Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and joining me today is Sarah Dowdy.
Speaker 1: How are you, Sarah. I'm good, Katie good. We keep
Speaker 1: getting emails requesting more about Canadian history and I have
Speaker 1: something close to Canadian history today, kooky Arctic mystery. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna go ahead and say that counts. We're talking
Speaker 1: about Sir John Franklin's Lost Expedition. John Franklin was one
Speaker 1: of twelve kids and his parents wanted him to become
Speaker 1: a clergyman, but he loved the sea and he was
Speaker 1: absolutely sure that was his destiny from a young age.
Speaker 1: So he entered the Royal Navy at fourteen, where he
Speaker 1: had a varied career. He took part in expeditions to Australia,
Speaker 1: he fought in the Battle of Trafalgar, and he commanded
Speaker 1: the Trent on an eighteen eighteen Arctic expedition in an
Speaker 1: attempt to reach the North Pole. And from eighteen eighteen
Speaker 1: to eighteen twenty two he conducted an overland expedition from
Speaker 1: Hudson Bay to the Arctic. I think and surveyed part
Speaker 1: of the coast, the parts that people had never seen before,
Speaker 1: a large swath of the coast, and published a book
Speaker 1: about it, the Narrative of a Journey to the Shores
Speaker 1: of the Polar Sea, and did another narrative a few
Speaker 1: years later after a second overland expedition in the same region.
Speaker 1: And during this time it was post Napoleonic Wars. The
Speaker 1: British Navy really needed something to do, basically, and they
Speaker 1: needed a purpose. Yeah, And so largely thanks to Sir
Speaker 1: John Barrow, they decided their purpose was going to be
Speaker 1: to navigate the Northwest Passage. And the Northwest Passage has
Speaker 1: been an idea floated around since Elizabethan times even but
Speaker 1: it was essentially that there was a way to take
Speaker 1: a ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific, going above Canada,
Speaker 1: and they knew it was there somewhere, they just didn't
Speaker 1: know where. Somewhere in all that ice between all those islands,
Speaker 1: they knew there was a way, but it took a
Speaker 1: very long time to find it, and even longer to
Speaker 1: actually navigate it. So in eighteen forty five they decide
Speaker 1: they're going to launch another expedition, and Franklin is not
Speaker 1: their first choice. Because he's older. He's fifty nine, and
Speaker 1: they think that might be too old for someone who's
Speaker 1: going to be in such strenuous conditions. Yeah, it's basically
Speaker 1: seemed like his naval career was over. He's been the
Speaker 1: governor of Tasmania for several years, he's been knighted. It
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like he's the man to choose for your
Speaker 1: Arctic expedition. But he's convinced that he's the right one.
Speaker 1: And I think someone said something to him about being
Speaker 1: sixty and he said, no, no, I'm fifty nine, with
Speaker 1: to make that clear. So it's a go, and Franklin
Speaker 1: is their choice. And the ships they were going to
Speaker 1: take were state of the art at the time. They
Speaker 1: had iron reinforced halls and steam engines. They were very
Speaker 1: well equipped. Yeah, they have three years worth of canned
Speaker 1: food on board, which partly ends up being a problem,
Speaker 1: but we'll get to that. Um. So they dock in
Speaker 1: Greenland in July of eight and they sent home a
Speaker 1: few men and a batch of letters. If you were
Speaker 1: one of the men to be sent home there, you
Speaker 1: were very lucky because things didn't go well from there
Speaker 1: on out. The last sighting of them is by British
Speaker 1: whalers north of Baffin Island at the entrance to Lancaster
Speaker 1: Sound in July of eighteen forty five, and then they
Speaker 1: disappear and go completely off the map. So what happened?
Speaker 1: Search parties were sent in eighteen forty seven to and
Speaker 1: through that exact question, because two years was too long.
