Dreams of a Northwest Passage connecting America to Asia tantalized empire builders from the earliest days of New World exploration. But after the Napoleonic Wars, the British turned this fascination into an obsession. Sending out the fleet to explore new trade routes kept the Royal Navy busy and injected new capital into exploration. The rage for trade gripped Victorian England with gusto.
Exploration of the unknown was also driven by national pride, and the 1845 Arctic expedition led by Sir John Franklin generated banner headlines. One of the most grandiose schemes of its day, this highly publicized project was unfortunately doomed from the start, undone by a prevailing scientific belief that the Arctic waters were open and warmed by the North Pole’s proximity to the sun. The reality was crushingly different, and the under-equipped explorers never had a chance.
Instead of adding another dazzling jewel to Victoria’s crown, the expedition’s two ships and 129-member crew vanished soon after London crowds cheered them off. The mystery surrounding their fate launched a series of nearly 90 search expeditions that achieved cult status and lasted into the present century. One writer called the expedition’s afterlife “the most extensive, expensive, perverse, ill-starred” manhunt in history.
Paul Watson now jumps into the Franklin fray. A Canadian reporter who has covered the Arctic, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, Watson meticulously researched naval archives and interviewed Inuit storytellers to create this portrait of human folly and endurance. But he was also a participant, traveling in 2014 aboard the icebreaker that found one of Franklin’s two ships, and later was the first journalist to report the news of the other ship’s discovery. Along the way, he came to understand firsthand the perils of the Arctic climate.
Ice Ghosts argues that the expedition was in trouble even before it left port. Watson describes Sir John Franklin, the expedition’s captain, as “a celebrated Arctic explorer seemingly past his prime.” Although his health was frail, Franklin actively campaigned for the post and the Admiralty finally acceded. But a faded daguerreotype taken the day before the expedition set out suggests good cause for doubt: Instead of a dynamic leader, the image captures a portly man of 59 who belonged in front of a fireplace sipping brandy—not helming an expedition to the North Pole.
Franklin desperately sought this spectacular assignment to restore his reputation. When he was younger, he had led overland missions to map the Arctic coastline with some success, but subsequent service as lieutenant-governor of the Tasmanian penal colony ended with humiliation: He was recalled in 1843. Franklin became convinced that the 1845 expedition offered a last, best hope to restore his public image.
The expedition’s two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were converted bomb ships. (Terror had memorably been to North America before: In one of the final battles of the War of 1812, the ship fired mortars at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write a poem about the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air.) The two ships were painted black with a yellow stripe and refitted with iron plating and steam engines. The expedition was provisioned for three years, with 33,289 pounds of preserved meat; there was also a library of more than 2,000 books and a hand organ for each ship. The ships also carried the latest magnetic surveying instruments—although when the expedition actually entered the Arctic seas, these state-of-the-art compasses failed miserably, jumbled by the magnetic fields near the North Pole.
The expedition’s ships left England on May 19, 1845, stopped at Greenland to take on more supplies, and were last seen in August by two European whaling ships in Baffin Bay near the entrance to the Northwest Passage. Nothing more was heard from the expedition.
When Erebus and Terror failed to return by 1849, search parties were formed. Artifacts and the graves of three sailors were found on Beechey Island, where the ships’ crews had camped in the winter of 1845-46. An official naval record written by the Erebus commander was eventually discovered further south under a stone landmark at Victory Point on King William Island; it described how the ships had been ice-locked for 19 months, and reported that Sir John Franklin had died on June 11, 1847. It also stated that the surviving 105 officers and men were abandoning the ships on April 22, 1848, and that they would attempt to travel by land to a mainland trading post 600 miles south at Back’s Great Fish River.
None made it. The Royal Navy had outfitted Franklin’s men with woolen mitts and coats; in comparison, Inuit wore elbow-high wolfskin mitts and multilayered fur clothing. As quickly became apparent, Royal Navy seamen’s boots were useless against the cold, making severe frostbite and gangrene inevitable.
No single mass death site has ever been located, but the skeletons that have been found indicated starvation and lead poisoning. (The solder used to seal the lids of the expedition’s 8,000 tins of food may have contributed to the lead poisoning.)
Watson reports on many of the search parties that set out after 1849 to discover Franklin’s fate, recounting the decades of efforts to piece together what happened to the expedition. The long hunt was clouded by egregious bureaucratic infighting, scientific bungling, and misinformation; Watson describes the search as “a tug-of-war between establishment experts sure of their knowledge and outsiders following an inexplicable compulsion, an inner voice, or an educated guess.” But even this veteran reporter gets swept up by the Franklin spell, admitting, “It really seeps into your blood. I became one of those people obsessed with the mystery.”
Interest in the Franklin expedition surged anew in 1984 when Canadian anthropologist Owen Beattie led a forensic team that excavated the three sailors’ graves at Beechey Island. The exhumed bodies were remarkably preserved by permafrost, and Beattie’s account made international headlines when it published photographs of mummified sailor John Torrington staring eerily into infinity. Beattie’s team also offered evidence suggesting that the crews resorted to cannibalism.
Watson describes interviews with Inuit who related their elders’ stories about two huge ships—“the ‘strange houses’ that delivered dying white men and then vanished beneath the waves.” Few white searchers apparently took these recollections seriously. Then, in 2014, a coalition of Canadian agencies and the nonprofit Arctic Research Foundation began searching the polar seas with sonar. Watson himself was aboard the Canadian icebreaker that discovered Erebus in September 2014. It was in just 36 feet of water, covered in “a thick forest of kelp”—and, as it happens, right where the Inuit had long been saying a ship sank. The wreck yielded a trove of artifacts, including the ship’s cast-bronze bell and two brass cannon.
Two years later, the other ship, Terror, was discovered just a dozen leagues away in 79 feet of water. No skeletal remains were found on either ship, and Sir John Franklin’s grave has never been found.
Amy Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.
