Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition

^Epilogue The Age of Lead

For decades, the elaborate historical constructs fashioned by students of the Franklin disaster provided a grimly satisfactory explanation of the tragedy, one that neatly adhered to prevailing expectations. Fundamentally, the expedition was viewed as a momentous test of endurance against the malignant forces of nature; Franklin’s defeat, alas, confirmed the hideous risks that that entailed. Subsequent investigations rarely strayed from the well-worn path—reliance on the cumulative wisdom of early searchers, written records and accepted truths—to consider physical clues, such as first-hand observation and analysis of food sources. Even then, the work was encumbered by the limitations of the existing technology for scientific analysis.

When a Franklin expedition tin, retrieved by M’Clintock, was opened and examined in 1926, the beef contents were declared to be “perfectly satisfactory.” In light of the catastrophic health consequences of ingesting the lead-contaminated contents of such tins, they would seem to have proven rather less than satisfactory to those reliant on the tainted provisions. Results from the contemporary analyses of the human soft-tissue samples by Walt Kowal, Owen Beattie and their colleagues, published in 1991 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, only served to underscore the dramatic nature of the lead poisoning identified in the bodies of Beechey Island. Comparison with lead levels in modern populations, even in instances of occupational exposure, confirmed the devastating effects. Lead levels in the soft tissues of the crew members averaged ten to thirty times higher than in modern unexposed individuals. The pattern was similar in all soft tissues examined, including the aorta, stomach, kidney, liver, lung, spleen, bladder, muscle and intestine.

Examination of preserved soft tissues and previously analyzed hair excluded the possibility that the lead exposure was simply a product of non-expedition factors, such as the environment of nineteenth-century industrial Britain. While the three crewmen died early on, within only seven to eleven months of sailing, sufficient time had elapsed to have eliminated most lead absorbed into the soft tissues before their departure. Lead resides in different body tissues for different periods of time after cessation of exposure. In the case of soft tissues, half of the lead present in an organ or tissue would have been eliminated in approximately twenty-one to forty days, with levels continuing to decline at a predictable rate. It is clear that the source of lead exposure originated not from factors or conditions encountered in England, but from those encountered aboard the discovery vessels themselves—aboard the Erebus and Terror. Here, too, contemporary scientific methods provide confirmation.

The tissues and solder were subjected to lead isotope ratio analysis, a means of “fingerprinting” the source of lead. The results indicated that the lead in the tissues was identical to that in the solder used in the food cans. These findings, published in the journal Nature, in 1990, concluded that the lead contamination came not from a variety of sources, but, without exception, from a single European geological location. Had the body lead resulted from chronic personal exposure to a variety of local and environmental sources before the crews’ embarkation, or even afterward, it is unreasonable to suppose that all the individuals would have demonstrated the same isotopic ratios. Unless the sampled sailors had literally lived under the same roof (a possibility discounted by British Admiralty records that show the crews were drawn from regions throughout the United Kingdom), the ratios of lead found in the tissues of each crew member would have been skewed differently. What’s more, while representing short-term exposure, the lead in the soft tissues was indistinguishable from lead in the bones. This evidence confirms that the lead stored in the bones of crew members before the expedition was swamped by the subsequent massive exposure resulting from the solder in the tins. There is no question of the source of the lead found in the bodies of Franklin’s men: it came from the tinned foods. The devastating impact on their health followed.

Furthermore, research conducted on skeletal remains discovered at a previously unrecorded site discovered on King William Island in 1992 served to provide independent corroboration of Beattie’s research. The results of this new investigation, published by Anne Keenleyside et al in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 1996, stated that the “pattern of distribution of lead between bones indicates excessive intake of lead during the period of the expedition. Predictions of blood lead levels based on the measured bone lead concentrations, suggest that the current upper limit for occupational exposure recommended to prevent neurological changes was exceeded.” In 1997, a second publication arising from this research stated that “elevated lead levels in the remains are consistent with previous measurements and support the conclusions of Beattie and colleagues that lead poisoning had greatly debilitated the men by this point.”

