This month marks the 180th anniversary of the departure of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition in search of the Northwest Passage.

On the morning of 19th May, 1845, two of the finest vessels of the British Admiralty set out on an voyage into the uncharted waters of the Arctic.  At Greenhithe, crowds cheered from the dockside as HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, resplendent in fresh coats of black paint with distinctive white bands around their hulls, weighed anchor and headed down the Thames, with their officers and crew waving from the decks. 

They were embarking on a quest for the Northwest Passage, as yet an unidentified sea route across the top of North America.  At that time, it was still not known what lay in the regions around the North Pole:  some believed that there was a great ocean, rimmed by ice.  But the possible existence of an easily navigable passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had already lured generations of explorers into the Arctic, so far without success.  This expedition was confident of finding it.

The departure of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, from the Illustrated London News (1845)

For many years Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, had dreamed of claiming the discovery of the Northwest Passage for Britain;  five months earlier, Barrow’s proposal to equip two ships dedicated to this mission had received the full backing of Britain’s Parliament and scientific institutions.   

Two former Royal Navy bomb vessels, the same ships which James Clark Ross had sailed around the Antarctic between 1839 and 1843, had been refitted and provisioned for a lengthy voyage.  To supplement their sails, they had been newly equipped with engines, re-purposed from locomotives and fitted to screw propellors.  For fuel, they carried 12 days’ worth of coal. 

Stirred by the prospect of adventure, scores of men had applied for places on the expedition, and a total of 134 were recruited.  As the leader, the name of Sir John Franklin, a veteran of two previous Arctic expeditions, was put forward and accepted, thanks, at least in part, to judicious lobbying by his wife, Lady Franklin.  Enough was already known about the annual icing up of Lancaster Sound, the Atlantic ‘gateway’ of any Northwest Passage, to necessitate a departure no later than May.

 

Sir John Franklin by Thomas Phillips

Although the ships were sailing into unknown hazards, public optimism was high.  That Erebus and Terror would enter Lancaster Sound and eventually emerge in the Bering Strait seemed to be a foregone conclusion;  the only uncertainty was the length of time it would take them to do so.  Sir Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society, summed up the confidence of the entire nation:  ‘The name of Franklin alone is, indeed, a national guarantee.’ 

One of the few dissenters was a man called Richard King, who had been on an expedition with Captain George Back to the Great Fish River (now the Back River) in 1833 and had seen the extent and thickness of the Arctic ice.  With brutal frankness, King wrote to Sir John Barrow and told him that he was sending Franklin ‘to form the nucleus of an iceberg.’  King wasn’t hugely popular, and nobody paid him much attention.

The expedition didn’t get off to the most auspicious start.  Entering the North Sea, the ships faced a storm so vicious that Franklin was advised by the Admiralty to double back and head southwest around the ‘toe’ of Britain.  This he refused to do.  James Fitzjames, Captain of the Erebus, referred to his ship disparagingly as ‘an old tub’ because she bobbed up and down so alarmingly, but Francis Crozier, Captain of the Terror, had been with James Clark Ross in the Antarctic, and had seen far worse. 

 

James Fitzjames (left) and Francis Crozier (right).  Daguerreotypes of the officers were commissioned by Lady Franklin, shortly before departure

To save coal, two steamers had been assigned as tugs to Erebus and Terror as they headed northwards to Orkney.  A third ship went with them, carrying additional supplies that would be transferred later in the voyage.  In turbulent seas, it took a week to reach the Farne Islands;   from there, the weather worsened until the tugs were forced to cast off their lines and leave Erebus and Terror to make their own way into Stromness, where they arrived on the evening of Saturday 31st May. 

The sheltered harbour of Stromness brought a welcome reprieve from rough seas and a chance to obtain last-minute provisions before British shores were left behind.  Four of the 10 live bullocks on board the supply ship had died, meaning that replacements needed to be found in Orkney.   But the residents of Stromness wouldn’t hear of trading on a Sunday, so it wasn’t until Monday morning that more cattle could be purchased.

 

Stromness c.1815, by William Daniell

Meanwhile, Sir John Franklin went ashore to dine with noted inhabitants of the town, among them John Hamilton, a doctor, and his wife, Marion.  Hailing from Orphir on the opposite side of the harbour, Marion’s family name was Rae;  her brother, John, was already in Rupert’s Land (a vast province encompassing modern-day Canada), where he had arrived over 10 years previously in his role as a surgeon and ultimately a surveyor for the Hudson’s Bay Company.  It would be John Rae who, in nine years’ time, would deliver crucial news about what had happened to Franklin’s expedition.

In time-honoured tradition, fresh water was taken on board the ships from Login’s Well at the South End of Stromness.  A safe voyage across the Atlantic was never a foregone conclusion, and seafarers would often pay a visit to an old lady called Bessie Miller who lived on the hill above the town and ‘sold’ favourable winds to sailors.  Even if they thought it was superstitious nonsense, they would still drop by, thinking it could do no harm.  But there is no note of anyone from Franklin’s ships going to see Bessie. 

