Next in this sequence, let's meet the talismanic figure of the era...and a star of the John Murray Archive...Bookending this heroic, and let us not hesitate to say, lunatic era in the search for the Northwest Passage, was one man, and two books, published by Murray in 1822 and 1859...one written in part by John Franklin, (and from which samples will follow in a later entry or two) being an account of a disasterous attempt to find the Passage overland from Great Slave Lake in Canada, up the Coppermine river to the sea...which was the biggest bestseller of the lot.
(Both Scott and Amudsen later claimed it as inspiration, which ought to tell you something about THEM)...
Franklin's account, scribbled in agonised pencil scratchings in 1819-21 as he lay dying by inches of scurvy and starvation (He and the other survivors were rescued by Inuits) is full of gallant details...they only survived at on lichen growing on stones...but they called it "Tripes des Roches" like they were in a resteraunt in Paris...
Most famously, it contains accounts of the explorers cooking and eating their own boots...like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush...which is almost certainly where the idea came from...
It also tells of a trapper called Michel who went mad...murdered two of the party, and brought back fresh cuts of meat to his companions, claiming he'd killed a wolf...
Unbelievably ghastly...and the public ate it up with gusto.
(Franklin's original notebooks from this trip are in my treasures gallery)
The second book is 'The Voyage of the Fox', published by Murray (John Murray III) in the same month as he published Darwin's Origin of Species...November 1859, and this was the account by Captain Francis McClintock of his expedition to find traces of Franklin's disappearance in 1845.
Yes, Franklin, by now aged 59 and in poor health...had gone BACK in 1845! looking for the same thing...the chimerical Northwest Passage...him and 129 men in two well equipped ships...who were sighted by a whaler in Lancaster Sound, and then just vanished in the wastleland. John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty and the Navy then sent a series of expeditions to look for HIM...
One of which found two graves on Beechey Island in 1850...there were then some vague reports from native Inuits collected in 1853...then the Admiralty gave up.
Not Lady Franklin though. She never stopped hoping. (There will be much more in future blogs about Lady Franklin)
Franklin's first disaster had made him a national hero...what McClintock found on the voyage of the Fox made Franklin into an icon of heroic sacrifice for generations of English Schoolboys (including Captain Scott...who wrote an introduction to a reissue in 1910 of Franklin's original Arctic narrative)...and since then?
There are archaeologists up there still looking for the corpses...autopsies were performed in 1999 on the bodies at Beechey Island, (discovering a terrifying level of lead poisoning in the corpses, probably from the new fangled tinned food they brought with them...the cans were sealed with lead solders!) and Franklin himself got his statue in Waterloo Place, and an empty mausoleum in Westminster Abbey, as a result of Lady Franklin's assiduous, dogged, obsessive lobbying.
Coming next, my second Arctic Treasure.
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