Lady Franklin's Lament (The Sailor's Dream) [Laws K9] -- Part 03

DESCRIPTION: Continuation of the notes to "Lady Franklin's Lament (The Sailor's Dream) [Laws K9]" [Laws K9]. -- Part 02. The account is concluded in Part 04.
Last updated in version 6.8
NOTES [8189 words]: Looking at the fuller versions of this song, including the Murray broadside and the 1861 Morning Light text printed by Huntington (which says "It is seven long years" since Franklin set sail), we observe that the texts detail rescue attempts but do not recount the fate of Franklin's crew. I think it nearly certain that the piece originated in this period -- probably in broadsides of 1850-1851, when almost nothing was known and before it became clear that McClintock and Rae and McClure and Collinson, not Austin and Ross and Grinnell, were the most important of the searchers. Additional evidence comes from the fact that no version of the song seems to mention Captain William Kennedy, who seems to have been Jane's favorite (McGooganFranklin, pp. 306-311); despite an extreme lack of sea experience, he led expeditions for her in 1851-1852 and 1853 (Alexander, p. 215) but not in 1850 or earlier.
It is possible that the Murray broadside is the original of the piece; it looks like a partial adaption of another lost-sailor song (in it, Lady Franklin is seen wandering by the Humber looking for her husband!). Nearly every other version, though, is shorter and frankly better; I suspect that there is at least one other deliberate recension standing between the Murray text and the large majority of traditional versions.
This song is surprisingly accurate in its details (another indication that it is contemporary), though later texts have mangled some names badly -- e.g. I can't imagine who captains Hogg(s) and Winslow might be (Mirsky, pp. 322-324, lists all Franklin search parties; neither name is mentioned, nor anything that sounds similar). Some examples of correct references in one or another text:
% "I dreamed a dream, yes I thought it true" (Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsA, B; Creighton-FolksongsFromSouthernNewBrunswick; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanI, II; Fowke/Mills/Blume-CanadasStoryInSong; Greig/DuncanA; Greig/DuncanB; Henry; Huntington; Murray; VaughanW; Lane/Gosbee; Cohen "I had a dream I hope it's not true"): The idea of a sailor seeing Franklin in a dream is not just fiction; one W. Parker Snow had dreamed of finding Franklin near the North Magnetic Pole (which was about right; the Pole at that time was on the western side of the Boothia Peninsula, the expedition passed quite close to it shortly before Franklin's death. Had rescuers gone straight there at the first opportunity, they might have rescued some of his men, would almost certainly have learned his fate sooner, and might even have saved one of the ships. To be sure, it didn't take much psychic ability to guess he was there, since magnetic exploration was one of the expedition's goals; Lambert, p. 142).
Parker's dreams seem to have arisen in his youth as the result of a head injury (Watson, p. 110) -- in other words, it was psychosis, not psychic powers. He had paid a high price for them, too. In his time in the Navy, he had been savagely punished in a way reminiscent of "Captain James (The Captain's Apprentice)." He had bad eyesight, difficulties in speech, and went into fugues -- presumably additional effects of his early beating.
(There were a lot of funny coincidences like this to the tale. When James Clark Ross explored the region he called Prince William Land, he named two capes he could see in the distance "Cape Franklin" and "Cape Jane Franklin." It was near those capes that the Franklin expedition was trapped, and that Franklin died.)
Snow, who had support from Lady Franklin, joined one of the searches as a result of his dream (Berton, p. 174, etc.; Watson, p. 111), though he was of no other significance to the search for Franklin -- when he wanted to explore the region where Franklin died, his commander refused (Watson, pp. 118-119). He later ended up having a major row with the later explorer Charles Francis Hall about a book they both wrote, but that is another story (Sandler, p. 269; Berton, p. 370).
Lady Jane Franklin, to her discredit, tried consulting spiritualists to seek her husband (MSmith, pp. 203-205), starting with one Ellen Dawson (Brandt, p. 323). Dawson seems to have pointed to the right place in the Arctic, and to have correctly stated that there were portraits of two women (Victoria and Lady Franklin) in Franklin's cabin -- but nothing came of it. And Dawson also said Franklin was alive when he had been dead for several years (Brandt, p. 323. Watson, pp. 95-98, has details of what this Dawson said -- and it frankly sounds like the usual case of the medium pulling information out of the client and making it sound like psychic revelations).
Lady Jane consulted a couple of other spiritualists, apparently believing at least one (Watson, pp. 99-101), and another turned up later claiming to have had accurate visions but not revealing them until after the details of the expedition's loss had been published (Brandt, p. 324). In fact, the claim used place names that hadn't even been awarded yet!
In 1998, a fellow named B. J. Rule, who said he was a descendent of Franklin, published a book in which he claimed Franklin came to him by various spiritual means to tell his story. I haven't seen this book; no doubt it explains why Franklin couldn't be bothered to visit any else in spirit in the hundred and fifty years he had been dead.
There is a yet a fourth spiritual link in the Franklin story, making you wonder how anyone could call this an enlightened period: Elisha Kent Kane, who tried to reach the North Pole while pretending to search for Franklin, was involved with a "spiritualist" named Margaret Fox; her ability as a "spirit rapper," according to Berton, p. 237, was "the mould from which all future mediums were fashioned." Berton's claims that no one tried to communicate with the dead are patently false (note that Saul is reported to have brought up the shade of the Prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 28!) but Fox perhaps did found the modern industry of making a *profession* of lying to fools stupid enough to listen to them. Supposedly Kane tried to get her out of this business, but still, he was attracted to her.
