Franklin Expedition

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Sir John Franklin

The Franklin expedition was the third and final great expedition of the British polar explorer Sir John Franklin . Their goal was to sail through the Northwest Passage completely from east to west for the first time, to map it out and thus to find a shorter sea route from Europe to Asia. The expedition failed catastrophically; From 1845 to 1848 everyone involved died in the Canadian Arctic archipelago . The last traces of the expedition participants were only discovered many years later near King William Island . It was only in 2014 that the wreck of the HMS Erebus was found in Victoria Strait . The remains of the HMS Terror were discovered in 2016 south of King William Island, in Terror Bay .

The Franklin expedition and the fate of its participants, which remained in the dark for a long time, received a lot of public attention at the time. Newspapers achieved high circulations with reports and speculations about Franklin's fate and exploited the subject according to all the rules of modern mass media. The expedition itself, as well as Lady Jane Franklin's intensive efforts to save her husband by means of ever new search expeditions, preoccupied the British public for years to an unprecedented degree and are still met with great interest today.

Expedition preparations

Participants in the expedition

Routes of the Northwest Passage from today's perspective

The Franklin expedition, had the task to the national honor of sea power Britain finally after 300 years of fruitless attempts, the last unknown 500 km of centuries as an important sea route from Europe to Asia prestigious Northwest Passage to sail and map. When Sir James Clark Ross , originally intended to lead the expedition , a nephew of the famous explorer Sir John Ross and himself an important Antarctic explorer , did not accept this honorable task for personal reasons, the British Admiralty gave Sir John Franklin the command of the expedition with the two of them in 1845 Expedition ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror as well as the supply ship HMS Baretto Junior  - a not undisputed decision.

Franklin had made a name for himself for a long time when he explored significant parts of Canada's north coast in the 1830s and visited and mapped them partly by ship and partly on long hikes, but the expedition leader, who had not been in the Arctic for 17 years, was considered at 59 years old, many consider it too old and not agile enough for the difficult company. Neither he nor his officers - apart from the experienced Captain Francis Crozier , who had already served under William Edward Parry - had previously stayed in the region to be sailed. The Admiralty, however, relied on Franklin's experience and the skills of his officers, who are among the elite of the British Navy.

In total, the expedition included 133 participants, four of whom returned to Great Britain before the ships reached the polar sea. The remaining 129 men were killed.

Condition and equipment of the expedition ships

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in an illustration from 1870

The condition and equipment of the two expedition ships, Erebus and Terror , fully corresponded to the state of the art at the time. The basic construction of both ships was based on the warship type Bomb Vessel ( Bombarde ), an armored ship whose task it was to fire explosive charges with mortars at fortresses located on land, i.e. to bomb them. In order not to be endangered, this type of ship was also provided with special steel protection. Both ships had already participated in several successful expeditions to the Arctic and the Antarctic .

They had been reinforced for use in polar waters, including additional steel reinforcement on the bow and the hull flanks , which was intended to prevent the ships from being crushed by the pressure of the pack ice . In order to keep Erebus and Terror maneuverable in the drift ice even when there is calm or unfavorable wind direction , a steam engine weighing around 15 tons was installed in each of the ships , which drove a specially designed, two-meter-high propeller . The propeller and rudder were mounted in such a way that if they got stuck in the pack ice they could be removed and brought to safety. Was completed the equipment through a coal-powered hot water heating, and in the galleys were desalination plants installed for the production of drinking water from the sea.

Stock for three years

The supplies of provisions and heating fuel were designed to provide the ship's crews with full supplies for at least three years. Above all, the food was carefully selected and a certain luxury was even included; no polar expedition had ever been so generously endowed. In addition to the usual supplies, including newly developed tins of fresh meat and 4200 liters of lemon juice for vitamin C supply ( scurvy prophylaxis), several tons of tea, chocolate, alcohol (especially rum, schnapps and wine) and tobacco were purchased Taken board.

The officers were among other desks Mahogany and silverware, and to entertain the crew were on the Erebus about 1700 and on the terror around 1,200 books carried, including 200 Bibles and prayer books and a large number of textbooks for the teaching of illiterates among the sailors. A barrel organ with 50 melodies and various musical instruments, and a daguerreotype ™ apparatus (forerunner of the camera) supplemented the equipment, which was hardly thought about the Arctic capability. Of course, the most modern device for measuring magnetic fields and for navigating in the then imprecisely mapped waters was also taken with them. A noteworthy additional supply by hunting land or marine mammals , however, was not planned; The hunting weapons carried mainly consisted of shotguns for bird hunting in order to vary the menu.

