A "Navigable" Northwest Passage?

Recently, the question of in how Dr. John Rae's charting of the strait that bears his name contributed to the tracing of a Northwest Passage. There can, I hope, be no question that Rae was one of the most skilled and capable Arctic explorers and surveyors, and that his establishing King William as an island was a discovery of great geographical significance. There are those, however, who wish to credit Rae, at the expense of Franklin, as the sole discoverer of the  passage, and for them, a key part of the claim is that the Rae Strait route would have been navigable by Franklin's vessels had he tried this route. And yet, it's also widely known that, although Roald Amundsen managed this route with his tiny Gjøa, he encountered shoals which obliged him to jettison a considerable amount deck cargo in order to avoid running aground.

Ken McGoogan, author of Fatal Passage, recently put his argument this way:

Rae Strait is 14 miles wide. I have sailed through it half a dozen times in ships that are far larger -- longer, heavier, and with much deeper drafts -- than the Erebus and Terror. I did it again last month. Google the Clipper Adventurer and compare. Big ships go through Rae Strait all the time, even in the dark. Amundsen was sailing very near the coast of KWI, that is all. A bit farther out, no problem whatsoever.

For the record, the Clipper Adventurer, a purpose-built vessel for adventure tourism, has a draught of 4.72 meters (15.5 feet); HMS Terror had a draught of 4.47 m (14 feet 8 inches); according to Amundsen's journal, the Gjøa, fully loaded, drew just over 10 feet.

A recognized reference on the subject, The Northwest Passage: Arctic Straits, by Donat Pharand and Leonard H. Legault, puts it succinctly: "Reconnaissance soundings show an uneven bottom with depths varying from 9 to 77 meters and an extensive shoal area in mid-channel of 5.5 to 18 meters. The Rae Strait would hardly seem suitable for deep draft navigation." It's possible of course that a sailing vessel of Franklin's kind might have, with very good fortune, have made it through -- but then there would be the far worse problem of Simpson Strait, which is filled with shoals and hazards.  The modern vessel "Hanseatic" (draft 4.8m) spent three weeks aground there in 1996, and Pharand and Legault class it as "obviously suitable for small ships only."

So how practicable is this route -- which must of necessity include both Rae Strait and Simpson Strait? To get a definitive answer to this question, I turned to Captain Patrick R.M. Toomey, one of the most experienced modern navigators and ice-pilots in these waters; he has made more than 30 voyages to the Canadian Arctic, including 13 complete transits of the Northwest Passage (the most recent just two weeks ago), and has commanded or piloted all manner of vessels ranging from Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers to enormous Russian vessels such as “Kapitan Khlebnikov."Although Toomey shares with me and many others a profound admiration for Sir John Franklin's mettle, he understands well the limits of the vessels of those days, and feels as I do that they would never have been able to manage this route.

In response to McGoogan's claim, he states:

The “Clipper Adventurer” has been through the straits to the east of King William Island, as have other small ships of less than 5 metres draft such as “Hanseatic," and Rae Strait is not the major problem on this route. Further north, the James Ross Strait, and to the southwest the Simpson Strait are far more dangerous, as the “Hanseatic” knows only too well, having spent almost three weeks aground in the Simpson Strait in 1996. If Ken McGoogan considers “Clipper Adventurer” to be a “big ship”, he should try “The World” at 6.7 metres draft, and 196 metres length, or the Russian icebreakers “Kapitan Khlebnikov”, “Kapitan Dranitsyn” and “Admiral Makarov” (all of which I have piloted) at 8 metres draft, which could, technically and theoretically, pass all three of the straits mentioned above, but would be very foolhardy to try.

As to McGoogan's views about Rae, he has this to say:

As for the claim that John Rae was the first to discover a navigable Northwest Passage in 1854, to give him credit he did discover one of the minor channels which form the route, which Franklin might have discovered himself during his three overland and small-boat expeditions from 1819-1823, if he had had more time and better luck. I would suggest that Franklin suspected there might be several routes to the north from Queen Maud Gulf – the south shore of which he had mapped - but that he was more interested in the wider channel to the west of King William Island, due north of his explorations along the coast east of Coppermine River.  With two clumsy Royal Navy warships hardly capable of sailing to windward, with auxiliary steam power insufficient to make any progress in ice, for lack of power and sufficient coal to fuel the boilers, he would certainly have tried a wider channel to offer more sea-room. The full facts will never be known, of course, but I am sure that shore parties went out to King William Island while the ships were beset during the winter of 1846/7, to check out any channels to the east.  I am equally sure that the report back would have been that such channels would not have been recommended, despite the lack of old ice, which is not usually found in those channels, because of the lack of sea-room to manoeuvre between the shoals, especially those of James Ross Strait.  It was in James Ross Strait, I believe,  that Amundsen had his problems, and he was in a tiny little vessel, of much less draft, and much more manoeuvrable when compared to “Erebus” and “Terror”.

