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A tiny three-masted ship, the Matthew, sails west through the icy waters of the North Atlantic, her square rigging pulled taut against the biting winds. Despite her apparent flimsiness and her diminutive size at barely 60 foot long, the Matthew has already survived a winter that would sink much larger ships. In fact, being small, she's maneuverable and responsive, and perfect for exploring these unknown coasts.
On deck, her commander, John Cabot, glances behind him to where a pale sun is rising. Cabot, just like his contemporary explorer and fellow Italian, Christopher Columbus, is in search of a quicker route from Europe to the east. Having left Bristol, England, on May 2, he and his 18-strong crew sailed across the island before setting a course due west, expecting to find Asia.
Now, nearly eight weeks later, a dark, craggy point of land rises out of the sea ahead. But even in late June, the approach to this rocky coastline is choked by ice. It's a worrying prospect for a small wooden craft whose side could be so easily pierced by half-hidden rocks or treacherous, ever-shifting ice. Feeling it's too dangerous, Cabot turns south to look for an anchorage, skirting the coast for three or four miles.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a wide inlet appears, beyond which lies open countryside covered with tall pines that will do nicely. After they have anchored, he takes a few crew members ashore in a smaller boat. There, they ceremonially raise a crucifix, a banner with the cross of St. George for England, and a Venetian flag to honor Cabot's home city. Then the important bit.
They officially claim the land in the name of King Henry VII of England, the voyage's sponsor. But Cabot knows he hasn't sailed anywhere near far enough for this to be Asia. Though finding this place, which will become Newfoundland, is a great step forward, their intended destination is still thousands of nautical miles away, over the top of Canada. The quest to find the Northwest Passage will last for centuries more.
it will cost millions and claim hundreds of lives. For seafarers, merchants, travelers, and monarchs, the idea of a northwest passage from Europe to Asia was pursued as the holy grail of maritime exploration. Mysterious, mythological, and seemingly impossible to find, some of Europe's finest seamen dedicated their lives to its discovery. What none of them realized was quite how inhospitable those uncharted waters would be.
or how often it would be drawn back there. So who were the men who gave up everything to find the passage? And why did they do it? Why did its discovery remain so vital, even when countless explorations had proved it an almost unviable quest? And who was the explorer to finally claim the discovery, after centuries of futile searching? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Network, this is a short history of the Northwest Passage. It's the late 1400s.
For Europe, trade in silks, spice, and other riches from the East has relied on a network of routes from Asia bringing goods across land. With the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, this so-called Silk Road is suddenly closed to European traders.
Desperate to continue the lucrative trade with the Orient, Europeans begin wondering: what if there were a sea passage connecting Europe to the East, which would allow uncontested trade with China and India? The coastlines of the Southern Hemisphere are already being mapped by the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch. In 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope, he opens up a potential route to India via the bottom of Africa.
It's a long way down, though, and now dominated by the Portuguese. But almost nothing is known of the lands lying to the north and west of Europe. So that's where explorer Christopher Columbus goes, bent on finding a shorter route to Asia. The search for the Northwest Passage is about to start. The idea of a northern route is not new. For thousands of years before Columbus set sail, the Arctic has been traveled by nomadic Inuit people and early Viking explorers.
Even so, when Columbus embarks on his expedition, the few maps he'll be navigating by are at best guesswork and at worst utter fabrication. Dr. Russell Potter is professor of English at Rhode Island College and author of Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture.
If you look at the Mercator maps and some of the other maps of that era, you know, the maps of the pole usually show it like a pizza that's neatly divided into four pieces with open water of some kind between those. And I think that's, you know, the fact that actual geography is so much less symmetrical and predictable than the imaginary ones took a while to grasp.
Even before those dubious maps were created, ancient Greek and Roman geographers had long posited the theory of a northern passage. In fact, it's their calculations that Columbus uses when charting his voyage. Which is why, having landed in what we now know to be the Bahamas, he confidently writes that he has found a straightforward route to the east. But in the competitive world of maritime exploration, his rivals doubt his claims.
Rivals like fellow Italian Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot, as his English patrons know him. Just like Columbus, John Cabot wants to locate a northern route to the Orient. Unlike Columbus, whose explorations are supported by the Spanish, Cabot has English backing. King Henry VII commissions him with five ships and as many men as he needs to discover and claim lands in his name. It's on Cabot's second expedition that he comes across what is now Newfoundland.
