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The Shipwrecks From John Franklin’s Doomed Arctic Expedition Were Exactly Where the Inuit Said They Would Be
In May 1845, 129 British officers and crew members set out in search of the Northwest Passage on HMS “Erebus” and HMS “Terror.” None returned
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In one of his last letters home, John Irving, a British lieutenant bound for the Arctic on an ill-fated voyage to discover the Northwest Passage, advised his sister-in-law that “there must now be a long blank in our correspondence.”
“Two years is a long time without any tidings, and perhaps we may be three years at least,” Irving wrote. Still, he pleaded, “Do not give us up, if you hear nothing.”
The lieutenant’s words proved prescient. After late July 1845, when a pair of whaling ships encountered HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in Baffin Bay, off the coast of Greenland, no European ever reported seeing any of the men alive again, despite the fact that as many as 36 expeditions searched for traces of them between 1847 and 1859. But the family and friends of the 129 officers and crew members—particularly Jane Franklin, wife of the expedition’s commander, John Franklin—refused to abandon hope that their loved ones had somehow endured in the Arctic environs.
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Ever since its departure from England exactly 180 years ago, on May 19, 1845, the Franklin expedition has captivated the public’s imagination. During the Victorian era, luminaries such as Wilkie Collins and Alfred, Lord Tennyson paid tribute to Franklin, eulogizing him as a martyr who sacrificed himself for the cause of scientific advancement. But by the 20th century, critics stopped seeing Franklin as the hero, arguing that imperialistic hubris prevented him and his men from adopting the ways of the Inuit, who had survived in the Arctic for thousands of years.
The explorers believed they “could support themselves if anything went wrong,” says Connie Wren-Gunn, author of The Land Was Always Used: An Inuit Oral History of the Franklin Expedition. “Realistically, there was no way there was ever going to be enough food for that many men in that one area, and Inuit could have told them that if they’d listened.”
Beyond acting as a mirror for the changing times, its meaning shifting with each new generation, the doomed quest for the Northwest Passage appeals to audiences because of its “human element,” says Russell A. Potter, author of Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search. “The idea of languishing trapped in the ice, unable to get out or get home for such an extended period, and at the same time, people are actively dispatching search expeditions and trying to locate you and find where you are—that really just captured [my attention], that poignancy of that loss.”
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The first report of the Franklin expedition’s fate arrived in Britain in 1854, just months after the Admiralty had officially declared the officers and crew dead. Written by the Scottish explorer John Rae, the account was based on Inuit testimony and suggested the survivors had resorted to “the last dread alternative as a means of sustaining life”: cannibalism. Jane and her supporters discredited these allegations.
Four years later, in 1859, searchers sent north by Jane uncovered the only known documentary evidence of the expedition’s movements after it lost contact with the Western world. Scribbled into the margins of a typewritten form and tucked into a cairn on King William Island, in the Arctic Archipelago, the Victory Point Note told a tale in two parts: Erebus and Terror had spent their first winter in the region at Beechey Island, some 400 miles west of Baffin Bay, before ascending Wellington Channel and returning via the west side of Cornwallis Island. “All well,” the May 1847 message concluded, with an underline for emphasis.
By April 1848, however, conditions had deteriorated significantly. The second set of annotations stated that Franklin had died just a few weeks after the first note was written, and a total of 24 officers and crew members had perished to date—a staggeringly high number for a Royal Navy expedition. Now under the command of Captain Francis Crozier, the surviving 105 men had “deserted” their ships, with plans to “start on tomorrow [April] 26th for Backs Fish River.” The written record ends there.
Today, the mystery of the lost Franklin expedition is far from solved, though the wrecks of Erebus and Terror were identified in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Archaeological research and Inuit oral histories have provided crucial clues regarding the men’s fate, but as David C. Woodman, author of Unraveling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony, says, “Everything about Franklin is still speculation. … All I can claim is that at least it’s partially informed speculation, and it has changed” as new details and evidence emerge.
