The discovery of George Mallory's body on Mount Everest failed to solve the mystery of whether he reached the summit. It will, however, encourage a small but growing band of people who spend each summer trying to discover the fate of a larger, older and still more mysterious expedition in the Canadian Arctic: the Franklin expedition of 1845.
Controversial, tragic and stubborn mysteries like these have a far greater hold on the public imagination than heroic successes. Indeed, for a stiff fee you can join an annual expedition to the Arctic to seek clues to the fate of that Franklin expedition. Like the Northwest passage itself, it keeps drawing people back.
Like George Mallory's discoverers, modern Franklin seekers have begun to find important clues in recent years, including skeletons and boats. They have also begun to fall out over interpreting the evidence. What they badly need, and many still believe they will find, is a logbook or journal.
As Fergus Fleming says in Barrow's Boys, his book about the Admiralty explorers of the 19th century, Sir John Franklin was the consummate British explorer-a glorious failure. Like Captain Scott, he discovered less than his rivals but became more famous by dying in the process. Even in his lifetime his fame eclipsed more successful Arctic explorers, because his first expedition in 1819 was so badly planned that he ended up eating his boots and losing many companions to starvation-possibly even to cannibalism.
But much worse was to come. In 1845, when the Admiralty despatched its biggest and most expensive expedition to try to penetrate the Northwest passage, it gave the command to Franklin. This was a bizarre appointment. Though he was by all accounts a likeable man, Franklin had just returned from a disastrous tour as governor of Tasmania. His previous Arctic experience was 20 years in the past and mostly overland, not on ship. He was shy, indecisive, stiff and traditional. He was 59 years old and in poor health.
Nor was he given the right ships. By then it was painfully obvious that only small, shallow-draft vessels could penetrate the ice-choked straits north of Canada, and that only small crews, capable of supplementing their diet with fresh fish, seal and caribou, could avoid the inevitable onset of scurvy. The problem was that this strategy was promulgated by John Ross, who had himself survived four years in the Arctic before being rescued by whalers-and the Admiralty hated Ross. So Franklin was given a crew of 134 men, two large ships-HMS Erebus and HMS Terror-and all the things an explorer might need: silver spoons, china plates, a 1,700-book library and three years' supply of tinned and preserved food.
By now the exploration of the polar regions was one of the Royal Navy's main activities, and one of the few that led to promotion. Indeed, it had begun in 1818 partly because the navy was looking for something to do after the end of the Napoleonic wars. But the organisation was slow to innovate and the crews remained steeped in the traditions of Trafalgar-a battle in which Franklin himself had fought.
The expedition left England in May 1845. Five men were sent back from Greenland on a whaler, but after that nothing was ever seen of any members of the expedition alive-at least not by white people. By 1849, the Admiralty was concerned, and by 1851, having sent several ships in search of Franklin, most of which looked in the wrong place, it was baffled. Franklin's first wintering place in 1845 at Beechey Island was found, together with three graves, but nothing more to indicate where he had gone.
Not until 1854, long after Franklin's supplies would have run out, did John Rae, a Hudson's Bay company sledger, stumble upon Eskimos (as Inuit were then called) with stories of starving white men and mementoes from the expedition, including four forks bearing the initials of expedition officers, Franklin's star of the Royal Guelphic Order and a watch. This was near King William Island, which lay in the last unexplored gap in the Northwest passage, where Franklin had been directed to try to pass through the passage (this fact had been overlooked by the Admiralty in directing its search ships).
In 1857, Franklin's wife sent an expedition under Leopold McClintock to search King William Island, but it was not until 1859-14 years after the original expedition had set sail-that McClintock and his second-in-command, William Hobson, reached the island by sledge. They found, scattered over 100 miles of coast, more pieces of evidence: the skeleton of a steward in uniform, lying where he fell in the snow; and a small boat containing two more skeletons, plus plates, books, soap, stoves and a note.
The note has been subject to detailed examination. It was originally deposited in a cairn on the north shore of King William Island by Graham Gore, third in command of the Erebus, in June 1847, two years after the expedition left England. The ships were then stuck in the ice north of King William Island, but according to Gore, who was leading a sledging party exploring the coast, otherwise "all [was] well." The note was then disinterred and added to (on 25th April 1848) by James Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, who scribbled in the margin that the two ships-Erebus and Terror-had been officially abandoned three days before, having been stuck in the ice since 12th September 1846. He reported that total deaths so far were nine officers (including Franklin himself on 11th June 1847, and Gore) and 15 men.
The 105 survivors, under the new senior officer Captain Francis Crozier, then headed south, aiming for the mouth of a river on the mainland. It was 200 miles away, and the nearest settlement was 300 miles further south. The Inuit settlement at Resolute Bay was a similar distance to the east; the whaling base at Pond Inlet on Baffin Island about as far away to the northeast. Only by living off the land had sledge parties achieved such distances; 105 sick and ill-equipped sailors could hardly live off the land. Barring a miracle, they were doomed and they knew it.
