Sir John Franklin - Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions: The Narrative of a Polar Explorer

Foreword Copyright 2017 by David Welky

First Skyhorse Publishing edition Copyright 2017

Reprinted from the 1859 edition published as Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions; or, The Adventures of Sir John Franklin.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Tom Lau

Cover photo credit: Library of Congress

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2385-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2386-3

Printed in the United States of America.

Assembled from earlier writings and first released in 1859, Sir John Franklins Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions captures a fascinating era of British and, indeed, world history. Not only is it an exemplary travel narrative that spans some of the most treacherous territory on Earth, it also opens a literary window onto a bygone era when braveperhaps foolhardymen plunged into dangerous expeditions with talk of God, country, and honor on their lips and little thought of their chances for survival in their minds. Beyond this, Thirty Years is a character study of its frumpy, balding, rather dowdy author, whose Arctic exploits made him famous and whose mysterious disappearance inspired a generations-long search for his final resting place.

His countrymen, and the entire civilised world, have recognised that the great though imperfect exploits of the traveler were outshone by the heroic qualities of the man, Henry Duff Traill wrote in his 1896 hagiography The Life of Sir John Franklin . Nothing about Franklins youth suggested heroism. He was born in 1786 in Spilsby, a market town 130 miles north of London. The ninth of twelve children, John entered the world with many advantages. His mother, Hannah, was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer and landholder. His father, Willingham, descended from generations of country squires, was a prosperous banker. Their combined wealth supported a rollicking household tempered by firm discipline. Johns childhood hijinks brought him into frequent contact with a whip that lay curled by the staircase. Punishment, however, could not quiet his instinctive desire for adventure. Although his parents sent him to respectable schools appropriate to their status, John decided at a young age that his future lay with the Royal Navy.

Willingham Franklin disapproved but eventually gave his consent after a two-year tussle to keep his youngest son on dry land. John volunteered at the age of fourteen for service aboard the HMS Polyphemus . Named for the Cyclops that appears in Homers Odyssey , the ship carried Franklin through the first stages of his own epic voyage. Great Britain was immersed in the Napoleonic Wars, and its navy represented both the pride and salvation of the nation. Franklin saw action at the Battle of Copenhagen and elsewhere before transferring to the old and leaky discovery ship Investigator , bound for Australia on a scientific mission. In 1803 he was aboard the Porpoise when it foundered on a reef in the South Pacific, two hundred miles from the nearest land. Franklin made it home, by way of China, in time to serve as a midshipman aboard the HMS Bellerophan during the 1804 Battle of Trafalgar, one of the climactic sea battles of the Napoleonic Era. A decade later Franklin was a seasoned lieutenant striding the deck of the HMS Bedford , part of a fleet trying to bottle up New Orleans during the War of 1812.

The Battle of New Orleans ended the War of 1812 with a thud for the British, who took solace from Napoleons final defeat at Waterloo three years later. With these two wars ended, the vast British navy suddenly faced a crisis of purpose. For years it had served as Albions oceangoing shield. Now the worlds most powerful military force had no apparent enemy. Lieutenant Franklin, thirty-one years old and envisioning a future without promotion or glory, was one of many fine officers searching for a new mission to justify the fleetsand his ownexistence.

The answer lay far to the north, in the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic wasnt exactly terra incognita to westerners. Whalers had charted some of its waters and shorelines. In the 1500s English privateer Martin Frobisher had searched the archipelago above eastern Canada for gold and a water route to China and India. He found neither, although he did carry home a hold full of worthless iron pyrite, or fools gold. A few other expeditions sailed north over the next few centuries, most notably the HMS Racehorse and the unfortunately named HMS Carcass , which struck out for the North Pole with a crew that included the young Horatio Nelson and the former slave Olaudah Equiano, whose abolitionist autobiography is still read today. Ice quickly turned them back.

Much of the region remained a mystery in John Franklins day. Charts reflected a combination of sketchy surveying, educated guesses, and outright speculation. Cartographers didnt even know whether Greenland was an island or a continent whose northern boundary extended beyond the North Pole. Many areas of the map were simply blank. Entire tribes of Inuit remained unknown to westerners. Some scientists believed the ocean around the North Pole was warm and free from ice. Educated men postulated that advanced civilizations lived at the pole, or within deep caverns accessible at 90 degrees north.

More important for the maritime nation of Great Britain was finding a navigable passage through the Arctic Archipelago to the Pacific Ocean and the riches of the Orient. The driving force behind this quest was Second Secretary of the Admiralty Sir John Barrow, a sharp-eyed civil servant who, besides understanding the public relations benefits of exploration, recognized the tremendous commercial potential in sending the fleet into the unknown. Discovering the fabled Northwest Passage, or better yet, a route passing directly over the pole, would shave thousands of miles from the voyage to Asia.

In 1818 the navy sent the HMS Isabella , under Commander John Ross, and the Alexander , under Lieutenant William Parry, to find the Northwest Passage. Rosss tiny fleet probed Baffin Bay before pushing west. He made it as far as Lancaster Sound before spotting a line of forbidding peaks blocking his way. He named them the Croker Mountains, in honor of First Secretary of the Admiralty John Croker, before turning around and heading home. Future expeditions proved that Ross had been deceived. The Croker Mountains were an optical illusion created by unusual atmospheric conditions. The Arctic would not yield its secrets easily.