% "In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish blow..." (Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanII; Fowke/Mills/Blume-CanadasStoryInSong; Greig/DuncanB; Henry; Huntington; Murray; VaughanW; Colcord "...where the right whale blows"; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanI, Lane/Gosbee "...where the cold wind blows"; Cohen "where the white whale blows"): The Northwest Passage does begin from Baffin Bay -- up the Davis Strait, into the Bay, through Lancaster Sound (which separates Baffin and Devon Islands) and Barrow Strait (between Somerset Island on the south and Devon and Cornwallis Islands on the north), with several alternatives from there (the straight path is through Viscount Melville Sound and McClure Strait, but these are almost always blocked by ice (after Parry was blocked by ice in the 1820s, no one even tried McClure Strait until the Manhattan in the 1960s -- Keating, p. 109 -- and even that ship and its icebreakers eventually gave up); the best route for small boats is south through Peel Sound, passing to the east of Prince of Wales and King William Islands, and then west along the north coast of the Canadian mainland). On July 28, 1845, in Baffin Bay, the Franklin Expedition was seen for the last time by Europeans; they met the whalers Enterprise and Prince of Wales before heading into Lancaster Sound.
(Whalers, we should add, did most of the original exploring of these northern regions; indeed, it was the report of a whaler, William Scoresby, that the ice was melting in the north, that helped encourage the British voyages of exploration after the Napoleonic Wars; see Berton, pp. 24-26. Whales, and hence whalers, are common in far northern and southern latitudes, because that's where the food is -- cold water holds more dissolved oxygen than warm.)
% "a ship of fame" (Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsA, B; Huntington; Lane/Gosbee; Cohen "this ship of fame")/"Two ships of fame" (Greig/DuncanB; Murray; VaughanW)/"Three ships of fame" (Henry)/"Those ships of fame" (Colcord): Franklin's expedition of course consisted only of two ships, Erebus and Terror, but they had initially had the supply ship Barretto Junior along; it turned back before they went on the ice. In addition, H.M.S. Rattler, famous for being an early screw steamer, accompanied them as they left England; Cookman, p. 74. Some versions say he had only two ships anyway.
It is ironic to note that the skipper of the Barretto Junior was among the first to call for a rescue expedition (Lambert, p. 182), but the mere fact that he had been the last to talk to Franklin at length carried no weight at all; most sources don't even mention his concerns.
The two ships that went to the ice were indeed famous, given their Antarctic adventures with James Clark Ross; Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror in Antarctica are named for them. Terror also participated in the bombardment of Fort McHenry that gave rise to "The Star-Spangled Banner"; as a bomb ship, she would have been responsible for at least some of the "bombs bursting in air." Since Terror had been part of George Back's arctic expedition of 1836, and both had been to the Antarctic with James Clark Ross, they were already adapted for arctic service, and were selected because they would need relatively little modification.
Indeed, according to Lambert, p. 134, the Franklin expedition to the passage was intended as a complement to the Ross expedition, involving a quick visit to the north magnetic pole to go with Ross's mapping of the southern pole; the idea (Lambert, p. 142) was to take measurements with more accurate data than Ross had had at the time of his earlier visit to the northern pole. Terrestrial magnetism at this time was a science of observation, not experiment (Brandt, p. 285, quotes the astronomer John Herschel on this point); the theorists desperately wanted more data. The expedition was also interested in biology; Franklin told his subordinate FitzJames that they should study "everything from a flea to a whale" (Beardsly, p. 200).
But this is where 1840s technology became a problem. Bombs were immensely strong; no ships in use were better designed to withstand the pressure of the ice; they had been used for exploration as early as Middleton's expedition a century earlier (Williams-Delusion, pp. 62-64; Williams-Labyrinth, p. 101).
But bombs -- tubby, heavy, low-riding vessels -- were probably the slowest class of ships in the navy, and the modifications for Arctic service, which added to their weight and put them lower in the water, made them slower still. Almost painfully slow. Terror was particularly bad (during the Antarctic expedition, Ross in Erebus often had to shorten sail to let Crozier's ship catch up; MSmith, p. 84). Terror even before her refit was capable of only nine knots before the wind and five when close-hauled (Cookman, p. 74). Those figures probably fell by a third as refitted for arctic service.
It was hoped that steam might provide the answer -- Franklin himself said that the benefits of steam were "incalculable" (Williams-Labyrinth, p. 268). The two ships had revolutionary engines -- removable screw propellers powered by locomotive engines -- but the supply of coal was finite (only enough for twelve days' steaming, according to Hutchinson, p. 56) and could not be replaced, and the engines developed only a few dozen horsepower anyway. Ideally, they didn't even want to leave the screws in place, as they slowed the ships. (Fortunately, they could be removed from inside the ship -- no diving needed!) This was the result of Barrow's hurrying the expedition along; the Admiralty had little time to fit engines more suited to the actual ships.
