John Franklin

John Franklin (1786-1847), British rear admiral and explorer of the Arctic and the Northwest Passage.

Franklin was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England. He participated in the battles of Copenhagen in 1801 and Trafalgar in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1818 he commanded the Trent in an unsuccessful voyage to the Arctic, and from 1819 to 1822 he commanded an overland expedition commissioned to explore the northern coast of Canada east from the mouth of the Coppermine River. In a subsequent Arctic expedition (1825-27), Franklin traced the North American coastline from the mouth of the Mackenzie River on the Beaufort Sea in northwestern Canada to about the 150th meridian in northeastern Alaska. In 1829 he was knighted and awarded the gold medal of the Geographical Society of Paris. From 1836 to 1843 he was lieutenant governor of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), where he established a college and scientific society. In 1845 he was appointed commander of an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. The expedition, consisting of the Erebus and the Terror, with 129 officers and men, was last seen by a whaling vessel on July 26, 1845, in Baffin Bay.

Between 1848 and 1859 numerous searching expeditions were dispatched to the Arctic. In July 1857 Lady Jane Franklin, Franklin's second wife, outfitted the Fox, which was finally successful in discovering the history of the ill-fated expedition. The search party obtained from the Inuit in Boothia Peninsula many remains of the Franklin expedition. A record found at Victory Point related details of Franklin's expedition up to April 25, 1848.

According to this record, in 1846 the Erebus and Terror had navigated Peel Sound and Franklin Strait in a southerly direction, but had been stopped by ice between Victoria Island and King William Island. The two ships, icebound from September 1846, had been deserted on April 22, 1848. At that time the total casualties had been 9 officers and 15 men, including Franklin, who had died on June 11, 1847. The surviving members of the party left the ships on April 26, 1848, but apparently perished some days later. Between 1878 and 1880 a U.S. expedition discovered the wreckage of one of Franklin's ships and skeletons of members of his party. A monument commemorating Franklin was erected in 1875 in Westminster Abbey. In the 1980s a Canadian anthropologist, through studies of tissue remains of the crew, determined that they had most likely succumbed to the effects of lead poisoning.