Unravelling the Franklin Mystery

Inuit Testimony

Discovery last month of the Erebus is good reason to plunge into this exhaustive analysis of Inuit testimony, though even dedicated Franklinophiles may require extensive page-flipping to check maps and keep straight (for example) the difference between Ukjulingmiut and Utkuhikhalingmiut.

And yet I read compulsively, for in these pages are the only eyewitness accounts of the Franklin expedition's demise. I felt closer to actual events than any with other Franklin book I've read.

True, the accounts are confusing and contradictory, but there are reasons aplenty for this. The physical evidence of the expedition’s passing is cryptic, and not just the muddled picture offered by the bones and relics, but also the few puzzling sentences on a single sheet of paper which is the only surviving written record.

Finally, with regard to Inuit testimony, cultural differences and translation difficulties cloud the issue, as well as references to other expeditions and the use of similar names in different circumstances.

For example, Woodman cites four locations known to the Inuit as Shartoo, all containing wreckage. Then there is Aglooka, "he who takes long strides," identified by Charles Francis Hall as Crozier, second-in-command. Yet the name was also bestowed by Inuit on at least four other Europeans: John Ross, James Clark Ross, William Parry, and John Rae.

So, with a quote from Sherlock Holmes and "a little judicious cropping," Woodman pieces together a cohesive scenario which...

...allowed use of all of the native recollections, solved some troubling discrepancies in the physical evidence, and led to some significant new conclusions as to the fate of the beleagured sailors.

But he does not claim to have reached "incontrovertible conclusions."

Even the picture thus formed is incomplete, a corner here, a bit of coherent background there. These too can be arranged in other patterns to reach quite different results.

The result is a variation on the "standard reconstruction" of events with minor differences in chronology, and a scenario that makes sense of the seemingly disorderly retreat of the crews. The departure for Back River on the mainland, as recorded in the note left by the expedition, may have referred to a hunting expedition, not a wholesale evacuation.

One of the ships is believed to have ended up in the vicinity of O'Reilly Island on the west side of Adelaide Peninsula. Woodman suspects it was the Terror, that it had been remanned, and that Kirkwall Island is a more likely spot to search for it.

Woodman also observes that the arrival of such a large group of men may have had serious consequences for the local Inuit. Their numbers appear to have declined drastically around this time, perhaps due to the depletion of game caused by the hunting efforts of the ships' crews.

Modern Searches

Since the book came out in 1992, Woodman has himself taken part in several searches. His "interpretation of the Inuit testimony," writes John Lorinc in the summer 2014 issue of Canadian Geographic, "has inspired most of the search missions undertaken since 1997."

In 2008 Parks Canada initiated searches of their own, and drawing on fresh Inuit testimony added a new search area -- Victoria Strait between King William Island and the Royal Geographical Society Islands.

The Erebus was found by the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition, a discovery welcomed by many as a validation of Inuit oral history. The exact location of the ship has not yet been revealed.

Parks Canada search areas (Canadian Geographic, summer 2014)

James Fitzjames

The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition

The early naval record of James Fitzjames, third in command of the lost Franklin expedition, is confusing and incomplete. He gave conflicting accounts of his age and place of birth, and his baptismal certificate was fraudulent.

The story that author William Battersby has pieced together is this: Fitzjames was the illegitimate son of an important British diplomat serving in Brazil, while his mother was "almost certainly" Portuguese. In England, he was raised "from an early age" by a foster family, the Coninghams, and maintained a deep attachment to them for the rest of his life.

At the age of 12 he went to sea on a ship captained by a blood relative, and a few years later parlayed an ambiguously worded letter into a rating as midshipman.

After serving in the Mediterranean, he signed on with the Chesney expedition, which was endeavouring to set up a mail route to India via the Persian Gulf. As part of this expedition he undertook a 1000-mile overland journey from the Euphrates to Beirut.

He received advanced training in gunnery, which he put to use in China during the Opium Wars. His fighting there came to an end when he was struck by a musket ball that pierced his arm, entered his body via the armpit, and lodged next to his spine. It was successfully removed without the benenfit of anaesthesia.

