One of the more unusual items of cutlery recovered from the Franklin Expedition is Cornelius Hickey's 'table knife’. Petty Officer Cornelius Hickey was the Caulker’s Mate on HMS Terror. He was born in 1826 in Limerick so was twenty four when the Franklin Expedition sailed and twenty seven when HMS Terror was abandoned off King William Island.
He was clearly the owner of a knife now on display at the National Maritime Museum collection, which can be seen at http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/object.cfm?ID=AAA2047, where it is described as “a bone-handled table knife inscribed with initials of Cornelius Hickey.” The accession record goes on to say “the maker's name on the blade is 'Millikin 301 Strand London”. The bone handle is carved with the initials 'C.H.' on one side and 'HICKEY’ on the other side.
But all is not what it seems with Mr. Hickey's knife. The firm of Millikin was a manufacturer of surgical equipment and it seems that Millikin supplied the surgical equipment for at least one of the surgeons on the Expedition. A metal tourniquet by Millikin was recovered by the Schwatka search expedition from near Ross' Cairn on King William Island in 1879 and is now in the National Maritime Museum collection as well. It can be seen at http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/object.cfm?ID=AAA2246. A Medicine Chest was also found (http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/object.cfm?ID=AAA22240) near this spot.
This knife was not a table knife at all but a surgical blade which William Hickey re-handled in bone. When did Hickey acquire this blade and convert it into a table knife? Obviously we don't know. It is generally accepted that officers' silverware was distributed to the sailors at the time of the abandonment of the ships, and the fact that one surgeon's equipment supplied by Millikin seems to have been abandoned at Point Victory at that time would suggest that this was when Hickey acquired this knife. We can guess why, though. On board ship sailors ate cooked food, often boiled, so the necessity for a sharp knife for eating was limited. Ashore, though, a sharp eating knife would be very necessary. It would be interesting to have an expert examine the bone from which the handle was carved. Was it made from the bone of a British domestic animal – cow, sheep or pig – or from an animal native to King William Island – seal, for example?
The National Maritime Museum website says that the knife “was obtained from the Inuit at Repulse Bay in 1854 by the Rae Expedition. The Inuit said they had found the material at a camp to the north west of the mouth of the Back River where a party of Europeans had died of starvation”. That implies that Cornelius Hickey may have been one of the last survivors of the Expedition to die at Starvation Cove. There is a final, ghoulish, possibility which integrated global scientific analysis might be able to examine. We know from the work of Owen Beattie and his team that cut marks consistent with butchery using metal knives have been found on the bones of members of the Franklin Expedition. As far as I know, no attempt has been made to match these cut marks with any of the blades recovered from the Franklin Expedition. This is a long shot, but would anyone dare try to match the profile of this blade to any of these cut-marks?
Sunday, 3 May 2009
A Plea for information on Franklin Expedition cutlery
The silver cutlery of the Franklin Expedition is famous but, as Russell Potter pointed out on his blog (http://visionsnorth.blogspot.com/2009/05/tale-of-spoons-and-forks.html), much more information could be derived from it about the Franklin Expedition if it could be collated and properly analysed. Russell has already sent me some new (to me) information, which is great.
I have tried to construct a database of information on this cutlery, which at the moment is mainly restricted to cutlery held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich or the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Although not complete, it suggests what a comprehensive database might tell us. Cutlery belonging to at least fifteen officers has been recovered: Couch, Crozier, Fairholme, Franklin, Goodsir, Gore, Hodgson, Hornby, Irving, Le Vesconte, Macbean, MacDonald, Peddie, Sargent and Stanley. Some of these definitely have scratches on them which look like the initials of seamen. The suggestion is that this cutlery was issued to the seamen at the time the ships were abandoned in April, 1848. If that is correct, the cutlery distributed is most likely to have been that of officers who had died prior to the abandonment of the ships. We know from the Victory Point note that Franklin had died before then and the fact that, of the sixteen pieces of Franklin’s cutlery in my database, no less than five definitely have seamen’s initials on them, supports this thesis. The only other officer who we know had died before then was Graham Gore, and I have two pieces of his cutlery in my database, but I do not know whether they have been examined for initials. Lt. Fairholme is the only officer other than Franklin whose cutlery definitely has a seaman’s initials (CH = Cornelius Hickey) scratched on it. This suggests that Fairholme might have been one of the seven un-named officers who had died before the ships were abandoned.
Conversely, the scratches on officers’ cutlery may help us identify some of the sailors who were alive when the ships were abandoned. My (incomplete) database suggests that Cornelius Hickey, either Thomas Terry or Thomas Tadman, William Closson, William Rhodes and/or William Wentzel were alive at that point. Additionally, a desert spoon of Franklin in the National Maritime Museum collection, AAA2486, is said to have the initial ‘IW’ scratched on it. There was no-one with those initials, although if it was a ‘JW’ or ‘TW’, it could refer to James Walker, Thomas Work, John Weekes, John Wilson or Thomas Watson.
