Death in the Ice: Part 1

I've been up to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to see this summer's big Franklin Expedition exhibition, Death in the Ice.  They don't let you take photos in the exhibition, which gives me the excuse to illustrate this review with scenes from a painting I made in 2013, on a door in Bom–Bane's restaurant, Brighton.

If you go, I recommend calling in first at the nearby chapel in the Old Royal Naval College, to see the Franklin Memorial. It's a powerful image of high hopes, on the left, crushed by the Arctic Ice, on the right.

The memorial is also the tomb of one of the only two men of the expedition to brought back to Britain (the other is in Edinburgh). From 2011 isotope analysis of his teeth, he's thought to be Harry Goodsir, the brilliant young naturalist who served as Assistant Surgeon on HMS Erebus. His skull also matches the daguerreotype of Goodsir taken on board Erebus before the expedition sailed.

I also suggest getting into a Victorian frame of mind by having lunch at Goddard's Pie Shop, which has been serving pie and mash since 1890. After a cheese and onion pie and mash (with liquor) and a bottle of London Pride, I was ready to go.

A big theme of the exhibition is that this is a story about 129 individual lives – men and boys who'd left families and friends at home, anxiously waiting for news. In front of the museum, there's a mass of banners, each representing a member of the lost expedition. The design is based on a sledge flag made by Lady Jane Franklin for one of the search expeditions, and carries the inspirational motto, 'Hope On Hope Ever'.

We looked for Harry Goodsir and found him. 

The first thing you see on going in is a single shoe, lined with sealskin for additional warmth. Here's a screenshot from a youtube video in which Marc-Andre Bernier (Underwater Archaeology Manager for Parks Canada) talks about the shoe.  I love the way that the exhibition allows the visitor the space to focus on individual objects like this.
 

THE ICY WORLD OF THE INUIT

We move from this dark space into a bright room, with projections of Arctic scenery on the walls. This represents the world of the Inuit. In the centre, there's a magnificent kayak and two sets of fur clothing. Gathered around is a collection of beautifully made tools, which the Inuit made from knives, files, copper and wood found in Franklin's camps. The one you can see here is a snow knife, used to cut blocks of snow to make igloos. Its blade is from a table knife made by Wigfall and Company of Sheffield. The explorer John Rae bought this knife in 1854 in Repulse Bay from some Inuit who told him the fate of the expedition. With one of these knives, an Inuk could make a shelter in minutes, and one much warmer than the flimsy tents that the Naval explorers carried with them. Imagine the story this knife could tell!

Meeting koblunas, as the Inuit called white people, was such an extraordinary event that stories of encounters were preserved for generations. Charles Francis Hall, searching in the 1860s for news of Franklin's men, was astounded to hear Inuit stories of Sir Martin Frobisher's three voyages to Baffin Island in 1576-8. The exhibition has two recordings of modern Inuit retellings of encounters, one with Frobisher's expedition, and the other with some of the last survivors of Franklin's expedition. This is the story of the Washington Bay encounter, told to John Rae in 1854, to Charles Francis Hall in 1869, to Frederick Schwatka in 1879, and to Knud Rasmussen in the 1920s. Here's how the story begins in Hall's version.

The modern account of this is a recording of Mark Tootiak, who was interviewed by Dorothy Harley Eber in 1999. I was struck by one extraordinary detail. Seeing the koblunas approach wearing such thin clothing, the Inuit feared that they would want to steal their fur parkas. So they took them off and hid them in their igloo! I've never heard that before. Could it be the way the story has grown?

THE WOODEN WORLD OF THE SHIPS

Unlike the Inuit, who adapted themselves to the Arctic environment, Naval expeditions took their environment with them – in this case, two converted bomb vessels called Erebus and Terror. So we move from the Inuit world into this Victorian British world – to a long room, painted brown, which has the internal dimensions of the lower deck on Franklin's ships. A table, the same size as the table in Franklin's cabin, has a computer graphic showing the mapping of the Canadian Arctic from Frobisher's voyages to the eve of Franklin's expedition in 1845. Only a tiny part of the puzzle was left to be filled in.

Franklin had no way of knowing that this area contains a deadly trap. A mass of ice, from the Beaufort Sea to the Northwest, is funnelled by currents here, piling up in the Victoria Channel to the west of Boothia. Ryan Harris, who found HMS Erebus, told the New York Times, 'Franklin and his men were doomed the moment they received orders from the Admiralty. He followed those orders to a T and into the worst choke point in the Arctic Archipelago.’ 

This was the best equipped expedition the Navy had ever sent to the Arctic.  Erebus and Terror, already massively strong ships, had their hulls doubled in thickness and bows reinforced with iron plates.  They were fitted with railway steam engines and retractable propellors, to give them extra push in ice breaking. An air based heating system kept the lower deck, where everybody lived, warm. Each ship carried a library, of 1,200 (Terror) and 1,700 (Erebus) books, including bound copies of Punch, and every book written on the Arctic. They had two mechanical hand organs, which could play 50 tunes, including ten hymns (it's a shame the exhibition doesn't play examples). The officers had their own monogrammed silver cutlery and fashionable willow pattern tableware. There was three years worth of food, much of it canned. You can read the list of HMS Terror's provisions here.

