Beechey Island
| Beechey Island | ||
|---|---|---|
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| Waters | Arctic Ocean | |
| Archipelago | Queen Elizabeth Islands | |
| Geographical location | 74 ° 42 '37 " N , 91 ° 51' 25" W | |
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| length | 3.1 km | |
| width | 2.7 km | |
| surface | 4.6 km² | |
| Highest elevation | 198 m | |
| Residents | uninhabited | |
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Beechey Island is an island 75 kilometers east of Resolute Bay and is a relatively small, Devon Island immediately southwest and connected rocky mountains in the Canadian Arctic . It received special historical significance after Captain Erasmus Ommanney reached nearby Cape Riley on August 23, 1850 and shortly thereafter discovered remains of a winter camp and graves on Beechey, which turned out to be the first traces of the Franklin expedition , which had been missing since 1845 . In 1979 the Canadian government declared the island a historically significant place .
history
The island was discovered in 1819 on a polar expedition under Sir William Edward Parry , after whose first officer Frederick William Beechey it was named. Its location between Lancastersund and the Wellington Channel apparently made it suitable for Sir John Franklin to winter here with his ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror 1845-46. His expedition set up a winter camp here, which among other things consisted of a warehouse and a small forge, and also buried three crew members here:
- John Torrington, chief ship heater , 20 years old
- William Braine, Royal Marine , 32 years old
- John Hartnell, seaman , 25 years old
The original plaques on the graves were moved to the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Center in Yellowknife some time ago .
After Franklin's legacies were discovered on Beechey, the island became a kind of starting point and assembly point for the ships involved in the various Franklin searches. Supply ships waited for instructions in front of Beechey, and sled troops transmitted messages from here between ships that had penetrated deeper into the ice. Scouting ships came here for years, hoping to find some informative messages from Franklin on Beechey. On August 21, 1853, the supply ship HMS Breadalbane sank off Beechey.
In addition to the three graves of the dead of the Franklin expedition, there are two other grave sites on Beechey:
- Grave of the seaman Thomas Morgan, who was part of the crew of the HMS Investigator under the command of Robert McClure . McClure looked for the Franklin expedition from the Bering Strait from 1850 to 1854 , had to abandon his ship on the north coast of Banks Island and reached Beechey Island on foot, where Morgan died on May 22, 1854 (presumably of scurvy ) .
- a mock grave , presumably in memory of the French naval lieutenant Joseph-René Bellot , who was torn into the water by a gust of wind on August 18, 1853 and has disappeared.
The dead on Beechey Island were exhumed several times and reburied in the same place; New tombstones were placed next to the old tombstones, which also provide information about the cause of death, tuberculosis . The Canadian scientist Owen Beattie came up with the theory that the defective soldering of the tin cans led to a creeping lead poisoning of the entire expedition through the high lead values found in the men .
tourism
Today, Beechey Island continues to attract visitors (especially on cruise ships ) looking for traces of the history of the Northwest Passage on the island . Even diving down with special submarines to the Breadalbane , the wreck of which was preserved in astonishingly good condition by the icy, clear water of the Arctic, has been part of the tourist offer since 1999.
literature
- Nunavut Handbook . Iqaluit 2004 ISBN 0-9736754-0-3
- Owen Beattie, John Geiger: Frozen in Time. Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition . EP Dutton, New York 1987 ISBN 0-525-24685-1 (English)
- Übers. Uta Haas: The icy sleep. The fate of the Franklin expedition . R. Piper, Munich 1992 ISBN 3-492-22113-0 ; again Egmont, 1995
- Peter Milger: NordWestPassage. The short but deadly sea route to China or the company of adventurers . vgs, Cologne 1994 ISBN 3-8025-2295-8
- Ansgar Walk: North flight . Pendragon, Bielefeld 2000 ISBN 3-929096-95-1
- Jutta Zimmermann, Elizabeth Hale Winkler Eds .: Atlantic Islands in the Americas. Sites of Cultural Contact and Identity Formation. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2017 (with a contribution to Beechey Island)
