland that, “we have got 10,000 cases of preserved ready cooked meats on board the Erebus alone so you see there is no chance of starving.” It was also while at the Whalefish Islands that the first tins of preserved meat, carrots and potatoes were opened, and the contents served to the expedition’s officers.

Franklin also wrote a letter in which he said his final goodbye to Lady Franklin. It was a message full of optimism:

Fitzjames sent home a journal in which he described the journey from Stromness to Disco—as well as many of his companions—and outlined his feelings for Franklin: “We are very happy, and very fond of Sir John Franklin, who improves very much as we come to know more of him. He is anything but nervous or fidgety: in fact I should say remarkable for energetic decision in sudden emergencies.”

The respect felt for Franklin was widely shared. A formal but affable character, Franklin was well-liked by his men. Lieutenant James Walter Fairholme, a 24-year-old officer aboard the Erebus, wrote to his family explaining, “he has such experience and judgement that we all look on his decisions with the greatest respect. I never felt that the Captain was so much my companion with anyone I have sailed with before.”

After saying farewell, Lieutenant Edward Griffiths, commanding the Barretto Junior, sailed back to Britain. He took with him members of the expedition, making a total of five who had already become ill enough to be sent home: three petty officers, one Royal Marine and an able seaman. Griffiths later described the spirits of the expedition as high and observed that the supplies, including the quality of the tinned foods, seemed quite satisfactory for the planned voyage.

A dog named Neptune and a pet monkey named Jacko accompanied the 129 sailors when, on 12 July, they pushed westward. Their last contact with the outside world came at the end of July, in Baffin Bay, where they met two whaling ships, one named Prince of Wales, the other, Enterprise. Franklin was waiting for conditions to allow for a crossing of Baffin Bay to Lancaster Sound. Captain Dannett of the Prince of Wales reported inviting Franklin and several of his officers aboard. “Both ships’ crews are all well, and in remarkable spirits, expecting to finish the operation in good time. They are made fast to a large iceberg, with a temporary observatory fixed upon it,” Dannett recorded in his log.

Captain Robert Martin of the Enterprise noted that Franklin said he had provisions for five years, and if it were necessary he could “make them spin out seven years.” Martin added that Franklin told him he would “lose no opportunity of killing birds and whatever else was useful that came in the way, to keep up their stock, and that he had plenty of powder and shot for the purpose.”

Martin was invited to dine aboard the Erebus, but shifting winds sent the ships apart, and so it was that in early August 1845, Franklin and his crews lost contact with their world. The Erebus and Terror were last seen making for Lancaster Sound, the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage, where they would enter the desert of silence beyond.

4 Puny Efforts

There was no anxiety at first. Unease about the status of the Franklin expedition only crept into the minds of the Admiralty’s London officials at the end of 1847. In March 1848, the need for a relief expedition was first raised in the House of Commons, where a confidant of Jane, Lady Franklin asked what, if any, steps the government might take regarding a search. The response confirmed that there was cause for concern, because the expedition had enough food only for three years, meaning its supplies would shortly be exhausted. None could have guessed that their worst nightmares were already about to play themselves out on the desolation of King William Island.

In 1848, the Admiralty dispatched three expeditions to relieve Sir John Franklin. Captain Henry Kellet was instructed to sail to the Bering Strait, where Franklin was to break free of the Arctic ice; a second expedition, under the command of Sir James Clark Ross, was sent into Lancaster Sound, following Franklin’s original route, and an overland party led by Dr. John Rae and Sir John Richardson was sent down the Mackenzie River. It was the failure of all three of these relief expeditions to find a trace of Franklin that finally sparked the fear that something might have gone terribly wrong. Ross’s experiences especially contributed to the growing sense of foreboding.

With Franklin’s disappearance, Ross’s wife’s entreaties—now coloured by the knowledge that it might have been her husband for whom they sought—were overridden by the Admiralty’s orders for Ross to command one of the relief expeditions. Rather than relieve Franklin, however, Ross very nearly replicated the disaster.

Ross, with his wealth of Arctic experience, well understood the need to defend against scurvy. When the Enterprise and Investigator, two barque-rigged sailing vessels, departed the Thames in tow of two steam tugs on 12 May 1848, the ships had been provisioned for three years, with an additional year’s stores for Franklin’s crews. The ships carried plenty of preserved meats as well as canned potatoes, carrots and mixed vegetables such as beets and cabbage; while the expedition still carried salt beef and salt pork, tinned foods constituted the bulk of the provisions. In consequence, Ross remarked that his Franklin relief voyage was exceptionally outfitted by the navy. “Long experience and liberal means gave us many comforts that no other expedition had enjoyed,” Ross would later write, “yet it is remarkable that the health of the crew suffered more during this winter than on any former occasion.”

As winter quarters for the Enterprise and Investigator (the latter commanded by Captain Edward Henry Bird), Ross chose Port Leopold, on the northeast coast of Somerset Island. Here, on the eastern shore of the harbour, a narrow beach stretches out in a series of ridges below a bluff. The western side is steep and very high; its headland named Cape Seppings. On arrival, the two ships sent rockets up every evening and morning in the event that Franklin’s men were in the vicinity. But the ships, moored some 200 yards (183 metres) apart, were soon frozen fast, and the crew immediately set to work in preparation for winter. A wall of snow 7 feet (2.1 metres) high was built linking one ship to the other, to aid with crossings during blizzards. In mid-October, winter awnings of “stout wool” were erected over the decks of each ship to afford protection from the wind and snow.

A concise account of the expedition was kept by James D. Gilpin, clerk-in-charge on the Investigator, and he recorded the news of the first death on 27 October 1848. “William Coombes, of the carpenter’s crew, died: he had been long wasting away and expired at noon this day. The disease I understood was in the brain, and contracted previous to his servitude in the Investigator” Coombes was buried three days later, during the gloom of a heavy snowfall. Wrote Gilpin:

The scene was a harbinger of the difficult winter ahead. For the expedition’s outbreak of illness was every bit as rapacious as that experienced by George Back in 1836–37, and also attributed to scurvy—a debilitating toll aggravated by the urgency of Ross’s quest.

Several days after Coombes’s funeral, on 9 November, the sun disappeared. It would not return until 9 February 1849. The dreary winter routine aboard-ship was interrupted only by the trapping of Arctic foxes. The animals were fitted with copper collars around the neck, upon which were punched the name of the ship, their position and date “in the hopes that Sir John Franklin, or some of his people, might in the ingenious manner be apprised of assistance.”

In March, Gilpin wrote that “two men are now lying seriously ill in their cots, one of them afflicted with scurvy, the first case of that malignant disease, so much dreaded in these voyages.” A short time later, Gilpin recorded the death of a seaman on the Enterprise, noting that “for some time previous to his illness, he had been very melancholy, and from the time he was placed on the sick list never once rallied.” The seaman, a Jamaican named James Gray, had been one of the most cheerful men on the ship for the first months of the expedition, but by December 1848 he had become “gloomy, distant and solitary.” On 27 December he sought medical attention and was diagnosed as “suffering from Nostalgia.” John Robertson, surgeon on the Enterprise, described the curious affliction:

Gray was placed on a diet of tinned meat and tinned vegetables, yet he continued to deteriorate, developing symptoms such as pains in the chest, exhaustion and incoherency. Bronchitis then intervened “on the pre-existing constitutional debility,” and he died on 16 April 1849. Robertson was impressed by Gray’s inconsolable longing to return to Jamaica: “This being the only mulatto we had on board, it would seem that children of the torrid zone have a greater love of home than ‘the children of the night’ of whom we had many.”

A second death followed on the Enterprise, on 30 April. The man, an able-bodied seaman named David Jenkins, had slipped while securing the ship to an iceberg nine months earlier. While no symptoms of the blow were visible for a lengthy period of time after the incident, his demise was attributed to a tumour that later developed. He suffered a “most lingering and painful illness.” Because of the unusual symptoms, an autopsy was conducted.

Then on 12 May, William Cundy, captain of the hold of the Investigator, died. Wrote Gilpin: “He was a weak, ill-made man, and his recovery despaired of soon after he was taken into the sick bay, his first illness was scurvy, but many unseen causes hastened his death.”

On 15 May, Sir James Clark Ross led the first of the sledging parties out in the search for Franklin. Ross marched west along the north coast of Somerset Island, then turned south, charting the island’s west coast and travelling in the general direction of the North Magnetic Pole and King William Land, which he had first visited nearly two decades earlier. Just over two weeks out, however, Ross was confronted with the near-total breakdown in the health of one of his party. Lieutenant Francis Leopold M’Clintock, who was also accompanying Ross, described the man’s condition: “James Bonnett now complained of spasmodic pains, loss of strength, giddiness, & c. He continued ailing, and unable to labour, for the remainder of the journey.” Three days later, M’Clintock recorded that the problem had spread to others: “Bonnett continues full of pains and devoid of strength, and all the other men are greatly reduced in strength; although our sledge gets lighter, they seem to be less able to drag it.”

The work was onerous, at times desperate, as the crew struggled southward over the hummocks and heavy crushed ice that served to fringe the “impregnable and forbidding” western coastline of Somerset Island. They travelled 250 miles (400 km) before Ross finally called an end to the search. At this point, a large cairn was constructed on a headland and a note deposited in a copper cylinder:

Ross’s party then began the return journey. He had sought to relieve Franklin, but concern for the health of his own men seriously hindered the efficacy of his search. Despite carrying with them lime juice as an antiscorbutic and the provision of a preferred diet of preserved beef and pea soup, several of his party were now “useless from lameness and debility,” so ill in fact that they had to be hauled on the sledges by the remaining men. M’Clintock recorded that five of the twelve men had “quite broken down.” Upon reaching Port Leopold thirty-nine days after setting out, Ross described his party as “so completely worn out by fatigue that every man was, from some cause or other, in the doctor’s hands for two or three weeks, and I am sorry to say that two of them are not yet recovered.” Gilpin remarked upon the “haggard looks and the attenuated forms of all of them.”

Unknowingly, at the furthest point of this sledge trek, Ross’s party came within 200 miles (320 km) of where Franklin’s ships had been deserted the previous summer. Ross had travelled south along Peel Sound, the very route that Franklin had taken in 1846. Later, M’Clintock lamented this failure, “because we were marching in the right direction, as [subsequent] discoveries… have proved.”

Other sledging parties were also dispatched from the two ships, though as Ross later discovered, “The labours of these parties were of comparatively short durations; still they, like ourselves, all suffered from snow blindness, sprained ankles, and debility.” One of the search parties travelled down the west shore of Prince Regent Inlet to Fury Beach, but the rigours of the journey also resulted in breakdowns in the health of some in the party. They did locate Somerset House, the structure occupied by the men under old Sir John Ross in 1832–33, and found it still standing. A tent was erected inside, fires were lit for warmth and two men—who were “too much fatigued to go any further”—were left as temporary occupants. The remainder of the party travelled only 25 miles (40 km) farther before erecting a cairn and returning to collect the invalids. The stores of the Fury were then examined and the contents tested. The tinned soup was declared “as good as when manufactured… most delicious, and in flavour and consistency, superior to any of our preserves of the same kind.”

While the physical demands of these sledge searches doubtless contributed to the outbreak of illness, those left aboard also fell sick. On 15 June 1849, Henry Mathias, assistant surgeon on the Enterprise, died. The death was blamed on consumption, which, “imperceptibly gaining on his strength, brought him to the grave.” John Robertson wrote that Mathias was “greatly beloved and respected by all in the expedition,” but that there was no hope of “getting him alive out of Port Leopold the grave of so many.” Ross observed: “Several others of the crews of both ships were in a declining state, and the general report of health was by no means cheering.” Even the Enterprises surgeon fell seriously ill. Robertson wrote that he suffered from scurvy and only “narrowly escaped destruction,” though he would continue to suffer active symptoms of “this abominable scourge” seven months later, even after his return to England.

There was another death on 8 July.

Before the ships departed from Port Leopold, Ross ordered that a depot be established. In it, he left behind a steam launch (with fuel), a shelter with carpenter’s tools, blankets, sleeping bags, stoves, provisions and other essential supplies, and an account of the expedition and its future plans. Gilpin: “Here then should any of Sir John Franklin’s people reach, they would find the means of subsistence and escape.”

After departing Port Leopold, Ross attempted to travel west, but the ships were beset on 1 September and carried by ice towards Baffin Bay. After three weeks they were freed, but with the intensifying malevolence of the disease amongst his men, Ross was forced to cut his losses, abandon his search and make a run for home. The Investigator’s cook died on 16 September during the homeward passage; the last case appeared less than a week before the ships limped into the English port of Scarborough in November 1849. Some of the sailors remained ill enough to require hospitalization, and one died shortly afterwards.

On 17 November, the Illustrated London News announced the expedition’s disappointing results, reporting the “great difficulty” encountered by the sledge parties and noting the deaths: “The assistant-surgeon, a very intelligent young man, and three able seamen of the Enterprise, with three of the crew of the Investigator, have died since the vessel left Woolwich in the spring of 1848.” The Athenaeum declared the search for Franklin “very incomplete”:

Ross’s own health was broken. While many critics felt he should have braved a second winter, lamenting his “puny efforts,” John Robertson, the surgeon on the Enterprise, thought most of the men would not have survived another year:

One officer on the expedition wrote: “We have certainly had to grapple with difficulties of no ordinary nature.” Years later, M’Clintock reflected that “we underwent as much privation and fatigue as in any equal period of my subsequent travel.” Yet the truth was that Ross’s expedition was the only one with at least a theoretical chance of saving some of Franklin’s men. When his ships reached Port Leopold, some of the men may still have been alive; with Ross’s defeat, any chance of their being saved was lost.

Struggling to understand the severity of the sickness suffered aboard Ross’s ships, some historians have theorized that the problem might have been compounded by the crews being accepted for the expedition without medical examinations. Ross’s own officers complained that the ships’ canned provisions were not only underweight but of inferior quality, in Robertson’s words, “a disgrace to the contractor.” The same contractor—Stephan Goldner—had supplied Franklin’s expedition. Doubts about the antiscorbutic value of the lime juice carried on-ship were also raised, with subsequent chemical analysis concluding that there was no guarantee of “the initial soundness of the fruit.” This grave conclusion unfastened an exhaustive inquiry by Sir William Burnett, the navy’s medical director-general. All juice then in the victualling stores was analyzed, with the conclusion that it was all below the proper standard of acidity. It was, of course, a mistake to suppose that acidity was the vital element.

In the end, the Admiralty attributed the health problems that beset the expedition, and the unusual number of deaths, to scurvy. Ross, who had seen scurvy’s effects on some of his earlier expeditions, was unconvinced. He pointedly did not use the word “scurvy” in his official report of the expedition nor, indeed, did his men when later examined, saying that there had been “debility but no scurvy.” The ferocity of the illness was unequalled in nineteenth-century Arctic exploration. Not even Franklin’s expedition during its first year came close to experiencing the crippling losses encountered by James Clark Ross’s during its lone Arctic winter; at one point, twenty-six men were on the sick list. The mortality on Ross’s expedition was more than twice that of Franklin’s 1845–46 winter losses.

5 Isthmus of the Graves

On 4 april 1850, the Toronto Globe published an advertisement announcing a £20,000 reward to be given by “Her Majesty’s Government to any party or parties, of any country, who shall render efficient assistance to the crews of the discovery ships under the command of Sir John Franklin.” A further £10,000 was offered to anyone able to relieve any of the crews or bring information leading to their relief. Finally, another £10,000 was offered to anyone succeeding in ascertaining the fate of the expedition.

