In 1845, Sir John Franklin departed England on the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. None of the 129 men were ever seen again. While relics, debris and bones have been found, and now even the ships themselves, the full story of the Franklin Expedition only seems to get more mysterious. This site is a catalog of readings, speculations, and links to Franklin related materials, as the mystery continues to capitivate many to this day. His ghost haunts us still.
HMS Erebus, found September 2014
Franklin's Ghost
Arctic exploration and the search for the Northwest Passage has in many ways defined an essential part of the Canadian identity. The search for the lost Franklin Expedition in particular plays a significant role in defining Canada, both from mapping the mysterious frozen lands to interactions between Europeans and the ancient native cultures of the North to the symbolic and even mythic importance of the North to Canadian sovereignty and identity. As the ships and more evidence are discovered, interest in finding the elusive answers grows over 150 years after the expedition first set out, Sir John Franklin's ghost haunts us still.
This site is a catalog of the readings, thoughts and speculations of one amateur Canadian historian, as well as links to related materials and websites as the mystery continues to capitivate many to this day.
Ted Betts practices corporate law at a major Canadian law firm in Toronto. He obtained his BA and Master's in History from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario with a focus on Canadian history (thesis: The Argument of the Century: The Ontario Press Coverage of the Scopes Trial and the Death of William Jennings Bryan). While he practices law and raises a family, he has remained a steadfast reader of history, particularly Canadian political and cultural history. Arctic exploration and the Franklin Expedition has over the years grown from an interest to a passion and now borders on being an obsession.
A previously unknown painting of HMS Terror , by non other than Royal Navy artist-turned-admiral Sir George Back, has been discovered and is to be auctioned off in September. They are expecting the painting to fetch $25,000.
It's a beautiful and dramatic watercolour as you can see above. Back painted it (or, more likely, sketched it before painting it later back in England) during his trouble-plagued voyage to Hudson Bay in 1836. That expedition was to cross the Melville Peninsula overland and explore the opposite shore. After being beset and nearly crushed against rock cliff outcrops and colliding with icebergs on the voyage home, HMS Terror was sinking when it was beached in Ireland in 1837.
The painting had been in the Back family until its owner passed away and the estate discovered it.
Who knows. Maybe the original will have been found by the time it goes to auction.
Painting of lost Arctic vessel HMS Terror comes to light after 175 years By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News July 14, 2011 1:55 PM
A dramatic and previously unknown watercolour scene of Canada painted during the golden age of Arctic exploration by that era's most legendary artist has come to light in Britain after 175 years.
The image of an enormous iceberg towering above the famous Arctic expedition ship HMS Terror and one of its rowboats was painted by Royal Navy artist-turned-admiral George Back, who captained the vessel during a trouble-plagued voyage to Hudson Bay in 1836.
The painting, which has emerged from the obscurity of a Back family collection to be auctioned in London by Bonhams, is expected to fetch up to $25,000 at a maritime art sale in September.
By then, the very ship depicted in Back's long-lost painting may have been located lying on the Arctic seabed in western Nunavut.
Parks Canada announced earlier this month that it will undertake a new search in August to locate the lost ships of the Franklin Expedition — the Terror and its sister vessel HMS Erebus, which were sunk by pack ice during a disastrous voyage led in the 1840s by Back's friend and mentor, Sir John Franklin.
[I was recently honoured to be asked to submit a list of Canadian books on Franklin to the Canadian Bookshelf, a great new blog and website and must read for any Canadian bibliophile, for their launch on June 7, 2011. The following is the list I submitted, which can be found here. Unfortunately, the site does not support hyperlinks, so for now you, the readers of Franklin's Ghost, get the to enjoy the exclusive privilege of reading the post here with the re-inserted hyperlinks. My original post was also edited a little bit with the introduction and conclusion merged to work with their "list" formatting.
Unfortunately, they excluded Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger from the posting as the book is out of print (a travesty in its own right) and they aren't set up for out of print books. Something about the way the information loads up directly from their publishers. It will be added eventually once they figure a workaround.
Obviously, the list is necessarily very limited by being restricted to Canadian books, as any more complete list of Franklin books would show. But there are two interesting observations I would make about the list.
First, the early writing that renewed and reinvigoured interest in the Franklin expedition and inspired later generations of writers were Canadians. Most notably, Owen Beatie and John Geiger's Frozen Time and Pierre Berton's Arctic Grail. Many fine non-Canadian writers have written about Franklin, of course, both before and after the mid-1980s, but those two (especially Beattie/Geiger) opened up new channels of study and interest. And the late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a relative flurry of Franklin-related writing insprired by those early writers. From Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler in fiction and cultural studies to Woodman in Inuit and historical studies.
Second, while Ken McGoogan has persisted in carrying the flag in the North, most recent writing on the Franklin expedition has been by , to a greater extent, British, and, to a lesser extent, Americans. Just like with the original searches, I guess. And this research has been deep and getting deeper. Somewhat to do no doubt with the volume of papers and artifacts actually in the UK, most especially the Scott Polar Research Institute, with books of Crozer by Smith and Fitzjames by Battersby, but also a number of British historians unsatisfied with the overall modern perception of Sir John Franklin, his expedition and all of the British Navy's explorations of the north (and elsewhere). Books like Beardsley, Cookman, Lambert, for example.
