After the Lost Franklin Expedition: Lady Franklin and John Rae

By Peter Baxter

A historian examines a disastrous, Victorian-era expedition in the Canadian Arctic, a shocking revelation, and the celebrity fallout that followed.
 
The fate of the lost Franklin Expedition of 1847 is an enigma that has tantalized generations of historians, archaeologists, and adventurers. The expedition was lost without a trace, and all 129 men died in what is arguably the worst disaster in Britain’s history of polar exploration.
 
In the aftermath of the crew’s disappearance, Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John’s widow, maintained a crusade to secure her husband’s reputation, imperiled alongside him and his crew in the frozen wastes of the Arctic. Lady Franklin was an uncommon woman for her age, a socially and politically astute figure who attacked anyone whom she viewed as a threat to her husband’s legacy.
 
Meanwhile, John Rae, an explorer and employee of the Hudson Bay Company, recovered deeply disturbing information from the Expedition. His shocking conclusions embroiled him in a bitter dispute with Lady Franklin which led to the ruin of his reputation and career. Against the background of Victorian society and the rise of the explorer celebrity, we learn of Lady Franklin’s formidable grit to honor her husband’s legacy; of John Rae being discredited and his eventual downfall, despite later being proven right. It is a fascinating assessment of the aftermath of the Franklin Expedition and its legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526727381

Peter Baxter

Peter Baxter is an author, amateur historian and heritage travel guide. Born in Kenya and educated in Zimbabwe, he has lived and traveled over much of southern and central Africa. Peter lives in Oregon, USA. His interests include British Imperial history in Africa and the East Africa campaign of the First World War in particular. He is the author of Pen and Sword's Gandhi, Smuts and Race in the British Empire.

Book preview

Part I

The Man Who Ate His Boots

Chapter 1

It was the winter of 1827, and the dining room of No. 21 Bedford Place was filled with men, and one woman. The occasion was a dinner party hosted by Captain John Franklin, to announce and celebrate his engagement to Jane Griffin. The news was hardly news, since The Times of London had already noted the pending union, with some speculation from here and there on the subject of age, wealth and suitability.

Jane would never have willingly intruded on the celebrations that evening, but so familiar was she in the company of these men that when the summons began, and all of that banging on the table and raucous cheering, she felt obliged to make an entrance. Acknowledging a loud cheer as she entered the room she seated herself in a chair made available beside Captain Franklin. One voice then began, ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, before others joined in. Soon they were all singing at the tops of their voices. From one or other she accepted a small glass of sweet sherry, which just touched her lips as she waited for the disorder to subside.

The men were well victualled, flushed and sentimental, cementing old friendships and sharing long memories. Besides her father, they were all army or navy men, all in their late thirties or early forties, and all of rank and accomplishment. The room in which they were assembled was lit softly by candelabras, its decorations all in the modern, Regency style. A significant amount of money had clearly been invested in the interior of this home, which stood mid-way up a row of identical Georgian townhouses in the respectable new arrondissement of Bloomsbury.

Occupying most of the second floor, the dining room, high ceilinged and spacious, was dominated by a row of large windows, draped now with curtains. There might perhaps have been a little too much gold brocade, and a few too many gilded frames, and the walls, clad in dark velvet, might have seemed extravagant, but it was all in the spirit of the times. Napoleon gave the fashionable British bourgeoisie their interest in the Orient, and so the floors were clad in Turkish rugs and the dining table stood on smooth, gilded columns. In a deep place, a fire blazed, guarded on either side by carved Moorish figures clad in black lacquer and gold. The effect of it all, to one with refined tastes, might perhaps have been wealth over breeding, but there were none that evening who would have cared one way or another.

On Jane’s left sat Captain Edward Sabine, a handsome, 35-year-old soldier, marvellously suave, elegant and witty, while to her right was seated the more reserved figure of Captain John Franklin. At the head of the table, liverish over his brandy and milk, sat John Griffin, the father of the bride and head of the household. He was a slight, ascetic man, ageing poorly, mildly valetudinarian, but satisfied on this particular evening that his favourite daughter was at last poised upon respectability. For more than a few years he had fretted over her uncertain future, but he could now rest content that, finally, a man of adequate credentials and respectable rank had accepted responsibility for her.

That evening Jane was flushed and merry and in excellent humour. A sip or two of brandy had passed her lips already, and she was apt for once to abandon herself to the pleasures of the moment. Although hardly beautiful, she was blessed with those rare Huguenot gifts of black hair and pale skin, with lightly blooded cheeks and lips full and red. Her eyes were sloe, dark and hooded, and lined in maturity in a manner quite becoming. Her dress was plain but expensive, and around her neck hung a string of pearls of evident quality. Her shoulders were draped with a thin silk shawl, one shoulder of which she had allowed to fall, and then to incline ever so slightly towards John Franklin.