And locomotive engines had a tradition in steamships -- the first iron steamboat had been powered by a locomotive engine (Fox, p. 142). Even the idea of transatlantic steamships was new; the first such was the Great Western, which had been designed in the 1830s and sailed in 1838 (Fox, pp. 74-80). But she was a paddlewheeler, which was clearly unsuitable for work in icy waters. So there was little practical experience to guide those who rebuilt the ships; they worked with the materials at hand. The result was that their engines gave them a speed of only about four knots (Cookman, p. 41; MSmith, p. 149, notes that Terror even on her test run under steam reached only four knots, implying that she would be slower still in field conditions). They were so weak that Captain Crozier, at least, thought they weren't worth the bother (Potter, p. 61).
Franklin's Erebus and Terror were not the first ships to use steam power in the Arctic -- Victory, sailed by John Ross in 1829, also used steam. But Ross supposedly hadn't told the people who had designed the engine how it would be used (Stein, p. 10,) and Ross found the engine so useless in arctic conditions that he actually yanked it out of his ship in 1830! (Fleming-Barrow, p. 283; Edinger, p. 33, mentions the curious fact that Ross didn't just toss the engine overboard, but carefully disassembled it and had it carried to a beach nearly a mile away. This was nice for historians -- Delgado, p. 91, shows a photo of some of the parts still by the seaside -- but a rather pointless burden for the crew. Ross's adventures inspired at least one song, "The Bold Adventures of Captain Ross," found in C. H. Firth, Publications of the Navy Records Society , 1907, p. 331, available in Google Books, though this shows some pretty substantial errors).
Steam technology had improved since then -- notably in the replacement of paddlewheels with screw propellers -- but steam engines were still not mass-produced; each had its own peculiar characteristics. And Cookman argues that the engines used coal that the expedition needed for heating. Erebus and Terror would be slow to make the passage even under ideal circumstances -- and ideal conditions never happen in the Arctic, and the ships were very unhandy if there were a need for fast maneuvering.
John Ross argued strongly that an Arctic expedition should use smaller, more nimble ships -- but no one listened to him. Lambert, p. 160, argues that small ships could not have done the magnetic studies that helped justify the voyage.
There was another drawback to the steam engines: They were not interchangeable. It had been settled policy for decades to send two nearly-identical vessels on exploring missions (Savours, p. 115; Williams-Labyrinth, p. 214); this meant that they could sail the same passages, move at the same speed, and exchange parts at need -- plus, if one ship sank, its crew would be able to fit on the other. Indeed, Erebus and Terror were close to identical as originally built. But there was no way they could swap engine parts. We have no reason to think it mattered -- but, with the fragmentary information we have, we can't prove it didn't, either.
Plus engine installation took up most of the preparation time allotted for the mission (Lambert, p. 156). This left less time to prepare the crew -- and, indeed, to recruit them, since the officers were worrying about what was being done to their ships! (It is fascinating to note that the first rescue ships did not have steam technology; Wallace, p. 83. This was mostly the result of their hasty mounting.)
Plus all that iron in the hold made magnetic measurements much more difficult (Lambert, p. 156). This may indicate some confusion of the mission -- was it scientific or exploratory?
Another side-effect of the hasty throwing-together of the expedition was the lack of a backup plan. Voyages to the Arctic *did* end in disaster -- as Ross's Victory expedition had shown; given supplies for only a year and a half, they spent four years on the ice, surviving only because of the caches left on Fury Beach years before by Parry. Ross had known about them, and planned all along to use those supplies -- though hardly intending to use them to survive two extra winters! (For details on how Victory was trapped, see Edinger, pp. 123-128; for her abandonment, pp. 170-177.) Franklin had no such emergency cache, and no backup route home -- and, like Ross, his ships would be iced in for more than one winter.
"Captain Brown" (Huntington): No idea
"Brave imbil" (Huntington): No idea
"Captain Hogg" (Henry): No idea
"Doctor Tate" (Lane/Gosbee): No idea
"Captain Kelly of Sedgwick town" (Lane/Gosbee): I'm guessing this is an error for Captain Henry Kellet (1806-1875), part of the expeditions of 1848 and 1852, who failed to find Franklin but did rescue McClure and the crew of the Investigator; more on this below
"Brave Winslow" (Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanII): Error for "Granville" or someone else
"Captain Perry of high renown" (Colcord; Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB "Crumswell Perry/Penny of fiery renown"; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanII "Brave Parry"; Greig/DuncanB "Penny of much renown"; Greig/DuncanC "Penny of much renown"; Henry "Captain Parry of high renown"; Huntington "perry of high renown"). [See also "Captain Penny."]: Not one of Franklin's officers; Captain F. R. M. Crozier commanded the Terror, which had also been his ship during Ross's Antarctic expedition, while the slightly newer and larger Erebus was under the immediate direction of Commander James FitzJames.
The choice of FitzJames, who had never been to the Arctic, was interesting. Battersby, p. 7, notes that he hid his family, and on pp. 23-27 concludes that FitzJames was illegitimate -- obviously a bar to promotion.
Yet he was so promising (Battersby, p. 43, notes that even as a teenager he was fluent in three languages and skilled in mathematics) and so well-versed in current technology that Secretary Barrow had thought about giving him command of the expedition (at least, that's the usual explanation for Barrow's favor toward him, an explanation which Battersby, p. 186, says goes back to Sir Clements Markham, whom he accuses of making it up; Battersby's own explanation involves an unknown favor Fitzjames had done for Barrow's son). But Fitzjames was considered too young at 33 (Sandler, p. 72; Cookman, pp. 55-57); MSmith, p. 138, is scathing about this nomination, which he thinks naked favoritism by Barrow, but none of the other authors seem to have thought him unfit, although Lambert observes his lack of magnetic experience -- but argues on p. 158 that Franklin, who was good at delegating authority, would be able to cover for that.
