On the finding of James Fitzjames

It's been a long, long time since anyone last heard anything from -- or of -- James Fitzjames. His last known letter was to Edward Sabine, and it closed with his characteristic optimism and high spirits:

    Sir John is very well and full of life and energy - and we are all as happy as possible looking forward to the commencement of our real work - No one I am sure will rejoice more than yourself at our success which we all anticipate eventually if not sooner.

It was dated 11 July 1845, and the next day went into the mailbag aboard the Barretto Junior. A little less than three years later, he penned the postscript in the margin to his own note, deposited at Victory Point, and telling of the deaths that had ensued while the ships were trapped, Franklin's included, signing himself "Captain Hms Erebus." After that, silence.

Which is not quite the same thing as nothing at all. His letters to his brother and sister-in-law were privately published, and came to serve a the first words most people read of all the letters sent home by the men of the Expedition. Every account told to the Inuit, every rumor and sighting and possibility of a sighting, was scanned for evidence of his presence. Most notably, perhaps, in 1999, the novelist John Wilson published North With Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames, in which his familiar voice, by some sort of conjuring, returned, lively as ever, and again took up his tale. Fitzjames figured in numerous other Franklin fictions, chipper and loquacious, almost never despairing. Most recently, as memorably played by Tobias Menzies in the AMC adaptation of Dan Simmons's The Terror, he came to life once more, cheered and reconciled and eventually helped to an easeful passing from a world of pain by his friend and fellow in command, Francis Crozier.

But now all this fierce imagining is done -- he himself is found, and in a place that seems to defy all our auguries -- near one of the abandoned whaleboats in Erebus Bay, a site presumably reached by the retreating men of the Expedition within the first weeks of their southward struggle. Did he perish early on from some illness or accident? Or did he go further, but then return, perhaps to look after those who could go on no more? It may never be possible to know, but what he can say is that his jawbone -- known as "mandible 226" -- shows cut-marks consistent with survival cannibalism. It's hard to imagine a state of starvation in which either the hands or face, which as Dr. Anne Keeenleyside once remarked are "the most human parts of the body," would be used as food, but that state must have been reached at some point.

There are two horizons over which an answer to these uncertainties may someday appear:  first, through the continued work of archaeologists such as Doug Stenton and his team, who are patiently surveying all the known sites on land with Franklin remains, and whose DNA database may yet identify other individuals. Secondly, we can hope that just perhaps, from the wreck of the Erebus, some written indication may come that will give us further clues. Right now, what we chiefly lack is a timeline -- after the April abandonment and the VP note all is blank -- and if either ship was ever re-manned, the records there (if found) might advance our knowledge of these events. Until then, what more can we say? 

I'll let John Wilson's fictive Fitzjames have the last word:

My dearest Elizabeth, the end will come with you in my thoughts and your picture clutched in my hand. Remember me fondly. For the last time, I wish you Good Night.

New details on the career of Stephen Samuel Stanley

Thanks to the indefatigable researches of Michael Tracy, we at last have several additional tantalizing bits of information about the medical career of Stephen Samuel Stanley, the Surgeon appointed to HMS "Erebus" for the Franklin expedition. Tracy, who is Harry Goodsir's cousin and closest living relative, never takes "no" for an answer, and is willing to winnow through the most vast and general of documents in search of a single grain of valuable information. This has been the case with the records of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, an association no less ancient (though slightly less august) than the RCS of Edinburgh. Unlike its Scots counterpart, the RCS was not associated with a single medical school, but nevertheless did grant diplomas; thanks to Mike's researches, we now know that Stanley received one on the 11th of May, 1838. His examiner was the eminent anatomist Sir Astley Cooper, and on receiving the diploma Stanley paid the required fee of £21 (about £1200 in today's currency). 

As to where and how he completed his medical studies, he appears to have begun them at the University of Edinburgh under the renowned Robert Knox; we know this thanks to a memoir of the anatomist Knox by Henry Lonsdale. Stanley's dissection of an elbow took the first prize in 1836 (Sir William Fergusson, recipient of the recently-discovered Stanley letter at the NYPL, was at the time Knox's demonstrator). He then seems to have studied under Fergusson himself, who taught at King's College; although Mike had the College archivist check their Entrance Records, no mention of Stanley could be found, as the volume for the relevant period has gone missing. 

