The Tale of the Bones, Part III

Bones of contention

Huxley's identification did not go unchallenged -- indeed, one of the foremost men involved in the Franklin search, Dr. John Rae, doubted that it was a Franklin skeleton at all. The value of Rae's opinion, however, was limited by the fact that he did not have access to Hall's field notebooks or journals, and since Nourse's edition of Hall's narrative wasn't published until 1879, he had no idea of Hall's success; he simply expressed his doubt that Hall could have persuaded any Inuit to take him so far as King William Island. But there was another problem: for some reason, in the same box as the bones, there was a metal blade, perhaps the head of a spear, stamped with the words "THE SHIP." Rae gave it as his opinion that it could not possibly have been used by Franklin's men, as they had plenty of guns and ammunition, though he admitted that he had seen "pieces of gun barrels hammered with all sorts of forms" by the Inuit. This artifact, as it turned out, was completely unrelated to the skeleton and may well have ended up in the box simply because Hall obtained it around the same time.

As recounted in Nourse (p. 400), it was just a few days earlier that he had, while searching unsuccessfully for the bodies reported to be on the Todd Islets, that he encountered an Inuk by the name of "Koo-nik," who gave him a number of items taken from the wrecked at "Ook-joo-lik"(which we now know to be HMS Erebus); he gave Hall

"a silver spoon ... and a second smaller mahogany box, with another spoon and many other articles, including pieces of copper with two stamps of a broad arrow, and a steel spear-head on which was  stamped " THE SHIP." All these had been brought from one of Franklin's ships and from the shore on the south side of Ook-joo-lik (O'Reilly Island). Knives, needles, thimbles, beads, and rings were
given in return."

Detail of Edmond Le Feuvre's letter

The spear-head seems to have caused confusion to Inglefield and Huxley as well, and influenced Dr. Rae's negative opinion about the bones. But there was not merely skepticism on these fronts only, but even -- once they were made aware of Huxley's view -- on the part of Le Vesconte's own family as to whether the bones were in fact his. We know this thanks to a surviving letter from Edmond Philip Le Feuvre, who was not only the executor of Le Vesconte's estate, but his cousin. Here is an excerpt from his letter to Le Vesconte's sister Rose Henrietta in May of 1873:

I quite agree with you that the fact of there being a little spec of gold in one tooth is no evidence that the remains are those of an officer, and I quite think the right thing has been done in them being deposited at Greenwich. I confess I wish they had been deposited in consecrated ground but they will be preserved quite sacredly when they are in front of the monument erected to the memory of the Expedition, and I suspect our church laws would not have permitted a burial service to have been performed in the absence of all proof of identity.

Edmond also mentions that he had called upon Sophia Cracroft, Lady Franklin's niece and companion, and that she apparently was convinced by Huxley's account, and by "the photograph of the pencil drawing" -- this must mean that a photographic copy of the sketch made in New York had been provided to her! -- but then muddles things by saying "this could not in any way be relied on being simply a copy of the daguerreotype likeness." Here, Edmond is in error -- having seen the sketch we know it's based on the skull -- but this gives us the wonderful vision of Sophy sitting at home, comparing the photograph of the sketch with her own copy of the Daguerreotype of Le Vesconte!

And, although in some ways for wrong reasons such as this, the skeptics were to be proven right -- although not for more than a century and a half. The proof will be the subject of the next (and for now final) chapter of this story.

The Tale of the Bones, Part II

Image courtesy Imperial College, London

The bones arrived in a carefully-packed crate, apparently the same one originally used by Hall. They were delivered by Vice-Admiral Inglefield to George Henry Richards, then the Hydrographer of the Navy, and with them a dilemma -- if they could not, as Inglefield hoped, be "certainly identified," it wouldn't be possible for them to be properly buried -- what to do? Richards felt he had to do something, and so contacted Thomas Henry Huxley, the foremost comparative anatomist of his day -- surely the great man would be able to solve this riddle. In a letter dated 22 June 1872 he wrote:

My dear Professor Huxley ,
Admiral Inglefield who has just returned from New York has brought with him a Complete Skeleton of one of Franklin’s officers which was found by Hall, the American traveller, on King William’s Land. It lies on my table at present in the box it was brought home in. The features are so remarkably distinctive added to which one of the teeth is stuffed with gold. I think there will be little difficulty in identifying the individual. I have thought perhaps you might feel sufficiently interested in the matter to put him together with a view to his identification and if so I will send him - any where you direct. 

