Among the most famous images of the Franklin expedition are the daguerreotype portraits taken of the twelve officers of Erebus in the run up to departure, together with Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames of the Terror. From a particular feature of the daguerreian apparatus (described below), we know the images were taken in pairs, making a total of twenty-eight images. Of the thirteen known originals still in existence, almost all are in the Polar Museum, which holds the glass plate image of Fitzjames and eleven of the officers of Erebus, missing only original portraits of Robert Sargent, (Erebus), and Francis Crozier, (Terror). The only other extant known original is nearly identical to the Polar Museum’s daguerreotype of Henry Le Vesconte, Lieutenant HMS Erebus and in the hands of Le Vesconte’s descendants. However, pre-1851 copies made for Sophia Cracroft on high quality salted paper (shown above) as well as other images distributed across collections and private ownership, have made it possible to glean some idea of the full set of twin images.

 

 

In nearly every case, the sitter – for whom photography was new – held the same static position for both twin images. For James Fitzjames, Henry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte, Charles Frederick Des Voeux, James Walter Fairholme however there are identifiable differences. In the case of the James Fitzjames portrait held by the Polar Museum he is stern-looking; while in the other, for which the original dagguerotype is lost and only copies are known to exist – he has picked up a brass telescope, and there is a hint of a smile. Fairholme described the sitting to his father, saying

‘I hope Elizabeth got my photograph. Lady Franklin said she thought it made me look too old, but as I had Fitzjames’ coat on at the time, to save myself the trouble of getting my own, you will perceive that I am a Commander! and have anchors on the epaulettes so it will do capitally when that really is the case.’

Thanks to Dr Huw Lewis-Jones of the Scott Polar Research Institute who was first to notice the phenomena, scholars of the Franklin daguerreotypes have been able to glean information about where the images were taken from the reflections in the peaks of the caps carried by Fitzjames and Lieutenant Graham Gore. Most of the portraits, including that of Sir John Franklin himself who was recovering from the flu, looking ill, and uncomfortably stuffed into his uniform, were taken in front of a cloth backdrop. However, the caps reveal this to be a temporary dockside studio rather than Richard Beard’s professional premises, illustrated by the infamous satirist George Cruikshank in 1841.

 

Franklin had taken a strong interest in the invention of the daguerrotype as early as 1840, while in Tasmania, and daguerrian apparatus was included among the instruments brought aboard “Erebus” and “Terror”. While the interest originated with John Franklin, the commission for the portraits of the officers to be taken in the days before the expedition departed appears to have come from Jane, with ice master James Reid writing to his family ‘Lady Franklin has ordered all the officers’ likenesses to be taken, and mine among the rest, with my uniform on. She keeps them all by herself.’

The photographer, Richard Beard, was a coal merchant who had taken to speculating in patents and one of only two men (the other being Antoine Claudet) with any kind of licence to make daguerrotypes. The twin images were a product of Beard’s mirror camera which had a singular feature: the mirror had a pivot something like a modern SLR camera, and by turning it the photographer could record two images on a single oblong plate. This gave Beard the opportunity to choose the better of the exposures, or – if both were satisfactory – provide two daguerreotypes and double his profit. This he did with the Franklin images, one set, now in the Polar Museum were given to Lady Franklin; the other once thought to have been given to the Admiralty, may have been purchased or distributed by relatives of officers. After the images were made the apparatus was stowed on Erebus. The challenges of sensitizing and exposing a plate, which required (at different stages) vaporizing both iodine and mercury, would have been considerable in the Arctic climate and there are no known Daguerreotypes of the frozen regions from this era.

This blog post on the Franklin daguerreotypes draws heavily on the blogs and publications of Russell Potter (visionsnorth.blogspot.co.uk), William Battersby, (http://hidden-tracks-book.blogspot.co.uk) and William Schultz (The Daguerrian Annual, Pittsburgh: The Daguerreian Society, 2005). For biographical detail on Beard and his rise as one of the most influential figures nineteenth-century photography in England, see Hannavay, John, ‘Beard, Richard (1801-1885),’ Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, London: Routledge, Vol. 1. 126-7.

 

 

 

 

In 1844, a community of prominent magnetic researchers persuaded the octogenarian head of Admiralty administration, Sir John Barrow, to lobby the Admiralty for another Arctic expedition. In an orchestrated pincer movement, and keen to make amends for the disastrous Tasmanian appointment, the veterans of polar exploration, William Edward Parry, James Clark Ross, Francis Beaufort, Frederick William Beechey, and Peter Fisher, lined up to back Franklin to lead the expedition. The Erebus and Terror were both Hecla-class bomb vessels, refitted for Arctic service in the winter of 1835 and deployed on subsequent expeditions. Built for the bombardment of coastal targets, with capacious holds and extremely strong construction, bomb vessels had long been the Admiralty favourite for conversion into discovery ships. The influence of the lobbyists and famous explorers was such that when on 3 March 1845 the Admiralty ordered the Erebus and Terror should be prepared for sea, they were already under refit at Woolwich dockyard.