 

Login’s Well (now sealed up)

On the Terror, Captain Crozier refused to let any of the ordinary seamen go ashore, fearing drunkenness.  But Fitzjames of the Erebus was more lenient.  He was approached by Robert Sinclair, the 27-year-old Captain of the Foretop, and 41-year-old Able Seaman Thomas Work, both from Orkney.  Fitzjames wrote that one of them wanted to see ‘his wife, whom he had not seen for four years, and the other his mother, whom he had not seen for seventeen - so I let them go to Kirkwall, fourteen miles off.’   

Unfavourable winds delayed their departure still further - ignoring Bessie Miller might already be having repercussions - so on the night of 2nd June, four men from Erebus, possibly emboldened by whisky smuggled aboard by their Orcadian shipmates, took a small boat and went on a drinking spree in Stromness.  They were rounded up by the ship’s Royal Marines, whose duty it was to maintain good behaviour.  Fitzjames ordered the hidden stashes of alcohol to be thrown overboard but forbore to punish the miscreants who, he felt, knew well enough that they had done wrong.  Since they would have no opportunity to repeat the offence until the ships called at one or other of the Pacific Islands on the other side of the Northwest Passage, they were allowed to stay on board.  Ironically, if Fitzjames had dismissed them, he would have saved their lives. 

By the morning of 3rd June the wind had dropped and it was time to leave.  Erebus and Terror, together with their supply ship, slipped quietly through Hoy Sound and into the Atlantic.  The two tugs escorted them as far as the island of Rona, some 60 miles north-west of Orkney.  With this last outlier of the British Isles still in sight, the shrouds of the tugs were ceremoniously lined by their crews who let out three farewell cheers for Sir John Franklin and his men.  From the masts of Erebus and Terror, three resounding cheers were returned. 

At Disko Bay in Greenland, the supply ship transferred its stores onto the now heavily-loaded expedition vessels before turning for home.  A handful of Franklin’s men were sent with it, some through ill health, leaving a complement of 129 to hazard their lives against the Arctic Ocean. 

Two final sightings of Erebus and Terror occurred towards the end of July.  One was by a whaling ship named Enterprise, whose captain spoke to Sir John Franklin and some of his officers.   The second sighting was by another whaler, the Prince of Wales, whose captain invited a number of Franklin’s officers on board.  They told him that they were confident of reaching Lancaster Sound by mid-August. 

Biding their time back in Britain, families and friends hoped to receive good news within a year, if not two.  It would be a long and agonising wait.  When search missions were eventually sent out, it became clear that everyone on the expedition had perished.  

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The Royal Scottish Geographical Society didn’t come into being until 1884, so it was unable to mark the departure of Sir John Franklin’s expedition.  However, in 1895, which was the 50th anniversary of the expedition, RSGS organised a special gathering whose guest of honour was Sir Leopold McClintock, the man who had been credited with bringing home irrefutable evidence about the fate of Franklin and his men.  McClintock had effectively confirmed the prior reports of John Rae, whose story had initially been rejected.

The timing of this event was discussed in correspondence between RSGS and Sir Clements Markham, President of the Royal Geographical Society in London.  (It’s interesting to note that Markham himself had joined a Franklin search expedition in 1850, on board HMS Assistance).   The RGS was planning its own commemoration, and Markham was keen to avoid a clash of dates.  He wrote suggesting that, as his own Society had picked 20th May for their event, RSGS could hold theirs on the date when Erebus and Terror left the shores of Scotland.  Eventually, RSGS settled on 4th June.

 

Letter from Sir Clements Markham (RSGS Collections)

Invitation to the Franklin Commemoration (RSGS Collections)

A large audience gathered at the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh to hear an opening address by RSGS’s President, the Marquess of Lothian.  Dr Scott Dalgleish then shared the history of Franklin’s expedition, as far as it was known at the time.  Interestingly, Dalgleish revealed that two members of the crew of the Enterprise - the whaling ship from Peterhead that had encountered Erebus and Terror in July 1845 - were still alive.  He named them as Mr J Brand of Peterhead (a carpenter), and Mr Thomas Yule of Roanheads (a steersman).

Sir Leopold McClintock was then invited to speak.  Recalling his search for traces of Franklin in the Arctic, McClintock described how he and Lieutenant William Hobson had scoured the barren coastline of King William Island and discovered purpose-built cairns of stones, two of which had yielded handwritten reports made by members of the expedition in 1847 and 1848 (now known as the Gore Point and Victory Point notes).