So this, I hope, should put an end to claims that Franklin could have sailed the route mapped by Rae. All the same, this route certainly could be and is a valid passage for modern vessels with shallower drafts, equipped with modern charts and electronic sounding devices. And, all the same, Dr. John Rae remains am extraordinary explorer, skilled surveyor, and resourceful hunter, who passed through lands where other white men died of starvation managing not only to keep himself and his party well-fed, but giving food to local Inuit along the way. So let us give him credit to him, alongside Sir John Franklin, not instead of him.

Yes, Franklin failed on his last voyage.  But let us recall, in the words of the great novelist (and navigator) Joseph Conrad, the essence of Franklin's contribution, as well as the discoveries of those who searched for him:

The dominating figure among the seamen explorers of the first half of the nineteenth century is that of another good man, Sir John Franklin, whose fame rests not only on the extent of his discoveries, but on professional prestige and high personal character. This great navigator, who never returned home, served geography even in his death. The persistent efforts, extending over ten years, to ascertain his fate advanced greatly our knowledge of the polar regions. As gradually revealed to the world, their fate appeared the more tragic in this, that for the first two years the way of the Erebus and Terror expedition seemed to be the way to the desired and important success, while in truth it was the way of death, the end of the greatest drama, perhaps, played behind the curtain of Arctic mystery.

Arctic Blackface

Peter Carney and others have brought up the question of the well-known "Black Men" story reported to Charles Francis Hall.  One possible explanation would be an onboard celebration of Guy Fawkes day, which would involve the blackening of faces as a reference to Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. Another explanation, however, might be worth considering: that the men were dressed up for a blackface "minstrel" show for the entertainment of the crews.

We know very well that, following William Edward Parry's success with shipboard theatricals enlivening the long winter darkness, all British naval ships in Arctic service were provided with theatrical props, costumes, and scripts.  One of the features of these shows, we also know, was male cross-dressing into female character.  Such broad burlesque seemed to be just the stuff to warm the hearts of the men on a cold Arctic night.  So why not blackface minstrelsy, which was in fact wildly popular in both the US and Britain from the late 1840's through the 1870's -- just the time of Franklin and the Franklin searches, and the voyages of Charles Francis Hall.  And indeed we have evidence that just these sorts of shows were staged aboard Arctic ships.  The first is from CF Hall's first book, "Life Among the Esquimaux, and describes a minstrel performance aboard the whaler "George Henry":

THEATRICALS ON BOARD THE GEORGE HENRY 

The following night, November 26th, "theatrical" performances took place on board the George Henry, The cabin was filled to its utmost capacity with Innuits and the ship's crew. "Jim Crow," the son of Artarkparu, occupied the centre of the cabin, and was performing on the "keeloun," while the other Innuits were seated all around, the female portion singing to the music. I made my way to the little after cabin, and there seated myself so as to have a full view of what was going on.  

The keeloun was accompanied by a tambourine made by Mr. Lamb. Another instrument was a triangle, a steel square pendent from a tow string, and struck with an ii-on spoon. The keeloun was played in turn by Annawa, Ooksin, Koojesse, and young Smith, a là negro ! While Annawa was going through the " sweating " process, playing the instrument and dancing the ridiculously wild figures that are indispensable, according to Innuit ideas, his music being accompanied by a full chorus of native female voices, there came bouncing into the very midst a strapping negress, setting the whole house in a roar of laughter. It was young Smith dressed in this character. The tambourine was passed into his hands, and he soon did full justice to the instrument, his or her sable fists soon knocking a hole through the whale's liver skin with which it was covered.  

