New research shines a light on the lost Franklin Expedition, a 19th century voyage to the Canadian Arctic gone awry.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
It turns out dead men tell some tales. Almost 200 years ago, a doomed polar expedition made its way to the Arctic. The full story of that voyage has remained an elusive mystery for archaeologists and historians. But as NPR’s Henry Larson reports, its story just became a little clear.
HENRY LARSON, BYLINE: The year, 1848. The place, the Canadian Arctic. The ice, unforgiving.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICE CRACKING)
LARSON: More than a hundred men were trapped by pack ice that would have sounded much like these recordings captured by an underwater microphone and preserved by the federal government.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICE CRACKING)
LARSON: The men were on a mission from England to find the Northwest Passage, an Arctic channel from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Three years into their mission, their supplies were running low. The men were dying in the dozens. And among the dead, their commander, the Royal Navy’s Sir John Franklin, namesake of the Franklin expedition.
RUSSELL POTTER: For the past several decades, I’ve found myself obsessed with the story of the lost Franklin expedition.
LARSON: This is Russell Potter, a literature professor at Rhode Island College.
POTTER: You’re trapped aboard your ships for two winters. You can hear the pack ice, and it’s constantly shifting and groaning and creaking, and the timbers of your ship are groaning and creaking, and you can’t go anywhere or do anything.
LARSON: When Franklin’s crew set off on his two ships, Erebus and Terror, in 1845, they could have been the astronauts of their day.
POTTER: That part of the world was as unknown as far reaches of outer space would be to us today.
LARSON: The ships had enough provisions for three winters and new steam engines installed. But when the ice was too thick to make enough progress, those three winters came and went, and there was no turning back.
POTTER: And there was the prospect of a fourth winter – which might not have been survivable – that persuaded them that the best of many bad options was to abandon the ships and try to drag supplies and get the men to safety somehow over land.
LARSON: Which brings us to our mystery. What exactly happened when those hundred men – likely starved and sick – desperately drag sleds and rowboats south towards mainland Canada? In recent decades, archaeologists have started to have much more luck studying the trail they left behind.
DOUG STENTON: We know from early accounts from Inuit who found bodies and graves of men, there are two very well-known sites where two ships’ boats were found.
LARSON: Doug Stenton is an archaeologist at the University of Waterloo in Alberta, Canada. He’s been working on cracking the mysteries of the Franklin expedition for decades, studying the remains of the few explorers found amidst the rock and ice of King William’s Island (ph). And now, he has four more clues to show for it. Just this month, he was the lead author on a pair of new studies identifying the remains of four men who died on the journey.
STENTON: We’ve obtained tooth or bone samples in particular.
LARSON: Stenton’s team has managed to find dozens of descendants of the Franklin expedition and collected their DNA to compare to those remains. Here’s one of their stories.
RICH PRESTON: They sent me a package in the mail to do a cheek swab, which I did. I duly posted it back to Canada, and genuinely, I thought that would be the last I would hear of it.
LARSON: This is Rich Preston. He’s a BBC presenter and great-great-grandchild of a half-sister of John Bridgens, a steward on the HMS Erebus. Bridgens is one of the men identified in the new research. Archaeologists can now prove his remains were found near the wreck of one of the ship’s lifeboats.
PRESTON: He joined the navy when he was, like, age 11, as a musician – volunteered for the Franklin expedition. Now, he didn’t actually marry, didn’t have any kids. So his connection to me is through his sister.
LARSON: A few years ago, Bridgens was portrayed by actor John Lynch in the AMC series “The Terror,” a heavily fictionalized interpretation of the expedition’s demise.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “THE TERROR”)
JOHN LYNCH: (As John Bridgens) They walked for hundreds and hundreds of miles through desert and snow with no food. Begin to imagine how you’d prepare for such a journey.
LARSON: For new clues about the expedition that this discovery unravels, Stenton, the archaeologist, says Bridgens was found with the remains of another member of the HMS Erebus crew, close to the site where the ship’s captain had earlier been identified.
STENTON: It raises the question of where the crews from The Terror are at that time or how they came to be separated, if, in fact, that’s what happens.
LARSON: But Stenton also says that some of the most important details don’t come from unpacking the timeline of the crews deaths.
STENTON: There’s a tendency – I think, unintentional – that we sometimes talk about these men in the abstract, muster list or in description books. And we lose sight of the fact that these were real people.
LARSON: Science helped us see those real people, and now their families will help keep them in view.
Henry Larson, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE”)
EL PONY PISADOR AND THE LONGEST JOHNS: (Singing) Ah, for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage to find the hand…
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