More information could undoubtedly be gleaned from a comprehensive database of cutlery. Russell Potter has pointed out that there may be a significant pattern in the distribution of where this cutlery was found. If we can identify the ‘final’ owners of some of these pieces, and associate them with sites where we know men died, we may be able to establish to some extent who died where.
If a comprehensive database of all the cutlery recovered existed, and if each item could be examined under the microscope with care for initials or other marks, we might be able to learn a lot more from it. I have seen Franklin cutlery on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and also at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge which plainly appears to have initials scratched on it. Yet as far as I am aware these have never properly been examined for initials, and if they have, the findings definitely have not been documented.
What is really needed now is a global search of public and private collections so that this information can be logged in a single, comprehensive and accurate database. I do not have any information from the Manitoba Museum, the US Armed Forces History Museum, nor any private collections. Could I ask anyone at these Museums, and anyone who has any information on any Franklin Expedition cutlery to email it to me using this blog? I will then add this to my database and maintain it as a public resource on my blog (once I have worked out how to do that!)
I have tried to construct a database of information on this cutlery, which at the moment is mainly restricted to cutlery held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich or the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Although not complete, it suggests what a comprehensive database might tell us. Cutlery belonging to at least fifteen officers has been recovered: Couch, Crozier, Fairholme, Franklin, Goodsir, Gore, Hodgson, Hornby, Irving, Le Vesconte, Macbean, MacDonald, Peddie, Sargent and Stanley. Some of these definitely have scratches on them which look like the initials of seamen. The suggestion is that this cutlery was issued to the seamen at the time the ships were abandoned in April, 1848. If that is correct, the cutlery distributed is most likely to have been that of officers who had died prior to the abandonment of the ships. We know from the Victory Point note that Franklin had died before then and the fact that, of the sixteen pieces of Franklin’s cutlery in my database, no less than five definitely have seamen’s initials on them, supports this thesis. The only other officer who we know had died before then was Graham Gore, and I have two pieces of his cutlery in my database, but I do not know whether they have been examined for initials. Lt. Fairholme is the only officer other than Franklin whose cutlery definitely has a seaman’s initials (CH = Cornelius Hickey) scratched on it. This suggests that Fairholme might have been one of the seven un-named officers who had died before the ships were abandoned.
Conversely, the scratches on officers’ cutlery may help us identify some of the sailors who were alive when the ships were abandoned. My (incomplete) database suggests that Cornelius Hickey, either Thomas Terry or Thomas Tadman, William Closson, William Rhodes and/or William Wentzel were alive at that point. Additionally, a desert spoon of Franklin in the National Maritime Museum collection, AAA2486, is said to have the initial ‘IW’ scratched on it. There was no-one with those initials, although if it was a ‘JW’ or ‘TW’, it could refer to James Walker, Thomas Work, John Weekes, John Wilson or Thomas Watson.
More information could undoubtedly be gleaned from a comprehensive database of cutlery. Russell Potter has pointed out that there may be a significant pattern in the distribution of where this cutlery was found. If we can identify the ‘final’ owners of some of these pieces, and associate them with sites where we know men died, we may be able to establish to some extent who died where.
If a comprehensive database of all the cutlery recovered existed, and if each item could be examined under the microscope with care for initials or other marks, we might be able to learn a lot more from it. I have seen Franklin cutlery on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and also at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge which plainly appears to have initials scratched on it. Yet as far as I am aware these have never properly been examined for initials, and if they have, the findings definitely have not been documented.
What is really needed now is a global search of public and private collections so that this information can be logged in a single, comprehensive and accurate database. I do not have any information from the Manitoba Museum, the US Armed Forces History Museum, nor any private collections. Could I ask anyone at these Museums, and anyone who has any information on any Franklin Expedition cutlery to email it to me using this blog? I will then add this to my database and maintain it as a public resource on my blog (once I have worked out how to do that!)
Friday, 10 April 2009
Is the conventional interpretation of the ‘Victory Point’ note wrong?
The Franklin Expedition was last seen on either 29th or 31st July, 1845, when the tips of their ships’ masts were visible to Captain Martin of the whaler ‘Enterprise’ in the eastern reaches of Baffin Bay. Martin’s position then was 75 12' N, 61 6' W. From the Victory Point note we know they became beset off King William Island on 12th September, 1846, and from the graves at Beechey Island we know they over-wintered there in 1845-1846. Almost the only other significant information we have about what happened between these dates is given in this extract from the Victory Point note, and its duplicate also left on King William Island:
“HM Ships Erebus and Terror 28 of May 1847 Wintered in the Ice in Lat 70 5 N. Long 98 23 W Having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in Lat 74 43 28 N. Long. 91 39 15 W after having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat. 77. and returned by the West side of Cornwallis Island.”