But though he is far from Asia, his travels reinforce the feasibility of reaching uncharted lands and a northwestern route from Europe to the east. It sparks a clamor to find and claim new territory. As the 16th century begins, France and Spain send out expeditions of their own. Gradually, painstakingly, maps begin taking shape.
Each expedition sequentially mapped what it could, and of course this led to a lot of dotted lines which indicated imagined coastline beyond where they had been able to go. And this was added to slowly and painfully over a long period of time, but often at great expense. And often the news was negative, basically, don't go that way, try someplace else. And there were a great variety of someplace elses to be tried.
as the coastline is mapped and more land claimed trade with far-off countries improves in february 1555 to explore these opportunities a new company is chartered by queen mary the first of england known officially as the company of merchant adventurers to new lands the muscovy company is a consortium of english merchants aimed to establish trade routes with muscovy or russia as we know it today
Thanks to their intrepid explorers, the company quickly opens up a sea route out of England, heading northeast over Scandinavia before reaching the Russian coast. But the true goal is to break all the way through to the Pacific and establish a trade route with Asia. In 1576, the Muscovy Company sends Martin Frobisher to locate an entrance to a northwest passage.
a fearless sailor. With a reputation as a swashbuckling privateer, Frobisher sails north and then west from England, full of gusto. But just five weeks into the expedition, two of his three ships are lost in a storm. Somehow he manages to save his own vessel and sails on. By mid-August, he reaches a large landmass to the west of today's Greenland. This glacier-laden mountainous place will later become known as Bathin Island.
For Frobisher, it is the end of the road. Impenetrable ice and relentless winds stop his northward advance. Reluctantly, he turns for home. He doesn't come back empty-handed, though. On finding a large lump of heavy, dark black rock on the island, he'd originally thought he'd found coal. But having assessed its weight and density, he is now convinced it contains gold.
Probysheert uses this idea to secure finance for his next voyage, and in 1578 he sails from Plymouth with a small armada in tow, with a plan to establish a mining colony. To this day, it is the largest Arctic exploration ever assembled. Ten ships are on the official list, with a handful of independent vessels tagging along, in the hope of cashing in on the gold rush.
But as he nears Baffin Island, ice and stormy weather drive him south into the mouth of a rushing tidal waterway. It's impossible to cross, and his exploration can go no further. The mining colony plan fails, and maybe it's just as well. The small mountain of the black rock he brings home turns out to be iron pyrite, or fool's gold.
Literally hundreds, if not a thousand needles came down like the heavens were falling. I'm Natalia Petruzzella. From BBC Radio 4, this is Extreme. Muscle men. When you're muscular, when you're big, you get respect. This is the story of the biggest illegal steroid operation the United States had ever seen and the lengths to which we'll go in pursuit of perfection.
Extreme Musclemen. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. In the late 1580s, a less bombastic but more diligent navigator grabs the baton. Devon-born John Davis crosses the Atlantic three times between 1585 and 1587. His charts of the northeastern latitudes of North America and of the west coast of Greenland are the most detailed yet produced. But he too fails to find the passage.
After Davis, a handful of further expeditions set out from different European ports. But ultimately, all end in failure. There was a kind of a relentless positivity, you know, to the point where some individuals went too far or persisted for too long and met an unhappy fate because they were unwilling or unable at a certain point to turn back and return to safety.
The clamor to discover the trophy and the commercial opportunity it represents leads to bolder or rasher explorers entering the fray, like Henry Hudson, an English explorer who, in the early 1600s, steps forward to write his name in the history books. Hudson, I mean, he sailed one year, he sailed for the Dutch. The next year, he sailed for the English. He was a ship for hire. And the hope, of course, was that he would find a profitable route of trade, and that was the reason for his going.
As a jobbing captain, working for whichever colonial government will fund him, Hudson is the kind of explorer who fears nothing and is happy to take risks. Hudson begins in 1607 and 1608 looking for a north-east passage across the top of Russia. On one of these trips, he actually comes within around 700 miles of the North Pole, before his ship is driven back by ice. Tired of these failures, he now unilaterally decides that a north-west route is far more likely.