Instead, Fitzjames was given the post of Commander aboard Erebus, where Franklin flew his flag -- making him, in effect, her captain, since Franklin would be commanding the whole expedition.
"Captain Perry" refers rather to the aforementioned William Edward Parry (1790-1855), an explorer active mostly from 1819-1825 -- and one of the best in terms of ground covered and casualties avoided; his first voyage had discovered Barrow Strait and Viscount Melville Sound and made it farther west than any expedition for more than thirty years. He, like James Clark Ross, had been offered command of the Franklin expedition -- and turned it down; he was long since done with adventure.
% "Captain Ross" (Colcord; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanII; Greig/DuncanB; Greig/DuncanC; Henry ; Huntington; Murray; VaughanW): Either John Ross or his nephew James Clark Ross. The elder Ross, who led expeditions in 1818 and then commanded the aforementioned Victory expedition of 1829 (the primary subject of Edinger), had harmed the quest for the Passage by erroneously stating that Lancaster Sound was a closed inlet.
John Ross's four-year second expedition (1829-1833 -- the one that resulted in him tossing his steam engine on the beach) learned survival techniques that the Franklin expedition ignored to its cost -- but also produced a distorted map of King William Island, with what proved fatal consequences (Delgado, p. 93; Fleming-Barrow, p. 288; Mirsky, pp. 132-133; a copy is on p. 247 of Brandt and p. 238 of Williams-Labyrinth. Ross's map is very hard to read at this scale, but the map on p. 273 of Williams-Labyrinth makes it clear exactly what Franklin thought he had to deal with).
At 72, John Ross led an expedition to find Franklin in 1850 -- but found nothing, and came back with a third-hand report from Greenland that the entire Franklin party was dead. That was, in fact, true, but the details of the report were entirely wrong, and were (properly) ignored. Indeed, other interviews with the same source found that Ross had gotten the story all wrong (Brandt, p. 330). Lady Franklin bitterly remarked that, if she could have done so, she would have put after her name in the subscription list for Ross's expedition, "with a deep sense of gratitude to Sir John Ross for murdering her husband" (Edinger, p. 249). Nonetheless, the Admiralty sent more expeditions; they just didn't send Ross. He died in 1856.
Ross the younger, who had served under his uncle and under Parry, commanded Erebus and Terror on their Antarctic expedition (1839-1843), making many discoveries including the Ross Sea and Ross Ice Shelf (which were named for him). Though Ross had refused to command the Passage expedition of 1845 (in part because he had an irrational dislike of steamers; Stein, p. 12), he took a turn hunting for his friends Franklin and Crozier in 1848-1849 (and broke his health in the process).
% "Captain Austin"/"Captain Osborn." Many versions have one of these names; few have both, making it likely that they are confused (Greig/DuncanB "Captain Austin of Scarborough town"; Murray, VaughanW: "Captain Austen of Scarbro' town"; Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB "Captain Osborne/Hobson of Scobrun town"; Colcord: "Captain Osborne of Scarbury town"; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanII "Captain Osborne of Scarborough Town"; Lane/Gosbee "Captain Osburn of high renown"): either Sherard Osborne of the Pioneer or, more likely, Horatio T. Austin of HMS Resolute, one of the search vessels. A man of great experience and courage (Sandler, p. 115), he nonetheless proved a not very inspiring leader. Lambert, p. 198, says he was "a skillful and human leader, but his party found little more than scraps because they were looking in the wrong places." Clements Markham, a midshipman on the expedition, describes him as small and stout, an advocate of steam, a "great talker," "genial and warm-hearted," "fond of detail," and having "wide knowledge, though he was a little narrow in his views. But for managing the internal economy of an expedition... he was admirable" (Savours, p. 205).
Alternately, Osborn was one of Austin's subordinates at this time. Neatby, p. 121, says that it was "Osborn's destiny to add colour to the search both by making history and writing it. He was no orthodox officer.... He was antipathetic to the Establishment" although he doesn't seem to have caused too much trouble at this time.
(The error "Hobson" of Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB is interesting, because it was Lieutenant William Hobson who actually discovered the Franklin message; McClintock, pp. 189-193. But he was a lieutenant, not a captain, and he wasn't even that at the time this song was written.)
Austin had been to the Arctic almost thirty years before, on Parry's third expedition that resulted in the loss of H.M.S. Fury; he was now too old and heavy to lead searches, so his role had to be organizational (Williams-Labyrinth, p. 287).
Austin and Erasmus Ommaney of Assistance were the first to find any traces of the Franklin expedition, in the form of discarded supplies on Devon Island, and later three graves and other artifacts on the peninsula known as Beechey Island (Berton, p. 180). (The three graves were later excavated and autopsied, to much publicity; James Taylor actually wrote a song about the corpse of one of the men, John Torrington; Potter, p. 13.) But they did not learn the expedition's fate (and met public scorn on their return home in 1851); curiously, although there were three cairns in and near Beechey (see map on p. 70 of Woodman), all three were empty of documents.