By the autumn of 1850, a fleet of ships was combing the Arctic’s waterways for a sign of the missing explorers. The British Admiralty alone sent three expeditions consisting of a total of eight ships into the Arctic. One of the search expeditions, made up of the HMS Enterprise and HMS Investigator under the command of Captain Richard Collinson and Commander Robert McClure, was sent through the Bering Strait; Captain Horatio Thomas Austin, with second-in-command Captain Erasmus Ommanney, was ordered to take four ships into Lancaster Sound, while the third expedition, led by Arctic whaling master Captain William Penny, was sent north into Jones Sound.

As early as February 1849, Jane, Lady Franklin travelled to Hull, a port from which whalers sailed to Baffin Bay, “with a view to plead her anxieties and distresses and to animate the commanders to her cause.” She was among those active in the race to save her husband and his men, and with the help of supporters sent a ship to join in the search. As well, the United States Navy Department assisted New York merchant Henry Grinnell, who outfitted two ships under Lieutenant Edwin J. De Haven, while aging explorer Sir John Ross led an expedition funded by the Hudson’s Bay Company and public subscription.

The Hudson’s Bay Company also sent John Rae, an expert in Arctic survival, to assist with what would be his second search. Rae, who travelled overland and by boat to Victoria Island, would discover two pieces of wood on the southern shore of the island, wood that could only have come from a ship. Yet there was no proof that the debris was from either the Erebus or Terror, and his survey ended on the southeastern corner of the island, where the ice that clogged Victoria Strait prevented him from crossing to nearby King William Island.

Finally, on 12 October 1850, the Illustrated London News was able to report: “some faint gleams of hopeful light have at last been thrown upon the gloom of uncertainty which hangs over the fate of Sir John Franklin and his companions.” For on 23 August 1850, Captain Erasmus Ommanney and some of the officers of the search ship HMS Assistance found signs of Franklin’s expedition at Cape Riley, on the southwest shore of Devon Island. After two years of disappointments, the Royal Navy at last had leads in the search for the missing men. Ommanney recalled:

But those relics told only of a brief stop, perhaps for magnetic observation early in the expedition, and gave away nothing in regard to Franklin’s whereabouts.

Ommanney pushed on, combing the shoreline for clues, until a large cairn was spotted high up on the headland of a nearby islet named Beechey Island. Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, commander of the steamship HMS Pioneer, which was also part of the Royal Navy search expedition under the overall command of Captain Horatio Thomas Austin, painted a dramatic picture of the men rushing towards the “dark and frowning cliffs… too steep for even [a] snow-flake to hang upon”:

Osborn was undeterred; he still held great hope that more discoveries would follow: “[The cairn] seemed to say to the beating heart, ‘follow them that erected me!’”

A flotilla of search ships converged on the area, among them the Lady Franklin under Captain William Penny. The gritty Scot swore to scour the area “like a blood-hound” until answers to the mystery were found. More traces of Franklin’s crew were discovered on Devon Island, this time at nearby Cape Spencer. Penny found the remains of a hut built of stones, artefacts that included scraps of newspaper dated September 1844, a fragment of paper with the words “until called,” more food tins, torn gloves—and that was all. Then, on 27 August, a breathless sailor brought Penny startling news: “Graves, Captain Penny! Graves! Franklin’s winter quarters!”

Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, ship’s surgeon under American searcher Edwin De Haven, was present when the news arrived and described what happened next:

The tombs lay side by side in a line with the headboards facing Cape Riley. Two of the grave mounds were “neatly paved round” with limestone slabs. Their inscriptions, chiselled into the headboards, read:

The second was:

The third grave, representing the earliest death, was not as carefully finished as the others, but Kane felt “its general appearance was more grave-like.” The headboard was inscribed:

Osborn noted that some seashells from the bay had been collected and “prettily arranged… by some old messmates.” The orderly arrangement of what Kane called the “isthmus of the graves” reminded Osborn of a parish cemetery.

The searchers hoped the discovery of the expedition’s winter campsite and the graves of its first three victims would somehow point to Franklin’s whereabouts. The dates inscribed on the headboards showed that the doomed expedition had passed the winter of 1845–46 nestled in a small bay on the east side of Beechey Island, and there was more.

Searchers sweeping the windblown island during the shortening days of late summer found other signs, including the remains of tenting sites, an armourer’s forge, a large storehouse, a carpenter’s house and a few other, smaller structures. Deep ruts left by sledges were found on the gravel terraces of Devon Island, leaving Osborn to observe “how little Franklin’s people were impressed with the importance of rendering their travelling equipment light and portable.” A polar bear killed by one of the searchers revealed an earlier bullet wound. The bullet was retrieved from the beast’s flesh and identified as having been fired from a weapon like those supplied to Franklin. Kane found “inexpressibly touching” the discovery of a little garden scraped into the gravel, with anemones still growing. Wrote Kane: “A garden implies a purpose either to remain or to return: he who makes it is looking to the future.” This discovery on Beechey Island, especially moving to a nation of gardeners, inspired a verse by Charles Dickens:

Another large cairn was discovered, this one made of more than 600 discarded food tins filled with gravel, but nowhere was there a message telling where Franklin and his crews had sailed. Why these empty cans had been stacked 7 feet (2.1 metres) high in such a manner was unclear. It was usual for Arctic expeditions to leave messages under cairns describing their current status and plans—but here there was no note. Such was the scale of popular interest in each development during the Franklin searches that even this peculiar discovery—a cairn of tins built without apparent purpose—found its way into another literary work, Walden, where Henry David Thoreau asked, “Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him?”

Wrote Thoreau: “Explore your own higher latitudes with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign.” But a sign of what in this case? What did it mean? With each discovery the Franklin mystery only seemed to deepen. As well, the trail that began at Cape Riley on Devon Island seemed to end on Beechey Island, just 1¼ miles (2 km) away. Osborn expressed the mood of the searchers this way: “Everyone felt that there was something so inexplicable in the non-discovery of any record, some written evidence of the intentions of Franklin and Crozier on leaving this spot…”

Although death was expected on expeditions of discovery through accident or illness, three deaths during the first winter was still considered unusual. The suggestion that the graves at Beechey Island could represent problems with the expedition’s food supply was discussed by the searchers and publicly stated by Ommanney in evidence given to the British government in 1852: “We know that 3 of their men (young men) died the first year, from which we may infer they were not enjoying perfect health. It is supposed that their preserved meats were of an inferior quality.”

Ommanney was referring to the possibility that some of the canned food was spoiled, or in his words, represented a “putrid abomination.” Sherard Osborn also noted angrily that “their preserved meats were those of the miscreant, Goldner.” Tinned-food supplier Stephan Goldner had had quality control problems with provisions supplied to later expeditions. In January 1852, it was reported that an examination at Portsmouth of a consignment of Goldner’s preserved meat (delivered fourteen months earlier), revealed that most of the meat had putrefied. According to the Times: “If Franklin and his party had been supplied with such food as that condemned, and relied on it as their mainstay in time of need, the very means of saving their lives may have bred a pestilence or famine among them, and have been their destruction.” Even before the Franklin expedition had sailed, Commander Fitzjames expressed concern that the Admiralty would buy meat from an unknown supplier simply because he had quoted a lower price. Indignation over the spoiled meat led to an inquiry, however it concluded that Goldner’s meat had been satisfactory on previous contracts. Wrote one Admiralty official: “From that period (1845) Goldner’s preserved meats have been in constant use in the navy, and it is only, I believe, latterly that they have been found to consist of such disgusting material.”

Dr. Peter Sutherland, surgeon on Penny’s expedition, believing some important clues to the health and the fate of Franklin’s expedition might be harboured within the graves, proposed their exhumation:

Sutherland went on to speculate on possible causes of death for the three sailors:

In August 1852, a squadron of ships returned to Beechey Island, and the searchers resumed their research there, but these further investigations were hampered by the frenzied activity that had taken place at the time of the discovery of Franklin’s first winter quarters two years earlier. Sherard Osborn, in a communication to the Royal Geographical Society, wrote of the destruction of the site:

Together, the rescue vessels had traced the first season of Franklin’s voyage from its disappearance into silence down Lancaster Sound in August 1845 until as late as September 1846. At most, searchers had found at Beechey Island only a partial record of the expedition’s first year beyond the reach of civilization. No one knew where to look next.

6 Region of Terror

Ironically, Franklin’s failure launched the golden era of Arctic exploration. More than thirty ship-based and overland expeditions would search for clues as to Franklin’s fate over the course of the following two decades, charting vast areas and mapping the completed route of the Northwest Passage in the process. Whilst many of these search expeditions were funded by the British government in response to public demand that Franklin be saved, others were raised by public subscription following appeals from Lady Franklin. Seamen volunteered for Arctic service in droves. Yet contemporary journals make it clear that many of these searches were also crippled by illness. In this respect, James Clark Ross was not alone.

Indeed, there was a more sinister enemy on board these Arctic voyages than the usual complaints of frostbite and stifling boredom. Where one captain, George Henry Richards, reported the “general debility” afflicting his crew, another, Sir Edward Belcher, abandoned four of his five ships in order to escape the far north after two years, fearing that a third Arctic year would lead to large-scale loss of life. The crew of another ship, the Prince Albert, a privately funded expedition, suffered severely from scurvy during their lone winter, 1851–52. And on the Enterprise, Captain Richard Collinson waged a bitter internecine war with his crew; by the end of his command he had placed, amongst others, his first, second and third officers under arrest. When he was subsequently criticized for his conduct, Collinson blamed “some form of that insidious Arctic enemy, the scurvy, which is known to effect the mind as well as the body of its victims.”

When another ship, the Investigator, commanded by Captain Robert McClure, became trapped at Mercy Bay on Banks Island, several of the men aboard went mad and had to be restrained, their howls piercing the long nights. The crew carried lime juice, specially prepared by the Navy’s Victualling Department, and hunted and gathered scurvy grass in the brief Arctic summers. By these methods, McClure was able to forestall the appearance of scurvy, but by the third winter, illness was widespread: “only 4 out of a total of 64 on board were not more or less affected by scurvy.” Alexander Armstrong, expedition surgeon, described treating sufferers with “preserved fresh meat,” as tinned foods were still considered to have antiscorbutic properties. Even after such interventions, three of the men died. McClure abandoned ship, and his crew were spared only by a fortuitous encounter with yet other search ships. Thomas Morgan, who was seriously ill at the time of this rescue, “sick and covered with scurvy sores,” died on 19 May 1854. He was buried on Beechey Island, alongside the men from the Erebus and Terror.

Yet McClure, who was credited with the first successful transit of the Northwest Passage, even without his ship, was glad for the struggle he had been put through. He, like others of the age, saw self-sacrifice in some noble cause as the pinnacle of human achievement. He captured the spirit of the Franklin searchers this way:

By far the worst afflicted, however, were two Franklin search expeditions funded by Henry Grinnell, a wealthy American benefactor. The first, commanded by Lieutenant Edwin de Haven of the U.S. Navy, aboard the Advance and the Rescue, went out in May 1850 and by August was already trapped in winter quarters with temperatures plummeting. Elisha Kent Kane, the ship’s surgeon and the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family, described the appalling living conditions endured by the crew:

A pervasive melancholy set in, and scurvy made its first appearance in September. By Christmas, there was a general shortness of breath, and the officers noticed a strange phenomenon that the British searchers had also identified, “a sort of craving” for animal fats. Kane described the complexions of the crewmen as having assumed a “peculiar waxy paleness,” even “ghostliness.” The men reported outlandish, vivid dreams. One described finding “Sir John Franklin in a beautiful cove, lined by orange-trees.” Another dreamt he had visited the desolate nearby coast and “returned laden with watermelons.” By January, de Haven was also stricken and forced to relinquish command. Among other complaints, he suffered severe pain from a wound in his hand inflicted by a schoolmaster’s ruler twenty-five years before. In February, twelve men were laid out by stiff and painful limbs. Largely dependent on salted and preserved foods, the crew’s stores of antiscorbutics, raw potatoes and lime juice were running low. In May, the crew succeeded in killing a large number of seals and walrus, and catastrophe was averted.

The second Grinnell expedition, this time commanded by Elisha Kent Kane, sailed in 1853 with instructions to search Smith Sound, ostensibly for Franklin’s missing ships. The expedition was, in fact, a thinly veiled run at the North Pole. This was his first command, and Kane was hardly the image of a grizzled Arctic explorer. Of sickly, almost dainty, constitution, he made up for his physical limitations with the spirit of a dauntless adventurer—his account of this journey is infused with romanticism. He relished the Arctic as a “mysterious region of terrors” as he tacked north through Smith Sound into an unexplored basin that now carries his name. Here, the crew established a winter harbour off the coast of Greenland and lived in a state of perpetual misery. Kane was right with respect to one thing: the terrors abounded. The ship was not insulated, and Kane had miscalculated on the amount of fuel required. By February they could no longer spare fuel to melt water to wash in. It was so cold inside the Advance that one man’s tongue froze to his beard.

Dependent on “ordinary marine stores,” notably pemmican and salt pork, there was also a severe outbreak of scurvy among the twenty men. Kane carefully noted the advance of symptoms. In February 1854, he wrote, “scurvy and general debility have made me short o’ wind.” In April, Kane dispatched his sledging parties north towards the pole. It was a foolhardy gambit that soon degenerated, the party stricken with frostbite and scurvy. The illness that had gnawed at them all winter now threatened to consume them entirely. Kane himself had to be carried back to the Advance, “nearly insensible and so swollen with scurvy as to be hardly recognizable.” His condition was regarded as hopeless. When the party reached the ship they were in total disarray, suicidal, incoherent, disease-ridden, gesticulating wildly and conversing with themselves. The ship “presented all the appearances of a mad house.” There remained only three men well enough to carry out ordinary duties. To top it all, rats had infested the ship.

Fortunately, with summer’s thaw, the hardships that had characterized the winter abated. Hunting parties were sent off and, with a large supply of fresh meat, health was soon restored. But the ice failed to clear from the ship’s harbour, and the crew faced a second winter.

Under stress Kane proved to be unfit for command. He became irritable and quarrelsome, and when he wasn’t picking an argument with one of his officers he was boasting about his family’s status or his amorous conquests back in Philadelphia. His lengthy dinnertime monologues were liberally peppered with Latin phrases, all for the benefit of men he considered his social inferiors. Sick and starved to the bone (on a good day eating the entrails of a fox, on a bad day sucking on their mittens), the crew looked on with a mixture of incredulity and contempt as their commander tried to impress them by speaking the ancient language. Soon, secret meetings were organized, and in September, seven of the men announced to Kane their intention to desert ship and attempt a 700-mile (1,126-km) trek south to Upernavik, the northernmost of Greenland’s Danish communities. Yet the mutineers got nowhere near it before returning to the brig nearly frozen to throw themselves at Kane’s mercy, which proved a shallow well indeed.