When Smith first entered some of the Innuit women were much frightened. Jennie, the angeko, was seated near me, and she tried to put as great a distance as possible between herself and the negress, believing the apparition to be an evil spirit. But all shortly became reconciled to the stranger, especially when Smith resumed his place, playing and shouting, Innuit-like, and making so much fun that all our sides ached with laughter. Even the singing women were obliged occasionally to give way and join in the merriment.  

The negress was next called on to act as drummer. Ooksin held the keeloun while ske performed "Yankee Doodle," "Hail Columbia," and other pieces, with admirable skill and effect, using two iron spoons for drum-sticks. The finale was a dance by two Innuit ladies and two of the ship's crew, the music being furnished by Bailey with his " viddle."

Then this from Elisha Kent Kane's narrative of the First Grinnell:

December 25. Ye Christmas of ye Arctic cruisers. Our Christmas passed without a lack of the good things of this life.  Goodies we had galore ; but that best of earthly blessings, the communion of loved sympathies, these Arctic cruisers had not. It was curious to observe the depressing influences of each man's home thoughts, and absolutely saddening the effort of each man to impose upon his neighbor and be very boon and jolly. We joked incessantly, but badly, and laughed incessantly, but badly too ; ate of good things, and drank up a moiety of our Heidsiek ; and then we sang negro songs, wanting only tune, measure, and harmony, but abounding in noise ; and after a closing bumper to Mr. Grinnell, adjourned with creditable jollity from table to the theatre. 

So clearly, on at least two occasions -- and doubtless many more -- Arctic voyagers of the mid-nineteenth century regaled one another just as they would have had they been "home." Oh, and what of the photograph at the top of this post?  Why that's just "Bones," "Jim Kroo,""Squash," and "Cinders," members of the "Dishcover Minstrel Troupe" aboard RF Scott's Discovery in 1902.

That Time of Year Again

So here we go again: Yet another Parks Canada search for the remains of Sir John Franklin's ships, the "Erebus" and "Terror." Once more, we have the press releases, the Arctic photo-ops with Stephen Harper, the meaningful pronouncements of various government ministers, and clips of the CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier at anchor near the Adelaide Peninsula. And then, in my e-mail inbox, come the requests from journalists for images of Franklin, his ships, and Beechey Island. I always say yes.

One figure, however, really says it all: $275,000. This is the amount budgeted for this year's "search" by Parks Canada.  And, as anyone who has done a budget for an Arctic venture of any kind would know, that kind of money won't go very far.  It might enable the launch of the two research boats from the Laurier, and it might pay for a few days of dragging around side-scan sonar equipment.  But in the haystack of possibilities as to the fate of the needles that are Franklin's ships, this effort won't cover more than a few straws.  Sure, they could be lucky straws! But barring that, the effort is, in my view, largely symbolic.  In terms of meaningful underwater archaeological efforts, it's nowhere near what is likely going to be needed, and so I can't think that the government really believes it is one.  Instead, like the planting of Canadian flags on Hans Island, it's really just a symbolic effort, one which makes sense only if the motive is to prop up the narrative of Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which it regards as its own internal waters.  This is acknowledged tacitly, and has been the subject of a CBC article, "Franklin Search about Politics as well as History" (and here I think you could substitute "instead of" for "as well as").

My sources in the Canadian Arctic, indeed, alerted me to the presence of the likely search ships in the vicinity some weeks ago; apparently they were waiting for ice conditions to become favorable.  And, despite global warming, this moment is no more predictable than in the past; if the cost of maintaining the ship and crew during the waiting period were added back in, I'm sure it would be more than the quoted figure.  Ice -- like time and tide -- may wait for no man, but waiting costs money, and to me it makes no sense to spend what's already been poured into these efforts without making them much more substantial.  The Harper government seem to want to get their sovereignty chits on the cheap -- a strategy very unlikely to lead to success in terms of actual archaeological progress.  But perhaps that's just fine with them ...

Retracing Bradford's Voyage

The American artist William Bradford chartered annual excursions for photography and ice-painting nearly every year from 1861 to 1867. In 1869, aboard the Panther, with the explorer Isaac I. Hayes as their guide, Bradford and his fellow artists journeyed father north than any such party had managed before, venturing deep into Melville Bay before being turned back by the implacable barrier of pack-ice at about 75º north. In his quest to make the most of his northern sojourns, Bradford regularly brought along hired photographers to take studies of every scene. Two of these, John L. Dunmore and George P. Critcherson, accompanied him on the Panther, making hundreds of wet-plate collodion images, from which Bradford later drew from to assemble the massive elephant-folio volume, The Arctic Regions.

