Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [86]
25th April 1848. H.M. Ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues NNW of this, having been beset since 12th Sept. 1846. The officers & crew consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain F.R.M. Crozier, landed here.
Sir John Franklin died on the nth June, 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers & 15 men.
F.R.M. Crozier
Captain & Senior Officer
And start on tomorrow 26th for Back’s Fish River
James Fitzjames
Captain H.M.S. Erebus
THE SEARCH FOR FRANKLIN
In 1845, Erebus and Terror, commanded by F.R.M. Crozier and James Fitzjames, had sailed from Britain under the overall command of Captain Sir John Franklin, a veteran of three Arctic expeditions, to map the last unknown waters of the Canadian Arctic archipelago and to complete the transit of the elusive Northwest Passage, for which the English had been searching for nearly three centuries.
Most of the Northwest Passage had been mapped by the Royal Navy and explorers from the Hudson’s Bay Company, but the last link— a blank spot on the map—remained. So what was envisioned by the British as the final Arctic expedition set sail under the experienced Franklin and his crew, many of them also veterans of Arctic forays, in two well-equipped ships, “to forge the last link.” But after entering Lancaster Sound from Baffin Bay in the summer of 1845, Erebus and Tenor were never seen or heard from again.
For more than a decade, thirty-one expeditions, both public and private, British and American, searched in vain for Franklin. Tantalizing clues—three graves on a small Arctic beach, relics bought from the Inuit, and disturbing stories told by the Inuit of ships trapped in ice, of men struggling to march overland and dying along the way, and of cannibalism and murder—filled the years of searching, but no conclusive evidence—wrecked ships or records of the Franklin expedition— had been found. Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the missing explorer, pushed the British government to keep on looking, even after a large search expedition in 1854 ended with the loss of several ships: “The final and exhaustive search is all I seek on behalf of the first and only martyrs to Arctic discovery in modern times, and it is all I ever intend to ask.”
An engraving of Fox trapped in the Arctic ice. Vancouver Maritime Museum.
But Britain had sacrificed much to search for Franklin, and now, in 1854, was caught up in an expensive war on Russia’s Crimean Peninsula. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine summed up what Britain had gained, at great cost: “No; there are no more sunny continents—no more islands of the blessed—hidden under the far horizon, tempting the dreamer over the undiscovered sea; nothing but these weird and tragic shores, whose cliffs of everlasting ice and mainlands of frozen snow, which have never produced anything to us but a late and sad discovery of depths of human heroism, patience, and bravery, such as imagination could scarcely dream of.”
In April 1857, the British government informed Lady Franklin that they had “come, with great regret, to the conclusion that there was no prospect of saving life, [and] would not be justified… in exposing the lives of officers and men to the risk inseparable from such an enterprise.” But the determination of Lady Franklin and her years of urging on the search for her missing husband and his men touched many heartstrings. So, when the British government gave its final refusal, Lady Franklin made a public plea and raised nearly £3,000 to send out her own search expedition. She bought the steam yacht Fox, a 120-foot, Scottish-built vessel, from the estate of Sir Richard Sutton, a master of the traditional hunt who had named the ship for his favorite quarry.
Lady Franklin placed Fox under the command of Captain Francis Leopold McClintock, a veteran of two Arctic voyages in search of Franklin. At his direction, shipyard workers