Amid the hectic final preparations for a large crew, extreme conditions and a demanding programme of scientific observations, substantial effort went into keeping up appearances. Aberdeenshire whaler James Reid, appointed ice master for Erebus, wrote home on 13 May 1845 to complain of the expense incurred with every officer required to buy his own silver spoons and forks. These badges of class and rank would become some of the most recognisable relics of the expedition, each item not only carrying the hallmarks of the original maker but also often the crests of individual officers. Because of these provenance marks the cutlery became a particular focus for search parties, with the McClintock Search Expedition (1857-59), led by McClintock himself, deciding to only acquire items associated with identifiable members of the missing Franklin expedition. Of particular significance, many of the recovered pieces bore more than just the crests and hallmarks; they also carried marks scratched into the silver that bore witness to layers of ownership. The marks, initials of crewmembers such as able seaman William Wentzell, quartermaster William Rhodes, and caulker’s mate Cornelius Hickey, were suggestive clues as to the fate of the expedition after all written records ceased. It seemed as though the officer’s silver cutlery must have been redistributed amongst the men, possibly to preserve it.

 

 

One of the items of cutlery N:980 in the Polar Museum’s collection, carries a further testimonial. A silver tablespoon bearing Franklin’s crest – a conger eel’s head between two laurel branches – and London hallmarks, the date code for 1844-5, and the maker’s mark of George Adams (GA), also features a copper join; a repair made by Inuit from Repulse Bay. Stone cooking pots were also mended in this way, using copper almost like thread to stitch the broken material back together, see the Parry blogs for more detail. In the mid nineteenth century, white men had visited the Inuit camp and gifted this spoon, before dying from the effects of scurvy.  When, in 1877, the whaler A. Haughton was wrecked on the north-west shore of Hudson Bay, crewmember Thomas F. Barry purchased the spoon. Barry sold the spoon on and it passed to the state department who presented it to Sophia Cracroft, John Franklin’s niece and Lady Jane Franklin’s companion, on 13 August 1878.

 

Sophia Cracroft had been a companion to the Franklins out in Hobart where Francis Crozier, Franklin’s second in command, had fallen passionately in love with her. In the final preparations for departure, Crozier proposed to Cracroft; it was not his first attempt but it would be the last. When the expedition departed 19 May 1845, delayed four days waiting on final provisions, Crozier was in a state of deep depression. Cracroft had rejected him yet again and he set sail not expecting to return, well aware of Cracroft’s preference for the Arctic hero, James Clark Ross, ‘the handsomest man in the Navy’.

 

Eleanor Porden and John Franklin married in 1823 following his return from the First Arctic Land Expedition in 1822. They had a daughter, also Eleanor, on the 3 June 1824, but the new mother’s health was irreparably damaged by the birth and she died of tuberculosis on 22 February 1825, just six days after John Franklin embarked on his second Arctic voyage carrying the flag she had embroidered to be raised when the expedition reached its furthest northerly point. Three years on from his wife’s death and the year after his return from the Second Arctic Land Expedition in 1827, Franklin married a friend of Eleanor’s, Jane Griffin.

To commemorate the event, Franklin sat for Pierre Jean David D’Angers, the famous French portrait artist who toured France, England and the German lands between 1827 and 1829 making busts and medallions of illustrious men and women. The wax portrait bust of Franklin, modelled on a slate base, was cast in bronze in 1829, the same year Franklin was knighted. The bust was donated to the Polar Museum in 1931 by the ‘Misses Lefroy’, Jessie, from Winchester and Louie, and M. Isabel (Mary-Isabella), who lived together in Bentworth, Hants. Their mother, Emma Cracroft, was Franklin’s niece and the younger sister to Jane Franklin’s lifelong companion and aide-de-camp, Sophia Cracroft. Their father was George Benjamin Austen Lefroy, a grand nephew of Jane Austen. When the bust N: 982. was donated, M. Isabel asked if the museum’s then director, Frank Debenham, could explain how it was that the original wax model remained in tact, when surely it should have been destroyed in the casting process, and further noted the particular value her aunt Sophia Cracroft had placed on the wax original. Debenham’s response was characteristically charming, but limited; though a bit late for Isabel Lefroy’s query (by nearly one hundred years), we now know more on the particularities of David’s technique and the value of the wax original.

