Stuff You Should KnowThe Mysterious Disappearance of the Franklin Expedition
One of the great Arctic mysteries was the disappearance of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition in search of a northwest passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. Not one man survived the trip, and they left precious little behind in the way of clues.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and Chuck is with me too, and we're just a couple of intrepid explorers sitting around in tiny rooms. I don't know what we're exploring, but we're exploring something freezing to death. Yeah, I'm a little warm. Actually, I'm kind of sweaty.
Maybe scurvy, I don't know, pneumonia.
Blood poisoning.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of bad things that happened about this expedition that we're going to talk about. The Franklin Expedition, very very famous. I guess polar No, it wasn't a polar expedition. It is an arctic expedition from the middle of the nineteenth century. And if you've ever seen that show on AMC, The Terror, Did you ever watch that?
No? I wonder be recommending that a while ago though.
It's so good, Chuck. So there's two seasons, two totally different stories. I'm recommending the one because it's all about like a speculative fiction about.
This, about this very thing, no believe.
It or no. The second season is about a Japanese family in a tournament camp during World War Two.
That sounds equally uplifting.
Totally different. But the first season is really amazing and it is all about this. All the characters in that season are based on actually people from this expedition. It's really neat.
Well, now it all hits home.
Yeah, there you go. So even before AMC came along and did it, this is probably one of the most famous expeditions in history, mainly because it was such a colossal catastrophe. There are one hundred and twenty nine crew members, including the captain, the expedition leader, all the officers, and all the crew, and not one survived. All of the crew was lost. That's really rare, even for Arctic exploration back in the day. And then on top of that, for a very long time, we had no real clue what happened to them. Well we did, we just ignored the clues, but it was a mystery. They just vanished. Basically. The last time they were seen was by a couple of whaling ships at the very beginning of their voyage, and that was it.
Yeah, I mean, there's lots of ways to disappear, especially in the Arctic. Yeah, in the Arctic in that time, of in the nineteenth century, very easy to happen.
Yeah, but at the same time, this was remarkable. Even at the time, it was weird that, like these guys, this expedition just went so colossally bad. And then one of the reasons, like I was saying that it's been such an enduring mysteries because we never really knew. We never had much evidence, and then we had scant evidence over time, and the little evidence that we did collect didn't really just explain everything. There were lots of question marks, and even today, with all the stuff we found and discovered along the way, we don't really know why this whole thing went so pair shaped so quickly.
Yeah, for sure.
But we're going to talk about whatever we do know. I think that's our task today. Are you prepared for this task?
Sounds like a very not thought out name that our show could have been called.
Our task is to explain this today.
No, everything we do know instead of stuff you should know? Okay, should we talk about the Northwest Passage?
I would love to because it's kind of important.
Yeah, Well, it's funny, it kind of is, and it kind of isn't. I think that they thought it was going to be really really, really important back in the day when they were like, hey, listen, we got to find a route to sail basically straight from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And as it turns out, it didn't end up being a big, heavily used passage. There's a problem with the Northwest Passage and that is it's really hard to get through. Yeah, there are a lot of Arctic islands up there north of Canada and there's a lot of ice. That ice moves around a lot. You can never exactly predict where you're going to find that ice or where it's going to recede, and even when you're out there, it's going to be moving around. So it's almost like playing a game of Frogger. Sometimes when you're to the forget the car part, like the highway, like when you get to the river, because you're like, oh, you know, I got a passage now because I see it in front of me, but I might not have it in an hour because the ice moves. So it's a very tricky thing to get through. A lot of people and a lot of expeditions went tried to get through it, charted, you know, great deals of it, and as we'll see in the end, John Franklin and his crew was tasked with basically about three hundred miles of you know, sort of figuring it out, charting it and that was sort of the last bit. And even had it been all charted, it's still not like an easy thing to get through.
No, but just charting it was a huge mission for the Royal Navy because at the time, the middle of the nineteenth century, the British Royal Navy was the greatest sea power in the world, and in their backyard, the Arctic, there was an entire piece of the globe that was just a blank question mark. I saw a really great documentary on Nova and they showed a map of the world as they understood it in the mid nineteenth century, and everything else had been charted except for the spot in the middle of the Arctic they actually did. They had a blank space and a question more amazing, it was like the Riddler had done that photography. But it was like a blemish on the reputation of the British Navy that they still hadn't been able to chart it despite trying for hundreds of years to at the very least chart it, if not make it through. So it was a big deal and that they really wanted to do this.