HMS Erebus also carried a daguerreotype camera, which had only been invented in 1839. Before sailing, the senior officers posed on deck for Richard Beard to take portraits of them. In his book, Finding Franklin, Russell Potter suggests that Harry Goodsir would have been responsible for taking photographs on the expedition.

I was excited to see, beside the Victorian model of HMS Erebus, a new model of HMS Terror, whose construction I've been following on the excellent blog of its builder, Ship Modeller. It has exquisite details, including the propellor, and the Preston Patent Illuminators and glass prisms set into the deck to let in light. Later in the exhibition, we get to see one of these illuminators, from HMS Erebus. On his blog, Ship Modeller reveals

'My version of Terror is modeled at the standard 1:48 Admiralty scale, the same as the builder’s model of Erebus....I had measured, scaled, remeasured, and measured again to ensure the scale and dimensions were correct, but I still worried that something was amiss. I had nightmares that museum staff would open the packing crate only to find that my Terror was larger than Erebus, or had the wrong bow shape, or some other fatal flaw.' 

The gallery looks at what life would have been like on board the ships. During the long winters, the crews would put on theatrical entertainments, and there are posters of these from other expeditions.  Arctic newspapers were produced on board, and there were slates so that illiterate sailors could be taught to read and write. We learn of the pet monkey, Jacko, a gift from Lady Franklin.

On 19 May 1845, cheering crowds watched the ships set off from Greenhithe, just down river from Greenwich. They were towed out to sea by the steam-powered sloop HMS Rattler.

You can still visit the berth where Erebus and Terror spent their last days in England. It's behind the modern Sir John Franklin pub, which is filled with nautical knickknacks. Why not make a trip to the pub after you visit the exhibition?

A sense of high hopes and high spirits comes from quotations from the last letters home, sent back from Greenland. One of the great losses of the expedition is the book that Commander James Fitzjames of HMS Erebus would have written if he'd returned. His comical sketches of his fellow officers could have been written by Dickens. The exhibition has a quotation from his letter in which he describes Harry Goodsir's excitement at the specimens he was collecting:

Gore and Des Voeux can be seen at all hours with cigars dangling from their lips, leaning over the sides with nets and long poles to catch the extraordinary animals which continue to send Goodsir into ecstasies. Osmer is always there to, laughing at everything. 

In Greenland, Goodsir wrote a scientific paper on 'Several new species of crustaceans allied to Saphirina', which was sent back with the last letters and published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. His beautiful drawings of the crustaceans are displayed in the exhibition. One of his copepods got called Alteutha oblonga.

WHERE IS FRANKLIN?

From the large ship room, we move into small narrower corridor, representing the confined world of the families left at home, waiting for news. I learn from Regina Koellner's Captain of Terror blog that the walls, painted maroon, mirror the interior of a Victorian drawing room. 

On the wall, there's the sledge flag embroidered by Lady Jane Franklin with the motto from a popular hymn, 'Hope on, Hope Ever'. Beside it is a desperately moving letter from John and Phoebe Diggle to their son John, a cook on HMS Terror. Unpublished, this was recently donated to the National Maritime Museum by Diggle's family. It's in beautiful copperplate handwriting with eccentric spelling, and it begins:

Dear Son, I wright these few lines in hopes to find you and all your Shipmates in both Ships well… but our fears his wee shall Never see you again seeing the Account in the Newspaper how you have been Situated what with been frozen inn and having that dreadful Disorder the Schervey wich us in little hopes of seeing you again but wee trust in God when HMS Plover recahes you our thought will be frustrated and joyful news it will be for us to hear on her return to England that you and all the crew are well Please God it may be so

The envelope alongside is stamped 'undeliverable'.

We listen to a recording of an actress, reading a letter from Lady Jane Franklin to her missing husband. The letter, which has tiny handwriting, was written in 1853, when Sir John had already been dead for six years. 

You must always have felt that I would never rest till I had more tidings of you….It is my heart’s sole thought; the one and only object and occupation of all my faculties and energies. My own dear husband it is for you I live.

Lady Jane's devotion won her the reputation of being England's Penelope, and was already celebrated in the early 1850s, in the famous song, Lady Franklin's Lament. My favourite version is by A.L.Lloyd, who sounds like a Victorian seafarer. I've combined it on Soundcloud with bowhead whale song. Bowhead whales are living witnesses of the Franklin expedition. They live to be 200 years old, and dead bowheads are found with Victorian harpoons in them. So the bowheads alive today were there when Franklin sailed past, searching for the Northwest Passage in 1845.

To be continued...