ON MAY 19th, 1845, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, two converted bomb-vessels, sailed from Greenhithe on the Thames under orders to proceed to 74 degrees north, 98 degrees west and south towards the Bering Straits. At a cost of £75,000, the most expensive and technologically advanced expedition ever mounted to uncover and navigate the legendary North West Passage was under way, commanded by the 60-year-old former Governor of Tasmania and veteran explorer, Sir John Franklin.
Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier of Banbridge, Co Down, who had sailed on earlier attempts at the passage and had captained HMS Terror under Sir James Clarke Ross in the Antarctic, commanded his old ship again, with Franklin, captain of Erebus and Captain James Fitzjames his second-in-command. Erebus carried a crew of 67, with a doctor and seven marines; Terror carried a crew of 64, with six marines. The hand-picked crew had been paid in advance.
Not much more than 100 feet in length, the two ships were cramped. Two converted locomotive boilers provided a rudimentary central heating. Between them, the two ships had a library of almost 3,000 books, including copies of Punch and Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. Supplies included lemon juice as a protection against scurvy, flour, tobacco and thousands of tins of meat, vegetables and various soups. The expedition was the first in the Arctic to carry a camera.
Disappeared forever
A devout man, Franklin read Divine Service on the day before his departure in the company of his family and his ships' crews. Erebus and Terror resupplied in the Orkneys and headed for the west coast of Greenland. In Lancaster Sound, on July 26th, the little expedition hailed an Aberdeen whaler, then disappeared forever.
Franklin's doomed expedition set out at the height of Victorian England's obsession with the Polar regions, with their promise of both mineral and strategic gain. This obsession created heroes, horrors and tragedy and invaded popular literature. Loss of life was common; at one stage a poster campaign against further Polar exploration broke out all over London. The Pole and the Arctic North were the unattainable grail, the cold, blindingly white heart of things to which the Victorian imagination groped its way. Franklin's story, when it came out, ended the fantasy.
Search expeditions
Two years and more passed without news of Franklin. His second wife, Lady Jane, consulted the Royal Navy and raised support for search expeditions. In a dozen years, nearly 40 expeditions set out in search of Franklin. The Crimean War of 1854 impeded further search expeditions and diluted Admiralty enthusiasm; the press turned against Lady Jane. But graves had been discovered on remote Beechey Island of Franklin crewmen who had died early in 1846. Dr John Rae of the Hudson's Bay Company returned with Inuit reports of men seen hauling boats over the ice of King William Island, and dying as they went. Captain Leopold McClintock of Dundalk, a friend of Lady Jane Franklin, had news that a note-book had been found on King William Island, as well as a cairn, under which was a scribbled record of Franklin's last days with important clues to the subsequent fate of the rest of the expedition.
Franklin had died of heart failure on June 11th, 1847, exactly 150 years ago today. In April 1848, with both ships stuck fast in the ice of the Beaufort Sea and no sign of a thaw, Francis Crozier had led 105 men across King William Island in temperatures of minus 30 centigrade in a hopeless attempt to reach Back's Fish River and the safety of Fort Reliance in Northern Canada. None arrived. Dark tales of cannibalism among the survivors trickled through to England, where they were hotly denied and condemned. English sailors, it was held, could not resort to such barbarism. Yet the evidence mounted in 1878 a report spoke of finding bones neatly sawn through. A cloud began to descend on the Franklin expedition which, at least on this side of the Atlantic, has never lifted. By contrast, Franklin has become a sort of folk hero in Canada.
Mystery deepened
Reasons for the failure of Franklin's lavish expedition range from sheer arrogance to scurvy, to lead-poisoning, or a mixture of all three. As searches continued the mystery deepened. The American amateur explorer Charles Francis Hall, who had become convinced that members of the expedition had survived, encountered Inuit who spoke of meeting with a haggard Francis Crozier and two crew members headed, they said, for Back's Fish River. They carried rubber boats such as were known to be aboard Erebus and Terror. Where did they go? What became of them?
Crozier's monument in Banbridge, Co Down, awards Franklin's expedition with "the honor [sic] of the discovery of the long sought-for North West Passage'
In 1903 Roald Amundsen became the first man to navigate the famed and tragic North West Passage. Was he, who had read avidly as a boy of Franklin's exploits and who stopped on his triumphant voyage to pay homage to his hero, watched over by the homesick ghosts of Crozier and those others who could never go home? And where is the final resting-place of Francis Crozier, who had led that doomed yet heroic trek over frozen King William Island?