The proposed marriage of John Franklin to Jane Griffin was regarded in the closed social circles of London as rather a curiosity, attracting considerable speculation and comment. Jane was, at the very least, a woman who knew her own mind, and she certainly would not have entered into any arrangement that did not suit her. At 35, however, there was more than a little gossip abroad that she had, in desperation, seized upon the first man to propose. A worse fate than an unhappy marriage was surely no marriage at all, and for a woman to reach her thirties unwed could never be regarded as a good omen.

Such opinions, however, were held mainly by the hacks on Fleet Street and those of the wider circle of her acquaintances who knew her only slightly. Spinsterhood, were it to have been her fate, would certainly have held no fear for Jane Griffin. She was a woman of both sovereign mind and capable disposition. Her father was substantially wealthy, a widower of long standing, now in uncertain health, and it would, in consequence, have been entirely respectable for her to eschew her own happiness to care for him. She was rich and did not need to marry well, or indeed, to marry at all.

And that she was a singular woman, no man present in the room that evening would ever deny. Most of them knew her well because she was comfortable in their company. Forthright and uninhibited, she was entirely uninterested in concealing her acumen, which was a common, and in fact, necessary habit for intelligent women of the age. Jane Griffin was boldly, and unashamedly intelligent, and having long abandoned any effort at serious commerce with women of her society, she tended now to confine her close friendships to men.

In children, she had no interest whatsoever. In confinement, one was so confined. One could not travel, or visit libraries and galleries, or take an interest in politics, or the many liberal and social projects that absorbed her. Over the years, several marriage proposals had been made, but each in turn had been rejected, some to the surprise of friends and family. For many years she held a torch for the whimsical lexicographer Peter Mark Roget, an elegant and fragile man, brilliantly intellectual and exasperatingly unattainable. The affair was never consummated, never even acknowledged, and certainly it was nothing that would ever have ended in marriage. For years it lingered, and in the end died, on the altar of friendship without intimacy.

And then one day, a day never recorded, nor explicitly mentioned in any of her correspondence, Jane Griffin made the acquaintance of John Franklin. At the time, Franklin, a young lieutenant, was married to an even younger society poet by the name of Eleanor Porden. It was an ill-matched and apparently unhappy and unsatisfying marriage. Eleanor Porden was tubercular, weak, and dying almost from the moment that she took her vows. A child was born of the union, a daughter also called Eleanor, but the mother and the wife suffered in an unhappy state for a long time before she died.

Her husband was abroad at the time of her death, as he was during most of their short life together, and it fell somehow to Jane Griffin to provide support and relief in the suffering of her final year. She and Jane were close friends, but this too was an odd friendship, because Eleanor Porden was precisely that ineffectual, hyper-dependent woman that Jane so despised. Nonetheless, when John Franklin returned to England to face the death of his wife, and the young daughter that remained behind, he found Jane Griffin on hand to offer the help and comfort that he needed. From there the two seemed to unearth some unique commonality, and before very long an engagement was understood.

John Franklin, 41 years old and of kindly and avuncular aspects, was modestly educated, his Lancashire tradesman’s accent unadulterated after twenty years service in the Royal Navy. His face, round and soft, was abundantly fleshed, and his eyes, slightly hooded, were liquid and tragic. The hair on his crown was sparse, but on his jowls it was ample, yet fine and silky, like the hair of a young child. About him there was a soft and sedentary air, of a man fond of his comforts, corpulent and ruddy. Those who knew him usually found only neutral adjectives to describe him, and he was regarded generally as a pleasant, inoffensive and mostly unremarkable man. The heroic hagiographies, typically offered up by his early biographers, seem always to be accompanied by a hint of apology. John Franklin was not of heroic character at all, and in fact, as some among the more honest souls of his acquaintance remarked, he was one of very few men who did not stand well in a military uniform.

In fact, John Franklin was in every respect a man whose life and reputation ought to have languished in blue books and official reports, never to rise to prominence. A visitor to London today might perhaps browse the statuary of Westminster Abbey and not necessarily notice a fine marble bust by the great Mathew Noble, memorialising the heroic achievements of Sir John Franklin. Likewise, on Waterloo Place, opposite the Athenaeum Club and in the shadow of the Duke of Wellington, a bronze of Franklin, also by Mathew Noble, stands poised at the moment that the hero realised he had discovered the Northwest Passage.