Course of the expedition

Assumed route of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror during the Franklin Expedition 1845–48

First hibernation off Beechey Island

On May 19, 1845, Erebus and Terror as well as the supply ship HMS Baretto Junior with a total of 134 officers and men ran out to great public sympathy. The supply ship accompanied the expedition to the Davis Strait on the western coast of Greenland , where the last provisions, including the meat from the fresh slaughter of ten oxen, were finally reloaded onto Erebus and Terror . On July 12, the supply ship left the association to return to Great Britain with letters from the crew and five crew members who did not want to or could not continue the voyage. The letters from the crew show a great self-confidence and anticipation for the fame of discovery that was already within reach, as well as a strong confidence in Franklin's leadership; the men were confident that they would be able to finish the trip successfully in the first summer.

Beechey Island limestone cliffs

On July 26, the two ships anchored in front of an iceberg met the whaling boats Prince of Wales and Enterprise ; one visited each other. The expedition team also seemed highly motivated and confident to the captains of the two whalers. It was the last contact of the expedition members with the European outside world.

Erebus and Terror sailed on the west and crossed between Devonian and Cornwallis Island northward into the Wellingtonkanal which she claims to be up to the 77th latitude up sailing - probably studied the expedition members, from the then popular open polar sea influenced the passage in the Pacific first in the north. Towards the end of the short summer, however, the two ships headed south again past the west coast of Cornwallis Island, and wintered in 1845/46 (not 1846/47, as stated on the last paper found) off Beechey Island ( location ) immediately on the southwest corner of Devon Island.

Beechey Island was discovered on Parry's polar expedition in 1819 and was named after his first officer, Frederick William Beechey . Its location between Lancastersund and the Wellington Channel apparently made it suitable for Sir John Franklin to winter here with his two ships. The expedition members set up a winter camp, which consisted of a warehouse and a small forge, and buried three members of the crew here, whose bodies were recovered in 1983 in a well-preserved condition:

Second and third winter in the pack ice off King William Island

In the following summer of 1846, the ships set out to continue their voyage and penetrated south-west through Peelsund, which until then was only regarded as a bay, to King William Island , where, however, in September 1846, dense pack ice drifting from the McClintock Channel stopped any maneuvering .

The summer of 1847 then brought so little warming that the ice did not loosen and the ships remained frozen off King William Island. On June 11, 1847, Sir John Franklin died here of unknown cause (possibly from lead poisoning caused by soldering the tin cans, but this theory is controversial) - about 200 kilometers from the point on the Kent Peninsula where he was coming from the west the first Arctic expedition he led (1819-1822) had mapped.

After a third hibernation in the pack ice, the 105 members of the expedition who had remained alive at that time gave up their ships on April 22, 1848 and attempted under the leadership of the captain of the Terror , Francis Crozier , and the first officer in command of the Erebus after Franklin's death , James Fitzjames (1813 –1848/1849) desperate to walk to an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company about 350 km south on the Back River . In a stone monument at Victory Point in the north-west of King William Island they deposited a paper with few but essential information; so far it is the only first-hand written record of the fate of the expedition. Other legacies discovered during the expedition indicate that the crew, misjudging their strengths, tried to pull the heavy dinghies as sledges across the rough tundra, packed with provisions and various more or less useless objects. Little by little, hunger, cold, exhaustion and probably illnesses carried away all men. In the end there was even cannibalism , as Inuit reported years later. Forensic investigations from the 1980s confirm this: Corresponding cuts were found in the bones found.

The fact that the HMS Terror was discovered in 2016 south of King William Island, 96 km south of the areas searched for the wreck, suggests that at least some of the survivors tried to save themselves with the ship before they finally got there failed.

Searching for survivors in vain

Most extensive rescue operation of the 19th century

In 1847, the complete lack of news from the Admiralty raised doubts about the success of the Franklin expedition, but consolation was that James Clark Ross and his expedition had spent four winters in the Arctic a few years earlier and lost only three men . For Franklin's excellently equipped crew, the Admiralty believes that exposure to arctic conditions should hardly pose a problem.

