A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (33 page)

Now a captain, he secured his fame with another expedition in 1825–7 to the ‘Frozen Regions' in co-operation with Captains Beechey and Parry in the search for the Northwest Passage, resulting in a second book and widespread acclaim, including the Gold Medal of the Geographical Society in Paris ‘for having made the most important acquisitions to geographical knowledge during the preceding year', an honorary doctorate from Oxford, Fellowship of the Royal Society and
a knighthood. He had other employment during this period, including several years of conventional naval duty as captain of a warship in the Mediterranean in the early 1830s and Lieutenant-Governorship of Van Diemen's Land – Tasmania, then a British penal colony – but it was these two expeditions that were the backdrop to the Admiralty's decision to invite him to lead the
Erebus
and
Terror
expedition in 1845. Aged fifty-nine, he had been able to continue a naval career after 1815 when many of his contemporaries had not, and he now could look forward to an exciting and rewarding final endeavour, one which on the face of it was better equipped and more likely to succeed than any previous attempts in the Arctic.

Those early years of adventure and war shaped Franklin as a man and a leader. In a letter written in 1802 from
Investigator
he wrote that he was reading Shakespeare and Alexander Pope as well as books on naval tactics, navigation, geography, French and Latin, and learning survey and astronomy from Flinders; a niece later wrote that he was ‘a devourer of books of every kind'. Even at Trafalgar, still only nineteen, he was learning from those about him; he greatly admired William Cumby, the officer who took over
Bellerophon
after Cooke had been killed, writing to him later how he had always tried to follow his example, ‘to seek by every means … the friendship of those with whom I have been associated. When this feeling is evinced on the part of the commander, it seldom fails of producing the best exertions of your companions.' Looking at the images of the ships on the seabed, through the panes of the captain's cabin on
Terror
into the wonderfully preserved interior, it is easy to fill the space with Franklin and his officers dining and recounting past adventures – men whose faces we know from the daguerreotypes, who had a strong sense of their place in history and of the momentous events they had helped to shape and were continuing to do so.

The Franklin expedition was not just a search for the Northwest Passage – the dream, shown by later explorers to be impracticable, of an Arctic route for commercial shipping to the Pacific and India – but was also a scientific project, with another objective being to record magnetism in the polar regions. As well as winning wars and keeping the
pax Britannica
, the greatest achievement of the Royal Navy since the time of Captain Cook in the late eighteenth century had been exploration, charting new shores and furthering science. Apart from
Arctic and Antarctic exploration, the most famous of these survey expeditions in the years leading up to the Franklin disaster was the 1831–6 voyage of HMS
Beagle
, under Captain Robert FitzRoy with Charles Darwin as naturalist – the main objective being to map parts of South America and the Galapagos Islands, but on the way giving Darwin the basis for ideas on evolutionary biology that were to result in
On the Origin of Species
in 1859.

Darwin wrote in 1846 or 1847 to the geologist Charles Lyell – on the subject of glaciers and icebergs – that he was ‘not well acquainted' with Franklin's work, but in September 1845 he recorded having read Franklin's book on his 1819–22 expedition. Conversely, it seems likely that Franklin, a voracious reader, would have read all or most of the four volumes of FitzRoy's account of the voyage of
Beagle
published in 1839, including Darwin's volume on the natural history, and that it would have been among the large library of books on exploration and survey known to have been taken on board
Erebus
and
Terror
. What he would not have read was the second edition of Darwin's volume – published between June and September 1845, with the ships having sailed in May. It was in that edition that Darwin famously put into print the first glimmerings of what was to become his theory of natural selection, reflecting on the differences in the beaks of finches among the islands of the Galapagos:

The natural history of these island is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands … Considering the small size of the islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range … we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth.

What mostly preoccupied Darwin during those years while his ideas on natural selection were gestating was barnacles (cirripedes), leading to his volumes on the pedunculated cirripedes in 1851 and the sessile cirripedes in 1854. He began that work in earnest in 1846, too late to have asked Franklin for specimens, but he did make the request in a letter of 31 December 1847 to Captain Sir John Ross, who had taken
Erebus
and
Terror
to Antarctica in 1839–43 and was now about to lead
one of the search expeditions to try to discover Franklin in the Arctic. ‘I am going to beg a favour of you,' Darwin wrote, ‘… to collect for me, during your ensuing expedition & preserve in spirits the northern species of Cirripedia or Barnacles, noting the latitude under which found, & whether the coast-rocks are abundantly covered.' There is no record of Ross having been able to do so, but Darwin did obtain barnacles from John Richardson, surgeon and naturalist on Franklin's polar expeditions of 1819–22 and 1826–7 who conducted a search for Franklin in 1847–9, as well as from Peter Cormack Sutherland, another physician and naturalist who accompanied a search expedition in 1850. In that indirect way, then, the Franklin expedition – its failure, and the search expeditions it provoked – provided food for thought for the greatest scientific mind of the time, adding to the other new knowledge of natural science and geography in the Arctic that came about through the search for Franklin and his men.

At the time of the Franklin expedition, the islands of what is now the Canadian Arctic were nominally a British territory, administered from London and based on land claims made from the time that Martin Frobisher first set foot on Baffin Island – named after another British explorer – in 1576. The mainland to the south of the islands was controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company, which had been granted legal title in 1670 by King Charles II to ‘Rupert's Land' – the watershed of Hudson's Bay, about half of present-day Canada – and in 1821 to the rest of the present regions of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The Province of Canada to the south was a British colony, created in 1841 from the union of the former colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, and only became a self-administering ‘Dominion' of Britain in 1867, with the Hudson's Bay Company transferring titles of its lands to Canada in 1870 and the British Crown its Arctic possessions in 1880.