Tinned foods came into widespread use among the general population by the late 1800s, becoming “almost a necessity,” and this popularity was mirrored by a dawning sense of the danger posed by the use of solder containing lead. These suspicions are recorded in the medical literature of the time. Documented instances of “metallic poisoning,” or lead poisoning, attributed to consumption of tinned foods, began to appear in the 1880s, and reference is made to the common complaint regarding drops or fragments of solder found mixed with the food contents within the tins. The Medical News in 1883 warned: “In cases of obscure nervous affections look out for lead-poisoning, and bear in mind the use of canned food as a source of such poisoning.” Physicians started to raise questions as to the desirability of tinning as a means of food preservation. Changes to the design of food cans were subsequently introduced, addressing the most obvious lead-contamination sources, but not before the world’s most prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, asked why bottles were not substituted for tins. The answer surely lay with an industry that had an enormous capital stake in the trade, and the jobs associated with it. Nor are the serious consequences of lead relegated to the nineteenth century. Only in recent decades has lead been removed from house paints, gasoline and food tins (though tinned goods and lead-glazed ceramics in developing countries continue to be problematic); as well, drinking water is monitored to identify and manage the hazard.

Microbiological research into Hartnell and Braine also produced another curious, perhaps ominous, discovery. Not only have bacterial strains of the genus Clostridium survived the prolonged period of freezing, but some of the strains have shown resistance to modern antibiotics, a remarkable characteristic considering that the bacteria originated nearly a century before the development of antibiotics. It has been suggested that strains of bacteria more tolerant of pollutants can also show resistance to antibiotics. Medical researchers are only beginning to investigate the significance and implications of this evidence, especially in relation to the role of environmental pollutants in exacerbating the development of such resistance. There is a certain irony in the possibility that men who lived during the reign of Victoria should be the ones to alert scientists to such an insidious effect of the poison, lead, in our own time.

It is certainly not easy—and for some, doubtless impossible—to entertain the notion that so basic an instrument of human convenience as a tin can could have been a major factor in the loss of the Franklin expedition. From a purely emotional standpoint, it should have been anything else. If rigid adherence to conventional interpretations of the disaster is not to be followed, with scurvy, starvation, stress and hypothermia judged the relevant health factors, then at least it would be more palatable to know that any new evidence to arise did so from investigation of more glamorous sources of information, such as the Erebus and Terror, still at rest in the icy deep. The fundamental lesson of the forensic investigation into the Franklin expedition is the very recognition that so great an undertaking as the most celebrated of all Arctic voyages could be vulnerable to so apparently minute a factor. Profound questions arise from the investigations of the simple evidence represented by the tins, questions not limited to the role of lead as a factor in the fate of the Franklin expedition, but rather the health consequences of European food-preserving technology of the nineteenth century on an entire era of exploration.

Before Franklin, there were the curious references to an unexplained illness that appeared in the narrative of Captain George Back from 1836–37. Immediately following Franklin, there was the official report of Sir James Clark Ross regarding his unsuccessful 1848–49 search expedition. It is notable that Ross, like Franklin, was supplied with tinned provisions by Stephan Goldner. The outbreaks of “debility” amongst Arctic expeditions did not end there, however; another outbreak is germane to this discussion.

Commander George Washington De Long, captain of the 1879–81 Arctic voyage of the U.S. steamer, Jeannette, had taken specific precautions against “debility.” Whilst unconvinced about lime juice’s efficacy, he well understood “the importance attached to it by Arctic medical authorities and Arctic voyagers generally [and] did not care to depart from an established custom.” De Long had three barrels of lime juice loaded aboard the Jeannette. The expedition also carried large stores of canned meats, soups and vegetables.