The search ships HMS Plover and HMS Herald on the north coast of Alaska
Relics of a supply depot of the search expeditions on Beechey Island, a memory pyramid at the top right
The three graves on Beechey Island

Only in March 1848, the Admiralty finally decided to take the first steps to rescue the expedition, and offered a reward of 20,000 pounds sterling (in today's value is about 1.6 million pounds or 2 million euros) for finding and rescuing survivors out. In this context, the press made extensive use of new types of color report illustrations and thus provided the readership with realistic images of the alleged events surrounding Franklin's expedition; public interest was now aroused.

Initially, three search expeditions were sent out under the command of

After none of the three expeditionary corps had found any indication of the whereabouts of the Franklin expedition, a large number of further rescue expeditions with a total of 14 ships were arranged in 1850:

  • Richard Collinson and Robert McClure led two expeditionary forces operating from the west on the ships Enterprise and Investigator ;
  • Horatio Thomas Austin undertook the search with the Resolute and the Assistance as well as the steamships Pioneer and Intrepid as supply ships from the east;
  • William Penny , an experienced whaler, set out on the search with the two newly built clippers Lady Franklin and Sophia ;
  • Lady Franklin herself financed the departure of the schooner Prince Albert , under the command of Charles Forsyth, with her private fortune ;
  • the American shipowner Henry Grinnell sent two search ships, USS Advance and USS Rescue , under the direction of Edwin De Haven ;
  • Even John Ross contributed his private fortune and commanded the Felix yacht and the Mary supply tender himself .

On August 23, 1850, Austin's search team found the first clear traces of the Franklin expedition when Erasmus Ommanney crossed Beechey Island with the Assistance . On August 27, the Lady Franklin's crew discovered three seaman's graves and the remains of Franklin's first winter camp on this island, and soon all ships in the vicinity turned up here to look for clues in the relics. Apart from discarded material and the graves, nothing was found that could provide information about the further fate of the Franklin expedition. Forsyth then discovered some of the expedition's personal equipment elsewhere and returned to Great Britain with the Prince Albert .

When Penny decided that the station on Beechey Island had been an observation post from which Franklin might have been looking for a gap in the pack ice of the Wellington Canal in the spring of 1846, all search ships entered the channel north at the first opportunity . In particular, Horatio Austin's ships came into great distress several times and threatened to be crushed by the pressure of the ice or pressed against rocks. Finally, Austin, Ross, Penny and De Haven returned to their home ports in the fall of 1851 without having achieved anything. Only the two ships, Enterprise and Investigator , operating from the Bering Strait, were missing any news.

New expedition corps were immediately set up:

  • Under the command of Edward Belcher , the Resolute , the Assistance , the Intrepid and the Pioneer ran together with the supply ship North Star again in Baffin Bay. Henry Kellett took over command of a sub-squadron formed from the Resolute and the Intrepid , which was to investigate the islands further west from Beechey Island. Belcher himself undertook another search in the Wellington Canal.
  • Lady Franklin sent the Prince Albert again , this time under Captain William Kennedy . Together with the French polar explorer Joseph-René Bellot, he explored the area around Prince of Wales Island and Boothia on a sledge .
  • In 1852, under the command of Edward Inglefield, the steamboat Isabel ran out, which did not provide any new knowledge in the search for Franklin, but made an important contribution to the exploration of northwest Greenland.
  • Finally, in 1853, Grinnell sent his ship Advance again , this time under the direction of the medic Elisha Kent Kane .

The rescue teams themselves get into trouble

In September 1852 the crew of the Resolute found a message hidden in a pile of stones on Melville Island with information about the whereabouts of the long-missing investigator  - Robert McClure had reached Banks Island in 1850 and then wintered in the Prince of Wales Strait . In 1851 he had advanced into Banksstrasse , but the ice eventually forced him to hibernate in a bay he called “Bay of God's Mercy” in the north of Banks Island. In the following two summers, however, the ice in the mouth of the “Bay of God's Grace” did not break, while the sea in front of the bay became passable. For the crew weakened by scurvy , there was little hope of getting their ship free again. Then a sleigh troop of the Resolute arrived with them (1853), which caused McClure to abandon his ship and march with his crew about 230 kilometers eastward over the ice to the Resolute . In this way he completed the "Northwest Passage" and was rewarded for this achievement on his return with half of the prize money of 20,000 pounds sterling advertised by the British Admiralty for the discovery and crossing of the Northwest Passage.