Having concluded that Franklin could not be west of Lancaster Sound, and could not have turned south because Peel Sound was blocked, Austin and Co. turned north into Jones Sound, where Franklin never ventured (Savours, p. 211), so naturally they found nothing else. The very fact that the Austin expedition's early return is not mentioned in the earliest known broadside hints that it dates from before they made it back. Austin would not serve in the Arctic after his first mission, and spent the last years of his career in what amounted to desk jobs (Sandler, p. 252). Indeed, there was an Admiralty inquiry into the (lack of) results of the expedition (Lambert, p. 215). And Lambert, p. 202, says the narratives of the expeditions were very exciting, but the song makes no hint of this.
"[Captain] and as many's the more" (Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB has this name twice): Given its context and the timing, this might be an error for "Captain Austin," but it might refer to Sherard Osborne, who as a lieutenant commanded the Intrepid during Austin's expedition and also served under Edward Belcher during the expedition of 1852-1854. Osborn was arrested by Belcher for arguing about the commander's plans -- but it wasn't held against him, because Belcher's expedition was a disaster. Osborne later wrote a book called Stray leaves from an Arctic journal (Savours, p. 206).
(Arresting a subordinate was by no means unusual for Belcher. Savours, pp. 243-245, devotes three pages to a history of his arguments with junior officers. On p. 245, she cites a source describing which tells how Belcher *habitually* court-martialed his officers at the end of a voyage! Lambert, p. 230, quotes an admiral who told him, "A skilful navigator and a clever seaman you may be, but a great officer you can never be, with that narrow mind." His own men wrote graffiti calling him a pirate; Lubbock, p. 355)
All that can be said in defence of Belcher is that few men died on his watch. Otherwise, his expedition was an unmitigated disaster, learning nothing useful and resulting in the loss of four ships. And not to the ice -- Belcher (who had indicated little interest in the Arctic) after two years decided he had had enough, and despite the arguments of his subordinates abandoned four of his five ships, even though they were still intact. Berton, p. 244, calls him "one of... the most detested figures in the Royal Navy" and Sandler summarizes his actions as a "disgraceful performance"; p. 253. Belcher of course faced a court-martial, which concluded that his actions fell within his discretion, but they gave him back his sword "in stony silence" (Sandler, p. 145). By contrast, his subordinate Kellett was openly praised when his sword was returned (Brandt, p. 361).
It is ironic to note that Belcher was the one Canadian among the exploring leaders -- he came from Nova Scotia (Wallace, p. 164).
Belcher was deprived of all future commands -- and his subordinate Osborn promoted for his actions (Mirsky, p. 153; Lambert, p. 246). Indeed, Osborn would campaign for expeditions to the Pole long after the Admiralty had decided to stop wasting ships and men on the Arctic.
(It was, incidentally, during Belcher's expedition that the supply ship Breadalbane was sunk off Beechey Island; MacInnis-Land, p. 38. The search for the Breadalbane was the subject of MacInnis's book; the ship was and is the northernmost known shipwreck. The ordeal of the ship shows the problems or operating in the Arctic. Erebus and Terror, despite a year and a half trapped in the ice, stayed afloat until abandoned, showing the strength of bomb ships. The unreinforced Breadalbane was not supposed to enter the ice -- but you can't avoid ice in the Arctic. Off Beechey Island, she was "nipped" by ice and sank in 15 minutes; MacInnis-Land, p. 116. Had the rest of Belcher's expedition not been based there, the entire crew would probably have been lost.)
% "[Captain] Penny" (VaughanW; Murray: "Penny of much reuown" (sic.)): [See also "Captain Perry."] Presumably captain William Penny, an experienced whaler based in Aberdeen (Lubbock, p. 51). In 1847, unable to find whales in the usual places, he had poked around in Lancaster Sound, and looked for Franklin while he was at it, making him in a sense the first man to look for Franklin (Watson, p. 64-65). His son would later command the Polynia, the ship which gave rise to "The Old Polina"; the elder Penny had supervised her construction (Lubbock, p. 52). Lady Franklin managed to convince ("con" might be a better word) the Admiralty into sending this veteran arctic sailor on a search expedition in 1850-1851, but he didn't find much (Berton, p. 171); he was sent into Jones Sound (north of Lancaster Sound, and far away from the path Franklin had been ordered to follow; (Berton, p. 173). It was closed by ice, so he headed for Lancaster Sound, but that left him among all the other search vessels. His men were the first to find the traces on Beechey Island (Sandler, p. 115), but they would have been found soon anyway.
He then wanted to head north up Wellington Channel -- he headed back to England to argue for this and was turned down (Brandt, pp. 337-338), but even had this been permitted, that wouldn't have found Franklin either. Franklin had indeed gone up Wellington Channel and around Cornwallis Island, but he didn't stay there. (Franklin's orders seem to have been somewhat contradictory -- the instructions to try Wellington Channel were written in a different hand from the other parts; Wallace , p. 50.) Berton thinks that if Penny had had his way, it might have caused the search to be directed in a better direction (pp. 190-191), but I can't see how.
Penny ended up in a dispute with Austin, and went back to whaling after his one experience with the navy (Simpson, p. 264). He ended up getting a lot of blame from the naval board (Watson, pp. 120-121). Watson thinks this was because of navy prejudice and arguments he had with Captain Austin, but it seems that Penny simply could not communicate in writing (Williams-Labyrinth, p. 195); the fact that he is mentioned here is an argument that the song was written before the results of the Austin/Penny expedition were known.