Yeah, And like I said, a lot of people. You can't like point to a single person and say like they discovered this passage kind of for some of the reasons we've been talking about the thirty thousand islands in the ice and people getting bits and pieces together a little bit at a time. But a lot of people take credit. There are a lot of people that are given credit for different parts of it. There was one guy named Robert McLure from the Royal Navy, of course, and he's credited as the first complete transit. Part of that was on land. And then there's a guy, a Norwegian named Roald Amundsen who was like, all right, now, this is the first guy who did it all by sea. And this was like what fifty plus years after McClure had done it partially on land. So it's like a lot of time is passing, and this is at a time when the advances of sailing and getting through passages like this was sort of at its peak.
Yes, and by the way, rolled Mundson he was also the guy who was the first to make it to the South Pole, so he was quite a show off. As far as explorers go, look at him. So yeah, it wasn't until the twentieth century that somebody actually made it all the way through by ship. So it kind of goes to show you that, like, they weren't really successful this Franklin expedition and even after the expedition. But what's interesting about it is Ed helped us out with this, and he made a point that there were a lot of rescue missions to go find the lost Franklin expedition, and while they were there they charted stuff that had been uncharted. So Ed makes the point that by getting lost, Franklin actually contributed more to the charting of this unknown part of the Arctic than he did while he was actually alive, because he didn't actually make it very far and his crew made it kind of far. But by the time they made it to where they were going, they couldn't have cared less about charting. They were just trying to stay alive unsuccessfully, as we'll see.
Well, there you have it.
I guess I spoil after having already said that not one of the one hundred and shine Men survived.
Yeah, you're like, no, wait, I spoiled it. In the first thirty seconds, not just now exactly. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about Franklin. John Franklin, that is not Benjamin, of course, sure he hated boats. John Franklin was born in seventeen eighty six and he was not a rich guy. He did not come from some noble family. But he did end up getting a lot of seafaring experience in the Navy, a lot of combat experience, Like he knew his way around a ship. So in eighteen nineteen he saw that the British Navy was downsizing some and the writing was kind of on the wall for at least he felt the writing was on the wall for him, and he said, all right, what I should do if I want to, you know, continue at sea. And you know, I kind of like this life is I got to get out of the military and become an explorer, become an Arctic explorer, because that was like a path post some military that you could do. You could become an adventurer.
Yeah, and he was still part of the British Royal Navy, he was a captain in it, but he wasn't engaging in warfareries engaging in explorations. So it was almost like they had two prongs. He could either go like Discovery Corps or you know, the core of death and destruction.
Sounds like both leads to death.
Yeah, in this case, Discovery cor didn't pan out very I.
Just want to spoil it again.
So yeah, we'll just everybody just forget that. Everyone dies. We're working up to that, apparently.
So he got to work on his discovery path. He was doing pretty well. He commanded some expeditions here and there. One ended up being a big failure on the north coast of Canada, exploring near the Coppermine River, and half of the men died. The reason that this is noteworthy is because that even though it was a big failure, he gained a lot of notoriety because he survived grim conditions and very famously ate his boots to survive, ate the leather from his boots, which is a thing that happened on alone on that TV show. I watched that some guy ate part of his belt.
Oh yeah, how did it go down?
It didn't go down.
Well, I can't imagine it would, man, I don't think.
I think the idea when you boil leather like that is that it's just you know, some of the fat will come off, and it's it might give you a little bit of caloric intake, but it's it's not a great plan for success long term. But Franklin earned a lot of notoriety by eating his boots and wrote a big best selling book about it, and was knighted even though it was a failure.
Yeah, because they kind of saw it as you know, he had sacrificed that much in the name of exploration, so sure, why not nightem? You know, it's better than like throwing rawen tomatoes at him upon his return. The guy had to eat his boots for Pete's sake, you know, Yeah, exactly. So that was one of his two initial expeditions. The one that we're talking about today was his third. The other one was pretty catastrophic too, nothing like the first one and nothing like the third one, but still noteworthy enough that it was not successful. They got lost, and both of those first expeditions, Franklin and his crew were bailed out by Inuit who basically made sure that they stayed alive. He probably wouldn't have survived that first expedition had it not been helped from the Inuit who made sure that they made it back and were fed and all that stuff. And that's a big recurring theme that we're going to run into, is the Inuit were in the background. Like back in England, people knew they were there. They called them Eskimo, spelled like it would if you were in New Orleans or something with the aux at the end. Oh really, yeah, that's what they did. They were not thought very highly of. And yet the whole time, as we'll see, like the Inuit were just witnesses to this history, had an extensive and detailed oral history, knew exactly what happened, where everybody was and what went down when. And yet the British and other European explorers just would not listen to them. And when they did listen to them and they tried to explain it to England, England shouted that person down and told them they were a fool for listening to the chattering of these these eskimaux. So that's just kind of a common theme as we'll see that the Inuit played a huge outsize role that were only now starting to kind of like acknowledge or recognize.
