If it’s 25 May, it must be the 164th anniversary of Francis Leopold McClintock finding a skeleton in the Arctic. He was looking for an earlier explorer, Sir John Franklin, who was, by this stage, unlikely to be alive, given that he’d been missing for 14 years.
The woman who funded this expedition, Lady Jane Franklin, was hoping to discover the fate of her husband, but this — from what was left of his uniform — appeared to be the remains of a steward, so McClintock, on his dog sledge, kept looking.
He was on King William Island, just off the northern coast of Canada, in the area where Franklin had been looking for the elusive Northwest Passage — a way of getting round America without having to brave Tierra del Fuego to the far south.
McClintock’s second in command, William Hobson, finally found a cairn, and a message on a standard Admiralty form signed by Lieutenant Graham Gore saying that, in May 1847 at least, all had been well.
Helpfully, as well as reproducing the form in his 1859 work, The voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic seas: A narrative of the discovery of the fate of Sir John Franklin and his companions, McClintock also spells out what it says:
This was a “wonderful success”, McClintock wrote, but, as you may have spotted, there is some small print, in the form of a second message written in the margins around the first:
But, alas! round the margin of the paper upon which Lieutenant Gore in 1847 wrote those words of hope and promise, another hand had subsequently written the following words:
“April 25, 1848. H. M. ships ‘Terror’ and ‘Erebus’ were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September, 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69° 37' 42” N., long. 98° 41' W. Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.
(Signed)
F. R. M. CROZIER, Captain and Senior Officer.
JAMES FITZJAMES, Captain H. M. S. Erebus.
and start (on) to-morrow, 26th, for Back’s Fish River.
‘Beset’ means the ships had been stuck in the ice so long they were going to run out of food, so they had to abandon them and court death further by setting out overland. But, as Fergus Fleming points out in his 2001 book Barrow’s Boys, it wasn’t just a question of supplies:
Part of the answer arrived in 1986, with the finding that pneumonia and TB were the most likely causes, although this news arrived 101 years too late for Lady Franklin, who popped off in 1875.
There was also the matter of lead poisoning from the solder used to seal their tins of food, and the ships’ system of distilling drinkable water from seawater, set out in a 2008 paper. Lead levels of 80 micrograms per decilitre (µg/dL) in the blood cause
malaise, forgetfulness, irritability, lethargy, headache, fatigue, impotence, decreased libido, dizziness, weakness, and paraesthesia [a burning, prickling sensation]
100–120 µg/dL means
encephalopathy … dullness, irritability, poor attention span, epigastric pain, constipation, vomiting, convulsions, coma, and death
All concerned had levels above this, and one man had 600 parts per million in his hair.
Still, the fact that Franklin met his end relatively early on was, in a way, welcome news for his widow. A few years earlier, the Hudson Bay Company’s John Rae had spoken to some ‘Esquimaux’, who had come across other remains…
This was Franklin’s fourth Arctic expedition. The second, in 1819, had killed half his men, nearly killed him, and earned him the nickname “the man who ate his boots” because of one of the ways they tried to survive.
So, obviously, he went back. Fergus Fleming’s account of some of the expeditions to remote parts of the world between 1816 and 1859, Barrow’s Boy’s, is subtitled A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude and Outright Lunacy, and not without reason.
The abandoned ships sank (and were discovered in 2014 and 2016). Franklin has never been found.
In 1997, though, research identifying cut marks on the bones showed that the stories of cannibalism had been true, giving rise to such marvellous headlines as
Somewhere in the region of 130 men died on this one expedition, although some accounts suggest that more ships and men were lost searching for Franklin. They succeeded in mapping more of the Arctic, but never found the Northwest Passage.
Arctic pack ice made going round the north impossible, and no alternative to Cape Horn would appear until the Panama Canal in 1914. Mind you, fucking the planet seems to be doing the trick about 150 years too late.
