The search for Franklin
In 19 May 1845, two wooden ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, sailed out of the Thames bound for the Arctic. At the helms were John Franklin and Francis Crozier, their mission: to find the fabled Northwest Passage – the shortcut between Britain and Asia. And with less than 500 kilometres of mainland Arctic coastline left unexplored, success seemed guaranteed.
But they never returned, and more than two years later, the British government announced a £20,00 reward – half for finding the ships and half for navigating the Northwest Passage. Dozens of ‘rescue’ expeditions took up the challenge, but it wasn’t until almost 15 years later that the grim fate of Franklin and his 129 crew was finally revealed.
A note found on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic detailed how their ships had become trapped in ice, how 24 men, including Franklin, had died, and how the others had attempted to march across the frozen landscape to reach help. None of them survived. And a mixture of Inuit testimony and bone fragments suggested that their final months had been increasingly desperate, with some of the men even resorting to cannibalism.
Although it wasn’t the news the British public had been hoping for, the Franklin mystery seemed to have been solved. But questions still remained: why had some of Britain’s most competent sailors and explorers been unable to survive in the region, and what had happened to the two ships?
Inuit testimony
Now, a team from Parks Canada, lead by Robert Grenier, a veteran marine archaeologist in his 70s, who oversaw the discovery of a 16th-century Basque galleon in Red Bay, Newfoundland, is attempting to answer these questions. And, with the help of local Inuit man Louie Kamookak, who has been recording Inuit testimonies about encounters with explorers for more than 30 years, they have traced the final movements of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
‘According to Inuit testimony, one of the ships popped out onto the ice, and then that particular ship disappeared, but not so much is known about the other one,’ Grenier says. However, Inuit sources suggest the second ship drifted down to an area south of King William Island.
He believes that the first ship was probably badly damaged by ice but that the second could still be in fairly good condition, particularly as the Teredo ‘worms’ that often bore into wooden ships aren’t active this far north. And the Inuit testimonies, which include walking out across the frozen sea to the ship and exploring its interior, have recently been backed up by artefacts that Grenier and his team have found on the nearby beaches.
‘We found a series of copper fragments,’ Grenier says. He believes they probably came from one of the ships, as copper sheets were used by the Navy at the time as a form of anti-foul and streamlining. More importantly, the fragments aren’t corroded in the way that they probably would be if they had spent more than 100 years under water, while others have been fashioned into Inuit tools. Consequently, Grenier believes these copper pieces were probably salvaged by the Inuit from one of Franklin’s ships just before it sank. And that might mean there’s a ship nearby. ‘This could be a smoking gun,’ he says. ‘Now we feel we could be really close.’
The next stage is to find the actual wreck. Usually, a magnetometer is used to pinpoint sunken ships via the large amounts of metal they contain, but despite help from the Canadian air force, the readings have proved useless. ‘The Arctic geology is very peculiar. The signals you get from the land up there are so strong,’ Grenier explains.
Instead, they’re relying on sonar, and Parks Canada has arranged for a team to travel to the area on an ice breaker over two more years. He hopes that finding one or both of the ships will help to explain why the extremely capable men of the Franklin expedition ended up starring in the greatest polar exploration disaster in history. So far, the most plausible explanation has been put forward by Owen Beattie, a Canadian anthropologist. He carried out a series of autopsies on the bodies of three men who were buried in the ice after expiring early on during the Franklin expedition and found that they contained astonishingly high levels of lead.
The discovery was a breakthrough: if Franklin’s men were suffering from lead poisoning, which can cause, among other things, fatigue and memory loss, they would have found it difficult to carry out the everyday tasks needed to survive in the Arctic and been susceptible to disease. At the time, Beattie presumed the lead poisoning was caused by badly soldered food tins (a later paper suggested that the tins may also have been infected with botulism), but Franklin researcher William Battersby believes that there might be another explanation.
Poisonous theory
According to Battersby’s research, a firm called Goldner supplied more than 15 tonnes of canned meat to the Franklin Expedition. Between 1845 and 1851, the same firm supplied the Royal Navy with more than 1,200 tonnes of canned meat. If Goldner had been producing tainted meat in 1845, Battersby argues, it’s difficult to see how it could have spent the next seven years getting repeat orders from the Navy.
This argument, coupled with a paper by a food technologist named KTH Farrer that suggested that the high lead levels found in the Franklin bodies couldn’t have been caused by tinned food alone, sent Battersby in search of another explanation. ‘I spent weeks thinking about it,’ he says. ‘If it didn’t come from the food, where did it come from?’
