Voyages of John Franklin

Sir John Franklin (1786-1847) was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer of Arctic North America who also served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (now called Tasmania) from 1837 to 1843.

Youth
Franklin was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 16 April 1786, the ninth of twelve children of a family with an obvious desire to better its social and economic position. One of his brothers later entered the legal profession and eventually became a judge in Madras, another joined the British East India Company, while a sister, Sarah, was the mother of Emily Tennyson, wife of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, author of "The Charge of the Light Brigade". His father intended him to enter the church or become a businessman, but was reluctantly convinced to allow him to go on a trial voyage on a merchant ship when he was aged 12. His experience of seafaring only confirmed his interest in a career at sea, so in March 1800, Franklin's father secured him a Royal Navy appointment.

Royal Navy
Initially serving as a first class volunteer, Franklin soon saw action in the Battle of Copenhagen on HMS Polyphemus, part of Horatio Nelson's squadron. As a midshipman, Franklin served on an expedition to the coast of Australia aboard HMS Investigator, commanded by Captain Matthew Flinders. He accompanied Captain Nathaniel Dance on Earl Camden, frightening off Admiral Charles de Durand-Linois at the Battle of Pulo Aura in the South China Sea on 14 February 1804, and was present at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 aboard HMS Bellerophon.

During the War of 1812 against the United States, Franklin, now a lieutenant, served aboard HMS Bedford and was wounded during the Battle of Lake Borgne in December 1814, just prior to the decisive American victory at the Battle of New Orleans one month later.

Explorations
Franklin's first command was aboard HMS Trent in the 1819 Svalbard expedition commanded by Captain David Buchan on HMS Dorothea. Believing in the "Open Sea" theory, and in a clean route through the Pole to Bering Strait, they left the Shetlands on their less-than-optimal ships, predictably encountered impassable ice beyond Svalbard, and turned back. Not much later after, Franklin was chosen to lead the Coppermine expedition overland from Hudson Bay to chart the north coast of Canada eastwards from the mouth of the Coppermine River. It was, by any objective standard, a disaster: Franklin completely failed in his goal of mapping a sufficient portion of the Arctic coast, only having been explored before the party was forced to turn back. Once he fell into the Hayes River at Robinson Falls, being rescued by a member of his expedition about downstream. Between 1819 and 1822, he lost 11 of the 20 men in his party. Most died of starvation, but there was also at least one murder and suggestions of cannibalism. The survivors were forced to eat lichen and even attempted to eat their own leather boots, which gained Franklin the nickname of "the man who ate his boots" In 1823, after returning to England, Franklin married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden. Their daughter, Eleanor Isabella, was born the following year. His wife died of tuberculosis in 1825, after he left for his second Canadian and third Arctic expedition, the Mackenzie River expedition. The goal this time was the mouth of the Mackenzie River, from which he would follow the coast westward, and possibly meet Frederick William Beechey, who would try to sail northeast from the Bering Strait. With him was John Richardson, who would follow the coast east from the Mackenzie to the mouth of the Coppermine River. After reaching Great Slave Lake using the standard HBC route, Franklin took a reconnaissance trip down the Mackenzie, and on 16 August 1825 became the second European to reach its mouth. He erected a flagpole with buried letters. The following summer, he went downriver again, and found the ocean frozen. Working his way west for several hundred miles, he gave up on 16 August 1826 at Return Reef, when he was about east of Beechey's Point Barrow (or seven days on foot; back home, having realized this, he lamented his decision). Returning to the safety of his main base Fort Franklin, now named Délı̨nę, at the mouth of the Great Bear River, on 21 September, he stayed until 20 February 1827, journeying to Fort Chipewyan (12 April), Cumberland House in Saskatchewan (18 June) and reaching New York City in August. On 1 September 1827, Franklin departed to Liverpool, arriving on 26 September.

