Sir John Franklin and The North-West Passage: Background information when reading The Terror

Sir John Franklin and The North-West Passage

This article relates to The Terror

The mythical North-West Passage held the imagination of Britain for most of the 19th century. At that time, before the great canals of Panama and Suez were built, trade with the lucrative markets in Asia was perilous and slow, with trade routes either flowing past the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, across to India, and thereby to the Far East; or taking the dangerous passage South around Cape Horn in South America, and then across the Pacific. What Britain sought was a shortcut: The fabled North-West Passage, a sea-route North past Canada, through to Alaska and the lucrative markets of the Orient.

Expedition after expedition was sent. People were convinced a passage was there, with wealth and fame awaiting those who found it. Some even speculated that beyond the ice-walls there was a new polar ocean, waiting to be discovered...

Sir John Franklin was at this time one of the world's leading Arctic explorers. Although in his 50s, he agreed to lead another Arctic expedition. The Franklin Expedition consisted of two ships: H.M.S. Erebus and H.M.S Terror, both seasoned Arctic vessels, and both refitted with innovations such as propellers and steam-powered heating for the crew. The expedition set sail from Greenhithe, England on the morning of May 19, 1845, with a handpicked crew of 24 officers and 110 men. After supply stops in Scotland and Greenland, they set off to explore...and were never seen alive again.

The ships' fate was revealed a few years later when an expedition found the ships icebound and abandoned. Later expeditions, including autopsies carried out in the 1980s, shed clues on the demise of the Terror and Erebus. Corpses exhumed from the first year of the expedition showed highly elevated levels of lead; this, coupled with large numbers of unopened tin cans, lead scientists to conclude that the cans were improperly sealed, allowing lead to penetrate the food and, in many cases, for the food to rot.

Based on this, archaeologists pieced together a likely series of events: The crews of the ships became trapped in the ice, possibly for years. Their supplies tainted, they soon began to run short of food. Scurvy, lead poisoning, and hunger must have killed many; the remainder, their judgment clouded by their physical condition, set off towards Canada. In those terrible Arctic conditions it is believed that none survived.

Useful Links

• Information about the archaeological research into the fate of the Franklin Expedition as recorded byNova.
• A BBC News article from September 2007, reporting that, for the first time since satellite records began in 1978, a direct shipping route from Europe to Asia across the Arctic Ocean was ice free. The Northeast Passage - a similar route that winds along Siberia's coast instead of Canada's - was almost clear. The article includes an interactive map from 1980 to the present showing the median ice edge year on year.
• Reports of modern expeditions in search of Franklin.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Terror. It originally ran in February 2007 and has been updated for the December 2007 paperback edition. Go to magazine.