Francis Leopold McClintock

Portrait of McClintock, 1856

Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, 1875

Sir Francis Leopold McClintock (born July 8, 1819 in Dundalk , County Louth , Ireland , † November 17, 1907 in London ) was a British naval officer and Arctic explorer. He became known as the one who was able to partially clarify the fate of the missing Franklin expedition .

Life

McClintock began his career in the Royal Navy in 1831 as a volunteer . In 1848 he took part in a first expedition under James Clark Ross , the aim of which was to clarify the fate of the Franklin expedition, which had been unknown since 1845. Although they found no trace of John Franklin's ships and men, they explored several hundred kilometers of hitherto unmapped coastline on Somerset Island on sled tours .

His experience with sledges would be very useful to him later. In general, the use of sledges in ship-based Arctic expeditions had been a rather seldom used option until then, and it probably took someone like McClintock, who designed an entire system for sled expeditions and developed it in practice, to convince the conservative high naval officials of the necessity and to convince the chances that were offered by the addition of sleds to the expedition ships.

McClintock's system took advantage of the large number of crew members on the ships and consisted of several sled teams of 6 to 8 men each, led by an officer, who pulled a sled together. There was always a vanguard who deposited supplies and scouted the area for suitable places for accommodation, the main team, as well as a support team who helped the main team up to half of the way with the transport of heavy loads such as provisions and tents.

During his next search expedition to Franklin under Horatio Thomas Austin , McClintock was then used as the commanding officer for the sled tours, and explored several hundred kilometers in the area around Melville Island with over 20 sled teams of 6-8 men each . For his services he was promoted to commander on his return , and was given command of the HMS Intrepid , which took part in another search expedition in the Melville area under the general direction of Edward Belcher and the immediate control of Henry Kellett . McClintock was again responsible for the organization of the sled teams, and his men achieved (in addition to the rescue of the HMS Investigator under Robert McClure who was trapped in the ice ) a new long-distance record for sled tours, over 1900 km. After the Intrepid and Kellett's ships, HMS Resolute , as well as Belcher's HMS Assistance and HMS Pioneer, got stuck in the ice in 1854 , Belcher gave the order to abandon the ships. The crews of all ships were then picked up by the expedition's supply ship, the HMS North Star , and the ships HMS Phoenix and HMS Talbot requested for this , and brought back to England. Here McClintock was promoted to captain .

In the same year the disturbing reports came in from John Raes , who had been living with the Inuit in the area around King William Island for a long time on a scouting tour of the Hudson's Bay Company , and who had collected their stories of white men and ships. Rae's results suggested that Franklin's men had made a desperate attempt to sledge south to safety, that all the men had gradually died, and that it had come to an extreme, cannibalism . The Royal Navy then pronounced Franklin dead and stopped sending further expeditions, but Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Griffin , could not let go of these tremendous accusations at the time, and raised money for another expedition to clarify the fate of her husband. For this expedition she hired McClintock as a consultant and finally as the captain of her ship Fox , a small steam yacht with a crew of 26.

The message found in the pile of stones on King William Island

The Fox sailed from Aberdeen harbor on July 2, 1857, and set out for Baffin Bay . Here she was surrounded by the drifting pack ice and spent the winter like that. After the onset of spring he reached Bellot Street near Somerset , where he spent the next winter. In 1859 he finally penetrated south to King William Island with sleigh rides, in which he had his small crew supplemented by sled dogs . Here he found the final clues that documented Franklin's fate - a boat converted into a sled with two bodies on board, as well as two messages in a stone man on paper from a common admiralty report. These said that Franklin first spent one winter on Beechey Island and then two winters surrounded by ice off the northwest of King William Island. Franklin himself died there on June 11, 1847, and his crew, under the leadership of the two most senior officers Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, attempted to advance south along the Back River , where they came across a settlement of the Hudson's Bay Company hoped All the men were probably killed in this undertaking, as the dinghy as the final resting place of two expedition members documented. On his sleigh rides, he was also the second after James Clark Ross to reach the magnetic north pole and documented its exact location at the time.

McClintock returned in September 1859 to England, where he obtained for his discoveries and investigations several honors and awards, including the accolade . His subsequent career in the Royal Navy went perfectly, and he was in 1871 for Rear Admiral , 1877 Vice Admiral , and finally honorary one day before his separation from service on July 7, 1884 for Admiral promoted. Throughout his entire service he remained committed to exploring the Arctic, was a member of the Royal Geographical Society , and campaigned for the renewal of the sled system that he had designed himself and that has now become the standard.

According to him, are Mount McClintock and McClintock Bastion in Antarctica and the McClintock Channel and McClintock Island in the Arctic named.

Works

• The Voyage of the "Fox" in Arctic Seas. A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and his Companions . John Murray, London 1859 (German edition: The journey of the "Fox" in the Arctic Sea: A report from the expedition to clarify the fate of Sir John Franklin and his companions , Marixverlag, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 3-86539-814-6 )

literature

• Barbara Bauer: "Difficulties [...] of no ordinary nature": Francis Leopold McClintock and the further development of sled technology on Arctic expeditions from 1848. In: Wissenschaft ist jung, Vol. 10, 2010, pp. 102–115.

Web links

Commons : Francis Leopold McClintock  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Francis Leopold McClintock in the catalog of the German National Library
• Francis Leopold McClintock . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).