The latest research indicates that the men split into groups sometime after April 1848, with some parties surviving longer than others but all ultimately dying of starvation, scurvy, exposure, physical exhaustion and chronic illnesses, among other causes. Cut marks found on expedition members’ bones corroborates Inuit testimony that describes the men engaging in cannibalism.
Reflecting on the expedition’s staying power in popular culture, Woodman says, “It’s a fundamental story: man against nature. In this case, nature wins.” He adds, “It inspired [Arctic] exploration for the next couple of decades, in the same way that if Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin had disappeared behind the backside of the moon and never reappeared, that would have been such a big story for us.”
The search for the Northwest Passage
Franklin and his men weren’t the first to set out for the Arctic on the quest for a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Explorers had been searching for a faster trade link between Europe and Asia since the 15th century, either failing to realize or ignoring the fact that inclement weather and ice would render the route impassable.
In the first few decades of the 19th century, separate expeditions led by John Ross and his nephew James Clark Ross, William Edward Parry, and George Back cemented the importance of finding the Northwest Passage in the Victorian imagination, much like space exploration captivated the American public more than a century later. But interest in the search faltered in the face of repeated failures, only to be resurrected in December 1844 by John Barrow, second secretary to the Admiralty, who proposed an expedition that he hoped would serve as the final flourish to his distinguished career.
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Franklin, who’d previously led two overland journeys to the Arctic, lobbied for command of this latest venture, encouraged in no small part by his ambitious wife, Jane. At 59, he was widely believed to be too old to lead the expedition, but the Admiralty’s concerns were likely assuaged by the fact that his ships would be captained by 48-year-old Crozier and 31-year-old James Fitzjames, two younger naval officers with distinguished records and, in Crozier’s case, extensive experience in polar exploration.
While contemporary accounts often claim that Franklin’s was the best-equipped, most technologically advanced expedition up to that date, Potter takes issue with this characterization. To prepare for the voyage, the Admiralty retrofitted Erebus and Terror, a pair of Royal Navy bomb vessels that had recently returned from an Antarctic expedition led by James Clark Ross, with support from his friend Crozier. “They’re outfitting them pretty much the same way for every expedition,” Potter says, though Erebus and Terror did boast at least one new piece of technology this time around: repurposed locomotive steam engines, which could help the ships navigate unfavorable winds and leads (fractures in the ice) but had to be used sparingly due to the limited amounts of coal on board.
In addition to coal, Erebus and Terror carried enough food to feed the officers and crew for three years (or five if rationed). Provisions included 8,000 tins of preserved meat, vegetables and soup; 36,487 pounds of biscuits; 9,450 pounds of chocolate; 3,684 gallons of spirits; and 9,300 pounds of lemon juice, which was supposed to help ward off scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiencies that was once the scourge of seafarers, killing an estimated two million sailors between the 16th and 18th centuries. To keep the men busy while they wintered in the ice, the ships held a vast library of novels, plays, religious texts and accounts of earlier Arctic expeditions, as well as tools and instruments for scientific study. “They are very strong, good ships and very well provided with every thing that can add to our comfort or convenience,” wrote Lieutenant Henry Le Vesconte in a letter to his mother.
On May 19, 1845, Erebus and Terror departed from Greenhithe, England, after a brief delay, making their way to Stromness, on Scotland’s Orkney Islands, to pick up the last fresh supplies. In June, en route to Greenland, the expedition’s final port of contact with the Western world, the men wrote their last letters home, painting a vivid portrait of life on board the ships and their hopes—and fears—for the coming months.
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Lieutenant James Walter Fairholme regaled his father with tales of the expedition’s resident animals, a “most lovable dog” named Neptune and a monkey named Jacko, who was “the annoyance and pest of the whole ship, and yet not a person in her would hurt him for the whole world.” Fairholme also praised Franklin as a “new man since we left,” one who’d earned the crew’s respect with his resolve and genuine interest in all aspects of the expedition. Erebus’ captain, Fitzjames, echoed Fairholme’s assessment, telling his sister-in-law that the commander “improves very much as we come to know more of him,” though he acknowledged that Franklin was “easily persuaded where he has not already formed a strong opinion.”
