Review: New book provides a different window into the demise of the Franklin Expedition

“Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery”

By Ken McGoogan; Douglas & McIntyre; 364 pages; 2023; $29.95

A detail from English artist Edwin Landseer’s 1864 painting “Man Proposes, God Disposes,” depicting ship’s wreckage in the Arctic, human bones, and two polar bears having their way with it all, graces the cover of Canadian Arctic historian Ken McGoogan’s most recent book, “Searching for Franklin.” A commentary on hubris and futility, the painting was not a direct reference to the catastrophic loss of the Franklin Expedition, dispatched two decades earlier, but was certainly inspired by it.

The fate of the Franklin Expedition has bedeviled millions for nearly two centuries now. In 1845, under the command of Sir John Franklin, two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, set sail from Britain to unlock what was then the Arctic’s greatest mystery: the location of the Northwest Passage, a long-fabled sea route through the western Arctic waters that would provide a direct path from England to Asia.

Far from resolving the question, the expedition instead presented an even larger mystery. What happened to it? Both ships disappeared, along with the 129 men aboard them. After a decade of searching, the only written clue ever found was a note in a cairn at Victory Point on the northwestern shore of King William Island in 1859 with two messages. The first, from 1847, indicated that all was well. Scrawled in the margins, however, was a second report from the following year stating that the two ships were icebound, Franklin had died, and the remaining men were heading overland toward Back’s Fish River, presumably to make contact with fur traders and find rescue.

They never did. The Erebus and Terror had sunk and wouldn’t be located until 2014 and 2016 respectively. Human remains and relics, however, were strewn about the island and nearby mainland. Contrary to Landseer’s painting, there was no indication of polar bear predation on the bones. There was, however, irrefutable evidence that some of the last survivors had eaten those who died before them.

Lost ships and cannibalism alone make for an enduring mystery, but there’s one more looming question. The Victory Point note stated that “the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.” Put differently, prior to the abandonment of the vessels, 34% of the officers had died, but only 14% of the crewmen. Why the disproportion?

That’s the question McGoogan seeks to answer in a book that takes a far different approach to the mystery than the countless volumes about the expedition that have preceded it.

McGoogan, who in earlier works has pointed to the folly of European explorers who failed to follow the example of the Inuit residents of the Arctic for guidance on survival, here continues in the same vein, reaching a conclusion that might explain the total loss of all members of the expedition, and why, as of 1848, the ships’ officers bore the lion’s share of fatalities.

To make his case, McGoogan spends minimal time on the 1845 expedition itself, which he summarizes early in the book, and far more on Franklin’s earlier overland expedition to Canada’s northern coast that he led between 1819 and 1822. That one, too, ended in disaster. During the grueling journey, 11 of Franklin’s 20 men perished. Agony, murder, starvation and, it’s quite apparent, cannibalism occurred. It was hardly a valiant effort.

Franklin emerged a hero, however, hailed by his countrymen as “The Man Who Ate His Boots” owing to the fact that expedition members resorted to eating leather during their tortured retreat south. But they also ate something else during their arduous journey: polar bear meat.

This might seem a minor point, but McGoogan believes it contains the answer to the question of why the reported deaths from the 1845 expedition so heavily tilted toward officers.

Polar bears are often carriers of the roundworm Trichinella spiralis, which causes trichinosis in those who eat undercooked meat from the animals. Left untreated, it slowly sickens and in many cases kills those who consume it.

The Dene of Northern Canada had a taboo against eating polar bear meat, no doubt due to deaths from its consumption in the distant past. During the 1819 expedition, the men’s Dene guide Akaitcho killed a bear, and while he didn’t eat it, he gave the flesh to the Europeans who, Franklin wrote, “had no such prejudice.” Franklin declared it “to be excellent meat.”

In that instance, no harm befell Franklin and his men. But McGoogan suspects the story was different with the 1845 crew. The ships sailed through a region thick with polar bears, and it’s a foregone conclusion that they were killed and eaten, with the officers receiving more of the likely tainted meat than the crewmen.

“They fell down and died as they walked along,” an Inuit witness told Francis Leopold McClintock, discoverer of the Victory Point note. Their fate, McGoogan argues, was sealed before they abandoned ship.

“I present Franklin as a well-meaning plodder,” McGoogan concludes, one whose British prejudices and evangelical zeal prevented him from listening to the Indigenous non-Christians who had dwelt in the Arctic for millennia. By zeroing in on Franklin’s earlier journey, one generally treated as a footnote or background story in most other books about the lost expedition, he makes the case that the men who sailed in 1845 were doomed not just by the Arctic, but by Franklin himself owing to a decision he made two decades earlier.

Thus Landseer’s painting is perhaps accurate after all, although not as unintended. Polar bears did take the men’s lives, not through violence, but through that which has killed far more humans than any wild animal: parasites.

McGoogan makes a strong case for his theory, one that will be debated by the notoriously fickle Franklin fanatics for years to come. Along the way, with his detailed narrative of that earlier expedition, he tells a damned good story. “Searching for Franklin” offers new grist for all who obsess over a mystery that keeps growing ever more complex.

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