Yeah. They also there was a common theme that if you were smart enough to listen to them while you were there. Then you fared much better than if you did things your own.
Way, definitely. But the problem was is like that was not something you would want to do back in the mid nineteenth century in front of your crew. Usually, Yeah, you could very quickly, like your crew could lose confidence in you because you were doing something totally out of the norm and probably out of the bounds of respectable behavior by following the lead of you know, an Inuit at the time, or I'm sorry, an inook. Something I learned is Inuit is the plural, inook is the singular. So if you're talking to you wouldn't say I'm talking to Americans, say I'm talking to an American, and in the same way say I'm talking to an Inuk who's a member of the Inuit.
Yeah. What they would were smart to do would be to take an inook around behind a big block of ice and very quietly say, listen, old boy, if you have any advice, please just let me know quietly, cappy to follow.
Can you draw it where we should go in the snow?
Right? And then yes, yeah, and then erase it very quickly and with pe say face yeah, with your urine. So or no, no, no, wait, erase it with urine or spell it out in urine.
You would erase it with urine. You could do both, but the spelling it out with urine would would be too permanent. You would want to pee all over it and it would melt out the instructions once you committed them to memory, and everybody in your crew would have thought, you just want behind the ice block to pee.
Well, that's why they have the slogan as the sharpie of snow riting.
What does P? Yeah, okay, I didn't know it. I didn't know P had its own slogan.
It did. I really circumnavigated at like a big ice flow that was nice, clumsily somewhat breaking through with my iron force.
There were a couple of bumps in there.
Sure, all right? So where are we? He as he had the second expedition that he said wasn't as bad as the first, and third still not great. Right, He's kind of thinking about hanging up his half eaten boiled boots. At this point. He's in his fifties, and in eighteen thirty seven they said, no, why don't you take this appointment as the Lieutenant governor Van Demon's Land, which we now know as Tasmania, and that only lasted a few years. And his wife Jane said, you know what you should really do is finished strong, you're getting old. You got one morning. You just to sort of save the family name one more Arctic expedition that might really be great and cement you as a victor. And he said, I guess I'll try if they'll.
Have me, he said, Roger Roger. Yeah, so he did, well, she did, I should say he kind of just went along with it. But lady Jane Franklin really worked behind the scenes to get her husband appointed to the head of an Arctic expedition, and in particular this one that was considered potentially the last one to map the Northwest Passage because there was only that three hundred miles of uncharted territory.
So I got a question, though, was this a situation where they gave it to this older guy because no one wanted to do it because it was so dangerous, or like I saw that the you know, younger captains you know, declined to take the position. Is it because it was just so fraught?
I don't know, I honestly don't know. It's possible but that seems like that would lie in the face of like the Royal Navy and their attitude at the time, like you would step up and be like, yes, I'll be the one to die, rather than be like I don't want that, you know. So I'm not sure exactly why I'll have to go back and watch the Terror again.
Is it like how historically accurate? Is it?
Extremely? But at the same time it also veers off into like just wild speculation.
Okay, I gotta see it now.
Yeah, it's I can't really get across how good it is. And it's one of those ones where you know when somebody talks something up and you go in expecting high hopes or with high hopes and you're invariably let down. You will not be let down. All right, that's how great it is. I expect texts from you every like couple hours while you're watching it.
Should we take a break? Yeah, all right, let's take a break. We've got it set up in that he is going to take this final voyage to restore his name and we'll be back right after this. I'll let you know what happened.
Okay, So, Lady Jane Franklin has successfully secured the appointment as head of this expedition in eighteen forty six. I believe in eighteen forty six expedition to the Arctic to uncharted territory, largely because no one else would accept it, but also because she maneuvered. I don't think. I think without her wrangling he still might not have gotten it. Even though no one else wanted it. He was ready to go out to pasture, and the Royal Navy was more than willing to let him go. Lady James Franklin said no, meet my sheer will, and they did, and so he became head. And it's not like he was just some hapless boob or something like that. He wasn't the finest captain in the Royal Navy. He wasn't the worst either. He was just you know, average, and his track record wasn't so great, and there were plenty of other captains in the Royal Navy that had far better track records than him. But again, I don't want to get across like he was the wrong man for the job. He just wasn't necessarily the best man for the job.
Yeah, exactly. I was trying to make up a funny name for the worst captain in the Royal Navy.
But stop I got I got nothing either.
Yeah.
No matter how I try, I guarantee it won't be good.
Like, uh, oh, what's something funny about someone who can't sail?
They have lead feet?
About lead foot Mick can't swim?
Oh boy, that's not a good sailor right there? Or James Francis can't steer?