This has always been read to mean that in the summer and autumn of 1845 the Expedition sailed past Beechey Island, up Wellington Channel to 77N, and then back south and east via the west side of Cornwallis Island to overwinter 1845-6 back at Beechey Island. (From the graves there we know the ‘wintering’ there took place in 1845-6 and not 1846-7). Then in spring / summer 1846 it left Beechey Island and sailed west and then south towards the North American coastline before becoming beset. But this depends on whether we think Fitzjames intended “having wintered ...at Beechey Island” to be a subjunctive clause or the start of a second sentence. The conventional interpretation
“HM Ships Erebus and Terror 28 of May 1847 Wintered in the Ice in Lat 70 5 N. Long 98 23 W. Having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in Lat 74 43 28 N. Long. 91 39 15 W after having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat. 77. and returned by the West side of Cornwallis Island.”
could equally read:
“HM Ships Erebus and Terror 28 of May 1847 Wintered in the Ice in Lat 70 5 N. Long 98 23 W, having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in Lat 74 43 28 N. Long. 91 39 15 W, after having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat. 77. and returned by the West side of Cornwallis Island.”
As far as I can tell from textual examination, either is possible. Which is more likely?
I make the distance from Martin’s position in Baffin Bay to the 77N position north of Cornwallis Island, then back to Beechey Island by the west of Cornwallis Island, to be about 850 nautical miles. If they made this voyage in 1845, the Expedition would have had to maintain an average speed of c.0.4 knots over the whole journey, or almost 750 metres per hour, 24 hours a day, even without stopping to take magnetic observations. By contrast their 1846 voyage, from Beechey Island to the position they became beset off King William Island, a distance of about 320 nautical miles, would only have required an average speed of 0.1 knots, or under 200 metres per hour.
But if in 1845 they only sailed from Martin’s position as far as Beechey Island, a distance of 440 nautical miles, their average speed would only have needed to have been c.0.2 knots, or 370 metres per hour. Then in 1846 they would have had to have sailed from Beechey Island north to 77N, then turned back and sailed south by the west of Cornwallis Island to the point where they became beset, which is a distance of just over 700 nautical miles. That would have required an average speed of c0.3 knots, or about 550 metres per hour. The conventional interpretation suggests they made an extremely fast voyage in 1845 and a very slow one in 1846. The alternative interpretation permits more consistency in their progress. There are a couple of logical arguments which suggest that the ‘alternative’ explanation may have some merit.
· Sherard Osborn made an interesting comment about the assumed magnetic observatory at Cape Riley, which was close to their Beechey Island anchorage. The expedition was charged with taking very detailed magnetic observations on certain specific dates, which were called Term Dates. The idea was that on Term Dates, every magnetic observatory around the world would take readings at exactly the same time. Later, when all the readings could be analysed together, they would make possible retrospective global analysis of fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetism. The Term Date after the Expedition left Disko Island was 29th August, 1845. Osborne suggested the Expedition was very likely to have been at Cape Riley on 29th August, 1845, and if so there would have been very little time afterwards to make the long voyage to 77 degrees North and then back to Beechey Island before winter set in.
· If the Expedition returned to Beechey Island in 1845 after ascended Wellington Channel to 77 degrees north, why did it do so by the west side of Cornwallis Island? This makes no sense when Beechey Island lay to the south and east of their position. Also, their maps did not show Cornwallis Island to be an island, so how could they have known that an unexplored channel to its south and west would lead them back where they wanted to go? But this route would makes sense if they made the ascent to 77N in 1846, as it would have allowed a much more direct route south to Peel Sound. There would have been time in 1845-6 for parties to have surveyed the area, and Peel Strait and the west of Cornwallis Island both lie within 100 nautical miles of Beechey Island. We know there were traces of sledging expeditions sent out from the Erebus and Terror in the snow and ice on the land around Beechey Island, but trails along the sea ice would not have survived.
The truth is that we don’t know which of these interpretations of the Victory Point note is correct, and we never will unless further written evidence comes to light. The only facts we know about what happened after the ships left Captain Dannet is that they overwintered 1845-6 at Beechey Island, became beset off King William Island on 12th September 1846 and before doing so attempted the North West Passage firstly to the north and then secondly to the south.
Monday, 23 March 2009
The graves on Beechey Island
While we all hope that one day more written material will emerge from all the archaeological research into the Franklin Expedition, can we learn any more from what has already been found? Amongst the most poignant memorials of the Franklin Expedition are the graves of the three crewmembers who died on Beechey Island in 1846 during the first winter of the Expedition. While Dr. Owen Beattie and his team members have carried out a great deal of invaluable pathological research into the remains of the three men, little attention has been paid to the possible meanings of the inscriptions on the graves themselves. Each had an inscribed wooden headboard with the following inscriptions:
- “Sacred to the memory of John Torrington, who departed this life January 1st, A.D.1846, on board of HM ship Terror, aged 20 years”
- “Sacred to the memory of John Hartnell, AB, of HMS Erebus, died January 4th, 1846, aged twenty-five years. “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways.” Haggai, I, 7”
- “Sacred to the memory of William Braine, RM of HMS Erebus, died April 3rd, 1846, aged thirty-two years. “Choose ye this day whom you will serve”, Joshua xxiv, 15”
The choice of texts for the second and third deaths puzzled observers and still does today. And why had John Torrington not earned a text on his grave? Some commentators have said that these are forbidding inscriptions – ‘consider your ways!’ and ‘choose.. whom you will serve?’ It has been suggested they might signify dissent or even mutiny on the Expedition.
