A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (32 page)

Terror
is the first wreck in this book for which the documentary evidence outweighs the archaeological in building up a picture of the ship before she sank – the first for which technical plans of the ship are available, along with lists of virtually everything taken on board. The discovery of the wrecks allows us to reflect on the wider value of archaeology not just as a source of new facts but as a spur to the imagination and an emotional experience. Until 2014 the only physical remains to be discovered of the expedition after the ships had become icebound were the note in the cairn, relics obtained from the Inuit, artefacts and a camp site found by the nineteenth-century search expeditions, and evidence located more recently by archaeologists scouring the islands. The wrecks provide something else, more vibrant and life-affirming, a time-capsule of how these men had lived not only while icebound but also in the exuberant first weeks of their voyage to the Arctic, and how they might have wished to be remembered – rather than through the evidence of their final desperate measures for survival on the ice.

In 1845 Queen Victoria had been on the throne for seven years, her consort Prince Albert was still alive and the British Empire was rapidly expanding, with the prospect of discovering the Northwest Passage being part of an ambition that would see Britain control a third of the land surface of the world and all of the oceans. India was still ruled by the East India Company, though with increasing British Government involvement that would lead to Crown control after the East India Company army mutiny of 1857–8 and Victoria being crowned Empress of India in 1877. At the time of the Franklin expedition the British were fighting a series of wars against the Sikhs that resulted in the Punjab being annexed and the border of British India being pushed to the Afghan frontier. In Afghanistan itself, they had recently fought a war that would set the stage for intervention there for a long time to come – one that ended in 1841 with the British and Indian army of more than 16,000 men being annihilated as they retreated from Kabul through the mountains to India. A famous painting by Lady Butler of the man thought to be the sole survivor, Assistant Surgeon Brydon of the Company's Bengal Army, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1879, was to become a central Victorian image of survival against the
odds and glorious failure – something that could be celebrated because it was set against the backdrop of the relentless march of progress and wider British success, and which might have seen Franklin's men similarly lauded had they survived.

Another war of wide-reaching consequences was fought in those years by the British against the Qing Dynasty of China, in order to prevent the Chinese from blocking the import of opium from India – the single most profitable part of the East India Company's trade, and a source of great wealth for its shareholders. The continuing British connection with slavery was another iniquity of this period. In 1807 it had become illegal for British ships or British subjects to engage in the slave trade; the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act freed more than 800,000 slaves in the British colonies, many of them on Caribbean sugar plantations. However, slavery continued to be pivotal to the British economy because of the cotton industry – England's largest industrial activity in the 1840s, employing up to one sixth of the population – and the fact that more than 80 per cent of the raw cotton came from plantations in the United States, where slavery was not abolished until the end of the Civil War in 1865. At the time of the Franklin expedition, therefore, huge fortunes were still being made in Britain on the back of slavery, and more people were dependent on it for their livelihoods than at the time of the notorious ‘triangular trade' of the eighteenth century when British ships participated directly in the slave trade from Africa to the Americas.

Rising population, rising unemployment and migration to the towns and cities were changing Britain from a fundamentally rural economy to one with a greater urban focus. Allied to this were the terrible working conditions exposed by Charles Dickens in his novels, and a criminal justice system in which people – mostly poor, and including children – were hanged or transported to overseas penal colonies for petty crime. In Ireland, the dreadful ‘Potato Famine' was beginning to unfold just as Franklin set off, with the potato blight becoming widespread in 1845; over the next few years, while Franklin's men were struggling to survive in the Arctic, almost a million people in Ireland died of starvation. The emigration of at least half a million Irish people to the United States changed the demography of the cities in the old north-eastern states, and elsewhere great developments were reshaping America – the annexation of Texas by the United States in that year, leading to the Mexican-American War of 1846–8, and
in January 1848 the discovery that led to the California Gold Rush, bringing hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to California and opening up the west to settlement and exploitation.

The only photograph to survive of Sir John Franklin is a daguerreotype taken along with those of other officers of the expedition on 16 May 1845, three days before they left England. It shows a man looking ill at ease and unwell, apparently suffering from a cold or flu at the time. Franklin had taken an interest in daguerreotypes from soon after the introduction of the technique in 1839 and requested that a camera be included in the equipment of each of the ships; the one on
Terror
may be a tripod and a box on a shelf in Crozier's cabin visible in the video taken of the interior of the wreck in 2019. The daguerreotypes are at once startlingly modern and from another era – these are men who had almost certainly never previously sat for a photographic portrait, something that only became common in the following decade. In Franklin's case, the most startling thought is that this was a man whose early adult life had been lived at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, a period that survives for us only in painted and sketched portraits and scenes of battles and ships.

John Franklin was born on 16 April 1786 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, close to England's east coast, the son of a landowner from a farming background who had become prosperous as a town merchant. This type of background, ‘landed gentry' rather than aristocracy, was common among naval officers of the period – Horatio Nelson was from a similar background, not far away in Norfolk – and helps to explain their drive and ambition, as most had to make their way without relying on private means. This was the economic and social class that produced many of the men who ran the Empire, and indeed two of Franklin's elder brothers went out to India to work for the East India Company – one becoming Chief Justice in Madras and being knighted, and the other, James Franklin, an officer in the Company's Bengal Army and a Fellow of the Royal Society, being renowned for his work as a surveyor and ornithologist.