 

The majority of David’s portraits were sketched in wax from life. In his studio David would model the finished portrait in plaster to make the mould for the bronze castings. The plaster model was pressed into a matrix of fine wet sand to leave an impression on the reverse. Into this cavity, when dry, a sheet of wax was melted or liquid wax brushed, precisely conforming to every detail of the impression. The thickness of the wax determined the thickness of the case and formed the incuse reverse. Wax sprues for the introduction of molten bronze and vents for the escaping air were attached to the wax, and the whole was covered with a heat resistant mixture of sand and plaster. The wax was then melted out, leaving a cavity to be filled with molten bronze in a process known as lost-wax casting. After the pouring and cooling of the bronze, the mould was broken away and the cast, scarred on the reverse when relieved of its sprues and vents of bronze, became a foundry model and could be used to make many additional impressions for sand-casting.

 

The replication of medallions by sand-casting is accomplished by placing the model, obverse up, on a tablet and completely covering it with fine sand contained within the upper part of a flask. When the flask and tablet are turned over and the tablet is removed, the exposed reverse of the model and surrounding matrix are revealed. This surface is dusted with a release agent, and the lower half of the flask is attached, filled with sand, and compressed. The sand in the lower half of the flask might be a less fine and more economical grade, as the reverse of sand-cast medallions often exhibits a grainier surface (as shown below). The two halves of the flask are separated, the model is removed, sprues and vents are cut into the sand, the release agent is applied, the mould is rejoined, and the resulting cavity is filled with molten bronze. When the cast is removed form the mould, the sprues and vents are filed off and the edge is smoothed of the irregularities caused by the intrusion of molten bronze where the two parts of the mould were joined. It is because of this last operation, evidenced by file marks on the circumference of finished casts, that medallions from the same foundry model can be of different dimensions.

 

When the casting process is complete, the bronze is given its colour, or ‘fire-patina’, by applying chemical compounds of sulphur, copper, and iron, among others, to oxidize the surface. This colouring process is distinct from “cold-patina”, whereby colouring pigments are applied to the bronze surface without further heat treatment. David’s medallions are characteristically shades of brown with the patinas on his early medallions a dark greenish brown, but they can range in colour from blackish brown, to light brown, to a transparent golden brown; this last being more prevalent on the medallions produced by Fumiere et Cie.

 

The newlywed Jane Franklin was teasingly critical of the portrait and Franklin, writing to D’Angers to offer ‘My warmest thanks to you for this medallion which has delighted all my friends by the lifelike resemblance and the strength of its execution’, noted ‘My wife persists in saying that the nose is too long and that you have made me too handsome.’ From the sad unfolding of events it is clear Lady Jane’s disapproval was tongue-in-cheek. On 4 November 1854, a week after reporting the tragic fate of the Franklin expedition (28 October 1854), a now famous article on the Franklin relics appeared in The Illustrated London News complete with emotive full-page engravings of the broken relics of the expedition, recovered by subsequent search parties.  These images were fully authorised by Lady Jane and crowned by a representation of D’Anger’s medallion portrait, though it had not been among the relics. The Polar Museum holds a significant collection of these infamous remains, that are so important not just to understanding the Franklin disaster in Victorian Culture, but also for thinking about what the Polar Museum is all about, and even for understanding current debates around Arctic sovereignty.

 

After his marriage to Jane Griffin in 1828 Franklin began planning another Arctic expedition, but the Admiralty had lost interest in polar exploration and withdrew their support. Between 1830 and 1833 he served in the Mediterranean during the Greek War of Independence, and following his return and three years unemployment, he was offered lieutenant-governorship of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, exploited by the British as the primary penal colony in Australia between 1800 and 1853. John Franklin’s limited experience of administration, the couple’s mutual interest in social reform, and the well-educated, literary, and scientific Lady Franklin’s unconventional behaviour were a recipe for disaster with the conservative high society of the colony. In 1843, six years after arriving in Van Diemen’s Land, the Franklins were recalled to Britain, his confidence shattered and Lady Jane determined to recover their self-esteem.