Kellett's ships Resolute and Intrepid were also held back by the ice in 1854. Now McClure and Kellett decided together with Belcher, who had to give up his ships Assistance and Pioneer in the Wellington Canal and also caused Kellet to leave his ships in the ice, to set off with their crews for Beechey Island, which has now become the main base of all expeditions in search of Franklin was. There they were picked up by the North Star and the supply ships HMS Phoenix and HMS Talbot and brought back to Great Britain. HMS Breadalbane originally belonged to the association; However, in August 1853 it was no longer able to cope with the pressure of the pack ice and sank off Beechey Island.

The Enterprise , under the command of Richard Collinson, which had formed an association with the Investigator under McClure, remained trapped in the ice for three winters until Collinson and his crew managed to free the ship under their own steam and cross the Bering Strait in 1854 To bring security.

Belcher, who had ordered Kellett to abandon his ships, was acquitted by a military tribunal, but never again put on an expedition. The Resolute , which Kellett assumed would still be released from the ice, was found floating by an American whaling boat on September 16, 1855 in the Davis Strait, some 1,500 km east, and returned to the British government on December 13, 1855.

Inuit reports

Artifacts of the Franklin expedition traded in with the Inuit by John Rae

It was more or less by chance that the Scottish explorer John Rae discovered during his explorations of the Arctic coastal area on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company that some Inuit resident near King William Island were carrying various artifacts from the Franklin expedition. He began systematically to ask about ships and white men in the Inuit camps and to buy up artifacts. He was credibly told of white men who, desperate and hungry, dragged themselves south across the country and who had gradually died in the process. The reports also revealed a terrifying detail that the last survivors had practiced cannibalism . The Inuit also told of several graves, one of which was filled with around 30 corpses. Trusting his reporters, Rae refrained from visiting the graves in person, as this would have meant a very strenuous and dangerous hike of about 14 days.

“In April 1854, Rae had heard from Eskimos on Pellybai (69 ° north latitude, 72 ° west longitude) that a 10–12 day journey further west had killed more than 40 white men from lack of food. As he continued on his way, he learned that in the spring of 1850 some Eskimos who had gone out to seal seals near the northern shore of King William's Island had seen about 40 white men migrating across the ice to the south; a few weeks later, 30 corpses of white men were found on the coast of the American continent, a day's voyage in the northwest of a large river, and found 5 others on a nearby island. It turned out that the Eskimos still had powder, bullets, shot, clocks, compasses, telescopes and the like. Had found shotguns, since Rae discovered at least parts of the latter objects, as well as silver spoons, forks, etc. were bought. "

- Pierer's Universal Lexicon of the Past and Present (1857)

Despite the indisputable artifacts he had exchanged from the Inuit, Rae's report met with a great deal of skepticism , especially in English society , and his trust in the authenticity of the statements made by "savages" was interpreted as a character weakness. Above all, it was considered unthinkable that Christian seafarers could be capable of cannibalistic behavior under the command of a gentleman like Sir John Franklin. After all, in 1856 Rae was awarded the second half of the Admiralty's £ 20,000 premium for news of the fate of the Franklin expedition.

McClintock's expedition

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

Lady Franklin, unwilling to let her husband's memory be tainted, urged the Admiralty and Government, nearly ten years after the Franklin expedition set out, to equip further search expeditions to clarify what had happened to her husband and his subordinates. As a result of the widening Crimean War , the British Admiralty was no longer ready to provide ships for a presumably unsuccessful search. The search for Franklin had already cost more lives than the actual expedition, and there was little hope of finding survivors. In the spring of 1854, the expedition members were officially declared dead.

Lady Franklin, on the other hand, did not want to believe in such a pathetic end for her husband. Therefore, with the support of a public donation fund, she financed one last expedition in 1857. Captain Francis Leopold McClintock , who had previously been involved in the search operations as 2nd officer on board the Enterprise , was entrusted by her with the command of the small steam yacht Fox with a crew of 26. He chose Lieutenant William Robert Hobson as his deputy.

The Fox set sail for Lancastersund on July 1, 1857 . After two winter stays in Baffin Bay and Beechey Island, the ship reached King William Island through the Peelsund . Between April and June 1859, McClintock and Hobson discovered the last evidence of the Franklin expedition while sledging in the west of the island. This included mutilated skeletons scattered across the tundra floor and two bodies in a dinghy converted into a sled. On the boat there were some items of equipment that looked strange under these circumstances, such as silver cutlery, perfumed soap, silk handkerchiefs, combs and brushes, six books, five gold watches, some tea and forty pounds of chocolate. The most important find by McClintock and Hobson, however, was the last message that Crozier and Fitzjames had deposited in a stone monument at Victory Point in April 1848. After that it was undoubtedly clear that John Franklin was no longer alive when the first search ship left England , and that the Inuit reports that Rae had collected had essentially been true.