As the second winter set upon them they were nearly out of coal, and Kane ordered the men to use wood from the Advance for fuel. They tore off the deck sheathing and removed the ship’s rails and upper spars. Unable to secure adequate supplies of raw meat in the fall, the disease returned even more virulently. The symptoms were gruesome. One man had the flesh drop from his ankle, exposing bone and tendons. By December, the only antiscorbutics left were the scrapings of raw potatoes, but there were only twelve of the potatoes left and they were three years old. The entire crew was seriously ill, and Kane was surprised to discover their condition improved or worsened in exact relation to their infrequent ability to obtain fresh meat. Wrote Kane: “Our own sickness I attribute to our civilized diet; had we plenty of frozen walrus I would laugh at scurvy.” He later wrote admiringly of the Inuit: “Our journeys have taught us the wisdom of the Esquimaux appetite, and there are few among us who do not relish a slice of raw blubber or a chunk of frozen walrus-beef… as a powerful and condensed heat-making and antiscorbutic food it has no rival.”

Other searchers had come to the same realization, and one, the surgeon Peter Sutherland, suggested in 1852 that had Franklin needed to increase his stock of provisions, “there is no doubt his ingenuity would suggest to him what the Eskimos have practiced for thousands of years—preserving masses of animal substances, such as whales flesh, by means of ice, during the summer months, when it may be easily obtained, for their use during winter.”

The realization came too late for Kane. The health of the crew reached its worst in the spring of 1855, and several men died. At one point, Kane referred to his compatriots in his journal as “my crew,” then corrected himself, writing: “I have no crew any longer.” Instead, he began referring to the men as “the tenants of my bunks.” Kane was, at this point, effectively alone. Of the men on the expedition, only he had remained in comparatively good health throughout the second winter. The reason was simple: Kane had taken to eating the rats infesting the ship. Despite their privations, he could not convince any of the other men to join him.

In the spring, after acquiring fresh walrus meat with the help of some of the natives of Greenland who visited the ship, the bedraggled partly abandoned the Advance and made its way down the coast, first over the ice and then in small boats. After eighty-four days they flagged down a Danish shallop and were saved. They had done nothing to advance the search for Franklin. In fact, they were some 1,000 miles (1,609 km) away from where the last remnants of the expedition were finally located.

7 Terror Camp Clear

By 1854 nine years had elapsed since Franklin set sail on his voyage of discovery. He had provisions for three years, though it was thought the supplies could have been rationed to last some months longer, perhaps until 1849. What became obvious to the Admiralty was that, regardless of what more could be done to solve the mystery, nothing could be done to save Franklin and his men. On 20 January 1854, a notice in the London Gazette stated that unless news to the contrary arrived by 31 March, the officers and crews of the Erebus and Terror would be considered to have died in Her Majesty’s service, and their wages would be paid to relatives up to that date. The expedition’s muster books show the sailors buried on Beechey Island, however, were “discharged dead” according to the dates on their headboards: William Braine on 3 April 1846, John Hartnell on 4 January 1846, John Torrington on 1 January 1846.

Despite the official acknowledgement that no more relief expeditions would be sent, interest in the Franklin search—and in the Arctic in general—remained high in Britain. Three Inuit (or “Esquimaux” as the Victorians called them) were taken to England by a merchant and given an audience with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, then “exhibited” in London. “The painful excitement which has so long pervaded the minds of all classes with respect to the fate of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic Expedition lends additional interest to the examination of these natives of the dreary North,” the Illustrated London News commented. Interest among North Americans did not always match that of the British public’s, however. In one instance, the Toronto Globe complained that only a handful of people attended a lecture on the Arctic and the possible fate of Sir John Franklin, while the same hall had been “filled to overflowing” with those curious to view the famous midget Tom Thumb.

Finally, on Monday, 23 October 1854, under the headline “Startling News: Sir John Franklin starved to death,” the Toronto Globe reported “melancholy intelligence” that had arrived in Montreal two days earlier. After his failed earlier investigations, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s John Rae had made the first major discovery of the Franklin searches while surveying the Boothia Peninsula. The Globe excitedly outlined the news:

Two days later, the Globe argued that Rae had succeeded “in revealing to the world the mysterious fate of the gallant Franklin and his unfortunate companions, and in proving the folly of man’s attempting to storm ‘winter’s citadel’ or light up ‘the depths of Polar night.’” By 28 October 1854, word had reached Britain that the veil that obscured the fate of Sir John Franklin had been lifted. In a letter to the Secretary of the Admiralty, Rae outlined his discoveries:

Rae went on to report descriptions of a party of white men dragging sledges down the coast of King William Island, of the discovery a year later of bodies on the North American mainland and evidence of cannibalism. Contrary to the Toronto Globe headline, there was no proof that Franklin himself had starved to death, but disaster had clearly befallen his crews. Evocatively, the Inuit also told Rae that “they had found eight or ten books where the dead bodies were; that those books had ‘markings’ upon them, but they would not tell whether they were in print or manuscript.” When Rae asked what they had done with the books, possibly expedition logs, he was told that they had given them to their children, “who had torn them up as playthings.” In support of the Inuit accounts, Rae carried with him items he had been able to purchase from the natives, including monogrammed silver forks and spoons, one of them bearing Crozier’s initials, and Sir John Franklin’s Hanoverian Order of Merit.

Because Rae’s information about the cause of the expedition’s destruction came second-hand, it was judged inconclusive by many, though the relics were evidence enough that “Sir John Franklin and his party are no more.” The British government, enmeshed in the Crimean War, asked the Hudson’s Bay Company to follow up on the new information. Its chief factor, James Anderson, was able to add only slightly to Rae’s report when he discovered several articles from the Franklin expedition on Montreal Island and the adjacent coastline, including a piece of wood with the word “Terror” branded on it, part of a backgammon board and preserved meat tins—but no human remains or records. Anderson’s search, which lasted only nine days, would be the last official attempt to learn the fate of Franklin. Rae, though attacked by critics for not following up on the Inuit reports and instead hurrying back to London, was given £8,000 in reward money; the men in his party split another £2,000.

The British public and government interest quickly turned to the Crimean War. The very week that news of Rae’s discoveries reached Britain, a confusion of orders resulted in a brigade of British cavalry charging some entrenched batteries of Russian artillery. A report in the Times captivated Franklin’s nephew, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who immortalized the encounter where so many British horsemen died in his “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Events had finally overtaken the disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his officers and crews, leaving many to believe that the mystery of the expedition’s destruction would never be solved. In addition, there were others who questioned the value of research expeditions such as Franklin’s, which demanded such a heavy toll. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine summed up this view better than any other journal in an article published in November 1855:

Yet there were still those who had not given up on Arctic expeditions, who still believed that the answers to Franklin’s fate lay somewhere on King William Island or on the mainland close to the mouth of the Back River. Foremost among them was Lady Franklin, who made one last impassioned plea to British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston: “…the final and exhaustive search is all I seek on behalf of the first and only martyrs to Arctic discovery in modern times, and it is all I ever intend to ask.” She failed to convince the British government to send one final search, and launched another expedition of her own. No longer seeking the rescue of Franklin, she now sought his vindication.

Lady Franklin, born Jane Griffin, personified the romantic heroine with her refusal to give up hope that searchers would one day discover the fate of her husband and his crews. Her determination, coupled with a willingness to spend a large part of her fortune to outfit four such expeditions, haunted the Victorian public as much as it inspired the searchers of her day. “To know a loss is a single and definite pain,” the Athenaeum observed, “to dread it is a complicated anguish which to the pain of the fear adds the pain of the hope… The misery is, that if the truth be not known, Lady Franklin will nurse for years her frail hope, almost too sickly to live and yet unable to die.”

What makes the devotion of Lady Franklin especially moving is the recognition that she was an independent and free-thinking woman who had not married until her thirties, and who saw more of the world than possibly any other woman of her day. During her long vigil, Lady Franklin not only implored the British for help, but the president of the United States and the emperor of Russia as well. She became an expert in Arctic geography. One famous folk song, “Lord Franklin,” captured the passion of her search:

With the help of a public appeal for funds and a donation of supplies by the Admiralty, Lady Franklin purchased a steam yacht, the Fox, and placed command with the Arctic veteran Captain Francis Leopold M’Clintock, a Royal Navy officer who had been involved in three earlier Franklin search expeditions, beginning with that of James Clark Ross’s attempt in 1848–49. M’Clintock chose Lieutenant William Robert Hobson, son of the first governor of New Zealand, as his second-in-command. The Fox sailed from Aberdeen, Scotland, on 1 July 1857.

Almost immediately, problems hampered the search and the Fox was forced to spend its first winter trapped in ice in Baffin Bay, before being freed in the spring. By August 1858 the Fox had reached Beechey Island, where, at the site of Franklin’s first winter quarters, M’Clintock erected a monument on behalf of Lady Franklin. The monument, dated 1855, read in part:

By the end of September the searchers had travelled to the eastern entrance to Bellot Strait, where they established a second winter base. From there, M’Clintock and Hobson were able to leave their ship in small parties and travel overland to King William Island, early in April 1859. The two groups then split up, with M’Clintock ordering Hobson to scour the west coast of the island for clues while he travelled down the island’s east coast to the estuary of the Back River, before returning via the island’s west coast.

On 20 April, M’Clintock encountered two Inuit families. He traded for Franklin relics in their possession and, upon questioning them, discovered that two ships had been seen but that one sank in deep water. The other was forced onto shore by the ice. On board they found the body of a very large man with “long teeth.” They said that the “white people went away to the ‘large river,’ taking a boat or boats with them, and that in the following winter their bones were found there.” Later, M’Clintock met up with a group of thirty to forty Inuit who inhabited a snow village on King William Island. He purchased silver plate bearing the crests or initials of Franklin, Crozier and two other officers. One woman said “many of the white men dropped by the way as they went to the Great River; that some were buried and some were not.”

M’Clintock reached the mainland and continued southward to Montreal Island, where a few relics, including a piece of a preserved meat tin, two pieces of iron hoop and other scraps of metal, were found. The sledge party then turned back to King William Island, where they searched along its southern, then western coasts. Ghastly secrets awaited both M’Clintock and Hobson as they trudged over the snow-covered land.

Shortly after midnight on 24 May 1859, a human skeleton in the uniform of a steward from the lost expedition was found on a gravel ridge near the mouth of Peffer River on the island’s southern shore. M’Clintock recorded the tragic scene in his journal:

M’Clintock believed the man had fallen asleep in this position and that his “last moments were undisturbed by suffering.”

Alongside the bleached skeleton lay a “a small clothes-brush near, and a horn pocket-comb, in which a few light-brown hairs still remained.” There was also a notebook, which belonged to Harry Peglar, captain of the foretop on the Terror. The notebook contained the handwriting of two individuals, Peglar and an unknown second. In the hand of Peglar was a song lyric, dated 21 April 1847, which begins: “The C the C the open C it grew so fresh the Ever free.” A mystery, however, surrounds the other papers, written in the hand of the unknown and referring to the disaster. Most of the words in the messages were spelled backwards and ended with capital letters, as if the end were the beginning. One sheet of paper had a crude drawing of an eye, with the words “lid Bay” underneath. When corrected, another message reads: “Oh Death whare is thy sting, the grave at Comfort Cove for who has any douat how… the dyer sad…” On the other side of that paper, words were written in a circle, and inside the circle was the passage, “the terror camp clear.” This has been interpreted as a place name, a reference to a temporary encampment made by the Franklin expedition—possibly the encampment at Beechey Island. Another paper, written in the same hand, also spelled backwards, includes this passage: “Has we have got some very hard ground to heave… we shall want some grog to wet houer… issel… all my art Tom for I do think… time… I cloze should lay and… the 21st night a gread.” The “21st night” could be 21 April 1848, the eve of the desertion of the Erebus and Terror—a possibility raised because of another discovery. The most important artefact of the Franklin searches had been located three weeks before the skeleton was found, as Hobson surveyed the northwest coast of the island. On 5 May, the only written record of the Franklin expedition—chronicling some of the events after the desertion of the ships and consisting of two brief notes scrawled on a single piece of naval record paper—was found in a cairn near Victory Point. The first, signed by Lieutenant Graham Gore, outlined the progress of the expedition to May 1847:

The document is notable for an inexplicable error in a date—the expedition had wintered at Beechey Island in 1845–46, not 1846–47—and its unequivocal proclamation: “All well.” Originally deposited in a metal canister under a stone cairn, the note was retrieved eleven months later and additional text then scribbled around its margins. It was this note that in its simplicity told of the disastrous conclusion to 129 lives:

“So sad a tale was never told in fewer words,” M’Clintock commented after examining the note. Indeed, everything had changed in the eleven months between the two messages. Beset by pack-ice since September 1846, Franklin’s two ships ought to have been freed during the brief summer of 1847, allowing them to continue their push to the western exit of the passage at Bering Strait. Instead, they remained frozen fast and had been forced to spend a second winter off King William Island. For the Franklin expedition, this was the death warrant. There had already been an astonishing mortality rate, especially among officers. Deserting their ships on 22 April 1848, the 105 surviving officers and men set up camp on the northwest coast of King William Island, preparing for a trek south to the mouth of the Back River, then an arduous ascent to a distant Hudson’s Bay Company post, Fort Resolution, which lay some 1,250 miles (2,210 km) away. M’Clintock described the scene where the note had been discovered:

Why some of these items had been carried even as far as Victory Point is another of the questions that cannot be answered, but M’Clintock was sure of one thing: “our doomed and scurvy-stricken countrymen calmly prepared themselves to struggle manfully for life.” The magnitude of the endeavour facing the crews must have been overwhelming, and the knowledge of its futility spiritually crushing. It also ran contrary to the best guesses of other leading Arctic explorers. George Back, who had explored the river named for him in 1834, was certain Franklin’s men would not have attempted an escape over the mainland: “I can say from experience that no toilworn and exhausted party could have the least chance of existence by going there.” John Rae thought that “Sir John Franklin would have followed the route taken by Sir John Ross in escaping from Regent Inlet.”

To this day, the route of the expedition retreat confounds some historians, who, like Rae, believe a much more logical and attainable goal would have been to march north and east to Somerset Island and Fury Beach—the route by which John Ross had made good an escape from an ice-bound ship in 1833. Fury Beach was not much further for the crews of the Erebus and the Terror than it had been for John Ross’s crew of the abandoned Victory. It was also the most obvious place for a relief expedition to be sent, and James Clark Ross did indeed reach the area with two ships, five months after the Erebus and Terror were deserted.

Instead, after quitting their camp on 26 April, the crews moved south along the coastline of King William Island, man-hauling heavily laden lifeboats that had been removed from the ships and mounted on large sledges. Plagued by their rapidly deteriorating health, the crews were then overcome by the physical demands of the task. M’Clintock found what appeared to have been a field hospital established by Franklin’s retreating crews only eighty miles into their trek. He suspected scurvy. Speculation also focussed on the tinned food supply. Inuit later told of some of their people eating the contents of the tins “and it had made them very ill: indeed some had actually died.” As for Franklin’s men, many died along the west and south coasts of King William Island.

Later, Hobson found a vivid indication of the tragedy when he located a lifeboat from the Franklin expedition containing skeletons and relics. Men from Franklin’s crews had at last been found, but the help had come a decade too late. When M’Clintock later visited the “boat place,” he described his tiny party as being “transfixed with awe” at the sight of the two human skeletons that lay inside the boat. One skeleton, found in the bow, had been partly destroyed by “large and powerful animals, probably wolves,” M’Clintock guessed. But the other skeleton remained untouched, “enveloped with cloths and furs,” feet tucked into warm boots to protect against the harsh Arctic cold. Nearby were two loaded double-barrelled guns, as if ready to fend off an attack that never came.

