“like a dream, sir.”

one year ago i took it upon myself to create a complete facsimile of the peglar papers. two months ago i finally got my nefarious little hands on a beautifully crisp high resolution copy of this page from an actual FE historian who had seen and handled the actual pages in real life. today i'm pleased to be able to show off the most legible and accurate iteration i've done of this page so far SO EVERYONE ELSE CAN READ IT TOO!!!!!!!!! i'm including a typed up transcription because i imagine not everyone else is used to staring at faint loopy victorian cursive and would like to have an easier time reading it.

the poem that henry has written down is a recalled version of 'the sea' by barry cornwall, and he wrote it within the first of two years that the expedition was stuck in the pack-ice off the coast of king william island. admittedly i'm a bit unclear when the original poem was actually published, but the earliest version of it that i've found is from 1831, as the lyrics to a piece of sheet music (if anyone can read music and can play what this sounds like for me...... hmu i want to hear it....) for my transcription, i was more often referencing 'english songs and other small poems' which was published in 1851-- so it's a bit past the timeline of when henry would have hypothetically heard the song/poem originally, but still is close enough that i assumed it to be pretty accurate.

henry's recollection of how the poem went was actually pretty good, i think, considering the circumstances of how the scurvy/lead poison combo was probably starting to really affect the surviving men in the franklin expedition by april of 1847. the original poem has six verses, and while he only wrote four down in his version, and also they are a bit jumbled out of original order. however, there are lines and phrases that he clearly remembered very accurately.

i've created this little diagram comparing the original poem and henry's version so that the overlap of what he remembered/what he didn't is illustrated a little bit more clearly:

there are a few key pieces of research done by actual published historians about the peglar papers that all mention this poem and the context and motivation for writing it, as well as the significance it has for current FE research. a lot of them are really very interesting reads if you're into this sort of thing!! i have a lot of sources bookmarked, so if anyone wants an actual bibliography, LET ME KNOWWWWW <333

i'm gonna cut this post off here before i go on and on and on about my own speculative theories, but i'd like to leave everyone with this excerpt from mcclintock's narrative of searching for the franklin expedition men in 1859 while aboard the fox, which was sent by jane franklin as a search party.

mcclintock was writing about the victory point cairn note here, though it is worthwhile to mention he was the same man who found armitage's skeleton and peglar's wallet originally, and that he considered the peglar papers to be a bit of a disappointment for the rest of his own life due to the difficulty to discern what they said. henry peglar wrote the open c poem one month before charles des voeux and graham gore placed the first infamous 'all well' note into the victory point cairn.