It was Crozier, captain of Terror, who was the most vocal in his doubts about the expedition, telling James Clark Ross, “What I fear is that from our being so late we shall have no time to look round and judge for ourselves, but blunder into the ice and make a second 1824 of it”—a reference to one of Parry’s expeditions, in which a vessel was damaged beyond repair and had to be abandoned. Crozier concluded, “All goes on smoothly, but James dear, I am sadly alone, not a soul have I in either ship that I can go and talk to.”
A supply ship that had accompanied Erebus and Terror as far as Greenland parted ways with the expedition on July 12, arriving back in Britain with the men’s final missives about a month later. Toward the end of July, in the Arctic Ocean’s Baffin Bay, Franklin dined with the captain of a whaling barque that was the last European vessel to cross paths with the expedition, telling him that if necessary, the crew could make their provisions “spin out seven years.” Franklin added “that he would lose no opportunity to killing birds, and whatever else useful that came in the way, to keep up their stock.” After that, the 129 men fell silent.
Tracing the Franklin expedition’s footsteps
Past this point in the story, the record is dotted with blanks that can only be filled in by archaeological finds, Inuit oral histories and scant documentary evidence. In 1847, after two years had passed without word from the expedition, Jane and seasoned Arctic explorers like the Rosses urged the Admiralty to send out a search party. Nobody found conclusive proof of the expedition’s fate. In 1850, the British government offered a £20,000 reward to anyone who could “discover and effectually relieve” the crews of Erebus and Terror, £10,000 to anyone who shared news that could lead to the men’s rescue or £10,000 to anyone who “shall by virtue of his or their efforts first succeed in ascertaining their fate.”
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The first traces of Franklin’s men surfaced that same year, when a search party surveying Beechey Island discovered a trio of graves representing the expedition’s earliest recorded deaths. The markers stated that 20-year-old John Torrington, 25-year-old John Hartnell and 32-year-old William Braine had died between January 1 and April 3, 1846. Later analyses attributed their deaths in part to tuberculosis, pneumonia and lead poisoning. Though this research, based on Owen Beattie’s exhumation of Torrington’s and Hartnell’s remains in the mid-1980s, suggested that lead from the expedition’s canned food had leached into the men’s bodies, causing mental confusion, irritability, fatigue, abdominal pain and a host of other health issues, that theory has now been debunked as a leading cause of the expedition’s failure.
The next major piece of the puzzle was Rae’s 1854 report, which drew on Inuit testimony and salvaged artifacts to argue that “a portion, if not all, of the then-survivors of the long-lost and unfortunate party under Sir John Franklin had met with a fate as melancholy and dreadful as it is possible to imagine.” Based on the “mutilated state” of bodies seen by the Inuit, Rae concluded that the men had been driven to cannibalism. Despite widespread public backlash to his reliance on Inuit accounts, Rae managed to claim the £10,000 reward for information.
Found in 1859, the Victory Point Note, the only known written record of the expedition’s Arctic travels, is one of the most tantalizing artifacts recovered by the various search parties. Though it claims that Erebus and Terror spent the winter of 1846-1847 at Beechey Island, the grave markers at the site indicate it was actually the winter of 1845-1846. This “elementary mistake,” made in Fitzjames’ handwriting in both the Victory Point Note and an identical copy found a few miles away, suggests that the captain’s “memory was clouded,” Potter writes in Finding Franklin. Historians don’t know whether this cognitive disturbance was caused by lead poisoning, exhaustion, scurvy or some other combination of factors.
