Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie Read Free Book Online

fifty-nine, Sir John Franklin was widely considered too old for the command. Lord Haddington, First Lord of the Admiralty, shared the doubts of many about Franklin’s fitness but agreed to interview him. During that meeting, the First Lord told Franklin of his concerns. “You are sixty,” he said. Franklin was nonplussed: “No, my lord, I am only fifty-nine.” Still, the Admiralty was nothing if not an old boys’ club, and William Edward Parry lobbied on Franklin’s behalf, telling Haddington: “If you don’t let him go, the man will die of disappointment.” On 7 February 1845, Franklin was given the job.
    Daguerreotype of Sir John Franklin.
    Born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 16 April 1786, Franklin entered the Royal Navy when he was fourteen and served in a number of famous battles during the Napoleonic Wars, including the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1814, he would be injured in a disastrous attempt to capture New Orleans. When the Duke of Wellington finally defeated Bonaparte in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Royal Navy was forced to look for new assignments for its best young officers. Arctic exploration was one way for such officers to distinguish themselves in peacetime. And so it was that, in May 1818, Franklin began his polar service as second-in-command of Captain David Buchan’s failed voyage into the Spitsbergen ice.
    In 1819 Franklin again headed north, this time in command of an overland expedition ordered by the British Admiralty to travel from Hudson Bay to the polar sea, where he was to map North America’s unexplored Arctic coast. George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company was highly skeptical of Franklin’s quali-fications for such a journey:
    Lieut. Franklin, the Officer who commands the party has not the physical powers required for the labor of moderate Voyaging in this country; he must have three meals p diem, Tea is indispensible, and with the utmost exertion he cannot walk above Eight miles in one day, so that it does not follow if those Gentlemen are unsuccessful that the difficulties are insurmountable.
    Franklin succeeded in surveying 211 miles (340 km) of the icy shoreline east of the Coppermine River before a tragic return journey over the Canadian tundra, or “Barren Grounds,” during which expedition members were reduced by starvation to eating an old leather shoe and caribou excrement. Ten men died from the cold and hunger, exacerbated in part by Franklin’s unfamiliarity with northern conditions. Franklin himself nearly succumbed to starvation before relief arrived. Yet when he returned to London, Franklin’s account of heroic achievement marred by murder, cannibalism and his own suffering caught the public’s imagination, and he became known as the man who ate his boots. Promoted to the rank of captain, he then returned in 1825–27 to the Arctic for a well-organized second overland expedition, resulting in the mapping of another 397 miles (640 km) of Arctic shoreline, for which he was knighted. Finally, after a six-year stint as colonial governor of Van Diemen’s Land (today, the Australian state of Tasmania), Franklin was placed in command of the greatest single expedition of discovery Britain had ever mounted.
    Royal Navy officers Captain Francis Crozier and Commander James Fitzjames were also appointed to the expedition. The veteran Crozier had served in a number of earlier attempts at finding both a Northwest Passage and reaching the North Pole and had been second-in-command of James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expeditions as commander of the Terror. As for Fitzjames, he had served as mate aboard the first steamer to successfully navigate the Euphrates, and had served on ships operating in the Middle East and China, where he first became interested in the romantic lure of the Northwest Passage.
    Captain Francis Crozier.
    Commander James Fitzjames.
    The days before the Erebus