% "Brave Granville" (Colcord; Murray; Greig/DuncanC; VaughanW ; Greig/DuncanB "Gravel"): Probably an error for Henry Grinnell, an American trader who was convinced by Lady Franklin to support the search. He paid for (but did not accompany) two expeditions; neither accomplished much except to make Elisha Kent Kane briefly famous for surviving a disaster he largely caused. The other possibility would be that it is the Hull whaling captain John Gravill, who was fairly well known at this time (Lubbock, pp. 349-350, tells of him having a near-disaster in the Arctic in 1849) but who was not involved in the Franklin search that I know of.
% "With a hundred seamen he sailed away" (Cohen; Colcord; Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanI, II; Fowke/Mills/Blume-CanadasStoryInSong; Greig/DuncanC; Henry; Huntington; VaughanW; Lane/Gosbee; Murray "...seamen with hearts so bold"; Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsA "five hundred seamen"): Franklin's force initially totalled 134 men, one of the largest forces ever sent on an exploratory voyage; interestingly, Captain Crozier, Franklin's second in command, thought that there were too many men on his ship (Hutchinson, p. 82). But he would have reduced the crew by only about two to four men.
Not all the men went to the Arctic. Five were sent home sick before the ships entered Lancaster Sound and were the only survivors. Three of those initial losses were significant: the sailmaker from Terror and the armorers (gunmakers) from both Erebus and Terror (McClintock, p. 231). The loss of the latter would make hunting for provisions much harder (and fresh food was the only way to get the Vitamin C to avoid scurvy, and 1840s guns needed a lot of maintenance); the loss of the former meant that the two ships -- never speedy, as we saw above -- might end up even slower
It's perhaps worth reminding moderns, who never face scurvy, how deadly it was at the time. It affects the connective tissue especially, meaning that scars reopen; it also causes blood vessels to leak, resulting in bruises where there has been no trauma; it leaves men weak and gasping for breath, and kills when blood vessels in the brain rupture (Sobel, p. 14). For years, it had ruined crews on long voyages, opening old wounds, causing joint pains, eventually resulting in the loss of teeth as the jaws swelled up; it also affected the mind, so the victims did not realize how bad the problem was.
Scurvy is prevented by Vitamin C, but that is found primarily in fresh vegetables, and also to an extent in fresh meat (especially organ meat). Crews on sea voyages had none such, and the symptoms usually started to occur in four to six months. This is because crews lived mostly on biscuit and salt meat (as late as the Franklin search, the daily diet for sledgers consisted of 3/4 of a pound of salted meat and bacon, a pound of biscuits, a drib of many-year-old potatoes, and chocolate and tea; Savours, p. 263). By the time of the Franklin expedition, the use of lemon juice (frequently called "lime juice") was common -- but the juice loses potency over time.
Another curious fact about the expedition is that, though the crew was hand-picked, it had very little useful experience (MSmith notes that the Admiralty had given responsibility for choosing the crew to FitzJames -- ordinarily it would have been Crozier's job -- and blames him for botching it, even accusing FitzJames of "nauseous whiff of patronage"; p. 146. This was unfortunate in at least one way: It meant that the depressive Crozier had no close friends aboard the expedition; MSmith, p. 155). Apart from Franklin and Crozier, the only commissioned officer who had been to the arctic was Lt. Graham Gore of the Erebus (Fleming-Barrow, p. 373) -- and his experience was slight; he had been on George Back's disastrous expedition on the Terror, which would have taught him a lot about shipwreck but little about arctic survival. Plus he, like Franklin, would die fairly early on. Crozier was the only officer on the expedition to know about wintering in the arctic on a ship.
The crewmen were better. On paper, only about half a dozen sailors had arctic experience (Cookman, p. 61) -- but some of those who did had very extensive backgrounds indeed. Thomas Blanky, who had been first mate on John Ross's harrowing four-year expedition of 1829-1833 (Edinger, p. 244), meaning that he had more experience of wintering in the arctic than any man alive other than James Clark Ross, would go on to be Terror's Ice Master (cf. Savours, p. 127). One of the surgeons had been on whaling voyages; there was a whaling captain who served as an Ice Master (Savours, p. 178). Even the men who had not been to the Arctic -- who were the large majority -- were mostly veterans with good records.
% "To the frozen ocean in the month of May" (Fowke/Mills/Blume-CanadasStoryInSong; Shepard "As through the frozen seas they pushed"): The expedition left the Thames on May 19, 1845, to arrive in Baffin Bay in June There was little point in arriving before June due to the ice, though a departure date a few weeks earlier might have allowed the expedition to make it a little farther before their first winter. At least in a normal year, though 1845 was more than usually icy (MSmith, p. 163).
Even if the ice had permitted, a departure date earlier than mid-May was impossible due to the rush with which the expedition was put together. In any case, it appears that there was ice in Barrow Straight in the first year of the Franklin expedition, causing them to make a useless circuit of Cornwallis Island before settling down to winter at Beechey Island. So to start earlier in 1845 would have done no good at all. The really strange part is that the expedition seems to have left no records on Beechey Island -- just empty cans and a few other artifacts and the three graves.
The phrase "the frozen ocean" predates this song; it is said to have been used in the early nineteenth century in a description of an attempt at the Northeast Passage (Mancall, p. 237).