Setting aside his orders, he turns his ship around and heads past Greenland and along the North American coast. Even this act of rebellion comes to nothing. He's trying to navigate past the North Pole, but frustratingly, his compass readings seem to alter dramatically the closer he gets to it. Back home, he busies himself with this second great Arctic mystery: the ever-shifting North Pole.
Having studied what little is understood of the Earth's magnetism, Hudson sets out in search of the passage once more. This time, his backers urge him to find a way through that furious, treacherous sea which defeated Frobisher and later Davis. Hudson is bold enough to try it. In April 1610, he sails off down the Thames in a small, 70-ton wooden ship called Discovery. With him are 21 men and two boys, one of whom is his own teenage son, John.
and supplies to last just one winter. Convinced they should head west of where they've previously explored, Hudson leads the ship into the turbulent inland sea which will later bear his name, Hudson Bay. Full of underwater ridges and rocky outcrops, the water here heaves violently amid strong tidal currents. At times, waves of 50 or 60 feet batter the ship, hurling chunks of ice.
Despite his crew's desperate pleas to turn back, Hudson sails on, hugging the rugged coastline. Eventually, to everyone's amazement, they enter a larger sea, where polar bears swim among the ice flows. Proof enough, Hudson believes, that they have found the entrance to the mysterious passage. With renewed excitement, they begin charting the eastern shores. But their enthusiasm quickly wanes as they sail back and forth for months without finding any egress.
Winter sets in and the Discovery becomes trapped in the ice. And that is when Hudson's troubles really begin. He is forced to start rationing the food, though most of the crew think he is playing favorites, hoarding the lion's share for himself and his friends. The ensuing winter brings snowstorms, icy winds, scurvy, hunger, and for some, death. When spring finally begins to thaw the ice, the crew are keen to head home.
But Hudson, having narrowly survived one winter, seems hell-bent on risking a second to continue seeking the passage. For most of his men, this is a step too far. It's June the 23rd, 1611. The Discovery, under the command of Henry Hudson, has been at sea for over 430 days, much of it locked in ice. Provisions are low and comfort scarce. Now, as summer eases in, the frozen sea is thawing fast.
Ear-splitting cracks echo around the vast bay as shelves of ice several meters thick carve from the solid mass. The way home lies tantalizingly open. Some of the crew have already succumbed to starvation. The rest are pleading to begin the return journey, but Hudson has no intention of doing so. He wants to press on for the discovery, for glory.
Now with the captain out of earshot in his cabin, the men on deck mutter in low, mutinous whispers. Wrapped in the coats and blankets of their dead colleagues, their stomachs knotted with hunger, they've had enough of this barren tundra. For some, like the ship's officer Henry Green, it is time to take matters into their own hands. Green is one of the more experienced sailors on board. He was once a friend of Hudson's, though the two have done nothing but fall out on this expedition.
Now, Green tells the others he is not willing to risk his life for a man who seems determined to kill them all. Removing the captain from this ship is his only hope of getting home this year. Another man says they are all thinking that the punishment for mutiny is hanging. But Green tells them that if they keep looking for this damned passage, they'll die anyway. Eventually, an agreement is reached. Better to hang at home than starve to death on this godforsaken wasteland.
The only choice is to get rid of Hudson and anyone loyal to him who might testify against the mutineers. Now a hatch creaks open and Henry Hudson emerges. The time for dithering is over. Dropping their sodden wool coats, Green and another man leap to their feet and grab the captain, restraining him. The others quickly subdue his closest allies, including his son, John.
Their struggles ignored, the captives are manhandled overboard into a small boat and set adrift with nothing but the clothes they stand in. Hudson curses and threatens, but to no avail. The rope is cast off and the shallop pushed free. Green shivers. He's just damned his old friend to a certain death. As the Discovery sails towards open water, Green has to turn away. He can't watch the small boat's desperate attempts to catch up.
Hudson's crew managed to keep pace for almost a day, rowing tirelessly. But once clear of the bay, Green and his accomplices let more sails out. The Discovery speeds away, and the small shallop carrying her stricken captain fades beyond the horizon, never to be seen again. Seventeen months later, in September 1611, the Discovery arrives back in London carrying just seven men and one boy, the only survivors.
