Franklin's Fate

John Roobol

Description

The 1845 North-West Passage expedition of Sir John Franklin in the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, with a full company of 129 officers and men, none of whom ever saw England again, was one of the most heroic and courageous, maritime expeditions in history. This enthralling book is the result of seven years of arduous research by retired geologist Dr. John Roobol, who weighs evidence gathered over more than 170 years, and offers a highly convincing interpretation of what really happened to the lost, heroic, expedition.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: The Conrad Press
• Date de parution: 11 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781913227043
• Langue: English

Extrait

Franklin’s Fate
an investigation into what happened to the lost 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin
John Roobol


Franklin’s Fate
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2019
Tel: [phone] www.theconradpress.com [e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-911546-49-8
Copyright © John Roobol, 2019
The moral right of John Roobol to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc


This book is dedicated to the memory of the Inuit, named herein, whose acute observations and oral history made possible this investigation into Franklin’s lost expedition. J.R.


W e left King William Island on the 31st May, after having been a month on its most inhospitable coast. In no part of the world have I ever experienced such a continuation of bad weather. From the 8th, the day we left Cape Franklin, to this date I scarcely saw the sun. It snowed almost incessantly. The wind held almost continuously from the NW varying in force from a strong breeze to a hard gale. The force of the wind was generally sufficient to raise snow drift.
Lieutenant Hobson of the McClintock expedition in search of ships, records and relics of the Sir John Franklin expedition, 1859


Please note:
Interpolations in square brackets as […] are by the author.
All distance measurements are straight-line distances taken from Google Earth. They often differ from historic published measurements.
M’Clintock and M’Clure were the nineteenth-century spellings and have been replaced by the modern spellings - McClintock and McClure.
In 1845 some words were spelled differently to today. A list of these and their modern equivalents follows:
Old Spelling Modern Spelling
Disco in Greenland Disko
Behring Strait Bering Strait
Kamschatka Kamchatka
Petro Paulowski Petropavlovsk
Back’s Great Fish River Back’s River
Poctes Bay Poet’s Bay
Eskimo/Esquimaux Inuit
See-pung-er Su-pung-er
Eskimaux language Inuktitut
Distances are given in miles as the many inserts into the manuscript use this style. Some reports mention ‘5 leagues’. 5 leagues is equivalent to 15 nautical miles, 17.26 geographic miles and 27.78 kilometres.
The following distances in geographic miles have their kilometre equivalents in brackets:
10 miles (16 km), 17 miles (28 km), 20 miles (35 km), 80 miles (130 km), 100 miles (160 km), 112 miles (180 km), 150 miles (245 km), 1,700 miles (2,800 km).