Today, one hundred and forty-three years later, the Chasing the Light voyage, with the support and sponsorship of the New Bedford Whaling Museum along with private donors and contributions pledged via Kickstarter, aboard the expedition trawler Wanderbird, will re-trace Bradford and Hayes's voyage.  This, too, will be a ship of artists, photographers, and polar guides, and it will call at many of the same ports in West Greenland as did the Panther.  This twenty-first century voyage will dramatize the many differences between 1869 and 2012, as well as the potential parallels; in particular, it celebrates the work of photographer Rena Bass Forman (1954-2011), whose sepia-toned gelatin silver prints so richly evoke the work of Dunmore and Critcherson, while at the same time capturing with a different eye the rich panoply of nature-sculpted shapes of ice and water in the Arctic. As with Bradford's voyage, it is of course impossible to predict what works and visions will come forth from this boreal sojourn, but unlike his voyage, we will not have to wait until its return to glimpse at least some of them.  Using modern satellite technology, there will be regular updates on the voyage's progress via the Twitter reincarnations of both Bradford and Hayes.  Some of the results of the trip wil also be part of a forthcoming exhibition, Arctic Visions: Away Then Floats the Ice-Island, opening in March of 2013 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.  It would be hard to imagine a better venue, as the Museum houses the finest collection of Bradford's canvasses in the world, along with a number of the original glass plates exposed by Dunmore and Critcherson under Bradford's direction.  I hope that readers here will join me in eagerly following these results!

At the same time, it seems peculiarly ironic that, just as this voyage is about to set sail, the news comes via NASA of an unprecedented meltoff of the Greenland ice cap.  The alarming, sudden nature of this melt may foreshadow further changes in the earth's climates; the Arctic has always been a bell-weather for the rest of us.  And, according to ice core studies, the last time such a melt is known to have occurred is roughly 150 years ago -- very close indeed to the date of Bradford's original voyage.

The Writing on the Wall

When little Weesy Coppin's ghost was called upon by Anne and her surviving siblings to show the fate of Sir John Franklin, the vision she gave was of a sort which was likely familiar to all the children and their parents: an enigmatic message, the 'writing on the wall' from the feast of Belshazzar in the book of Daniel:

In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. And then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.  The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers. And the king spake, and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing, and shew me the interpretation thereof, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom. And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

Quite probably the scene had been related in a sermon or Bible reading in the family, and even if it had not, the same scene had been the subject of a number of moving panoramas -- one of them displayed in 1833 alongside Sir John Ross's Arctic paintings -- as well as cartoons in Punch; the phrase "writing on the wall" was already proverbial.

And writing on walls seems always to be enigmatic; the Hebrew words on Balshazzar's can be literally translated as mina, mina, shekel, half-mina, with both mina and shekel being common coins.  The prophet Daniel, summoned to interpret them, decreed their significance to be "Mina, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; shekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; half-mina, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians."  This was not what Balshazzar wanted to hear, no doubt, but since he was killed later the same night, he had little time to ponder it; in the proverbial sense, "writing on the wall" comes too late to be a warning, and is more of a sentence of fate.

We also learn in reviewing Skewes's account of the vision, along with what survives of correspondence about it, that at least one of the Coppin children had the 'gift of tongues.'  This supposed gift has to do with that given to the Apostles in the Book of Acts to speak in the tongues of many nations -- but in practice, it too means that one person speaks in "tongues" -- usually inscrutable in terms of earthly languages -- and another has the gift of interpreting these arcane utterances.

So it is little surprise that we have again an enigmatic text: B.S. = P.R.I. = N.F. = S.J.F. = B.V.F.R.G.R.L.S.P.F.M.F.M., with Victory and Victoria also "frequently written." The first few clusters immediately suggest a polar voyage, with Barrow Straits, Prince Regent Inlet, and "Sir John Franklin" -- N.F. eludes me -- and as to the remaining letters, the possibilities are too numerous to count.  On a later occasion, the child's ghost, asked for clarification, came forth with fuller phrases: "Erebus and Terror, Sir John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Point Victory, Victoria Channel." This seems a good deal more straightforward, and does indeed suggest a definite polar itinerary, as well as implying a passage from Prince Regent Inlet -- the Bellot Strait -- which was not yet discovered. It also, however, is problematic, as there was no "Victoria Channel" in 1849, this not having been given its name -- derived from Victory Point -- until Captain Collinson did so in 1852.