This sort of recognition was certainly not the manner in which Victorian England generally rewarded its mediocre sons, and yet the fact remains. Sir John Franklin, immortalised thus, took his place in death among the greatest of British heroes, besides numerous monarchs, and numbered among other great sons and daughters of the British Empire. Indeed, John Franklin, that dull man, an uncomprehending smile hung on his features, seems upon examination to be an odd fellow in such company, but there he stands.

On that particular evening, however, at No. 21 Bedford Place, those monumental honours lay years into the future. John Griffin, a man of astute judgement, might have been among the few to see who John Franklin really was, and might perhaps have understood better than most the decision made by his most beloved, but brilliantly wilful Jane. Franklin was due to be knighted, the matter had been gazetted, and so Jane, when she married, would be Lady Jane Franklin. As far as John Griffin was concerned, if the man was an idiot, then he certainly would not be the first idiot to rise to the zenith of imperial greatness. It was enough that the house of a wealthy liveryman should be dignified by the man’s rank and title.

John Griffin, therefore, was perfectly content with how it was all turning out, and if Jane was happy too, then all well and good. Eventually he laboured to his feet and, tapping his brandy goblet with a silver butter knife and breathing heavily, he brought the company to order. After a short and salutary speech, he wished the couple well and raised his glass in a toast.

‘To the man who ate his boots!’ he declared, and the room immediately erupted into a bellow of approval. There were loud hoots and cheers.

‘To the man who ate his boots!’

And thus, the story had to be told again. Florid men, faces glazed in an overheated room, thumped the table and demanded in chorus.

‘Tell, tell, tell!’

Franklin demurred and protested, and demurred once again, but slowly he was urged to his feet, and as he rocked back on his heels his lady clapped gaily, and the men clapped too. He cleared his throat, and in his uniquely ponderous way, but in a way that so many also found wonderfully appealing and straightforward, he began once again to tell that epic story.

Chapter 2

The story begins eight years earlier, on 23 May 1819, as the Prince of Wales , a 400-ton barque of the Hudson Bay Company, cast off from the quayside at Gravesend. She was an old and inelegant ship, a working barque, rolling heavily on the tide as her jibs unfurled and caught the first offshore breeze of the morning. On board were supplies and trade goods for the Hudson Bay Company settlement of York Factory, and a handful of paid passengers crossing the Atlantic. Accommodations were rudimentary, but travelling on board the Prince of Wales were men, and now and again women, who were quite accustomed to such things.

The outward leg of the journey typically began in a southern English port, usually Gravesend or Tilbury, but sometimes she sailed from Aberdeen or Peterhead. Traditionally, every HBC supply ship embarking on that journey furloughed for a fortnight on the Orkneys, to take on men and water. Orkneymen were favoured by the Company for their resilience and resourcefulness, and as Scottish Islanders, the climate of Rupert’s Land did not dismay them.

After Stromness, there came the long haul across the North Atlantic. Ideally, by early July, the ship would be entering Hudson Strait, and within a few days she would be docked in the mouth of the Hayes River. The Company offered a generous bonus to captains and crew who completed a round trip in one season. Very often they failed and spent a wasted winter locked in the ice, but they were determined men, and they took achieving that round trip very seriously indeed.

By mid-morning on that particular day, a few hours after launch, the Prince of Wales was to be found cruising ten miles off the coast of Foulness, wading heavily under full sail through the grey waters of the English Channel. By early evening, the lighthouse at Gorleston appeared on the headland, and the Prince of Wales trimmed her sails and entered the harbour at Great Yarmouth. Here she would overnight, and the passengers were free to disembark.

Among those passengers were five young Royal Navy men embarking on a magnificent adventure. The oldest, and leader of the expedition was Lieutenant John Franklin, 33 years old, and solemnly conscious of the responsibility entrusted to him. His companion and second-in-command was naval surgeon John Richardson, a year younger and of much less solemn disposition. Richardson was a hospital-based physician with minimal professional experience of life at sea, so the rigid naval chain of command seldom, if ever, applied to him. He was a tall, well-fleshed and handsome man, 32 years old, extremely well educated and somewhat better placed than Franklin on the social and academic hierarchy. He was confident where Franklin often fumbled, and articulate when Franklin frequently groped for words.

Appointed by the Admiralty to serve the expedition as physician, John Richardson was undoubtedly a well-respected doctor, but it was not his interest in medicine that prompted him to volunteer. He also happened to be an accomplished amateur naturalist, and an expedition to America was too good an opportunity to miss. Although intended primarily to answer geographic questions, this expedition, as with most Royal Naval expeditions, would be conducted, at least in part, as a scientific enterprise. It was necessary, therefore, for there to be among the complement of senior staff someone with some identifiable scientific credentials, and Richardson was that man.