De Long sought the North Pole, failing which he intended to navigate the Northwest Passage. It would be a privately backed expedition; De Long’s benefactor was a newspaper proprietor, James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald and the man who also assigned correspondent Henry Morton Stanley to travel to Africa to locate the British missionary Dr. David Livingstone. Bennett’s influence was such that he was able to secure an Act of the United States Congress declaring the Jeannette’s voyage a “national undertaking.”

De Long had been involved in an earlier cruise into the eastern Arctic, and had written, “I never in my life saw such a dreary land of desolation, and I hope I may never find myself cast away in such a perfectly God-forsaken place.” He was not an Arctic lion either, in appearance (balding, pince-nez) or temperament (he was sensitive and studious), but he had caught a bad case of what his wife termed “the polar virus.”

The Jeannette sailed from San Francisco on 8 July 1879, with a scientific staff that included an astronomer, meteorologist and naturalist from the Smithsonian Institution. Beset by ice on 6 September, she then drifted for two years in the polar pack as sickness gradually tightened its hold on her 33 crewmen. The men were largely dependent on tinned foods, and, as their symptoms worsened to include severe abdominal pain, fear spread that something in their diet was poisoning them. The crew was already in a severely weakened state when the Jeanette was finally crushed by the pack-ice in the Laptev Sea in 1881, though the men escaped, dragging three boats and supplies over hundreds of miles to open water. There was no fresh meat to be had out on the ice, only what provisions they could carry with them. One boat foundered in the icy sea, the other two were separated before they reached land at Siberia’s Lena Delta.

Wandering across the marshy and featureless land of the delta, the crew of one boat stumbled across a native village and was saved. The men in the other boat—including De Long—faced a terrible ordeal. They located small huts, but found they had been abandoned: “We can see traces of Russians or other civilized beings. A rude checker-board, wooden forks, pieces of pencil, etc.” They struggled on for a month, killing several reindeer, but it was not enough. De Long made the painful decision to kill and eat the ship’s mascot, a dog named Snoozer. Soon his party was reduced to eating the animal hides the men had worn for warmth, their boot soles and, finally, moss dug from the frozen ground.

Their final days were recorded in pitiful detail by De Long, the delirious howls of the starved men “a horrible accompaniment to the wretchedness of our surroundings.” In his journal, he also recorded the strange dream of the ship’s surgeon, James Ambler: “He seemed to be accompanying the survivors of Sir John Franklin’s last expedition on their journey to the Great Fish River.” Certainly the appalling nature of their suffering had a great deal in common with that of the Franklin crewmen, and Ambler’s dream proved portentous: he suffered the throes of just such a death. When his body was found, there was a trickle of blood from his mouth, into which his fingers were stuffed.

With the ground frozen, the first men to die were carried out on the ice of a nearby river and crude markers were carved and erected on its bank in their memory. Soon the survivors were too weak to carry the dead out to the ice, so they dragged them behind the corner of their makeshift shelter so the bodies were out of sight. De Long continued to read divine service, but his diary entries, which once consumed pages with scientific observations and exacting accounts of their lives amidst the polar pack, were spare. As with his strength so went erudition. De Long made a last diary entry on 30 October 1881. There was no stirring sentimentality or evocation of patriotism, simply this: “Boyd and Gortz died during the night. Mr. Collins dying.” In all, twenty of the thirty-three expedition members perished. Wrote a searcher after coming across De Long’s last camp: “The world is richer by this gift of suffering,” though he could only offer in evidence the following: “A slight gain was made in the solution of the Arctic problem.” Ironically, the Jeanette, or at least relics of her, completed the Northwest Passage, drifting from west to east without her crew; and wreckage from the ship appeared on the southwest coast of Greenland in 1884, borne there by the polar tides.