This last point is certainly evidence that the 'revelation' as such was augmented and altered over time, though perhaps unintentionally.  It is also, in any case, flawed in two other regards: Franklin does not appear to have ventured Prince Regent Inlet or traversed Bellot Strait -- the latter of which would have been quite tricky for ships with the draught and beam of "Erebus" and "Terror" -- and, although Weesy showed him waving his hat, he had already in fact been dead for some months.  Never the less, the fact that these revelations not only played a role in Arctic discovery, but also in at least some of their particulars proved uncannily accurate, cannot be disputed.

The Londonderry Vision, Redux

I have posted before on the "Londonderry Vision" and Captain Coppin, but new interest in the subject -- along with some thought-provoking research by the indefatigable Ralph Lloyd-Jones, makes it worth a second go.  We are also fortunate in that both the first and second editions of the Rev. J. Henry Skewes's Revelation are now available online at archive.org for anyone to download or read (the book is exceedingly scarce -- only a handful of copies are in libraries, and it rarely comes up for sale). All this makes a fresh look at the story worthwhile, and opens it up the historical evidence to scrutiny by the wisdom of crowds.

The basic facts are simple enough: In 1849, Captain William Coppin -- a comfortably well-off shipyard owner in Belfast -- heard from his family of strange visions in which his recently-deceased youngest daughter Louisa -- known to the family as "Weesy" -- appeared to her siblings and offered revelations on various subjects.  The family became convinced of their truth after the child's ghost predicted the death of the family banker, and the children -- as the mystery of Sir John Franklin's fate was much in the air -- asked their spiritual sibling whether she had any intelligence as to his whereabouts. "Weesy" readily replied with a vision of his ships in icy waters, along with a map and some letters upon the wall.  When Mrs. Coppin, on one of her husband's apparently infrequent visits to the family home, related this story to him, he decided -- after some delay -- that he should inform Lady Franklin of the particulars, and bring her a chart drawn by Weesy's sister Anne from the one which had appeared on the wall. They corresponded, met, and it appears that Jane may well have passed on some of the advice apparently contained in these revelations to officers then preparing to leave for the Arctic to search for her husband.

It is at this point that we enter into uncertainty, as most of the claims that the Reverend Skewes published in 1889 in his book about the affair cannot now be independently substantiated.  The first suspicion that we might have, sensibly enough, would be that Skewes altered or fabricated evidence to make the Coppin story more accurate than in fact it was.  Such a possibility can't be entirely ruled out, absent any letters from the period, or the chart itself -- but as Lloyd-Jones observes in his recent article on the subject in the Polar Record, there is good reason to believe that the reason these materials are missing is that Sophia Cracroft retained, and probably destroyed them.

The evidence for this is in the second edition of the book, where the good Reverend took it upon himself to reply to an indignant public reprimand by Sir Leopold McClintock.  McClintock had gone to pains to stress that his search was not conducted under any supernatural direction, and denied that he or Lady Franklin would ever have credited such evidence if that had received it.  Skewes, warming to the battle, quoted in his rebuttal an 1859 letter of Lady Franklin's to Captain Coppin in which she very explicitly thanks him for his daughter's revelation, and reassures him that the chart and letters were in her safekeeping:

"I have received your letter of yesterday, requesting you to tell me how far the 'mysterious revelations' of your child, in 1850, respecting the expedition of my late husband, correspond with the facts recently ascertained by Captain McClintock's researches. In reply, I have no hesitation in telling you that your child's drawn by herself, without as you assure me having seen an Arctic chart before, represented the ships as being in a channel which we believed at that time to be inaccessible, but which has since been found ... I have carefully preserved your letter and the child's drawing and you may be assured they are in safety."

There is, I think, no reason to doubt the authenticity of this letter, and it suggests not only that Lady Franklin took an interest in the original revelation, but eagerly noted that the subsequent discovery of the Bellot Strait -- via which McClintock had reached King William Island -- was exactly in correspondence with the map (she did not, it should be observed, note the map's error, in showing the Gulf of Boothia connecting with the waters south of King William Island -- an error which it shared with Arrowsmith's charts of 1844, which Franklin would have relied on).

