![]() An old Eskimo woman told McClintock of how the starving men fell down and died as they walked. The ships, still gripped by ice, were deserted on April 22, 1848, and the 105 survivors tried to head south across the North American mainland to the Back River, apparently resorting to cannibalism along the way. By April 1848, Franklin and 23 others had perished there. In September 1846 they became trapped in the ice in Victoria Strait, off King William Island (about midway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans). ![]() Returning southward along the western side of Cornwallis Island, they passed through Peel Sound and Franklin Strait. Having ascended the Wellington Channel, in the Queen Elizabeth Islands, to 77° N, the Erebus and the Terror wintered at Beechey Island (1845–46). Found were skeletons of the vessels’ crews and a written account of the expedition through April 25, 1848. Francis Leopold McClintock, reached King William Island, south and west of Lancaster Sound. For 12 years, various expeditions sought the explorers, but their fate was unknown until 1859, when a final search mission, sent in 1857 by Franklin’s second wife, Lady Jane Franklin, and headed by Capt. In 1847, when no word had been received, search parties were sent out. The vessels were last sighted by British whalers north of Baffin Island at the entrance to Lancaster Sound in late July. Knighted in 1829, Franklin served as governor of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, from 1836 to 1843.įranklin’s search for the Northwest Passage began on May 19, 1845, when he sailed from England with two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, carrying 128 officers and men. These efforts, which added new knowledge of about 1,200 miles (1,932 km) of the northwest rim of the North American coastline, were described in Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1825, 1826, and 1827 (1828). A second party followed the coast eastward from the Mackenzie to the Coppermine. On a second overland expedition to the same region (1825–27), Franklin led a party that explored the North American coast westward from the mouth of the Mackenzie River, in northwestern Canada, to Point Beechey, now in Alaska. After his return to England, he published Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819, 20, 21 and 22 (1823). David Buchan’s Arctic expedition of 1818, which sought to reach the North Pole.įrom 1819 to 1822 Franklin conducted an overland expedition from the western shore of Hudson Bay to the Arctic Ocean, and he surveyed part of the coast to the east of the Coppermine River in northwestern Canada. Franklin is also the subject of a biography by Sir John Richardson that was originally published in 1856 in the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.įranklin entered the Royal Navy at age 14, accompanied Matthew Flinders on his exploratory voyage to Australia (1801–03), and served in the Battles of Trafalgar (1805) and New Orleans (1815). Sir John Franklin, (born April 16, 1786, Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England-died June 11, 1847, near King William Island, British Arctic Islands ), English rear admiral and explorer who led an ill-fated expedition (1845) in search of the Northwest Passage, a Canadian Arctic waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
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