I’d rather eat Johnson, sir!

I think it’s fair to say that Sir John Franklin was in love with the Arctic. He kept returning on expedition after expedition, trying to find the North-West Passage and failing each time. Eventually he became part of the Arctic, dying on some frozen waste with nothing to mark his passing but a note from his second in command. And he had such a promising start in life.

He was born in 1786 an unremarkable ninth child out of 12 that poor old Hannah Franklin (nee Weekes) had had to endure labour for. He was meant for the church for reasons that remain unexplained. These days, of course, people are ‘called’ to the church but in those days, after a few of the elder children had divided up the family business, the remaining sons were destined to become priests. The daughters, of course, were expected to marry and, like Hannah, endure copious amounts of pregnancy.

Anyway, John decided that the church was not for him and went to sea instead. He joined the Royal Navy and sailed on ship to ship, gradually rising in rank as he performed well in naval battle after naval battle. He served on such ships as the Bellerophon, the Bedford and the Forth.

When not sailing off to war, John was busy exploring the world by sea. He was aboard the Investigator with Matthew Flinders when it circumnavigated Australia from 1801-1803. There were a few scrapes on this voyage but he managed to survive.

Then, sadly for John, the Napoleonic Wars came to an end and he was out of a job. Retired on half pay he sat and twiddled his thumbs.

But then, as if by some sort of divine intervention or other mythical means, but was actually because the second secretary to the Admiralty, John Barrow was convinced that there was a north-west passage, the Navy decided to restart its Arctic exploration programme. Presumably John Franklin jumped up and down with his arm in the air yelling “Pick me! Pick me!” because he was chosen. It was probably because of his service aboard the Investigator with Flinders but I do like the thought of him jumping up and down.

Then begins the litany of disastrous attempts to find the Passage. Stories of heroism, bravery, cowardice and cannibalism accompany the travel diaries of Sir John Franklin with each attempt harder than the last. Still, he managed to survive through each failure until, in 1837, someone decided he’d make an excellent Lieutenant-governor of Tasmania (still called Van Diemen’s Land in those days).

Following directly on from the awful tenure of George Arthur making life less than easy for John. He tried (oh, how he tried) but he just didn’t have the skills or diplomacy to manage such a fractious colony. (As a side note, he tried to save the last Tasmanian Aborigines from extinction but, as we all know, failed.) Eventually he was returned to England just in time for his final Arctic trip.

Happy again, Sir John set off with the ships Erebus and Terror (both of which had special fittings for lifting the propellers in ice riven waters – I know because I researched them a few months ago) and headed for the cold. After a bit of waving and hollering at a whaling vessel in Baffin Bay, the expedition was never seen again.

No-one knows what happened but after a few rescue missions were sent out, a couple of notes were found. The first said that all was well and was dated 28 May 1847. The second note had been written by the second in command, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, stated that the ships had been abandoned on 22 April 1848 and that Sir John had died on 11 June 1847. It’s unknown how Sir John died and this will never be known unless someone finds his body which is probably stuck in a big ice block somewhere up north.

After all was said and done, of the 129 members of the expedition, none survived. They gradually died as they tried to walk to some safe haven, through bitter cold and a constant lack of food.

Sir John’s story is summed up beautifully by his biographer, BA Riffenburgh:

The aura of mystery about and the horrifying fate of Franklin’s final expedition, together with the fame and honour he had earned for his first land expedition, meant that biographers had difficulty making fair judgements of Franklin for many years after his disappearance and death. Assessments have oscillated between emphasizing his reliability, deep sense of morality, and courage, and his apparent inflexibility, inability to adapt to new conditions, and unquestioning following of orders. But, as with Robert Falcon Scott more than half a century later, the brave naval officers who died carrying out their duty for England, no matter how misguided or flawed, attained an exalted position with the British public. In Franklin’s case, this is not wholly unwarranted: he was not the most innovative or successful of Arctic explorers, but his charting of the North American coast was accurate and extensive, his governorship of Van Diemen’s Land was just and compassionate, and his personal qualities and characteristics were admirable.

Note: For those that don’t know…the title is a Python reference.