Leopold McClintock's discoveries in 1859 confirmed this story. The ships were deserted, then the men struggled south round the western coastline of King William Island, dragging far too much stuff in boats on cumbersome sledges, and dropping in their tracks from starvation or scurvy. There was one flaw in this tale: the small boat found by McClintock was pointing north, not south. McClintock wondered if some of the men had attempted to return to the ships.
In the 1860s and 1870s, the same area was searched by the first of the Franklin buffs, an enthusiast from Cincinnati named Charles Francis Hall, and later by an American army officer named Frederick Schwatka. Hall and Schwatka concentrated on talking to the natives, but they also found a few more skeletons and relics of the expedition. Hall's interviews with the Inuit were extensive and detailed, but he died before he had organised his notes into a book.
Hall was convinced that he would find survivors still living among the natives. It was known that the Inuit had met a large party of survivors and had even given some of them food and shelter. The Inuit described a rubber boat which one officer had been carrying (this was later confirmed by examining the expedition's supply list). But other native tales were surprising. For example, some natives claimed that they had visited one of the ships and found a large corpse with "long teeth" on a bed in one of the cabins. And Hall himself found skeletons on the eastern shore of King William Island, 100 miles from where the ships were abandoned. One was identified as Henry Le Vesconte: he is now buried at Greenwich.
Schwatka found the body of another lieutenant, this time close to where the ships had been abandoned, and in a proper grave. A medal found next to the grave led him to conclude it was the grave of John Irving. But why would desperate men on the march take time to dig a grave? And if Irving was fit when the ships were abandoned (which we know, from Fitzjames's scribble), why did he suddenly drop dead? A similar puzzle surrounds the fate of Gore. He was a popular officer, a naturalist and a good player of the flute-"a capital fellow" according to Fitzjames. We know that he was well in June 1847, when he left the ships in charge of an exploring party and cheerily reported "all well" on the note. We also know from Fitzjames that by April 1848 he was dead.
The north-pointing boat, the grave of Irving, the long-toothed corpse seen by the Inuit: most modern Franklin buffs now believe that the survivors returned to the abandoned ships in the winter of 1848-9, and may even have sailed south. The most dedicated of the buffs is David Woodman, whose day job is assistant harbour master of the port of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. It must not be a very busy port, for Woodman has produced two books of incredible detail about Franklin: Unravelling the Franklin Mystery and Strangers Among Us.
Woodman concludes that Crozier's men struggled as far as Terror Bay on the south coast of King William Island, where some managed to survive the winter in a camp. A party then returned north to the ships, remanned one of them and sailed it round to the strait between the island and the mainland, landing on the mainland. From there, in the summer of 1849, the survivors, by now fairly accomplished hunters, struck inland, or possibly made their way east towards Repulse Bay. They never made it.
Later, visiting the abandoned ship, the Inuit caused it to sink by breaking open the hull. From the Inuit description of the place where this happened, Woodman thought he had located the site of the ship. In 1997, he went there with a crew of archaeologists and other experts. Using side-scan sonar and magnetometers, they began criss-crossing the sea in search of a wreck. They found nothing but a few copper sheets-but there is much more seabed still to be searched, so Woodman has not abandoned his theory.
After Hall and Schwatka, the mystery remained undisturbed for a century. Then, in 1981, archaeologist Owen Beattie searched King William Island and came back with a handful of bones and other relics from the south shore, clearly not from natives. Having analysed them, he made two startling claims. First, they bore cut marks as if butchered with knives-a strong suggestion of cannibalism. But, second, they contained very high levels of lead-enough to make a man pretty sick. Then, in 1984 and 1986, 400 miles to the north, at Beechey Island, he disinterred three well-preserved bodies buried in the permafrost during Franklin's first winter of 1845-6. He analysed their tissues for lead: again, very high levels, even in the hair, which implied that they had been imbibing lead during the expedition and not just before they set out.
The source of this lead was undoubtedly the solder used on cans of preserved food; in later Arctic expeditions, the problem was encountered again. Lead poisoning has subtle effects: it can make you paranoid and unpredictable. Perhaps this explains the bizarre behaviour of some Arctic commanders in the 19th century: martinets like McClure and Collinson, or irascible captains like John Ross and Edward Belcher.
Although most Franklin enthusiasts believe that lead was not the main cause of the disaster, it might have contributed to the unusually high number of early deaths: 24 after the first three winters. Moreover, it boggles the mind to imagine more than 100 men camped on a bleak shore many hundreds of miles from safety-all slowly turning paranoid.