As Lloyd-Jones has it, her Ladyship's willingness to try any and all means -- psychics included -- was nothing but admirable, though it certainly went against the religious feeling of many, and was a departure from the previous views of herself as well as Sophia.  By 1889, after Jane's death, Sophia and Sir Leopold doubtless felt that the whole thing might reflect poorly on Jane's posthumous reputation, and were willing to deny a story that -- so far as they thought -- was only known within private circles.  They had not, alas, reckoned on the limitless haughty enthusiasm of Skewes.

But what of the revelation itself?  There's a second post to be had on that (which will follow soon enough), but for now suffice it to say that, if the child's chart is somewhat cryptic, the "writing on the wall" -- a series of initialisms open to the possibility of standing for any number of things -- is another story altogether.

Amelia Earhart's Freckle Cream?

The recent conference, held under the auspices of TIGHAR, on new evidence as to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, was packed with fascinating material, particularly on the last few possible wireless signals from her aircraft.  Yet the thing that most caught my eye -- and perhaps, thanks to my fascination with Sir John Franklin, I am simply "relic crazy" -- was this broken glass jar, which has been tentatively identified as having contained anti-freckle cream.  As those at the conference noted, Earhart was self-conscious about her freckles, and might well have used such a product; researchers using the glass container's distinctive shape have linked it to Dr. Berry's Freckle Ointment, a long-gone cosmetic product sold in a similarly-shaped jar.  It's not an exact match -- the jar of this product is of milk-glass, not clear -- but it certainly is striking, the more so as one of the fragments of this glass shows signs of having been used as a tool.

But as an historical researcher, I had questions about this identification right away.  Milk-glass, I knew, was at its peak of popularity in the 1890's and the first decade of the 20th century, well before Earhart's flight.  And, as other bloggers had noted, the form of Dr. Berry's ointment sold in these jars was banned around 1912 due to its high mercury content.  Dr. Berry's apparently reformulated their product, as it continued to be sold for some years thereafter, and would indeed have been available to Earhart in 1937.  However, even in a clear jar, this sort of thing did not look like a 1930's-era product to me.  Fortunately, thanks to the vast digitization project of the Hathi Trust, I was able to find a 1936 Sears Catalog which included Dr. Berry's ointment among its products, and as I had suspected, it was shown in a pillbox-style cylindrical container with far more modern lines.  I suspect it hadn't been sold in the large glass jars for some time, and it's hard to imagine that Earhart, a woman who -- however much she may have disliked her freckles -- was very fashionable and had endorsed many "modern" products, among them a line of luggage (my family still has one of 'her' suitcases) would have deliberately brought along an outdated, heavy glass jar of such cream when a compact modern one was available.

I could be wrong.  It might be that, after the popularity of milk-glass faded, Dr. Berry's continued to sell its product in clear glass jars.  Earhart, perhaps for sentimental reasons, might have brought this sort of jar along.  It may even be possible that, as with other products of this type, some people preferred to have the old jar filled with the new product at their local pharmacy.  But alas, despite the freckled connection, this piece of evidence remains, I think, of uncertain value.

Sir John Franklin, Poet?

The career of Sir John Franklin inspired numerous poems both during and after his lifetime, ranging from the romantic (Swinburne's "The Death of Sir John Franklin") to the modernist (Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Terror and Erebus") to the postmodernist (David Solway's Franklin's Passage cycle) -- but until now, Franklin had never been known as the author of any poetry of note.  The excellent Non Solus blog just put up a scan of the manuscript of Franklin's foray into verse, which was preserved in the pages of a special presentation copy of his Journey to the Polar Sea, which was inscribed to Sir John Richardson's wife.  This copy had been acquired by the University of Illinois library under the auspices of Professor Robert Eugene Johnson, whose biography of Richardson was published in 1976, but although Johnson mentioned the poem in his book, it has not previously been published, so far as the blog's editors (or myself) can tell.

