John Franklin

Sir John Franklin (16 April 1786 – 11 June 1847) was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer and colonial administrator. After serving in the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and through the islands of the Arctic Archipelago, during the Coppermine expedition of 1819 and the Mackenzie River expedition of 1825, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1837 to 1843. During his third and final expedition, an attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage in 1845, Franklin's ships became icebound off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, where he died in June 1847. The icebound ships were abandoned ten months later, and the entire crew died from causes such as starvation, hypothermia, and scurvy.

Biography

Early life

Franklin was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on , the ninth of twelve children born to Hannah Weekes and Willingham Franklin. His father was a merchant descended from a line of country gentlemen, while his mother was the daughter of a farmer. One of his brothers later entered the legal profession and eventually became a judge in Madras; another joined the East India Company; while a sister, Sarah, was the mother of Emily Tennyson, wife of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. John Franklin must have been affected by an obvious desire to better his social and economic position, given that his elder brothers struggled, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to establish themselves in a wide variety of careers.

Educated at King Edward VI Grammar School in Louth, he soon became interested in a career at sea. His father, who intended for Franklin to enter the church or become a businessman, was initially opposed but was reluctantly convinced to allow him to go on a trial voyage on a merchant ship when he was aged 12. His experience of seafaring only confirmed his interest in a career at sea, so in March 1800, Franklin's father secured him a Royal Navy appointment on .

Commanded by Captain Lawford, the ''Polyphemus'' carried 64 guns and, at the time of Franklin's appointment, was still at sea. He did not join the vessel until the autumn of 1800. Initially serving as a first-class volunteer, Franklin soon saw action in the Battle of Copenhagen in which the ''Polyphemus'' participated as part of Horatio Nelson's squadron. An expedition around the coast of Australia aboard , commanded by Captain Matthew Flinders, followed, with Franklin now a midshipman. He accompanied Captain Nathaniel Dance on the , frightening off Admiral Charles de Durand-Linois at the Battle of Pulo Aura in the South China Sea on . He was present at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 aboard . During the War of 1812 against the United States, Franklin, now a lieutenant, served aboard and was wounded during the Battle of Lake Borgne on 14 December 1814.

Franklin commanded HMS Trent in 1818 on a journey from London to Spitzbergen, now Svalbard. The overall expedition was commanded by Captain David Buchan on HMS ''Dorothea''.

1819: Coppermine expedition

In 1819, Franklin was chosen to lead the Coppermine expedition overland from Hudson Bay to chart the north coast of Canada eastwards from the mouth of the Coppermine River. On his 1819 expedition, Franklin fell into the Hayes River at Robinson Falls and was rescued by a member of his expedition about downstream.

Between 1819 and 1822, he lost 11 of the 20 men in his party. Most died of starvation or exhaustion, but there were also at least one murder and suggestions of cannibalism. The survivors were forced to eat lichen and even attempted to eat their own leather boots. This gained Franklin the nickname of "the man who ate his boots".

1823: Marriage and third Arctic expedition

In 1823, after returning to England, Franklin married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden. Their daughter, Eleanor Isabella, was born the following year. His wife died of tuberculosis in 1825. Eleanor Isabella married Reverend John Philip Gell in 1849. She died in 1860.

In 1825, he left for his second Canadian and third Arctic expedition, the Mackenzie River expedition. The goal this time was the mouth of the Mackenzie River from which he would follow the coast westward and possibly meet Frederick William Beechey who would try to sail northeast from the Bering Strait. With him was John Richardson who would follow the coast east from the Mackenzie to the mouth of the Coppermine River.

At the same time, William Edward Parry would try to sail west from the Atlantic. (Beechey reached Point Barrow and Parry became frozen-in to the east. At this time, the only known points on the north coast were a hundred or so miles east from the Bering Strait, the mouth of the Mackenzie, Franklin's stretch east of the Coppermine, and a bit of the Gulf of Boothia which had been seen briefly from the land.) Supplies were better organised this time, in part because they were managed by Peter Warren Dease of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).

After reaching Great Slave Lake using the standard HBC route, Franklin took a reconnaissance trip down the Mackenzie and on , became the second European to reach its mouth. He erected a flagpole with buried letters for Parry. He returned to winter at Fort Franklin (modern-day Délı̨nę) on Great Bear Lake. The following summer he went downriver and found the ocean frozen. He worked his way west for several hundred miles and gave up on at Return Reef when he was about east of Beechey's Point Barrow.

