Lost Franklin Expedition

combines some history with mystery and talk about the loss Franklin expedition so ever since the Marco Polo ventured to the east and discovered the riches of the Far East men had always wanted to find a faster more secure way of getting there now the only sea route available to Europeans was to either travel down the Atlantic and around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America or around the the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of South Africa and both of these routes proposed numerous problems of course the weather at the bottom that the both of these capes was always severe and was it was tricky to get around there was also pirates in the region and that the length of the journey meant that too often crews were subject to illnesses like scurvy and typhoid and yellow fever and things so that journey was very very difficult so for a long long time men including great explorers like fur be sure and Peary and and James Cook and lar perused and dozens of other men searched for a route through what was known as the Northwest Passage to no avail now the Northwest Passage was a mythical place it was thought that people could get through this area and get all the way across to the Pacific now if that was possible it would be a huge bonanza for the country that discovered it it would take about six and a half thousand nautical miles of the journey which would mean months and months at sea so an economic stimulus to the country that found it would be enormous and Sir John Barrow he was the man who was the second secretary of the Admiralty for 40 years from 1804 and he's the man that is seen by most historians has been the person most responsible for the buildup of the British Navy into the greatest Navy of its time and he was responsible for innovations in ship design armaments he made sure that there was uniform training right across the Royal Navy so someone could go from one ship and go to another position on another ship and he exactly what to do he was also responsible for making sure that promotions were based on merit and not on people's connections and so he was very influential and he had he was responsible for fighting the battles against Napoleon and then he'd fought the beer war of 1812 against the Americans and then he'd also fought wars against the Dutch and reduced their power as a great naval nation and but now these wars were done and it was the era of discovery the era of exploration and he's greatest he's crowning glory was planned to be before his retirement he wanted to discover a way through the Northwest Passage and to do that he decided to create the the best the biggest the most scientifically advanced the best resourced mission of all time to go through and discover that passage and he had all the weapons at his disposal by this time but to do it he also had to have the right person to be in charge and but just two before we get there I'll just show you that that this is the area that we're talking about above Canada and before we get to the Arctic and each winter the ice would flow down from the Arctic and block all those channels and those passages but it was believed in summer when the ice I thought there would be a passage and you would be able to get their way through so as I said Barrow wanted to select the best person for them the job to lead this this great mission that he was going to undertake he knew exactly who he wanted but before he could offer the position to that man he had to go through some protocols because the greatest arctic explorer of his generation a man by the name of Sir William Edward Peary was first in line you had to offer it to him first as a matter of courtesy Peary was as I said a great arctic explorer he'd gone on several missions to the Arctic in 1827 here his expedition to try to get to the North Pole got further us than any other person had ever done before and that record stood for over 50 years but he was 60 years old now and he exploring days were over but as a courtesy as I said he was offered the role and as expected he turned it down he declined so then that gave the opportunity to offer the job to the man that he really wanted to take on this mission and that was Sir James Clark Ross now he was your quintessential hero he was a handsome charismatic man a very courageous he had been on several on four missions to the Arctic with Perry he'd also been on missions to the Arctic with his uncle Sir John Ross and most recently he'd traveled - he'd been a leader of an expedition to the other end of the world to the Antarctic with two ships the the Erebus and the terror and this had been an extraordinary expedition and they discovered a lot of things he he named Mount Erebus the southernmost volcano active volcano in the world after one of his ships and he also named Mount terror after the other ship and in turn the Ross Sea which is just to the south of us right now Ross Island which is also to the south and the Great Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica is named in his honor but but he had a bit of a dilemma he had just married this stunningly beautiful woman and he'd promised her that he wouldn't embark on any more expeditions and so when he was offered this role here - dilemma that he had to face you know do I go away with the smelly men on this small boat for two three four years or do I stay home with my beautiful wife raise a family and be the darling of the London society that I am so you know what do you do you have to weigh that up don't you so in the end he and he declined the offer as well so but he recommended his very best friend the man that he thought would be perfect for the mission a man by the name of Francis Crozier Crozier had been on missions with Perry and crows you had also been the captain of the Erebus when he had gone to Antarctica so he was a very very well current