There was a public clamour for an accounting for De Long’s tragic failure. Naval and congressional investigations followed, and, in 1883, a writer in Medical News, drawing from the Report of the Court of Inquiry, published evidence that something other than scurvy or starvation might have been a factor in the disaster. In response to direct questions from the Court regarding the “character of the provisions” supplied to the expedition, a survivor, Lieutenant John Danehower, said: “In May, 1881, a number of the people became affected with stomach disorders, which were attributed to tin-poisoning. It had been observed that the inside of the tomato cans had turned dark, as though acted upon by the acid…” When asked by the judge advocate about the physical condition of the men when they landed on the ice, in June 1881, the same witness said: “…Lieut. [Charles] Chipp was disabled and prostrated by what was supposed to be tin-poisoning… A number of men… were also affected by the tin-poisoning, and were prostrated a few days later.”

In the Report of the Court of Inquiry, the sickness was judged to be “the result of eating canned provisions.” In his 1883 account, the medical writer W.E. Magruder declared: “I have no doubt the so-called ‘tin-poisoning’ was really lead-poisoning, resulting from the use of cans coated with the alloy of tin and lead.” As the Medical News went on to report: “The danger of contamination from the lead contained in the solder depends upon the way in which the can is made… In a hand-made can by a careless workman, a square inch or more of solder surface may be present on the inside of the can. Drops of solder may also fall into the can in the process of sealing, and most of our readers must have seen such fragments of solder. If they have not, their cooks have.”

While De Long did not survive, his journal did, and it describes with remarkable clarity the effects of lead on the Jeannette’s crew. For the first time, a contemporaneous account by an explorer identified lead poison as a health factor on an expedition:

Certainly no exemption from scurvy was secured for many of the Arctic expeditions of this era, despite the claims made for the antiscorbutic properties of tinned foods, though in that respect De Long’s seems to have fared better than most. But the ancient scourge now had company from an equally virulent and deadly affliction.

The successes, or more often the failures, of nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions are usually viewed as little more than inventories of the foibles of individual commanders—which, if one believes the usual popular historical appraisals, run the gamut from simple incompetency and benign eccentricity to outright, stark-raving lunacy—squared off against a malignant climate and relentless geography. With hindsight, the decisions made and actions taken by some of those commanders do lend credence to the view that the Arctic heaved with an armada of the reality-challenged. But all that arrogance and misapprehension amounts to little beside one simple fact: that many of those who sailed in search of the passage in the nineteenth century did so with their physical and mental health seriously compromised.

These failures cannot simply be assigned to character in the face of history’s failure to account for a fundamental truth: That at the very moment when explorers sought to conquer the places of greatest extremity, where success relied on every advantage of technology and human ingenuity and when the consequences of failure were so stark and absolute, a new and unanticipated threat to human health had entered the equation. It was a threat absolutely germane to the debate about character, for it also had the effect of subverting and undermining a commander’s mental faculties at the same time as it mugged his body. Yes, the forces of the natural world they encountered were little understood. But even less understood was the “debility” caused by the scorbutic and saturnic diseases that ate away at expedition members, loosening their teeth, blackening their gums, bloating their extremities and clouding their judgment.

The story of how the Royal Navy failed to achieve the Northwest Passage is really that of how the world’s greatest navy battled, and was ultimately humbled by, a simple yet gruesome disease—scurvy, allied to a menace of which they could not begin to conceive: lead poisoning. The source of their defeat was not the ice-choked seas, the deep cold, the winters of absolute night, the labyrinthine geography or the soul-destroying isolation. It was found in their food supply, most notably in their heavy reliance on tinned foods.

The landscape of the Canadian Arctic has changed little in the intervening years. The grey tracts of stone, the relentless, grinding course of the sea ice, the violet hues of the late-setting sun, all are today as they were in Franklin’s time. Adventurers visiting King William and Beechey islands this summer or the next, whether burdened by backpacks or man-hauling sledges in a personal struggle to attain some commonality with a lost world, will find their satisfaction. The romance of the Franklin era of exploration and the emotional response that it evokes is enduring. What is not is the assumption that great men die only of great causes. For despite the hostile forces of climate and geography the region represents, it was something else that had a catastrophic effect on the Franklin expedition—something human.