It was one of the greatest mysteries of the 19th century. To this day, exactly what happened remains unexplained. In summer 1845, a well-equipped expedition commanded by one of Britain's greatest explorers, Captain Sir John Franklin, set sail with a hand-picked crew on what was widely touted as the triumphant culmination of a three-century quest to find the Northwest Passage. Instead of conquering the elusive passage, two ships and 129 men disappeared into the Arctic wastes at the top of the world, never to be seen again.
Unlike a modern disaster flickering repeatedly across television screens at the moment it is apparent that something has gone wrong, the tragedy of the Franklin expedition played out in isolation, with few witnesses. The fact that the expedition was lost took years to discern and inspired a decade-long search. Between 1849 and 1859, 32 separate expeditions sailed from Britain and the United States to find and rescue Franklin and his men. None of them succeeded. Instead, they found scattered traces—an abandoned winter camp on a small island, a few relics purchased from the local Inuit, and finally a trail of discarded equipment and a few bodies. All were painfully wrested from the ice and tundra in a series of grueling searches that spanned the breadth of the Canadian Arctic archipelago.
When the search ended in 1859, all the searchers knew was that Franklin was dead, his ships sunk, and most if not all of his men had died in a futile attempt to flee the frozen north. This, in its time, inspired a new quest for additional relics of the ill-fated expedition and interviews with the Inuit, the only witnesses to the disaster. That late 19th century search for answers continued into the 20th century, as a new generation of explorers sailed in Franklin's wake to conquer at last the elusive and treacherous Northwest Passage. The hunt for relics uncovered more traces, including more bodies—some scattered skeletons, others buried on sandy Arctic beaches.
In the early 21st century, the story of the Franklin expedition and the search for answers continues unabated. Late 20th-century searches took to the air and into the icy seas, scouring the barren landscape for more clues, while electronic surveys of the seabed sought the sunken wrecks of Franklin's ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. But while rumors of encounters with the sunken hulks by U.S. Navy submarines circulate through the Arctic, no civilian scientist, archaeologist, or modern-day Franklin searcher has found the two ships.
Despite the fact that the Erebus and Terror remain elusive targets, the scouring of the Arctic for Franklin has yielded other amazingly well-preserved discoveries: the frozen bodies of three of Franklin's men, buried at the expedition's first winter camp, and two sunken ships. One of these wrecks, the transport Breadalbane, crushed by the ice and sunk while part of a Royal Navy expedition to find Franklin in 1854, is, like the bodies, a moment frozen in time, resting in the cold deep of Lancaster Sound. Another wreck, discerned by sonar but not yet investigated, lies in adjacent deep water, discovered in 2000 when the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Matthew Healy (WAGB-20) navigated the Northwest Passage.
Now, our team's dives into the cold coastal waters of Greenland have revealed the grave of another sunken hulk, the steam yacht Fox, the last ship sent from Britain to find Franklin. The Fox's incredible voyage took two years, cost two lives, and nearly ended in disaster. Thanks to the skill of captain and crew, and grueling hard work to search the shores of King William Island, the Fox returned to England in 1859 with definitive news, discerned from a single note left sealed in a stone cairn by the survivors of the expedition. Franklin was dead, and the Erebus and Terror had been abandoned to the ice as the survivors landed on the northern shore of King William Island and marched south. A trail of scattered relics and bones marked their retreat and their fate.
The Aberdeen (Scotland) shipbuilding firm of Alexander Hall & Company built the Fox in 1855 as a private yacht for Sir Richard Sutton of England. An auxiliary-powered steam vessel, the 120-foot-long Fox carried a three-masted topsail schooner rig. Thomas Hall & Company of Aberdeen manufactured and installed the machinery, including a 30-horsepower double-cylinder steam engine, which drove a single screw.
Following the yacht's maiden voyage to Norway in 1855, owner Sir Richard Sutton died in November that year. Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of the missing Arctic explorer, purchased the Fox in early 1857 for £2,000 and sent the yacht back to Hall shipyard to refit for Arctic service. She was to search for definitive news of Franklin and his crews and, Lady Franklin hoped, rescue survivors and records of the expedition, missing since it had departed England a decade earlier. Jane Franklin's devotion to her husband and her single-minded quest to secure a place in history for him remains one of the great stories of spousal devotion in the history of exploration. She never gave up, even when Britain's largest expedition to search for Franklin ended in disaster with the abandonment of several ships to the ice in 1854.
Diving on the Fox
Diving at Qerqertusuaq is difficult. Equipment must be flown to this remote location, and the only available means of filling air tanks is through the local fire hall. The 2003 field work was undertaken by Econova, a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based film production company, to produce a 44-minute documentary for the National Geographic International television series The Sea Hunters. While the show emphasizes the search for and discovery of "famous shipwrecks," the producer is an advocate of archaeology. As such, he provides the means of archaeological survey and documentation to the extent possible with each episode if the show is not on location with an existing archaeological project, as has been the case with shipwrecks in Poland, Finland, and Japan.