Mike has also found that Stanley had two medical publications -- one, in the venerable Lancet, on "Dropsy of the Pineal Gland" (1838) and another "“Case of Perfect Ankylosis of the Five Superior Cervical Vertebrae” in the Edinburgh Medical And Surgical Journal in 1841. All told, his training and published work would seem to have fitted him more for a brilliant career as an anatomist than the more humble one of a Surgeon in the Royal Navy. On joining, he was initially posted to Haslar Hospital, where he was stationed from 5 June 1838 to 11 November 1839.

Just a few months into his posting, on the 10th of November, Stanley seems to have become involved in what, despite the word-mincing of press reports, can only be described as a duel. The cause of this contention is unstated. Stokes Bay is not far from Haslar, and one can imagine that the site was chosen for its shingle beach, which in November one could assume would be fairly sparsely populated.

The following year, he finally joined his first ship, as he was posted to HMS Blonde on November 16th and dispatched to China; Stanley's next few years would be on a series of ships involved in what became known as the First Opium War: the Algerine, the Cornwallis, and the Siren. Although it's often cited as his principal posting, his time aboard the Cornwallis was relatively brief, from June to August of 1842; there, fatefully, he was to meet Le Vesconte and Fitzjames. His service aboard the Siren would have qualified him for a China Medal, but according to Glenn Stein, with whom I checked, there's no indication that one was sent to him or his relations. And, despite all these new bits of information, Stanley's date of birth and parentage remain elusive, as do any details pertaining to his life before he commenced his medical studies. And since, despite his marriage to Mary Ann Windus on the eve of the Franklin expedition's sailing, he never updated his will -- which left his entire estate to one Robert Barr -- no further information can come from that quarter.

The diploma first mentioned does, though, perhaps shed some light on one (since lost) Franklin relic, a board or plank found on Montreal Island and said to have the inscription, "MR STANLEY." It's an oddity of the College of Surgeons that, in order to qualify for membership one must already have completed one's medical studies, and would be known as "Dr. so-and-so." And yet, on receipt of the Diploma, one becomes a qualified Surgeon, yet as such entitled only to be addressed as "Mr."

The Mystery of Catherine Tozer

The essential details of the life of Solomon Tozer, a sergeant in the Royal Marines assigned to HMS Terror, are well-known, and have been documented in Ralph Lloyd-Jones's article "The Royal Marines on Franklin's Last Arctic Expedition" (Polar Record 40 (215) (2004). He was born in Axbridge, near Cheddar, in 1815 or possibly 1817, and may have been a Nonconformist (a religious term from the day, signifying those who did not agree with the 29 articles of the established Church of England). 

However, what is far less well-known is that he may have had a sister, Catherine, who was a nonconformist in a much more modern sense of the word. According to the 1913 press article, she'd worked as a schoolmistress, but suffered so much abuse from her husband that she left him (it should be borne in mind that divorce was essentially impossible at this period in time), and chose to adopt male attire for the rest of her life, going by the name of "Charley Wilson" and finding employment as a painter. Further details about her are scarce -- the two newspaper items in this post contain almost all of what is known, and my efforts to contact the family descendant who first drew my attention to her story have not (so far) met with success, but apparently the family genealogy is -- by that account -- fairly certain.

(The few other items about her online are often accompanied by a photograph said to be hers -- but in fact the image is a glass plate photograph of Marie Høeg (1866-1949), a Norwegian photographer and suffragist who had taken private photographs of herself wearing a theatrically fake mustache). 

The Catherine Tozer known in these newspaper columns seems to have been born in 1837, which would make her twenty years younger than her brother, quite a stretch but not an impossibility. By this earlier account, she first came to public attention after a scandalous affair -- circumstances rather different from those described in the Cheltenham Chronicle years later. The details are in this item from the Bury Times of September 8, 1860 (the dates given here are inconsistent by two years with those of the other article). 