M’Clintock named the area, on the western extreme of King William Island, Cape Crozier. The boat, which had been carefully equipped for the ascent of the Back River, was 28 feet (8.5 metres) long; M’Clintock estimated the combined weight of the boat and the oak sledge it was mounted on at 1,400 pounds (635 kg).

Careful lists of the “amazing” quantity of goods also contained in the boat were compiled. Everything from boots and silk handkerchiefs to curtain rods, silverware, scented soap, sponges, slippers, toothbrushes and hair-combs were found. Six books, including a Bible in which most of the verses were underlined, A Manual of Private Devotions and The Vicar of Wakefield, were also discovered and scoured for messages, but none were found. The only provisions in the boat were tea and chocolate. M’Clintock judged the astonishing variety of articles “a mere accumulation of dead weight, of little use, and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews.” Perhaps strangest of all was the direction in which the boat was pointing, for instead of heading towards the river that was the target of the struggling survivors, the boat was pointed back towards the deserted ships. M’Clintock guessed that the party had broken off from the main body of men under the command of Crozier, and was making a failed attempt to return to the ships for food: “Whether it was the intention of this boat party to await the result of another season in the ships, or to follow the track of the main body to the Great Fish [Back] River, is now a matter of conjecture.”

This picture, of dying seamen shambling along, dragging sledges loaded down with the detritus of Victorian England, is the enduring image of the Franklin expedition disaster. Reviewing the evidence in 1881, M’Clintock concluded that surviving members of Franklin’s expedition:

Even among his own sledging parties, M’Clintock observed, “scurvy advanced with rapid strides.” Hobson, who had carried tinned pemmican for food, “suffered very severely in health,” ultimately having to be dragged back on the sledge. Wrote M’Clintock of Hobson’s plight: “How strongly this bears upon the last sad march of [Franklin’s] lost crews!” Years later, Hobson was asked: “Can you give… any opinion as to the cause why scurvy broke out with you?” His answer was, “I can scarcely say that scurvy did break out with us. I said that the men were debilitated, that they lost stamina. There was no cause that I know of, except the fact of not being able to get really fresh meat and fresh vegetables.”

The success of their voyage brought both honour and fame to M’Clintock and Hobson, as well as some solace to Lady Franklin. She now knew the exact date of Franklin’s death and that he had died aboard-ship long before the final, gruesome events on King William Island, thus preserving his reputation. What is more, he had died close enough to his objective to have justified at least a moral claim to the prize: Discoverer of the Northwest Passage. M’Clintock had produced, it was popularly decided, “melancholy evidence of their success.” Sherard Osborn, who had commanded a ship in an earlier search, captured the public mood when he wrote of Franklin:

In Toronto, the Globe echoed:

Finally, on 15 October 1859, the Illustrated London News attempted to recapture the emotions felt by Franklin’s sailors near Victory Point in their final desperate struggle to survive:

In their last final march, the crews of the Erebus and Terror had indeed discovered the Northwest Passage. But by the time they walked along the shores of Simpson Strait, the triumph must have been a hollow one, for all around them was despair.

Franklin and his crews entered the Arctic with their primary goal the completion of the passage. Although geographically there is no single passage, and on a map it is possible to plot a myriad of routes around and through the clusters of islands that make up the Arctic archipelago, in reality, until the advent of ice-breakers, ice conditions narrowed the possibilities to only a few choices. By 1845, when Franklin sailed, much of the mainland coast of North America had been charted by overland explorers questing for a navigable passage, and when the ship-based explorations up to that point are added to the map of the Arctic, it becomes apparent that only a relatively short distance, in the King William Island region, remained uncharted.

In their first season in the Arctic, Franklin’s ships sailed up Wellington Channel to 77°N latitude where they were turned back either by ice or the lateness of the season. The expedition then travelled south to Barrow Strait by a previously unexplored channel between Bathurst and Cornwallis islands. Wrote M’Clintock: “Seldom has such an amount of success been accorded to an Arctic navigator in a single season, and when the Erebus and Terror were secured at Beechey Island for the coming winter of 1845–46, the results of their first year’s labour must have been most cheering.” When the sailing season of 1846 began with the break-up of ice in Barrow Strait and in Erebus Bay (their winter harbour off Beechey Island), the two ships sailed roughly south and west, ending beset in the ice off the northwest coast of King William Island in September 1846. What route the ships took to reach this point is still a matter of conjecture, though it is likely the Erebus and Terror travelled through Peel Sound and what is now Franklin Strait between Somerset and Prince of Wales islands. Franklin believed this route would eventually lead him to parts of the mainland coastline he had explored two decades earlier. His maps told him that, in the King William Island area, he had to complete the stretch along the west side of what was then called King William’s Land (a distance M’Clintock estimated at 90 miles/145 km—but, in fact, was actually 62 miles/100 km) to be credited with completing the charting of a Northwest Passage.

The northern extent of this unknown gap was a low point of land on the northwest coast of King William Island, visited by James Clark Ross from the east in the late spring of 1830. Ross had named the location Victory Point. The southern extent was to be found at Cape John Herschel on the south coast of King William Island. In 1839, Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson explored along the mainland coast; moving eastward along the coast to Boothia Peninsula, they eventually turned back to the south coast of King William Island, exploring the island until they reached Cape John Herschel, where they built a large cairn. From this point they crossed back to the mainland and retraced their route to the west, a route which itself had been extended over time to Bering Strait, the western entrance to the passage.

Curiously, perhaps tragically, both Ross in 1830 and Dease and Simpson in 1839 suggested that the area they had explored was an extension of the mainland—a bulge of land connected directly to the southwestern part of Boothia Peninsula. It is very likely that Franklin, armed with the maps, descriptions and opinions of these earlier explorers as well as his own theories on the geography of the region, believed he had no choice in sailing direction when he eventually encountered Cape Felix, the northern tip of King William Island. Thinking that a route to the east of this point would lead to a dead end, he turned his ships to the southwest, directly into the continuously replenished pack-ice that grinds down the length of McClintock Channel from the northwest. The power and persistence of this ploughing train of ice cannot be overestimated; the northwest coast of King William Island bears the scars as proof. This ice mass does not always clear during the short summers and a lethal trap awaited the two ships, a trap made all the more cruel with the realization that the route along the eastern coast of the island regularly clears during the summer. It was only during their final doomed march that the surviving men from the Erebus and Terror completed the gap—and the Northwest Passage. In the words of searcher Sir John Richardson, “they forged the last link of the Northwest Passage with their lives.”

M’Clintock’s discoveries on King William Island thus provided an outline of the expedition’s last days. And with this new information, the final clamour for answers to the Franklin mystery died down, even though it was apparent that many questions remained. As the Illustrated London News was to explain on 1 January 1881: “[M’Clintock’s] search was necessarily a hasty and partial one, as the snow lay thick on the ground, and the parties had to return to their vessel before the disruption of the ice in summer.”

In the end, the impetus for continuing to probe the Franklin disaster came not so much from the British but from two colourful Americans, who were without any Arctic experience when they each began their separate searches.

Charles Francis Hall, a Cincinnati, Ohio, businessman who became interested in the Arctic following the disappearance of Franklin’s expedition, decided in 1859 to conduct a search of his own. Hall argued before potential backers that Franklin survivors might still be alive among the Inuit; besides, the shores of King William Island needed to be searched during the summer for more clues as to the expedition’s last days. After a failed first attempt to reach King William Island, Hall returned again in July 1864, finally reaching its southern coast in May 1869. Here, Hall noted Inuit accounts of cannibalism among Franklin’s starving crews. He also recorded his anger at learning from the Inuit that, while several native families had provided an officer thought to be Crozier and a group of his men with some seal meat, the Inuit had then left, ignoring pleas for further aid. Forgetting to add that the Inuit themselves only managed to survive at subsistence level, Hall wrote:

Hall itemized Franklin relics found in the possession of the Inuit, including a mahogany writing desk that “had been recently in use as a blubber-tray.” He transcribed Inuit testimony of having dug up, and left unburied, a body on King William Island: “This white man was very large and tall, and by state of gums and teeth was terribly sick.” The Inuit also recounted having seen a ship in the area of O’Reilly Island, off the Adelaide Peninsula, which Hall took to be evidence that either the Erebus or Terror had “consummated the Great Northwest Passage.” According to their account, the Inuit had at first approached the ship with caution, but when it seemed no one was aboard, a group visited it. In a locked cabin, they told of the discovery of “a dead man, whose body was very large and heavy, his teeth long. It took five men to lift this giant kob-lu-na. He was left where they found him.” According to Hall’s intelligence, the Inuit then began “ransacking” the ship for materials. Among the many items on board, they described seeing meat in cans.

Hall deduced that the Inuit found the ship in the spring of 1849. According to the Inuit account, there was a gangway reaching from the deck to the ice, suggesting that the vessel was still occupied that winter. The ship sank a short time later and debris, masts, boxes and casks drifted to shore. It was after this that an intriguing discovery was made: “fresh tracks were seen of four men and a dog on the land where the ship was. In-nook-poo-ihee-jook, who had seen Ross and his party on the Victory and Rae in 1854, knew these tracks to be kob-lu-nas’… ” If that is the case, then it is likely that survivors of the Franklin expedition were alive at the time that James Clark Ross made his sledge journey in May 1849.

Searching for remains on King William Island and on nearby islets, Hall in once instance identified a human thigh bone, but his work was constrained because snow remained on the ground. He also found a skeleton, later identified by a gold filling as Lieutenant Henry Le Vesconte of the Erebus. Hall conducted a solemn ceremony to honour the dead man, including flying the American flag at half-mast and building a monument of stones. The remains were then collected by Hall and taken to the United States before being returned to England, where they were entombed at a Franklin memorial in Greenwich Hospital.

Much more important American discoveries were to come. On 19 June 1878, Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, a United States cavalry officer who had served in the Indian wars of the American West at the same time as the famed defeat of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer at Little Big Horn, and who was also a qualified lawyer and medical doctor, led a tiny expedition backed by the American Geographical Society into the Arctic. Schwatka was inspired by Hall’s earlier efforts, and by American whalers who, having spoken with the Inuit, reported that documents of the lost expedition might be found.

Travelling by sledge on what was to become a 3,249-mile (5,232-km) return journey, Schwatka was able to reach King William Island and conduct a thorough search in 1878–79 along the route taken during the retreat of the Erebus and Terror crews. Besides confirming important aspects of M’Clintock’s search, Schwatka added immeasurably to the record of relics and human remains scattered along the western and southern coasts of the island.

On 21 July 1879, Schwatka visited the boat place seen by M’Clintock some nineteen years earlier, but instead of an intact boat and contents, he found that the site had “evidently been thoroughly overhauled by the natives.” Besides the remnants of the boat, Schwatka found combs, sponges, toothbrushes, bottles and powder cans. He also found the widely distributed bones of four skeletons, including three skulls.

On 24 June that same summer, at what Schwatka called the “very crest” of his long journey, near Victory Point on the island’s northwest shores, an opened grave was discovered. A medal with the name of John Irving engraved on it was found at the site, though the grave had been “despoiled by the natives some years before.” Schwatka described the scene in his journal:

Because of the original care taken in the burial, Schwatka believed that the body had been buried from the ships, where a proper coffin could have been constructed. The gravesite stood in contrast to the final resting places of the other Franklin sailors found on King William Island, where the bones lay scattered on the ground. A human skull and other bones, thought to be Irving’s, were found scattered over a wide area around the grave. “They were carefully gathered together, with a few pieces of cloth and other articles, to be brought home for interment where they may hereafter rest undisturbed,” Schwatka wrote. (Of all the skeletal remains discovered by the American, only those identified as belonging to Irving were removed from the island, to be eventually buried with full naval honours at Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.)

Schwatka’s expedition made other discoveries: a large cairn covering a fragment of paper with a hand drawn on it, the index finger pointing; an Inuit cache with more relics, including several red cans marked “Goldner’s Patent.” Schwatka also found and interviewed a woman who said that some of the men she had met had “dry and hard and black” mouths, suggesting the presence of scurvy. He also recorded testimony similar to that collected by Hall, from an old man named Ikinnelikpatolok, who told of a large ship frozen in the ice to the west of Adelaide Peninsula, north of O’Reilly Island, and claimed he had seen one white man “dead in a bunk.” Among other items, “they found some red cans of fresh meat, with plenty of what looked like tallow mixed with it. A great many had been opened, and four were still unopened.”

Before leaving the Arctic, Schwatka met an old Inuk woman and her son who told a grim story of finding relics of the Franklin expedition on the shores of the North American mainland many years before, including one of the lifeboats the retreating crewmen had been dragging. Schwatka recorded the son’s account:

The last thirty or forty of Franklin’s men had apparently left the tragedy of King William Island behind them near the mouth of the Peffer River and crossed Simpson Strait, only to exhaust their last hopes in the barren reaches of an area Schwatka named Starvation Cove. (It has been argued that the two boxes may have contained the remains of Sir John Franklin and the expedition logs, but they have been lost forever.) A search of the area revealed little, only the partial remains of one sailor. The Inuit explained that the land had reclaimed the rest of the bodies—that the bones had sunk into the sand, mute testimony of the horror that visited the area so long ago.

Schwatka’s party returned to the United States in September 1880. The Illustrated London News provided detailed coverage of the expedition’s journey across King William Island, including an explanation for the absence of proper graves:

The president of the Royal Geographical Society concluded that the Franklin search expeditions had succeeded in surveying much of the Arctic archipelago and “expunged the blot of obscurity which would otherwise have hung over and disfigured the history of this enlightened age.” Despite the failure to locate the ships’ records, or either of the two vessels, the Franklin searches had also pierced the Arctic long enough to answer the fundamental mysteries of the expedition’s disappearance. Its route had been generally established, the reason for the desertion of the Erebus and Terror was made known and the Inuit accounts and sad discovery of relics on King William Island attested to the crews’ final chilling days of life.

With the great search at last over, Tennyson wrote the epitaph for the Westminster Abbey memorial to Franklin:

Britain transferred sovereignty of the Arctic islands to Canada in 1880. The Northwest Passage was finally sailed by Norway’s Roald Amundsen in 1903–06, aboard a wooden sloop named Gjoa. It was perhaps fitting that Amundsen should have been the first, for it was the narrative of Franklin’s 1819 overland journey that led him to dream of being a polar explorer. “Oddly enough it was the sufferings that Sir John and his men had to go through which attracted me most in his narrative. A strange urge made me wish that I too would go through the same thing,” wrote Amundsen, who conquered the passage and later the South Pole, only to die in a plane crash in Arctic waters in 1928. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Henry Asbjorn Larsen later sailed the passage from west to east aboard the St. Roch in 1940–42, and from east to west in 1944.

Occasionally, bones thought to belong to a Franklin expedition member were discovered. In one case, a partial skeleton was sent to Canada’s National Museum in Ottawa, where it remains in storage. And in 1923, the explorer Knud Rasmussen, a native of Greenland, reported interring some remains on the east coast of the Adelaide Peninsula, which, from surviving scraps of clothing and footwear, were “unquestionably the last mortal remains of Franklin’s men.”

Rasmussen also wrote down Inuit oral history of the discovery of a deserted ship, found when the natives were hunting seals off the northwest coast of King William Island. One old man named Qaqortingneq described what was seen by those who went aboard: “At first they were afraid to go down into the lower part of the ship, but after a while they grew bolder, and ventured also into the houses underneath. Here they found many dead men, lying in the sleeping places there; all dead.”