Opportunities abound for some enterprising Canadian writer.]
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Sir John Franklin set out from Greenhithe, England, on the morning of May 19, 1845to discover the Northwest Passage. He and his 129 member crew were never seen again. While bones and artifacts, and even graves, have been found, their ships have never been found and the mystery of their disappearance has endured for 150 years. With the discovery of the sunken HMS Investigator and the unexpected possible finding of the last resting place of the Franklin crew last year, and multiple new expeditions in search of answers every year, the Franklin story not only refuses to fade away, but grows yearly.
The resurgent interest in the mysteries of the Franklin expedition in the last 25 years was initiated by, and continues to be spurred on by, Canadian writers. Here's a few of them.
If you were to pick one book to start with, it really has to be The Arctic Grail, the classic book by the iconic Canadian writer and historian Pierre Berton. Following shortly on the heals of Owen Beattie’s foresic discoveries (see below), and no doubt inspired by them, it is an excellent survey of arctic exploration and the central role the Franklin Expedition and, more importantly, the decades plus search for Franklin had in mapping and exploring the Arctic.
The groundbreaking archeological work of Owen Beattie almost single-handedly re-opened research and interest into the Franklin expedition. Beattie's first expedition explored King William Island, where nearly 150 years earlier Franklin's men abandoned their ships and supposedly started their long "death march" along the western coast. Strewn along the coast were the bones of dozens of European men from the mid-nineteenth century. Using modern day forensic analysis on the bones back at the University of Alberta, Beattie made two startling discoveries. The first confirmed what was already generally known: that the expedition survivors had indeed "been driven to the last dread alternative", cannibalism. But it was the second discovery that surprised: bone samples revealed extremely high and dangerous levels of lead. Frozen In Time then documents two subsequent trips to Beechey Island in which the bodies of the 3 found sailors were exhumed. The cadavers, frozen in the permafrost for a century and a half, confirmed the earlier results: the Franklin sailors were suffering from lead poisoning to such a degree that it was a contributing factor to their demise. The 2004 paperback edition updates their research to subsequent theories.
Historian David C. Woodman is one of the first modern writers to recognise the profound importance, accuracy and reliability of Inuit oral history and to analyse it in depth. He concludes from his investigations, among other startling discoveries, that the Inuit probably did visit Franklin's ships while the crew was still on board, that there were some Inuit who actually saw the sinking of one of the ships and that the crew, or at least some of them, may have lived for years longer than supposed. This is a book for the real Franklinophile. Consider also Woodman's harder-to-find follow-up Strangers Among Us (1995).
No reading list of Franklin history or of northern Canadian exploration would be complete without at least a few books from historian Ken McGoogan. Two of McGoogan’s “Fatal Passage Quartet” related directly to the lost Franklin expedition. Hudson Bay Company chief explorer John Rae charted more of Canada’s northern coastline on foot than possibly any other. It was Rae who not only uncovered the true story of Franklin – the location of the disaster and cannibalism (the telling of which doomed his career and reputation) – but also, according to the author was the true discoverer of the Northwest Passage and received £10,000 for it. In Fatal Passage, McGoogan tries to re-cast Rae into his rightful place in history.
The story about Sir John Franklin cannot be fully understood without knowing about his ambitious, determined, obstinate and opinionated wife, Lady Jane Franklin. But for her efforts to mount and continue the search for her husband, there would have been no search for Franklin and no mapping of millions of square kilometers in the north. More than that, in Lady Franklin's Revenge, McGoogan brings to vivid life Lady Franklin and her husband Sir John, and the events that led to his command of the fateful expedition.
De Bon Usage des Etoiles [On The Proper Use of Stars] by Dominique Fortier (2008; translated to English in 2010)
The lost Franklin expedition has inspired not only serious research and study by non-fiction writers, but a library of fiction as well. The science and history inspired a significant portion of Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1990), Margaret Atwood’s short story “The Age of Lead” (1989) from Wilderness Tips (as indicated by the title, directly from Beattie, in fact) and more recently the Helen Humphreys short story “Franklin’s Library” (2005) and the mystery/detective novel by the late, prize winning Canadian author Dennis Richard Murphy in Darkness at the Stroke of Noon (2008). Most recently, Dominque Fortier’s captivating and elegant historical fiction, On The Proper Use of Stars, which won the Governor General’s Medal in 2008 and was beautifully translated in 2010 (by Sheila Fischman) shows us the magneticism of this slowly unraveling mystery.
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In a way, the historical and scientific writing, and the modern fiction it has inspired, is only catching up to generations of writing on Franklin by artists and folklorists and dramatists and poets. As Margaret Atwood noted in her 1995 book, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, though, the Franklin mystery has been told and re-told so many times that it has created a fundamental Canadian myth.
