Franklin's lost expedition

[2] The expedition met with disaster after both ships and their crews, a total of 129 officers and men, became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut.

Hypothermia, starvation, lead poisoning[4] or zinc deficiency[5] and diseases including scurvy, along with general exposure to a hostile environment while lacking adequate clothing and nutrition, killed everyone on the expedition in the years after it was last sighted by a whaling ship in July 1845.

[9] The search by Europeans for a western shortcut by sea from Europe to Asia began with the voyages of Portuguese and Spanish explorers such as Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus in the 15th century.

[citation needed] Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century voyagers who made geographic discoveries about North America included Martin Frobisher, John Davis, Henry Hudson and William Baffin.

Barrow began pushing for the Royal Navy to find a Northwest Passage over the top of Canada and to navigate toward the North Pole, organising a major series of expeditions.

The ships also carried libraries of more than 1,000 books and three years' supply of food,[19] which included tinned soup and vegetables, salt-cured meat, pemmican, and several live cattle.

[25] At the Whalefish Islands in Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, ten oxen carried on Barretto Junior were slaughtered for fresh meat which was transferred to Erebus and Terror.

According to the second part of the Victory Point Note dated 25 April 1848 and signed by Fitzjames and Crozier, the crew had wintered off King William Island in 1846–47 and 1847–48 and Franklin had died on 11 June 1847.

In particular, Rae bought from the Inuit several silver forks and spoons later identified as belonging to Franklin, Fitzjames, James Walter Fairholme, and Robert Orme Sargent of the Erebus, and Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, captain of the Terror.

On 5 May, the party led by Lieutenant William Hobson discovered the Victory Point Note, which detailed the abandonment of Erebus and Terror, death of Franklin and other crew members, and the decision by the survivors to march south to the mainland.

In the boat was a large amount of abandoned equipment, including boots, silk handkerchiefs, scented soap, sponges, slippers, hair combs and many books, among them a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith.

[citation needed] Among these materials were accounts of visits to Franklin's ships, and an encounter with a party of white men on the southern coast of King William Island near Washington Bay.

This was about 64 km (40 mi) north of Crozier's stated goal, the Back River, and several hundred miles away from the nearest Western outpost, on the Great Slave Lake.

Woodman wrote of Inuit reports that between 1852 and 1858 Crozier and one other expedition member were seen in the Baker Lake area, about 400 km (250 mi) to the south, where in 1948 Farley Mowat found "a very ancient cairn, not of normal Eskimo construction" inside which were shreds of a hardwood box with dovetail joints.

[71] Seeking information about the Franklin crew's health and diet, he sent bone samples to the Alberta Soil and Feed Testing Laboratory for trace element analysis and assembled another team to visit King William Island.

[78][self-published source] After completing Torrington's autopsy and exhuming and briefly examining the body of John Hartnell, the team, pressed for time and threatened by weather, returned to Edmonton with tissue and bone samples.

[86] Uniquely for this expedition, the ships were fitted with converted railway locomotive engines for auxiliary propulsion which required an estimated one tonne of fresh water per hour when steaming.

[87] Under difficult field conditions, Derek Notman, a radiologist and medical doctor from the University of Minnesota, and radiology technician Larry Anderson took many X-rays of the crewmen prior to autopsy.

When detached parties found Franklin relics – primarily copper sheeting and small items – on the beaches of islets to the north of O'Reilly Island the search was diverted to that area, but poor weather prevented significant survey work before the expedition ended.

[107] On 1 September 2014, a larger search by a Canadian team under the banner of the "Victoria Strait Expedition"[108][109] found two items on Hat Island in the Queen Maud Gulf near King William Island:[110] a wooden object, possibly a plug for a deck hawse, the iron pipe through which the ship's chain cable would descend into the chain locker below; and part of a boat-launching davit bearing the stamps of two Royal Navy broad arrows.

[citation needed] In 2017, Douglas Stenton, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and former director of Nunavut's Department of Heritage and Culture, suggested that four sets of human remains found on King William Island could possibly be women.

Stenton acknowledged that women were known to have served in the Royal Navy in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, but he also pointed out that it could be that the DNA had simply degraded as further tests proved ambiguous and he concluded the initial findings were "almost certainly incorrect".

A.M., the remainder of the parting, having, upon the 26th instant, ascertained that the waters we are now in communicate with those of Barrow Strait, the north-eastern limit being in latitude 73°31′, N. longitude 114°39′, W. thus establishing the existence of a NORTH-WEST PASSAGE between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

This was due in large part to efforts by Lady Franklin to protect her husband's reputation and dispel suggestions of cannibalism – with assistance from prominent figures like Charles Dickens, who asserted that "there is no reason whatever to believe, that any of its members prolonged their existence by the dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead companions".

[168] Fictional treatments of the expedition begin with Jules Verne's Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras, (1866), in which the novel's hero seeks to retrace Franklin's footsteps and discovers that the North Pole is dominated by an enormous volcano.

Verne also remembers the efforts of Lady Franklin to discover the fate of her husband in Mistress Branican (1891), which stages a similar plot but situated in Oceania and Australia instead of the North Pole.

In 1861, Frederic Edwin Church unveiled his great canvas The Icebergs; later that year, prior to taking it to England for exhibition, he added an image of a broken ship's mast in silent tribute to Franklin.

In 1864, Sir Edwin Landseer's Man Proposes, God Disposes caused a stir at the annual Royal Academy exhibition; its depiction of two polar bears, one chewing on a tattered ship's ensign, the other gnawing on a human ribcage, was seen at the time as in poor taste, but has remained one of the most powerful imaginings of the expedition's final fate.

Other Franklin-inspired songs include James Taylor's "Frozen Man" (based on Beattie's photographs of John Torrington) and Iron Maiden's "Stranger in a Strange Land".

[182] In 2023, German atmospheric black metal band Antrisch released a concept album "Expedition II: Die Passage" chronicling the events from the point of view of the crew.