Although McClintock’s findings were widely known, it must still have been hard for his listeners to hear at first hand about the relics, including human bones, that he and his companion had found, all amounting to evidence of a ‘desperate retreat’ over land to reach civilisation. ‘The officers,’ he said, ‘must have known perfectly well that it was a desperate undertaking to attempt to reach… the Hudson Bay territory, and it was quite beyond their power to do it.’   (Years before, in his official report, McClintock had expressed his opinion that Franklin had discovered the Northwest Passage, although he’d been unable to sail through it in his ships.  But the visual sighting of the ‘last link’ in the Northwest Passage is now attributed to John Rae.)

Sir Leopold McClintock, from a photograph by J P Cheyne

Continuing, McClintock paid tribute to the memory of Lady Franklin, who, he said, ‘still persevered’ even after many search expeditions had returned, with the result that he himself had commanded the Fox, a ship that Lady Franklin had purchased with the assistance of generous sponsors.  McClintock explained:  ‘She appealed to the country, and the widow’s prayers and the widow’s appeals and the widow’s mite prevailed, and so they had the records in the exhibition in the next room.’

The exhibition to which McClintock was referring must have been a wonderful sight to behold.  At the gathering on 4th June, and for several days thereafter, RSGS hosted a public display of artefacts relating to Franklin and the polar regions in general.  McClintock himself had contributed two sledges used on his expedition and a replica of a third, while the ‘Rae Collection’ of relics obtained in the Arctic, including silver cutlery belonging to Franklin and Fitzjames, had been loaned to RSGS by Edinburgh University Court.  John Rae had died in 1893, but his widow, Kate Rae, had loaned a portrait of her late husband, together with portraits of Sir John Franklin and Sir George Simpson, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Territory.

In addition, the Free Public Museum in Liverpool had sent relics collected by Dr David Walker, surgeon and naturalist on the Fox, which were found in a boat on the shore of King William Island;  the Albert Institute of Literature, Science and Art in Dundee had loaned a sledge used by another search expedition and a knife found on Beechey Island;  and from private individuals all over Scotland (many of them likely RSGS members) came astonishing items too numerous to mention, such as tins of food, tobacco, buttons, medals, items of clothing, model boats, letters, books, memoirs, sketches, charts, natural history specimens, and even playbills of entertainment from rescue ships beset in the Arctic ice. 

Notable among these were the memoirs, portrait and medal belonging to Lieutenant John Irving, Third Lieutenant of the Terror.  Irving was (and still is) one of the few members of the expedition whose remains had been identified;  they were discovered in a grave on King William Island and were returned to his family in Edinburgh in 1881 for re-burial in Dean Cemetery. 

 

Lieutenant John Irving

Perhaps in response to an invitation, Dr David Walker of the Fox had written to RSGS’s Honorary Secretary, Ralph Richardson, apologising for his absence from the event and citing the great distance between Edinburgh and his present home in Portland, Oregon.  Born in  Belfast and aged 19 at the time of McClintock’s search expedition, Walker was now 57.  ’My heart,’ he wrote, ‘still remains constant with good wishes for all who are interested in polar research whether it be Boreal or Austral.’  He concluded by sending kind regards ‘to my old Scotch acquaintance who still bear me in occasional remembrance.’ 

 

Letter from Dr Walker of the Fox, dated 6th May 1895 (RSGS Collections)

Scores of signatures in the RSGS Visitors’ Book in June 1895 testify to the popularity of the Franklin Commemoration and accompanying exhibition.  While most of the visitors were from Scotland, it drew people from as far afield as the US, Canada and Australia, and some may have had a family link with Franklin’s crew.  There is a sense that they still mourned the loss but also celebrated the spirit of the age, when mariners sailed ‘off the map’ in order to chart new regions of the ocean. 

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Reference

Ken McGoogan, Fatal Passage (2001)

Michael Palin, Erebus (2018)

William Battersby, James Fitzjames - The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition (2010)

Captain Leopold McClintock:  The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas:  A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin (1859)

Visions of the North: blog posts by Russell Potter https://visionsnorth.blogspot.com/

Scottish Geographical Magazine (1895)

The Scotsman newspaper, June 1895

Documents in RSGS archives

Footnotes:  

The wrecks of Erebus and Terror were discovered in 2014 and 2016 respectively.  More information about ongoing investigations can be found on the website of the Royal Museums Greenwich:  https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/hms-terror-erebus-history-franklin-lost-expedition and Parks Canada:  https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/nu/epaveswrecks

It was Roald Amundsen who, between 1903 and 1906, made the first navigation of the entire Northwest Passage. 

Further reading about John Rae:

Scotland’s forgotten Arctic explorer https://www.rsgs.org/blog/john-rae-scotlands-forgotten-arctic-explorer

An Orkney upbringing and the call of the sea https://www.rsgs.org/blog/john-rae-an-orkney-upbringing-and-the-call-of-the-sea

and about Sir Richard Collinson, who also joined the search for Franklin:

https://www.rsgs.org/blog/sir-richard-collinson-and-the-search-for-franklin