#finding franklin

Francis Crozier to James Clark Ross, 19 July 1845

“...we know that Crozier, captain of the Terror and second-in-command overall, was miffed one day when he discovered that tea and sugar he had arranged to have delivered had been misappropriated and directed to Fitzjames instead.”

November 4, 1854 - The Britstol Mercrury chose “The Enquiry” by Charles Mackay as the issue’s poetry selection - juxtaposed alongside several articles about the fate of the Franklin Expedition, reprinted from other newspapers and periodicals.* 

The poetry section was standard for the paper, but given the placement on the page alongside the Franklin articles, I suspect it was deliberately chosen as a eulogy. In the poem, the narrator asks the “winged winds,” the “mighty deep” and the moon whether men can hope for any happier fate than the struggles of life. The poem means to contrast the physical world with the promise of another world in heaven, but in context it specifically evokes the harsh climate and long night against which Franklin’s men would have struggled in the Arctic.** These parallels would likely have been obvious to the Victorian reading public, who had been inundated with articles, images, and exhibits about the nature and dangers of the Arctic for years***. 

I particularly was struck by the stanza where the narrator addresses the ocean itself, and asks whether there is “Some island far away,” “Where sorrow never lives, / And friendship never dies.” What a contrast between that imagined place (perhaps not only evocative of the island of Great Britain, the home the lost men remembered), and the islands of the Arctic, which readers would truly associate now with sorrow and the death of men and their comrades. 

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*some of which believed the Inuit testimony as reported by John Rae, and some of which were blatantly racist (be forewarned if you choose to read through all the screenshots).   

**I am reminded of Crozier’s eulogy for John Franklin in The Terror! 

Commander Graham Gore

On the earlier conversation about Graham Gore’s promotion, this blog entry by Dr. Russell Potter suggests that Gore may either have been promoted for achievements in the Arctic shortly before Franklin’s death, OR as a “matter of course” after Franklin’s death, when Fitzjames became Captain.

Another interesting thing to point out is that after Franklin’s death, it seems like Terror may have become the flagship in Erebus’s place. When Franklin died, Crozier would have been within his right to transfer his command to Erebus. However, in VPN part the second, he signed his name first, followed by “Captain HMS Terror,” which indicates that Terror was considered the flagship by that point.

Terror Camp Clear