Right? Yeah? I love it. Should we speaking of steering? Should we talk about these boats?
Uh? Yeah, let's because they're kind of important too.
Yeah, very important. One, as I guess, is named for the TV show The Terror or vice versa. Yeah, and the Arabis. What also said it was named after the TV show and the Arabis. These were previous to this outing. They were they were warships, but they were ships that didn't, you know, have like cannons up and down the sides. They were delivering big mortar rounds close to shore, so they were they were squatty, and they were super strong, and they were sailing ships. But they were retrofitted for this adventure. I keep calling you an adventure.
It was an adventure. I think that's yeah.
For a while at least they were retrofitted in a bunch of ways. First of all, adding these iron plates to the front to you know, break through the ice. But then they also added a steam engine to this sailing vessel, not to just use full time, but you know, because you require too much coal, you can't do something like that, but to get you through, like like I was talking about that moving ice. If they were like, oh my gosh, we need to get over there quick because I see a channel that's closing, they could kick in that steam and get over there faster. That's just like one ways that they would use the steam engine.
Yeah, like if you were playing Frogger, you wanted your steam engines going exactly. So they also figured out how to use the steam as basically central heating. This was like a cool state of the art. We're talking like the late eighteen forties here, and these guys were going on an Arctic expedition and I think they may have been the first crew ever to sail into the Arctic with central heat. So that was an enormous luxury. And they also used the steam system as a water distillation system, so they had all the fresh water they needed, but they could desalinate it, they could decontaminate it. It was just a really ingenious system, all kind of built into one.
Yeah. And if you're wondering about the propellers, sure being a problem with the ice. They actually retracted back into the hole when they were in shallow water and icy water. So for the eighteen forties, this felt like a very modern operation.
Oh yeah, for sure. So it's important to remember though that the steam was meant to just kind of give them a boost. They were still sailing ships, that's yes. Mostly how they moved was through sale.
Yeah, and they brought a lot of stuff. We always like to talk about, oh boy, the load of any expedition and what they kind of carried, because it's usually a precursor too. They didn't either have enough or they had the wrong stuff. They had thirty two thousand pounds of beef, thirty three pounds of tinned meat, which will very much come into play. We'll get to that later. They had fresh veggies, they had livestock. They had live animals on board, right.
They had cattle, sheep, pigs, hens. Sure, all meant to probably not last very long, and then eating was good at first, exactly. They also had pets to chuck. There were three pets there was a monkey that Lady Jane Franklin gave to the ship as a president, and I guess was kind of Captain Franklin's pet. Yeah, and they apparently used to steal stuff a lot, but it was a super cute monkey, so everybody forgave him every time. Yeah. Much more popular was a dog named Neptune and Newfoundland. I mean, come on, it gotta have a dog on board. And then there was a cat that may or may not have had a name, because I think I got this information from a historian named John Geiger, who was basically dedicated as a career to the Franklin expedition, and he does not name this cat, and the fact that he didn't makes me think that cat didn't have a name. It was just the cat.
I don't think they named cats for a while.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of historical stories where there was like a cat they just called cat.
So like mister Sphinx didn't come around until like the seventies. Maybe, I don't know, we'll find out. What's the short stuff just waiting to happen.
I totally They also had thousands of pounds of sugar, had ton of spices. I mentioned the veggies they had. You gotta have tobacco. They had about seven thousand plus pounds of tobacco, tons of booze, four thousand gallons of either rum or wine, close to three thousand pounds of candles so they could see because you know, it gets during the winter there, it's dark for long, long periods of time.
For sure.
Lemon juice, lots of lemon.
Juice, that's a big one. They had nine hundred and thirty gallons of lemon juice to stave off scurvy, and every crew member got an ounce a day, and unfortunately it didn't work for a lot of people. A lot of guys seemed to have gotten scurvy. Their teeth fell out, and they were fatigued, and all sorts of terrible things happened because of a vitamin C deficiency. And yet they had enough lemon And apparently historians think that the lemon juice may have started to ferment, and so to kill off those that bacteria, they may have boiled the lemon juice to get kind of recharge it, and in doing so I would render the ascorbic acid, the vitamin C totally ineffective, inert. Basically and so they could have been drinking lemon juice all day long and they still would have gotten scurvy. So that's a great theory. I don't know how accurate it is, but it's the best one i've heard. It's also the only one I've heard, but it's still pretty good.
And how about we set up the first part of this tinned food thing and then we'll reveal what happened later. Yeah, but he you know, it was sort of a new thing. Usually you would take dry goods like salted pork and stuff like that if you wanted to eat well on a ship. But Franklin said, no, let's do this a little better. Tinning technology is new. I'm in a contract with this guy's named Stephen Goldener, and he's well, I was about to say the best at this, but he was doing this and they said, give us whatever you can get us on time. We need eight tins of food, cooked beef, cooked pork, preserve meat, all soup even.
