Franklin, Sir John
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Sir John (1786-1847), a noted Arctic explorer. He was a native of Lincolnshire, England. He entered the English navy in his youth. He was present at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and took part in the expedition against New Orleans in 1814. While in the service of the government he became interested in the exploration of the Arctic coast of North America . In 1845 he was placed in command of an expedition to survey the waters and coasts from Baffin's Bay westward. He sailed with two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, May 18, 1845. The expedition was last heard of off the entrance of Lancaster Sound, July 26, 1845. No less than thirty-nine relief expeditions, public and private, were sent out to search for Sir John and his ill fated companions. In 1857 the yacht Fox, sent out by Lady Franklin, returned with the first authentic information. A number of articles, including a journal kept by one of Franklin's officers, was found in a heap of stones. In 1869 Captain Hall succeeded in purchasing from the Eskimos over 150 articles recognized as belonging to former members of the expedition. In 1880 Lieutenant Schwatka explored Prince William's Land where he found the bodies of a large number of the party, together with the scientific records which had been hidden in a cairn. The account of the Franklin expedition forms an important chapter in the history of Arctic exploration. Queen Victoria was much pleased with the efforts of the Americans to get news of the lost Sir John. In 1881 she presented the White House a chair made from the timber of Franklin's ship, the Resolute. See Arctic Regions ; Nansen ; De Long ; Greeley
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910, the fate of the Erebus and Terror rested on relics, graves and the 1859 note recovered by Lady Franklin's yacht Fox — the ships themselves were simply gone. They have since been found: the wreck of Erebus in 2014 in Wilmot and Crampton Bay and Terror in 2016 in Terror Bay, both located by Canadian searchers working from Inuit oral testimony that nineteenth-century officers had largely discounted, and both now protected as a national historic site with ongoing dives recovering artefacts. Forensic work on the Beechey Island burials and on bones from King William Island in the 1980s and after added scurvy, disease and evidence of cannibalism to the picture of how the crews died. One detail to correct: the Resolute, whose timbers furnished the gift to the White House (a desk, still in the Oval Office), was one of the search ships, not Franklin's own.
Written for this edition, 2026.