Two navy midshipmen, George Back and Robert Hood, both in their early twenties, served the expedition as its junior officers. They too had been carefully selected and examined, and both were extremely tough, competent and dedicated men. Hood, a trained draftsman, doubled as the expedition’s artist, and it is his finely crafted sketches and watercolours that serve as the visual record of the journey.

Back and Hood, however, did not get on well. Back was short and compact, physical, competitive and aggressive. Hood, on the other hand, was whimsical and sentimental. On board the Prince of Wales they met for the first time, and a mild antipathy was almost immediately apparent. In the early glow of excitement, they tolerated one another, but this wore thin very quickly.

The fifth member of the expedition was an ordinary seaman, a Scotsman by the name of John Hepburn. Hepburn was 24 years old, illiterate, the son of a highland sharecropper and ex-merchant mariner. Others would be recruited in Orkney and Rupert’s Land, but these five men formed the official nucleus of the expedition.

Informally, the expedition was known as the ‘Coppermine River Expedition’, and it was one part of a two-part Royal Navy effort, the other part being a maritime survey comprising two ships commanded by a young naval prodigy by the name of Captain William Parry. In geographic terms, the objective of the Coppermine Expedition was relatively simple, but in scope it was vast. Its first destination was York Factory, the main Hudson Bay Company post located on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay. From there it was to strike inland to the banks of the great Coppermine River. Using boats and canoes, the party would then descend that river and reach its mouth on the North American Arctic coastline. Using either canoes or small boats, it would turn east and survey and map the coast. Ideally, and certainly according to projections, the voyagers would then round the right shoulder of North America, and return to York Factory along the inner shore of Hudson Bay.

Very simple indeed. The logistics, however, were fearsome. The region was enormous, larger than Western Europe, and mostly uninhabited. It was sparsely mapped, and not by any means fully known or understood. It suffered then, as it suffers still, some of the most atrocious weather conditions on earth. In the context of the age, and even today, the distances involved were astronomical. While a handful of expeditions had in the past successfully penetrated to the north coast, they had done so on a much smaller scale and based on far greater experience.

The Coppermine was a Royal Navy expedition, however, so it was not travelling light. It was, in fact, a Royal Navy affair under full sail and was organised with precisely the mentality of stocking a warship. Twice as much as was necessary of everything, and a caravan of superfluous supplies and unneeded equipment. Whatever could not be accurately projected was simply oversupplied, and any resulting shortfalls or difficulties would be overcome by discipline, courage and English derring-do.

Although he could hardly have known it at the time, the logistics necessary to pull off Franklin’s expedition were just not available. The Hudson Bay Company factories and depots, strung out like oases over a vast desert, survived off only what they needed. The HBC directors in Fenchurch Street might publish orders for all traders to aid the Crown, but Rupert’s Land lay a very long way from London, and survival in those regions was a matter of prudence and economy. Help would be minimal and reluctantly given. Franklin truly had no idea what he was getting himself into.

So much for the Coppermine River Expedition. Lieutenant William Parry, 29 years old, commanded two Royal Navy ships, the HMS Hecla and the HMS Griper, both already on the high seas some two weeks in advance of Franklin. A wish was expressed in the popular press that somehow Franklin and Parry would meet and grasp hands across an Arctic strait, signifying English ownership of the Northwest Passage. It was picturesque idea, unlikely to be realised, but it nonetheless symbolised the hope and expectation invested in the two expeditions. English prestige was at stake, and the finest of Englishmen were venturing forth to prove it.

A higher expectation was invested in Parry. A naval officer commanding a ship was prestige of the highest order. A navy man setting off on foot on the other hand, while admirable, was hardly the same thing. Parry was in command of two heavily modified Royal Navy vessels, carrying supplies for three years. For this, the Admiralty tapped deeply into the treasury, and the public was frankly more interested in Parry than Franklin. While not a single journalist was present at the departure of the Prince of Wales, Fleet Street besieged the navy docks in Deptford when Parry set sail.

And then there was the matter of the reward. In support of the quest for Northwest Passage, a long-standing government award of £20,000 remained on the table. This would go to the first man, or to the owner of any ship or vessel to navigate a ‘Northwest Passage through Hudson Strait to the Western and Southern Oceans of America’.

The smart money was on Parry. Franklin’s mission was as obscure in the minds of the general public as the unknown coast that he would explore. He was an unknown, and his orders were simply to gather mundane geographic details and to add what could be added to the map. Parry, on the other hand, had merely to sail into the Arctic Archipelago and out the other side. Easy to picture and easy to imagine. The British press lauded the young captain upon whose shoulders the pride of the Kingdom rode.