credentialed man in his own right but the problem wasn't and like we saw with Shackleton the other day crows II was Irish and there was no way that the English were gonna allow an Irishman to get the credit for discovering the Northwest Passage I mean Barrow was was one thing about promoting on merit but it was another thing having an Irishman lead an expedition of this immense scope and importance so he was knocked out for that reason and also for the fact that he was very lowborn he had risen through the ranks of the of the Navy to get to this position he wasn't one of the chaps he didn't belong to the right clubs so he was not debt for that as well and so they went through a few more people few more options and weren't satisfied with them but until they came across Sir John Franklin now lady Jane Frankland was a very very influential woman in in those times and she had petitioned the Admiralty to select her husband to lead this mission she wanted him to go down in history for his greatness he had been born in Lincolnshire in England in 1786 he was the ninth of twelve children his parents didn't have a television set apparently at the age of fourteen he joined the Royal Navy and it was only the following year at the age of 15 that he fought at the Battle of Copenhagen along with Lord Nelson in 1802 he was part of the circumnavigation of Australia along with Matthew Flinders and that's another talk that I'll do after we leave Sydney and in 1805 he was a midship and during the Battle of Trafalgar the great battle along with again Lord Nelson and then in 1819 he was selected as a left-hander to lead what was known as the copper mine X expedition it was a rural Navy expedition but it was gonna be overland it was going to start in the Baffin Bay area of Canada and go overland to the north coast of Canada and explore that north coast so once again no survey that to see whether there was a route through there for the Northwest Passage but the mission itself was very poorly resourced he only had three other men from the Royal Navy and the plan was that he was going to get to Canada and recruit local trappers and hunters to be part of his team but when he got there when he explained the mission to these men they refused to go the experienced trappers the the ones that he really wanted weren't interested in going based on what he told them about the mission compared to what the British were prepared to pay for their services so he could only recruit inexperienced men and this wasn't become a problem so he set out in 1819 with 20 men to go on this mission now from the get-go things were very very tough they were supposed to Everage about 18 to 20 miles per day but Franklin insisted on stopping fatigue every few hours so by the time they built fires and unpacked their equipment to make the tea and then packed it up again if there was constant delays and Franklin was later said to be very unfit and they very rarely made more than eight miles per day instead of 18 or 20 so the going was very slow they've quickly ran out of food and the the local trappers that they'd employed was supposed to live off the land and hunt for gain but they didn't have that experience to do so so after a very short while they were eating off bugs and insects and things like that they went term further north and eventually the the the trappers they were with them decided that they had enough they wanted to turn back Franklin told them that you're now members of the Royal Navy this is a Royal Navy expedition you wonder that you're under the rules of raw Navy if you this is considered a mutiny if you go ahead with this you'll be hung so they had no choice they had to keep going so on they went and eventually they got to the north coast of Canada and there was supposed to be a food depot dropped for them a ship was supposed to come in from the Pacific and drop food off but that hadn't that ship hadn't Br to get through the ice pack so there was no food for them now you'd think at this stage from the desperate situation that they're in there Franklin would say ok well that's you know common sense let's go back but he didn't he still insisted on following his orders and conducting this this survey of the North Coast it was a few weeks later that the trappers were desperately they were they were eating moss and bark to supply themselves with with sustenance and so they revolted once again and in the end Franklin had to see sense and he decided to turn around and the return journey was even worse than the way up as I said they were living on bark they were very rarely found any food and of the 20 men that embarked 11 died on the return journey mostly of starvation although one man was actually murdered and it was believed that he was cannibalized by at least one other of the men in that party Franklin got so desperate that he actually ate his boots he ate his own boots on the way back and later on he became known as the man who ate his boots and Charlie Chapman we are growing up in England remembered that story and of the story of Franklin and here is 1925 classic movie the gold rush it tells the story of the Little who goes off into the wilderness of Alaska to seek his fortune he's freezing cold and that he's got no food and eventually he has to cook and eat his own boots and that was based on on Franklin but eventually they were on the way back they were discovered by a Native American Indian tribe they were given assistance they were given food and they were taken back to safety then the Canadian authorities were very very critical of Franklin and his leadership they said he wasn't fit to lead this expedition he had he was inflexible with carrying out his orders he had no common sense he was foolhardy in what he had done but when he got back to England the British government was in affair the critical situation there was a crisis going on and they didn't need any more