% "Seven long years" (Cohen; Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanI; Murray; Henry; Huntington; Lane/Gosbee; Fowke/Mills/Blume-CanadasStoryInSong omits "long"; Greig/DuncanB "a long time, seven years have passed"; Greig/DuncanC "since that time seven years have passed"); This would make the date of the broadside c. 1852; note that in Shepard the event is dated *nine* years ago, and it says that "At length sad tidings of this brave band Have reached the shores of their native land." The Shepard broadside, which has relatively few of the common words, appears to be a rewrite after John Rae brought in his report.
% "On mountains of ice their ship was drove" (Colcord ; Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsA; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanI; Fowke/Mills/Blume-CanadasStoryInSong; Greig/DuncanB; Greig/DuncanC; Huntington; Murray; VaughanW ; Shepard "their ships by blocks of ice were crushed"; Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB "on mountains of Fife"; Cohen "on mount'nous icebergs"; Lane/Gosbee "with mountains of ice where their ship was stove): The phrase "mountains of ice" predates this song; Abacuk Pricket used it in his description of Henry Hudson's 1610 expedition (Mancall, p. 97), and it appears John Barrow used the wording in the period leading up the the nineteenth century explorations (Williams-Labyrinth, p. 172).
And certainly there was plenty of ice on Franklin's route. The whole Northwest Passage is around 70 degrees north; as early as 1631, Luke Foxe had proved that there was no passage south of the Arctic Circle (at least in his own mind, although some of his subordinates were dubious; Williams-Labyrinth, p. 64), and this was confirmed by explorations of the west side of Hudson Bay done in the eighteenth century.
Despite stories by men such as Juan de Fuca, the "Straits of Anian" (an easy Northwest Passage with at most a short stretch in the Arctic) had been definitively cast from the map by Samuel Hearne, who in 1771 (in the company with a party of natives) reached the mouth of the Coppermine River and became the first European to view the seas of the Arctic Archipelago. His journey proved that northern Canada was very large and contained no straights or sounds or passages (Williams-Delusion, pp. 231-233). The passage, such as it was, is all in the Arctic.
(Hearne, incidentally, was forced to witness a massacre along the way, and his sad retelling of the tale would much later inspire Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; McGooganHearne, pp. 1-3.)
Much of the Passage, including Lancaster Sound, is well north even of the Arctic Circle. Even in summer, the waters are never entirely free of ice; in winter, they all freeze over, and it's a matter of luck which ones thaw out in any given spring. (It took some time to realize this; there was a hypothesis in the nineteenth century that sea water never froze -- Williams-Labyrinth, p. 133. Ridiculous as this sounds to us, it should be remembered that this was a time when artificial refrigeration did not exist.)
Every arctic expedition at some point found itself frozen in, and those which handled their ships badly would see them crushed by the ice. Franklin was neither the first nor the last to come to grief this way, though severe weather in 1847 probably sealed the expedition's fate. (Beattie, p. 128, notes that ice cores show that "the Franklin era was climactically one of the least favorable [i.e. coldest and iciest] periods in 700 years." The climatologists are not absolutely sure of this -- according to Potter, p. 190, there is a five year margin of error about in the core studies -- but MSmith, p. 179, Walpole, p. 146, and Woodman, p. 292, mention an Inuit report that "there was no summer between two winters" in the time the ships were trapped in the ice, which seems like good supporting evidence.)
The history of ships in the passage shows how deadly the ice could be. Parry's H.M.S. Fury was lost to it on his third expedition. The ice had trapped John Ross's Victory, forcing him to abandon the ship. Terror herself had nearly been wrecked in George Back's expedition of 1833-1835 -- the ice "once hurled his battered vessel forty feet up the side of a cliff" (Berton, p. 130); the ship wallowed back across the Atlantic and had to be beached on the Irish coast. Breadalbane, mentioned above, lasted only a few days in the Arctic. And H.M.S. Investigator never escaped Mercy Bay after being trapped in the Franklin search -- it was found, largely intact, in the bay in 2010 (Stein, p. 250), although so far only limited archaeological work has been done at the site.
"Only the Eskimo in his skin canoe Was the only one to ever come through": The Inuit did indeed use skin kayaks, and they did know the paths through the ice -- and, as it turned out, saw some of the Franklin refugees. They had saved John Ross's 1829 expedition, which would have perished due to starvation and scurvy without them. But not every European commander had the diplomatic skills or wisdom to work with them (no one prior to Charles Frances Hall in the 1860s really tried to make friends with them), and no one bothered to talk to them about Franklin until John Rae in 1854. One of them drew a map for Hall that -- it now appears -- shows the site of one of the wrecks, but no one at the time was able to interpret it (Watson, p. 298). Worse, there were very few competent Inuit interpreters a the time, so even when they were asked, the results were riddled with errors of translation and understanding (Walpole, p. 147). This failure, combined with very poor record-keeping and what we would now call archaeological work (a very large fraction of Walpole is devoted to nitpicky, almost unreadable reports about problems with the provenance of artifacts; a good example is p. 183, which shows that we can't even always identify the surviving artifacts with the expedition they came from, let alone where they were collected on that expedition), severely handicapped later attempts to figure out what happened.
In any case, Franklin had too many men for the Inuit to be able to provide useful supplies; the natives traveled in small bands and were barely able to feed themselves even so.
% "For my long-lost Franklin I'd cross the main": Lady Franklin did not physically participate in many searches (Sandler, p. 86, says that she volunteered to join John Richardson's search, only to be politely rejected; Watson, p. 75, says that she tried to lead an expedition), but she did in fact go to the Americas during the hunt, and during the great push starting in 1850, she was hovering around the edges of the search.