Green is not among them. They have been steered home by Hudson's first mate, Robert Bylot. When the mutiny is uncovered, there are calls to hang its perpetrators. But the survivors claim that the real mutineers died on the return journey. Their only crime, they say, was to go along with it to save themselves. Finally, Bylot announces that he has discovered the entrance to the Northwest Passage and the baying for blood quietens.
Five years later, in 1616, Bylot heads northwest again, this time with accomplished sailor William Baffin. Together, they map what they'll name Baffin Bay and discover the entrance of Smith Sound, the main gateway to the North Pole. Finally, they come across a long arm of water leading up from the newly christened Baffin Island. Entering the channel, they can't help but admire its imposing majesty.
When you go in at the beginning, it's really quite dramatic. You've got these gigantic basaltic cliffs to your north, and so it really does look like you're entering this kind of extraordinary, almost magical landscape. And drifting ice, of course, and then sometimes some landfast ice that is along the coast. Icebergs as you go up the coast of Greenland on your way to get in. So it is a very dramatic landscape.
They name the stretch of sea the Lancaster Sound, after one of the funders of this expedition, Sir James Lancaster. In years to come, it will prove to be the entrance of the Northwest Passage. Only Byleth and Baffin don't realize it now because, once more, it's blocked by ice. History will credit Baffin with most of their discoveries, perhaps because Byleth's name is still tarnished by the mutiny on the discovery.
For years, unaware that Baffin and Bylet have already found the entrance to the Northwest Passage much farther north at Lancaster Sound, explorers continue to search for it around Hudson Bay. In 1619, navigator Jens Munch sets out to claim the route for his king, Christian IV of Denmark and Norway. Munch's expedition explores the turbulent waters of Hudson Bay before spending the winter there.
One afternoon, while hunting on the water's edge, Monk shoots a polar bear, a welcome meal for his crew. He has the ship's cook roast a few strips of the meat for him, then lightly boil the rest before preserving it in vinegar. Winter rolls on, locking them in. They continue making scientific observations, but then the men start getting sick. On November 21, they bury the first crew member, as the strange illness starts to gather pace.
Attacks of dysentery are followed by joint pain, agonizing stabbing sensations in the loins and stomach, muscle spasms, teeth loosening and falling out. They are literally wasting away. On December 12, one of the two ship's surgeons dies. On January 10, the other surgeon and the priest take to their beds, having been ill for days. The head cook dies the same day.
By mid-February, only seven men are still healthy enough to go ashore for water and wood. The next day, the death count reaches 20. Too weak to hunt, they're almost out of meat. Not that it matters. Their mouths are so swollen and painful, most can't chew anyway. March brings better weather, but no respite from the sickness. By early May, only 11 of the original 65 crewmen remain, and they're all sick, including Monk.
Two men leave the ship, and Monk spends days and nights on deck, wrapped in dead men's clothes, feeling totally abandoned. But after a few days, he is amazed to see the two men coming back, and they are walking upright. They help Monk to shore, and the three of them live under a bush, digging up plants and sucking the juice from their roots. Slowly, incredibly, they start to recover. When they return to the ship to sail home,
they find everyone else has perished. Against all odds, the three men finally arrive back in Copenhagen on Christmas Day. Most who hear their tale are outraged that cold and scurvy could take such a toll on otherwise healthy sailors. Only recently has another likely cause come to light: a parasitical disease called trichinosis, which is endemic in polar bears.
Eating undercooked, infected meat deposits larvae in a person's stomach, which reproduce in the intestines and enter the bloodstream. Within weeks, they cause a painful death. What the crewmen had thought of as a bountiful resource had been their undoing. They were aware of some of their limitations, so they were able to do things like, for instance, hunt for food. And if only they had cooked the polar bear meat a little more thoroughly, it might have gone better for them.
With little progress being made, interest in the Northwest Passage peters out. Focus, instead, turns to trade in the areas that have already been discovered. Half a century after the Jens Monck disaster, in 1670, King Charles II of England grants a royal charter to an independent trading company of noblemen and merchants. His Hudson Bay Company is given a monopoly over the vast basin's lucrative fur trade.