Eventually, after examining the lives of the sailors to see if they had any common heritage that could account for high levels of lead in their bodies – they didn’t – Battersby realised that the only thing that was different about the Franklin expedition was the presence of locomotive engines in the ships. ‘It turned them into de facto steamers,’ he says.
It turns out that the system used to feed the locomotives with fresh water also provided heating and drinking water to the men through what was probably a maze of lead piping. Battersby believes that this piping was responsible for the lead poisoning. He says his theory is supported by the ‘unusual provisioning’ of the ships, which consisted of a high level of concentrated ingredients – from soups and flour to rum – that would have been reconstituted on board. On most 19th-century expeditions, the water was ‘pretty foul’, but the near-limitless supply of fresh water on the Franklin expedition meant that these ingredients, which would have weighed less and taken up less space, became an option.
And, it also explains the early deaths among the ships’ officers, who normally fared better at sea because of the better quality meals they ate. On this voyage, they may well have been suffering from higher levels of lead poisoning because their food was being prepared with heavily contaminated water. ‘It’s just a theory,’ says Battersby, but he believes finding a Franklin wreck could provide more answers.
Telling tales
For Kamookak, who has been working with Grenier to locate the wrecks, a wreck discovery would ‘prove that Inuit history is very accurate’. Many of the oral testimonies he has gathered from the Inuit elders have matched up almost exactly with the accepted written history.
Collecting the material proved surprisingly easy – once word got around that there was someone who would listen to their stories, the Inuit themselves tracked him down. ‘It’s inbuilt in them to tell their stories,’ Kamookak says. He explains that storytelling was a way of passing on survival skills and entertaining each other ‘when there was just one and half hours of daylight and no TV or Nintendo’.
Grenier hopes that the discovery of one or both of the wrecks will bring other advantages to the region. He’s keen to find the ships first (during the past couple of decades, several rich businessmen and film producers have been nosing around the area) because he wants to make sure they’re properly protected, and hopes that they will become an attraction that can benefit the Inuit.
He also feels that discovery of the wrecks will make up for the way that, in his opinion, Franklin snubbed the Inuit. ‘They were very arrogant. They had more than 1,000 books in their library but none about the Inuit language,’ he says. Although he now accepts that the officers themselves weren’t guilty – they were simply products of the Victorian age – he feels that if he can find one or both of the ships, they could now act as, ‘Franklin’s gift to the Inuit, the one he forgot to bring with him at the time’.
February 2010
But they never returned, and more than two years later, the British government announced a £20,00 reward – half for finding the ships and half for navigating the Northwest Passage. Dozens of ‘rescue’ expeditions took up the challenge, but it wasn’t until almost 15 years later that the grim fate of Franklin and his 129 crew was finally revealed.
A note found on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic detailed how their ships had become trapped in ice, how 24 men, including Franklin, had died, and how the others had attempted to march across the frozen landscape to reach help. None of them survived. And a mixture of Inuit testimony and bone fragments suggested that their final months had been increasingly desperate, with some of the men even resorting to cannibalism.
Although it wasn’t the news the British public had been hoping for, the Franklin mystery seemed to have been solved. But questions still remained: why had some of Britain’s most competent sailors and explorers been unable to survive in the region, and what had happened to the two ships?
Inuit testimony
Now, a team from Parks Canada, lead by Robert Grenier, a veteran marine archaeologist in his 70s, who oversaw the discovery of a 16th-century Basque galleon in Red Bay, Newfoundland, is attempting to answer these questions. And, with the help of local Inuit man Louie Kamookak, who has been recording Inuit testimonies about encounters with explorers for more than 30 years, they have traced the final movements of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
‘According to Inuit testimony, one of the ships popped out onto the ice, and then that particular ship disappeared, but not so much is known about the other one,’ Grenier says. However, Inuit sources suggest the second ship drifted down to an area south of King William Island.
He believes that the first ship was probably badly damaged by ice but that the second could still be in fairly good condition, particularly as the Teredo ‘worms’ that often bore into wooden ships aren’t active this far north. And the Inuit testimonies, which include walking out across the frozen sea to the ship and exploring its interior, have recently been backed up by artefacts that Grenier and his team have found on the nearby beaches.
‘We found a series of copper fragments,’ Grenier says. He believes they probably came from one of the ships, as copper sheets were used by the Navy at the time as a form of anti-foul and streamlining. More importantly, the fragments aren’t corroded in the way that they probably would be if they had spent more than 100 years under water, while others have been fashioned into Inuit tools. Consequently, Grenier believes these copper pieces were probably salvaged by the Inuit from one of Franklin’s ships just before it sank. And that might mean there’s a ship nearby. ‘This could be a smoking gun,’ he says. ‘Now we feel we could be really close.’