Don't forget that.
Oh well, what is pemmican? I've heard of that.
It's uh, it's it's I saw it described as paste of dried and pounded meat mixed with fat and spices. I saw it compared to oily beef jerkey, and then some people like I guess keto, people like we'll add like maybe some fruit or something to it, just for a little bit of carbs. Okay, But it was a very popular staple in the Arctic because it was fatty and full of protein and that's what you needed. Those are good things, yeah.
For sure. And Goldener was like, all right, uh, this stuff is gonna be great. It'll last you a few years and I need to get to work though, because I have a short timeline. But delivered those tins and that's where we're gonna leave it for now.
Yeah. So they they took on all these supplies I think after they passed Scotland in Disco Bay d s KO. Yeah. Yeah, they do not dance in Disco Bay. That's in Greenland on the west coast of Greenland. That's where they took on supplies. And then also really interestingly, they left behind five guys. There were originally one hundred and thirty four crew members, but five of them were left behind in Greenland because they were basically booted off the ship by Franklin. The only explanation I saw is that they had run a foul of his bands on swearing and drunkenness, so they actually managed to avoid this grim fate by cursing and being drunk essentially. So yeah, for sure. So they took on all of these supplies. They took on the coal, they took on all the tin meat and all that, and they started sailing toward baff And Bay. Not the one in Texas. This one is up in the Arctic. And they were about to enter Lancaster Sound, or they did. Right before they did, they were sighted by a couple of whaling ships, the Enterprise and the Prince of Wales. And it's really disappointing. They didn't spell the Prince of Whales like a whale. They build it like the country. It's a whaling chip.
Come on, yeah, I mean, and boat names are supposed to be buns.
For sure, for sure. Like, oh man, I can't think of one right now.
I can't either.
All of them are, though, aren't they. Yeah, at least the one's in Florida, and you know California, like San Diego.
Yeah, they're very funny usually.
Okay, So these whaling ships hung out with them. Apparently they boarded and like looked around and they were like, oh my god, central heat. When they took their leave of the Arabis and the terror, they were the last people. They were the last Europeans to see these people alive.
That's right.
And one of the other things I just want to say about Lancaster Sound chuck from baff And Bay. If you look at it on a map and they don't map out the sea ice, it is a You could shoot an arrow from baff And Bay to the Arctic Ocean, which would eventually take you to the Pacific, just straight through Lancaster Sound. And yet because of the ice, it was so bad they couldn't go anywhere near across Lancaster Sound. They had to immediately start to go south.
Yeah, boy, go south. Indeed, I guess we should talk a little bit about sort of how you navigate through this ice. We did mention that that had, you know, iron on the front of their ships, and any any sort of ice ship or fishing ship that's in icy waters will have a reinforced hull because you know, you can break through some of this stuff. If you ever watch you know, Deadliest Catch. They do that kind of thing here and there. But if you really get sort of in a position where you you know the ice is too thick, and you know this ice is continually being just smashed against the shore until you have like ice mountains along the shoreline and it just it just stacks up on each other. So eventually, if you get to a place where you really can't get through, there are a couple of things you can do. You can wait for summer and like cross your fingers that it'll melt, because it may not even melt then. Or you can use a process called warp, which is when you basically inch yourself along little by little by If there's land nearby, you could like tie yourself to something strong on land and winch yourself by little by little. If there's no land around, you can put your anchor in a dinghy and send somebody out, probably not a dingy, a little bit bigger boat, drop the anchor, and then wind yourself toward that anchor. But it is extremely slow going if you can even get through at that point. I think Edie's one example of a rescue expedition that was trying to find Franklin that spent nine hours basically going the length of their ship like an inch at a time, So it's not fun. It is, but it's like that may be your only chance at survival sometimes because you can, you could get stuck in ice forever and die for sure.
And that's actually what the Franklin Expedition found themselves in that situation. Now, at first they were doing fine. They wintered Ichy Island, which is not very far past where they entered from baff And Bay, because I think they set sail on May nineteenth, and winter comes quickly, right exactly, They finally oh sorry, they finally left Disco Bay in July of eighteen forty five. So yeah, winter comes way earlier up there than it does here. So they wintered pretty quickly and they were successful that first winter. I started to melt and they started to do some cool little navigating and apparently doing U turns and all sorts of stuff that will never probably know exactly what they did. Yeah, but that first winter and summer went fine.
