Searching for Franklin

It might be said of Sir John Franklin, as of the unlucky Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, that "nothing became his life like the leaving of it." Had Franklin succeeded in finding a navigable Northwest Passage, he would have gone down in history merely as a notable navigator; instead, by vanishing, he has ascended to the firmament of Arctic mythology, as much a fixture of that sky as the Aurora Borealis. His death, and the mystery surrounding it, has inspired dozens of poems and novels, attracting writers from Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad and Margaret Atwood; any number of poignant ballads (among them Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage,' which has become almost a second Canadian national anthem), and (to date) four plays, six documentary films, a German opera, and an Australian musical.

The search to rescue, and then to discern the fate of, Sir John Franklin and his men was the very first mass-media disaster. For more than a decade, it dominated the popular press on both sides of the Atlantic; writers such as Dickens, Collins, Swinburne, Thoreau, Eliot, Verne, and Conrad were enthralled by its dark mysteries; clairvoyants from Scotland to India had visions of Franklin's ships, and more than thirty vessels were dispatched, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars in today's money, to seek him out. Stage plays, moving panoramas, and lantern shows depicted the wild loneliness of the "Frozen Zone"; lecturers equipped with maps, charts, and Esquimaux artifacts opined on his likely location, and his wife/widow Lady Jane Franklin became a dominating figure of the day, lauded by The Times of London as "Our English Penelope." Alas, for her, there would be no returning Odysseus! But loss and death draw down to deeper springs of human feeling, perhaps, than happy returns and loving embraces. And when, finally, the specter of the "last dread alternative" -- cannibalism -- was cast over the affair, it drove its tincture of admiration and revulsion deep down into the British psyche.

Even after the recovery of the expedition's final "Victory Point Record" by Francis Leopold McClintock in 1859, there was continued interest in discovering anything further about his final fate. The American eccentric and erstwhile newspaper publisher Charles Francis Hall led two search expeditions in the 1860's; in the 1870's, the U.S. Army dispatched Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka on a new seach for paper records or artifacts that might help clarify the last days of the Franklin exedition. Individual searchers returned to the area periodically from the 1880's through to the 1980's, among them the great explorer Knud Rasmussen, who in the 1902's heard stories of Franklin's ships from the grandsons of the men who had seen them perish, stories almost exactly the same as those collected by Hall more than half a century earlier. Forensic expeditions -- Owen Beattie in the mid-1980's, and Anne Keenleyside in the early 1990's -- collected the bones, and analyzed the bodies, of known Franklin remains, finding evidence of lead poisoning, scurvy, and tuberculosis. Most significantly, historians such as David C. Woodman and Dorothy Harlan Eber have collected and gathered Inuit testimony, comparing numerous accounts with the hope that a common narrative thread could be found. Woodman has traveled to the Arctic numerous times, searching for the ships in the places the Inuit described.

But it wasn't until 2014 when the first of Franklin's ships -- HMS "Erebus" -- was finally found. It was located by Parks Canada's underwater archaeologists only a few kilometers from where Woodman had searched, right where the Inuit had said it would be. Dives on "Erebus" have netted several remarkable objects, including the ship's bell, several china plates, brass buttons, and the hilt of a naval sword. Many of those, such as myself, who had followed the search for years, thought that finding one ship was already beating the odds -- and then, in 2016, the second ship "Terror" was found, again thanks to Inuit accounts (though in this case that of a contemporary witness, Sammy Kogvik). Although suspended during COVID, new dives resumed in the summer of 2022, and many more are to come -- who knows what secrets these wrecks may disclose? Meanwhile, land-based archaeologists have not been idle; earlier this year Doug Stenton announced that he'd been able to use DNA to identify one of the better-known skulls as that of John Gregory, who'd been hired to operate the steam engine installed in Erebus.

Interest in the Franklin story has continued to grow, both thanks to the discovery of the ships and the the 2018 AMC TV series "The Terror," starring Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin, Jared Harris as Francis Crozier, and Tobias Menzies as James Fitzjames. Based on Dan Simmons's horror novel The Terror, it nevertheless stays largely true to the history of the original expedition, and was meticulously researched and shot. To the historical hazards of scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism, the story adds a mythological Inuit beast, the fearsome "Tunbaq" -- if you don't mind the blood and gore, it's a wonderful re-telling of the Franklin story. You can download individual episodes from iTunes, or get the entire series as a DVD.  Michael Palin's new book on HMS Erebus will doubtless spur still more interest, as many who only know him through the Pythons or his BBC travel shows will get his dramatic take on the ship's history, and his account of re-tracing its routes around the world from Tasmania to the Arctic. Part of this involved visiting Franklin sites in the Canadian territory of Nunavut aboard the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, a voyage on which I was lucky enough to accompany him.

It's been more than 170 years since he went missing, and Sir John Franklin remains a source of seemingly endless fascination -- but why? Is it just the mysterious nature of his disappearance? Or does he symbolize something deeper, something we feel we've lost in these modern times?