When McClintock returned to England in September 1859, he was showered with honors. His method of using dog sleds to explore long distances and setting up temporary camps set the trend for later polar expeditions.

Hall's expeditions

Despite the discouraging discoveries by McClintock, the American Charles Francis Hall held on to the idea that survivors of the Franklin expedition had joined a group of Inuit and were still alive. With the support of Henry Grinnell, he started expeditions in 1860 and 1864 to re-examine the area around King William Island and to interview the Inuit resident there. His first expedition was not very successful, as he did not reach his destination by far, but he was able to make some additions to the geography of Baffin Island and discover the supposed gold mining sites of Martin Frobisher , who had shipped fool's gold to England. On his second expedition he spent several years alone among the Inuit and collected their stories about the expedition. Eventually he reached Boothia and King William Island and found other human skeletons and relics from the expedition there. The Inuit statements he noted were largely identical to those of John Raes, but Hall also made translation errors and mix-ups in many places, which were more related to John Ross' expedition of 1829.

Scientific expeditions

Schwatka's expedition

Hall's expeditions and his accounts of life in the Arctic inspired the young lieutenant in the United States Army, Frederick Schwatka, to take command of a research group funded by the American Geographical Society in 1878 . The aim of this overland expedition was no longer to track down survivors of the Franklin expedition, but to search for further documents laid down in stone monuments. Schwatka's expedition, which was completely adapted to the Inuit way of life, set a new record for sled journeys by covering more than 5200 kilometers. However, she only discovered other body parts. The book As Eskimo among Eskimos by Heinrich Klutschak , a member of the expedition, is an early ethnographic study of the Inuit.

The following important information is missing from this article or section:
This seems cleared up (September 2016), but by then there have been around 10 expeditions since 1981 (35 years). Belong on this side at least in summary.
Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Search for the shipwrecks

In 1992 Canada declared the presumed sinking site of the ships to be a site of national importance ( National Historic Site of Canada ). The Canadian government agency Parks Canada has organized six major expeditions since 2008 to find the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror .

For many years the prospect of discovering almost undamaged wreckage from one of the ships, preserved by the cold waters of the Arctic, or Franklin's grave in the ice, attracted adventurers as well as film and television people to travel to King William Island. However, under Canadian law, such private research is strictly regulated; Violations of them are punishable by heavy penalties.

For Canada it had become a national task to take part in the search for the Franklin expedition ships - for example with the Navy. It is also about territorial claims in the northern polar region with its rich gas and oil deposits. With the proof of mastering complex scientific and technical challenges under the extreme conditions of the Arctic, the neighboring country would like to underpin its territorial claims towards Russia, the USA, Norway and Denmark in the region. The Canadian prime minister emphasized in the media that the support in the search for the missing Franklin expedition had laid "the basis for Canada's state sovereignty" in the Arctic.

Find of the HMS Erebus

On September 9, 2014, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced in Ottawa that one of Franklin's ships had been in Wilmot and Crampton Bay off the Adelaide Peninsula two days earlier with the help of a submarine at position 68 ° 15 ′  N , 98 ° 45 '  W been located. During the course of the investigation it turned out that it was the HMS Erebus . According to a sonar image , parts of the deck structure were still intact, including the main mast, which was suspected to have been torn off the ice when the ship sank.

Find the HMS Terror

In September 2016, almost 170 years after her sinking, the very well-preserved wreck of the HMS Terror was found far from its suspected location in Terror Bay , a bay in the south of King William Island , at 68 ° 54 ′  N , 98 ° 56 ′  W found.

A clue led to the find, according to which two Inuit, Sammy Kogvik and James Klungnatuk, saw a large piece of wood - possibly a mast - sticking out of the ice during a hunting trip around six years earlier in Terror Bay. Kogvik told this on September 3, 2016 on the research ship Martin Bergmann , for the Arctic Research Foundation in search of the terror , the head of the Foundation Adrian Schimnowski. The fact that the HMS Terror was discovered south of King William Island in 2016, at a location 96 km south of the previous search areas, suggests that at least some of the survivors tried to save themselves with the ship before they got there finally failed.