Why does John Torrington not have a Biblical quotation? This surely is because of the different characters of the two Captains, Crozier and Franklin. While Crozier was a conventional Anglican, Franklin had a real sense of Christian mission. John Torrington died aboard HMS Terror so Captain Crozier would have taken his funeral service and presumably chose not to put a text on the grave. The other two men were from HMS Erebus where Sir John Franklin was Captain. Franklin took his duties as spiritual leader very seriously. We know he held a Church service every Sunday and we even know what some of these services were like. Franklin took the first service of the Expedition on Sunday 18th May, 1845. After it Lieutenant Couch described him as ‘quite a Bishop. … Gives sermons out of his sermon books, and I can assure you add a great deal himself. They say they would sooner hear him than half the parsons of England’. Fitzjames wrote of the same service: ‘I like a man who is in earnest... Every one was struck with his extreme earnestness of manner, evidently proceeding from real conviction’. Fairholme said that Franklin had ‘the most beautiful and impressive manner I ever heard, even in a clergyman’ adding that ‘the service here is very different from in most ships’. On Sunday, 25thMay, 1845, when Franklin took the second service of the Expedition, he preached his sermon on 1 Kings xvii 16th verse: ‘and the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord’. He drew a straightforward message for the crew from the Old Testament text he selected - that the Expedition was well supplied with provisions and, provided they retained their faith, they would achieve their goal and come to no harm. Sergeant Daniel Bryant, Royal Marines, said that ‘Sir John called the ship’s company’s attention to that part of the sermon: and the whole of the ship’s company were very much pleased with Sir John’s appropriate text, and united in this point of view with Sir John, to accomplish our object which we have in view’. Franklin also held a second, more informal, service in his cabin every Sunday evening and Sergeant Bryant was so impressed with the ‘cruse of oil’ sermon that he said he would attend the evening sermon too, writing that ‘I shall always go as long as I am able. I could remain for hours to hear him.’ Both ships were fitted with barrel organs which could play ten psalm or hymn tunes, so these services had a musical accompaniment.
The Funerals of these men would have been important occasions and Franklin would have put in a lot of thought into the address he would preach at each. The text on the headboards must surely reflect his address. It would be strange to preach a sermon on one text and then inscribe a completely different one, and an obscure one, on the headboard. Can we draw any inferences from these texts which might inform us about what Franklin was trying to tell his men in these funeral addresses?
Hartnell’s text comes from the Book of Haggai. This was an exhortation by the prophet Haggai to the people of Israel to rebuild the second Temple at Jerusalem after the end of the Babylonian Captivity. Analysis of it enables us to suggest how Franklin might have seen Hartnell’s death and the lessons he might draw for the Expedition. Haggai is one of the shortest Books in the Bible and only a Biblical expert like Franklin could preach from it. In the Book the Prophet Haggai speaks three times to the Jews. Haggai’s first prophecy was made because the Jews had not rebuilt build the Temple in Jerusalem, concentrating instead on rebuilding their houses. God was angry and as a consequence the Jews were suffering from bad weather (Haggai 1:10), not enough to eat or drink and, apparently, inflation. God spoke through Haggai and asked the Jews to reconsider their priorities. This was the passage Franklin selected for John Hartnell’s grave: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Consider your ways”. The second prophecy of Haggai was prompted because the Jews responded that the Temple they would rebuild would not be as magnificent as the first Temple which had been built by King Solomon. God explained through the Prophet that if they did their best, He would ensure that whatever they did would become better than the old Temple, even if they could not understand why. This was taken to relate to the fact that Jesus would in time come to the new Temple and in this sense it would be more magnificent than King Solomon’s Temple. Hartnell was a junior member of the Expedition, so this choice of text could be used to show that his contribution should be valued as much as any other member of the Expedition. To the Expedition Franklin was saying that his crews were working hard and were well provided for in material ways and that if they ‘built the Temple’ with him, God would approve of them and grant them further help, but in ways which they could not necessarily understand. This message would have appealed especially to Franklin since, as a Freemason, he may well have taken the Masonic understanding of and relationship with the Temple very seriously. We can well imagine that a preacher with Franklin’s powers of oratory would deliver a surprising, challenging, moving and ultimately uplifting sermon on this text.