bad news so the story was spun as being a great heroic event and he triumphed against adversity and and struggle through the wilderness to against all all odds and survived so he was actually promoted to captain and later on receive a knighthood for his efforts he was later appointed in 1836 appointed as lieutenant governor of Van Diemen's land which we now know as Tasmania and when we get to Hobart you'll see some of the the evidence of Franklin there and I'll talk about that a little bit later and then in 1845 he was appointed officer commanding the British naval Northwest Passage expert expedition now he was 59 years old at the time which was old for an explorer that was that was old back in those days not like these days where 60s a new 30 isn't it Crozier had accepted the role as second in charge of the expedition he had really had no choice he had no other employment that he could he could go to but Franklin at the time it was an unusual choice because he was unfit he'd been sick for quite some time so why was he going but the authority said he doesn't need to be fit he um he's always gonna do he's been on a ship the whole time and just saw through this passage she doesn't need to get on the ice doesn't need to do anything at all so not a problem these two minute actually met previously when Franklin was lieutenant governor of Tasmania or Van Diemen's land a Crozier had been part of that expedition the wrost expedition down to Antarctica and they stopped off in Hobart and Crozier had met and fallen in love with the niece of Franklin the lovely Sofia the two of them were very much in love Crozier proposed marriage to her and at least two occasions and she declined even though she was madly in love with him she declined he wanted a husband that was going to come home to her every night not go off to sea for weeks or months or even years at a time and being explorer like she'd seen her uncle be so she later became the secretary - Lady Jane Franklin for the rest of life she later had poetry published and a lot of those poems talk about the the love of her life who went off to sea and never returned and it's based on Crozier they were going to be given two ships the same two ships that have been taken to the Antarctic by Ross but these ships were going to be reconfigured and redesigned now HMS terror and HMS Erebus don't seem like really they seem like great names for warships but don't really seem like great names for ships of Discovery Erebus is actually the name of the entrance to hell so and as you will see later on the crew of the ships probably thought that these became very appropriate names they they were going to be reconfigured like I said they were going to have four inch steel plating put all the way around the hull of the ships to protect the ship's from the ice and in the bowels of the ship so there's going to be even more steel put in there so they could push through the ice it's wonderful new innovation was going to take place on these ships for the very first time they were going to have locomotive steam engines installed onto the ships along with four pillars so these ships will be able to be powered not just by the wind but by this this new power of steam and they would be able to travel that four knots which doesn't seem like very much at all to us but at the time this was brilliant because they could actually travel against the wind and against the current and they could maneuver more importantly through the ice if necessary and push against the ice so this was an amazing revelation they're also going to have internal heating so if the ship was stuck in the ice for for a year for a winter then the crew would be very countable and they'd be comfortable along with the fact that they were going to have about a thousand books each on each of these ships a library there so they had things to do during that the times where they were stuck in the ice and one of the other great innovations that this this mission was going to have for the very very first time was tinned food they'd invented how that you could put food into a can and preserve that and with them so they were going to have three years supply of tinned food so there was no need to go out onto the ice hunting for anything else or or trying to find food the food was all going to be supplied with them and they're going to take it along on this mission with them so an amazing sort of sort of find now these ships were initially designed to be gallery platforms and rocket platforms and they had been designed for the war of 1812 against the United States and HMS turbot these ships had seen service in that war HMS terror was actually involved in the Battle of Baltimore now that was a fairly innocuous sort of sort of battle and the British wanted to land troops at in Baltimore and take the city but the city was protected the bay of Baltimore was protected by a Pentagon shaped fort in Baltimore Harbor named Fort McHenry now to approach to the British would have to attack Fort McHenry bombard that and take that before they could take the city of Baltimore the Americans were being canny they had sunk a couple of ships in the shipping lane leading to the fort so the British had to stand off at the ulted them the maximum range and fire their cannons and their rockets at Fort McHenry from this maximum range and which was very very inaccurate and so on on either side there was only a couple of casualties so as a battle itself it wasn't very important but a young lawyer from Baltimore had been invited on board the British ships to arrange a negotiate a prisoner exchange and that that young lawyer conducted the negotiation successfully then he was invited to stay aboard the British ships and dine with the senior British officers and then he was invited Reid compelled to stay on board the ships because he did they didn't want him disclose the the details of the battle