Dealing with the wrecks and salvage finds

In 1997 Canada and Great Britain agreed that possible gold discoveries on the wrecks would be shared between the two states and any third parties, if they should make claims. Canada was granted ownership of all other items found on the wrecks. When the Nunavut area was founded in 1999, the Inuit were contractually assured that Canada and the Inuit Heritage Trust would share ownership of all archaeological finds in this area in view of the possible discovery of the wrecks . The National Museum of the Royal Navy on the British side, the Canadian government and the Inuit Heritage Trust are now jointly discussing the whereabouts of objects that have already been recovered from the HMS Erebus , as well as all other salvage finds. Since summer 2017, selected finds have been shown at an exhibition in London (Greenwich).

Reasons for the failure of the expedition

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

When the expedition failed, a multitude of causes apparently worked together. One reason could be the tin cans that were soldered with lead . The Canadian scientist Owen Beattie believed in lead poisoning as one of the causes of the weakening of the expedition members after a detailed examination of three well-preserved corpses on Beechey Island and further bone finds on King William Island in 1986, until investigations by Canadian physicists in 2013 questioned again. Preserved foods were primarily intended to prevent the vitamin C deficiency disease scurvy . As a preventive measure, more than four tons of lemon juice were taken with them, but at that time very little was known about its shelf life.

In addition to the catastrophic effects of extreme cold, hunger, scurvy, and possibly lead poisoning, there are believed to have been diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia . The thesis put forward by Scott Cookman in his documentary Ice Blink - The fate of Franklin's last expedition that the food had produced deadly botulinum toxin due to the inadequate manufacture of the canned food was examined more closely, but has not been accepted.

Inadequate equipment, such as the lack of protective goggles against snow blindness , is complained about . The members of the expedition lacked the equipment and knowledge to be able to survive independently of the supplies on board, for example by hunting caribou or seals . There was also a lack of sledges with which the participants could have covered long distances overland in an emergency; the dinghies were not suitable for this.

It was also fatal that three years after the start of the expedition (until 1848) there were no plans for any necessary rescue of crews and ships. Another mistake was the failure to post messages about the previous and further planned course of the expedition in as many places as possible, which considerably limited the prospects of rescue operations.

Impulses for further exploration of the Arctic

From a historical point of view, the course of the Franklin expedition and the subsequent search expeditions generally gave positive impetus to Arctic research and changed the way explorers acted. The assumption of Victorian England that even the most inhospitable regions of the world could be made bearable by the achievements of civilization carried with it had proven to be wrong. The Arctic explorers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries increasingly turned to the survival techniques of the Inuit. Roald Amundsen, for example, who was the first to cross the Northwest Passage in 1906 and also the first to reach the geographic South Pole, dressed like the Inuit in light, warm caribou skins ; in dog sledding with unsure destinations, he planned to eat some of his sled dogs if necessary and to feed them to the remaining dogs. Men like Amundsen were a very different type of explorer from the sea captains of the Victorian century.

reception

exhibition

literature

  • Owen Beattie, John Geiger: Frozen in Time. Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition . EP Dutton, New York 1987, ISBN 0-525-24685-1 . ** German Version: Icy Sleep - The Fate of the Franklin Expedition. 4th edition. Piper, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22113-0 (A list of the participants in the expedition is attached).
  • Scott Cookman: Ice Blink. The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Lost Polar Expedition . Wiley, New York et al. a. 2000, ISBN 0-471-37790-2 .
  • Fergus Fleming: Barrow's Boys. An unbelievable story of true heroism and brilliant failure . Piper, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-492-23966-8 .
  • Peter Milger: Northwest Passage. The short but deadly sea route to China or the company of adventurers . vgs, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-8025-2295-8 .
  • D. Notman, O. Beattie: The palaeoimaging and forensic anthropology of frozen sailors from the Franklin Arctic expedition mass disaster (1845–1848): a detailed presentation of two radiological surveys. In: K. Spindler et al. (Ed.): The man in the Ice. Vol 3: Human Mummies. A Global Survey of their Status and the Techniques of Conservation . Springer, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-211-82659-9 .
  • Russell A. Potter: Finding Franklin. The untold story of a 165-year search . McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal et al. a. 2016, ISBN 978-0-7735-4784-1 .
  • James M. Skidmore: The Discovery of Franklin. A Comparative Literary Exploration. In: maple leaves. Marburg contributions to Canada research. Volume 14. (= writings of the Marburg University Library . 105). Marburg 2001, ISBN 3-8185-0323-0 , pp. 29-43.
  • James M. Skidmore: The role of art in two recent novels about Captain Sir John Franklin. In: Beate Henn-Memmesheimer, David G. John (Ed.): Cultural Link: Canada-Germany. Festschrift for the 30th anniversary of an academic exchange. (= Mannheim studies on literary and cultural studies. Volume 31). Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2003, pp. 253–266.
  • Michael Palin: Erebus: One ship, two journeys and the world's greatest mystery at sea. mareverlag, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-86648-604-1 .

