We don’t know when it started, or who took the decision, but some time in May 1848 British sailors from HMS Erebus and HMS Terror began butchering and eating their comrades…

Andrew Lambert, 2009.

At the Polar Museum we’re lucky enough to have a diverse collection of material associated with one of the most iconic, and controversial, figures in the history of polar exploration, Captain of the ill-fated British Naval Northwest Passage Expedition 1845-48 (HMS Erebus and HMS Terror), Sir John Franklin. Most of the time I work for Greenwich National Maritime Museum, researching an early nineteenth century campaign to survey the earth’s magnetism dubbed ‘The Magnetic Crusade’. Historians have looked to the ‘powerful sickening fascination of the Crusade’s magnetic data’ to explain Franklin’s obsession with polar exploration that led to this last, fateful voyage. Since February, I’ve been doing some work for the Polar Museum to enhance the available information on their Arctic collections, with a particular interest in nineteenth century expeditions or anything related to magnetism. I hope these posts will be teasers for some of the amazing objects on show and in storage there. As with many of the Polar Museum’s collections, much of the material related to Franklin was donated by family and the descendants of Franklin and of fellow officers; so it ranges from the domestic and personal, through expedition equipment and relics of the expedition’s tragic end, to commemorative items. This is what makes the collection so exciting and diverse but also particularly important for thinking about the life of one of the most infamous heroic failures in the history of polar exploration. It’s a story that begins, and ends, with cannibalism.

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