A second unknown in Fitzjames's life is the act of assistance he rendered to Sir John Barrow's son, George, in Singapore. Whatever it was, it was enough to earn Sir John's lasting gratitude, and resulted in Fitzjames obtaining his first command, the HMS Clio, and later his place on the Franklin expedition.

The Franklin Expedition

Fitzjames harboured a secret ambition. Once the Northwest Passage was conquered, he wanted to deliver the news to England via an overland journey across Siberia. It was a characteristic attitude of the time that all one needed in a risky undertaking was sufficient pluck.

Ironically he thought Franklin reckless for piling on too much sail as they made for Greenland, and ordered the canvas reduced after Franklin had gone to bed. But he was not alone in this view, and Franklin after all had not commanded a ship in 10 years, and never in arctic waters.

Several of his crewmates were close friends or former shipmates, including LeVesconte, DesVoeux, Fairholme, and Couch.

Refutations

Battersby is at pains to correct the previous image of Fitzjames as "well-educated, aristocratic, wealthy, of good family, Church of England, fast rising in the service -- and thumpingly, lispingly, English to the core," which is Scott Cookman's description of him in Ice Blink, and one that has been generally accepted for over a century, and so entrenched that it has found its way into popular works of fiction (e.g. Clive Cussler's Arctic Drift and Dan Simmons's The Terror.)

Fitzjames, who was responsible for selecting most of the crew of the Erebus and Terror, has been criticized for choosing men without polar experience. Battersby refutes this charge, and here again Cookman is specifically mentioned.

Battersby also challenges the contention of Michael Smith (Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing?) that Crozier's Irishness was prejudicial to his advancement within the Royal Navy.

Summation

This book contains an astonishing amount of original research, though some of the conclusions that Battersby reaches are speculative. He provides an interesting snapshot of what it was like to serve as an officer in the Royal Navy in the first half of the 19th century -- the hardship, danger, camaraderie, and travel to far-flung places.

Fitzjames, in the course of his career, visited Lisbon, Malta, Troy, Constantinople, Babylon, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, and Hong Kong -- to name some of the better-known spots. Two of his more colourful experiences: being mooned by a group of women while steaming up the Euphrates, and being clawed by a pet cheetah while aboard the Clio. (It used to climb up the rigging with the sailors.)

Fitzgerald himself was handsome, charismatic, and ambitious. He was fluent in Portuguese and French, with some knowledge of Spanish and Arabic. He was a competent artist (the book reproduces a few of his sketches) and the author of a 10,000-word naval poem. He was a lover of elaborate practical jokes, and almost recklessly brave.

In the end he left this life as mysteriously as he entered it.

Links

Updates and Corrections
Hidden Tracks (Battersby's blog)
Review by Russell Potter

Bering

The Russian Discovery of America

Vitus Bering was a Dane who served in the Russian navy from 1704 until his death in 1741. He is best known for leading the Second Kamchatka Expedition, which sailed from the Russian Far East to the Gulf of Alaska.

This book is primarily an account of that astonishing journey, which started out from St. Petersburg and took four years just to cross Siberia. On the east coast another four years passed before two ships, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, finally put out to sea in June of 1741. They made landfall on several islands in the Gulf of Alaska and brief contact with native Americans. In the latter case the two groups only succeeded in perplexing each other.

The St. Paul returned to Kamchatka in October, but Bering's ship, the St. Peter, was hampered by bad weather and bad decision-making, and in November was wrecked on an island (later named after Bering), which was mistaken for the mainland. Bering died the following month at the age of 60. The survivors built a smaller vessel out of wood scavenged from the St. Peter and sailed to Kamchatka the following summer.

Misc. Notes

The author incorporates two recent sources of information. One was the exhumation of Bering in 1991 by a joint Danish-Russian expedition. The other was the discovery in 1996 of a dozen letters that Bering and his wife had sent home from Kamchatka.

Bering (the author says) was virtually a hostage of his officers. In an eerie foreshadowing of socialism his orders were sometimes overturned by a sea council. The fatal decision to land on Bering Island rather than continue sailing west was not made by the captain.

Bering Island was thronged with "wicked" arctic foxes. They "dragged apart all the baggage, ate the leather sacks, scattered the provisions, stole and dragged from one man his boots, from another his socks and trousers, gloves, and coat.... They even dragged off iron and other implements that were of no use to them."