Major L.T. Burwash of Canada’s Department of the Interior made several visits to King William Island, interviewing Inuit elders for further clues about the Franklin expedition. In April 1929 he secured a statement from two men named Enukshakak and Nowya who told of finding, forty years earlier, a large cache of wooden cases carrying “tin containers, some of which were painted red.” According to the men’s account, some of these provisions were tins of preserved meat, purportedly found on a low flat island to the east of King William Island. They expressed their belief that the cache was left by the crew of a ship that had been wrecked off nearby Matty Island. This testimony, coupled with the report, recorded by Schwatka, of a wreck a short distance from O’Reilly Island, prompted Burwash to present the theory that some of Franklin’s crews had returned to the Erebus and Terror and that “the ships were eventually brought to their final resting places while more or less under the control of their crews.”

Burwash also included with his account what was purported to be unpublished testimony from a member of Charles Francis Hall’s expedition, by then deceased, which strangely never made it into Hall’s official account. Attributed to an Inuk hunter, this additional material revealed that Sir John Franklin may have been buried in a cement vault on King William Island: “one man died on the ships and was brought ashore and buried… in an opening in the rock, and his body covered over with something that ‘after a while was all same stone.’”At the time the remains were interred, “many guns were fired.”

In 1930, Burwash and pilot W.E. Gilbert would become the first men to fly to Grozier’s Landing. However, there was little more than some rope and broadcloth left for them to see. Gilbert described the scene in an article published in the Edmonton Journal on 9 September 1930:

There was no sustained challenge to Franklin’s reputation mounted in Victorian times. It was not until 1939 that Canadian Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote his essay, “The Lost Franklin Expedition,” and asked how these sea-toughened men, armed with shotguns and muskets, could have “contrived to die to the last man” of hunger so quickly in a land where the Inuit had survived for generations, hunting with Stone Age weapons.

Stefansson concluded that the chief failure of the Franklin expedition, and other nineteenth-century British explorers of the Arctic, was in the refusal to respond to the harsh environment by adopting the ways of the Inuit: “The main cause… was cultural.” An explorer and ethnographer, and a man who had subsisted on a fresh meat-only diet in the Arctic for seven years, Stefansson repeatedly argued that the Arctic explorers would have thrived had they done the same. As he wrote: “The strongest antiscorbutic qualities reside in certain fresh foods and diminish or disappear with storage by any of the common methods of preservation—canning, pickling, drying, etc.” Yet as late as 1928, Stefansson’s theories about the antiscorbutic value of fresh meat continued to be greeted with skepticism. As a result, he submitted to a bizarre experiment in which he ate nothing but raw meat for a year while living in New York City. To the astonishment of medical observers, he remained perfectly healthy.

There is no doubt that an abundance of fresh meat would have offered a means of salvation to Franklin expedition survivors. As Stefansson argued, Franklin and his officers need only have studied the narratives of two then recent expeditions to have had a command of the situation: “When you compare the John Ross expedition of 1829–33 with the George Back expedition of 1836–37, you have the complete answer to how a polar residence should be managed.” Stefansson conceded, however, that while John Ross had wisely adopted the Inuit diet, he had not demonstrated that whites could be adequately self-supporting, as most of the food had been obtained from the Inuit through barter. In addition, there is evidence that Franklin expedition survivors did procure limited amounts of fresh meat from the Inuit, but pleas for further aid were then rebuffed.

In truth, the large number of survivors disgorged onto King William Island doomed any hopes of securing adequate quantities of fresh meat. Even among the Inuit, episodes of starvation have been documented in the region of King William Island and the adjacent mainland. Schwatka encountered Inuit who he reported were “in great distress for food” and who had already lost one of their number to starvation. He gave them caribou meat. Knud Rasmussen also wrote that, for the Inuit, life is “an almost uninterrupted struggle for bare existence, and periods of dearth and actual starvation are not infrequent.” As late as 1920, Rasmussen documented that eighteen Inuit had died of starvation at Simpson Strait.

More to the point, Stefansson noted the curiously high number of deaths—before the Erebus and Terror were deserted, “while there were still large quantities of food on the ships.” That “scurvy took so heavy a toll” even then, required, he argued, a “special explanation.” If scurvy was indeed the cause of those deaths, then that explanation was almost certainly an enduring faith in the antiscorbutic value of tinned foods. As the historian Richard J. Cyriax stated in his 1939 study of the Franklin expedition: “As tinned preserved meat has no antiscorbutic properties, Goldner’s meat, if perfectly good, would not have prevented scurvy.”

8 Scattered Bones

Owen Beattie, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, believed King William Island might still hold secrets of the Franklin expedition disaster, information that could be exposed by the use of the latest equipment and methods employed in physical anthropology. He believed at least one last pilgrimage in the interests of science was warranted. His initial survey, which would take two Arctic summers to complete, would again follow that rock-strewn trail down which a straggling procession of British seamen had made their desperate retreat.

An aura of doom hung over desolate King William Island during the nineteenth-century visits of M’Clintock, Hall and Schwatka. And for many years after the Franklin disaster, evidence of the tragedy remained fresh. Beattie planned his survey of the island’s south and west coasts in a manner that would be meticulous, even though by 1981, 133 years would have passed since the disaster and he wondered what, of the 105 men who died on the island and in nearby Starvation Cove, endured. He would be the first to apply the techniques of forensic anthropology to investigations into the Franklin expedition.

Beattie had studied archaeology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. As a graduate student, he concentrated on the human skeleton, with advanced training requiring dissection courses in primate and human anatomy. His doctoral research in physical anthropology involved two areas of study: the analysis of hundreds of prehistoric skeletons from the northwest coast of North America; and the use of chemical analysis of bone to aid in the identification of modern human remains relating to forensic investigations. After joining the University of Alberta in 1980, his primary interests continued to grow in the area of human identification studies, or forensic anthropology, a subdiscipline of physical anthropology.

Although the Franklin expedition’s failure was of considerable historical importance, it was first and foremost a mass disaster, involving multiple human deaths linked to a single, catastrophic event. It represented an unresolved forensic case, a fact in no way altered by the time that had passed. (If such a tragedy were to occur today, it would be investigated along precisely the same lines as would the carnage resulting from, for example, a modern-day train wreck, fire or airplane crash, using exactly the same scientific techniques to interpret skeletal and preserved soft tissue remains.) Given this fact, Beattie planned to collect any skeletal remains found on King William Island, then try to identify physical evidence that would support or disprove the conventional view of the expedition’s destruction through starvation and scurvy. He intended to look for information on health and diet, for indications of disease, for evidence of violence and for information as to each individual’s age and stature. There was also a remote chance that a victim’s identity could be established, through dental features such as gold teeth and crowns, or through personal belongings found in association with a body.

Because of his special training in forensic anthropology relating to human identification, Beattie had assisted in numerous investigations conducted by medical examiner’s offices, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other police agencies, and had testified in court as an expert witness. On King William Island, he planned to apply this expertise to a far older and greater mystery.

Beattie prepared for his Arctic journeys by studying sites identified by nineteenth-century searchers, and on 25 June 1981, set out from his cramped office on the thirteenth floor of the Henry Marshall Tory Building on the University of Alberta campus in Edmonton to investigate the Franklin expedition sites for the first time. First, he boarded a Boeing 727 to Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, then flew on past the Arctic Circle to the central Arctic transportation centre of Resolute, a tiny community of 168 people nestled on the south coast of Cornwallis Island. Travelling with Beattie was co-investigator and Arctic archaeologist James Savelle.

A truck from the Polar Continental Shelf Project picked up the two researchers at the terminal in Resolute; they were then driven to nearby barracks where they met up with field assistant Karen Digby. The Polar Shelf, an agency of the Canadian government, provides a vital service by supplying scientists and researchers in Canada’s far north with logistical and air support. Beattie, Savelle and Digby soon met Polar Shelf base-manager Fred Alt, picked up a short-wave radio, a 30.06 rifle and 12-gauge shotgun, and prepared for a Twin Otter aircraft to carry them into the field.

From Resolute, the research team flew to Gjoa Haven, an Inuit community on the southeast coast of King William Island, where Inuit students Kovic Hiqiniq and Mike Aleekee joined the team as assistants. Hiqiniq and Aleekee arranged for two hunters to carry the researchers and their equipment by snowmobile the next day, south across ice-clogged Simpson Strait. There, at Starvation Cove, an inlet on the North American mainland that sprawls and meanders inland for several miles, it is believed that the last of Franklin’s men perished.

On 27 June 1981, the five researchers made the gruelling twelve-hour journey over hillocks and cracks in the ice on komatiks, traditional sledges once hauled by dog teams, but in this case pulled by snowmobiles. Sitting atop a mound of equipment and supplies, each firmly grasped hold of both sides of the komatik, as every icy obstacle along the way threatened to dislodge them. Joining them on the journey was the wife of one of the hunters carrying an infant tucked inside her amauti, or hooded parka. The temperature was seasonal, hovering between zero and 41°F (-17.5°C and 5°C).

Beattie and Savelle hoped to survey Starvation Cove, looking for relics or remains of the hardiest men from the doomed expedition, but the land is extremely low, marshy and sandy, and was almost completely covered by meltwater that summer, making such work all but impossible. The snowmobiles soon continued on, carrying the researchers a short distance north to a temporary Inuit fishing camp on Richardson Point. Dining that night on raw and boiled seal meat and raw caribou, they questioned their hosts about possible European gravesites on the south coast of King William Island. One possible site was described as lying on a high crest of land at Peabody Point, along their planned route.

The first actual survey work of the field season was conducted in the early morning the following day. A mist hung over the researchers as they walked over Richardson Point, which is just ⅔ mile (1 km) wide. Besides prehistoric and historic Inuit campsites (the locations of which were mapped by Savelle), nothing was found. Disappointed that any evidence of Franklin expedition crew members on the North American mainland remained hidden, the five-member survey team parted company with the Inuit hunters and crossed back over Simpson Strait to the southern coast of King William Island near Booth Point, hauling their supplies and equipment, including a canoe, themselves.

There, 1½ miles (2.5 km) west of Booth Point, they located the partial skeleton of the single individual from the Franklin expedition referred to in the 1869 expedition account of Charles Francis Hall. The unusual scatter of bones was found outside a tent circle associated with the expedition. It was a significant discovery, and it raised hopes that other Franklin remains would be located that summer. Once work at the Booth Point site was complete, the survey party then continued westward along the south coast of the island. (The grave identified by the Inuit fishermen they had visited at Richardson Point was located at Peabody Point, but it was actually an Inuit burial from the early 1900s. Because of its more recent origin, the remains were not investigated.)

At Tulloch Point, where in 1879 Frederick Schwatka had discovered what was believed to be a Franklin expedition grave, the researchers also found skeletal remains, though Beattie and Savelle would identify anatomical and cultural features that confirmed the skeleton was actually the mid-nineteenth-century remains of an adult Inuk male. Another burial site thought to have been of Franklin expedition origin, identified by Canadian explorer William Gibson in 1931, turned out to contain the remains of an adult Inuk female, also probably from the nineteenth century. Both of the latter sites were mapped and bone samples collected for further analysis. What became clear, though, was that at least some of what were Inuit graves had been mistaken for those of Franklin’s men by searchers, further confounding Beattie’s attempts to piece together the circumstances surrounding the expedition’s destruction.

On 5 July, as the research team surveyed the coastline west of Tulloch Point, the large white dome of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line Station at Gladman Point came into view—nearly 16 miles (25 km) away. It was strange to see this Cold War relic on the tundra. But such radar stations are not uncommon in the Canadian Arctic: twenty-one dot the landscape from Alaska to Baffin Island. Built in the 1950s as a line of defensive warning against air attack from the Soviet Union, the stations had been modernized in recent years and were continuing their function of maintaining sovereignty over Canada’s airspace.

After hours of hiking, the party reached a reasonably large, slow-moving river that required the use of their canoe to cross. Once on the other side, and within a few miles of the station, they began to set up camp. While Digby, Hiqiniq and Aleekee went about this routine task, Beattie and Savelle walked to the station. They were warmly greeted, and over the next day the tired crew were treated to hot coffee, fresh fruit and showers.

It was while they were visiting the station that they learned of an amazing coincidence. A few days prior to their arrival, one of the station personnel had, while hiking, discovered a moss-covered human skeleton on the tundra’s surface within a mile of the station. This discovery was reported to the closest Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment at Spence Bay (today called Taloyoak). When Beattie and Savelle and their group arrived at Gladman Point, the constable stationed at Spence Bay was on his way in his small plane to investigate the discovery. When he arrived he met up with the surveyors, and Beattie and Savelle both accompanied the constable and station personnel when they went to view the bones. As it turned out, the skeleton was that of a prehistoric Inuk male. His remains had rested above ground for hundreds of years. It was remarkable that, considering the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who had been to the station during its construction and period of operation, the skeleton was discovered only a few days before a forensic anthropologist and archaeologist literally wandered up to the station’s front door.

The Gladman Point skeleton was the last to be found that summer. Beattie returned to Edmonton in late July, disappointed that the remains of only one of the 105 officers and men who has deserted the Erebus and Terror had been located. It was possible that the physical evidence of scurvy identified on the Booth Point remains would be one of few notable accomplishments of the 1981 survey. But it had been important to learn that previous searchers had almost certainly mistaken Inuit burials for those of Franklin’s sailors. In addition to the small contributions to the archaeological record made that summer, the historical record had at least been further clarified and corrected.

Tiny pieces of the bone samples collected from both the Franklin sailor’s skeleton and the Inuit skeletons were soon sent to a laboratory for trace element analysis. Use of such analytical techniques on skeletal remains is common, as various elements found in bone can provide information about problems in diet and possible deficiency disorders. Then, weeks later, while Beattie and Savelle redrew maps and reviewed field notes at the University of Alberta offices, the scatter of the bones found at Booth Point returned to bother them. For nearly all of the skull fragments had been found near a group of larger stones at what was identified as the entrance to the tent structure, while bones from the arms and legs were found more loosely scattered around the outside of the stone circle. What was initially thought to have been the remains of a sailor who had been left behind at a campsite, either near death or already dead, now began to reveal more ominous secrets.

In late September, when Beattie and Savelle were preparing the first report on the summer’s research, they were forced to acknowledge what had been implied by the evidence at the site from the beginning: They had found the first physical evidence to support Inuit accounts of cannibalism among the dying crewmen.

While studying the right femur found at the site, Beattie confirmed that three roughly parallel grooves measuring .02–.04 inches (.5–1 mm) in width and up to ½ inch (13 mm) in length had been cut into its back surface. The cut marks were made by a metal implement, suggesting intentional dismemberment. Fracture lines indicated that the skull had also been forcibly broken; the face, including both jaws and all the teeth, was missing. Evidence that the body had been intentionally dismembered was further supported by the selective parts of the skeleton found: the head, arms and legs. Besides the face, most of the skeleton was missing, including the twenty-four ribs, sternum (breastbone), all twenty-four vertebrae of the back, the three large bones of the hip (sacrum and two innominates), the two clavicles (collar bones) and the two scapulas (shoulder blades).