Part two of the Victory Point Note, dated April 25, 1848, also contradicts the previously stated timeline, reporting that “Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April five leagues NNW of this, having been beset,” or trapped in the ice, since September 12, 1846. The message names two of the men lost on the expedition thus far—Franklin himself, who’d died on June 11, 1847, and “the late Commander [Graham] Gore”—before placing the overall death toll at 9 officers and 15 men. In a last-minute postscript, Crozier, by then in command of the expedition, recorded the crew’s intention of leaving the following day for what is now known as Back River.
Based on these sparse scribbles, an established narrative of the Franklin expedition’s fate emerged: After abandoning their ships in 1848, the men embarked on an overland march south, hauling heavy sledges loaded with supplies alongside them. Many died along the way, with some of the last survivors meeting their end at a site on the Adelaide Peninsula dubbed Starvation Cove. But this theory, like all others surrounding the expedition, is simply speculation—and it’s not fully supported by Inuit testimony.
How Inuit testimony unraveled the mystery of the Franklin expedition
To piece together an alternative version of what might have happened after the events of the Victory Point Note, contemporary historians have increasingly looked to the Inuit, who actually saw, talked to and “tried to help Franklin’s men,” says author Wren-Gunn.
Woodman’s 1991 compendium of Inuit testimony was one of the first to emphasize these eyewitness accounts, which had long been overlooked due to racism and the Western tendency to prize written evidence over oral histories. A mariner by trade, Woodman traces his interest in the Franklin expedition to his desire to find an undiscovered shipwreck—not necessarily Erebus or Terror, but “one of my own that no one else had found,” he says. Realizing that the key to the expedition’s fate lay in the interviews conducted by explorers while they were searching for Franklin and his men, Woodman started visiting archives and museums that housed Inuit testimony, including the Smithsonian Institution, which holds the papers of Charles Francis Hall, who traveled to the Arctic in the 1860s.
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The Inuit “were excellent observers,” Woodman says. “They had to be to live in the Arctic in those days. Even now … if you’re sending your grandson out to fetch caribou from a cairn you made two years ago, you have to give him pretty good directions” based on extensive knowledge of the land and its features. Across generations of testimony, he found that certain elements of the story remained remarkably consistent—a testament to just how large the encounter with Franklin’s men loomed in the Inuit community’s memory. “It would be as if aliens landed in your backyard,” Woodman says. “You would pay attention to the details.”
Independently from Woodman, Inuit oral historian Louie Kamookak embarked on his own quest for answers. As early as the 1970s, when he was still a teenager, Kamookak started asking elders in Gjoa Haven, the closest modern Inuit settlement to the area where the Franklin expedition met its end, about their community’s history. In the 1990s, he compared what he’d learned with the scholarly literature about the expedition, using his knowledge of Inuit family trees, traditional place names and hunting grounds to reframe accounts that had long puzzled Western historians.
“While Kamookak was listening to elders for clues, interpreting them with an innate understanding of the culture and the environment that sustains it, Woodman was focused on the written word,” writes journalist Paul Watson in Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition. “Both spent uncounted hours winnowing out the chaff by meticulously cross-referencing details, trying to figure out which of many accounts were the most credible.”
In Unraveling the Franklin Mystery, Woodman notes that only one Inuit account of the Franklin expedition is “universally accepted among historians.” Rae outlined the earliest version of this story, reporting that in 1850, “whilst some Esquimaux families were killing seals near the north shore of a large island … 40 white men were seen traveling in company southward over the ice, and dragging a boat and sledges with them.”
Speaking with Hall in May 1869, a pair of men named Teekeeta and Ow-wer described what happened next. Two qablunaat (the Inuit word for white people) approached and tried to speak to the Inuit. The one who appeared to be in charge, whom the Inuit dubbed Aglooka, communicated via hand motions that he “wanted to get something to eat,” Hall wrote. “He then made a motion to the northward and spoke the word oo-me-en, making them to understand there were two ships in that direction; which had, as they supposed, been crushed in the ice.”