Speaker 1: They should have heard something by now, and the searches
Speaker 1: keep going. Yeah, by eighteen fifty as many as fourteen
Speaker 1: ships were in the area at the same time looking
Speaker 1: for them. This turned out to be kind of the
Speaker 1: romantic adventure of the age searching for Franklin and his
Speaker 1: lost crew, and consequently a lot of information about the
Speaker 1: Northwest Passage was discovered during these rescue attempts. But we're
Speaker 1: going to kind of give the overview of what happened
Speaker 1: to Franklin and his men during this time. This was
Speaker 1: all pieced together over years and years. But I'm something
Speaker 1: like thirty expeditions to find them. They each came back
Speaker 1: with a little pieces. Yeah. So by in eighty five
Speaker 1: to six they winter at Beechey Island and three crewmen
Speaker 1: die there and they started with a dred and twenty
Speaker 1: nine people. Yeah, so the numbers are are dwindling slowly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty six, these ships which are named Erebus
Speaker 1: and Terror not a good name. Four ships leave Beechy
Speaker 1: Island and they sail down Peel Sound to King William Island,
Speaker 1: and then by September of eighteen forty six, the ships
Speaker 1: get trapped in the ice off of King William Island
Speaker 1: in Victoria Street, um and so they winter there. And
Speaker 1: there's a note that was found later, uh from May
Speaker 1: forty seven saying that things were okay, you know, they
Speaker 1: were stuck in the ice still, but it was going
Speaker 1: all right. But on June eleven, eighteen forty seven, as
Speaker 1: close as we can tell, Franklin died. And he is
Speaker 1: the head of everything of the whole expedition, and he's
Speaker 1: one of very few men and the crew who actually
Speaker 1: has Arctic experience. And things get bad then because that's
Speaker 1: when the ice from the winter should have thought and
Speaker 1: they should have been able to move on, and it doesn't,
Speaker 1: so they winter again on King William Island. Obviously, there
Speaker 1: are questions of food that are going to come up soon,
Speaker 1: so they have to start making difficult decisions in the
Speaker 1: next year about what they're going to do, and they
Speaker 1: abandoned their ships on April eighteen forty eight and decide
Speaker 1: to try to make a go of it, and in
Speaker 1: a note that was later found um, by April four
Speaker 1: men had died and the survivors were marching south to
Speaker 1: the Black River, and things got very messy there. Uh
Speaker 1: they resorted to cannibalism and a lot of them were
Speaker 1: addled by what later looked like lead poisoning um. And
Speaker 1: some people say the lead poisoning as a result of
Speaker 1: poorly tinned foods. The foods were apparently supplied by kind
Speaker 1: of a cut rate dealer and lead was supposed to
Speaker 1: have really dripped into the cans from the soldering. But
Speaker 1: an author of ice Blank Scott Cookman, actually has a
Speaker 1: different theory and he thinks that botuli is um in
Speaker 1: the cans caused all of the mental and physical issues
Speaker 1: that happened and was responsible for why these men died
Speaker 1: on the ice, not on the ship, on the ice
Speaker 1: when they were away from reliable cooking sources, because proper
Speaker 1: heating will that kills the cluster dam spores that if
Speaker 1: they don't have a stove head on the ice, and
Speaker 1: maybe you have a dinky little stove or not a
Speaker 1: stove at all, and so he kind of thought that
Speaker 1: explained why they all die out there and not on
Speaker 1: the ships. And there were there was also evidence of scurvy,
Speaker 1: which is what happens when you don't get enough vitamin C,
Speaker 1: and scurvy and lead poisoning lead to the same kinds
Speaker 1: of weakness that make you unable to do the hard
Speaker 1: work that's necessary to do. And they weren't. They weren't
Speaker 1: adopting Inuit ways of dealing with the weather, and they
Speaker 1: were carrying lots of unnecessary supplies with them, so it
Speaker 1: was not they weren't equipped for an overland expedition. The
Speaker 1: list of their supplies I wish I had it on
Speaker 1: me is just so strange. It wasn't at all survival stuff.
Speaker 1: It was things like books. Silver, Yes, you don't need
Speaker 1: silver if you're trapped in the Arctic, for future reference
Speaker 1: for all our listeners, don't bring the silver. The first
Speaker 1: search for Franklin goes out in eighteen forty seven. The
Speaker 1: first official search isn't until eighteen forty eight, and over
Speaker 1: the years a lot of the expeditions get very close
Speaker 1: to where Franklin ships were actually abandoned, but there's a
Speaker 1: lot of delay, and one of the reasons is when
Speaker 1: ships were over there looking at Peel Sound where the
Speaker 1: boats went, it seemed impos possible that they could have
Speaker 1: gone in that direction because the ice cover was so heavy,
Speaker 1: so they just skipped over it. And of course there
Speaker 1: was a huge cold snap going on in the Arctic
Speaker 1: at this time too, so these weren't normal conditions for
Speaker 1: that area. The early searches turned up some accounts from
Speaker 1: Inuit who had seen the explorers and had stories about
Speaker 1: starving men. There's even one account that was taken much
Speaker 1: much later from an Inuit in nine saying that, uh,
Speaker 1: some of the boats were remainned, and they knew of
Speaker 1: large vessels that lay on the other side of the island,
Speaker 1: basically far away from where they're supposed to have been.