The Franklin expedition and tragedy inspired a great deal of artistic work. There were songs and poems and paintings and skuptural creations, mostly but not exclusively from English artists, that attempted to honour, understand, grieve, lament, mythologize or explain the great tragedy and the mystery that surrounds it.
One of the most enduring was the touching ballad "Lady Franklin's Lament" (which is also known as "Lord Franklin"). It is a traditional folk ballad that commemorates the expedition (allegedly) written by Jane, Lady Franklin herself in or around 1855, at a time when Lady Jane still (publicly) maintained that the expedition was still missing and not lost.
I recently stumbled upon a recording of the song by Sinead O'Connor, one of the singers and singing voices that I adore the most. She delivers a soft and truly beautiful rendition this very touching ballad and, in this youtube video of the song, also explains the powerful emotions evoked by the song. O'Connor tells us how, to truly sing this song, "you have to become the song, and become the ghost, if you like" and that strong emotions of a song only come out when you "inhabit a song or let it inhabit you". In singing the last line for the first time, she apparently burst into tears as she connected with the feelings of Lady Franklin.
Which is one reason why the song reveals an important part of the Franklin expedition story. I do think that with all of the recognition and focus Lady Franklin's ambition, strong-will, independence, status-seeking, influence peddling and "petticoat" governing has received - the strong woman behind the weak man, writing or re-writing some of Sir John's letters and reports (especially when Lieutenant Governor of Van Dieman's Land), showing more ambition and drive for his career than he seems to have - very little attention has been paid to what I think was her very genuine love, affection and deep compassion for her husband. It is something I am personally exploring in her letters but I've only really just started in on this. However, it does seem to me that her real love for her husband drove her to push for positions, expeditions, searches and memorials for Sir John as much as, if not more than, raw ambition and status-seeking.
That comes out very distinctly in "Lady Franklin's Lament" and all the more powerfully with O'Connor's recording of it.
And that is the power of art. Especially looking back as historians, it is art and culture that captures the human experience far more powerfully than raw data points and lists of facts. Art does not merely "bring the story to life" like a re-enactment or dramatization, but it strikes a very real, human and emotional connection to the events, the time and the people caught up in those events. That connection can lead to understanding that simple study and knowledge of facts cannot accomplish.
This particular art, this song, like all good and great art also transcends the particular circumstances in which it was written. It speaks to timeless longing, searching, love and loss. It speaks to the searching for human connection. According to Wikipedia, the song has been recorded by numerous artists, including Martin Carthy, John Renbourn, Pentangle, Pearlfishers, Connie Dover as well as the Duncan McFarlane Band, where the chorus of the Northwest Passage is added to the end. The version by Micheál Ó'Domhnaill and Kevin Burke is very well known in Ireland and appears on the album "Promenade." It can be heard on youtube. The melody was also used for Bob Dylan's song "Bob Dylan's Dream", as well as David Wilcox's "Jamie's Secret". The 1981 song, "Northwest Passage" by Stan Rogers (who also wrote "Barrett's Privateers" among many other great maritimer folk songs) also recalls Franklin's expedition. The first verse is also used in "I'm Already There" by Fairport Convention. O'Connor herself, in the youtube video above, notes that she had never heard of the song before it was introduced to her just before she sang it.
I recently came across another fairly recent recording of "Lady Franklin's Lament" by Sejd who uploaded his recording on youtube with a very engaging slide show of images of the Arctic, Franklin and his expedition. While the singing, in my humble view, is less emotionally evocative, the juxtaposition of the Arctic and Franklin images serves much of the same purpose: it forces you to pause for a moment, listen and watch and even think about what it must have been like.
Of course, as I noted above, there was much more written or sung or painted or skulpted than just this one song. And that artistic creation has itself spawned a growing library of commentary. Margaret Atwood wrote about the Franklin mythologizing in Canadian culture in "Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew", the first chapter of her book of lectures-cum-essays Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. In 2006, Sarah Moss turned her Ph.D. dissertation into The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration in which, among other tales of the North and South Pole, she examines the mostly English uses and abuses and manufacturing of the Franklin story and why. In other areas as well, Professor Russell Potter has explored the visual representations of the north, including Franklin, in his 2007 Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1815-1885 (many of the images in the Sejd slide show appear in his book; on Potter's website Visions of the North, you can also read his insightful and informative analysis of the Landseer's "Man Proposes God Disposes" depiction of the fate of Franklin's expedition and what would have meant to Victorians at the time).
There is much more to do in this regard. It seems to me the field, particularly from a Canadian perspective and perspectives of Canada, is just opening up as our broader public attention turns to the poles and the environment.
So, while the search for the answer to the mysteries of the fate of the Franklin expedition continues with new search expeditions, forensic analysis, archival research, relic analysis, etc continues and expands, the search for the meaning of the Franklin expedition and its impact on history continues and expands as well. Understanding the art and culture of the time adds greatly to the richness of our understanding of the expedition and the human experience.