Since the wreck of the Fox, while never "lost," has nonetheless never been surveyed or documented, it was decided this show would film the actual process of an archaeological reconnaissance and documentation. The field team of divers (Mike and Warren Fletcher and the author) assembled with the camera and sound team in Iqualuit, Nunavut, Canada, on 18 August 2003, flying to Aasiaat the following day. There, the team connected with the fishing vessel Mary West, which transported the team across Disko Bugt (Disko Bay) on a four-hour sea voyage to Qerqertusuaq. The captain of the Mary West, Neils West, pointed out the funnel of the Fox on Kødøen or Qeqertaq Island and the location of the wreck. A visit to the island found the rusting, bullet-marked funnel set into concrete and a cemented rock base on the island, tied down by wire rope that ran from the original rigging points on the funnel.
Dive operations commenced on 20 August with a single dive and continued from 21 to 24 August with five dives over a total of eight hours' dive time. Using a 200-foot tape, we ran a baseline from the bow to the stern along the line of the keelson, and we used this to plot all subsequent positions. The reconnaissance and survey was nonintrusive, with no excavation except hand fanning some of the loose algae and sediment that covers the collapsed starboard hull. Less than a centimeter of algae and mud overlays the hull, indicating a consistent tidal scour of this shallow-water wreck, and the hand fanning was done to examine and photograph features more closely. By the next day's dive, all hand-fanned areas were reburied in algae and silt. Because of the shallow nature of the wreck, it has been heavily salvaged over time, and few small or loose artifacts were noted during the survey.
Lady Franklin pressured the British government to help her, writing to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston that "the final and exhaustive search is all I seek on behalf of the first and only martyrs to Arctic discovery in modern times, and it is all I ever intend to ask." But the British government had done all it could and demurred. Mounting a public appeal, she raised private funds to finance her own expedition. With those funds, she bought the Fox.
Lady Franklin placed the Fox under the command of Captain Francis Leopold McClintock, a veteran of two previous Arctic voyages in search of Franklin. McClintock described the work done at the Hall yard in the late spring of 1857:
The velvet hangings and splendid furniture of the yacht, and also every thing not constituting a part of the vessel's strengthening, were to be removed; the large sky-lights and capacious ladderways had to be reduced to limits more adapted to a polar clime; the whole vessel to be externally sheathed with stout planking, and internally fortified by strong cross-beams, longitudinal beams, iron stanchions, and diagonal fastenings; the false keel taken off, the slender brass propeller replaced by a massive iron one, the boiler taken out, altered, and enlarged; the sharp stem to be cased in iron until it resembled a ponderous chisel set up edge-ways; even the yacht's rig had to be altered.
McClintock described the yacht's now less-than-luxurious accommodations: "Internally she was fitted up with the strictest economy in every sense, and the officers were crammed into pigeon-holes, styled cabins, in order to make room for provisions and stores; our mess-room, for five persons, measured 8 feet square."
An account in The Illustrated London News in October 1859 also described the refitted, spartan Fox:
There is very little ornament about her, but what she has is in wonderfully good condition. The Fox has three slender, rather raking masts, is of topsail schooner rig, and small poop aft. She is rather sharp forward and her bows are plated over with iron. . . . She looks not unlike a bundle of heavy handspikes, iron pointed at each end, is for fending off drift ice.
As the crew made final preparations, Lady Franklin instructed McClintock to rescue any survivors of her husband's expedition if he encountered them and then to recover "the unspeakably precious documents of the expedition, public or private, and the personal relics of my dear husband and his companions." The Fox sailed for the Arctic in summer 1857, only to be trapped in the ice of Baffin Bay. The next year, she sailed from the Danish port of Gødhavn, today known as Qeqertarsuaq, and headed into the Canadian Arctic. Following Franklin's presumed trail, McClintock moored the Fox in the ice off the Boothia Peninsula near Bellot Strait and headed south on foot with sledges to King William Island. Carl Peterson, a Greenland Inuit interpreter with McClintock, had learned from the local Inuit that two ships had sunk near King William Island. Relics that McClintock bought from the Boothia Inuit were from the Franklin expedition, so he pushed on in the harsh winter to King William Island to link with another sledging party from the Fox led by Lieutenant William Hobson.
On King William Island, the sledge parties discovered scattered skeletons, discarded equipment, a ship's boat filled with provisions and equipment, and the bodies of two of Franklin's men. But Hobson made the single greatest discovery. A stone cairn on the shores of the island yielded a note sealed in a tin canister that told, in the briefest of notes, what had happened.