When seen on a practical level, Parry had much less to fear from it all than Franklin. The very worst that he faced was the prospect of one, perhaps two Arctic winters aboard a well appointed, well supplied Royal Navy survey vessel. Franklin and his men, on the other hand, faced an overland journey of over 5,000 miles in wholly unpredictable circumstances. Most of that distance would be travelled on foot, or in snowshoes, and much of it on water. An Arctic winter, and unsupported travel across a huge wilderness, followed by a small-boat expedition along the unknown Arctic coast. This was a vast human undertaking, dwarfing in every respect the dreary exertions of seaman confined to the holds.

To the men approaching it on their first day out, however, the prospect was thrilling. With the optimism of amateurs, it must all have seemed so very possible. In their own pedigree they held absolute faith, in the power of their race they had no doubt, and in the fidelity of His Majesty they were willing to entrust their lives. All of this kept their spirits high. Young men of His Majesty’s service could be expected to do better, and go further. Franklin certainly was of that particular school of thought, a long established royal services alternative to authentic imagination. Guts and cold steel, that was all that was ever required. As dusk settled on that first day of the expedition, the Prince of Wales trimmed her sails, drifted into the mouth of the Yare, and dropped anchor a few hundred yards offshore. Lighters detached from the docks and began to ply the straits, while a handful of passengers took the opportunity to disembark.

The expedition members, except Hepburne, did the same, although Franklin was restless and anxious, and did not linger on shore for long. Hood, Back and Richardson all disappeared into town, leaving Franklin to his ledgers. The next morning, as the ship prepared to cast off, Franklin found all members present except Richardson. When a search party failed to turn him up, the Captain of the Prince of Wales was forced to raise anchor and tack out of the harbour without him.

Waking up in some bordello later that morning, Richardson rushed to the quayside and was dismayed to see the Prince of Wales rounding the headland a mile or so in the distance. As she swung north and caught the ample wind of the North Sea in her sails, he turned and hurried back into town. There he hired a coach and set off on a nine-day overland journey to Stromness, the next of the Prince of Wales’ ports of call.

Chapter 3

Both expedition commanders, John Franklin and William Parry, and, for that matter, all of their subordinates and every Royal Navy functionary and serviceman anywhere in the world, answered to but one supreme authority: the Second Secretary to the Admiralty, Sir John Barrow.

The combined expeditions of Parry and Franklin were Barrow’s brainchild, and it was thanks to him that two brilliant young careers were now in incubation. Barrow is the only one of the entire Northwest Passage dramatis personae whose role simply cannot be excluded. One of the most gifted and accomplished men of his age, he was a career bureaucrat and the acknowledged doyen of the Royal Navy establishment. The Northwest Passage was his particular obsession, and he pursued it with relentless determination for the duration of a long career at the head of the Admiralty secretariat.

Sir John Barrow, the 1st Baronet, was very much a product of that first imperial generation awakening to the fact that England was the most significant power on earth. The Isles were democratising, and growing in wealth on the back of industry and the wage economy. The popular press was exploding, and with the rise of the labour and reform movements, the common man of England was more invested in national affairs than ever before. England was running far ahead of the pack, and the defeat of the French in 1815, after an enmity of generations, marked the moment of English primus inter pares in Europe. It was the Royal Navy that substantively won that war, and few Englishmen were unwilling to acknowledge that the principal instrument of English power, the spearhead of that imperial surge, was the Royal Navy. The great British public owed much to the Admiralty, and it was granted a status among domestic institutions well befitting its authority and achievements. The lords were minor gods on a stage of global domination. They possessed power that could be projected anywhere in the world, and although they wielded that power only by leave of Parliament, they did so at their own discretion, and seldom were they denied.

The First Lord of the Admiralty was a political appointment, so the office tended to rotate according to the ebb and flow of the majority. The remainder of the board, subordinate lords, were usually career men rewarded for long service, and as such they held the power of vote or consensus, but no real authority. It was the Second Secretary of the Admiralty who was the permanent secretary, and in his hands resided the practical, day-to-day administrative authority of the Royal Navy. Sir John Barrow held that office from 1804 until his retirement in 1845, forty-one years, during which he ran the Royal Navy almost as a private fiefdom. As well as many smaller wars and campaigns, he presided over the last crucial decade of war with France, including Trafalgar, the most significant moment of any in Royal Navy history. By the end of that era, he was one of the highest paid bureaucrats of the imperial administration, and without a doubt the most powerful civil servant in the British government.

When war with France ended, however, the role and responsibility of the Royal Navy abruptly changed. While a handful of ships