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As arctic explorers go, British Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin was more famous than successful. His best known—and last—expedition began in 1845 and ended in 1847 with all 129 expeditionary members dead. Earlier, in 1821, Franklin explored the Hood River in the Northwest Territories of Canada, and over half of the 20 men along died of exposure or starvation. Writer John Lentz canoed down the Hood River in the 1980s. In this story he considers what the explorers went through in the harsh, mosquito-infested barren lands. At magnificent Wilberforce Falls, Lentz and his companions discover artifacts left by Franklin’s men a century and a half before.
By John W. Lentz
'The weather was remarkably fine, and the temperature so mild, that the musquitoes again made their appearance,' arctic explorer John Franklin wrote on August 26, 1821, as he and his crew canoed up an uncharted river. It was the first of three expeditions the British naval officer made in quest of the Northwest Passage. With the last his name became a byword for heroic tragedy when all on the voyage perished.
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Horror also stalked the first trip. Racing winter and starvation, 11 of 20 men died, including Robert Hood, for whom Franklin named this river. Mindful of these ghosts and guided by their journals, five canoeing enthusiasts and I crossed their path 162 years later.
We began our 24-day expedition when a floatplane dropped us at a lake called 1595 for its elevation in feet above sea level. Twenty miles of paddling brought us to Takijuq Lake, where ice still gripped the shore in mid-July. For a while it was easier for me to haul as Charles Bond maneuvered the boat in shallow, ice-clogged water. Crossing the lake in ten hours, we faced a day of uphill portaging with 78-pound canoes and 80-pound packs to reach the Hood.
Our 170-mile downstream trip through a succession of rapids was a white-water paddler's ideal. The riverbed flashed beneath us as we plowed through standing waves and dodged rocks. But for Franklin his 60-mile trip upriver was a struggle. His journal records nights when rain and wind so lashed their tents that 'we were almost beaten out of our comfortless abodes.' The gales that can scour the tundra never came for us. Finding a dry, level spot was the only difficulty Bob Sands and John Schultz had pitching their tent.
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Today's gear can almost foil the summer scourge of the Arctic—mosquitoes and blackflies.…
Midshipman Hood's account is chilling: 'They swarmed under our blankets, goring us with their envenomed trunks, and steeping our clothes in blood. …an evil of such magnitude, that cold, famine, and every other concomitant of an inhospitable climate, must yield the pre-eminence to it.'…
Once hunted to near extinction for its hide, Ovibos moschatus has been protected in Canada since 1926. Hundreds breed in the late summer and early fall around Bathurst Inlet, an area identified by Parks Canada as a potential national park. The area is also thought to hold one of the world's largest concentrations of the endangered peregrine falcon.
These wildlife encounters were exciting diversions on our trip, but they meant sheer salvation for Franklin's party. He and his crew often had to eat musk-ox, although they were not fond of it. 'The flesh has a musky disagreeable flavour,' he noted.
Considered fine eating, caribou were a vital and welcome staple throughout Franklin's expedition. But by October the men no longer had the strength to steady their guns; some took to searching the heavy snow for caribou remains. Shortly before Mathew Pelonquin became the first in the party to die from exposure and starvation, he returned from a day's hunt with only the 'antlers and back bone of a deer which had been killed in the summer. The wolves and birds of prey had picked them clean, but there still remained a quantity of the spinal marrow. This, although putrid, was esteemed a valuable prize,' Franklin reported.
The disaster of 1821 appalled and instructed Franklin. On his second expedition, begun in 1825, after which he was knighted, Franklin surveyed without major mishap 1,237 miles of coastline now belonging to Canada and Alaska.
On his final search for the Northwest Passage, Franklin with 129 men on two ships became icebound in 1846 near King William Island, and all eventually perished. The numerous rescue missions that searched in vain for them nearly completed the mapping of the Canadian Arctic.
A breathtaking obstacle, Wilberforce Falls convinced Franklin on his second day upriver that it was 'useless to attempt proceeding any farther in the large canoes.'
Named by Franklin for a British philanthropist, these falls, thought to be the highest above the Arctic Circle, drop 160 feet.…
For four days the men camped here, building two small canoes from the unwieldy freighters. To further lighten the men's burdens, the 'stores, books, &c., which were not absolutely necessary to be carried, were then put up in boxes to be left en cache here.'
Could anything remain of that cache? Guided by Franklin's journal, others had unsuccessfully searched this area before us. But armed with a sophisticated metal detector, we began diligently to scan the ground.
Paydirt came after four futile days of searching for the cache. Ready to give up, Charles Bond made one last pass with the detector. A mere ten feet from our tents, covered by about eight inches of earth, lay three ax heads, a broken file, a scattering of handwrought nails, and a small copper piece, possibly a reinforcement from one of the cached boxes.
The staff at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife had cautioned: 'Identify, then let us go in for the excavation.' After completing our run to the mouth of the Hood, we returned to the site to watch center director Robert Janes and senior archaeologist Charles Arnold dig with precision.
In all, eight ax heads were recovered. The handles might have been removed for firewood before the canoe builders apparently dropped this excess equipment in a pile.
Since Franklin carried no shovels, the boxes of goods were probably hidden in nearby alder and willow brush and long ago discovered by Inuit hunters. Sediment would have quickly hidden the ax heads from view. Along with a similar ax head and a number of small artifacts found at Fort Enterprise, these tools are our only archaeological evidence of Sir John Franklin's first Canadian expedition.
Source: Lentz, John W., “Clues to a Tragic Trek: On Canada’s Hood River.” National Geographic, January 1986.
Appears in
Northwest Territories; Exploration, Geographic; Northwest Passage; Franklin, Sir John
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