Two days later, apparently having heard back in the affirmative, Richards sent him the bones along with an accompanying note:

I send the box containing the skeleton as you desired. It is packed in Shavings. I have not disturbed any thing but the head - and put that back again in its place. Admiral Inglefield tells me all the Bones are in the box. Some of the teeth are shaken out and will be found among the Shavings if they are carefully reserved. I did not like to disturb anything. When you have found the age - the distinctive features appear to me to be so well marked that I have no doubt we shall identify the man. The names are all in McClintock’s- last Cheap Edition of the Fox Voyage what I have here if you require it. I send also a fancy portrait which was done by the New York professor to whom Hall gave the skeleton but I understand from Inglefield that nothing but the head has ever been out of the box since it was found on King William’s Land there are some remnants of clothing about the bones and in the Box.

The "fancy portrait" apparently referred to the sketch shown above, which is still among Huxley's papers -- if one looks closely at it, one can see that the facial features are carefully traced over a precise profile of the skull. Despite all efforts, I've been unable to identify the "New York Professor," but it must have been someone engaged by Brevoort, in whose care Hall had left the bones.

It took some time for Huxley to reply -- Richards had almost given up on him -- and when he did, he took the view that there was little doubt that the "skellington" was that of Henry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte, a lieutenant on Franklin's expedition. He commented mainly on the skull and teeth:

The skull is very well formed & shows that its person had a prominent nose & chin, & a square cut and powerful lower jaw. There is a socket for only one cutting tooth on the left side in the upper jaw, main, having been extracted  in youth ... The most important point  in regard to the teeth however is that the first premolar, a bicuspid tooth, on the right side has been stuffed with gold ... which leads to the conclusion that its possessor may have been an officer.

Detail of the portrait

Based on these observations, and with the age of the individual estimated at 30-35 years, Huxley apparently felt that Le Vesconte was the best match. Nevertheless, his identification was apparently considered insufficient by the Naval authorities; when the bones were interred -- initially under the floor of the Painted Hall of the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich -- they were identified simply as those of "one of Sir John Franklin's companions." The bones were later moved to the Chapel, and re-interred in the base of an impressive marble monument designed by William Westmacott. When, in 2009, the memorial was moved to a more prominent position near the chapel's entrance, a formal memorial service of remembrance and rededication was held, and Huxley's identification was used as its basis.

H.T.D. Le Vesconte

The ceremony opened with Beethoven's Funeral March, after which the Reverend Jeremy Frost, Chaplain to the Greenwich Foundation, ascended to the pulpit and intoned:

We gather on this solemn occasion to give renewed thanks for the life of Lieutenant Henry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte, and to re-inter his mortal remains in the vestibule of this Chapel In this the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary year of the discovery of Sir John Franklin's death, we pray that peoples from across the world who visit this holy and historic place may hereafter pause, and remember all those who lost their lives alongside Franklin ..

There was only one problem, as it turned out: the bones were not those of Le Vesconte. In our next installment, we'll find out why -- and how indeed, even at the time, some members of Le Vesconte's family felt Huxley was mistaken -- and how his mistake was finally corrected.

[to be continued ...]

The Tale of the Bones, Part 1

Peffer River, photo by Doug Stenton, courtesy the Government of Nunavut

It was a desolate place, the site of two of the last of Franklin’s men accorded what searcher  Charles Francis Hall deemed a “Christian burial.” A little over two miles to the east of  the estuary of the Peffer river on King William Island, Hall had at last reached the place described by Nee-wik-tee-too, a Netsilik Inuk who had since died. As Hall recalled his testimony, “The bodies buried by placing stones around and over them;  the remains facing upward, and the hands had been folded in a very precise manner across the breasts of both ; clothes all on ; flesh all on the bones. On the back of each a suspended knife found. The bodies perfect when found, but the Innuits having left the remains unburied, after unearthing them, the foxes have eaten meat and sinews all off the bones. A tenting-place of the whites close by where these two men were buried. Many needles and one nail found by the Innuits at this tenting-place."

It was early in the season, and snow covered the ground. Hall's guides In-nook-poo-zhee-jook and Zuk dug about for some time, and at last were able to locate one of these graves, the skeleton nearly complete:

At length Zuck and In-nook-pou-zhe-jook (the former had been seeking too, having the snow shovel) cried to me + motioned with upraised arms. I knew by this sign [that he] had something there so I hastend to the spot which is the one on which I was writing these notes + they had discovered the grave of one – that is they had taken off the pure unspotted mantles of the heavens + laid bare the skeleton remains of one those gallant sons of Franklin Expedition that so triumphiantly + gloriously accomplished the North West Passage.