that was going to take place so he had a fairly good I heard zai view of this bombardment of Fort McHenry and that's the scene from the bombardment and of course the man I'm talking about was Francis Scott Key who wrote went on and wrote a poem about the the which he named the the defense of Fort McHenry and in that Capone he mentioned the Rockets red glare the star-spangled banner and years later that was put there was music put to that poem and of course became the American national anthem we know today so a little bit of history there a little bit of trivia for you as well Francis Scott Key's son was having an affair with the congressman for the wife of the congressman from New York the congressman found out about it and I shot a key in broad daylight in a park with dozens of witnesses around him he was arrested and put on trial and he was the very first person in history to be acquitted on the basis of temporary insanity so there you go also in the third stanza of the poem that T wrote there's a line there that says and this be our motto in God is our trust and of course that's been shortened to In God We Trust and it appears on all the the American currency today so the ship sailed from England on May 19th 1845 with great fanfare people were so excited about this mission they couldn't wait for it to start and they couldn't wait for it to them to come back there was 24 officers and a hundred and ten men spread across the two ships and if you read the newspaper articles at the time there's no mention of if this mission mission was going to be successful it's all about when and what would happen when they discovered the Northwest Passage what it would mean to Britain how long did it take to get the ships to get through to to the Far East there was very very positive stuff the ship's got to Disko Bay on the off the coast of Greenland and they men wrote their last letters home there was and if you read through some of these letters it's pretty amazing too that they're so positive about it there's men talking about how what a wonderful leader Franklin is and how motive I used to work with and there was one letter from a young midshipman who wrote back and he was complaining about the fact that he was disappointed that they were going to get this mission over and done with so quickly and discover the Northwest Passage so quickly that he wouldn't get to spend any time in the Arctic he wanted to spend at least one winter in the Arctic and he was lamenting the fact that he wouldn't be able to do it there on the journey over to Greenland five men were were found to be unsuitable for the mission and they were discharged and sent home and then on the 29th of July 1845 an American whaling vessel sighted the two ships Erebus and terror as they headed into Baffin Bay into what was now known as the entrance to the the Northwest Passage and the Whalers later reported that the men of the ships lined the side of the ship they were waving and they were cheering and they were singing and they looked very very positive and that ladies and gentlemen was the last time anyone saw Franklin and the 129 men aboard these two ships alive so thank you that's at the end of the presentation no I wouldn't do that to you we have to find out what happened don't we so Lady Jane Franklin she was a remarkable woman a very very intelligent woman a woman who was said to have had great mental activity while her husband was the lieutenant governor of Van Diemen's land she was the most popular woman in the colonies of Australia she did a lot of work charity work herself and we'll talk about that later and she was the first woman to actually travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney she bought 640 acres with her own money of land near in the human Valley near Hobart and she gave these things up into farms and she gave this this land to local men with the intention that they would farm the land and hire other men employ other people too in the farm and she encouraged them to plant apples now a french expedition sometime earlier had planted a couple of apple trees in the region and these had flourish and she had seen these so she encouraged the farmers to to grow apples and the very first export from Tasmania was apples at the exporter to the US and to New Zealand and now Tasmania is of course known as the Apple Isle now after about 18 months she went to the Admiral since her husband had left aboard this mission she went to the Admiralty and she told them she had a bad feeling she had a premonition about this things weren't going properly and she asked the herbal tea to send a mission to search for her husband and they just said there's no need listen there's no problem mean we don't we weren't expecting here from for at least two or three years they've got supplies for three years don't you know not a problem but as time went by she got more and more concerned and in the end she actually funded seven missions expeditions of her of her own money to go and search for her husband over the the next few years and much of what we know about that region of the world right now is because lady Franklin said these expeditions out and they gathered a lot of information about that region but eventually she did a lot of work she lobbied the Admiralty she lobbied Parliament she went to the newspapers and scores of it of aster and eventually after about two and a half years the Admiralty thought that they had to act and this is a painting of a group of the most senior military officers and Arctic explorers of their of their time and they're planning the rescue of Franklin and his men and it's not a great photo but in the background there you can see a painting on the wall and that's the painting of Sir John Franklin himself the very first man to put his hand up and say I want to go and search for these men I want to see if I can find my very best friend was was Ross he by this stage he had his wife had given him a son in an air and this kid was almost two years old and Ross couldn't get out of there quickly enough you can know how he feels so he went searching with it with a rifle of four warships to search for Franklin to no avail and then the British herbal tea put out a reward of 20,000 pounds for anyone who came up with any information about Franklin and his ships now this is the equivalent of about 10 million pounds in today's currency so it was a huge amount and it meant that private ship owners from Britain and from the United States sent ships to the area to search for Franklin and that was the idea of it but to no avail and the very first time we had a clue about what had happened to to the men was in 1850 so this was four years after Franklin and actually four or five years after Franklin had actually left and they came across a very remote place called Beechey Island and on the beachy Island it seemed that Franklin and his ships had wintered there of the winter of 45:46 and there was three graves there and these were the graves of Petty Officer John Torrington rule marine private Billy Barrett brain and able seaman John Hartnell so but it asks more questions that had answered there was no other information about what they died from there was no information about where Franklin attempted to go after he left beachy Island there was nothing there was no clues whatsoever it was in another mystery and so the search went on but it seemed that what had happened is that they rented here at Beechey Island which is just above the the sign there that says Barrow Street named after Barrow John Barrow I was talking about before and then they'd turn south and they'd come down through here through this Strait and as they'd came down the the ice followed them down there was an early winter that year and the ice only a few weeks after I left beach y'all and the ice followed them down and entrapped them again at the northern part of King William Island up here and once again the men were entombed in ice for at least another winter they tried to make them they went it's believed that they went out exploring and seeing what they could find but it was going to be another dismal sort of winter now the next time that anyone found out any information about it was a man by the name of John Rae who in 1854 so this is nine years after our Franklin had left he was traveling he was part of a mission that the eronel he had sent overland so he was following basically the same route that Franklin had taken during the copper mine expedition and he got to the north coast of Canada and he came across some Inuit families and they had in their possession some of the possession possessions that belong you to Franklin and his men these were things like pocket watches tobacco cases flasks military insignia all these types of things are even cutlery and plates and some of them had the names of the person inscribed on the on the item and now obviously from Franklin and he's men and so Rhea questions the the the Inuits and they said that there was many dead white men on King William Island so at least now they had a clue where where to go and that some that the Inuit gave evidence to to Ray about what had happened and they said that they told him that on one occasion two Inuit hunters had come across ten or twelve white men the white men indicated that they were very hungry and the Inuit gave them some seal meat which they ripped apart in their hands and threw down their throats roar the white men started pointing to the the sled dogs of the Inuits and the universe became very concerned and frightened and worried about their dogs so they took off they ran away from these white men and you have to remember that this was a very very barren country there was nothing growing there there was hardly any food source and these Inuits were were just managing on the margins of survival themselves there was no way they couldn't survive without their their sled dogs so they had to run away and there was no way that even if they wanted to there was no way that they could provide enough food to feed these ten or twelve other men for any period of time the the Inuits also told gave them evidence to say that on some occasions they'd come across these white men and they'd been dismembered and some of their organs had been taken out and that they came across some other scenes where limits had been cut off and there was bones in cooking pots and it was assumed that they'd resorted to cannibalism now that was a very delicate matter and Ray actually did a report giving all the evidence of the Inuit said he'd come across and he sent that report back to England along with the the note that said that his countrymen had been driven to the last resource which was cannibalism and when that report was released in London it caused an absolute sensation lady Franklin was furious she threatened libel action against anyone who published the report any newspaper that would print it she would go after with legal action and she had the resources to do it she also petitioned the Admiralty and every and the government that Ray would not receive one penny of the reward money that was entitled to him because of the allegations that he made she couldn't believe for a second that her husband would have anything to do with cannibalism and he never did receive any money from that term from that reward now the next and and all the information that he'd sent back about the evidence the Inuit had given was largely ignored by the Admiralty I mean these were but savages and why would we believe anything that they had to say anyway they were they were robbing the the the bodies of these men but one man did read the report and that was a man by the name of Francis McClintock so he knew that there was something happening at King William Island so he went there in 1859 14 years after Franklin and had left England so this wasn't going to be a rescue mission anymore it was going to be a recovery mission or a mission of trying to find out what had happened and he uncovered he found a can of stones with a flag on top and he dug into that can of stones and he discovered in a metal box there was a note this note had been ripped out of a book that of novelty book and there was a note inscribed on it across there and the note was from from Franklin and it said 28th of May 1847 Her Majesty's ships Erebus and terror wented in the ice at latitude bah-bah-bah having wented at forty six seven @bg island in latitude de lara now this was a mistake by the way wasn't forty-six forty-seven it was 45 46 so why had he made a mistake having after having ascended Wellington channel to latitude 77 and returned by the west side of Cornwallis island and it was signed Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition and had finished with all well all well now the noted Clint Ock realized that that note had obviously been dug up again and more had been written on the note because around the outside of the of the letter that Franklin had written was another letter written by Crozier which was a lot more ominous it said 25th of April 1848 Her Majesty's ship terror in Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April five leagues north northwest of this having been beset since September 1846 the officers and crews consisting of a hundred and five Souls under the command of captain Crozier landed here in latitude dot Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June 1847 and the total loss by death in the expedition has been to this date nine officers and fifteen men and it was signed James Fitzgerald the Erebus and if M Crozier captain and senior officer and it ended with the note and start on tomorrow 26 for backs fish river so this gave a clue as what was happening first of all Franklin was dead he he died only two weeks after writing the original note and it also pointed out that they'd been stuck in the ice at this location for more than 18 months and that they were going to try for backs fish river the fall we go overland 500 miles to the backs fish river which was which was a huge endeavor McLintock also and his men also discovered one of the boats the lifeboats from one of the ships and once again this offered no clues what was happening it asked more questions that aren't answered the boat was pointing back towards where the ships had been so had the men been trying to to get back to the safety of these ships the other thing there was two skeletons within the boat and one was holding a rifle and you think that if you were going to drag one of these very very heavy boats all the way across the ice with you to try to survive you would only take the bare essentials necessary for your survival wouldn't you but in this boat they discover some very unusual items there was cakes of scented soap there was hair brushes there was slippers there was dozens of books there was 40 pounds of chocolate which proved beyond any doubt that there's no women on this expedition because that would be the first thing one would go and they even found brass curtain rods in the boat why and mean why had they dived as the died of starvation if there was 40 pounds of chocolate there as well it just didn't make any sense and as I said it asked more questions than it answered and these are some scenes that were printed out or painted by men back in now in London once or England once they heard these stories about what had happened and it seems from what we know now is that they were lost the ships were were grounded in the ice up here at the northern end of King William Island and that they tried to make their way around the the western part of the island remember that was all iced in so where you see the blue there there was no blue was all iced in so they were trying to pull these these boats all the way around and we know that by the fact that they found researchers of fair embodies all the way along that that route it would have been very very hard going you know a few years ago a group of experiment made 105 recruits from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were asked to be involved in this experiment these were all fit young men who hadn't been stuck on a ship with no exercise for three years they were nutritionally very very sound they wore the latest in lightweight Arctic wear and they were there's a YouTube video showing this actually it's very very interesting they were having a hearty breakfast all joking and laughing amongst themselves then they were put on a bus and taken out to where three boats were positioned and these were boats for the same size and the same weight as the boats that Crozier would have had to haul across the ice and they were put some of them are put into harnesses to pull it and some were put behind the boats to push them and they were told to set off and get as far as they could and initially they raced each other there was a lot of jokey and lara amongst the all the men as they tried to race each other across the ice and they came to some obstacles like some fissures in the ice and they had to try and haul these boats over and across these things and then at this time there was decided to be a few injuries and people were by shaking their fingers when they jam their fingers there was a few dislocated fingers someone broke their collarbone there were some scratches and things like that and then they were given a bit of lunch a very very quick lunch and then they were told to get on their way again and then five o'clock in the afternoon they were told to stop and get back on the bus and go back to their headquarters and there's the scene in this YouTube video where people went back and they were too tired to eat their meal there was people asleep on the floor and under the tables people slumped beside their meals unable to have the energy to eat and it was estimated that each one of them had used up an average of eleven thousand calories that day hauling these these boats across the ice now I exercise and I find it hard to burn 2,000 calories in a day let alone 11,000 calories and you know how far they got that day for miles only four miles Crozier and his men had to go 500 miles to find the nearest blade of grass they had to go a thousand miles to find any form of civilization they had absolutely no chance of survival and along the route that they would have had to take as I said there's there's many bodies that have been found over the years and some of these have been found in in single positions some of the men have been twos and threes and in some in more and in some cases they're lined up in in rows you know very neatly like they've been put into a tent and and someone said we'll come back for you when we get help and then some are just slumped all over the place and in some cases they have found our bodies with Nicks in the bones which was obviously from a knife when their bones had been fileted and they did find bones in in cooking pots and things so there certainly was some form of cannibalization by by some of the men and also a number of artifacts have been found by different people that tobacco tin a military a naval badge pocket watches and things that have been found along the way and even our China that was was taken there has been found along that that route and then in 1981 the scientists from the Canadian government given permission to resume the bodies of the three men that were found on Beechey Island and I'm going to put a bit a picture up here in a second which shows these dead men so if anyone's offended by that you'd need to look away but these were the meant the Torrington Hartnell and Billy brain and this is the way they were found now they're in very very good condition because they were frozen in the ice for all that time and when autopsies were done on these men they found extremely high levels of lead in their tissue now London was a very polluted city at that time but even this wouldn't account for the high levels of lead that was found so what had causes now also nearby they found the tins with the food was to be poured into for this expedition now the the teams were soldered with lead solder and it seemed that these men had suffered from lead poisoning and what had happened is that the company who had been given the contract to supply these 10 meals had never had anywhere near the size contract that this was was it was a massive contract form they had to supply 130 men with very hungry men with three meals a day for three years so it was a massive undertaking they were given the contract on April Fool's Day 1845 appropriately and they only had six weeks to fulfill the contract before Franklin was due to sail so they had to hire in a lot of people unskilled people to solder these teams and seal them and these men had no experience and basically the the the lead solder was painted on these cans there was lots of lead in this system and the the way that they would heat this food up would be to boil some water put the cans in the water and leave it there for five or ten minutes to heat the insides up and it said that when this happened the the lead actually melted like candle wax into the food and contaminated the food and that's why there was such high levels of lead and also the steam engine was using lead pipes throughout the the ship and they use some of that water in their daily diet and that also impacted on the amount of lead in their system now the amount of lead wasn't going to be something that was going to kill these men but it would really impact on their their mental capacity their thinking ability their rational thinking and so that's probably why some of these strange decisions had been made it also impact on their ability to fight other diseases often and and that could have had an impact as well one of the ships that went looking for Franklin and his men there'd been a few expeditions searching for his men and and then in the end in 1854 the Aral decided everybody decided to send their very best ship the HMS resolute it was going to go across with a FULFILLER of four other ships and search for Franklin and he men when they got there though the the resolute got stuck in the ice as did two of these other ships that have been sent across the captain of the resolute wasn't perturbed by this at all he sent out sledding parties to see if he could find any evidence of Franklin but he couldn't but one of the sledding parties came across another ship HMS investigator that had been trapped in the ice for two and a half years the men on that ship were on half rations and they were virtually starving so they're very very happy to see the men of the resolute they followed that the sledding party back to the resolute and then the captain of the other resolute wrote a report to his flotilla commander reporting what had happened saying that they were stuck in the ice but they'd rescued these men from the investigator the the commander a Commodore bellow was became very very concerned by this he he could see disaster happening and he didn't want his name involved with this pending disaster so he ordered the captain of the resolute to abandon the ship and travel overland back to where his two ships were and head back to England the resolute captain protested the order because he thought he'd be able to make it out in the when the the the ice thawed in the spring but the order was was confirmed and he made the ship as shipshape as he could and then he and his men started a very arduous trek across the ice to our the other two ships now eighteen months later in September 1855 the resolute was found by an American whaling vessel twelve hundred miles from where she'd