The men survived by killing manatees, also known as sea cows. One was 30 feet long and weighted nearly four tons. The men not only ate the meat and fat of these gentle creatures, but also drank their milk.

Bering's "discovery" of Alaska led to an influx of Russian fur traders, and the eventual formation of the Russian-American Company, which constructed settlements as far south as California. "Russian America" came to an end in 1867, the same year as Canadian Confederation, when the US purchased Alaska.

Stellar Steller

Bering for me remained a rather distant and shadowy individual. As the author explains, there are valid reasons for his aloofness and expensive tastes, but these are attributes that do not endear one to a modern sensibility.

Most readers, I think, will find Georg Stellar a more interesting and praiseworthy figure. A naturalist and physician, he was the butt of much unprofessional behaviour by the officers and Bering himself. Yet Steller's interest in nature remained unquenchable, and his humane behaviour when shipwrecked was exemplary. He used plants and fresh meat to cure scurvy in his crewmates, and provided the kind of leadership that helped carry them through the winter.

Steller survived the expedition, returned to Kamchatka, and died a few years later in Tyumen. Today his name graces a number of species, including Steller's Jay and Steller's Eider.

His Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742 is available in a 1993 edition prepared by the author of Bering, Orcutt Frost.

Weird and Tragic Shores

The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer

Great title for a fabulous book about a self-made man from Cincinnati who becomes obsessed with the Arctic. In 1860 he mounts a one-man expedition and heads north by bumming a ride on a whaler.

He spends eight years living among the Inuit, first on southern Baffin Island, where he is astonished by tales of Frobisher's visits three centuries before, then on the Arctic mainland where he is thrilled by stories that a few men from Franklin's lost expedition may have survived long after the rest had perished.

Hall returns to the US something of a celebrity, meeting President Grant and Lady Franklin. He writes a book, Life with the Esquimaux, and mounts a new expedition, this time with government backing.

It is a bitter disaster. He dies claiming he's been poisoned, and half the company is marooned on an ice floe for over six months.

This book is a rarity in that it contains much original research without sacrificing readability. It is topped off by the author's visit in 1968 to Greenland, where he exhumes Hall's body. Analysis of hair and fingernail clippings reveal that Hall had ingested toxic amounts of arsenic. Loomis carefully works out the ramifications of this discovery.

Ebierbing and Tookoolito

As remarkable as Hall's story is, equally affecting is that of Ebierbing and Tookoolito, an Inuit couple he met on Baffin Island. They were to remain his companions for the rest of his life. They accompanied him to the US, then back to the Arctic on his second and third expeditions. It was Ebierbing's skills as a hunter that enabled 19 people to survive for the six months they spent on the ice floe drifting south.

Their story is worthy of its own book.

Captain Francis Crozier

Last Man Standing?

In YK part of my job involved visits to a massive government warehouse that held everything from beer to kayaks. One day I stumbled across a forgotten flat of small blue volumes published by the GNWT.

Second-in-Command by May Fluhmann summarized in brief chapters the life of Francis Crozier, who was second-in-command on Franklin's last voyage. The book was a genuine work of scholarship, for Fluhmann had access to Crozier's correspondence from 1828 to 1845. But the volume had a slightly amateurish air, and I doubt it was ever widely available or attracted much notice.

Now there's been a resurgence of interest in Crozier. Dan Simmons made him the central figure in his novel, The Terror, which came out in 2007. And in the previous year Michael Smith published a more complete, more polished biography, which cites May Fluhmann as one of its sources.

Smith's book of necessity covers much familiar ground. For me, the most interesting part was Crozier's role in a four-year Antarctic expedition, of which he was second-in-command under his close friend James Clark Ross. According to Smith, both men were so unnerved by the voyage that afterward they were never quite the same. Ross began drinking heavily, and Crozier subsided into a depression from which he never recovered.

A second reason for Crozier's depression was his failure to win the hand of Sophy Cracroft. His "uncertain state of mind" caused him to "stand aside from the leadership battle" for what was to become Franklin's last expedition, even though he was the most experienced officer available and the logical choice for the position.

