In May of 1845, Sir John Franklin led an expedition of two British Navy ships to seek out the waterway through the North American Continent that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They never returned. It’s a mystery to this day as to what exactly happened to them.
Passageway for East/West Commerce: Both the United States of America and Great Britain were competing as rivals to capture trade with China that could be enhanced greatly by a waterway across the North American Continent. The British had the upper hand since they had the best developed navy and merchant marine. But a waterway that crossed the continent could only be found in the northern reaches of Canada, as none existed in either southern Canada or the United States. This would mean navigating in arctic weather conditions with the risk of being frozen in place. Other expeditions had tried and failed, but Franklin’s appeared to have the best chance to succeed as the two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, had proven their ability to sail into cold climates in Antarctica. Each ship contained a steam engine and a single propeller to help penetrate the ice.
The Journey: On May 19, 1845, the expedition left England with another navy vessel and a supply ship bound for Greenland. On the west coast of Greenland, the two exploration ships were resupplied, and offloaded mail plus five sailors who were too sick to continue. The escort ships then returned to Britain. In July, 1845, the two exploration ships were spotted by whaling vessels in Baffin Bay where they were waiting for satisfactory conditions to continue on to Lancaster Sound and the Northwest Passage. That was the last time the expedition was seen or heard from by any European.
Victory Point Note: In 1859, the McClintock Arctic Expedition that was sent to try to determine what happened to the Franklin Expedition came upon a note buried in a cairn (a stack of rocks) signed by the officer of a shore party indicating the location of the ships, and that all was well. The note was on a pre-printed form from the admiralty and was dated May 28, 1847. The same form had a second note written on it on April 25, 1848, that had a different message stating that both ships had been abandoned and that 24 men were dead including Franklin. The second note was scribbled around in the margins of the original note. It was signed by Officers Fitzjames and Crozier, and indicated that the survivors were bound overland for Back’s Fish River. This constitutes the best written evidence of the fate of the expedition.
Graves Found: Several more searches besides the McClintock Arctic Expedition were conducted, and a trickle of evidence of where the men were headed was encountered. Two expeditions between 1860 and 1869 by Charles Francis Hall, an American explorer living with the Inuit natives, uncovered graves, camps, and artifacts used presumably by the surviving crew. The remains in one of the graves turned out to be that of one of crew after examination in Britain. Hall continued looking for more cairns in hope of finding further evidence of the expedition’s fate, while gathering and documenting much of the oral tradition from the Inuit. Hall concluded that none of the survivors sheltered with the Inuit. Lt. William Hobson, the discoverer of the Victory Point Note, further found a lifeboat with a skeleton, and numerous artifacts presumably from the Franklin Expedition, including boots, handkerchiefs, scented soap, sponges, slippers, combs, and books, but no written information about their whereabouts or fate.
Shipwrecks Found: In September, 2014, a search team found the wreck of the HMS Erebus in 36 feet of water. In 2016, a different search team found the wreck of the HMS Terror farther to the north and west. In 2019, archeologists began probing the wrecks for any other information that might shed light on what happened. However, the wrecks were found in different locations from where they had been abandoned. That meant that the most reliable evidence turned out to be the oral traditions from the Inuit who correctly told where HMS Erebus could be found. A video made in 2019 of HMS Terror showed the ship frozen in time with many artifacts still in place.
Conclusion: The general theory is that the survivors died one at a time from disease, starvation, or other malady, on the overland journey southward. Most are believed to have perished in 1848/9, but an Inuit tradition has at least one survivor living until 1851.
Sources: History.com, What Happened to the Doomed Franklin Expedition? By Kieran Mulvaney, January 3, 2020.
Wikipedia, Franklin’s Lost Expedition.