It was certainly not meant for public consumption, and its interest today is more historical than poetical -- although married to the poet Eleanor Ann Porden, Franklin was, to his very soul, a man of prose. The subject of the poem is the pressure Franklin felt on his being expected -- as had been tradition for explorers -- to write up his journey for public consumption, whence it would be brought forth by John Murray, whose arrangement for such things with the Admirality was a long-standing one.  Many biographers have noted the struggles Franklin went through in producing his narrative, and the prose indeed is labored in parts (though not half so much as this poem!).  Never the less, the result was widely read, and secured his reputation as "the Man who ate his boots"; the book has rarely been out of print since.

The poem itself is in a sort of ballad stanza, and is filled with archaisms, forced rhymes, and other such tokens of the light verse it aims at -- the first two stanzas are a fair sample:

Heigho! alack and well a day! 

 Was ever wight like me distressed

What shall I write? What can I say

Will this or that way read the best?

Oh! that my foe a book had written

So spake the wisest of mankind

Alas! his curse my head has smitten

And write I must tho ill enclined.

And it continues in this manner. One might be tempted to rehearse Harry Bailey's rejoinder to Chaucer's "Tale of Syr Thopas" -- but then again, Chaucer's doggerel was meant to be bad.  Still, the poem offers up some insight into Franklin the man; apparently he possessed a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor, a trait not often otherwise noted among his writings -- and for this, we can certainly be grateful.

HMS Breadalbane

The Franklin search ship HMS Breadalbane was caught or "nipped" by pack-ice and sank on Sunday 21 August, 1853; according to one crew member, "it was a very sad and unceremonious way of being turned out of our ship -- from the time the first nip took her, until her disappearance, did not occupy more than fifteen minutes."  Aside from landing some stores at Cape Riley, the Breadalbane had not lasted long enough to make much of a contribution to the search for Sir John, but its history since then has been full of interest and significance.  Until the re-discovery of M'Clure's "Investigator," she was the furthest-north known shipwreck in the world, and the search to find her, recover artifacts, and learn from the wreck site has stretched over nearly forty years, and took an interesting turn last week when divers working as part of the Canadian military's Operation Nunalivut explored the wreck using a submersible ROV, sending color video images to the surface.

The wreck was not far off Beechey Island, and its general location fairly readily ascertained. The first definite evidence of the wreck was located by diver Joe MacInnis in 1975; based on his evidence and subsequent searches, a Canadian Coast Guard vessel discovered the wreck using side-scan sonar in 1980. Remarkably, her hull was largely intact, and two of her masts will still standing, one of which still seemed to be carrying some portion of canvas.  MacInnis later led several dives to the wreck, and retrieved the ship's wheel.  This and his earlier searches were described by him in his book The Breadalbane Adventure, which featured an introduction by Walter Cronkite.

MacInnis later hit on the idea of setting up a seasonal camp on the ice, and taking aquatic tourists down to the wreck at thousands of dollars a pop.  To that end, he purchased a number of large mobile dwellings, had them shipped to Resolute, and fixed to skids so they could be towed out onto the ice by tractor.  The hoped-for number of tourists never materialized, and when I was at Resolute in 2004 the mobile units could still be seen, abandoned, a few hundred yards from the main port.

You might think that all the archaeological knowledge possible had already been retrieved from the Breadalbane, but this didn't stop Canadian Forces divers from searching the wreck again this April.  The annual northern military exercise in Nunavut, though it mostly involves staged search-and-rescue operations, is also geared toward strengthening Canada's claim to its northernmost territories, and apparently nothing spells "sovereignty" quite so well as a sunken Franklin-era vessel.  Nothing new was discovered, so far as I know, though the online video shows some intriguing images.  There's also a fairly detailed account of the dive on the Canadian Forces' own website here.

Petition for Ancanthe

IN the spirit of Lady Franklin's Appeal to Lord Palmerston, I've just done something I've never tried before -- launch a petition.

The background is this: Near Hobart in Tasmania, the original Greek-style temple dedicated by Lady Franklin as the centerpiece of botanical garden and museum she named Ancanthe still stands.  Not surprisingly, there has been a fair amount of incursion over the years, with some of the original land now occupied by homes.  Recently, there was a proposal brought to Hobart City Council for a new subdivision which would much further encroach upon the area, and destroy much of its character,  A group of citizens fought back, and are making a counter-proposal that Hobart acquire much of this same area as public lands, and establish there a) A botanical garden, a project not quite realized in Lady Franklin's time, and neglected since; b) A restored museum and grounds, with a "Franklin trail"; and c) an 'international centre of excellence.'

