A 19th-century British explorer spent his final years desperately seeking funding for a journey to the North Pole in a bid to restore his ruined reputation. By the time he was declared dead, his name had become so toxic that his wife was reduced to poverty. More than a century after his disappearance, a discovery in the Arctic wilderness finally confirmed the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew. Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to chart the Northwest Passage was intended to be the crowning achievement of a distinguished naval career.
Instead, the expedition vanished without a trace. The two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were last seen entering Baffin Bay in July 1845; they were never seen again by Europeans. Over the next several decades, more than a dozen rescue missions were dispatched to find him, but they returned with only fragments of information: scattered graves on remote islands, a single note left in a cairn, and accounts from Inuit hunters who reported seeing groups of white men dragging a wooden boat across the ice. The initial public reaction to Franklin’s disappearance was a mix of grief and outrage, but as the decades passed without a definitive answer, speculation turned to scandal.
Reports emerged from Inuit witnesses describing evidence of cannibalism among the surviving crew, claims that were met with horror and disbelief in Victorian England. Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, mounted a relentless campaign to clear his name and fund search expeditions, but the stigma of the cannibalism allegations clung to his memory. By the late 19th century, historians had largely written Franklin off as a man whose stubbornness and poor judgment had doomed his men. The first breakthrough came in 1981 when a team of anthropologists exhumed the bodies of three of Franklin’s sailors from the permafrost on Beechey Island.
The mummified remains were remarkably well preserved, and autopsies revealed they had died from pneumonia and tuberculosis, but they also carried elevated levels of lead in their bones. That discovery suggested a more complex story than the simple narrative of poor leadership. The lead exposure was likely the result of poorly soldered tin cans used to store the expedition’s food, which may have caused severe physical and mental deterioration among the crew long before they succumbed to the elements. The story changed dramatically in 2014 when a Canadian search team using sonar technology discovered the wreck of HMS Erebus on the ocean floor in the Queen Maud Gulf.
In 2016, the remains of HMS Terror were found further north, remarkably well preserved. Curiously, the discovery of Terror in that location contradicted historical assumptions about the crew’s movements. The ship’s placement suggested it had been re-manned and sailed south after being abandoned, indicating that a significant number of the crew had returned to their vessels in a desperate final attempt to escape, rather than simply marching inland as previously believed. These physical findings have led modern historians to reassess Franklin’s character.
While his stubbornness in the face of ice conditions was a factor, the lead poisoning and the sheer impossibility of the terrain suggest a tragedy of circumstance as much as one of botched leadership. For the descendants of the crew, the discoveries have brought a measure of closure, even while a few central mysteries remain about the final weeks of the crew’s lives. The search parties of the 19th century searched for years. The finding of the ships and the analysis of the bodies have reframed the disaster from a simple case of hubris to a nuanced story of technological failure and impossible odds.
Franklin’s name has shifted in public memory from an emblem of imperial failure to a representation of the raw dangers of exploration, a story where the final chapter has only recently been written.