William Braine died three months later. He was a Royal Marine Private on HMS Erebus. Like John Hartnell, he received a carefully selected Biblical quotation on his tombstone. Again, it has been seen as forbidding. This is misconceived. In fact the quotation has an optimistic and even triumphalist message for the crew. But it also suggests that there had been a massive change in Franklin’s view of his own future on the Expedition. Chapter 24 is the last chapter of the Book of Joshua in which, with God’s help, the people of Israel triumph. It starts with Joshua calling together the warriors from the two tribes of Reuben and Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh, who had come over the Jordan with him to help fight the Canaanites. Joshua commends them for their obedience to Moses, to him and to God. It may be significant that Joshua is addressing the fighting men of the Israelites and that William Braine was a soldier too, a Royal Marine.
Joshua then sends the people on their way, having recapitulated to them all the great things God has done for them since they chose to follow Him alone. It is difficult to see how Franklin could have resisted referring to God’s promise in Chapter 23, verse 4 that “I have allotted to you these nations that remain... even unto the Great Sea westward (toward the going down of the Sun).” Surely Franklin would have referred to this passage, identifying the ‘great sea westward’ with the Pacific Ocean? (Joshua of course was referring to the Mediterranean.) Joshua tells the people that they should stick to the Laws of Moses and the covenant with God, and that if they did they would be sacrosanct as God’s people, but that they must show this covenant with their lives. This is an optimistic message.
What is quite extraordinary is that Joshua was speaking to the people of Israel in the knowledge that his own death was close and that they would have to continue without him. In 23.14 Joshua says “this day I am going the way of all the earth, and you know in all your hearts, and in all your souls, that not one thing has failed of all the good things which Yahweh your God has spoken concerning you. All have come about for you. Not one thing has failed of them.” Franklin must have understand that Joshua, the original preacher of this text, was dying and knew he was; and nor could his congregation have missed this implication. We know that in fact Franklin actually died a little over a year later, on 11th June 1847. Joshua was giving the people precise instructions to keep to the right ways and the rightful worship of God, and challenging them to affirm that they would, after he died. It was from precisely this passage that Franklin took the text inscribed on Braine’s grave:
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord”.
Was Franklin asking the same thing of his men in this address?
In the Book of Joshua, the people chose the side of righteousness and rejected the false Gods, so Joshua finalised a covenant with them to confirm that. The Book closes with an account of the great covenant ceremony at Shechem, where Joshua had already written the words of the covenant on stones (8.32). Shechem was the place Moses had declared a covenant ceremony should take place on entering the land (Deuteronomy 27.2-8). It was there that Joshua finalised the covenant with the people that they will do their duty, at which point he died. Did Franklin draw a parallel between Beechey Island, where the Expedition had ‘entered the land’, and the Biblical Shechem, especially if Franklin knew that he was not going to survive much longer? Were these two graves – three including John Torrington’s –Franklin’s “altar in accordance with Exodus” 20.24-25 and “sanctuary there in response to God’s revelation” (Deuteronomy 27.5)?
The difference between the two texts is striking: the first is optimistic but the second may imply that Sir John Franklin’s health had broken during the hard winter of 1845-6. The address might be an acknowledgment that he was dying but a message that his men could still succeed after his death if they stuck to their ‘Covenant’? Of course this is speculation, and without more evidence we will never know whether this is the meaning Franklin attributed to these texts. But the analysis is intriguing and does at least suggest that the view that they imply any dissent on the Expedition at this stage is wide of the mark.
Sunday, 22 February 2009
What is 'Hidden Tracks'?
'Hidden Tracks: the Secrets of James Fitzjames and the Franklin Expedition' is the book I've just completed. (Actually I'm obsessively editing and re-editing the manuscript, but that's another story). 'Hidden Tracks' is the first complete biography of Commander James Fitzjames, the third-in-command of the Franklin Expedition.
Why did I write it? Well, first of all he was an amazing guy. He was a true hero and his life story reads like a real-life Hornblower novel. He was also very lively and great company. He had a wicked sense of humour and some of the jokes he carried out are still very funny today. He was charismatic and he mixed in the highest echelons of British society of the time. He was only actually thirty two when he joined the Franklin Expedition but he'd already packed more into those thirty two years than most people do in a lifetime. He entered the Royal Navy just after his twelfth birthday and within six months had done his first double Atlantic crossing. That's about how old I was when I first crossed the Atlantic, but I did it in a Boeing 720, not a wind-jammer. He was one of four Royal Naval officers on the now almost forgotten Chesney Expedition. This was led by a British army Colonel called Chesney and it sailed two iron paddle-steamers down the River Euphrates and into the Persian Gulf. In 1835-6! Col. Chesney was a martinet straight out of central casting. One of Fitzjames' friends said the Colonel was 'a most determined man', which was certainly something of an understatement...
Fitzjames fought in two wars, one in Syria and the other in China. In the first war he did something so daring that an Egyptian General put a price on his head. In the second he was shot and nearly killed - firing rockets while street-fighting.