Speaker 1: And they also said that because the winter was so cold,
Speaker 1: they too were having a really hard time finding food
Speaker 1: and hunting. So if the crew was depending on the
Speaker 1: locals for food, they didn't have any to give well,
Speaker 1: and it's likely that the crew wouldn't ask for help
Speaker 1: to they there were sales sufficient. British men and the
Speaker 1: Royal Navy men exactly in the process of the search,
Speaker 1: the Northwest Passage is actually completed, although it's by several
Speaker 1: ships and led it's not completed by the way one
Speaker 1: ship until the twentieth century, I believe. UM. But in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty nine there is a very important search mission
Speaker 1: sent out. The Royal Navy was effectively done with this
Speaker 1: after getting looking for years. Yeah, and then they felt
Speaker 1: like they had gotten a gotten back enough information about
Speaker 1: the men. But Franklin's widow wasn't satisfied. Jane Lady Franklin,
Speaker 1: was the first woman to receive the Founder's Medal of
Speaker 1: the Royal Geographical Society because of everything she'd done to
Speaker 1: organize these expeditions. She was determined that they would at
Speaker 1: least find some concrete proof that the men were dead.
Speaker 1: So she hires Captain Francis Leopold McClintock, who had actually
Speaker 1: been on several earlier search missions UM and during some
Speaker 1: of those had really developed the art of sledging across
Speaker 1: the land and learned a lot of the Inuit customs
Speaker 1: and helped prepare future Arctic explorers for conditions. And he
Speaker 1: was very effective because he used all of these other
Speaker 1: resources and his crew found skeletons of the Franklin expedition.
Speaker 1: I think only four of them. Yeah, But most importantly
Speaker 1: he finds that note UM, which has the first message
Speaker 1: message saying that everything is okay, and then the later
Speaker 1: message abandoning ship, lots of people dying were walking. Um
Speaker 1: finds it in a pile of stones on the icy island.
Speaker 1: It's very creepy it is, and I we'll never know
Speaker 1: entirely what happened. These are just again what historians and
Speaker 1: scientists are able to piece together from the evidence that
Speaker 1: they had. So there are things were sure of, like
Speaker 1: there was too much lead in the bodies, there was
Speaker 1: evidence of scurvy. There was definitely cannibalism from what they
Speaker 1: can tell from the bones. But some of it will
Speaker 1: never quite know. And very strange thing to think of
Speaker 1: today is um icebreaker luxury cruises go right up by
Speaker 1: the island where they all died. Now, Um, it's strange
Speaker 1: to think how accessible all that is. And actually the
Speaker 1: Northwest Passage is open. Uh. It first opened in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven enough ice had melted that it was considered
Speaker 1: fully navigable, and it happened again in two thousand eight
Speaker 1: along with the northeast passage, which made the North Pole
Speaker 1: circumnavigable for the first time in hundred and twenty five
Speaker 1: thousand years. That's insane. See, that's why we need your
Speaker 1: green knowledge on the podcast. And I'll end with a
Speaker 1: memorial by Tennyson, who was a kinsman through marriage to Franklin.
Speaker 1: And he said, not here the white North has thy bones,
Speaker 1: and the heroic sailor soul aren't passing online happier voyage
Speaker 1: now towards no earthly pole. And you had mentioned a
Speaker 1: rather ironic fact that happened from that memorial poem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: another ill fated polar explorer, the American Adolphus Greely, became
Speaker 1: fascinated by the Arctic by a visit to London where
Speaker 1: he read those words. So does it happens when you
Speaker 1: were mentioning tragedy? So if you like to learn more
Speaker 1: about survival, we've got all kinds of survival articles on
Speaker 1: the website. And check out the Stuffy missed in History
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