As was his practice, Hall ordered a volley shot over the grave, and raised "the Stars and Stripes" over the bones. And then -- though he made no immediate note of it -- he pondered a decision: should he bring the bones with him, back to America, eventually perhaps to England? Or should he let them rest where they lay? At last, he decided to bring them with him. We don't have any record of his inner deliberations, although J.E. Nourse, who edited Hall's narrative, said that Hall had had "much hesitancy as though he might have done wrong."

Hall papers, Smithsonian Museum

On his return to the United States in 1869, Hall was a busy man -- in addition to sorting out his notes and preparing the full account of his search asked for by Lady Franklin, he was in the early stages of raising money and attention for what became his third and final expedition, in search of the North Pole aboard the USS "Polaris." He at last decided to delay the ultimate decision of what to do with the remains by placing them in the care of his patron J. Carson Brevoort (whom Hall, mindful of all who had helped him in the past, addressed as "Friend Brevoort"). On November 3rd, he drafted a letter to Brevoort, reporting that "I wish to confide to your special care, for the present, a case that contains the remains of one of the immortal heroes of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition that discovered the North West Passage." Hall did not add any further instructions, and it seems that the skeleton remained in Brevoort's care for several years, until 1872 at least. By then, Hall was dead, murdered with arsenic by his own ship's doctor, and Brevoort no doubt felt free to exercise his own judgment. He contacted the British Embassy in Washington D.C., where -- by happy coincidence -- the Arctic veteran Edward Augustus Inglefield was serving as Naval attaché. Inglefield apparently agreed that the bones should be brought home, and made the necessary arrangements. And here the plot thickens .... but that's a matter for my next post.

NB: Before going any further, I want to express my gratitude to Lelia Garcia, who -- at short notice -- spent two afternoons with the Hall papers at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and who managed to locate the letter shown above. My thanks also to Russ Taichman for sending along his images from Hall's field notebooks. It's through efforts such as these that the Franklin story is advanced, inch by inch, and the larger understanding of it enhanced, mile by mile.

The Three Franklin Records

Nearly everyone who develops an interest in the lost Franklin expedition comes -- sooner rather than later -- upon the famed "Victory Point" record. In the contrast between its bold and confident original message and the second, sorrowful one in its margins, it's the most potent encapsulation I know of the whole tragedy that befell Franklin and his men, and has been studied for years in search of any additional clues that might be preserved in its peripheries.

But it's not as well known that that a second record, minus any marginal message, was deposited by the same sledging expedition that left the first. It was found by Lieutenant Hobson at a cairn only eight miles south of that at Victory point, surely less than a day's hauling, suggesting that Gore and his party must have had a practice of leaving a message in a cairn at each prominent headland. The area where the second record was left is now known as Gore Point; doubtless there were many others which are now lost.

But there is yet another record -- one fewer still have seen.  This third record (actually the first, in order of which they were deposited) was mentioned by Richard J. Cyriax in several of his papers, but never reproduced. My friend and fellow Franklinite, Gina Koellner, found a xeroxed copy among Cyriax's papers at the National Maritime Museum. Happily, the xerox included the index number for the original at the National Archives at Kew, and that's where Gina found it, glued down to a sheet of paper that was bound into a larger volume; you can see the stitch-marks on the binding at the left. Just recently, another far-faring Franklinite, Logan Zachary, re-visited Kew to take high-resolution photos, and that's the occasion for this post.

Location where record was left, via Google Earth

Now, for the first time, we can see the third record in all its glory. Perhaps the most notable feature is Sir John Franklin's bold signature -- clearly, it had been usual practice for him to sign these forms personally, which makes it seem the more likely that the later records -- where his second, James Fitzjames had simply written "Sir John Franklin commanding" -- are a sign of Franklin's illness or incapacity. The other information shows that Erebus and Terror were still accompanied by the "Baretto Junior, Transport," and their latitude and longitude show them off the coast of Greenland near Simiutaq, an uninhabited island about 150 miles NNW of Nuuk. The original also adds, "with a Danish Brig in company."

Photo by Logan Zachary

Franklin's instructions were to toss these messages -- in their cylinders and suspended inside a barrel -- overboard periodically so as to help ascertain the direction of the currents. In this case, they must have tended north, as the notation at the side shows the message was recovered near Imerissoq -- Franklin's "Whalefish Islands"-- nearly two hundred miles up the coast, in July of 1849 -- more than four years later. Alas, aside from the currents, the message doesn't add very much to our overall knowledge of the early days of the expedition, but the presence of Franklin's signature -- clear as day -- does add force to the suggestion, first made by William Battersby, that the illness that took Franklin's life on June 11, 1847 must have already taken a significant toll before Gore and company departed the ships on the 28th of May.

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.