Interlude
On 5 November 1828, he married Jane Griffin, a friend of his first wife, and herself a seasoned traveller, who proved indomitable in the course of their life together. Jane Franklin became the greatest woman traveler of the age. She rode a donkey into Nazareth, sailed a rat-infested boat up the Nile, climbed mountains in Australia, Africa and the Holy Land, and beat her way through the Tasmanian bush, all at a time when few Victorian women ventured beyond the home security. On 29 April 1829, they were made "Sir" and "Lady" by George IV; the same year, Sir John was awarded the first Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie of France. On 25 January 1836, he was made Knight Commander of the Royal Guelphic Order and a Knight of the Greek Order of the Redeemer. In 1837, Franklin was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land. His tenure was troublesome though, having quarrels with his subordinates, and he left office in 1843.

Demise
Back from Tasmania, once he heard rumors of the Admiralty's plans for a new attempt to chart and navigate the Northwest Passage, he became restless to secure its command, which was granted to him. It was to be his last voyage, Franklin's Lost Expedition, on HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which had been recently upgraded with steam engines and heating, more than 1000 books in their libraries, and packed full of canned supplies. The expedition set sail from Greenhithe on the morning of 19 May 1845, with a crew of 24 officers and 110 men. The ships stopped briefly in Stromness Harbour in the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, and from there they sailed to Greenland with HMS Rattler and a transport ship, Baretto Junior; the passage to Greenland took 30 days. The expedition was last seen by Europeans in late July 1845, when Captain Dannett of the whaler Prince of Wales and Captain Robert Martin of the whaler Enterprise encountered Terror and Erebus in Baffin Bay, waiting for good conditions to cross to Lancaster Sound. What happened next would be pieced together over the next 150 years by other expeditions, explorers, scientists and interviews from native Inuit peoples. Franklin's men wintered in 1845–46 on Beechey Island, where three crew members died and were buried. After traveling down Peel Sound through the summer of 1846, Terror and Erebus became trapped in ice off King William Island in September 1846 and are believed to have never sailed again. Having wintered off King William Island in 1846–47 and 1847–48, the remaining members of the expedition, now led by Terror 's captain Francis Crozier and Franklin's deputy James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland on 26 April 1848. By this point, nearly two dozen others had died; none of them were ever heard of again. According to the "Victory Point" note, dated 25 April 1848 and left on the island by Fitzjames and Crozier, Franklin had died on 11 June 1847; the exact location of his grave is unknown.

Aftermath
Pressed by Lady Franklin and others, the Admiralty launched a search for the missing expedition in 1848. Prompted in part by Franklin's fame and the Admiralty's offer of a finder's reward, many subsequent expeditions joined the hunt, which at one point in 1850 involved eleven British and two American ships. Several of these ships converged off the east coast of Beechey Island, where the first relics of the expedition were found, including the graves of three crewmen. These quests led to the precise mapping of North American waters, and merit study, but don't belong in a travel guide.

An independent rescue mission, led by Scottish Arctic explorer John Rae in 1854, brought the first Europeans to visit and map the strait between King William Island and the Boothia Peninsula (today named Rae Strait), while searching for Sir John and the Northwestern Passage itself (any of these prizes would surely be extra handy, financially, for him). Franklin's ships had actually sank on a correct passage route. Rae learned from his Inuit contacts about Franklin's death and cannibalism among the survivors, and came to map the whole passage, not completing the journey for a lack of resources. Back home, publishing reports about his discoveries, he earned the enmity of Lady Franklin, who was openly racist against Inuit and poured scorn on Rae, refusing to believe his stories, when he had in fact been the first person to return with definite news of her husband's fate. Tireless patriotic efforts to glorify Sir John and his crew meant effective damnatio memoriae of Rae and his legacy by the British system. Lady Franklin became somewhat of an Imperial celebrity, a kind of "patron saint of Arctic search", waiting for her husband until her dying day, 18 July 1875. Her burial vault has a vacant spot next to her, reserved for Sir John. The wreck of HMS Erebus was discovered in 2014, and HMS Terror 's in 2016, reportedly in "pristine condition"; their archeology is ongoing as of 2020.

Dan Simmons' novel The Terror (2007) is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin's 1845–1848 lost expedition. In the novel, while Franklin and his crew are plagued by starvation and illness, and forced to contend with mutiny and cannibalism, they are stalked across the bleak Arctic landscape by a monster. The novel has been adapted as an eponymous 2018 television series by cable TV channel AMC.

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