Hudson’s Bay Company searcher John Rae was the first to hear of the ghastly possibility of cannibalism among Franklin expedition crewmen. In the spring of 1854, Rae was given details of the expedition’s final days by Inuit who also had in their possession a variety of artefacts. Rae recorded their descriptions of a shocking sight:

The response to this testimony was immediate and fierce. Many Britons simply refused to believe cannibalism was possible. Charles Dickens, who followed the Franklin search closely, spoke for them when, in 1854, he argued that Franklin expedition crewmen represented the “flower of the trained English Navy… it is the highest degree improbable that such men would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.”

Dickens then attacked the source of the stories, the Inuit, as “covetous, treacherous and cruel…” Writing in Household Words, he said:

United States Chief Justice Charles Patrick Daly, president of the American Geographical Society, went a step further, charging that Franklin was “murdered by the Indians, who had already imbued their hands in the blood of white travellers.” Rae fought back, arguing,

Fifteen years later, Rae received corroboration from Charles Francis Hall, who had also heard the tales of cannibalism and reported them in much greater detail. Even today, the stories are abhorrent. The Inuit reported finding boots “that came up high as the knees and that in some was cooked human flesh—that is human flesh that had been boiled.” Wrote Hall: “Some bones had been sawed with a saw; some skulls had holes in them.” Other bodies found nearby had been carefully stripped of all flesh, “as if some one or other had cut it off to eat.”

Even three decades after the disaster, gruesome accounts continued to be collected from the Inuit of the region. Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka’s 1879 search recorded “almost unmistakable evidences of their being compelled to resort to cannibalism.” An Inuk named Ogzeuckjeuwock reported seeing “bones from legs and arms that appeared to have been sawed off… The appearance of the bones led the Inuits to the opinion that the white men had been eating each other.” Schwatka’s account was compelling and, according to one British newspaper, had finally “cleared the reputation of a harmless people from an undeserved reproach.”

It is difficult for those sated in their daily demands for food and drink to believe that any civilized person would intentionally and knowingly eat human brains, consume strings of arteries or split open bones so that the marrow could be picked out and eaten. That fact is no different today than it was during Queen Victoria’s reign. Yet under certain dire, life-threatening circumstances, many people would come to the realization that seems to have faced the last tattered remnants of Franklin’s expedition, that cannibalism is all that stands in the way of sure death.

Modern disasters, such as the 1972 crash of a chartered plane in the Andes Mountains of South America, provide insights into the rationale for consuming other humans. One of those to survive the Andes crash explained later in an interview:

Prehistoric occurrences of cannibalism associated with starvation provide striking similarities to the Booth Point skeleton findings. An archaeological investigation of an Anasazi settlement in the American Southwest revealed 11 skeletons that had been dismembered and processed for eating: “The overall picture of skeletal destruction is that of dismemberment, crushing of long bone shafts, facial mutilation, scattering and loss of elements of the trunk (ribs, vertebrae, and pelves), and the loss of hands and feet.”

So cannibalism follows a pattern: once the decision is made, the initial sections removed from the body are the meatier areas like the buttocks, thighs, lower legs and arms. Recognizably human parts, such as hands and feet, are not eaten at first. As time passes and hunger continues to tear at the survivors, the options of where the flesh comes from are reduced, and bone marrow, organs, arteries and skin are consumed. Removal of muscle tissue is usually done with a knife or other sharp object, and this can leave butchering marks on the bone. Removal of bone marrow requires the bone to be smashed open. The brain is either pulled through the base of the skull or eaten after the face is cut off. The need by members of Franklin’s dying crew for a portable food supply was the reason for the only exceptions to this pattern.

A small group of the last survivors of the doomed expedition trudged eastward along the south coast of King William Island in July or perhaps August 1848. The exhausted men probably continued to hold out hope that they would reach the mouth of the Back River, from where they would attempt to travel nearly 1,000 miles (1,500 km) upstream to the safety of a Hudson’s Bay Company fort located on the eastern edge of Great Slave Lake. Slowing significantly as a result of increased exhaustion aggravated by scurvy, their food supply at an end, the sailors must have desperately looked for alternative food sources. But there were too few birds’ eggs to feed the group and hunting on the sparse northern island would have been unrewarding.

When their food finally ran out and they were too ravaged by hunger and disease to continue, the men sat down and prepared to die. But with the first death came new hope. The survivors must have found themselves contemplating a stark fact: starvation need not be a factor any longer.

Cannibalizing the trunk of the body would have given them enough strength to push on. The head, arms and legs, easily portable, were carried along as a food supply. Finally they came to a part of the island that turned sharply to the northeast—away from their goal. Camping on a small spit of land near Booth Point, the same spit of land later visited by the University of Alberta researchers, they ate their last meal. Disease and physical deterioration continued to drain them of energy as they turned southward across ice-covered Simpson Strait, avoiding the many long, thin slivers of black seawater slicing through the ice and the turquoise and azure pools of meltwater, making their way towards Starvation Cove. For them, the adventure and the suffering would soon be over.

9 The Boat Place

In surveying the King William Island coastline the following year, Beattie, this time with field assistants Walt Kowal, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Alberta, Arne Carlson, an archaeology and geography graduate from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and Inuk student Arsien Tungilik, planned to retrace the searches of M’Clintock in 1859 and Schwatka in 1878–79.

Although both nineteenth-century searchers had discovered the skeletal remains of crewmen at a number of sites, the surveyors would concentrate on Schwatka’s published accounts, since the explorer had found and described more of these finds. Schwatka had also gathered up the scattered bones and buried them in common graves at the various sites, placing stone markers on them. Beattie hoped these graves could be located, and, with great anticipation, plotted their supposed position using Schwatka’s journals and maps. From the descriptions of bones buried at some of the sites, the number of crewmen represented could be four or more.

After a three-and-a-half-hour flight south from Resolute on 28 June 1982, the Twin Otter supplied by the Polar Continental Shelf Project swept over Seal Bay on the west coast of King William Island. Spotting a dry gravel ridge near the beach, the pilot circled back, flying close to the ground and as slow as aerodynamics would allow. The co-pilot opened a door and, with the help of Arne Carlson, booted a crate filled with supplies out of the plane. All watched as the box bounced a few times and rolled to a stop on the ridge, its pink-coloured cloth wrapping visible from miles away. The aircraft then headed south along the coast to Erebus Bay, where a similar procedure took place. (The run-off from melting snow on King William Island made landings too risky that season, and the staff at the Polar Shelf base in Resolute came up with the idea of the air drops.)

The scientific team then headed on to Gjoa Haven, where field assistant Arsien Tungilik was picked up. The Twin Otter soon flew back towards the northwest coast. After a time, the pilot suddenly banked the plane to the left—he had spotted a potentially good landing site in a land otherwise covered with summer run-off. Gesturing to Beattie, he pointed out of his window to the beach ridge and nodded his head. Looking at his map, then out the window, Beattie nodded back that the site, about 3 miles (5 km) north of Victory Point, would make a good starting point for the survey. After making one more low-level pass, the pilot put the plane down with feet to spare and, with one engine left running, the scientific crew jumped out of the plane’s side door and began unloading their supplies. Within five minutes everything was piled outside, and the pilot and his co-pilot pulled themselves back up into the plane. After restarting the second engine and throttling up, the plane edged forward. Seconds later it was airborne and heading north, then immediately it banked and flew past the group on the ground, the pilots waving as they set course for distant Gjoa Haven to refuel before their return to Resolute.

Although the team’s food caches had been dropped along their planned route, each person’s backpack was weighed down with food and supplies. Extra clothing for temperatures expected to hover around the freezing point, and other personal items, were usually stuffed to the bottom. Next came the food, consisting mainly of packaged freeze-dried goods and chocolate bars. Other important items such as matches, tent- and boot-repair kits, first-aid kits and ammunition were packed near the top. Sleeping bags were tied to the bottom of the packs, with a tent and sleeping pad strapped one to each side. The rifle and shotgun were attached to the top and could be reached easily while the pack was on. Other items that increased the weight of each load were the cooking utensils, stoves and fuel. A radio was carried, with which they would make twice-daily contact with the base camp at Resolute. Later, when leaving a cache site, their packs would be stuffed to overflowing with supplies and more things would be hanging from straps on the outside.

Each team member was burdened with one of these heavy packs (Beattie and Tungilik carried more than 60 pounds/30 kg; Carlson carried even more), but it was Kowal, a powerful man with seemingly endless energy, who served as the self-assigned workhorse for the survey party. During the first phase of the fieldwork, Beattie and Carlson had to lift Kowal’s pack up to help him get it on. In it, in addition to his own belongings, he carried food, the radio, a rifle, ammunition, a sleeping bag and pad, a tent, an inflatable raft, a set of oars, two camp stoves, his camera and, strapped to the back of the pack, a full 5-gallon (23-litre) container of stove fuel—for a total weight of more than 130 pounds (60 kg). Beattie was amused and amazed at the sight of Kowal as they moved along on their survey: a huge mountain of supplies appeared to be lumbering ahead on its own, powered by two legs that would disappear as Kowal squatted to investigate something on the ground. The mountain would then slowly rise and continue along on its course.

Loaded down as they were, each researcher had to move slowly to conserve energy. The survey needed alert minds and inquisitive eyes; fatigue would steal those necessary qualities away. They took frequent rests supplemented by liquids (tea, coffee, hot chocolate) between each camp. Even with these breaks, they were able to survey between 6 and 12 miles (10 and 20 km) each day, and when searching an area out of one of their established camps, they took only the necessary supplies for one day, greatly increasing their range and speed.

Their first day on the island, even before they had a chance to set up camp, a curious Arctic fox was noticed studying them from a nearby beach ridge. Beattie thought of the brief visit by the small animal, still covered in its heavy white winter fur, as a form of welcome to the strange and exotic island they were about to explore. Although Beattie had visited King William Island’s south coast the previous year, he was about to survey areas where people had not been for many years.

When the fox had scurried off into the distance, the four surveyors busied themselves setting up the tents of their first camp and preparing a meal of freeze-dried food. After settling in, despite being tired from the long plane journey, they then briefly explored the surrounding area. Walking inland soon brought them to a large lake, and they could see in every direction that the land was flat and virtually covered in a sheet of water.

The following morning, as they moved northward along the coast, the temperature gradually warmed to 41°F (5°C), the sun emerged and the wind shifted so that it was blowing off the island. The team stopped briefly to remove parkas, then continued in shirt sleeves for the remainder of the day. The warmth of the season resulted in great quantities of meltwater flowing towards the coast from inland lakes, which made surveying conditions very difficult and almost impossible along parts of the route. Each mile of coastline covered usually required two or more miles of walking. Although their plan was to survey completely up the coast to Cape Felix, on the northwestern tip of the island, it would be physically impossible on foot. So when they reached a swiftly flowing stream at Cape Maria Louisa, 12 miles (20 km) south of Cape Felix, they decided to turn south. After searching unsuccessfully for a Franklin campsite that had been discovered in the area by M’Clintock and Hobson in 1859, they then camped for the night, returning to near Victory Point the next day.

Breaking camp on the morning of 30 June, the four men carried their supplies southward to the bank of another swollen stream. The depth of the water and speed of the current were too great to consider wading across, and they had to skirt round the outflow by walking out onto the ice of Victoria Strait. They wrapped their supplies in a large orange tarpaulin, tying the corners together. Then, dragging this large bundle and burdened with their overstuffed backpacks, they picked their way over the broken piles of ice at the waterline and out onto the smoother ice further offshore.

For the next two hours they walked, waded and jumped over fractures and cracks in the ice and areas of open water created by the stream, until they were able to angle back to the safety of the shore on the far side of the stream. After kicking off their boots and taking a well-earned rest, the survey then continued south along the shoreline to the place visited by James Clark Ross in 1830, subsequently named Victory Point.

Standing on the low rise of the point and looking south, Beattie was astonished by the accuracy of the scene, as depicted in an engraving made from a sketch drawn by Ross during his explorations—part of his uncle Captain John Ross’s failed 1829–33 expedition. James Clark Ross described his visit:

Despite the accuracy of the engraving, nothing could be found of the cairn erected by Ross. Only a small cairn dating from the mid-1970s remained.

Victory Point is a low gravel projection into Victoria Strait, rising less than 33 feet (10 metres) above the high-water mark. From this spot it is possible to see Cape Jane Franklin several miles to the south, glazed with a permanent snow cover on its western rise, and to the west, the thin, horizontal dark line of Franklin Point. Ross named these features in 1830, in the case of Franklin Point writing in his journal that “if that be a name which has now been conferred on more places than one, these honours… are beyond all thought less than the merits of that officer deserve.” (In one of those instances of tragic irony, Sir John Franklin would die within sight of Franklin Point and Cape Jane Franklin, seventeen years later.)

Two miles (3 km) south of Victory Point, Beattie and his small party came across another, much smaller, projection of land, marking the site where the crews of the Erebus and Terror congregated on 25 April 1848, three days after deserting the ships 15 miles (24 km) to the NNW. It is this place that, along with Beechey Island, forms the focal point for the discovery of the fate of the expedition, for a note of immeasurable importance was left here, providing some of the few concrete details relating to the state and action of the crews from the wintering at Beechey Island in 1845–46 to the desertion of the ships on 22 April 1848.

Setting up camp, Beattie prepared to spend two days thoroughly researching and mapping the site as well as surveying the surrounding area. The two tents were placed so that their doorways faced each other; the team could then sit and prepare meals and talk in their own makeshift courtyard. During that first evening, the sky and clouds to the south darkened to a deep purple and bolts of lightning flashed out from the clouds, reaching down towards the ground. Although orange sunlight still shone on their camp, the four watched with anxiety as the dark storm moved westward to the south of them. The site, known as Crozier’s Landing, was so flat that their metal tent poles were prominent features—perhaps even lightning rods. They were relieved when the storm at last faded from view.

By 1982, few relics of the Franklin expedition remained at Crozier’s Landing. Where piles of the crews’ discarded belongings once lay strewn about, only scattered boot and clothing parts, wood fragments, canvas pieces, earthenware container fragments and other artefacts could now be gleaned from among the rocks and gravel. One rusted but complete iron belt buckle was found during the survey, as was a stove lid, near the spot where M’Clintock had located a stove and pile of coal from the expedition. A smashed but complete amber-coloured medicine bottle was also found, as was part of the body of a clear glass bottle, complete with navy broadarrow marking.

What struck Beattie was the paucity of the remains marking this major archaeological site. How could a place with such a history of tragedy and despair—shared by 105 doomed souls—appear so impartial to the events that transpired here during late April 1848? The artefacts that were mapped and collected in 1982 were pathetic, insignificant reminders of the failed expedition. Disturbances at the site were such that a search for the grave of Lieutenant John Irving, discovered by Schwatka, failed to turn up anything, though a series of at least thirteen stone circles indicated the actual location of the tenting site established by Franklin’s men. Other tent circles attested to the visits by searchers, primarily M’Clintock and Hobson in 1859 and Schwatka in 1879, and by Inuit. Evidence of more recent visits were also clearly visible: a hole excavated by L.T. Burwash in 1930, small piles of corroded metal fragments (possibly the remains of tin canisters), a note left by a group during an aerial visit made in August 1954 and other signs of visits made within the last decade. A modern cairn is situated at the highest point of the site, representing the approximate location of the cairn in which the note was discovered by Hobson in 1859.