The charter includes a duty to search for the Northwest Passage, but by the early 1700s, the company is more interested in setting up trading posts, forts, and supply depots to support the trade in animal pelts. Exploration continues, but their search is for the copper and maybe the gold they've heard is out there, rather than a trade route to China. The fascination with the Northwest Passage is, however, too deeply ingrained to be forgotten for long.
In 1775, the British government sets up a reward to encourage more explorations. Five thousand pounds, about twenty times the average naval captain's salary, to the first expedition to achieve 110 degrees west, beyond the furthest point yet navigated. The first to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic will get a staggering twenty thousand pounds. Still, nobody comes forward to take on the job. It's just too risky, even for that kind of money.
and the quest languishes once more. Then, in 1815, Britain wins the Battle of Waterloo, ending the Napoleonic War with France. Suddenly, the Royal Navy finds itself with fleets of idle ships, and hundreds of experienced but now unemployed officers collecting half-pay. Exploration, it's decided, will be the answer, and the Arctic is the place to do it.
One of the naval officers charged with leading this new, glorious era of exploration is Sir John Ross. Well respected by the Admiralty, he's a lifelong naval man, having joined the service as a boy. In April 1818, Ross sets out on his first Arctic expedition, commanding the HMS Isabella. As well as answering the question of a Northwest Passage, he must also note the currents, tides, and ice on his way.
As he nears Baffin Bay, he realizes to his relief that those maps created by Bylot and Baffin over 200 years ago are surprisingly accurate. In August, he enters the Lancaster Sound at the north end of Baffin Island. He sails a few miles more before the maps finally seem to fail him. Up ahead, blocking the way completely, is a huge mountain range. Despite heavy protestations from his crew, Ross determines there is no way through.
He names the range the Croker Mountains, after the first secretary of the admiralty, and turns back. Had he listened to his men and sailed on, he may well have discovered the passage, since he was already well inside what we now know to be the Eastern Gateway. Those mountains he saw were nothing more than a complex mirage. His lieutenant on the Isabella, William Parry, returns to Lancaster Sound in 1819 and sails well beyond the so-called mountain range, thus proving Ross was mistaken.
In 1829, partly to redeem his reputation, and partly because the passage still remains a mystery, Ross decides to venture north again, this time aboard the HMS Victory.
This was a private voyage that was actually sponsored by Sir Felix Booth, the djinn magnate. And he ended up trapped there with his ship, which he had to abandon for three years, and then was miraculously rescued by a passing whaler, which turned out to actually be his own former ship, the Isabella. And so when he came back to England then, he was a kind of wonderful, redeemed hero.
And people called him for expert testimony on the viability of a passage. He said, "I believe it would be absolutely useless." Because you can't really have, of course, commercial traffic on a passage where you might occasionally get trapped for three years and maybe lose your ship and your life. That puts a damper on commerce. Even though Ross has confirmed that the passage, if it exists at all, will not be the trade route they'd all imagined, the expedition is not without success.
He does manage to solve the other great mystery of the Arctic Circle with his discovery of the magnetic North Pole, a breakthrough he's later knighted for. By now, though extensive lengths of the coastline have been mapped, what remains is a series of blanks. But with so much spent and so many lost, finding the Northwest Passage has become a matter of pride for the Admiralty.
It was only as that hope for a viable commercial passage was gradually replaced by the awareness that it was going to be a very difficult, hazardous, and only occasionally viable passage. That's when glory came in, because you can get glory even by failing miserably. No figure in the history of the Northwest Passage encapsulates this quest for glory in the face of great hardship better than Sir John Franklin.
Another lifelong Navy man, he has already led a handful of expeditions to the Arctic with varying degrees of success. His first exploration, in 1819, resulted in the loss of 11 of his 20 men through starvation and exhaustion. Franklin himself resorted to sucking his leather shoes for nutrition. But he made it back home, sealing his reputation as a great explorer. In 1828 he marries, and shortly afterwards he is knighted.
The new Lady Franklin is a forthright woman, with every interest in furthering her husband's reputation and prospects. For him, she still sees both greatness and glory, even though his career has been dwindling recently.
Lady Franklin is a fascinating figure. And in some ways, I think her success at making herself into a formidable figure has lasted well beyond her personal demise and into the present day. But, you know, she was in some ways not unlike other naval wives hoping for advancement for her husband.