In the 1990s, expeditions of paying guests, led by a determined Franklin buff named John Harrington, began searching afresh the north coast of King William Island. In 1993 they found about 300 bones on a tidal island in an area known as Erebus Bay, close to where McClintock found the small boat. Beside the bones were nails, a clay pipe, a buckle, a comb and other pathetic mementoes of this camp.
Many of the bones bore deep, narrow cuts of the kind made by metal knives. These cuts were in just the places you would expect if they had been made while dismembering a body for consumption. It was, said the archaeologists who analysed the bones, "a pattern consistent with intentional disarticulation" and "the location of cut marks is also consistent with defleshing or removal of muscle tissue. Evidence for decapitation is suggestive, but not conclusive."
The hint of cannibalism was not new. The first native accounts gathered by Rae in 1854 had mentioned cooking pots with human remains, which led a scandalised Admiralty to ostracise Rae. Here, 150 years after the event, there seemed real proof. But Ernie Coleman, a former Royal Navy officer who has been on four Franklin search expeditions in the 1990s, furiously refutes the accusation of cannibalism. He says that by far the most common location for cut marks on the skeletons is on the hands. Cannibals, even inexperienced ones, do not generally eat fingers (they nearly always start with the buttocks, as did the Uruguayan rugby players who crashed in the Andes in the 1970s), whereas people who are trying to defend themselves in fights are more likely to sustain cuts to their hands.
Coleman favours the theory that the Franklin survivors were attacked and killed by Inuit. It is certainly true that the particular Inuit tribe which had until this date seasonally visited King William Island, the Ukjulingmiut, were in the process of being pushed out by a more aggressive neighbouring tribe, the Netsilingmiut. The Ukjulingmiut died out after a famine in about 1850, although they may also have been victims of violence. The natives who reported having met the Franklin survivors were all Netsilingmiut. Perhaps relations between them and the doomed white men were hostile. Perhaps, too, it is no coincidence that a surprising number of Franklin remains have been found on islets, either separated by mud or sea from the main island. These might have made defensive positions.
But if Coleman is outraged by the imputation that sailors would resort to cannibalism, John Harrington is no less outraged by the suggestion that the Inuit would resort to massacre. He says that Franklin's men heavily outnumbered the Inuit and were much better armed with guns and swords. Less plausibly, Harrington appeals to the myth of the noble savage: "the Inuit are a caring, loving, giving people."
The other feature of the bones is that they are pockmarked with the telltale scars of scurvy. Whatever else was causing sickness, the survivors were desperately short of vitamins. Most previous expeditions had suffered from scurvy, and in the mid-19th century the Navy was, if anything, backsliding in its understanding of scurvy. By heat-treating lemon juice in order to preserve it, the Navy reduced its effectiveness. Paradoxically, this weakened the theory that scurvy was caused by diet at all.
None the less, some Arctic commanders, such as Edward Parry and John Ross, had kept their men scurvy-free, during four year-long expeditions, by growing cress over the heating pipes on board ship and by buying fresh fish from the natives. Crozier, Franklin's deputy, had been on all three of Parry's expeditions and two of Ross's-he was the most experienced polar explorer of all time. It is inconceivable that he did not try to repeat the cress trick.
The difficulty was the scale of the Franklin expedition (134 men) and the fact that it spent two winters marooned in the ice a long way from land. By the third summer, with still no chance of buying seals or salmon from natives and with the cress exhausted, probably all his men would have been suffering from various stages of scurvy. Once they began to drag their possessions on clumsy sledges along a stony shoreline, their joints would have swollen and their gums would have bled-the principal symptoms of scurvy. Hunger, lethargy, paranoia, pain and cold would have been a lethal combination. Even cannibalism would have made the problem worse. A human body is fresh meat, but eating the meat from a man who has died of scurvy only compounds the vitamin deficiency.
Modern arguments about the fate of Franklin tell us more about our prejudices than their fates. Lead poisoning suits some, cannibalism suits others, while there are many people who consider both explanations sacrilegious to the memory of brave, ill-equipped men. I think there is no great mystery to be solved. Weakened by lead poisoning, wracked by scurvy and aware of the hopelessness of their plight, the survivors were in no state to save themselves. Some may have returned to the ships; others struggled to the mainland and even perhaps a long way inland, living off caribou; but most lay down and died in their tents on King William Island. It seems plausible that by then they had split into different groups (possibly hostile to each other), some of which practised cannibalism on their dead comrades.
There is little doubt that the remains were comprehensively looted by the natives during the following years, which accounts for the scattering of some items. Relics from the expedition remained in currency among the Inuit for years. One native account mentions books given to native children to play with. But another account mentions a sort of mud which turned to stone-perhaps cement? Maybe somewhere on that desolate shore, beneath a small, overlooked cairn, lies Crozier's diary.
