Sir John Franklin KCH FRS FLS FRGS (16 April 1786 – 11 June 1847) was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer and colonial administrator.

During his third and final expedition, an attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage in 1845, Franklin's ships became icebound off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, where he died in June 1847.

[2] John Franklin must have been affected by an obvious desire to better his social and economic position, given that his elder brothers struggled, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to establish themselves in a wide variety of careers.

[4] His father, who intended for Franklin to enter the church or become a businessman,[1] was initially opposed but was reluctantly convinced to allow him to go on a trial voyage on a merchant ship when he was aged 12.

[5] His experience of seafaring only confirmed his interest in a career at sea, so in March 1800, Franklin's father secured him a Royal Navy appointment on HMS Polyphemus.

Initially serving as a first-class volunteer,[8] Franklin soon saw action in the Battle of Copenhagen in which the Polyphemus participated as part of Horatio Nelson's squadron.

[10] He accompanied Captain Nathaniel Dance on the Earl Camden, frightening off Admiral Charles de Durand-Linois at the Battle of Pulo Aura in the South China Sea on 14 February 1804.

During the War of 1812 against the United States, Franklin, now a lieutenant, served aboard HMS Bedford and was wounded during the Battle of Lake Borgne on 14 December 1814.

The goal this time was the mouth of the Mackenzie River from which he would follow the coast westward and possibly meet Frederick William Beechey who would try to sail northeast from the Bering Strait.

He worked his way west for several hundred miles and gave up on 16 August 1826 at Return Reef when he was about 150 mi (240 km) east of Beechey's Point Barrow.

The white north hath thy bones and thou Heroic sailor soul Art passing on thine happier voyage now Toward no earthly pole His wife worked to set up a university, which was eventually established in 1890, and a museum, credited to the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1843 under the leadership of her husband.

[22][23] Shortly after leaving his post as Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land, Franklin revisited a cairn on Arthurs Seat, a small mountain just inside Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, Australia, that he had visited as a midshipman with Captain Matthew Flinders in April 1802.

These included steam engines from the London and Greenwich Railway that enabled the ships to make 4 knots (7.4 km/h; 4.6 mph) on their own power, a unique combined steam-based heating and distillation system for the comfort of the crew and to provide large quantities of fresh water for the engine's boilers, a mechanism that enabled the iron rudder and propeller to be drawn into iron wells to protect them from damage, ships' libraries of more than 1,000 books, and three years' worth of conventionally preserved or tinned preserved food supplies.

After misjudging the location of Whitefish Bay on Disko Island, the expedition backtracked and finally harboured in that far north outpost to prepare for the rest of their voyage.

The expedition was last seen by Europeans on 26 July 1845, when Captain Dannett of the whaler Prince of Wales encountered Terror and Erebus moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound.

[28] In 1854, the Scottish explorer John Rae, while surveying the Boothia Peninsula for the Hudson's Bay Company, discovered the true fate of the Franklin party from talking to Inuit hunters.

[29] Forensic evidence of cut marks on the skeletal remains of crew members found on King William Island during the late 20th century somewhat supported the Inuit accounts of reported cannibalism.

[29] In the mid-1980s, Owen Beattie, a University of Alberta professor of anthropology, began a 10-year series of scientific studies that showed that the Beechey Island crew had most likely died of pneumonia[31] and perhaps tuberculosis.

[37] It appeared from these studies that a combination of bad weather, years locked in ice, poisoned food, botulism, starvation, and disease, including scurvy, had killed everyone in the Franklin party.

In October 2009, marine archaeologist Robert Grenier outlined recent discoveries of sheet metal and copper which have been recovered from 19th-century Inuit hunting sites.

A quote from the British newspaper The Guardian states: After studying 19th-century Inuit oral testimony – which included eyewitness descriptions of starving, exhausted men staggering through the snow without condescending to ask local people how they survived in such a wilderness – [Grenier] believes the 19th-century official accounts that all the surviving expedition members abandoned their ice-locked ships are wrong.

One broke up, but Inuit hunters arriving at their summer hunting grounds reported discovering another ship floating in fresh ice in a cove.

The ship, probably the Terror, was very neat and orderly, but the Inuit descended into the darkness of the hull with their seal-oil lamps, where they found a tall dead man in an inner cabin.

In 2009, a special service of Thanksgiving was held in the chapel at the Royal Naval College to accompany the rededication of the national monument to Sir John Franklin.

[43] It was a celebration of the contributions made by the United Kingdom in the charting of northern Canada, and honoured the loss of life in the pursuit of geographical discovery.

The service also marked the 150th anniversary of Francis McClintock's voyage aboard the yacht Fox, and that expedition's return to London with news of the tragedy.