Image credit: National Maritime Museum

The Expedition

The Franklin Expedition was one of a number of attempts to map the high Arctic while scouting the final, presumed route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Explorers had plotted much of the area from both sides, but there was still a mysterious blank spot in the middle of the map — about 300 miles of what could have been coastline, open water, or impassable solid ice.

The task of filling in this void fell to a man who was well suited for the challenge. Rear-Admiral (retired) Sir John Franklin was an experienced explorer, and by later in his career had been elected as the governor of Tasmania (called Van Diemen’s Land at the time), where he served for seven years. His term as governor was interrupted when he was recalled to England after embarking on a journey to cross a poorly mapped part of the island; he got lost, which inspired consternation among the civil servants who ran Tasmania in his absence. By 1844, Franklin was back in England and looking for a new challenge. He was an obvious choice to lead a search for the Northwest Passage.

The expedition had been assigned state-of-the-art ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, on loan from the government of the United Kingdom. They were fitted for the fierce weather of the Arctic with reinforced hulls, and had steam-driven engines that could push along at a speedy four knots (about five miles per hour) in calm weather. These had come from a railway engine, and were accompanied by a mechanism that allowed the rudder and propeller to be withdrawn and encased in iron shields to protect them from the ice.

There were also over a thousand books onboard, and enough tinned and other food to last three years. The whole enterprise was a demonstration of the British Empire at its finest: a crew of brave men led by an experienced explorer who knew the territory; an expedition equipped by the Admiralty with huge quantities of supplies and the latest in equipment. What could possibly go wrong?

Arctic expeditions at the time were long adventures. The usual approach involved sailing as far as possible in the short Arctic summer, then hunkering down for the long winter—letting the ship freeze in the ice until the return of summer melted it and freed the vessel. On a ship that was strong enough to withstand the pressure of the ice, this worked well. Often, expeditions were at sea for several years, sailing and waiting out the weather in cycles until they completed their objectives. They were literal voyages into the unknown, and in the days before radio (and too far from land for carrier pigeons) it wasn’t unusual to hear nothing from a ship until a few days before it sailed back into home port for a heroes’ welcome.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Franklin Expedition never sailed home, though. After a few encounters with other ships on the way to the Arctic in 1845, it vanished, leaving no survivors and no indication of their fate.

Franklin’s wife was the first to raise alarm in 1847, when she began asking the Admiralty to send an expedition to search for her husband. Knowing that there had been food aboard to last at least three years, it declined to do so until 1848—when it posted a sizable reward (£20,000, equivalent to about £2 million today) for anyone who could find and save the ships.

Vessels sailed in from the east and the west, and an overland expedition down the MacKenzie River tried and failed to find anything. It wasn’t until 1850 that a mounted expedition encountered a few telling signs; and it took several more voyages for the first real facts to emerge in 1859, thanks to conversations with Inuit hunters, and the discovery of relics and scattered written notes left by the crew of Terror and Erebus.