But everything was not what it seemed with James Fitzjames. He concealed several secrets, which is why I've called the book 'Hidden Tracks'. One of these was the scandal surrounding his birth. He concealed his true identity and would not even let anyone know his date of birth. Despite this, he made advantageous personal connections which he played with great skill to achieve promotion astonishing in the Victorian Royal Navy. He was appointed a full Captain at the age of only thirty three.
He had more secrets. He was only a thirty two year old Commander, but had far more influence at the Admiralty than you would have expected an officer of that relatively junior rank to have had. This is very apparent in the history of the Franklin Expedition, for example. But why? Well, there is a reason and it's tied up with another of those little secrets which Fitzjames was able to cover up. There is a third secret, too, which explains why he was so keen to join the Franklin Expedition, even though the position he accepted was actually a demotion for him. He had a plan, and the Franklin Expedition was only a part of it ...
We'll never know everything about James Fitzjames because of the way he covered his tracks, but 'Hidden Tracks' takes the evidence about as far as it can go. It will enable us for the first time to understand his true significance for the Franklin Expedition. It will put him in context and help us better understand some of the things which we know happened on the Franklin Expedition. And lastly we have a great portrait of a witty, amusing and brave man who does not deserve to be forgotten.
Actually I feel a little guilty teasing out the things Fitzjames took such care to hide, but I take solace from having got to know him a little. I'm sure he'd be delighted that he succeeded in pulling the wool over the world's eyes for more than one hundred and sixty years, and I think he would laugh it off over a pint of porter or a good bottle of claret. At least, I hope so.
Why did I write it? Well, first of all he was an amazing guy. He was a true hero and his life story reads like a real-life Hornblower novel. He was also very lively and great company. He had a wicked sense of humour and some of the jokes he carried out are still very funny today. He was charismatic and he mixed in the highest echelons of British society of the time. He was only actually thirty two when he joined the Franklin Expedition but he'd already packed more into those thirty two years than most people do in a lifetime. He entered the Royal Navy just after his twelfth birthday and within six months had done his first double Atlantic crossing. That's about how old I was when I first crossed the Atlantic, but I did it in a Boeing 720, not a wind-jammer. He was one of four Royal Naval officers on the now almost forgotten Chesney Expedition. This was led by a British army Colonel called Chesney and it sailed two iron paddle-steamers down the River Euphrates and into the Persian Gulf. In 1835-6! Col. Chesney was a martinet straight out of central casting. One of Fitzjames' friends said the Colonel was 'a most determined man', which was certainly something of an understatement...
Fitzjames fought in two wars, one in Syria and the other in China. In the first war he did something so daring that an Egyptian General put a price on his head. In the second he was shot and nearly killed - firing rockets while street-fighting.
But everything was not what it seemed with James Fitzjames. He concealed several secrets, which is why I've called the book 'Hidden Tracks'. One of these was the scandal surrounding his birth. He concealed his true identity and would not even let anyone know his date of birth. Despite this, he made advantageous personal connections which he played with great skill to achieve promotion astonishing in the Victorian Royal Navy. He was appointed a full Captain at the age of only thirty three.
He had more secrets. He was only a thirty two year old Commander, but had far more influence at the Admiralty than you would have expected an officer of that relatively junior rank to have had. This is very apparent in the history of the Franklin Expedition, for example. But why? Well, there is a reason and it's tied up with another of those little secrets which Fitzjames was able to cover up. There is a third secret, too, which explains why he was so keen to join the Franklin Expedition, even though the position he accepted was actually a demotion for him. He had a plan, and the Franklin Expedition was only a part of it ...
We'll never know everything about James Fitzjames because of the way he covered his tracks, but 'Hidden Tracks' takes the evidence about as far as it can go. It will enable us for the first time to understand his true significance for the Franklin Expedition. It will put him in context and help us better understand some of the things which we know happened on the Franklin Expedition. And lastly we have a great portrait of a witty, amusing and brave man who does not deserve to be forgotten.
Actually I feel a little guilty teasing out the things Fitzjames took such care to hide, but I take solace from having got to know him a little. I'm sure he'd be delighted that he succeeded in pulling the wool over the world's eyes for more than one hundred and sixty years, and I think he would laugh it off over a pint of porter or a good bottle of claret. At least, I hope so.
All about lead...
Primo Levy said that 'lead is the metal of death'. You can't read about the Franklin Expedition for very long without coming across lead. Why?
The Franklin Expedition is unique in modern(ish) British exploration history in that it was the only such Expedition to disappear totally. Two apparently-well equipped Royal Navy exploration vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, set out in 1845 with combined crews of 134, including their commander Sir John Franklin, to attempt to sail through the North West Passage. Five men were sent back from Greenland, after which the two ships and the 129 men remaining on them completely disappeared. Over the 160 plus years since then, quite a lot has been found out about what happened to them. The bodies of three members of the Expedition have been autopsied and some human remains have been found, accounting for about 20% of the men altogether. But the ships have still not been found and much remains mysterious.
