John Franklin (1786-1847)

Abstract

.. The man who charted nearly 3000 km of the coastline of North America is best remembered as the leader of an expedition that cost the British Admiralty two ships and the lives of 129 men and that made no direct contribution to the geographical unfolding of the Canadian Arctic. ... Franklin endured an enforced idleness for three years before he was put in command of the brig Trent, which was to accompany the Dorothea under David Buchan up the east coast of Greenland and, it was hoped, over the Pole to the Orient. The voyage came to naught, the ships being turned back by heavy ice near Spitzbergen. In the same year, 1818, John Ross had been sent on an ancillary expedition to look for an opening leading out of Baffin Bay; when Ross returned to England to report that Baffin Bay offered no westward egress, John Barrow, Secretary to the Admiralty, refused to believe him. Hence, in 1819 the Admiralty dispatched Edward Parry to search Baffin Bay again, while Franklin went across the mainland to explore the northern cost east of the Coppermine River's mouth. ... The advanced season and a mutinous crew forced him back at Point Turnagain on Kent Peninsula. To avoid the treacherous return along the coast in the much-weakened bark canoes, Franklin decided upon a 500 km overland crossing by compass-bearing to Fort Enterprise, a journey that took them across the Barrens and that witnessed the deaths by starvation and exposure of nearly half the party of 20, at least one murder, an execution without trial, and suspected cannibalism. Franklin and two of his three officers survived; the voyageurs paid the heaviest toll, only 2 out of 11 returning. ... With a well-disciplined crew of 27, comprising mostly British seamen and marines and including Dr. John Richardson and George Back, survivors of the 1819-1822 expedition, Franklin set off for Great Bear Lake [in 1825]. There the party built Fort Franklin, a winter residence near the Great Bear River, which drains the lake into the Mackenzie River. After wintering at Fort Franklin, they descended the Mackenzie in the summer of 1826, using four sturdy boats rowed by seamen in place of the frail bark canoes manned by voyageurs of the previous expedition. At the delta, Dr. Richardson and E.N. Kendall turned east with two boats and about half the men, surveying the coast as far as the mouth of the Coppermine, where the eastward survey had begun on the first Arctic Land Expedition. Franklin and George Back took the remaining men and boats and headed west. ... Under John Franklin's command, then, two small parties of about two dozen men each put over 2800 km of previously unknown coastline on the map. The 1819-1822 expedition had charted the shore almost 900 km east of the Coppermine, and the 1825-1827 party had explored just short of 2000 cm of coast to the Coppermine's west. The north shore of mainland North America stretches some 76 [degrees] of longitude between the Alaska/Yukon border and the northern tip of Labrador; the coastline mapped under Franklin extends 40 of that longitude. Such is the accomplishment that earns John Franklin his greatness. Notwithstanding this major achievement, Franklin is more often known by his final expedition of 1845. ... The Erebus and Terror were last sighted by whalers in Baffin Bay in July 1845, two months after they sailed from London. Not a single crew man ever returned. The many searches for the missing ships and men led to the mapping of much of Canada's Arctic, but the Franklin expedition itself added nothing to that discovery. The mysterious fate of the 1845 expedition, nevertheless, almost totally obscures the geographical triumphs Franklin made in the 1820s when he - to use L.H. Neatby's phrase - "put a roof on the map of Canada."