Sir John Franklin: The lost hero

Published on Tuesday 16 June 2009 19:25

ACROSS Waterloo Place, off Pall Mall, the statues of two polar heroes gaze across at each other. One is of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, as sculpted by his widow Kathleen Bruce, and shows the lean, ill-fated adventurer in polar garb, leaning on a ski stick; opposite him is the plumpish and somewhat un-explorarly looking figure of Sir John Franklin.

Engraved below the Franklin statue, erected in 1866, are the lines: "To the great Arctic navigator and his brave companions who sacrificed their lives in completing the discovery of the North West Passage AD 1844-48," while a further inscription declares: "They forged the last link with their lives." There is nothing, naturally, about the apparent cannibalism which tainted the memory of his ultimately disastrous expedition – nor the vilification heaped on the Scots explorer John Rae, who shocked Victorian England with his reports that the doomed men had resorted to eating their dead.

The memorial is all heroic stuff, and despite his unlikely corpulence (at 59, he weighed 16 stone), Sir John Franklin was indeed a hero, and an admirable man, although not in the manner in which the Victorians chose to enshrine him, as a new biography suggests.

Some ten minutes' stroll from the statue, in his office in King's College, London, the author of Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation, naval historian Andrew Lambert, explains how Franklin was neither the bungler who led his men to an icy death which 20th-century revisionists have made him out to be, nor was he a single-minded, self-sacrificing explorer, hell-bent on finding the North West Passage. In fact, argues Lambert: "He wasn't sent to find any Passage, he wasn't sent to explore." Franklin, he explains, was a highly skilled navigator who headed into Arctic waters primarily as part of the great "Magnetic Crusade" of the period, intent on amassing data on the earth's magnetic field. "His feat of navigating through hitherto unknown territory, getting his ships within 50 miles of the magnetic north Pole, was brilliant."

The received version is well known – how in May 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin set off with a well-equipped expedition on board the steam-and-sail vessels Erebus and Terror in search of the North West Passage, the fabled sea route which, it was supposed, would open up a direct maritime link between Europe and Asia. Last sighted by two whalers in Baffin Bay, between Greenland and Arctic Canada, they were never heard of again. Successive fruitless ventures attempted to trace the lost expedition – as often as not through the tireless agitation of Franklin's wife, Lady Jane, whom Lambert describes as conducting "a brilliant public campaign" to secure political support in tracing her husband. Then in 1854 the doughty Orcadian explorer and Hudson's Bay agent John Rae returned, with reports gleaned from Inuit accounts which suggested that not only had there been no survivors, but that the expedition's last desperate members had resorted to cannibalism. Inuit accounts spoke of sea boots and kettles crammed full of cooked human flesh and as late as the 1990s, human bones were found in the area, bearing evidence of having been cut with steel knives consistent with defleshing.

Victorian Britain was aghast, and Rae vilified in what Lambert describes as a classic instance of shooting the messenger. Charles Dickens was among those who allied themselves with Lady Franklin in excoriating Rae's report. "Cannibalism struck at the very heart of the Victorian sensibility," writes Lambert. "Englishmen were not expected to eat each other."

Finally, in 1859, another expedition on board the steam yacht Fox, financed by Jane Franklin herself and led by the experienced Captain Francis McClintock, located remains of Franklin's equipment on King William island, where the expedition had landed after abandoning their ice-bound ships. At Point Victory, in a tin container secreted within a cairn, they found a scrap of paper which was effectively the entire surviving written record of the Franklin expedition, stating that they had overwintered on the ice and a party consisting of two officers and six men had left the vessels on 24 May 1847, and that all was well.

However, a hastily added second note, dated 1848, stated that "Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues NNW of this having been beset since 12th Septr. 1846. The officers and crews consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F R M Crozier landed here…" Sir John Franklin, added the hurried report, had died on 11 June 1847 and another nine officers and 15 men had perished to date.

Lambert paints a grim picture as the crews, under their remaining officers, left their trapped vessels (which have never been traced to this day), took to the ice and, as starvation and disease took their toll, discipline gradually broke down.

Did they simply eat their dead, or, as their situation became more unbearable, did they start killing the weakest? Lambert sighs: "Well, the story is that they only ate the dead. But of course none survived to say, and what we know about 19th-century seafarer cannibalism is that it's actually much more useful to kill the living, because one of the most valuable parts for the hungry and malnourished is the blood, and the dead don't give up their blood. It would be improbable if there wasn't killing, given their circumstances. This isn't Hannibal Lecter, this is survivor cannibalism."

There is no mystery, he says, as to why Franklin and his men perished. While their vessels theoretically carried enough provisions to support them for three-and-a-half years, they became ice-bound in a part of the Canadian high Arctic which offered no game to hunt, no shelter, and little driftwood for fuel. They succumbed largely to malnutrition and scurvy (prolonged freezing of their supplies of lemon juice nullified its Vitamin C content), as well as botulism and suspected lead poisoning from poorly soldered cans. "I think Franklin was always going to be one of the first to die, given his age and health," muses Lambert, who also suspects that a virulent strain of tuberculosis was at work within the vessels.

Lambert has some insight into what conditions were, having been invited in 2004 to join a documentary film crew visiting King William Island, where skulls and other remains were found by 19th-century searchers, and Beechey island, with its remnants of Franklin's observatory, as well as the graves of three expedition members.

Spending a fortnight tracking the last desperate route that the crew followed after abandoning ship, they were considerably more comfortable than their doomed forebears, having gone in high summer and travelling on quad bikes, rather than hauling sledges laden with boats.

"We went up to Point Victory where they abandoned ship and it's the most desolate place on God's earth," says Lambert, who revisited the Arctic as a tourist on on board a Russian icebreaker. "At least we had the means to get out."

Franklin is a book the naval historian, whose biography of Nelson was widely acclaimed, had never intended to write, he says, "but my visits to the Arctic changed that. Walking the ground and getting a chance to think about these things on the spot opened the whole thing up. Suddenly, instead of being received wisdom, it became a set of questions. And the more research I did, the less the older version made sense."

Victorian hagiography and a ghoulish interest in cannibalism has tended to obscure Franklin's abilities as a leader and scientific investigator. "Franklin was neither a bungler nor an explorer," writes Lambert. "An inspirational leader, the noblest of public men, he made important contributions to polar navigation and magnetic science, wrote a best-selling narrative, governed a colony and commanded a ship of war."

But by the time he married his second wife, Jane, Franklin "in essence had become a romantic hero, a cultural icon, and it was perhaps this image that she married."

The real Franklin was a curious compound of elevated religious zeal and personal integrity dedicated to the pursuit of naval service, exploration and scientific work as divinely ordained duties. His manner was described as calm, dignified yet resolute."

Yet it was the heroic explorer whom Jane Franklin continued to mourn, campaigning for statues and promoting the North West Passage line. But Franklin has been reduced to a heroic caricature for too long, says Lambert. "What I've done is to give him back his integrity and his reputation for what he really was." Even in an age of GPS and space flight, the words "North West Passage" still resonate, and they are taking on an piquant new lease of life as we realise that the Arctic ice is receding and rupturing under the influence of global warming. Two years ago the Passage became fully clear of ice for the first time since records began.

The irony, says Lambert, "is that the route that will be really useful isn't the Passage, but straight over the top. The Polar Sea will open first. You'll basically be able to head out from the Firth of Forth, go due north past Spitzbergen and end up in Hawaii … and you won't need icebreakers."

• Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Exploration is published by Faber & Faber on 2 July