However, Beattie’s group did make one interesting discovery as they marked with red survey tape the locations of artefacts scattered along the beach ridge. Paralleling this ridge, and towards the ice offshore, was an area of mud that, because of the time of year, had begun to thaw—and visible in the mud were coils of rope of various sizes. The anaerobic conditions of the mud and the long period of freezing each year had resulted in good preservation of the organic material, in stark contrast to the disintegrated rope and canvas fragments found on the gravel surface. One of the preserved coils was of a very heavy rope, about 2 inches (5 cm) in diameter. Yet despite this discovery, so little of the presence of Franklin’s men at Crozier’s Landing remained that it was almost impossible to visualize that scene of bustling activity and preparation that would have been played out in growing despair. The last marks of this most famous of Arctic expeditions were all but erased, as if scoured away by the constant, turbulent and chilling winds that blow off the ice. Beattie began to entertain the possibility that pursuing new leads into the fate of the expedition on King William Island might be a waste of time.

From the perspective gained at Crozier’s Landing, where the final agony of the explorers began in 1848, perhaps the deeper mystery was not so much the fate of the 105 men who died trying to walk out of the Arctic (which had until this time been Beattie’s focus), but the mystery of the twenty-four others who died (including a disproportionate number of officers) while the expedition was still aboard-ship and food stores remained. (After deserting their ships, the deaths of the 105 survivors seemed unavoidable along the desolate shores of King William Island.) To Beattie, it became increasingly obvious that the real Franklin mystery lay not here at its tragic end, but much earlier: the period from August 1845, when the expedition sailed into the Arctic archipelago, until 22 April 1848, when the ice-locked vessels were deserted off King William Island. For it was during those thirty-two lost months that nine officers, including Sir John Franklin, and fifteen seamen died. (Three were buried at Beechey Island; the graves of the others have never been found.)

Even before the ships were deserted, the Franklin expedition had been an unprecedented disaster. Its heavy losses contrasted sharply with the escape of John Ross and his crew, including James Clark Ross, after they deserted the discovery ship Victory on the southeast shore of the Boothia Peninsula in the early 1830s. For despite all that time in the Arctic, away from the protection of their ship and suffering the ravages of scurvy, Ross returned to England with nineteen of his twenty-two men. To Beattie, it began to appear that the most important insights into the Franklin disaster would come from the group of twenty-four who died aboard ship.

While Beattie and Carlson mapped and collected the few artefacts found at Crozier’s Landing, Kowal and Tungilik built a makeshift sledge from scraps of lumber found beside the ice edge. Round nails and the relatively fresh appearance of the wood suggested it was of very recent origin, and the two carpenters, using rocks for hammers, put it to good use. They planned to haul the camp supplies, mounted on the sledge, south across ice-covered Collinson Inlet to near Gore Point. Although the ice was fairly rotten and beginning to break, they calculated that, with some care, they could save more than a week’s walking by cutting across the inlet’s mouth instead of going round its wet and marshy source.

Within an hour the sledge was complete and they prepared to resume their southward trek. The early evening hours were becoming cool and a silvery fog hung over the ice. The wind, usually a constant companion, had dropped to a whisper. Beattie and Carlson, who stayed behind to complete the artefact collection, watched as the other two were soon engulfed by the swirling fog. They stood silently for a few moments, listening to the receding sounds of trudging footsteps and the rasp of the sledge runners.

With Kowal pulling the sledge by a rope looped around his chest, the two weaved, struggled and fought their way across the 2½-mile (4-km) distance in four hours. Tungilik, with his superior knowledge of ice conditions, walked ahead and scouted the safest route, which Kowal followed faithfully. When they reached land they lugged the supplies up onto the beach. Although both were completely exhausted, they immediately began the arduous journey back to rendezvous with Beattie and Carlson, who had struck out across the inlet after their artefact collection was completed.

The ice was very difficult and dangerous to cross. Parts were so soft that the men would sink to their knees; large ponds of melted water blanketed the ice surface. Wide cracks were a hazard in a number of locations and innumerable smaller cracks braided the ice. Tall, massive hummocks of snow and ice dotted the route, and Beattie worried about surprising a bear hidden on the opposite side of one of these—a healthy paranoia that resulted in a wide berth being given to these small ice mountains. As well, he noted that the ice they travelled over, and had seen offshore since their arrival on King William Island, was first-year ice, often little more than 12 inches (30 cm) thick. Recently, he knew, Polar Continental Shelf Project scientists had used ice core samples taken from High Arctic ice caps to study climate conditions over time, and had concluded that the Franklin era was climatically one of the least favourable periods in 700 years. This explained the multiyear ice encountered by Franklin off the northwest coast of King William Island, ice that was sometimes more than 80 inches (200 cm) thick.

Carrying packs filled with artefacts, Beattie and Carlson laboured across the ice for an hour. The fog had finally lifted when they saw Kowal and Tungilik a mile distant, heading towards them. Within another hour they were all safely across.

On 4 July, the team searched unsuccessfully for the grave of a Franklin crewman recorded by Schwatka. They also searched for the cairn at Gore Point, where a second Franklin expedition note was discovered by Hobson in 1859. (Virtually identical to the note found at Crozier’s Landing, this scrap of paper contained only information on the 1847 survey party of Gore and De Vouex. There were no marginal notes on the document, though, curiously, the error in the dates for wintering at Beechey Island was repeated.) A small pile of stones was located on the far end of Gore Point. As the pile was definitely of human origin and did not come from an old tenting structure (either Inuit or European), it seemed likely that the stones represented the dismantled cairn that had once held the note.

Moving southward along the coastline, the team encountered nothing to indicate that the area had been visited recently, only locations marking the probable campsites of Schwatka and his group. The next focal point in their survey was the supply cache that had been dropped from the air on the south shore of Seal Bay. After spending two days at this location, making good use of the stores of food and observing the dozens of seals that dotted the ice floes offshore, the team surveyed the coast down to a location adjacent to Point Le Vesconte, where Schwatka discovered and buried a human skeleton. Point Le Vesconte is a long, thin projection of land that is actually a series of islets. At low tide it is easy to walk out along the point, but, as the team discovered, at high tide the depth of water separating the islets can nearly reach the waist.

Of all of Schwatka’s descriptions, the locations of two skeletons along this coast were the best documented and most accurately identified on the survey team’s maps. At Point Le Vesconte, Schwatka had recorded human bones, including skull fragments scattered around a shallow grave that contained fine quality navy-blue cloth and gilt buttons. The incomplete skeleton, of what Schwatka believed had been an officer, had been carefully gathered together and reburied in its old grave and a stone monument constructed to mark the spot. Yet again, the survey team failed to locate this grave or the second one on the adjacent coastline. Beattie was disappointed. In “curating” the skeletal remains he discovered, Schwatka had apparently marked each grave with “monuments” consisting of just a couple of stones. Along King William Island’s gravel- and rock-covered coastline, such graves were lost in the landscape. After scouring the area for an entire day, the frustrated party pushed on to the south.

On the morning of 9 July, Beattie turned on his shortwave radio for the daily 7 AM radio contact with Resolute. But instead of being greeted by the reassuring and familiar voice from the Polar Shelf base camp, only a vacant hissing sound was heard. No contact with Resolute could be made that morning. The aerial was checked, the batteries changed, the radio connections and battery compartment cleaned, all in preparation for the regular evening communication.

Loss of radio contact is serious in the field; within forty-eight hours the Polar Shelf will dispatch a plane to the last known location of the party, bringing an extra radio and batteries. There may be a genuine emergency, but if the reason for missing radio contact is trivial, such as simply sleeping through the schedule, the Polar Shelf will put in a bill for the air time spent on re-establishing contact, for an important function of the twice-daily radio contact is to track the status of each group of scientists working in the field throughout Canada’s Arctic. It is to everyone’s advantage to pass along position information and plans for camp moves to the officials in Resolute.

With their radio not functioning, the team was completely cut off from the outside world. As the group sat around discussing the consequences, they guessed it must be a radio blackout caused by solar activity—a relatively common occurrence. What worried Beattie was that, in their last radio contact with Resolute, they had indicated they were on their way to a predetermined camp location, 25 miles (40 km) south at Erebus Bay. Loss of contact with Resolute meant there was a possibility that a plane would be sent out within the next day or two to Erebus Bay. There was some urgency, therefore, to get to that location before the plane. Three thoroughly exhausting, long days of surveying and backpacking followed before radio contact was at last resumed; for those days, they felt like they were the only people on earth. The absolute isolation imposed by the radio blackout was a sobering experience, one they were not anxious to repeat.

As they approached Rivière de la Rocquette across a dismally flat landscape, two small objects caught their attention. The first was a small grey lump in their path, which soon revealed itself to be a young Arctic hare, or leveret. Born fully haired, with their eyes wide open, hares are able to run just minutes after birth. This tiny, gentle animal stood out in stark contrast to the forbidding landscape. It was rigid with fright, its heart pounding. The four watched it for a time, took some photographs, then continued on. The second object turned out to be what was almost certainly an Inuit artefact, constructed from material collected in the nineteenth century from a Franklin site. It resembled a primitive fishing rod made of two pieces of wood and twine; the wood held together in part by a brass nail. It was a good example of the use made by the Inuit of abandoned European artefacts.

Surveying the coast had largely meant walking along beach ridges of limestone shingle and sloshing through shallow sheets of water draining off the island. Now, as they held up their hands to shade themselves against the sun, the team could see the other side of Rivière de la Rocquette, ⅓ mile (.5 km) to the southwest; beyond that point the land was too flat to pick out any landmarks. The river itself posed a considerable obstacle, and there was discussion as to whether they should attempt to walk round it, out on the ice of Erebus Bay. However, earlier that day they had been able to see the effect of the river’s flow on the ice in the bay. The volume of water had pushed it far offshore, and the ice that could be seen through binoculars did not look inviting. Finally, all agreed that to walk out on that rotten ice would be too dangerous; the river would have to be waded.

Beattie recalled the vivid description of Schwatka’s group when they had stood on the same spot 103 years before: at that time the river was considered impassable down near its mouth, and the group had to hike inland a number of miles to where the river narrowed and they could cross in icy-cold, waist-deep water. Beattie wondered how he and his crew, far less rugged and experienced than Schwatka’s men, would fare in gaining the far bank. Carlson and Tungilik had hip waders, which they untied from their backpacks and put on. Kowal donned pack boots that reached to mid-calf and began slowly wading out into the shallow edge of the river, searching carefully for submerged banks of gravel that would allow him to keep the water from rising above the boot tops. Tungilik struck out along the same route. Carlson and Beattie unpacked and began inflating a two-man rubber boat that they had carried (along with a set of oars) since their survey began. They planned to use it to float their supplies across the river, but Beattie also hoped to find a way to keep his feet dry. As he had only pack boots himself, it seemed reasonable to have Carlson, in his hip waders, pull him across the river in the boat. Kowal was too far away for the others to see if he was having success in keeping dry, and the wind and distance were too great to shout to him.

Carlson and Beattie had problems inflating the boat with the rubber foot pump, and when the craft was half-inflated, the pump ceased working altogether. Despite having a rather floppy, unmanageable water craft at his disposal, Beattie loaded his pack and climbed in. He quickly found himself floundering—before finally tumbling over on his back with his legs sticking up in the air. After a good laugh, he righted himself and, soaked, climbed out of the boat. He and Carlson started wading slowly across after the others, the empty and limp boat bobbing and swivelling downstream from a rope attached to Carlson’s pack. The water turned out to be very shallow almost the whole distance across, though within 160 feet (50 metres) of the other side it increased to knee depth.

Resting by a rock near the river bank the four looked off to the west across a forbidding 6 miles (10 km) of mud flats. Their next stop would be the food cache that had been dropped from the plane on the first day of the season. They needed to replenish their supplies: over the past two days they had virtually run out of food and fuel, and they were looking forward to the supplies they had packed in the distant cache. So, thinking as much about their empty stomachs as the obviously difficult walk before them, they struck out onto the grey-brown featureless mud flats.

The clay-like mud had melted down 4 inches (10 cm) or more and was softy and pasty. Each footstep squeezed the mud out like toothpaste, and the friction and suction made extracting their feet a struggle. At first they sank in only up to their boot tops, but as they pushed a few more miles out onto the flats, there was more water in the mud. Now their feet sank down to the permafrost. The grip of the mud, sometimes ankle-deep but at other times more than knee-deep, was so strong that they often pulled their feet right out of their boots.

At times they would encounter an island of vegetation where the footing was good, and at each of these spots they would take a short rest before plunging into the mud again. In one of these “islands,” the intact skeleton of a bearded seal was found. Virtually undisturbed by animals, it looked almost surreal against the backdrop of the mudflats.

Halfway across they began to see the slightly raised beach ridge that marked the location where they had dropped their cache, and two hours later, when they finally started up the nearly imperceptible slope of the western extent of the flats, they were within only a few miles of their next camp. When at last they reached firm ground, they threw their packs down and sat to rest their legs.

It had taken more than four hours to cross the flats. Although the cold wind blew persistently off the ice at Erebus Bay, the day was sunny and warm, nearly 50°F (10°C), and before long all were lying on their backs, soaking in the sun, thankful that they did not have to return by the same route. Twenty minutes passed with hardly a word said before one of them, Carlson, finally sat up and busied himself with his pack. Their bodies now rested, stomachs began to growl; the next goal was the cache.

Walking to the west they dropped quickly down into another flat area, but this one was only two-thirds of a mile across and had good footing. Several pairs of whistling swans, which had constructed their large nests here, could be seen nearby, and the four men paused to observe the large and majestic birds before continuing on their long walk. Then, in the middle of the flats, Tungilik stopped dead and, pointing at the ground, asked Kowal, “What’s this bone?” Kowal was shocked to see a right human tibia lying on the surface of the flats. He called to Beattie and Carlson, who had been following. As the others hurried towards them, Kowal decided to have some fun. He quickly covered the bone with a piece of driftwood. When Beattie and Carlson finally arrived, both panting under the weight of their packs, Kowal said, “Look at this!” Beattie looked down at the wood and said, “You made me hurry up for this?” Then, turning the wood over with his foot, a broad smile crossed his face. All thoughts of reaching the food cache quickly vanished as the team searched the location for other bones. Five more were found nearby, as were two weathered pieces of wood planking, one of which had remnants of green paint, a brass screw and badly rusted iron nail shafts. Because the six bones were from different parts of a skeleton, it seemed likely that they were from one person. However, since none of the bones was from the skull, it was not possible to tell whether the person was a European or Inuk, though the bones were close enough to the location of the lifeboat first found by M’Clintock that they were most likely those of one of Franklin’s men. The wood planking supported this interpretation.

The bones were photographed, described, then collected, and the location marked on the team’s maps. Elated with their discovery and feeling renewed confidence that this area of the boat would yield new and important information, they continued on at an increased pace. When they saw the bright pink bundles of supplies in the distance, they broke into a jog and, if the packs had allowed, would probably have raced to their cache. Reaching the bundles almost simultaneously, they unslung their packs, rummaged quickly to locate their knives and within seconds were all slashing away at a claimed bundle. Each man searched for his favourite food: Kowal was looking for boxes of chocolate-covered macaroon candy bars; Tungilik, cans of roast beef; Beattie, tins of herring; and Carlson, canned tuna. With hardly a word to each other they dug into their food, sitting on the sandy beach ridge among the debris of their haphazard and comically frenzied search. The sounds of chewing, the crackle of plastic wrappers and the scraping of cans were interrupted by Kowal: “Can you believe us?” he said, looking up from a near-empty package, a chocolate macaroon poised in his right hand. “And we’re not even starving. Those poor guys must have really suffered.”