Franklin entered the Royal Navy in October 1800 aged fourteen and soon saw action, on board the 64-gun ship-of-the-line HMS
Polyphemus
at the Battle of Copenhagen on 2 April 1801. Fought not against the French but against the Danish, the battle was an attempt to prevent a coalition including Denmark and Russia from reopening
trade with French ports, something that the British had been trying to prevent since they had been drawn into war with France in 1793. It was a hard-fought fleet action famed for the second-in-command, Vice-Admiral Nelson, ‘turning a blind eye' on seeing flag signals to withdraw – Nelson having, by this point, only one eye, having lost the other during the Battle of Calvi in Corsica against the French in 1794. To reach Copenhagen,
Polyphemus
sailed past the entrance to Roskilde Fjord, where Danish merchant ships were taking refuge very close to the site of the Viking longships discussed earlier in this book.

As a prospective officer Franklin would have had to ‘learn the ropes' like any other seaman, with promotion to midshipman and then lieutenant being based on time served and passing a rigorous examination. Nevertheless, family connections could help to gain placement with a captain of influence whose patronage could further an officer's career. In Franklin's case it was Matthew Flinders, his cousin by marriage, who took him on as a midshipman in his ship HMS
Investigator
for his expedition to Australia in 1801. What followed was an extraordinary adventure for Franklin on one of the great voyages of discovery – the first-ever circumnavigation of Australia, exchange from
Investigator
to HMS
Porpoise
for the voyage home, shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef and two months surviving on a coral atoll, a voyage to Canton and then home in an East Indiaman that fought off a French attack in the Battle of Pulo Aura, an action in which Franklin distinguished himself. As a result,
Erebus
and
Terror
are not the only underwater sites associated with Franklin – two anchors jettisoned from
Investigator
in the Recherche Archipelago off Western Australia were found by divers in 1973, and the wreck of
Porpoise
on ‘Wrecks Reef Bank' is a protected historic site under Australian law.

Franklin then took part in one of the most significant naval engagements of all time, the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. As signals midshipman on the 74-gun ship-of-the-line HMS
Bellerophon
, he saw and wrote down Nelson's famous message ‘England expects that every man shall do his duty' and passed it to the ship's captain, James Cooke, who had it read out to the men waiting at the guns.
Bellerophon
became entangled with the French ship
Aigle
, also of 74 guns, and engaged her at point-blank range, the gun's muzzles nearly touching and the men fighting hand-to-hand through the gunports – a French grenade tossed into
Bellerophon
detonated in the gunner's storeroom, fortunately blowing the door of the powder magazine shut
rather than the other way round. On deck the main and mizzen masts were shot away and men were exposed to murderous fire from sharpshooters in the
Aigle
's rigging. The first lieutenant, William Cumby, saw that officers were being targeted and urged Cooke to remove his captain's epaulettes, but he refused: ‘It is now too late to take them off. I see my situation, but I will die like a man.' Just like Nelson on HMS
Victory
later that day, Cooke was shot in the chest and fell fatally wounded on the deck. Franklin later recalled seeing the hands of French sailors on the railings as they attempted to board but were savagely beaten back; he was one of only seven of forty-seven men on the poop deck not to be killed or wounded. He came out of the battle partly deafened by gunfire, his hearing never fully to recover, but he had played a part in a battle that defeated the French and Spanish at sea and secured the naval supremacy that Britain had enjoyed since the time of the
Royal Anne Galley
nearly a century before.

In 1807 he transferred to another ship-of-the-line, HMS
Bedford
, which took the Portuguese royal family to Brazil in 1808 to escape the French invasion, remained off South America for two years and returned in 1810 to spend four years blockading French ports. The Treaty of Paris on 30 May 1814 ended the war against France for the Royal Navy – Napoleon's brief return in 1815, culminating in the Battle of Waterloo, being solely a land campaign – and freed up ships to participate in the war that had been underway against the United States since 1812. In order to relieve pressure on the Canadian border, an attack was planned through the Gulf of Mexico on Louisiana, the former French territory that had been sold to the United States by Napoleon in 1803.

On 8 January 1815 Franklin was present at the Battle of New Orleans, taking a leading role in the only successful British actions of the day – commanding
Bedford
's boat in an attack on American gunboats and then leading her ‘small-arms men' in a combined naval, marine and infantry assault on the west bank of the Mississippi to capture an American gun battery that was then meant to be used against the main American force on the other bank. Unfortunately, a delay in their assault meant that the British infantry attack on the American line on the other side of the river began before the guns had been captured, leaving Franklin and his men to watch helplessly as more than 2,000 British soldiers were shot down in the open marshland in less than half an hour – many of them by Kentucky and Tennessee
frontiersmen using their highly accurate longrifles. The battle took place fifteen days after the Treaty of Ghent that ended the war, before news of it could reach the other side of the Atlantic. Despite this, it was a pivotal one in world history; had the British taken New Orleans they could have retained it, arguing that the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was void, and as a result the history of the United States might have been very different.

Lieutenant Franklin was commended for his work at New Orleans, one of four junior naval officers whose ‘exertions and intelligence have so repeatedly been the admiration of the general and superior officers under whose orders they have been acting on shore', and was recommended for promotion. However, the fact that the battle was a failure for the British and that Europe and the Americas were now at peace meant that no such advancement occurred, and many naval officers were put on half-pay. The Battle of New Orleans was to be Franklin's last active service and from then on his career took a different direction, following the main route open to officers in peacetime who wanted challenge and potential distinction – survey and exploration. Drawing on the skills he had learnt in survey and cartography under Flinders in Australia, he got himself appointed in command of the brig HMS
Trent
in 1818 as part of an expedition with the ambitious objective of sailing over the North Pole to the Bering Strait. This proved unsuccessful, but in the following year he led the expedition that first brought him to wide public notice, overland from Hudson's Bay to ascertain the position of the Coppermine River and the trend of the polar sea to the east. An undertaking that Franklin described as ‘long, fatiguing and disastrous', it lasted from April 1819 until the summer of 1822 and saw eleven of the twenty men die. His book on the expedition,
Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819–22
, published in 1823, was widely admired for the zeal and fortitude that it showed.