Jane Griffin

Portrait of Jane Griffins as a youth, copperplate engraving

Jane Griffin, Lady Franklin (born December 4, 1791 in London , † July 18, 1875 ) was a British adventurer of the Victorian era and became known as the wife of the polar explorer Sir John Franklin , whose expedition in the Canadian Arctic in search of the legendary Northwest Passage disappeared without a trace.

Life

Jane was one of three daughters of John Griffin and Mary Guillemard.

Time in Tasmania

She married Franklin on his return from his second Arctic expedition in 1828, since he had been a widower since the death of his first wife Eleanor Anne Porden shortly after he left in 1825. As the wife of a knight , she now bore the courtesy title of Lady Franklin . Jane accompanied her husband in 1837 when he was posted as governor of Van Diemen's Land , which she gave the current name of Tasmania . Lady Franklin undertook several overland hikes across the Australian continent and Tasmania, in 1839 between Port Phillip and Sydney , and in 1841/1842 from Hobart to Macquarie Harbor . Lady Franklin corresponded intensively with Elizabeth Fry during this time and founded the Tasmanian Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners in 1843 to reform the living conditions of female prisoners in Tasmania. Franklin was removed from his post as governor in 1843 due to an acute economic crisis in the province and his unpopular reform project regarding the penal colony there , and so both returned to England in 1844.

Search expeditions

In May 1845, John Franklin set out on an expedition that should finally bring clarity about the Northwest Passage. After two years in which there was no news from his ships, Lady Franklin, together with the polar explorer John Ross , who had personally promised Franklin to look for him after three years without news , urged the Admiralty to send search parties. This came as a more or less surprise to the Admiralty - after all, Franklin's expedition had been the most technically equipped of the century, and earlier expeditions had spent four winters in the ice by far more primitive means without major losses. Therefore, there was no rescue plan at the time. But since public opinion also took a great interest in the fate of the men and demanded clarification, the first search expeditions were sent out in 1848, which quickly expanded to become the largest search operation in history to date.

Lady Franklin also took part in these actions with her private fortune and increased, among other things, the reward for rescuing or clearing up the fate of the men by 10,000 pounds sterling (a good million euros in today's money value). She invested almost all of her fortune in the financing of a total of five rescue expeditions. She supported the voyages of the schooner Prince Albert under the captains Charles Forsyth (1850) and William Kennedy (1851) and the steam boat Isabel under captain Edward Inglefield (1852). These expeditions, like the much more extensive undertakings of the Royal Navy , were largely unsuccessful in terms of clarifying the fate of Franklin. During these years, Lady Franklin collected everything imaginable about the Arctic and was correct in her assumption that Franklin had probably tried his luck further south at Victoria Island .

In 1854, nine years after Franklin's ships sailed, the Royal Navy declared Franklin and his men officially dead and refused to send any further expeditions, given the huge losses of men and material the search parties had suffered, as well as the widening Crimean War . In addition, this year there were extremely disturbing reports about the Scottish researcher John Rae , which were based on the statements of the Inuit and suggested that Franklin's men were all in the area of King William Island while trying to get to safety by land. perished, and would have probably also made use of the “last resort”, which was completely unimaginable at the time, cannibalism .

Lady Franklin refused to acknowledge this report and in the ensuing period criticized Rae in public debates in newspapers and magazines, receiving great support from the public opinion of her day, including Charles Dickens , who wrote in his own newspaper Household Words as well as The Times and The Illustrated London News took a stand against Rae's theses. According to her statements, she still felt hope to see her husband alive again. The still young mass media took up the topic more and more, and so the sympathy for the sad fate of the heroic Lord Franklin and his faithful wife was very great.

Finally, in 1857, with the help of donations, Lady Franklin had raised enough money to finance another expedition. Francis Leopold McClintock , who had already taken part in the first expeditions of the Navy as an officer, set sail on July 2nd with the small steam yacht Fox and finally found the harrowing remains in the area around King William Island described by John Rae in 1859 of the expedition, including a letter deposited in a pile of stones stating that Lord Franklin had died on June 11, 1847.

So after it became clear that her husband had passed away for so long, Lady Franklin returned to her passion for travel. She was received with overwhelming expressions of sympathy in many places and toured North America , India and Japan , among others . In her final years she continued to devote herself to clarifying the fate of the unfortunate Franklin expedition and to the memory of her husband. So, two weeks after her death, a large plaque that she financed was unveiled in Westminster Abbey .

In retrospect, the search expeditions to clarify Franklin's fate made an enormous contribution to the exploration of the Arctic.

Awards

The Royal Geographical Society awarded Lady Franklin the Founder's Gold Medal in 1860 as the first woman . According to her also was the Lady Franklin Bay , part of Nares Strait in Nunavut , Canada named. Her example as a faithful wife who cared for her heroic husband with dignity inspired a number of contemporary songs and poems.

literature

• This errant lady: Jane Franklin's overland journey to Port Philip and Sydney, 1839 . edited by Penny Russell, National Library of Australia, 2003
• As Affecting the Fate of My Absent Husband: Selected Letters of Lady Franklin Concerning the Search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 1848-1860 . edited by Erika Behrisch Elce, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009
• Ken McGoogan: Lady Franklin's Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History . HarperCollins, Toronto 2005
• Penny Russell: "Her Excellency": Lady Franklin, Female Convicts and the Problem of Authority in Van Diemen's Land . IN: Journal of Australian Studies 53, 1997, pp. 40-50.

Web links

Commons : Jane Griffin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Jane Griffin . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).
• Estate in the National Library of Australia (English)
• Lady Franklin Museum, Tasmania (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Interestingly, Australia itself got this name through an uncle of Franklin, the discoverer Matthew Flinders , so that in this context one could almost speak of a family tradition.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Catharine MC Haines: International women in science: a biographical dictionary to 1950 . ABC-CLIO Ltd, 2001, p. 100.