Sir John Franklin

Origins and early years

John Franklin was born at Spilsby in Lincolnshire in 1786 and entered the Royal Navy in 1800. In Matthew Flinders’ Investigator he learnt surveying along the Australian coast. He later served in Bellerophon at Trafalgar and in the New Orleans campaign of 1814–15. War and hydrography formed the two sides of his early service.

The course of a life

The first land expedition left England in 1819. Surgeon-naturalist John Richardson, George Back, Robert Hood and seaman John Hepburn accompanied Franklin into a country whose waterways linked Hudson Bay to the northern interior. The Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company were expected to supply the enterprise while competing fiercely for the fur trade. Promised assistance exceeded what their distant posts could reliably deliver.

In 1821 the party descended the Coppermine and followed the coast eastwards. Turning back as the season closed, the men abandoned the sea route for a punishing inland retreat. Hunger reduced them to lichen and scraps of leather. Hood was killed; Richardson reported shooting Michel, whom he held responsible. Back went ahead for help. Hunters sent to the survivors brought food and nursed them through the first stages of recovery. Eleven of the coastal party’s twenty men died.

Franklin returned to the Arctic in 1825–27 with a better supplied expedition. From the Mackenzie delta he explored westwards while Richardson surveyed eastwards. The result extended the known outline of the northern coast without repeating the catastrophe of the first journey.

As Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1837 to 1843, Franklin entered another kind of difficult terrain. A penal colony required sustained administrative control; disputes with established officials weakened his government. Jane Franklin took an active interest in the colony’s cultural life. The appointment ended in recall.

In 1845 Franklin sailed in Erebus with Terror under Francis Crozier to seek the passage through the Arctic archipelago. Neither ship returned. A message recovered in 1859 recorded Franklin’s death on 11 June 1847 and the later abandonment of the icebound ships. Jane Franklin supported the searches. Inuit accounts preserved evidence of the men and ships; that knowledge also helped guide the modern searches which located Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016.

The literary work

The 1823 Narrative combines a travelling record with the work of a scientific expedition: positions, weather, natural history and the practical business of moving stores. Its scale contracts as provisions fail. A river crossing or a meal becomes an event on which the next day depends. Richardson’s account of the retreat also reminds the reader that the book contains testimony from more than one participant.

The legacy

Franklin’s missing ships drew generations of searchers into the archipelago. His earlier book opens a different Arctic: rivers, inland posts and a coast reached by canoe. The passage remains a concern of shipping and northern strategy. Reduced summer ice offers longer opportunities for navigation, while moving ice and narrow channels continue to impose hazards; the distance on a map still tells only part of the journey.