It is the total loss of the entire Franklin Expedition, with so many people, that is so anomalous. After all, Scott's last expedition is rightly seen as a tragedy, yet most of the people on the Expedition came back safely - only the five members of the Polar party actually died.
Ever since it became clear that the Expedition was a total loss, people have been trying to find a unique explanation for this apparently unique event. The tinned food which the Expedition took with it was an early candidate for suspicion. The contractor who supplied it definitely supplied the Royal Navy with substandard tinned meat later, and he was an early scapegoat for blame by the authorities in 1850's Britain. In fact the substandard meat he produced was supplied five years after the Franklin Evidence sailed. There is no evidence that the tinned food he supplied the Franklin Expedition was in any way tainted and there's quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that there was nothing wrong with it.
In the last thirty years two new theories have been advanced to try to provide an explanation for the Franklin Expedition disaster which relate to this tinned food. The first is the theory advanced by Scott Cookman in his best-selling book 'Ice Blink' that the provisions were tainted with botulism, which would have progressively and randomly killed off many of the Expedition, crippling it and making their deaths in the Arctic inevitable. The problem with this theory is that tinned food, while not sold in the shops in 1845, was certainly in quite common use on expeditions and long voyages. For example, Colonel Chesney took tinned food on the Euphrates Expedition of 1835-1837, on which James Fitzjames served. Ross and Crozier took tinned food on the Erebus and the Terror, when they sailed to the Antarctic in 1839-1843. So if botulism was such a killer in tinned food, we should expect to find some evidence of it on other expeditions. But we don't.
The second theory related to the tin cans is the lead theory advanced by Owen Beattie and John Geiger and popularised in their book "Frozen in Time". This is based on some epic original research by Owen Beattie. He actually autopsied the bodies of the three Expedition members who died during the winter of 1845-1846 while the Erebus and the Terror were locked in to Beechey Island by the ice. The descriptions of how his team and he carried out this tremendous work is gripping, and everybody owes them a huge debt of thanks for this work. Their most remarkable finding was that all three men had very high levels of lead in their bones and in their soft tissues. It is difficult to come up with an explanation for this, other than that all three men had had a recent and sustained exposure to lead. Given that they had been on the ships for up to nine months, that means the source of this lead must have been on the ships. This very significant finding has been corroborated by analysis of the bone fragments of some Expedition survivors who died on King William Island several years later - certainly not before 1848. Their bones all show evidence of a similar sustained exposure to lead. Together, these individuals account for something like 20% of the entire Expedition, and definitely do not all come from one of the ships (two of the Beechey Island dead were from the Erebus and one from the Terror). So it looks like the men on both ships were exposed to dangerous levels of lead while on the Expedition.
At first sight, the idea that the lead came from the tins looks compelling. You can see lead solder on the remains of tins from the expedition today. It was only when I studied what Dr. K.T.H. Farrer had written about it that I began to have doubts about this theory. If you read his research, notably his paper "Lead and the Last Franklin Expedition" published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 20, No. 4. (July 1993), pp. 399-409, you can see that it does not appear to be possible for the men to have absorbed anything like the amount of lead seen by Owen Beattie, from the amount of tinned food they took on the expedition. So if it was the tinned food 'wot did it', both could not be correct: either the measurements of the lead in the bodies were wrong, or Dr. Farrer's findings were wrong. Yet they both seemd to make sense to me.
I read both men's research very carefully and puzzled over this for a long time. I decided I'd try to find out if there might be another, and much greater, source of lead on the ships which nobody else had thought of. I felt that whatever this source was, it had to be unique not just to these ships, but to these ships on this Expedition. Don't forget, the Erebus and the Terror only returned in 1843 from nearly four years exploring in the Antarctic. They took tinned food on that Expedition too, so on this basis tinned food fails the 'unique' test, as well as not containing enough lead. If the contemporary tinned food was so lethal, then surely we should hear of lead poisoning on the 1839-1843 Expedition? And we don't.
What I found is summarised in the paper I wrote: 'Identification of the Probable Source of the Lead Poisoning Observed in Members of the Franklin Expedition', which the Hakluyt Society kindly published in the online Journal of the Hakluyt Society in September 2008. I found that there was a pervasive source of potential lead on the Erebus and the Terror which was unique for this Expedition only. This 'uniqueness' means that for the first time we can fully accept the pathological evidence which Dr. Beattie presented in 'Frozen in Time' without needing to blame the tinned food. And what was this source? Well, I'd direct you to the paper so you can follow my argument and make up your own mind on what you think of the different probabilities.
Don't forget, there is no proof in all of this. Until someone finds the ships and tests their systems, it's all a question of probabilities based on the various pieces of research carried out so far.
The Franklin Expedition is unique in modern(ish) British exploration history in that it was the only such Expedition to disappear totally. Two apparently-well equipped Royal Navy exploration vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, set out in 1845 with combined crews of 134, including their commander Sir John Franklin, to attempt to sail through the North West Passage. Five men were sent back from Greenland, after which the two ships and the 129 men remaining on them completely disappeared. Over the 160 plus years since then, quite a lot has been found out about what happened to them. The bodies of three members of the Expedition have been autopsied and some human remains have been found, accounting for about 20% of the men altogether. But the ships have still not been found and much remains mysterious.
It is the total loss of the entire Franklin Expedition, with so many people, that is so anomalous. After all, Scott's last expedition is rightly seen as a tragedy, yet most of the people on the Expedition came back safely - only the five members of the Polar party actually died.
Ever since it became clear that the Expedition was a total loss, people have been trying to find a unique explanation for this apparently unique event. The tinned food which the Expedition took with it was an early candidate for suspicion. The contractor who supplied it definitely supplied the Royal Navy with substandard tinned meat later, and he was an early scapegoat for blame by the authorities in 1850's Britain. In fact the substandard meat he produced was supplied five years after the Franklin Evidence sailed. There is no evidence that the tinned food he supplied the Franklin Expedition was in any way tainted and there's quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that there was nothing wrong with it.
In the last thirty years two new theories have been advanced to try to provide an explanation for the Franklin Expedition disaster which relate to this tinned food. The first is the theory advanced by Scott Cookman in his best-selling book 'Ice Blink' that the provisions were tainted with botulism, which would have progressively and randomly killed off many of the Expedition, crippling it and making their deaths in the Arctic inevitable. The problem with this theory is that tinned food, while not sold in the shops in 1845, was certainly in quite common use on expeditions and long voyages. For example, Colonel Chesney took tinned food on the Euphrates Expedition of 1835-1837, on which James Fitzjames served. Ross and Crozier took tinned food on the Erebus and the Terror, when they sailed to the Antarctic in 1839-1843. So if botulism was such a killer in tinned food, we should expect to find some evidence of it on other expeditions. But we don't.
The second theory related to the tin cans is the lead theory advanced by Owen Beattie and John Geiger and popularised in their book "Frozen in Time". This is based on some epic original research by Owen Beattie. He actually autopsied the bodies of the three Expedition members who died during the winter of 1845-1846 while the Erebus and the Terror were locked in to Beechey Island by the ice. The descriptions of how his team and he carried out this tremendous work is gripping, and everybody owes them a huge debt of thanks for this work. Their most remarkable finding was that all three men had very high levels of lead in their bones and in their soft tissues. It is difficult to come up with an explanation for this, other than that all three men had had a recent and sustained exposure to lead. Given that they had been on the ships for up to nine months, that means the source of this lead must have been on the ships. This very significant finding has been corroborated by analysis of the bone fragments of some Expedition survivors who died on King William Island several years later - certainly not before 1848. Their bones all show evidence of a similar sustained exposure to lead. Together, these individuals account for something like 20% of the entire Expedition, and definitely do not all come from one of the ships (two of the Beechey Island dead were from the Erebus and one from the Terror). So it looks like the men on both ships were exposed to dangerous levels of lead while on the Expedition.
At first sight, the idea that the lead came from the tins looks compelling. You can see lead solder on the remains of tins from the expedition today. It was only when I studied what Dr. K.T.H. Farrer had written about it that I began to have doubts about this theory. If you read his research, notably his paper "Lead and the Last Franklin Expedition" published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 20, No. 4. (July 1993), pp. 399-409, you can see that it does not appear to be possible for the men to have absorbed anything like the amount of lead seen by Owen Beattie, from the amount of tinned food they took on the expedition. So if it was the tinned food 'wot did it', both could not be correct: either the measurements of the lead in the bodies were wrong, or Dr. Farrer's findings were wrong. Yet they both seemd to make sense to me.
I read both men's research very carefully and puzzled over this for a long time. I decided I'd try to find out if there might be another, and much greater, source of lead on the ships which nobody else had thought of. I felt that whatever this source was, it had to be unique not just to these ships, but to these ships on this Expedition. Don't forget, the Erebus and the Terror only returned in 1843 from nearly four years exploring in the Antarctic. They took tinned food on that Expedition too, so on this basis tinned food fails the 'unique' test, as well as not containing enough lead. If the contemporary tinned food was so lethal, then surely we should hear of lead poisoning on the 1839-1843 Expedition? And we don't.
What I found is summarised in the paper I wrote: 'Identification of the Probable Source of the Lead Poisoning Observed in Members of the Franklin Expedition', which the Hakluyt Society kindly published in the online Journal of the Hakluyt Society in September 2008. I found that there was a pervasive source of potential lead on the Erebus and the Terror which was unique for this Expedition only. This 'uniqueness' means that for the first time we can fully accept the pathological evidence which Dr. Beattie presented in 'Frozen in Time' without needing to blame the tinned food. And what was this source? Well, I'd direct you to the paper so you can follow my argument and make up your own mind on what you think of the different probabilities.
Don't forget, there is no proof in all of this. Until someone finds the ships and tests their systems, it's all a question of probabilities based on the various pieces of research carried out so far.
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