The two parties traded goods and spent at least one night camped alongside each other, but when Aglooka attempted to stop the Inuit from leaving, putting his hand to his mouth and speaking the Inuit word for “seal,” Teekeeta, Ow-wer and their companions decided to move on. “The Innuits were in a hurry [and] did not know the men were starving,” Hall wrote. “After leaving Aglooka and party, [they] never saw anything more of them till some were found starved to death.” Inuit eyewitnesses recalled clear evidence of cannibalism at this place of mass death, describing bodies with “hands sawed off at the wrists [and] a great many [with] their flesh cut off.” The Inuit found gold and silver watches, compasses, kitchen utensils, and books and papers scattered across sites associated with the expedition. “They were given to the children to play with and have been broken up and lost,” a woman named Tooktoocheer later said.
“Testimony tells us that had Franklin and crew … adapted to the ways of the Inuit, they would have likely survived much longer than they did,” says Edna Ekhivalak Elias, an Inuk elder from Kugluktuk, Nunavut. “But according to the oral histories, it sounds like some of the crew members were already, perhaps beyond help.” One Inuit eyewitness described the men as “very thin, and their mouths were dry and hard and black.” Another said they were “hollow-cheeked and looked ill.”
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Separate Inuit accounts told of a ship that “was overwhelmed with heavy ice in the spring,” according to Hall. “While the ice was slowly crushing it, the men all worked for their lives in getting out provisions; but, before they could save much, the ice turned the vessel down on its side, crushing the masts and breaking a hole in her bottom and so overwhelming her that she sank at once, and had never been seen again.” Both Woodman and Potter identify this vessel as Terror, meaning a second ship found by the Inuit in “complete order” in the Utjulik region, on the northwestern coast of the Adelaide Peninsula, must have been Erebus. On board this abandoned ship, the Inuit discovered the body of a man with “very long” teeth. Later, when they returned to the site, they found that the ship had sunk, leaving only the tops of its masts visible.
These Inuit oral histories contradict the “standard reconstruction” of the Franklin expedition, which suggests the men abandoned their ships in 1848, then died that same year as they marched south. “There is so much evidence, including in my book, but others have done the same, that proves that could not possibly be right,” Woodman says. Based on the timing of the Inuit encounters with the expedition, the fact that the Inuit rarely visited the area where Erebus and Terror were trapped between 1846 and 1848, and an assortment of other evidence, Woodman argues that the desertion of the ships mentioned in the Victory Point Note was a temporary abandonment, with the crew returning to the vessels that had sheltered them for so long and remanning at least one to sail farther south. From there, the men eventually splintered into groups, each pursuing a different strategy in the fight for survival. None succeeded.
“Although the Arctic is often described as harsh and hostile, and I grant that it is extreme, I always think of it as beautiful, exposed, emotionless and uncompromised, a place where the land and sea provide but where mistakes are not forgiven,” says Margaret Bertulli, one of the first archaeologists to study sites associated with Franklin on King William Island in the 1990s. “That [the men] succumbed to the final resort of cannibalism makes sense to me, considering that the human spirit may be just as indomitable as that of the Arctic.”
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Finding Erebus and Terror and the future of the Franklin mystery
Between 1992 and 2004, Woodman led or participated in nine expeditions to the Arctic, drawing on Inuit oral histories to narrow down the search area. Though these ventures failed to find Erebus and Terror, they laid the groundwork for Parks Canada, the government agency that oversees Canada’s national parks and historic sites, to embark on a multiyear search in partnership with archaeologists, Kamookak and other Inuit elders, and private organizations like the Arctic Research Foundation. Searchers found Erebus’ wreck in 2014 and Terror’s in 2016. Both were exactly where the Inuit had said they would be.
Artifacts recovered from Erebus and Terror have shed light on life on board the ships, revealing some of the books the men read to pass the time, the instruments they used to record scientific data, and the hairbrushes and toothbrushes they used to groom themselves. The fact that Terror’s propeller is still in place is a “big clue” that the ship was remanned and “somehow made its way to some open water,” says Woodman. “You wouldn’t have left the propeller in place when the ships were abandoned in pack ice. It was a weak point, and it wasn’t that hard to retract.” He finds it more likely that the survivors used Terror’s steam engine and the propeller to navigate south.