The city council may be persuaded to back the plan, but first they are asking for evidence that the site is one of internationally-recognized historical and cultural significance.  This is something beyond the quick reach of the citizens of Hobart who support this plan, so I've volunteered to enlist all the "Franklinites" I know in its support.

You can read more about the situation on the Saving Ancanthe Facebook page here.

And, if you choose to sign the petition, it's here.

Lastly, if you know of others, whose names I have perhaps neglected to include here, who could lend their heft to the affair, I'd be grateful if you could forward this request.

I hope you'll decide to join me in this effort to preserve a small patch of Franklin history in Tasmania.

Only Known Photo of Lady Jane Franklin

A few years ago -- in May of 2008, to be precise -- I was in Philadelphia along with many Arctic historians and writers for the "North by Degree" conference hosted by the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. By good fortune, I found myself at the same bed-and-breakfast as my good friends Huw Lewis-Jones and Kari Herbert, and so we had ample time before and after each batch of conference sessions to talk about our shared passion for all things Polar.  Kari was there to give a talk about some of the remarkable parallels between her mother Lady Marie Herbert's experiences and those of Josephine Peary, and after the conference was off on a research trip to see some Peary materials in Maine. This was all in preparation for her work, Polar Wives, which has now come to fruition, and which traces the careers of many of the women who supported their husbands' Arctic and Antarctic endeavors, whether from home or from a tent pitched in the midst of a howling gale on a rocky beach in Greenland.

Lady Jane Franklin was to be, and is, one of the subjects of Kari's book, and one afternoon in Philadelphia, she mused aloud that there must be, somewhere in some archive, a photograph of her -- why had none ever come to light?  I took this as a personal challenge, and set myself to find one; it was only many months later, by the good chance of putting the right keywords into the right database, that I found just such a photograph at George Eastman House, which has one of the best collections of nineteenth-century (and later) photos of any institution in the world.  It was, like the famous "purloined letter" in the Poe story, hidden in plain sight -- in the center of the frame in one of the stereoviews of Yosemite taken by Carleton E. Watkins, and commercially reproduced by him and succeeding stereoview publishers.  Doubtless there are hundreds of copies -- one of them has recently been scanned and uploaded to the Wikipedia -- but no one had really realized the rarity of the image itself. George Eastman house, happily, has Watkins's original glass plate negatives for his Yosemite views, which can be enlarged much more than the printed cards, and here we can finally see Lady Franklin -- and Sophia Cracroft -- in a camera's eye.

Lady Franklin has a most curious expression -- she seems to be positively beaming good cheer -- but is wearing some sort of Victorian-era hood or wimple that -- for me at least -- brings to mind Sally Field as the Flying Nun.  Traveling costumes for women from this period were odd affairs, to be sure, but Lady F. seems to be sporting one of the odder ones.  Between Jane and Sophia there is the somewhat blurred or  obscured visage of one of their guides, and then we see Sophia's face, everything that Jane's is not -- sober, severe almost, looking directly into the camera.  A few feet further we see two more guides, one of whom is apparently picking his teeth with a twig -- seated at the foot of a tree, the bark of which has been cut with an axe, possibly as a sort of blaze for the trail.  Yosemite, in the 1860's, was a fairly rugged destination, and for Jane and Sophia -- who rarely traveled without some sort of entourage -- this was roughing it.

The larger frame shows two other figures, a man who is seeking to blow a fire aflame at left, and at right, a jaunty figure sporting a cap with a bill and peak, a pair of braces, and writing or drawing on what looks like an oversize sketchpad.

The visit by these two women to the site seems to have had a lasting impression on the nomenclature of the place; though credited in the photo as "Moss Rock" this almost surely the same as the modern "Lady Franklin Rock," though exactly when, and by whom, the change was made is unclear.  It has for a long time been a favored place to take a photo of the Vernal Falls from -- though much less often photographed itself.  The identities of the guides here are unknown to me; I would certainly be interested to hear from anyone who can tell me more about them, and about this visit.  All I have is this note from a modern guidebook, which says of Lady Franklin Rock: "So named because that distinguished lady visited the Yosemite in 1859, and being very feeble at the time, was carried up to this rock by the guides on a chair, and from here she viewed the fall."

PHOTO CREDIT: George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography