New finds from HMS "Erebus" revealed!

They sit upon the shoulders in their portraits -- Daguerreotypes taken in May of 1845 -- Franklin and his men, their ghostly images a core part of what made them such a "gallant" crew -- and here is a pair of them, taken from the cabin assigned to Lieutenant James Fairholme aboard HMS "Erebus," 175 years afterwards.

It's quite a moment. For, while a goodly number of the relics recovered by Rae, McClintock, Hall, and Schwatka could be readily associated with their owners, these are the very first items I can think of recovered during the modern archaeological work by the divers of Parks Canada's underwater archaeology team that can be fairly definitively associated with a single individual.

Epaulets -- or epaulettes if one prefers -- have featured in the Franklin story before. Captain Henry Kellett of HMS "Resolute" left his behind when he (very reluctantly, and only under direct orders) abandoned his ship. Against all odds, they were returned to him, brightly polished and still in their case, when the Resolute was returned to Britain in 1854; you can see him wearing them in a portrait painted the following year. Lieutenant Fairholme, alas, is long gone, and can know nothing of this remarkable discovery, though I'm sure it's quite significant to his living family members in Canada and around the world.

More astonishingly still, these are but one of 350 artifacts announced today as the results of Parks Canada's dives in 2019. It was a gloriously long and productive season, and -- despite some rough weather near the end -- has set new benchmark for both the quantity and quality of artifacts recovered. We have seen only a small smattering so far -- a platter, some plates, a pencil case, and a few other items -- mostly from Franklin's steward Edmund Hoare's closet -- but clearly, there are many more to come. Many of them were unveiled in an event today in Ottawa at Parks Canada's conservation center, attended by senior government ministers along with Pam Gross, the head of the Inuit Heritage Trust, along with Stanley Anablak, president of the Kitikmeot Inuit Association. One of the key notes struck was that of continued co-operation and co-curation of all artifacts with Inuit, a crucial element which both underlies and augurs well for these extraordinary finds, and many more to come.

And the story is larger still -- for, even in the most seemingly minor details of each item, many stories more than one remain to be told. A good example is the epaulettes themselves -- for, although found in Fairholme's cabin, they are certainly not the ones which he was photographed wearing in 1845. Why not? Because, as he confessed in a letter home to his father,

“I hope Elizabeth got my photograph. Lady Franklin said she thought it made me look too old, but as I had Fitzjames’ coat on at the time, to save myself the trouble of getting my own, you will perceive that I am a Commander! and have anchors on the epaulettes so it will do capitally when that really is the case.”

Commander Fitzjames's coat -- and its epaulettes -- remain to be found. But this fascinating item never the less tells us of something far more personal than any other artifact yet recovered. It is just a touch, lightly upon the shoulder, to remind us of those who have gone on.

A Song of Hope

Courtesy Edinburgh University Library, Goodsir Papers, Gen 301/5en

Those who searched for the men of the lost Franklin expedition were hardy souls, and had to endure many a winter's night in the dark spaces below the decks of their wooden ships. We've known of a number of songs sung amidst the frozen regions, some comic (as how better to relieve the cold monotony of winter), some tragic -- but this one comes to us from a new and unexpected source. About a year and a half ago, I received an unexpected e-mail from a man named Michael Tracy. He identified himself to me as the closest living relation of Harry Goodsir, and had been engaged for some time in searching the archives for everything he could find about him. I was able to share a few things, but Mike's work was much more extensive; it included having transcripts made of all of Harry's letters (which are preserved in the Royal Scottish Geographical Society's archives) and well as arranging for photography of the vast collection of Goodsir papers at the University of Edinburgh. Among those, he made a singular discovery -- one that I'll let him describe in his own words: 

Housed in the University of Edinburgh Special Collections are my family papers.  There are literally hundreds of correspondences, lecture and medical notes, newspaper clippings, and diaries spanning over three generations of the Goodsir family.  Upon the death of Dr. Robert A. Goodsir in 1895, Professor John Chiene, the executor of his estate, donated eleven boxes of Goodsir memorabilia to the University.  

Located near the bottom of one of the boxes, was a faded folded lined page with words for an original song entitled, Song of Hope, written in extremely well-formed handwriting.  Beneath the title written in brackets, is stated, Air: Jennett et Jennetto, clearly a well-known musical tune of the time; at the foot of the Song’s words is a signature in less tutored handwriting, “James Davidson.” This intrigued me.  Why was this saved and what significance, if any, did it hold?  On the Song’s reverse, was an attribution that provided the answer:“Song by James Davidson, A.B. [Able Seaman] on board the Lady Franklin, Assistance Harbour, 10th March 1851.”   

This composition, conserved in Edinburgh University Special Collections Gen 301/5, had been originally recorded by Dr. Robert A. Goodsir, Surgeon, aboard the Lady Franklin during the second Arctic voyage to search and rescue Sir John Franklin and his crews of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, including his brother Harry.  Goodsir had obviously been so impressed by Davidson’s song that he recorded the words and tune to which it was possibly sung by Davidson, whom he honored by having him sign the copy.  Whether the Song of Hope was sung later during the expedition is unknown, but the sentiment of Davidson’s composition encapsulates in naive terms the mood of the moment.  It certainly must have echoed the thoughts of Dr. Robert Goodsir, who liked the song well enough to record and save it for forty-four years until his own death.  

A "Song of Hope"! Mike asked me to find out everything I could about it, and what I discovered just made this find all the more remarkable. The note on the back told me when and where it was written -- the writer's "Assistance Harbor" was certainly the place more commonly known as "Assistance Bay" on Cornwallis Island, where the Franklin search ships "Lady Franklin" and "Sophia" had wintered in 1850-51. Aboard the Lady Franklin was one passenger with a strong personal reason for being there: Robert Goodsir was Harry's brother. As described elsewhere in this blog, he'd been among the first group of people to discover the graves at Beechey Island, and now here he was, waiting out the winter, and -- or so I like to imagine -- singing this song.

The "Air" referenced is more commonly known as "Jeannette and Jeannot" and was one of many similar folk ballads telling a tale of a soldier's farewell to his sweetheart; a number of broadsheet versions can be found in the Bodleian's collections. But there was a particular reason that it would have been on men's minds in 1851, as just three years previous a version adapted by the British theatrical composer Charles William Glover had been a big hit at London's Olympic Theatre in 1848. The only remaining question was what melody the "air" was sung to -- some of the broadside recommended "The Boatman's Dance," but the tone of that tune, to my ear, is much too jolly. Luckily, I stumbled on a version of Glover's own setting, which I feel pretty sure was the melody that this song followed -- you can hear a MIDI version here!

From the Arctic Medal rolls

The only remaining mystery is now the identity of James Davidson, AB -- one must assume he was aboard the same ships, and indeed he appears in the crew list of the Lady Franklin. He must have been a capable man; we know that William Penny chose him as one of the crew for his open boat journey (see Gill Ross's Hunters on the Track, p. 312). It's tempting to imagine he might have been the man of that name who captained the whaler Xanthus, which was sent to relieve the Lady Franklin when she was under-provisioned in Cumberland Sound in 1863, though that would have required him to have left the navy and risen rapidly up the ranks in the Aberdeen whaling fleet. He may have remained in the Royal Navy, though his time there began before "continuous service" records were made, so there's no way to be certain. His name certainly appears in the rolls for the Arctic Medal, but there's no indication that he or his family ever claimed it. For the moment, at least, we will have to be content with knowing only just that much. For now, at least, we can sing his song -- here is the full text of the lyrics and a full image of the original.

The grave at Comfortless Cove

Those who know the story of the infamous "Peglar Papers" -- those enigmatic documents discovered in a leather wallet in the coat pocket of the corpse of one of Franklin's men -- will recognize at once the phrase "the grave at Comfort Cove" (well, since the papers were mostly written backwards, it was actually "Eht evarg ta Trofmoc Evoc"). This is an apparent reference to some place in the Arctic, though it took its name from a place on Ascension Island, and it's also possible that it referred to that site. For many years, Ascension -- due to its remoteness -- had been used as a harbor for quarantined ships and men; those who died during these quarantines were buried on shore there. The name, appropriately enough, has since shifted to Comfortless Cove, and the graves there remain almost entirely undisturbed.

Just recently, though, I received an e-mail from Dr. Karl Harrison who had participated in an archaeological dig there in 2008 under the overall direction of Dr. Carl Watling and the RAF. The dig focused on a group of five cairn-like structures just north of Comfortless Cove at a site known as Pyramid Point, excavating one of them. What they found was a somber sight -- a male skeleton of relatively short stature, wrapped in a fabric wound about with twine. There were no other material artifacts, and no marker of any kind, but given the period of use of this area, the remains were very roughly dated to circa 1828.

The vicinity of the grave

If, indeed, the writer of the "Peglar" papers was thinking back to the burial of a shipmate, it's entirely possible that this was he -- or else, he lies nearby, quite possibly buried in a similar manner. And it's the manner of burial that strikes another chord -- for just so, the body presumed to be that of Lieutenant John Irving, discovered in 1880 by the Schwatka search expedition, was found wrapped in canvas; in William Gilder's words, "there was also a large quantity of canvas in and around the grave, with coarse stitching through it and the cloth, as  though the body had been incased for burial at sea.” A fragment of this same canvas -- stamped with the words "NAVY SAIL CANVAS" -- is still in the collections of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. In both cases, it seeems, these seamen were buried in a kind of hybrid manner -- wrapped in sailcloth, or a hammock, as though destined for the sea, but then laid upon land, and stone upon stone thereafter.

It's suggestive of the likelihood that, at the time of Irving's death, one or both of Franklin's ships must have been nearby -- after all, men hauling sledges -- some of which, according to Inuit testimony, were assisted with sails -- would have had no canvas to spare. And it's a reminder that the Arctic is far from the only place with lonely cairns of stone.

With deepest thanks to Dr. Harrison for sharing this remarkable find.

The Hall Cairn

Eternal glory never lasted such a short time as it did on the 'lonely cairn of stones' erected by Charles Francis Hall on King William Island. He'd spent years trying to reach the place, only to be defeated by the constraints of time (his Inuit guides needed to cross  back to the mainland to hunt) and visibility (snow still covered the ground thickly, such that even those of his guides that knew the terrain intimately, couldn't re-locate all of the skeletons they'd seen there in past summers. On a horizontal stone, Hall had scratched the inscription "ETERNAL GLORY TO THE DISCOVERERS OF THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE," but part of the stone with the last few letters (EST PASSAGE) eventually broke off. Below, on a smaller stone, he scratched the date "May XII 1869," adding an "H" for Hall.

And there's another reason most of us haven't seen an image of this cairn before: although Gilder's account of its discovery is well-known, its only known depiction is in Richard Galaburri's pamphlet Lost! The Franklin Expedition and the Fate of the Crews of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror, privately printed and rather hard to find. Years of scouring the Internet for its source had led nowhere, until I tracked down Galaburri himself. He identified it as having come from a December 1880 issue of Harper's Weekly -- a publication of which only scattered copies can readily be found online -- and I was able to obtain a copy from a dealer in rare newspapers.

Slide used in Stackpole's book

The article is apparently by Gilder himself, with illustrations credited to "Henry" Klutschak. And yet there's a small discrepancy in this: Klutschak was not among the party that went to visit the site of the cairn; Gilder mentions having made a "quick sketch" but this did not appear in his book. Apparently, Kultschak drew a more professional version based on that sketch -- it appears as slide #29 in Schwatka's lantern lecture to the American Geographical Society that same year -- and this was used as the source by Harper's. The engraver for Harper's probably did a fairly close copy for this depiction, which is opposite the more familiar one of Irving's grave marker, but other elements of his two-page spread are somewhat more freely adapted than the corresponding images in the Illustrated London News or Gilder's book. The confusion over Hall's marker was also accidentally amplified in Stackpole's edition of Schwatka's Long Arctic Search -- he used a set of commercially available lantern slides, and misidentified the slide depicting the Irving marker as Hall's cairn.

These stones have another significance: near them, Hall's guides uncovered a skeleton, which was sent back to England, and for many years misidentified as Le Vesconte's -- it was only when it was examined during the move of the Franklin memorial to the front of the chapel that it was found, by analysis of the teeth and a facial reconstruction, to be far more likely that of Harry Goodsir. The archaeologist Doug Stenton, who's done so much work to re-locate historical sites on King William Island, hopes to use this image to identify the site of the cairn in a future visit.

New artifacts from HMS Erebus

Photo courtesy Hailey Aklah Nalungiaq Okpik

We're all aware of the fantastic new video from below the decks of HMS Terror -- but this year, Parks Canada's archaeologists also enjoyed a remarkably long window for dives on HMS Erebus. As she's in much more shallow water, and subject to ongoing forces of tides and currents, work on Erebus has been given a priority, with the recovery of artifacts proceeding along much more urgent lines. This is beacuse, for archaeologists, context is everything; it's not about bringing things up so much as it is about learning from where things are. If the ship, or parts of it, are moving or being damaged, the context will be destroyed with it, and there's no way to recover that lost knowledge.

Parks Canada hasn't yet given out any official press account of the items brought up from the Erebus. Fortunately, thanks to Hailey Aklah Nalungiaq Okpik and other friends in Gjoa Haven, along with careful work by Logan Zachary and many other members of the Remembering the Franklin Expedition Facebook group, we've been able to see some of the items that were shown to the community, and learn something about their context ourselves. Seen above, for instance, is a Whampoa pattern meat strainer plate, which was found in a portside officer's cabin, probably the Mate's. At that same location were found a button, a pencil, a wooden handle, and a regular Whampoa pattern plate. At another location, the Officers' Mess Room, a bottle, apparently intact, was recovered.

Some items, though fascinating, weren't tagged with a visible label in the photos; these include a pair of tongs (probably meant for sugar), a ceramic ink bottle, and a boot-brush missing its bristles. Also recovered were a leather boot sole, a glass decanter, and a liquor bottle, quite possibly the same as seen in Okpik's photograph (right). It's also noteworthy that the numbers of the tags are well into triple digits, which suggests that, well beyond the items which were displayed in Gjoa Haven, there is much, much more to come! It's tantalizing to wonder what other wonders await -- but at least for now we have a sample to savor. One thing is for certain: the success of the Parks team during this extraordinary season more than makes up for last year's truncated one, and will surely add a vital new chapter to what we know of the men whose lives were lived aboard both HMS Terror and HMS Erebus.

The Hand of Crozier?

Fragments enhanced by Logan Zachary

A guest post by Regina Koellner

When my fellow researcher and member of the "Remembering the Franklin Expedition" Facebook group Alison Freebairn discovered the Beechey paper treasure in the National Archive (see the previous blog post) I was coasting along Norway in a Hurtgruten ship and could only look at the scraps with my phone. They looked interesting, and some of the contents made me think of magnetic observations, but every time I tried to zoom in on one of the photos it took ages -- Internet reception along the Norwegian coast can be quite poor when you leave the coast for the open sea. So I thought I would look at them on the computer when I got home, which had to be postponed – it seemed that, every evening, something else came up. It was only when I saw her lovely guest post yesterday that I finally decided to take a casual flick through the images, on the bus on the way to work.

These papers, found by Franklin searchers in 1850-51 on Beechey Island are always described as one scrap of paper in Fitzjames's handwriting most likely having to do with magnetic observations, along with some newspaper articles. One of the scraps is clearly in James Fitzjames's somewhat unruly handwriting but when I came to the other paper (or rather two pieces that clearly belong together) I felt a sudden sense of vertigo -- it was as if Francis Crozier was waving at me from the depths of my phone. It was quite surreal. I know his handwriting pretty well as I’ve spent two years transcribing every scrap written by him that I could find across the world. So even without a direct comparison on the bus I thought it was highly possible this was written by him; I sent Russell, Alison and Logan Zachary, another fellow researcher and digital wizard, my thoughts.

After a long day at work itching to get home I finally started to compare handwriting samples by Fitzjames and Crozier with the pieces of paper. I think it is pretty obvious that the two parts that deal with what I think are instructions for erecting a portable observatory are not written by the same person that wrote about observations in 2.5 minute intervals (which, by the way, points towards the time consuming observations of several delicate instruments on an international magnetic term date – a quite interesting fact. These term days happened every month for the remainder of 1845; the first feasible for the Franklin Expedition was the one on August 29th).

The other scrap – or rather two scraps – is in my eyes part of instructions on how to put up one of the portable observatories which were carried by each ship and put on shore whenever possible. The comparison of the handwriting samples certainly rules out Fitzjames as the writer, and in my opinion it looks very similar to Crozier's hand. At left is a comparison of the two hands. And above right, a comparison by Logan Zachary who thinks that we can probably see the reminder of Crozier's signature which I think is very possible indeed.

NEXT: The significance of Crozier's writing on this document.

Lost and found: the Beechey Island papers

A guest post by Alison Freebairn

It was a ridiculous dream. “I’m going to the National Archives in London to look for some papers that have been missing for 168 years,” I told friends. “I’ll go through a pile of musty old ledgers line by line and, just when I’m starting to lose hope, I’ll turn over a page and that’s when I’ll see them.”

Of course, nobody believed that this would happen, least of all me. And we were all correct: I didn’t find the specific missing papers I had been looking for. But I found something else.

I’d never visited the National Archives before. But in July 2019, W. Gillies Ross published Hunters on the Track, and I realised that not all of the 1850-51 search expedition journals had been returned to their authors following the conclusion of the Arctic Committee investigation. I weighed up the probability that these papers still lurked in a ledger somewhere in Kew, ordered every record relating to those specific search years, and started to go through them page by page. This is how I spend all my holidays: sitting in silence and reverence with the history that I love.

A few hours into my first day, I turned a page in an unpromising-looking collection of letters and press cuttings and saw two beautiful pieces of paper that I had read about but had never seen before: a colourfully-treated scrap with Captain James Fitzjames’ writing on it, and a far smaller piece marked “Mr M’Donald” in pencil. I took a photo, and sent it to my Franklin research partner Logan Zachary, who was travelling with me via web chat. I told him: “I’m having an emotion”. I turned another page, and then another, and then I started to have ALL the emotions.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. So many pieces of paper, all clearly identified as having been picked up on Beechey Island by Captains William Penny, Erasmus Ommanney, Horatio Austin and other members of the search teams in August 1850. I kept turning pages. Each one contained a Beechey scrap. A second page in Fitzjames’ hand: was that from a journal? A ragged wrapper from a chocolate bar. A long strip, opalescent with age, and yet the words ‘To be called’ are still visible. A few lines of faded calculations elsewhere. A torn piece of brown wrapping paper with large, incomplete lettering. Small fragments of newspaper; a larger fragment of newspaper, substantial enough for me to very gently open by hand. I was touching a newspaper that had travelled to Beechey Island on HMS Erebus or HMS Terror and had probably been read by the entire ships’ companies several times over. The room started to sway around me.

I sent all the photos to my research partner and went outside to sit by the pond and try to clear my head. A swan stared at me, balefully. I smiled at it, foolishly.

Over the next 48 hours, we ransacked the Remembering the Franklin Expedition group’s rich archive of posts for any reference to papers found on Beechey. Books were consulted. The  internet was turned upside down and given a good shake. We brought in Allison Lane and John Wilson, RtFE’s experts on Harry Goodsir and James Fitzjames respectively.

I was hoping that someone – anyone – would say: “Oh, those old things. Obvious hoax. John Bertie Cator got into the rum ration and decided to play a joke on Captain Austin.” But nobody did. And then I got in touch with Russell Potter. Russell was in the Arctic, because of course he was. This caused some initial communication problems:



[Scene: domestic, somewhere on the west coast of Scotland] 

My mother: “Why isn’t that man replying to your email? Doesn’t he know how important this is?”
 

Me: “Mum, he’s on an icebreaker in the Canadian Arctic.”
 

My mother: “Well, that’s no excuse.” 

[Scene ends]

Russell replied as soon as he could. I had said: “I wouldn’t be trying to contact you if I didn’t think this was really important.” We spoke, and I had confirmation that, yes, this was really important. And at that moment, everything changed.

Identified as a page from John Stephens's Incidents of travel
 in Egypt, Arabia, Petræa, and the Holy Land (1838)

Somewhere along the path, the 1850 discovery and recovery of the Fitzjames/Mr M’Donald/To Be Called fragments may have slipped below the collective radar of Franklin researchers. I can only speak for myself when I say that, yes, I was aware that some scraps had once been found on Beechey Island, but I thought that they must have been lost long ago or had fallen into private hands – which can sometimes feel like the same thing.

But now here we all are most unexpectedly, with a little more knowledge than we had three weeks ago, and with a lot more Franklin relics.

At this stage, it’s impossible to know the stories they can tell us, and the full significance of the papers may take years to unpack, analyse, and set in context. But this find, following on from RtFE members’ identification of the Beechey Anvil Block last year, gives continued hope that more traces of the Franklin Expedition are still out there somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.  

And those specific missing papers I was looking for in Kew? Well, they’re still missing. But I will find them: I just need to keep searching. 

Southward, Ho!

Sunset in Ulukhaktok

I'm writing this from the beautiful hamlet of Ulukhaktok N.W.T., the final stop on this year's voyage through the Northwest Passage. Later this afternoon, I'll be getting on the first of several flights that will take me to Kugluktuk, Yellowknife, Vancouver, Boston, and finally home to Rhode Island! The people here have been very friendly and welcoming, and we were lucky that one of my fellow expedition team members had brought some caribou meat that she'd picked up in Cambridge Bay, so we had a lovely final dinner last evening. In just a few days, all the members of the expedition team I worked with will be at their respective homes, though some of us a longer journey ahead than I do -- one to South Africa! -- and the sense of adventure we shared will become just photographs and memories.

We were able to stop at just one Franklin-related spot -- Beechey Island, which I was glad to visit, as last year ice conditions prevented any landings there -- but we did manage to follow his original route through Peel Sound, which was a treat. And, when the news of Parks Canada's new below-decks video from HMS Terror reached us, it was a special thrill to be able to share it "hot off the press" to a shipboard audience.

The Passage was busy this year -- more ships than before, if my informal count is correct -- including old veterans like the Bremen and newer vessels such as the Roald Amundsen and the new Fram. The interest in the natural beauty, land and sea mammals, birds -- and, of course with the ice itself -- is running high, as is the fascination with the Franklin story.  There was some lingering ice, some from last year, but most vessels were able to manage to find a track through, with very minimal support from icebreakers. One must always take the ice seriously, though -- another expedition cruise ship in Svalbard was trapped in rapidly-encroaching ice, and its passengers had to be rescued (the ship itself was freed not long after).

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting highlights from my trip, especially our historical sites and community visits, with some reflections on this ever-changing, ever-constant part of the world. But just now, I'm very happy to be on my way back. As the late, great Stan Rogers put it:

How then am I so different from the first men through this way? 

Like them, I left a settled life, I threw it all away. 

To seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men 

To find there but the road back home again . . .

HMS Terror Revealed

After what has seemed, to the waiters, an excruciating interval -- but in fact only about three years -- the underwater archaeology team at Parks Canada has opened the door -- or rather, the hatch -- into a world of wonders beyond anything any of us could have imagined. The newly-released video, mostly made using its brilliantly small ROV, takes us far inside the ship, both forward (we see bottles and mugs on a shelf in the forecastle) and aft (in one of the most stunning sequences, through the passageway along which the junior officers' cabins lie, and eventually all the way to Francis Crozier's "Great Cabin." There, aside from the thick layer of protective silt; things look much as they must have when the cabin was last in use; though a table seems overturned, Crozier's desk, with its enticing drawers, is upright and looks to be in perfect condition. Nearby, we see what must be his chair, and what looks to me like a parallel rule that would be used in plotting routes on a chart. The bank of cubbies and drawers which, as on Erebus, would have held those charts, looks similarly pristine, while on the port side another set of larger drawers seems a bit more damaged. On the starboard side, two shelves -- are those dusty books? -- while in the back, the eerie light of the surface world still peeps through the mostly intact windows.

On our way, we note the sliding doors that open into the officers' sleeping quarters (so wonderfully reproduced in AMC's The Terror), and peep inside one -- the bed-rail is still in place (is that someone's back-scratcher hanging from it?), and the chamber-pot tucked away on the floor, its user having gone more than a century and a half without the need of it. A couple of plates are seen behind a rail, with stacks more on another shelf; we seem to be looking into a storage area for the officers' mess. In other images, a wall of cubbies holds numerous intact bottles (apparently Crozier did not drink up all the whiskey!), some of which seem to have slips or papers underneath them, while on a nearby shelf a large, ridged bottle has become a home for anemones.

And we realize, of course, that this ultimate teaser-trailer is only a tiny selection from what are likely hundreds of hours of video, over which the Parks team will be poring for the next year, and longer. In much the way that Bob Ballard's earliest ROV video of RMS Titanic evoked a powerful sense of luster and loss, the camera becomes for us a kind of mournful visitor, urging us on even as, on another level, we feel a bit like intruders. Already, of course, Franklinites around the world are pondering, sifting, and will soon be having a grand back-and-forth over the finest of details in a single video frame. But for this first gilmpse -- so quickly shared with the public -- we must always be simply grateful.

Northward, Ho!

Image courtesy London Science Museum, cc-by-SA 4.0

It's that time of year again. And although, unlike last year, there aren't any eggs frying on any sidewalks in my neighborhood -- in fact, it's been an unexpectedly mild August so far -- the lure of the Arctic is as inviting as ever. Each year, I understand more why so many people -- explorers, adventurers, scientists, and artists -- who've experienced the wondrous beauty of these regions yearn ever to return to them.

I'll be on a different route this time, working my way up the Greenland coast from Nuuk northward, then crossing over and heading north along the coast of Baffin Island, calling at Clyde River before I get to Pond Inlet, where I hope to meet up with old friends and see some familiar sights. Soon after, it's on to the Franklin expedition graves on Beechey, which due to heavy shore ice I was unable to reach last year. The ice charts, so far, look favorable, although the complex nexus of the Bellot Strait and the northern tip of King William Island is still in flux.

And of course I'll be eager to gather news of this year's search by the underwater archaeology team at Parks Canada, working with the cooperation of Inuit organizations and the Guardians program, as well as the dedicated support of the newly refurbished RV David Thompson; their work this summer on HMS Erebus and HMS Terror promises great things. And, as time away from my other duties allows, I hope to share what I find here, with the readers who have followed me on my previous journeys north. I have a feeling it's going to be another memorable year!

Black Graves of Beechey Island

Photo courtesy of and © 2019 Derbyshire Record Office

Every so often, a discovery is made in the archives that completely upturns our assumptions about the history of the Franklin expedition. For most of the past century and a half, almost all of us have thought of the graves at Beechey Island as white -- whether we've seen the current replacement markers, or photos of the originals in the archives of the NWT or Nunavut, or the scarcer ones of the monuments prior to their initial removal in 1972 (I shared a selection of these in my last post).  The visual identity of the grave markers, indeed, was tied up with our idea of these lonesome white headboards surrounded by a wilderness of white.

It was easy to dismiss or set aside Miertsching's account of the headboards as being black, even when it was echoed by Robert Goodsir -- by his account the first person to stand beside them after Erebus and Terror departed. And yet, thanks to a fortuitous discovery among the Franklin materials at the Derbyshire Record Office, we now have an image that shows -- definitively -- that they were originally black, with the incised lettering in white.

The discovery was made by assistant conservator Clare Mosley, who discovered the photo carefully lain within a volume of "Arctic Scraps"(as in scrapbook) atop two newspaper clippings. These clippings appear to date to the period between June and September of 1851, which might possibly help date the photo. Since the other exposures made at Beechey by Leopold McClintock and Dr. David Walker date to 1858, if the photo is from 1851 it is by far the earliest. Like McClintock's and Walker's, it is a paper positive print made using the Calotype or "Talbotype" process, but its dimensions don't correspond with theirs (since Calotype cameras used a wooden frame to hold the sensitized paper, and all prints were "contact" prints, each camera produces prints of the same size). Research is ongoing to determine whether anything more can be learned about the image from other materials in the archives.

So what does all this mean? For one, it would suggest to me that further examination of the surviving original headboards be made; knowing the original paint scheme should enable us to look for traces of the pigments used. The Royal Navy employed black paint for a number of shipboard uses, and it may be possible to match the chemical profile of any surviving pigment to that of other period painted fixtures. Why and how the markers came to be painted white, and the incised white lettering switched to black, is also unclear. As late as 1972, seems that the three Franklin crew markers still appeared to be black, though Torrington's was now framed in white trim; the actual markers (now part of the Archives of Nunavut) show no outward trace of this scheme (we know this thanks to this photo taken in 1972 by Stuart Hodgson). That photo also shows the "tablet" marker at far left, and the "door" marker with its horizontal crosspiece at far right.

There are still more mysteries, it seems, yet to be probed when it comes to the graves of Beechey Island.

NB: The Derbyshire Record Office is in the midst of a fundraising campaign that I urge all readers of this blog to consider supporting: check out the Lady Jane's Museum Crowdfunder website where you can learn more, and make a contribution to this very worthy effort. Discoveries such as this one are a dramatic example of the enormous value of archival work that is being done at local and regional archives such as the DRO.