In May 1845, Britain’s greatest explorer Sir John Franklin left London on an intrepid expedition. His mission, like all those who ventured out, was to find the fabled Northwest Passage. At 59 years old, Franklin took on an overwhelmingly difficult task. It was especially poignant given that he had devoted his entire life to Arctic exploration, despite the fact that he’d been retired for 18 years. The British Admiralty, then headed by John Barrow, offered a reward of 20,000 pound sterling. They yearned for a successful find of the maritime route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Franklin’s “lost” expedition departed with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror each with a crew of 128 men. The expedition intended to pass through the hazardous Arctic seas into the Pacific, which Franklin had already passed through on three successful former expeditions. Yet by 1846, the expedition was stuck in sea ice off the north coast of King William Island. This entrapment ultimately led to the doom of Franklin and his men as they succumbed to the harsh realities of their surroundings.
Franklin’s post-polar fame as “the man who ate his boots” speaks to the depths of grim survival they sunk to, Franklin and his men both. Even with the crew’s experienced ranks, the very worst of circumstances led to a swift and terrible drop in their population. The expedition’s fight with starvation and disease was made clear as the days wore on.
“But one by one, every single sailor must have succumbed to a variety of maladies including, we can assume, starvation, tuberculosis, scurvy and trench foot,” – Mark Synnott
Franklin himself succumbed to these harsh conditions, dying nearly a year after becoming trapped in the ice, in September 1846. The expedition’s plight remained unknown for several years until 1854 when Dr. John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company uncovered the grim fate of Franklin’s crew. Rae found records showing that 105 survivors began an odyssey of hopelessness. They pulled their skin boats over miles of ice and tundra to find pools of open water.
Though the Inuit had never met anyone like Franklin’s crew, they knew their Arctic home well enough that the Inuit held the knowledge to save Franklin’s sailors. They had developed ways to prepare polar bear meat as food. The lost sailors might have found or even accessed this crucial resource, yet fail to recognize its significance. Instead, Franklin’s crew probably chose to scuttle their vessels and set off on a grim ice-bound death march, braving shifting ice floes.
Mark Synnott, an expert on Franklin’s ill-fated expedition, describes the terrifying unraveling of discipline among the crew.
“Nearly every shred of the Franklin expedition’s recorded history has been lost to the winds of time and… the story of Franklin’s expedition is one of cannibalism and chaotic disintegration of order although one small band may have survived for years,” – Mark Synnott
This descent into chaos highlights the extreme psychological and physical toll that the unyielding Arctic environment inflicted upon the sailors. The brutality of their external world made the fight for survival something more than just a basic instinct. It became a fight against hopelessness itself.
Franklin’s tomb and logbooks have never been found, further deepening the mythology behind an already tragic tale. The toll taken by this mission foreshadows a heartbreaking example of human fragility in the face of nature’s most deadly forces.
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