One of the last records I could find was a notice from the Gloucestershire Echo of 15 October 1897 noting that she will be able to leave a workhouse in West Ham thanks to the support of the Painters' Union and an offer of employment in "some light business." If I have her correct date of birth, she would have been sixty years old at that time. 

More recently, a lengthy research article on the Tozer family has come to light, compiled by a user known as @dustygnome; a link to this article may be found via Tumblr. There's a tremendous amount of valuable information in this article, which covers several generations of the Tozer family. I've also located a couple of additional resources in more specialized archives, including this trans history page which links to a newspaper article that contains an actual interview with Charley Wilson conducted shortly before his death. From this site, it's also fascinating to learn that Wilson was employed painting ships for the Peninsular & Oriental shipping company, including the Rome, the Victoria, the Oceania, and the Arcadia. P&O, as it was known, continued in business until 2006, when it was sold to DP World; a reconstituted part of the company operates P&O Ferries, infamous for sacking its entire staff in 2022. Charley Wilson is said to have died in 1911; I have so far been unable to locate a burial site.

Parks Canada 2023 finds

Marc-André Bernier examines the seaman's chest

The news is in: Parks Canada has just made its first official release of results from the 2023 dive season. It was a relatively short one -- just twelve days -- but the objects recovered from HMS Erebus are remarkable both for their number -- said to be in the hundreds -- and for the light that those so far publicly identified cast upon the lives of those aboard Franklin's flagship.

It's a slow and patient process, as divers have to ensure that they disturb the context of the objects they recover as little as possible, knowing full well that this means that there will always be items that must wait until the next dive season. The Underwater Archaeology Team (UAT) has been moving slowly through the accessible spaces of Erebus, continuing their work on the captain's steward's storage area just forward of Franklin's Great Cabin, and looking into one of the officer's rooms -- likely that of lieutenant H.T.D. Le Vesconte. At the same time, with an eye to learning more about the onboard lives of regular sailors, a seaman's chest in the fo'c'sle -- forward of the wardroom but astern of the sick bay -- was investigated. The finds in each of these areas have already transformed our understanding of the lives of Franklin's men, even as we must be cautious -- since such a small portion of all the artifacts on board has yet been recovered -- of the ways in which finds yet to be found may re-shape the story.

Beginning with the captain's steward -- Edmund Hoar -- new items have been found in what was likely a storage area of which he was in charge. Notable among these is a bottle, embossed with the "broad arrow" signifying government property, as well as a letter "K." Dubbed the "K bottle" (after a compressed-air bottle in quite common use among divers), it may contain some sort of medicine; similar bottles with different letters have been recovered from marine sites elsewhere in Canada. The location seems to have been well-contained, which suggests that perhaps Hoar, or the Captain he served, had some need of it. Further along the companionway, a room believed to be likely that of H.D.T. Le Vesconte disclosed an unexpected find: the reel of a fishing rod (found with other parts of a fishing kit), which quite alters one's imagined view of Le Vesconte or any Franklin officer if the room were theirs. Once, we knew them only in their dress uniforms; now we must imagine at least one of them with rod and reel, which conjures up quite a different image.

But it's the seaman's chest in the fo'c'sle that piques the imagination most -- among the objects within appear to have been some pistols, one of which has been recovered to the surface and will be undergoing conservation. Why would side-arms have been kept in such a chest? Were they stored there under lock and key in case of need, or perhaps cached for safety when the ship was deserted? It's worth noting that the Royal Marines would have shared this area with the regular sailors, and yet such pistols were not necessarily standard equipment (though Nelson's navy had its sea-service pistols). One thinks also of the long rifles hanging from the beam in Terror's great cabin -- was the attitude toward firearms more relaxed while on Arctic service? More context is certainly needed to answer such questions; it may perhaps emerge in future dive seasons, when the chest is further excavated.

It's the suggestive and enigmatic quality of these objects that makes them so special. My personal favorite is a stoneware bowl, also found in the chest; unlike the fancy flo-blue and transferware from the officers' mess, the regular sailors would surely have made do with humbler vessels, and this is one. It's a reminder that, both in written records and in artifacts, the daily life of most of the men aboard Franklin's ships has only just now begun to be accounted for.