 

The Polar Museum holds a button from Franklin’s governor’s coat (N:757). The pulling apart of the status coat, reduced to a humble button, is eloquent of Franklin’s time in the colony; but alongside the relics recovered from the Arctic it takes on new meaning. Buttons were not only collected and revered as tokens of the lost heroes but were manufactured by the search parties, stamped with information such as the date, place, and ships’ name, and distributed among the indigenous people they encountered in the hope of making contact with the lost Franklin expedition. Since the expedition’s first disappearance, buttons have offered a way to recover Franklin. The button is not the only fragment of the Franklins’ time in Tasmania held by the Polar Museum, two pieces of coral from the Indian Ocean feature in the collection.  These were originally housed in a leather-covered seaman’s chest, along with exotic shells; stones cut and polished; zoological curiosities, such as the sword from a swordfish; and fossils and minerals from all over the world. A card lain on top of the chest documented the sad provenance, sold by Lady Franklin at her Hedingham Castle bazaar 9 July 1850 ‘… in aid of the funds for fitting out an additional ship sent chiefly at her Ladyship’s expense, in search of the missing expedition to the Arctic regions, under the command of Captain Sir John Franklin.’ The corals are remnants of this chest, and the Franklins’ time in Tasmania, later broken up and sold off in pieces.

 

When the couple reached England in 1844, the Admiralty were again looking to polar exploration, this time as part of the major international collaborative campaign to survey the earth’s magnetism, which would come to be known as The Magnetic Crusade. With Admiralty advisors and administrators keen to make amends for the disastrous Tasmanian posting, Franklin found himself, despite his age, in pole position to take command. To the very day that last fateful expedition set sail Franklin remained obsessed with correspondence and pamphlets attempting to revise public opinion of his Tasmanian humiliation.

 

Equipped with specially designed boats, well manned and supplied, this second expedition reflected the hard lessons of the First Arctic Land Expedition of 1819-22.  Franklin himself noted:

It was impossible not to be struck with the difference between our present complete state of equipment and that on which we had embarked on our former disastrous voyage. Instead of a frail bark canoe, and a scanty supply of food, we were now about to commence the sea voyage in excellent boats, stored with three months’ provision.

The party wintered at Fort Franklin on Great Bear Lake from September 1825 till June 1826, before descending as far as the mouth of the Mackenzie River on the North American coast where the party split into two on 4 July. Nineteenth century Admiralty charts weren’t just projections and plotted data, they also included detailed coastal views; the quality of which were crucial for future surveyors and navigators. The same well-drawn church spire or rocky peak would be used over and over by different surveyors as a reference point to orient sightings.  For this, but also as part of the Admiralty’s publicity campaign around such voyages, each party had its own artist. Richardson’s group, in the Dolphin and Union, took assistant surveyor Edward Nicholas Kendall to survey the coast between the Mackenzie and Coppermine Rivers; while Franklin, in the Lion and Reliance, attempted to go west from the Mackenzie to Icy Cape with officer-artist George Back.

While the equipment was better, the weather was worse, and the surveying ambitions of the two expeditions became impossible:

The obstinate continuance of fog forms another material difference between this season and the same period of 1821. We were only detained three times in navigating along the coast that year to the east of the Coppermine River; but on this voyage hardly a day passed after our departure form the Mackenzie that the atmosphere was not, at some time, so foggy as to hide every object more distant than four or five miles.

Weather observations were an important component of the expeditions and published alongside the narrative accounts of the officers. In addition to supplies, clothing, boats, and bibles, the expedition had a whole suite of astronomical, magnetic, and meteorological apparatus. To have some idea of how well any instrument was working, every instrument needed to be compared against a designated standard. The twelve thermometers on the expedition give some sense of the sheer amount of scientific apparatus the parties were carrying. Ten ivory-scale thermometers made by James Newman from his London premises at 7 and 8 Lisle Street, which he occupied in the years 1816-25, were regularly compared with one another and then the instrument which gave the readings nearest the mean temperature of the whole set was compared with one of two thermometers made by member of the famous Dollond family of scientific instrument makers and recently elected Royal Society Fellow, George Dollond of St Paul’s Churchyard, London. Trust in the Dollond instrument, based in complex reasons of society, genealogy, and class, was used to calibrate the best of the Newman instruments. One of the Newman thermometers from the expedition is held by the polar museum (Y:54/21/1). A note on the reverse of the ivory scale identifies the Polar Museum’s thermometer as the one used in the Observatory in the two sets of winter observations before being removed on 1 May to register the temperature of the open air.

Despite the challenging weather, the two parties successfully charted over 1100 miles of ‘undiscovered’ coastline along the Beaufort Sea, now known as the Amundsen Gulf, between July and September 1826. The total number of miles surveyed and mapped was closer to 5,000; but as these were routes had long been traversed by fur traders, Franklin omitted them from his ‘discoveries’. Franklin’s party turned back within only 160 miles of the British Naval Exploring Expedition 1825-28 (HMS Blossom) captained by Sir Frederick Beechey that was advancing eastward from Icy Cape.