I don't think she had any instrumental role in Franklin being chosen. The Admiralty approached the most senior people on the list and everyone said, oh, give it to poor Franklin. He'll die of disappointment if you don't give him the command. And so they did. In fact, the Admiralty puts the proposition of finally mapping the sea passage in front of Franklin, Sir John Ross, and William Parry. Of the three, Franklin is the most enthusiastic in his response.
So much so that in 1845 the Admiralty charges him with the command of a two-vessel exploration of the Arctic. He will lead the Erebus and the Terror to find the Northwest Passage. On hearing that Franklin has agreed to take the mission, Sir John Ross warns him that the two ships, both of which Ross had commanded on an expedition to the Antarctic, are too large and sit too deep in the water.
According to Ross's own recollection of the conversation, he advises Franklin to leave notes in cairns along his route to guide those who will doubtless need to rescue him later. Despite these warnings, Franklin is happy to get the command and prepares to sail into history. It's the afternoon before Sir John Franklin is due to depart. His trunks have all been shipped aboard. Goodbyes have been said. Now his quarters lie in ominous silence.
As the staff prepare for a farewell meal, Sir John has retired to his chambers. His wife, Lady Jane, now hurries along the corridor towards his room, her heels clacking on the wooden boards. To her chest she clutches the parting gift she has lovingly made for him. Following naval tradition, she has hand-stitched him a British flag. It's taken her hours, and she's eager to see her husband's face when she shows him what she's done.
Stopping outside his room, she hears his gentle, familiar snoring. It's unlikely he'll enjoy a peaceful afternoon nap again for quite a while, and yet she's excited to present him with his gift. Quietly, she pushes the door open and finds her husband asleep in full dress, his chest rising and falling rhythmically with a low rumble. Not having the heart to wake him, she creeps forward and drapes the flag carefully over his sleeping body. Before she can finish,
Sir John's eyes snap open. He looks at her, frowns, looks down, and instantly sits bolt upright, horrified. Leaping to his feet, he throws the flag to the floor, making her scream in alarm. "Don't you know," he shouts, "that in the Royal Navy, we lay the Union Jack over a corpse?" Shocked and hurt, Jane runs out. When Franklin follows, she assures him that her gesture should only be seen as a harbinger of his success.
Well, it's a Harbinger, all right, but not as she has planned it. The following day, on May the 19th, Jane Franklin stands in the window of their lodgings, admiring the Erebus and the Terra in the water below. Freshly painted in black and yellow, with a wide stripe running the length of each, the two refurbished battleships sparkle in the sun. They have been completely refitted, supplied with every modcon currently available.
At around 10:30 a.m., Jane watches on as a steamboat tows the ship out of the harbor and into open water. From there, they sail into the distance, followed by the fading calls of gulls. Every good and clever idea that could be packed aboard the ships was packed aboard. They did have steam engines borrowed from railway trains and put into the hold and attached to removable propellers. The propellers could be drawn up through a shaft to avoid being damaged by the ice.
Aside from their technological advantages, between them the Erebus and Terra carry 134 men, a ship's cat, a dog named Neptune, and a monkey called Jacko, who is a gift from Lady Franklin. They also take two tons of tobacco with them, alongside 7,500 liters of liquor, thousands of books, plus theater costumes and sports gear.
They also had a patented stove system. It was actually relatively effective at keeping the ship warm and dry because condensation below decks was a big issue. They brought a daguerreotype camera so they could have and possibly did take some photographs. That's lovely, but of course it doesn't do anything to help with your survival. And then enormous quantities of tinned food and other provisions packed very tightly in the hold. So, you know,
With the old set of assumptions that these expeditions were sent with, Franklin's was the pinnacle. They had every advantage that one could possibly have had in the eyes of the planners at the time. This well-prepared, fully equipped voyage reaches the Whalefish Islands on the west coast of Greenland at the beginning of July. While there, the men write letters to their loved ones. Some are determined they'll pass through the Northwest Passage this year. Others seem resigned to the idea they may never make it home.
On July the 12th, they set sail for Baffin Bay, where they'll wait for the ice to melt before continuing to Lancaster Sound. Two years pass with no further news home. A third winter looms.