In film and television

  • The Legendary Northwest Passage in Alaska - Franklin's Tragic Expedition by Louise Osmond (Channel 4, 2004)
  • Peter Bate's Missing Expedition (Ireland, 2005)
  • HMS Erebus: The Arctic Dead Ship appears (Original title: Hunt for the Arctic Ghost Ship ), directed by Ben Finney, Great Britain, 2015
  • Terra X: Drama in Eternal Ice: The Lost Expedition of John Franklin , Germany, 2016
  • The Terror , 2018 American drama and horror television series based on the novel by Dan Simmons

Web links

Commons : Franklin Expedition  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A list of the expedition participants can be found as an appendix in Owen Beattie, John Geiger: The icy sleep. The fate of the Franklin expedition. Cologne 1989, a list of officers online in Karl Brandes: Sir John Franklin. The undertaking for his rescue and the north-western passage , Verlag der Nicolai'schen Buchhandlung, Berlin 1854, p. 25.
  2. ↑ Sue Black: All That Remains: My Life With Death. Dumont, Cologne 2019, ISBN 978-3-8321-6515-4 , p. 157.
  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 .
  4. ↑ a b Ronald Richard Martin, Steven Naftel, Sheila Macfie, Keith Jones, Andrew Nelson: Pb distribution in bones from the Franklin expedition: synchrotron X-ray fluorescence and laser ablation / mass spectroscopy. In: Applied Physics A. Band. 111, No. 1, 2013, pp. 23-29. doi: 10.1007 / s00339-013-7579-5
  5. ^ Peter Watson: Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt. In: The Guardian. September 12, 2016. Retrieved September 13, 2016.
  6. ↑ Pierer's Universal Lexicon of the Past and Present . 4th edition. Verlagbuchhandlung von HA Pierer , Altenburg 1865 ( zeno.org [accessed on November 27, 2019] Lexicon entry "Franklin, 2) John").
  7. ^ Erebus and Terror National Historic Site of Canada. In: Canadian Register of Historic Places. Retrieved September 10, 2014 .
  8. ^ Thomas Trösch: Searching for traces under arctic ice. Spektrum.de, March 23, 2015, accessed on September 12, 2016 .
  9. ↑ The shipwreck in the Arctic is "HMS Erebus". n-tv, October 2, 2014, accessed September 12, 2016 .
  10. ↑ Statement by the Prime minister of Canada announcing the discovery of one of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition Ships lost in 1846. (No longer available online.) Website of the Prime Minister of Canada , September 9, 2014, archived from the original on September 9, 2014 . September 2014 ; accessed on September 9, 2014 .
  11. ↑ Mystery of the century: wreckage of legendary Franklin expedition discovered. In: Spiegel Online . September 9, 2014, accessed September 10, 2014 .
  12. ^ Peter Watson: Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt. In: The Guardian . September 12, 2016. Retrieved September 13, 2016.
  13. ↑ Second Franklin ship found. In: Yacht-online. September 13, 2016, accessed September 14, 2016.
  14. ↑ Ashifa Kassam: Inuit argue for say as Canada and Britain decide fate of HMS Terror wreck. In: The Guardian. September 16, 2016, accessed September 18, 2016.
  15. ^ B. Zane Horowitz: Polar Poisons: Did Botulism Doom the Franklin Expedition? In: Journal of Toxicology: Clinical Toxicology. Volume 41, No. 6, 2003, pp. 841-847. doi: 10.1081 / CLT-120025349
  16. ^ Hermann Marggraff: Fritz Beutels wonderful journeys and adventures on water and on land . Third chapter: Fritz Beutel's expedition to the North Pole. In: Flying leaves . Volume 1, No. 20, 1845, pp. 153-156.
  17. ↑ He compares two novels, from Germany and Canada, about the expedition.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on April 25, 2007 .