Yeah, but three guys did die of basically kind of how you die back then in those conditions. Could have been pneumonia, it could have been I mean, he knows what kind of helped some of these guys are in but it wasn't anything like super unusual. They just lost three guys.
Yes, but that supposedly was not a good record, even for an Arctic expedition, losing three guys that quickly. Yeah, So aside from the three deaths, fine, things went pretty well compared to the rest of the expedition. That was great, right, Sure, So the first winter comes and goes, the first summer comes and goes, and now they've made it to the northwest corner of King William Island and they get they get iced in for the winter. And again, this is what they're expecting. They had three years worth of supplies. They figured it would take that long to circumnavigate all of this, you know, this ice flow and throughout these seasons. So they're not worried yet. When they start to worry is when the next summer comes and the ice doesn't melt right.
And that's what I mentioned earlier by crossing your fingers. You know, it sometimes it melts, sometimes it doesn't. It all depends on the conditions at the time. At this point, they had been there for a while, like you said, we're surviving and they were even sending guys ashore that were you charting their location, and nothing was really out of the ordinary, like you said, until they were like, well we're still stuck, and that's when it got fairly scary. This is I guess spring or what would be spring. I don't even know what you would call may in that area in eighteen forty seven Winter part two, maybe sure, there was a team that went to leave. They had this method for leaving messages. They would use these Royal Navy forms, basically like they should have just had letterhead because they would have had more room to write, but instead they would write in the margins of these Royal Navy forms, just to make sure people knew it was them, and they would leave them in sealed canisters in various places. This one was under a cairn that someone else had built before them, and it was a pretty brief note. Things were okay, nothing out of the ordinary to report at that time. These people came back to the ship from you know, delivering this note and making sure it was safe to be found later. And Franklin had died while they were gone on June eleventh.
Yeah, they even said in the note Franklin commanding and then all as far as we know, right, So that's I mean that's kind of a big deal. I mean, the leader of the expedition dies, it's not like, well, what do we do now? I Mean there was a second in command, a guy named Francis Krozer, and then a third in command named James Fitzjames, so there was like a clear chain of command of able captains and leaders. Right sure, but it's still I mean, at the very least, that's just seems like bad juju when you're up on an Arctic expedition and you've been snowed in through summer, right.
Yeah, and a few other people died too, so at this point they've lost, you know, probably close to ten people.
So from remember eighteen forty six when they first got iced in for the second time, this time off the northwest coast of King William Island, all the way through eighteen forty eight and actually beyond, they just sat there. Their ships were iced in. They didn't move. They just stayed there. If the ice moved, then the ships moved, but that was it. They didn't move within the ice. And these guys are like living on these ships, kind of living on shore. They made camps and then they finally abandoned the ships because it was becoming clear that I guess Krozier had this gamble to make. He could either wait to see if the ice melted next summer, and in which case they could probably make it through to safety. They could sail the safety during the summer and be saved, but if the ice didn't melt, he would have wasted several months waiting to see if the ice melted when they could have been walking to safety. And he chose option B. He said, we need to start moving towards safety because I don't think that the ice is going to melt again.
Yeah. And the Inuit, uh, the ones who listened to them, a few dozen of them did make it to mainland Canada. But just because you made it to mainland Canada doesn't mean like that you're saved. Like they were still in big trouble. Yeah, obviously at this point, Lady Jane, well, should we take a break now?
Actually, yeah, let's take a break.
Yeah, all right, we'll take a break and talk about what lady Jane did right for this. All right. So at this point, things are going really bad the expedition itself, as far as trying to get these last three hundred miles that that passage figured out was. I mean, forget about that. At this point. These guys are just trying to be alive.
They're walking across yeah, frozen sea ice that they're just walking. It's that much ice that it's just like one continuous sheet all the way to Canada.
Yeah, not a healthy prospect for survival.
No. And one other thing, Chuck, I want to throw in. They're not just walking. They're pushing huge ships loaded with supplies. They're dragging them and pushing them along this ice and rock.
Okay, not a fun task, no, exactly. So this is where the search period begins, which spanned from eighteen forty seven to eighteen fifty nine. All kinds of people went out looking. Lady Jane was ringing that bell. The Royal Navy was offering up twenty thousand pounds in eighteen fifty ton of money.
Do you I know.
Hear it? Was this an American?
Or I got both, buddy, Well, let's hear it. That would be two point two million pounds today or two point eight million dollars today.
What about euros?
Oh? I didn't do that one. You got me interesting, You could have said, what about Drachmas.
You're typically more thorough. But that's fine.
Sorry, No, that's it, man.