The next stage is to find the actual wreck. Usually, a magnetometer is used to pinpoint sunken ships via the large amounts of metal they contain, but despite help from the Canadian air force, the readings have proved useless. ‘The Arctic geology is very peculiar. The signals you get from the land up there are so strong,’ Grenier explains.
Instead, they’re relying on sonar, and Parks Canada has arranged for a team to travel to the area on an ice breaker over two more years. He hopes that finding one or both of the ships will help to explain why the extremely capable men of the Franklin expedition ended up starring in the greatest polar exploration disaster in history. So far, the most plausible explanation has been put forward by Owen Beattie, a Canadian anthropologist. He carried out a series of autopsies on the bodies of three men who were buried in the ice after expiring early on during the Franklin expedition and found that they contained astonishingly high levels of lead.
The discovery was a breakthrough: if Franklin’s men were suffering from lead poisoning, which can cause, among other things, fatigue and memory loss, they would have found it difficult to carry out the everyday tasks needed to survive in the Arctic and been susceptible to disease. At the time, Beattie presumed the lead poisoning was caused by badly soldered food tins (a later paper suggested that the tins may also have been infected with botulism), but Franklin researcher William Battersby believes that there might be another explanation.
Poisonous theory
According to Battersby’s research, a firm called Goldner supplied more than 15 tonnes of canned meat to the Franklin Expedition. Between 1845 and 1851, the same firm supplied the Royal Navy with more than 1,200 tonnes of canned meat. If Goldner had been producing tainted meat in 1845, Battersby argues, it’s difficult to see how it could have spent the next seven years getting repeat orders from the Navy.
This argument, coupled with a paper by a food technologist named KTH Farrer that suggested that the high lead levels found in the Franklin bodies couldn’t have been caused by tinned food alone, sent Battersby in search of another explanation. ‘I spent weeks thinking about it,’ he says. ‘If it didn’t come from the food, where did it come from?’
Eventually, after examining the lives of the sailors to see if they had any common heritage that could account for high levels of lead in their bodies – they didn’t – Battersby realised that the only thing that was different about the Franklin expedition was the presence of locomotive engines in the ships. ‘It turned them into de facto steamers,’ he says.
It turns out that the system used to feed the locomotives with fresh water also provided heating and drinking water to the men through what was probably a maze of lead piping. Battersby believes that this piping was responsible for the lead poisoning. He says his theory is supported by the ‘unusual provisioning’ of the ships, which consisted of a high level of concentrated ingredients – from soups and flour to rum – that would have been reconstituted on board. On most 19th-century expeditions, the water was ‘pretty foul’, but the near-limitless supply of fresh water on the Franklin expedition meant that these ingredients, which would have weighed less and taken up less space, became an option.
And, it also explains the early deaths among the ships’ officers, who normally fared better at sea because of the better quality meals they ate. On this voyage, they may well have been suffering from higher levels of lead poisoning because their food was being prepared with heavily contaminated water. ‘It’s just a theory,’ says Battersby, but he believes finding a Franklin wreck could provide more answers.
Telling tales
For Kamookak, who has been working with Grenier to locate the wrecks, a wreck discovery would ‘prove that Inuit history is very accurate’. Many of the oral testimonies he has gathered from the Inuit elders have matched up almost exactly with the accepted written history.
Collecting the material proved surprisingly easy – once word got around that there was someone who would listen to their stories, the Inuit themselves tracked him down. ‘It’s inbuilt in them to tell their stories,’ Kamookak says. He explains that storytelling was a way of passing on survival skills and entertaining each other ‘when there was just one and half hours of daylight and no TV or Nintendo’.
Grenier hopes that the discovery of one or both of the wrecks will bring other advantages to the region. He’s keen to find the ships first (during the past couple of decades, several rich businessmen and film producers have been nosing around the area) because he wants to make sure they’re properly protected, and hopes that they will become an attraction that can benefit the Inuit.
He also feels that discovery of the wrecks will make up for the way that, in his opinion, Franklin snubbed the Inuit. ‘They were very arrogant. They had more than 1,000 books in their library but none about the Inuit language,’ he says. Although he now accepts that the officers themselves weren’t guilty – they were simply products of the Victorian age – he feels that if he can find one or both of the ships, they could now act as, ‘Franklin’s gift to the Inuit, the one he forgot to bring with him at the time’.
February 2010
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