AUTHOR’S NOTE
T he complete disappearance of the 1845 Arctic expedition led by Sir John Franklin remains a mystery even to the present day. Two well-equipped ships of the Royal Navy with 129 men sailed in search of the North-West Passage and never returned. The puzzle has generated a whole library of speculation as to what might have happened. A massive international search for the lost ships produced almost nothing.
It was not until 1854 that Scottish explorer and Hudson’s Bay Company explorer Dr John Rae unexpectedly heard of the lost expedition from the Inuit and purchased relics from them. The Royal Navy at the time was heavily engaged in the Crimean War and could not spare any more ships for searching. So Sir John Franklin’s widow, Lady Jane, organised another search ship. She purchased the steam yacht Fox and obtained the voluntary services of Captain (later Admiral Sir) Leopold McClintock. The latter met with Dr Rae before he sailed to ensure he had all the information available of where the lost expedition had been seen in retreat by the Inuit, and where relics were found.
McClintock’s book is a masterpiece of courage and endurance. He faced almost insurmountable difficulties. He failed to reach the search area in the first year. In the second year (1859) he had to leave his ship some 300 miles from the search area. He and Lieutenant Hobson led two sledge parties and crossed the line of retreat but at a time when the ground was still covered with winter snow. He brought back a naval message form with two brief messages, numerous relics and heard from the Inuit of a ship wreck that came ashore and was much salvaged and of another that sank abruptly and was little salvaged. In 1864, American Charles Francis Hall set out in search of survivors and spent five years collecting Inuit testimony. He did not find survivors but brought back many relics and one skeleton. Later, in 1879, American Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka led an overland expedition to the area of the retreat. His was a summer search but failed to find the missing records, but collected many relics, Inuit testimony, buried skeletal remains and brought back one skeleton.
Because Dr John Rae’s report included reference to cannibalism by some of the last survivors, there was a great outcry in England and the blame was placed on the Inuit whose testimony was ignored for a long time. There was insufficient information to explain how the expedition came to be entirely lost.
My own interest in the lost expedition began in 1963 when as an undergraduate at London University, I was given a copy of McClintock’s book ‘Voyage of the Fox ’. This sowed the seeds of curiosity and as a geologist working around the world on smaller expeditions I often found myself wondering how the 1845 expedition was lost. In the early 1970s, well before desktop computers were around, I tried to make sense of the information available. But it was inadequate and resulted in a lot of pieces of paper. Still the puzzle bothered me in quiet times, usually in some desert camp where there was little distraction. Meanwhile I was gaining lots of experience of expeditions in remote places including two sailing expeditions, one to the Caribbean and another to the Pacific.
Having always been dissatisfied with the problem, when I returned to the UK to retire, I decided that I had waited long enough for somebody to deliver a better understanding for the loss of the expedition. Unless I undertook the project, it seemed likely I would never know what happened. So I made the Franklin expedition my first retirement project. It took seven years to collect all the literature needed, read it and assemble the fragments into a coherent whole. The two books of David Woodman (1991 and 1995) that were based largely on his reading of Hall’s notebooks at the Smithsonian Institution were a major step forward as they took the Inuit testimony seriously. But there was still insufficient evidence to fully understand the catastrophe. Then, Dorothy Harley Eber’s 2008 book produced previously unrecorded Inuit testimony that added much to the story, in particular a description of one ship that was reoccupied and sailed south. Lastly, the Canadian Government’s search for the two lost ships under the direction of Parks Canada succeed in 2014 with the discovery of the wreck of Erebus and in 2016 with the discovery of Terror .
Finally there were enough pieces to put together a reasonably complete account of the actions of the lost expedition. This was done in the form of a compilation of all the known evidence arranged into chapters that might reveal the history of the expedition. The Inuit testimony was critical but usually lacked dates and often place details, although the time of the year was known from the major seasonal changes. However some publishers said that the manuscript (Franklin’s Fate) was too academic. So I sat down and wrote what I thought had happened as a novel (Trapped). The latter was accepted for publication by James Essinger of The Conrad Press in Canterbury, UK. James became interested and decided to publish both books simultaneously with his editing.


PREFACE
O n July 26 1845, Sir John Franklin, accompanied by 129 men (Appendix 1) aboard the two exploration ships H.M.S Erebus and H.M.S. Terror (referred henceforth as Erebus and Terror ) was last seen by whaling ships. The two ships were moored to an iceberg awaiting passage through pack ice into Lancaster Sound, a body of water in the far north of Canada, between Devon and Baffin Islands (Map 1).
The twenty-three sections of Admiralty orders to Sir John Franklin were to proceed directly to Lancaster Sound and advance along it and Barrow Strait at approximately latitude 74 degrees 15 minutes, until they reached Cape Walker (about 98 degrees west). He was not to examine any channels extending north or south from Barrow Strait. Then he was to steer to the southward or westward towards Bering Strait. If obstructed by ice at Cape Walker, he was to pass between Cornwallis Island and North Devon, if the strait between them (Wellington Channel) was open. The two ships were not to separate and Captain Crozier was to be kept fully informed of his intentions.
The expedition was seeking to complete the North-West Passage – a sea route north of the American continent linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It was the best equipped Arctic expedition ever, with many new scientific inventions including two railway train engines to drive propellers that could be raised and lowered, and even a central hot water heating system.
The expedition never returned and the mystery created numerous searches and a library of writing.
An examination of the fate of the lost expedition has to be made in three fundamental parts.
The first stage, the preparations and the voyage to Disko Island in Greenland and the final sighting by whalers in July 1845 is well documented. A crowd of 10,000 watched the expedition leave Greenhithe on May 19.
The second part of the expedition, from July 1845 to April 1848 is known from the remains of their 1845/46 winter quarters on