 

 

 

 

Franklin was born in 1786, son of a Lincolnshire textiles merchant. He joined the Royal Navy in 1800 and accompanied Matthew Flinders on his circumnavigation of Australia in 1802-1803; before serving as a midshipman on the ‘Bellerophon’ at Trafalgar. Still just a junior officer at the end of the war, he became involved in Arctic exploration as commander of the British Naval North Polar Expedition 1818 (HMS Trent and HMS Dorothea), in an attempt to find a route to the North Pole through the pack ice north of Spitsbergen. It was on board HMS Trent in 1818 before the expedition’s departure that Franklin met his future first wife, romantic poet Eleanor Porden. The encounter was the inspiration for her verse ‘The Arctic Expeditions’ which would launch a network of polar exploration romance writing. The following year he led an overland expedition to the Arctic coast – the British Naval Exploring Expedition 1819-22 (First Arctic Land Expedition) – with the goal of exploring the northern coast of Canada via the Coppermine River. For the expedition Franklin and his men were equipped with clothing and moccasins made by Inuit women, stitched together with the caribou sinew these women had prepared as thread. Sewing was crucial to survival in the Arctic and once you start looking you can see sinew thread stitching and binding everywhere on gallery – from boots and jackets to sledges and knives. The Polar Museum even has skeins of whale and caribou sinew thread collected on the British Naval Northwest Passage Expedition 1821-23 (HMS Fury and HMS Hecla) led by William Edward Parry and contemporary with Franklin.

Despite being well-equipped in clothing, the Coppermine River expedition was poorly provisioned and, with their two canoes badly damaged, Franklin and his nineteen men abandoned the expedition and turned inland. Then the hunting parties began to fail. Before long they were eating ‘[their] old shoes and a few scraps of leather’. When they ran out of boots they starved on a weak, bitter broth of boiled lichen called ‘tripe-de-roche’ which had formerly seasoned the game provided by the once successful hunts.

 

The expedition split into three parties. One, led by Franklin headed for Fort Enterprise in the hope of finding supplies there; another, led by George Back went in search of a group of Indians who had previously supplied the party with food; the third group was made up of surveyor Robert Hood, who was too weak to go on, seaman John Hepburn and Scottish naturalist Dr John Richardson, Franklin’s closest associate on the expedition, who agreed to stay behind with Hood. Franklin’s party soon split again with three French-Canadian voyageurs, Teroahauté, Belanger, and Perrault, exhausted and starving, opting instead to return and join Richardson and the others. Only one, Michel Teroahauté, made it to rejoin Richardson.

 

Following his reunion with Richardson’s small group, Teroahauté went hunting and returned with fresh wolf meat for the party. However, after eating the meat, the others became increasingly convinced that the voyageur was lying and that the meat was in fact, in Richardson’s words, ‘a portion of the body of Belanger or Perrault’. A few days later Richardson and Hepburn returned to the camp after a foraging expedition to find Hood dead with a bullet hole in his forehead and Teroahauté claiming it was suicide. Richardson shot Teroahauté to prevent, as he believed, the voyageur murdering them and eating their bodies. Richardson and Hepburn then sought out the Franklin party, reaching Fort Enterprise in late October to find Franklin and three other members of the expedition, all those of the Franklin party still living, themselves near death. George Back accompanied by the Indians he had set out to find eventually rescued the Fort Enterprise party. Of the twenty men who formed the original Coppermine expedition, eleven had died. Despite the disastrous losses Franklin became a British hero and Richardson was never tried for the murder of Teroahauté.

A group of concerned and well-wishing ladies had provided the expedition with a small collection of religious books before it left London. Throughout these ordeals Richardson’s party kept hold of the most portable, reading portions to one another as they lay in bed, in addition to the morning and evening services. For Richardson the affect was such that ‘[h]ad my poor friend [Mr Hood]   been spared to revisit his native land, I should look back to this period with unalloyed delight’. When he was reunited with Franklin at Fort Enterprise he introduced the practice so that Franklin would later recall, despite being half dead from exhaustion,  ‘the performance of these duties always afforded us the greatest consolation, serving to reanimate our hope in the mercy of the Omnipotent, who alone could save and deliver us.’ The Polar Museum has two such ‘portable’ religious works owned by Franklin, a book of sacred poetry (N:820) and The Christian Pattern (N:987), this latter apparently purchased before Franklin and Richardson returned to the Arctic again in 1825 on the British Naval Exploring Expedition (Second Arctic Land Expedition) 1825-27.

 

 

 

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.