That's a lot of money enough to attract what eventually ended up being over thirty expeditions that were gonna be fraught with the same peril, you know. I mean it's not like things had changed and it was now easy, but it was you know, it's sort of like in Jaws. You know, all these all these people had money on their mind. They had their mind on their money and the money on their minds right, and wanted all those pounds, and it was a big uh, it was a big public thing. Like people, people wanted them back, and they tried to get them back their hardest.
Yeah, because you know, one of the reasons why John Franklin was known was because he was the man who ate his boot, going to get that guy the English public, right, and the English public was also very much fascinated with Arctic exploration. It would be kind of analogous to the American public being interested in going to the moon in the sixties.
Yeah, kind of like that. Yeah, not like no, no one cares, no.
Sadly, hopefully everybody will get reinterested again when we start going to the moon again soon.
One of the big names in the one of these search parties was a guy named John Ray. He was He was a guy that sort of well, we'll get to kind of his big reveal in a second here, but he was very noteworthy and proficient guy. He knew what he was doing. He had been all over the Arctic. I think he was one of the guys who listened to the Inuit, right.
He was, and he was. He got shouted down as a result because he came back from this exploration and interviewing a number of Inuit and he said, hey, they told me that these guys probably not probably, but definitely engaged in cannibalism. That's how desperate they became. And that did not No, that did not sit well with Lady Jane Franklin, and she actually got Charles Dickens to basically write this diatribe about how terrible a person Ray was for listening to the Inuit and how terrible, yeah, how terrible the Inuit were. John Geiger says that it was just a stain on his reputation that continues today. It was very racist, the stuff that he wrote, and he did it on behalf of Lady Jane Franklin. To basically say, like, you're slandering these heroes, and Dickens even said, if there's if they're dead, I'll bet it was the Inuit that did this. Anything but the possibility that they actually became so desperate to engage you cannibalism. And as we'll see, it turns out the Inuit who said that this happened were actually proven correct, like a century later.
Yeah, exactly, by the nineteen hundreds, they had found graves, they had found corpses, they had found a lot of the stuff except for the ships. And remarkably, just oh how long, not even ten years ago, in twenty fourteen, and in twenty sixteen they found the Erebus and the Terror respectively in about thirty feet of water, fairly intact considering how long it had been. And this was I think Terror was off of King William Island. Arabus was a little further south near the Adelaide Peninsula. And they just don't know for sure how the Arabis exactly got there, whether it was sailed there or moved there, or just accidentally drifted there some combination of all those.
Who knows, Yeah, it's possible it drifted like after the ice melted some people say maybe the ice moved it all the way down there. That wouldn't have happened. It would have crushed the boat. It could have very easily been sailed. But either way, like finding those ships was annoyed. And there's really cool Parks Canada videos of scuba divers swimming through these ships that are like almost entirely intact. There's like still dishes on the shelves and bottles on shelves and like desks intact, and they the drawers are closed. They think because of the state of the water and the anaerobic conditions that there's probably lots of documentation of what went on during the expedition in those drawers that they're going to eventually be able to get to totally.
As far as why they perished, there were a bunch of theories sort of you know, three of them can be kind of lumped together, and it could happen to sort of any expedition, which is, you know, bad luck with the weather. You know, those two really bad winters in a row, without that summer thaw that they maybe were counting on, combined with not being as prepared as you should have been. I guess two not three. Even though they were prepared, they were heavily stocked. This was just really rough territory, and the clothes they had might not have been perfect. They really held water well, which would freeze. The equipment was really heavy. They, like we said, they weren't listening to the locals about how you should really do things. They were doing things their way. So that's a kind of underpreparedness. And so those are just sort of under the normal ways that one could die on an expedition like this.
Then, and with the bad luck in particular where they got iced in for that second winter, even the Inuit are like, well, you don't really go around there. They called it two New Knee, which is back of Beyond, which is a terrible name for a place that you're iced in in the Arctic. And then on that No documentary they took ice core samples and they found that those winters that they were iced in were two of the worst winters in seven hundred years in that area.
That's called bad luck.
They had terribly bad luck for sure.
Yeah, slash under prepared because they shouldn't have been there to begin with, right, So those are all sort of normal ways that you could perish. Like I said, the last one that we have to talk about, though, is this lead poisoning. We talked about the contract with the guy that was innovating with his ten meats. He had rushed this thing through it apparently leaked lead and you know, it was lined with lead and that leaked into the food. They did lots of studies over the years. The first, I believe was nineteen eighty one. There was an anthropologist named Owen, doctor Owen Beatty and basically was the first person to say, you know, I think this. We literally are founding lead in their bones, like at levels that we should not see. And it seems pretty obvious that was lead in the examined corpses. Like it may not have been everything, but it definitely had something to do with a lot of the deaths.