% "Ten thousand pounds would I freely give" (Cohen; Doerflinger-SongsOfTheSailorAndLumbermanII; Greig/DuncanC; Henry; Huntington; Murray; Shepard; Creighton-MaritimeFolkSongsB "one hundred pounds"; Fowke/Mills/Blume-CanadasStoryInSong, Lane/Gosbee "five hundred pounds"): When Franklin had been gone for three years, the Admiralty offered 100 guineas for word of him -- and Lady Franklin 2000 pounds (Williams-Labyrinth, p. 279).
Brandt, p. 320, says that by about 1849 Lady Franklin was offering a thousand pounds of her own money to any whaler who found her husband. She later raised this to three thousand pounds (Brandt, p. 322). McGooganFranklin, p. 349, claims that by 1856 she had spent 35,000 pounds on the search. He is including others' contributions in that (and I frankly don't believe that total in any case), but there is no question but that she gave it her all. Fortunately for her, she often was able to gain free lodging and assistance on her travels because of her fame and sorrows. But she eventually had to cut off charities and others whom she had assisted, and for her last expedition, ended up selling property in Australia (Alexander, p. 241; Beardsley, p. 222); all her money went to feed her obsession with her husband (Beardsley, p. 217).
The official rewards also increased for a time. The Admiralty for a while was offering twenty thousand pounds for anyone who could rescue the Franklin expedition (Williams-Labyrinth, p. 286), and half that for definitive word of Franklin's fate, but eventually dropped it, though John Rae did manage to collect (McGoogan-Rae, p. 242). Lambert, p. 250, says that Rae was publicly blamed for the bad news of cannibalism he brought back, even though he believes that the officials privately accepted it; "As an outsider, a man of trade and the wild frontier, he could be hung out to dry to serve official ends, and paid off later." Brandt, p. 369, describes how the British public simply refused to accept the truth -- as McGooganRae, p. 234, observes, the British had to be able to claim moral superiority over natives to justify their colonial policies. Lady Franklin, who of course was outraged, enlisted Charles Dickens to support her cause. And Dickens, who was liberal in most things but a racist with a prejudice against native peoples, went along and leveled charges against the Inuit; McGooganRae, pp. 223-226.
Rae had the account of cannibalism second-hand from the Inuit, but Schwatka's 1876 expedition supplied direct evidence (Walpole, p. 99), and more has arisen since.
McClintock's final expedition, which found the key evidence telling of the expedition's fate, was relatively small mostly because of Lady Franklin's need to keep costs down (Berton, pp. 317-318): it consisted of one small ship, with the officers serving as volunteers. The exact amount she spent is unknown -- I've seen estimates as low as 3,000 pounds and as high as 35,000 (so Berton, p. 333, although that total probably includes contributions from others) -- but it was substantial.
As noted above, Berton, pp. 202-203, and Brandt, p. 233, say that Lady Franklin brought ten thousand pounds to their marriage, and that part of the estate was one of the things he left her in his will. Thus, if she did spend ten thousand pounds, it was the entirety of her own money. On the other hand, there is every indication that she spent more than her own money; Franklin had left his first wife's dowry to his daughter Eleanor, and she quarreled with her stepmother -- not even telling Jane Franklin about her upcoming marriage (Watson, p. 106) after she and Jane had disagreed about the marriage and the way to search for Franklin (Alexander, pp. 230-231) -- arguing that Lady Franklin had wasted her estate.
She was probably right; Jane Franklin had power of attorney over her husband's estate (Alexander, p. 231) -- but only as long as he was alive and on an expedition, so the longer Jane refused to admit that John was dead, the longer she hung on to an inheritance that should have been Eleanor's. (In fact Jane outlived Eleanor, who died at age 36; Alexander, p. 245.) She also opened the will without telling her stepdaughter -- and found that it did not give her the inheritance she wanted (Alexander, p. 233); it followed the normal rules of inheritance, meaning the legacy would go to Eleanor (McGooganFranklin, p. 320). And, while this was going on, she granted Eleanor only 200 pounds per year of the 600 per year her inheritance called for (Alexander, p. 232), leaving Eleanor and her husband John Philip Gell (who had 200 pounds a year of his own; McGooganFranklin, p. 294) barely middle class. To be sure, Eleanor Franklin and Lady Franklin had had strained relations for decades; if Jane Franklin was not a deliberately cruel stepmother, she was certainly not a kind one, and Sophia Cracroft, who would know better than most, said that Eleanor hated her stepmother; Beardsley, p. 153.
The quarrel was so bad that it ended up in the papers (Alexander, pp. 234-235), and Jane for a time would not see Eleanor and her husband (Alexander, p. 236).
Lady Franklin had devoted so much money to the quest that her rich father in 1851 cut her out of his will to keep her from wasting more money (Brandt, p. 326; McGooganFranklin, p. 322).
Sophia herself had had something of a quarrel with the Franklins after their return fromTasmania had to go live with her mother; for the disagreement, see Alexander, p. 205. Sophia and Jane reconciled four years later (Alexander, p. 211). The point is, Lady Franklin could be abrasive, and the main reason was her obsessions.
Lady Franklin's dedication did do some slight good for feminism: She would be the first woman to be given the Patron Medal of the Royal Geographic Society.
As we see, the original version of the song ended before the fate of Franklin was known. So what happened to him? See the next part....
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