After Franklin was given the job, Crozier did a volte-face and agreed to act as second-in-command. Smith suggests that Crozier did so in the hope of gaining favour with Sophy, who was Franklin's niece and Lady Franklin's constant companion.

Soon Crozier began to rue his decision. Franklin had not been North in 17 years. Worse, Crozier had no hand in selecting the crews, a task that was given to Fitzjames, who was third-in-command but with no Arctic experience. Crozier turfed two of the men selected by Fitzjames as being "perfectly useless either at their trade or anything else."

Smith describes Crozier's last letter to Ross as "the dark, brooding missive of a troubled man harbouring major doubts about the dangerous undertaking which lay ahead." Many are the ironies, mysteries, and tantalizing possibilities surrounding that doomed voyage. According to Inuit oral history, Crozier was one of the last survivors. Indeed, it has even been suggested that he lived among the Inuit for many years afterward.

The two ships, Erebus and Terror, have never been found.

Fatal Passage

The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin

Author Ken McGoogan claims that John Rae solved the two most celebrated Arctic mysteries of the 19th century – the fate of Franklin and the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Yet he was deprived of those distinctions by the conniving of Lady Franklin and the short-sightedness of historians.

Rae was awarded the prize for being the first to bring back news of the Franklin expedition’s fate, yet historians have generally credited Leopold McClintock with that discovery. They also have agreed that Franklin and his men found the Northwest Passage -– “forging the last link with their lives,” as Franklin’s old friend and travelling companion, Sir John Richardson, put it. The problem is, that passage is not navigable. It was Rae who discovered that King William Land is not joined to Boothia Peninsula. The strait that separates them, and which now bears his name, was used by the first ships to navigate the Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen’s Gjoa, and the RCMP's St. Roch.

Rae was, says McGoogan, “a post-colonial figure in a colonial age,” a person that we in the 21st century find more palatable than Franklin and his ilk. Not only was Rae endowed with almost superhuman endurance (he once snowshoed 75 miles in a single day), but he favoured living off the land, and employed native clothing and survival techniques. This was in direct opposition to the methods employed by the British Admiralty, which sent out expensive unwieldy expeditions, and frowned upon “going native.” Furthermore, Rae was a superb hunter who supplied the majority of the meat for his men on all his expeditions. He also esteemed the native men he travelled with, and defended them against English prejudice, as typified by Charles Dickens, who savaged the Inuit in Household Words.

Fatal Passage also upsets another cherished apple cart in portraying Lady Franklin as spiteful and manipulative. She “orchestrated the beatification of her dead husband,” which McGoogan terms an “historic fraud." He is the first, I believe, to describe Lady Franklin in such unflattering terms. Before then she had been portrayed as a saintly figure -- a model of wifely devotion, indomitable in her crusade to coerce the British Admiralty in not abandoning the search for Franklin.

Fatal Passage, then, is an ably written and well researched page-turner about a remarkable man. My only complaint is the Epilogue, in which the author inserts himself into the story by describing his own voyage to Boothia Peninsula to place a plaque in honour of John Rae. Rudy Wiebe did something similar in his Franklin-inspired novel, A Discovery of Strangers, when in the Acknowledgments he described building a cairn to house a record of his own canoe trip in the NWT.

While I find such actions self-aggrandizing, they do attest to the never-waning appeal of the Franklin mythos. Today, 150 years after Franklin disappeared, people are still looking for him. New books appear every year about Franklin or some of his buddies. Here are a representative few that have appeared since the turn of the century.

2000 - Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin’s Lost Polar Expedition by Scott Cookson (botulism blamed for the expedition's failure)

2001 - The Franklin Conspiracy: Coverup, Betrayal, and the Astonishing Secret Behind the Lost Arctic Expedition by Jeffrey Blair Latta (weird history)

2002 - Deadly Winter: The Life of Sir John Franklin by Martyn Beardsley (biography)

2003 - Franklin’s Passage by David Solway (poetry)

2004 - The Arctic Fox: Francis Leopold McClintock, Discoverer of the Fate of Franklin by David Murphy (biography)

2005 - Lady Franklin’s Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History by Ken McGoogan (biography)

2006 - Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing? by Michael Smith (biography)

2007 - The Terror by Dan Simmons (horror)

2008 - Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818-1860 by Janice Cavell (history)

Rae's Arctic Journeys

1846-47 – Rae and 10 men left York Factory and travelled by boat to Repulse Bay, then explored the base of the Gulf of Boothia from Fury and Hecla Strait to the east shore of Boothia Peninsula. Unknown to anyone at the time, Franklin’s ships were beset on the other side of Boothia.