These claims of ownership had little bearing on the day-to-day lives of the Inuit, the indigenous people who lived in small groups spread thinly over much of the archipelago and the adjacent mainland shore. It is thought that the present-day Inuit descend from people who had come from the area of Alaska about a thousand years ago – about the time of the initial Norse settlement of Greenland – and replaced the previous ‘Dorset' people, named after a Cape in Nunavut where their artefacts were first identified. The earliest people to explore the region
probably came across the Bering Strait from present-day Siberia about 5,000 years ago – about the time of the construction of the Cheops pyramid in Egypt – and almost certainly used the skin boats that continued to be their mainstay until recently, supremely well adapted to the Arctic environment and the needs of individual hunters or small groups as they ranged widely using harpoons to kill seals and other marine life.

Called Eskimo or Esquimaux by Europeans, a word possibly derived from the Innu for ‘He who laces a snowshoe', the Inuit were regarded in derogatory terms by some commentators in England who reacted to John Rae's report of cannibalism among Franklin's men, refusing to believe the Inuit accounts on which he relied – one of whom was the novelist Charles Dickens, who had great compassion for the poor in England but regarded the Inuit as ‘savages'. However, those who had first-hand dealings with the Inuit and First Nations people in the north, particularly the men of the Hudson's Bay Company, learnt to respect their knowledge and adopt their survival techniques. John Rae was one of the most admired of those men, and an outstanding figure in the Franklin saga. Born in the Orkney Islands in 1813, he qualified in medicine at the early age of nineteen in Edinburgh and then accepted a position as surgeon at the Hudson's Bay Company outpost at Moose Factory on the southern shore of James Bay, the southernmost point of Hudson's Bay. Already a keen outdoorsman and hunter in the Orkneys, he became fascinated by winter survival techniques in Canada and proved extremely proficient at travelling long distances with minimal equipment, leading the Company to appoint him as a surveyor.

Rae made his own snowshoes and used them to walk over 1,500 miles from Moose Factory to Toronto to attend a course on survey techniques, thus demonstrating their value. In learning to build ‘snow-houses' – igloos – he recounted how he made the mistake of pouring water over the roof to make ice, thinking it would insulate them better, but learnt from the Inuit that to do so simply made the igloo into a fridge and that the snow blocks needed to ‘breathe' in order for warmth to be retained inside. He learnt that to travel in small parties of just a few companions was the key to survival, rather than the large expeditions that were often the European way; he would have known that the party of ‘about 40' of Franklin's men seen by the Inuit would have been too many to survive off the land or for the Inuit to
help. He learnt how to deal both physically and psychologically with the severe, all-encompassing cold that people growing up in northern Canada would have been used to but was unfamiliar to many of the men of Franklin's expedition – men used to long, arduous sea voyages of several years' duration, something that helps to explain their extraordinary endurance in the Arctic over almost five years but was ultimately of limited use without adopting Inuit survival techniques.

Rae's account of his survey expedition to the Boothia Peninsula opposite King William Island,
Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea in 1846 and 1847
– in which he describes learning to make igloos and finding them warmer than tents – would have proved helpful reading for Franklin and his men, who at that time were icebound in their ships not far away. In Rae's letter to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1854, in which he notes that the Inuit found abundant ammunition with the bodies of the men – so much gunpowder they could make a mound with it, and ball and shot – in other words, plenty for survival by hunting, had they split into small groups – he ends with a few words on his own expedition: ‘I may add, that by means of our guns and nets, we obtained an ample supply of provisions last autumn, and my small party passed the winter in snowhouses in comparative comfort, the skins of the deer shot forming abundant warm clothing and bedding.'

One of the most poignant discoveries in the abandoned boat on King William Island was a copy of Oliver Goldsmith's
The Vicar of Wakefield
, a novel first published in 1766 that was greatly admired by Charles Dickens and popular among Victorian readers. Beautifully preserved in the National Maritime Museum with the pages still readable, it is the 1843 edition with illustrations by William Mulready, an Irish painter known for his romanticised rural scenes.
The Vicar of Wakefield
is a sentimental novel, recounting the idyllic lifestyle, financial misfortune and resurrection of a rural vicar, and is often seen as a celebration of the innate goodness in people. Someone on the expedition chose to take this novel with them on their final journey, knowing the challenge that lay ahead of them in the most hostile environment imaginable – about as far as it is possible to get from the idealised English village – and the looming possibility of what they might have to do for survival, the awful choice revealed by the Inuit accounts and the forensic evidence.

A photo taken shortly after the return of the McClintock expedition in 1859 shows a display case with twenty small books from the boat, all of them except
The Vicar of Wakefield
devotional in nature. One of them, a pocketbook of Christian melodies also in the National Maritime Museum, is inscribed to ‘G.G.', Lieutenant Graham Gore of
Erebus
. Described by Captain Fitzjames as a ‘man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers', Gore was already dead by the time that the decision had been made to abandon the ships and leave with the boat, so the book must have been taken from his belongings or been in a communal collection. Not only the officers but also the ratings had books of Christian devotion, including a book of prayer issued to every seaman by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The mandatory ‘Seaman's Library' carried on every Royal Navy ship was dominated by books with Christian and moralising themes; the list approved by the Admiralty in 1836 included a
Life of Nelson
, abridged from Robert Southey's biography of 1813, but also Bishop Gibson's
Serious advice to persons who have been sick
, Stonhouse's
Admonitions against Swearing, Sabbath-breaking and Drunkenness
, Woodward's
A Kind Caution to Profane Swearers
and, poignantly for the men of the expedition, Assheton's
A discourse concerning a death-bed repentance
and
An Old Chaplain's Farewell Letter to Seamen.