When was it concerning that nothing had been heard from the expedition? One year? Well, that was expected. Two years? Well, no need to worry. Three years and people start to worry. And the Admiralty, I think, did need some prodding from Lady Franklin to slowly realize that it might not be a bad idea to send someone to see if there was any trace of the expedition. In 1848, with only a rough notion of the direction in which Franklin was headed, a three-pronged mission sets out to find him.
James Ross, nephew of Sir John Ross, will head towards Lancaster Sound. Two other vessels, already in the Pacific, will search along the Americas. And a third company is sent to cover the coast further west. None of these missions are successful. The ice stops them from even getting close to where Franklin might have gone. Back in England, many now begin to whisper that the crews of the Erebus and the Terror may be lost forever.
The Admiralty then ups the ante. 20,000 pounds, well over a million today, is offered to any private vessel that helps find Franklin's ships. There is also an offer of 10,000 pounds for any confirmed news of their fate. Across 1850, no fewer than 15 ships set out on the search. For now, the Northwest Passage must wait. Recovering the crews is the primary order.
In August, one team finds what appears to have been a winter camp with fragments of clothes, stores, and a cairn of rocks. Frustratingly, the cairn contains no records of where the party headed. Not too far away, they also find three graves, whose markers bear the names of two sailors from the Erebus and one from the Terror. The search continues. Joining the hunt in 1850 is another naval officer, Robert McClure.
Having passed the mouth of the Mackenzie River, over the next few years he makes his way slowly up a previously uncharted opening, half sailing, half carried along by the ice. When his ship inevitably becomes frozen in, he and his crew are forced to abandon, afraid the vessel will be crushed. Instead of heading home, though, McClure continues his expedition on foot, pulling the supplies they need on dog sleds.
And it's by doing this that, in April 1853, he makes something of a breakthrough. Robert McClure is credited with the first crossing of the Northwest Passage, but he traversed some of that on foot, and his ship, of course, did not traverse it. It was abandoned in the ice up in Mercy Bay, where it still is. It's been found there. So although he was given the parliamentary prize and everything, it wasn't quite the voyage through.
Back at home, McClure's claim on the Northwest Passage is disputed by some. Yes, he has proved its existence. But because the brief was to find a viable shipping channel, some feel he's not fully succeeded. And there is still the matter of Franklin's lost ships and the continued search for the fate of his men.
Almost a year after McClure's voyage, in April 1854, naval officer John Ray makes a dramatic discovery while continuing the search for the missing ships. Through an interpreter, some Inuit hunters tell him of a party of white men they encountered some years before camping off King William Island in Victoria Strait. Ray believes the site to be too far from where Franklin's ships should have been, but as he spends time interviewing the hunters,
Doubt begins to creep in. Then, when the Inuit bring him various artifacts they recovered from those camps, the grim truth about Franklin's expedition suddenly becomes clear. These were the kinds of things that you would realize right away that the men would not have freely given up.
Sir John Franklin's own Medal of Knighthood, a shirt cuff with somebody's name embroidered on it, spoons and forks with family crests, personal items, and then scientific instruments like sextants and chronometers. These are not things that you just leave behind. If these objects are now in the hands of Inuit hunters, and if their word is to be believed, then most, if not all, of Franklin's men must have perished. But what on earth happened to them?
Through lengthy interviews, Ray determines that most of the crew abandoned their ships. Contrary to expectation, they trekked south towards mainland America. Without any of the equipment and resources that McClure's overland team enjoyed, many of Franklin's men must have died as they went.
The whole idea of the expedition was to get through in the ships, to go out of the ships and away from that huge store of provisions was just not part of the plan. They weren't very well equipped for hunting. They had some shotguns and things like that. And so their idea was to put all of the provisions they needed on these enormous sleds that they had built on board ship and then to manhole these sleds, presumably in the direction of the back river. And I think that would have been a huge challenge.
One party of Inuit hunters describes how they discovered 35 or 40 dead bodies together, some in tents or exposed on the ground, others under an upturned boat. One man, apparently an officer, died with a telescope slung over his shoulder and a double-barreled shotgun beneath him.
The biggest thing we really don't have is a chronology. We know some things that definitely happened, but we don't know in what order they happened. But I think the overall story is abandonment of ships, heavy casualties on land, physical exhaustion, exposure, scurvy, doubtlessly. But the worst detail revealed by Ray's Inuit sources is something he knows will shock the world.