been abandoned the American couldn't believe their luck this was a ship in very good condition there was no one on board they could try and claim the salvage rights which they did so they they sailed the ship back to Connecticut claiming the rights and then the United States Congress I decided to intervene the US had been at war with Great Britain twice in the previous eighty years and the the US the Congress wanted to do something to become friend create a better relationship with the United Kingdom so they purchase a vessel and renovated the vessel back it's original standard at the cost of 40 thousand US dollars which was a fortune at the time and then they they sailed it across the Atlantic and they presented it to Queen Victoria on the 13th of December 1856 and she came down to the ship herself to accept this wonderful gift from the American people and this was seen by most historians as the start of the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom now 25 years later when the resolute was decommissioned Queen Victoria ordered that her very very best Timbers be used to create a desk and this desk was presented to President Rutherford B Haynes in 1880 and of course is the resolute desk which has been in the Oval Office ever since it's been used by most presidents of the United States ever since it's a little bit of more history for you so bit more more recent news in September of 2014 researchers Canadian research has found the wreck of the Erebus exactly where the Inuit Indians had said it was and then almost two years to the day later they found the the wreck of the terror once again almost exactly where the Inuit Indians had said it was the that advice that they'd given that evidence that they given had been ignored for all those years now the Canadian government's doing lots of research onto these vessels it seems that from what they've found so far is that they became stuck in the ice at the northern end of King William Island and then they either broke free from the ice and drifted down to where they were discovered later on at these locations or they may be someone was able to sail them down to that location before becoming stuck again that we don't know but that's why the research is going on the Canadians have made it an area off-limits to anyone else and they're just doing that that research trying to find out what's what what happened now largely because of late Franklin who wanted to preserve the memory of her husband is a great hero there's been statues to him erected in his native Lincolnshire in Hobart in Tasmania in Franklin Square and in Hobart and of course in London and we visited the Franklin Memorial in London a few months ago and the inscription says to the great Arctic navigator and his brave companions who sacrificed their lives in completing the discovery of the Northwest Passage now a little poetic license and all that because of course Franklin didn't complete the discovery of the Northwest Passage that honor went to a Norwegian man who some of you might know Roald Amundsen who was famous for being the first person to reach the South Pole he didn't because he considered he didn't consider the South Pole his greatest achievement he considered his conquest of the Northwest Passage as his biggest achievement and he took three years from 1903 to Irbil to achieve it he didn't need to actually he could have done in two years he could have went it in the ice for one year but he stayed for another year on purpose and that first year when he was stuck in the ice he went off exploring and he came across a tribe of Inuit and the two parties started helping each other and over that course of that time our Mertzon learnt a great deal about survival in the arctic conditions from the inuit including the caribou fur that he's wearing here now scientists have done tests on this caribou and apparently each individual fiber of fur holds tiny pockets of air and their air being a great insulator the best insulator you can get so even though this is very very light it's very very warm and comfortable to wear at the time European explorers were wearing layer after layer after layer of clothing so they had cotton then they had wool then they had canvas and they had oil skins over the top of them so it was very very heavy to wear it was very uncomfortable I once it was wet it was very hard to get dry but this caribou fur was was fantastic and I macedon use it for his quest of the South Pole they also taught him how to handle dog sleds and to make the that the the sledding much more efficient if you take water into your ice water into your mouth and warm it up in your mouth and then spit it onto caribou fur and rub it along the rails or the the the rails of the sleds then that ice is up those sleds and makes them 30% more efficient across the ice and I'ma sinuhe's this all this information that he'd learnt from the the Inuit to conquer the South Pole on the December 14 1911 and even though he had set off way behind Scott he arrived at the South Pole more than a month before Scott and he's ill-fated expedition so ladies and gentlemen that's the story of the lost Franklin expedition I hope you've enjoyed that if you did I think you'll enjoy the next talk it's about the famous French naval officer and Explorer lar peru's who explored more of the Pacific in his one voyage of discovery to the Pacific then cook did during his three voyages so I hope you come along to that and people have also asked us how to keep in contact with us after the the cruise is finished our Facebook page is retired afloat if anyone wants to go on that and I keep in contact that way so ladies Adam thank you very much it's been a pleasure see you next time

Channel: Geoff Peters

Views: 130,209

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Id: actGIgjpHdQ

Length: 52min 32sec (3152 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2019