NATIONAL MARITIME

AS A ‘whodunit’, it remains one of the greatest of all time, a British seafaring mystery with such enduring fascination that even after 170 years of rumour, allegations and speculation, it still fires imaginations.

What really did happen to Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin and the 129 sailors on the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror who set sail to explore the Arctic in 1845 but who never returned home from that frozen wasteland?

Precisely how, where and why they died has only ever been guessed at.

Over the years it has variously become a legendary tale of men fighting against starvation, sickness and extreme elements to stay alive, or a baffling story of unexplained death, with murky under-currents of possible murder, suicide and cannibalism.

At last, though, there has been a breakthrough, as a new exhibition, Death In The Ice, at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London reveals.

In 2014 and 2016, the wrecks of Erebus and Terror were discovered in the depths and marine archaeologists have been examining them ever since. The exhibition reveals the preliminary findings – and the startling results call for a complete rethink of the saga of Sir John Franklin’s epic last voyage.

The ships and their crews went missing on a Royal Navy expedition to find and chart the last 900-mile section of the fabled North-West Passage – a sea route over the top of the world linking the North Atlantic to the Pacific via the Arctic Circle.

They were sailing into the unknown, trying to weave their way from Baffin Bay to the Bering Strait, between thousands of islands, large and small, where ice-covered land and frozen sea constantly merge and icebergs block the way.

To add to their troubles, they experienced winters so severe that even the Inuit, the native inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic, thought them exceptional.

In command was the 59-year-old Franklin, a much-admired seaman who had fought at Trafalgar and sailed the Arctic three times before.

But he had recently been a failure as governor of the British colony in Tasmania and, desperate to restore his reputation, volunteered to lead the expedition. The Admiralty was concerned about his age but gave him the nod anyway.

Erebus and Terror were, like Franklin, veterans of the ice, having survived previous expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic.

Their hulls were reinforced with iron sheeting to cope with the frozen seas, and had steam-driven propellers for when they were becalmed or in danger of becoming ice-bound.

 

THE officers and men on board were the Navy’s finest, each one a volunteer for a voyage expected to last up to three years.

In May 1845, the ships left the Thames, sailing north. By July they were in Greenland, and in August their tall masts were spotted by whalers between Greenland and Canada heading for the start of the North-West Passage.

After which, they were never seen or heard from again. So began the mystery.

For two years, the Admiralty did nothing, expressing its “unlimited confidence in the skills and resources of Sir John”. But family and friends were growing anxious, particularly Franklin’s wife, Jane, who lobbied for action.

Ships were finally dispatched to search from both eastern and western ends of the Passage.

In all, more than 30 search teams would be launched over the next decade – some out of altruism, others inspired by an Admiralty award equivalent to £1.5million today for a successful rescue. But no traces of the ships were found.

Then in 1850, three graves were discovered on an island near the start of the Passage, yielding the frozen and intact bodies of two sailors and a Royal Marine private. But of the rest of the crews, there was no sign.

Their fate was by now a Victorian obsession, prompting endless debate, books, magazine articles and folk songs. Spiritualists joined in, claiming to have seen visions of the lost souls.

Then, in 1853 – eight years after the Erebus and Terror had set sail – significant new light was thrown on the plight of the crew.

John Rae, a Scottish explorer, returned with stories he heard from the Inuit. They told of having seen a ghostly party of sick, hungry and desperate qalunaaq (“white men”) who walked across the ice until they dropped dead.

The Inuit said they had found many corpses, and cooking pots with body parts inside.

The obvious conclusion was that starving men had resorted to what Rae described as “the last dread alternative” – cannibalism.

Rae’s discoveries were a massive shock to the British public, and an outraged Charles Dickens denounced the suggestion that British heroes had stooped so low as to eat each other in extremis. The arguments raged on, but from Rae’s evidence, the men’s fate seemed certain. The Admiralty declared the members of the expedition “’assumed dead” and paid out the men’s wages to their relatives.

But Jane Franklin was having none of it – neither the money, nor the idea that all hope had gone. She protested that there still might be survivors sustained by fish or seal or polar bear meat.

Some 12 years after the expedition went missing, she financed her own search mission by Arctic explorer, Leopold McClintock.

On King William Island, McClintock came across Inuit who had in their possession silver spoons and forks and other items from the Franklin expedition. They told him of how ships had been stranded in the ice nearby and of bodies in the snow.

McClintock and his team found three skeletons and a 28ft lifeboat lashed to a sledge, with an array of boots, towels and tobacco inside.

Most revealing of all, they came across a handwritten message inside a cairn with instructions that anyone finding it should forward it to the Admiralty. It gave the position of Erebus and Terror, referred to the ships and their crews wintering on the ice in 1845-46 and declared that “all [is] well”.

But dated April 28, 1848, more scrawled text had been added that told a much bleaker story.

It explained that by now the ships had been stranded in this same place for 20 months; that Franklin was dead (and had been for almost a year), as were 23 other crew members; and that the remaining 105 “souls” were abandoning the ships. The message was signed by James Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, and Francis Crozier, captain of the Terror who, with Franklin dead, had become the faltering expedition’s commander.

McClintock raced back to London with his findings, establishing the narrative that was now to be generally accepted as the truth about the sad fate of Franklin’s expedition.

The ships had stranded in the ice to the north-west of King William Island and after three winters had run out of provisions.

The men were heroes who tried to save themselves by slogging across the ice to the other side of the island but one by one dropped from exhaustion, hunger, frostbite and sickness. The cannibalism allegations were set aside.

 

HERE instead was a legend of British grit to be proud of – summed up in an iconic Victorian painting that today hangs in the National Maritime Museum depicting Franklin and his men dying in the snow.

What remained missing, though, were the actual ships. McClintock had been told were Erebus and Terror were but, assuming no one was left on board, he had seen no point in finding them.

And in the following century and a half, their location remained unknown, assumed lost for ever.

Then in 2014, following an extensive search authorised by the Canadian government, HMS Erebus was pinpointed and two years later, Terror was also found.

Today, the wrecks rest on the sea bed, upright and amazingly intact, awaiting further investigation by divers and marine archaeologists.

Substantial relics have already been brought to the surface – the ship’s bell of Erebus, a six-pounder cannon, the gilded hilt of an officer’s sword, even willow-pattern china plates from the gallery.

But perhaps most astonishing is that the ships were found more than 100 miles from where their crews abandoned them.

It is possible that shifting sea-ice moved them from their original site. But there is also a strong chance that they may have sailed to their final locations. In which case, the abandoned ships must at some stage have been re-occupied by some of the crew.

Significantly, Terror appears to have been anchored – which could only have happened if there had been crew on board.

And if that’s true, the notion of Franklin’s men heroically remaining together as a disciplined British military unit trekking doggedly through blizzards until the very last man collapsed and died, is thrown up in the air.

HMS Terror may yet contain the answers everyone seeks. She sits in 150ft of water, her hatches closed and the glass windows apparently still intact. In such a closed, cold environment, documents may have been preserved.

Perhaps the ship’s log or diary is nesting there, sealed inside a water-tight container – something that could settle once and for all the long-running mystery of what exactly happened to the 129 lost souls who went out to find a passage through the ice and never returned.

– DEATH In The Ice: The shocking story of Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin’s final expedition. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Until January 7, 2018.