Book Review: Two Books About the Lost Franklin Expedition -- Jill Hand

The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard is among my favorite books. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to do so at the first opportunity. It’s a true story about the race to be the first to reach the South Pole. The competitors were members of a ridiculously oversupplied British expedition against three lean, mean Norwegians. The Norwegians, led by Roald Amundsen, got there first, on Dec. 16, 1911. That was because Amundson was practical and goal-oriented and didn’t dilly-dally the way the British did, by making a side trip to collect penguin eggs and taking too much time fooling around with tractors and ponies and arguing over who was going to be included in the group to make the final dash to the Pole.

Amundsen just hitched up his sled dogs and got going, allowing him to plant the Norwegian flag at the Pole four days before the English got there. He left them a nice note, too. They read it, felt rotten about losing, and then they died on the way back to their base camp. Three of them, including the leader of the expedition, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, starved to death in a squalid little tent while caught in a blizzard. A fourth walked out into the snow and was never seen again.

Cherry-Garrard was one of the survivors of the expedition who waited at the base camp for their friends to return, growing increasingly frantic as the days passed. He was 24 at the time and it messed him up for life. That’s why his book is so good. He didn’t hold back in describing how awful it was. If you’re having a bad day, it will cheer you up to think that at least you’re not starving to death in a blizzard, having failed to accomplish what your friends and family, as well as your entire nation were counting on you to do.

Reading true accounts about suffering can be enjoyable, at least I find it so. Two books I read recently are right up there with Worst Journey for harrowing descriptions of an ill-fated expedition. While they’re not first-person accounts, they make up for it in careful research and by the mind-boggling fact that everyone died. All 129 people, as well as a Newfoundland dog, a monkey, and a cat.

The books are Erebus: The Story of a Ship, by Michael Palin and Sir John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror Expedition: Lost and Found by Gillian Hutchinson

. Links to buy them on Amazon are at the end of this post. Or you can probably find them at your local library and read them for free.
And now for the wretchedness!

For a young man who lived in the British Isles or in one of the Commonwealth nations in the nineteenth century, joining the Royal Navy was his best chance of being absolutely miserable. It didn’t matter whether he was rich or poor, misery was an equal-opportunity outcome for anyone serving aboard one of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s ships, although to be fair, the rich suffered slightly less.

First, consider the accommodations. Ordinary seamen slept in canvas hammocks that wrapped around them, like a cocoon. It reduced the risk of being hurled five or six feet down onto the deck during rough seas, but still, sleeping in a dirty, smelly hammock for months on end, crammed in among one’s shipmates couldn’t have been much fun.

Officers had the luxury of private cabins, but except for the one allotted to the captain, these were cramped, with floor space about the same size as that of a queen-size mattress. Into that scant area went a bunk, a desk, a washstand, and all of the occupant’s possessions. Imagine living in a space roughly the size of your bathroom and you’ll get the idea.

As for the food, there wasn’t much variety. Officers brought wicker hampers with them, filled with delicacies. They supplied their own wine, monogrammed linen napkins, and sterling silver cutlery engraved with their initials or family crest. When the goodies from home ran out, there were usually cows and sheep and chickens on board that would be slaughtered and cooked.
Ordinary seamen had to be content with stew, and hard tack, a biscuit made from flour, water and salt. In addition, they were given a daily “tot” of rum: one-eighth of an imperial pint.

The daily rum ration was thought to be sufficient to improve morale and keep sailors going, as they went through a long day of brutally hard labor. Drunkenness was frowned upon. Dipping into the rum stores would merit a flogging. Many transgressions merited flogging. Fail to salute an officer? That’s grounds for a flogging. Don’t answer promptly and politely when addressed by an officer? More grounds for a flogging. Sullenness? Impertinence? An untidy appearance? Falling asleep while on watch? All grounds for a flogging.

Flogging was suspended in the Royal Navy in 1879, when politicians began to argue that it was not only inhumane, it discouraged recruiting. It wasn’t formally banned until 1881. In 1845, at the time of the doomed Franklin Arctic expedition, flogging was very much a staple of shipboard life.