Yeah, it's kind of criticized that he didn't have a control group, Like it's possible these guys had tons of lead in their bodies anyway, just from lifelong exposure to lead, and that it's possible their bones released it as they started to die. Basically, we don't know because there isn't a control group, but it is it's quite possible that it had some effect on the expedition if it wasn't directly killing people. They also think that the contaminated tins, or that the poorly soldered tins may have been contaminated with botulism, which would have killed off a lot of people too. And then yeah, so's it's just not clear a lot like those first three graves that they found from the first winter, like you said they were, I think they died from pneumonia from tuberculosis, But so few people have been found and the state that they've been found in hasn't really allowed for forensic anthropology to say this is how this guy died, this is how this guy died. So it's all left to the imagination. Yeah, And I think one of the things that captures my imagination the most is that there Inuit reports that in the summer of either eighteen fifty one or eighteen fifty two, there were still four survivors left from this crew, four of them and a dog, probably Neptune the Newfoundland, I imagine, and that they were the most skilled at hunting, so they had survived the longest and they were all that was left, and by eighteen fifty one eighteen fifty two there had already been numerous search expeditions launched, so that means that there were people searching for them while there were still survivors. They just didn't their paths didn't cross. They just didn't find one another. And those guys were those last four were the last of them, and I guess they did not go on.
Yeah, I guess we should talk a little bit about the cannibalism thing, because that's, you know, that was what Ray was sort of brave enough to talk about and was, you know, like you said he was. He was basically shunned because of this. They didn't want to hear anything like that, and it turns out that he was. He was basically he was right. I mean, there's no other way to say it. They found cut marks on bones, on leg bones, They found a skull from the same person that was intentionally broken. All these like they now that we know what cannibal sites look like, it has all the markings basically literally, yeah, like intentionally breaking bones, cutting bones on purpose. What else they found like clusters clusters.
Of bones together like they'd just been tossed.
That weren't like just part of the body dying, Like bones that shouldn't be together, were together.
Yeah, and then a lot of the bones that were found were like long bones, so they suspect that they had just been like carrying arms and legs. Is portable food. It was. It was a bad jam. So there is it is clear that they did engage in cannibalism, and not only was Ray right, they into it who told Ray that they had engaged in cannibalism were right. And throughout some of these expeditions that came during this what's called the Franklin Search period from eighteen fifty seven to fifty nine, a lot of Inuit agreed to be interviewed with translators with some of these explorers, and they documented these interviews and it wasn't until like a century later that historians like John Geiger went through this stuff and was like, oh, the Inuit knew all along exactly what had happened. Apparently one of them pointed to where the ship was that I think the Arabis, and they still didn't discover it for another century after that. So it's a really interesting, just kind of side note that like there's this whole group of people were willing to cooperate and share their knowledge and they were just totally ignored and that's what led to the mystery that lasted for over a century.
Yeah. I mean, I think if it hadn't been for him poking around more, they were quite happy just to leave this as it was and that sort of be the end of it all.
Yeah, I guess, so, I guess.
So good stuff.
Yeah, so that's the Franklin expedition. And now that we found the ships, yeah, they are pretty confident they we'll have a lot more information soon. So that'll be pretty cool to look out for. And since I said it's cool to look out for. Oh, by the way, if you want to know more about this, go check out that Nova episode on it. It's really really good. And since I said that, it's time for listener now.
I'm going to call this the shortest short stuff because this is from Kent and Kent Talks. He's basically sending in a short stuff suggestion, but I think says enough about the thing that it can just be its own little episode. Here at the end, Oh, we were talking about the seventies trucker craze on the trucker episode Long Haul Trucking, and he said, we all know truckers have their own lingo. But one phrase that has died out in usage is the mond Fort lane. Have you ever heard of this?
I had until I wrote his email.
Yeah, the Montfort lane referred to the left lane of the interstate. In the early seventies of Colorado, cattle legend named Kenny Montfort started shipping meat to the East coast. He had a fleet of supposedly triple digit trucks and drivers who are not afraid to mash it. They turned two trips a week from Colorado to New York City. One driver recalled he had twelve hundred dollars in speeding fines one year. When these were back when tickets were about fifteen bucks and points didn't accumulate on your license.
It's important.
Yeah, you just rack them up forever and have the company paid for him, I guess. And interestingly, the Monfort family is now the principal owners of the Colorado Rockies baseball team. That is very interesting, and that is from Kent.
Thanks a lot, Kent, good stuff all around. That was the short stuff right there on the end of the Franklin Expedition episode. Great if you want to be like, what was it, Kent?
Kent?
If you want to be like Kent and give us a little short stuff that we can add on as a listener mail. I think that's a cool new thing. Let's give it a shot and you can send that to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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