On 12 July the surveyors headed out from their newly established base camp. They found nothing more in the area where they had discovered the six bones, just two-thirds of a mile from their camp, but 2 miles (3 km) to the west of the camp they discovered a 100- by 130-foot (30- by 40-metre) area littered with wood fragments. As they closely searched the site, larger pieces of wood were also found. Schwatka’s description of the coastline and the small islands a few hundred feet out in Erebus Bay left the men with little doubt that they had reached the boat place where the large lifeboat from the Franklin expedition, filled with relics, was first discovered by M’Clintock and Hobson in 1859 and later visited by Schwatka in 1879. But the sight that had filled M’Clintock and the others with awe so many years before had vanished: the skeletons that once stood guard over their final resting place were nowhere to be seen. An exhaustive search of the site was conducted, and slowly, out of the gravel, came bits and pieces that graphically demonstrated to them the heavy toll of lives once claimed by the desolation of King William Island.

In the immediate vicinity, they eventually located many artefacts, including a barrel stave, a wood paddle handle, boot parts and a cherrywood pipe bowl and stem similar to those found by M’Clintock at the same site. More important, however, was the discovery of human skeletal remains. From the boat place and scattered along the coast to the north, they found bones from the shoulder (scapulas) and leg (femurs, tibias). Several of the bones showed scarring due to scurvy—similar to the markings discovered on the bones found a year earlier near Booth Point. (In total, evidence of scurvy would be found in the bones of three individuals collected in 1982.) The team worked long and hard, each of the four men combing the ground for any relic or human bone. Dusk soon surrounded them, but no nightfall follows dusk during the summer at such high latitudes. It was under the midnight sun that Tungilik made the survey’s most important find.

While systematically searching the boat place, Tungilik caught sight of a small ivory-white object projecting slightly from a mat of vegetation. Picking at the object with his finger, out popped a human talus (ankle bone). With his trowel, Carlson scraped the delicate, dark green vegetation aside, revealing a series of bones immediately recognizable as a virtually complete human foot. Continuing his excavation, which lasted into the early morning hours of 13 July, Carlson found that most of the thirteen bones from the left foot were articulated, or still in place, meaning that the foot had come to rest at this spot and had not been disturbed since 1848. The remaining skeletal remains varied from a calcaneus, or heel bone (measuring 3 inches/8 cm in length), to a tiny sesamoid bone (no bigger than .12 inches/3 mm across). Also found was part of the right foot from the same person, which supported the interpretation that a whole body once rested on the surface at this spot.

M’Clintock had argued that, as the lifeboat was found pointing directly at the next northerly point of land, it was being pulled back towards the deserted ships, possibly for more supplies:

The 1982 discoveries at the boat place supported this interpretation: the human skeletal remains were found scattered in the immediate vicinity of the lifeboat, and in the direction of the ships for a distance of two-thirds of a mile. It appears that those pulling the lifeboat could go no further and had abandoned their burden and the two sickest men. They continued on, but some had nevertheless died soon after.

In all, the remains of between six and fourteen individuals were located in the area of the boat place. In determining the minimum number of individuals from the collection of bones, Beattie first looked to see how many of the bones were duplicated. Then he examined their anatomy, such as size and muscle attachment markings, comparing bones from the left and right sides of the body to see if they were from one or more individuals.

Beattie was sure that the bones had been missed by Schwatka. From his journal, it is obvious that Schwatka was reasonably thorough in his collection of bones. He had discovered the skull and long bones of at least four individuals and buried these at the site. As in the previous searches along the coast that summer, Beattie and his crew were not able to find this grave. Of the bones discovered by the scientists in 1982, no skull bones were found.

Strangely, the most touching discovery made at the boat place was not a bone but an artefact, found by Kowal. Surveying a beach ridge further inland on 13 July, he saw, lying among a cluster of lemming holes, a dark brown object that, on closer inspection, turned out to be the complete sole of a boot. Picking it up he could see that three large screws had been driven through the sole from the inside out, and that the screw ends on the sole bottom had been sheared off. Kowal carried the artefact back to camp, where the others, who had been cataloguing the collection, examined it. It was obvious that the screws were makeshift cleats that would have given the wearer a grip on ice and snow—a grip absolutely necessary when hauling a sledge over ice.

It was this object, more than even the bleached bones of the sailors, which brought home to the four searchers the discomfort, agony and despair that the Franklin crews must have endured at this final stage of the disaster. For the research team, the piece of boot symbolized the final trek of the men of the Erebus and Terror. The imagination can play tricks in such situations. And while sitting alone during the dusk-shrouded early hours of 14 July, with brisk winds blowing in off Victoria Strait, Beattie felt that Franklin’s men did indeed still watch over the place. It was as if the dead crewmen might yet rise up for one last desperate struggle to ascend the Back River to safety.

Later, Beattie, Carlson, Kowal and Tungilik surveyed 3 miles (5 km) further to near Little Point. To the west of this location was a long inlet filled with rotten ice, which effectively formed a barrier to any further survey that season. And so, packing their precious cargo of bones and artefacts, the team readied to leave the island. With the King William Island surveys at an end, Beattie was already wondering what new insights into the Franklin disaster his small collection of bones would provide.

10 A Doorway Opens

During the early months of 1982, bone samples collected from four skeletons discovered on King William Island in 1981—three Inuit (two males, one female) and the Franklin expedition crewman from near Booth Point—were submitted to the Alberta Soil and Feed Testing Laboratory for trace element analysis. The reason for the testing was to gain possible insights into the individuals’ health and diet. The method of analysis used, called inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy, would assess the level of a number of different elements contained in the bones. At the time, Owen Beattie believed that scurvy and starvation were the likely cause of the Franklin disaster, but the 1981 bone samples were submitted without instructions to look for a particular element.

By the time Beattie returned from the field in 1982, the findings of the trace element analysis were waiting for him. The results showed that the level of lead found in the Franklin expedition crewman’s bones was extremely high, raising the possibility that some—or all—of the crew had been exposed to potentially toxic levels of lead; and that the difference between the lead levels found in the Inuit skeletons and that of the Franklin crewman was astounding. In the three Inuit skeletons, the lead levels ranged from 22 to 36 parts per million. (Such levels fall within the range identified in other human skeletons from cultures with no exposure to lead beyond that found in the environmental background.) In contrast to the Inuit skeletons, the occipital bone from the Franklin crewman registered levels of 228 parts per million. These results meant that if the Franklin crews had suffered this level of intake during the course of their expedition, it would have caused lead poisoning—the effects of which in humans have been well documented and include a number of physical and neurological problems that can occur separately or in any combination, depending on the individual and the amount absorbed. Anorexia, weakness and fatigue, irritability, stupor, paranoia, abdominal pain and anaemia are just a few of the possible effects.

Lead poisoning had plagued the ancient Greeks and Romans, who employed kettles, buckets, pipes and domestic utensils made of lead. Because the metal has a saccharine taste when dissolved (which is why the acetate is commonly called “sugar of lead”), the Romans had even used sheet lead to neutralize the acidity of bad wine. Even in 1786, when Benjamin Franklin provided the first detailed medical description of the “mischievous effect from lead,” the serious, even deadly, risks that he enumerated were nonetheless not widely disseminated. Cosmetics such as face pomades and hair powder, pewter drinking vessels, tea caddies, water pipes and cisterns, children’s toys and candlewicks all caused lead poisoning in the nineteenth century.

One scholar who has studied the circumstances under which lead poisoning arises, describes the outbreaks as “legion, oftentimes bizarre, and sometimes dramatic.” A mystery illness, for instance, called the “York Factory Complaint,” afflicted the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur trade post from 1833–36. Most of the men at the fort suffered the telltale signs of “debility,” resulting in a series of unexplained deaths. Symptoms included “a total loss of reason,” “great nervous weakness,” weight loss, convulsions and stupor. One new arrival at York Factory in 1834 described the inhabitants as having a peculiar pallor, which made them seem “more like ghosts than men.” At the time, the illness was blamed on a number of factors, including “the want of vegetables and fresh beef.” Today, scientists attribute the outbreak to saturnism (lead poisoning), most likely derived from the lead-lined containers used for food or drink.

Whilst lead’s dangers were little understood at the time, some warnings did enter the medical and scientific literature of the mid-1800s—an article in Scientific American that appeared in 1857, for instance, declared “all combinations of lead are decidedly poisonous.” One particular characteristic militated against its discovery, and gave rise to lead poisoning’s other name: the “aping disease.” As one scientific study concluded: “So protean are its manifestations that it, like syphilis, may simulate a hundred other conditions.” Lead poisoning also has a way of appearing in epidemics, so that it was often attributed to some unrelated cause. In the context of Arctic expeditions, these symptoms—emaciation, discolouration of the gums, abdominal colic, shooting pains of the limbs—would naturally suggest to medical officers and expedition commanders a well-known and feared illness: scurvy. All are, however, symptoms of lead poisoning.

Most poignantly for those dragging heavily laden sledges, “lead poisoning has a mean way of penalizing the extremity most used in muscular effort.”

The unexpected discovery of elevated bone lead levels begged another question: What could have been the source? Suspicion immediately fell on the relatively new technology of preserving foods in tin containers, as used by the Franklin expedition. Nearly 8,000 lead-soldered tins containing 33,289 pounds (15,113 kg) of preserved meat were supplied to the expedition, as well as the tinned equivalent of 2,560 gallons (11,638 litres) of soup, 1,200 pounds (545 kg) of tinned pemmican and 8,900 pounds (4,040 kg) of tinned preserved vegetables. (Even today, the seams and seals of some tins are known to be a significant source of lead contamination in some developing countries, so this certainly could have been a problem.) But ignorance of its ill effects remained commonplace. Just as authorities had failed to understand the link between scurvy and reliance on tinned food, so too they failed to understand the effect of interior-lead-soldered seams on tinned foods, and thus, on those dependent for long periods on such provisions. In addition, lead-glazed pottery and tableware were used by nineteenth-century British Arctic expeditions. The storage and serving of acidic foods and beverages (which can dissolve lead salts)—such as lemon juice, wine, vinegar or pickles—in lead-glazed vessels could have been a major source of lead ingestion during the expedition. Other possible sources of lead on the expedition included tea, chocolate and other foods stored in containers lined with lead foil. In addition, food colouring, tobacco products, pewterware and even lead-wicked candles could have added to the possible contamination. As a result, lead poisoning, compounded by the severe effects of scurvy, could have been lethal for many members of the expedition’s crews during the early months of 1848. Rapidly declining health might well in fact have been the major reason for the decision by Crozier and Fitzjames to desert the ships. As the note discovered by Hobson on King William Island shows, nine officers and fifteen men had already died by 25 April 1848.

This radical new theory, proposed by Beattie, would prompt debate among historians who had, for so long, relied on the theories of nineteenth-century searchers and, later, parliamentary inquiries in Britain as the basis for their investigations. While such sources are invaluable in the reconstruction of events, all the volumes written about the doomed expedition combined were not able to provide the scientific data Beattie had already gained from the scanty physical remains found on King William Island.

The problem with Beattie’s theory, however, was that skeletal remains alone were not enough to make a conclusive case. Although the lead values found so far were undeniably high, bone does not reflect recent exposure so much as it does lifetime exposure; lead sources present in the early industrial environment of mid-nineteenth-century England could have been to blame rather than any short-term exposure on the expedition. Also, contamination over the twenty-five or so years of the unknown Franklin crewman’s life could have caused physical or neurological symptoms, but they would have been much milder than those associated with classic lead poisoning and might have resulted in only slight behavioural problems. Therefore, to establish or disprove lead as a health problem on the expedition required the analysis of preserved soft tissue, which would reflect lead exposure following the departure of the expedition from England in May 1845.

The unexpected discovery of high lead levels shifted the focus away from the just-completed 1982 survey of King William Island. The gross examination of these bone materials, however, yielded two important observations: they added to the evidence for scurvy as a factor in the crewmen’s health late in the expedition and, significantly, backed up the bone lead findings. Values of the bone lead analyses from the remains of sailors collected in 1982 ranged from 87–223 micrograms per gram. By contrast, lead levels in bones of Inuit of the same time period and same geographical area ranged from 1–14 micrograms per gram. This provided convincing evidence that environmental lead contamination in the Arctic was not a contributing factor to the lead exposure. But even a physical anthropologist could learn little more from these test results. The definitive answer lay elsewhere: at the only known location where Franklin crewmen had died and been buried in the frozen ground by their shipmates. That place was tiny Beechey Island, off the southwest coast of Devon Island, where three sailors, Petty Officer John Torrington, Able Seaman John Hartnell and Private William Braine of the Royal Marines, died during the first winter of the Franklin expedition and were buried in the permanently frozen ground. What if those bodies remained frozen to this time? Wouldn’t they hold the key to whether Beattie’s lead theory was supportable or not?

Preserved human remains have given researchers and historians untold insights into life in very different worlds from our own. They are time capsules of the history and evolution of human beings. The mummified pharaohs of ancient Egypt, for example, have added greatly to our knowledge of that distant time, just as the bog people of northern Europe have shed new light on Iron Age man. But bodies have also remained frozen for great lengths of time. Examples include Charles Francis Hall, who died in 1871, and whose partially preserved remains were uncovered in Greenland’s permafrost in 1968. Prehistoric Inuit have also been found entombed, in the ice near Barrow, Alaska, and in Greenland, while in the Altai Mountains of southcentral Siberia, 2,200-year-old Scythian tombs have been discovered containing frozen and partially preserved human remains. The Arctic temperatures on Beechey Island were perfect for at least the chance of similar preservation.

Beattie first officially proposed the exhumation of the three graves to Canadian authorities early in 1983. In 1981 and 1982, he had required only an archaeology permit issued by the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre of the Northwest Territories and a science permit from the Science Advisory Board of the Northwest Territories to conduct his survey for skeletal remains on King William Island. The plan to investigate the buried corpses of Beechey Island, however, was far more complicated. The site was, in effect, a graveyard, and the identities of the three Franklin expedition sailors were known. Beattie had to ensure that all proper authorities were notified and that they approved of the planned research.

Archaeology and science permits were obtained from the Territorial government, which in turn asked that the British Admiralty, now part of the Ministry of Defence, be informed and that an attempt to contact any living descendants of the three sailors be made. The scientific team sought, and eventually received, clearance from the chief medical officer of the Northwest Territories, who assessed whether there was a potential health risk involved in the exposure of remains dating to the mid-nineteenth century. Exhumation and reburial permits, issued by the Department of Vital Statistics of the Northwest Territories, were also applied for. Permission from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was also required, and, with its assistance, Beattie notified the British Ministry of Defence of the planned excavations. The Settlement Council of the Resolute Bay community also granted permission to conduct research on the site, which falls within their local jurisdiction. Finally, in an effort to contact any descendants of the three Franklin crewmen, Beattie wrote to the Times asking that a request for descendants to contact him be published as soon as possible. The short article produced no response.

Because of the nature of the work on Beechey Island and what might be contained in the graves, the research team was then expanded to include an archaeologist and a pathologist. At last, in August 1984, the team of scientists from the University of Alberta left Edmonton for Resolute, en route to Beechey Island. They shared the same hope: that the very cold that once worked to destroy the Franklin expedition would now help them unlock the mystery of its destruction.