Reaching safety at Fort Franklin on , he left on and spent the rest of the winter and spring at Fort Chipewyan. He reached Liverpool on the first of September 1827. Richardson's eastward journey was more successful. Franklin's diary from this expedition describes his men playing hockey on the ice of the Great Bear Lake; Délı̨nę, built on the site of Fort Franklin, thus considers itself to be one of the birthplaces of the sport.

On , he married Jane Griffin, a friend of his first wife and a seasoned traveller who proved indomitable in the course of their life together. On , he was knighted by George IV and the same year awarded the first Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie of France. On , he was made Knight Commander of the Royal Guelphic Order and a Knight of the Greek Order of the Redeemer.

1837: Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land

Franklin was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land in 1837 but was removed from office in 1843. He is remembered by a significant landmark in the centre of Hobart—a statue of him dominates the park known as Franklin Square, which was the site of the original Government House. On the plinth below the statue appears Tennyson's epitaph:

His wife worked to set up a university, which was eventually established in 1890, and a museum, credited to the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1843 under the leadership of her husband. Lady Franklin may have worked to have the Lieutenant-Governor's private botanical gardens, established in 1818, managed as a public resource. Lady Franklin also established a glyptotheque and surrounding lands to support it near Hobart. Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin adopted the daughter of the chief of an indigenous Australian tribe. She was renamed Mathinna and was raised with their own daughter Eleanor, but she was abandoned in Tasmania when the Franklins returned to England in 1843.Raabus, Carol
The hidden story of Mathinna: spirited, gifted, utterly destroyed
936 ABC Hobart, 16 February 2011.

The village of Franklin, on the Huon River, is named in his honour, as is the Franklin River on the West Coast of Tasmania, one of the better known Tasmanian rivers due to the Franklin Dam controversy.

Shortly after leaving his post as Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land, Franklin revisited a cairn on Arthurs Seat, a small mountain just inside Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, Australia, that he had visited as a midshipman with Captain Matthew Flinders in April 1802. On this trip he was accompanied by Captain Reid of The Briars and Andrew Murison McCrae of Arthurs Seat Station, now known as McCrae Homestead.

1845: Northwest Passage expedition

Exploration of the Arctic coastal mainland after Franklin's second Arctic expedition had left less than of unexplored Arctic coastline. The British decided to send a well-equipped Arctic expedition to complete the charting of the Northwest Passage. After Sir James Clark Ross declined an offer to command the expedition, an invitation was extended to Franklin, who, despite being 59 years old, accepted what was to become Franklin's lost expedition.

A younger man, Commander James Fitzjames, was given command of , and Franklin was named the expedition commander. Captain Francis Crozier, who had commanded during the Ross expedition of 1841–1844 to the Antarctic, was appointed executive officer and commander of ''Terror''. Franklin was given command on , and received official instructions on .
The crew was chosen by the Admiralty. Most of them were Englishmen, many were from northern England, and a small number were Irishmen and Scotsmen.

''Erebus'' and ''Terror'' were sturdily built and were outfitted with recent inventions. These included steam engines from the London and Greenwich Railway that enabled the ships to make on their own power, a unique combined steam-based heating and distillation system for the comfort of the crew and to provide large quantities of fresh water for the engine's boilers, a mechanism that enabled the iron rudder and propeller to be drawn into iron wells to protect them from damage, ships' libraries of more than 1,000 books, and three years' worth of conventionally preserved or tinned preserved food supplies. The tinned preserved food was supplied by a cut-rate provisioner who was awarded the contract a few months before the ships were to sail.

Though the provisioner's "patent process" was sound, the haste with which he had prepared thousands of cans of food led to sloppily applied beads of solder on the cans' interior edges, allowing lead to leach into the food. Additionally, the water distillation system may have used lead piping and lead-soldered joints, which would have produced drinking water with a high lead content.

The Franklin Expedition set sail from Greenhithe, England, on , with a crew of 24 officers and 110 men. The ships travelled north to Aberdeen and the Orkney Isles for supplies. From Scotland, the ships sailed to Greenland with and a transport ship, ''Barretto Junior''. After misjudging the location of Whitefish Bay on Disko Island

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