From the mutilated state of many of the corpses, and the cooked contents of the kettles they found, it's clear that some of the crew had resorted to the so-called "last resource" cannibalism. When Ray's unedited account reaches Britain, it's met with horrified disbelief. Franklin's wife, in particular, refuses to accept the allegation. She even enlists Charles Dickens to write an expose denouncing Ray's shocking claim.
In a sentiment largely felt at the time, Dickens loudly proclaims that "all savages are liars by nature." But dismissing Ray's findings means that many more men will risk their lives trying to find answers to the great Franklin mystery. In the years to come, Lady Franklin will continue to fund expeditions searching for the truth of what happened to her husband and to clear his name of this ungodly accusation.
These expeditions will find proof that the missing are in fact dead, in the form of graves, bodies, and artifacts from both ships. But no one dare mention cannibalism again. It's only in recent years that the Inuit accounts have been accepted as truth. In 2014, the wreck of the Erebus was found on the ocean floor, almost exactly where Ray's interviewee had described seeing it go down. It turns out that both of Franklin's ships had made it through the Northwest Passage before sinking,
Trapped in pack ice, it seems they were probably conveyed through with not a soul aboard to witness it. Even though his ships may have made it, Franklin can only lay a partial and posthumous claim to the discovery of the Northwest Passage. The novelist Joseph Conrad said that Sir John Franklin served the cause of exploration even in his death because of all the people who went searching for him. And eventually the passage was known, although still no one had sailed all the way through it.
It was while searching for the lost ships that McClure found his route. And in discovering Franklin's fate, John Ray had managed to chart the final link between the two entrances of the passage that had previously been mapped. But it's not until 1905, over 400 years since Cabot and Columbus set off to find the Northwest Passage to Asia, that the first explorer finally sails all the way through.
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen heads out in 1903 with a crew of just six men on a 45-ton fishing boat, the Jøa.
He did all the things that Franklin didn't. He had a very small ship and a very small crew. And he learned from Inuit how to hunt on the land and how to travel by sled with dogs, skills he put to use very effectively a few years later at the South Pole. So he was the first one that actually sailed the passage from end to end. He thought highly of Franklin. Franklin was one of his heroes. But at the same time, he realized that some of those Victorian ideas, big, heavy, strong, shipped, lots of people, were not very good ones.
Forced to spend two winters in King William Island, waiting for the ice to clear, Amundsen uses the time to learn from the Inuit. He learns their wisdom on matters of hunting, wearing animal skins for warmth, and using dog sleds. Finally, in 1905, having traversed some sections with a clearance of just a foot of water below her keel, his ship clears the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
They wait through the winter again before going on to Nome on Alaska's Pacific coast. He has made it to the Pacific. All that remains for Amundsen is to make the 500-mile overland trip to Eagle to the nearest telegraph station to send news of his success home. Though the mystery of the Northwest Passage was finally answered by Amundsen, the mythology surrounding this most unforgiving of sea routes endures to this day.
Even with the onslaught of climate change and the diminishing Arctic ice, the route often remains impassable. The fates of those great explorers still capture the imagination, drawing hundreds of curious adventurers today. Though modern visitors now travel on cruise ships better designed for the conditions, the sacrifice of those who cut a path before them is clearly etched all along the coastline.
The bodies of countless adventurers claimed by the ice and lost to the landscape may never be recovered. For others, their graves and cairns stand as shrines to their fatal endeavor. Ultimately, the quest to find the Northwest Passage became a matter of pride and glory. A siren's call that kept drawing people back to that incredible, magical place. Somewhere that few of us will ever see.
It's extraordinarily beautiful. It is the most lovely place on earth that I've ever been. The ice is not white. It is suffused with colors of every kind.
And of course you have the Northern Lights as a regular visitor rather than once every hundred years or so. And just the beauty, the starkness of this vast land. A great part of it, you know, still unvisited and uninhabited if you go to the north of the strait there. And it's a stunning instance of nature at its most magnificent. Next time on Short History, we'll bring you a short history of the scramble for Africa.
The European colonial project is not one of economic integration and therefore some kind of development. The European colonial project is about extractivism. And what you are identifying is the ways in which that extractivism essentially created a certain kind of economic structure that still, quite frankly, shapes much of Africa. That's next time.