Little boys, some as young as eleven or twelve, were sent off to sea as cabin boys. It was thought to be good for them. It built character. Instilled discipline. Gave them an opportunity to travel. Rich families with extra sons hanging about the house sent them off to sea. Poor families did, too. Got a little boy that you’d rather not feed and clothe? Off to sea with him! That was the Victorian attitude.
My paternal grandfather was one of those little boys. It was shortly before the turn of the twentieth century, and he was twelve. Living in Nova Scotia, an island surrounded by water, as islands are, his family thought nothing of sending him off on a wooden merchant vessel to perform menial tasks.

Rather surprisingly, he managed to become commodore of a fleet of merchant ships. He was one of the lucky ones. He carved out a successful seagoing career while avoiding drowning, being killed in a fire (ships caught fire all the time), or dying of a horrible disease.

My point is that life at sea was no picnic. And yet, people kept being drawn to it. Some were women, who disguised themselves as men. It happened more often than you might think. In fact, there’s an intriguing possibility that four of the members of Franklin’s Arctic expedition were women, based on DNA samples taken from the frozen corpses of some of the crew.
The leader of the expedition was Sir John Franklin, a British Royal Naval officer. Sir John had already led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic before making his third, fatal journey in search of the Northwest Passage, the seaway linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Finding the Northwest Passage was a big deal back then. It would cut the route from Europe to the Far East, by avoiding the long trek south around Cape Horn, where weather conditions were notoriously horrible. Get to the Far East quickly, load the ship up with spices, of which the eager buying public couldn’t get enough, and your fortune would be made. Be the first captain to navigate through the ice at the top of Canada, and you were a hero. Your name would go down in history. You’d shown the world that the British Empire had the right stuff. There’d be statues of you erected in every town and city. The Queen would want to thank you personally.

That’s what inspired Sir John Franklin to give it a go. There was just one little problem. Nobody was sure where the Northwest Passage was, exactly. They had a vague idea, but maps were unreliable. It’s not as if they could use Google Earth to find the best route through the ice. It kept changing. There was a LOT of ice up there, and it tended to move. A route that was passable one year would be iced up the next. A couple of centuries of effort went into searching for a way through, and the result was always the same: failure.

On one Canadian expedition, Sir John nearly starved to death and was forced to eat his leather boots. You’d think that would convince him to retire and collect his pension, while giving fervent thanks that he’d escaped alive, but no. Back he went. If truth was told, he was proud of being known as The Man Who Ate His Boots. It proved he had pluck.

In 1845, Franklin was nearing sixty. He was overweight, and had already made two disastrous expeditions to the Arctic. The Admiralty wasn’t keen on him going back a third time, but Sir John, and more specifically his energetic wife, Lady Jane Franklin, pushed and pushed, nagging and cajoling and pleading, using influential friends to promote their cause. Finally, the Lords of the Admiralty got tired of being badgered and gave in and let him go.

What was unknown at the time was that the Arctic weather was exceptionally cold that year. As a result, the ice was much thicker than usual. Franklin expected his two ships to get stuck in the ice and have to wait until it warmed up enough for them to continue on their way. He thought it might take four years to complete the journey, maybe more. He wasn’t particularly worried. They had plenty of food on board the expedition’s two ships, Erebus and Terror. If they weren’t heard from in a while, it would be no cause for alarm; they’d just hunker down and wait for a chance to proceed. If they ran out of food they could always go hunting. At least that’s what everyone thought.

Years passed, with no word from the expedition. Franklin died, possibly of pneumonia or some other illness. All 129 crew members perished. Some succumbed from tuberculosis. Others starved to death. There were rumors of cannibalism, which, when they appeared in print in England, caused Charles Dickens to fly into a rage. If anyone ate members of the expedition, it wasn’t Englishmen, he ranted. No Englishman would ever do such a thing. It must be the Inuit. They were savages. They would pretend to be friendly and then eat you the moment your guard was down.

As it turned out, the Inuit were helpful when rescue parties finally arrived, much too late, searching for the lost expedition. They described where they’d encountered survivors, all of whom appeared to be in bad shape, and where the bodies of some of the dead were. They even told them where the ships sank, although nobody believed it for very long time.

What befell Terror and Erebus, as well as the men (and maybe some women) aboard makes absorbing reading

To learn more about the search for Franklin’s doomed expedition:

Lnk to Erebus: Thge Story of a Ship

Link to Sir John Franklin's Erebus and Terror

Link to Frozen in Time