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Though the wrecks answered vital questions about the fate of the Franklin expedition, they also raised new ones. “If you think of [the mystery] as a big onion, and you’re peeling the layers of the onion trying to get to the center,” discovering the ships doesn’t mean “that you’ve solved it,” Potter says. “It’s just that now you’ve got a much bigger onion, and it’s going to take longer to sift through and sort these things.” Archaeological investigations are underway at both wreck sites, but the harsh conditions prevent divers from accessing them during most of the year. Meanwhile, Erebus is at risk of degrading due to strong currents.
Forensic analyses of skeletons recovered from the Arctic is ongoing. Just last year, a team led by Douglas R. Stenton used DNA to identify a jawbone found on King William Island in 1993 as that of Erebus’ captain, Fitzjames. The bone exhibited multiple cut marks, suggesting that “neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the final desperate days of the expedition as [the surviving men] strove to save themselves,” Stenton said in a statement.
The circumstances of Franklin’s death are still a mystery. Kamookak, who died in 2018, believed the commander was buried on King William Island’s uninhabited west coast, and he dreamed of one day finding Franklin’s body and returning it to England. Did any written records of the expedition besides the Victory Point Note survive? Potter is intrigued by the possibility of finding documents in Crozier’s desk, which has been photographed by a remotely operated vehicle. Perhaps the biggest question of all is one that’s fundamental to understanding the allure of the expedition: How did 129 experienced sailors and Royal Marines with enough supplies to last for several years all die in a landscape where others managed to survive?
The answer to this last question is the subject of endless speculation, but it’s unlikely to ever be definitively solved. Inuit oral histories indicate that the winters Franklin and his men spent in the Arctic were unusually harsh, and even under normal circumstances, life for the Inuit was “an almost uninterrupted struggle for bare existence, and periods of dearth and actual starvation [were] not infrequent,” as the Greenlandic Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen wrote in 1927. Given the challenges of surviving in the Arctic, Woodman argues that the 19th-century Inuit’s choice to leave the expedition to its fate was “undoubtedly the logical decision.” As he writes in Unraveling the Franklin Mystery, “Had every Netsilingmiut hunter miraculously gathered at King William Island with the express purpose of aiding Franklin’s 105 men, the result would probably have been the demise of both populations.” Ultimately, the expedition’s failure likely came down to a combination of factors, including dietary deficiencies, hubris and simple bad luck.
In recent years, Inuit experiences have become more central to accounts of the Franklin expedition. The first season of “The Terror,” an AMC series based on Dan Simmons’ book of the same name, features an Inuit character named Lady Silence. Nive Nielsen, the Inuk actor who plays Lady Silence, advised the production team to ensure “we were faithful to what she felt [was] the representation of her culture,” showrunner Soo Hugh told Smithsonian magazine in 2018.
The Land Was Always Used, a 2024 collection of oral histories about the Franklin expedition, is arguably the culmination of these efforts to put the focus back on the Inuit. A collaboration between Parks Canada, the Nattilik Heritage Society and Know History, the book combines historical accounts of the Franklin expedition with contemporary testimony from the Inuit community. Wren-Gunn worked with Elias to collect these accounts.
“Nattilikmiut were so relieved to have been able to tell their stories kept from being told for years and years for fear of an invasion of more strange people,” says Elias. “Their long-kept secret as to the locations of the two sunken ships was lifted off their shoulders. Now, the public can enjoy these stories.”
As Wren-Gunn explains, “The goal of the book was not so much to tell another story of the Franklin expedition. It was more about telling a story of Inuit in that area.”
She adds, “Their ancestors have been there for generations, hunting and fishing and sealing, and [today,] they use all the same travel routes that their ancestors did. They use the same harvesting areas. The point of the book was to say there’s way more to this than Franklin. Inuit were here. They’re still here. They’re still going to be here in many more generations.”