1848 – Rae and Richardson formed one of the search parties sent out to search for Franklin. They travelled down the Mackenzie River, then east along the Arctic coast to the Coppermine River, and wintered at Fort Confidence on Great Bear Lake. Rae spent 1849 in Fort Simpson, then returned to Fort Confidence in 1850 in preparation for another search for Franklin.

1851 – Rae left Fort Confidence and travelled the southern expanse of Victoria Island, and the bottom of Coronation Gulf as far as the Kent Peninsula. On the east shore of Victoria, he found a few pieces of wood that likely came from Franklin’s ships. Once again he was maddeningly close to Franklin. Three times he attempted to cross Victoria Strait to King William Island, but was prevented by the same ice jam that had beset Franklin’s ships.

1853-54 – Rae retraced much of his first expedition on behalf of the HBC, in an attempt to discover the final link in the Northwest Passage. This time he travelled to the west side of Boothia Peninsula, meeting Inuit from whom he purchased artifacts belonging to Franklin and his men, and recording stories about their demise.

Websites: Ken McGoogan, The Fate of Franklin

The Terror

The title does admirable double duty, bearing the name of one of Franklin's lost ships and alerting readers they are venturing into the world of horror. At 769 pages it's a typical Simmons offering -- a big smooth page-turner.

The disappearance of Franklin and his 1845 expedition is one of the most enduring mysteries of the North. The two ships have never been found, and the only written communication from the expedition is a single sheet of paper that does little to shed light on what went wrong. In other words, the expedition is a perfect candidate for a fictional re-working. Mordecai Richler briefly exploited it in Solomon Gurski Was Here, but but only in passing. The Terror is the first, I believe, to focus exclusively on the expedition itself.

The book is extensively researched and accounts for all the known facts of the expedition. The endpapers consist of maps showing its route and final movements, and each of the 67 chapters begins with a date and is precisely located by longitude and latitude. Simmons recreates the sights, sounds, and smells of shipboard life, and does a fine job of portraying many of the crew members, especially Captain Francis Crozier -- who, according to Inuit oral history, may have survived many years after the ships were lost.

Almost every character in the book is an actual historical person. Two major exceptions are an Inuk named Lady Silence, and a supernatural creature from Inuit legend, a sort of giant polar bear that dispatches most of the crew members (including Franklin himself) by ripping them apart.

Ken McGoogan (a Franklin scholar and author of Fatal Passage and Lady Franklin's Revenge) noted in the Globe and Mail that the monster could be seen as allegorical -- that is, as an embodiment of all the things that contributed to the expedition's demise, from scurvy to cultural hubris. Since everyone died, the monster must be omnipotent and invincible.

The book has garnered nothing but laudatory reviews since it appeared. Certainly, introducing a monster to a story that is already monstrous is a wonderful conceit. Yet I found myself wishing Simmons had tapped another literary source and recruited a different monster. Frankenstein, if you remember, ends in the Arctic with the monster leaping from a ship and fleeing over the ice -- a monster with vulnerabilities, a monster who (I think) offers far better allegorical possibilities. Even the dates match, the first “popular” edition of Frankenstein coming out in 1831, only 14 years before Franklin set sail. The monster that Simmons created is so over the top (especially the tongue-ripping ceremony) that I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief.

There are other aspects of the novel that are similarly too extreme. Temperatures that plunge to minus 100 degrees, 80-foot pressure ridges, lightning storms as fierce as artillery barrages, hailstones as big as cannonballs, a surreal costume party out on the ice.

And one final gripe. When Franklin sees Lady Silence, his face turns white. He thinks she is Greenstockings, the beautiful Dene woman whom he encountered on his first expedition, and whom two of his officers were prepared to fight a duel over. I was delighted by this development, but (unless I missed it, which is certainly possible), Simmons does not provide an explanation, leaving us to assume that Franklin was mistaken.

The endpapers provide a useful map of the area.