The fate of Sir John Franklin’s polar expedition was one of the great mysteries of the Victorian age. He set out for the Arctic with two naval ships and 128 men on May 19, 1845. On July 4 they stopped off in Greenland to take aboard provisions and send letters home. Towards the end of that month they sailed past two British whalers, and Franklin told the captain of one of them that they had enough stores to last for five years or possibly seven. After that nothing was ever heard from them again.

The admiralty sent 15 search-and-rescue missions, but found only the remains of Franklin’s 1845-46 winter camp, three graves and a heap of meat and vegetable tins. Then, in 1854, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company met a party of Inuit who showed him relics of the expedition, including Franklin’s order of knighthood and some cutlery. They told him that all the white men had died years before, and that from the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the cooking vessels it was clear that some of them had been driven to cannibalism in their desperation to stay alive.

In England the news provoked horror and disbelief. Some suggested that the Inuit, being heathen savages, were probably the cannibals. Charles Dickens told readers of Household Words that he was sure no English gentleman would commit such an atrocity, though the “coarsest and commonest” crew members might. Andrew Lambert’s keenly researched biography interprets the public reaction as a clash between modern awareness of man’s animal nature, soon to be endorsed by Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and Victorian chivalric dreams. The British had come to see the rescue missions as a crusade, and naval search parties flew emblazoned banners from their sledges, like questing knights. The more realistic view was expressed in Landseer’s great painting of 1864, which depicts an icy wasteland with the debris of a shipwreck and two happy-looking polar bears consuming human remains.

Judging from Lambert’s account of Franklin’s character, he would have chosen the chivalric alternative himself. A devout Christian, with high ideals of public service, he first proved his mettle as a 14-year-old midshipman at the battle of Copenhagen in 1801. At Trafalgar he served aboard HMS Bellerophon, and was partially deafened for life by the cannonade. On an overland expedition to the Arctic in 1821 he and his men were reduced to eating rock lichen and their untreated leather footwear. His write-up of their adventures was a bestseller, and he rocketed to fame as “the man who ate his boots”. It was typical of his devotion to duty that he left for the Arctic again in 1825 though he knew his young wife was dying of TB.

His naval career suffered in the 1830s when funds for polar exploration dried up, and he was sent to Tasmania as lieutenant-governor, taking his new wife Jane with him. Lambert says she became an “obsessive monomaniac”, but she seems by far the most interesting person in his book, intelligent, enterprising and resolute. Her unusual qualities sent tremors through the small-minded hierarchy on the island, and Franklin was recalled in 1843 amid chuntering about “petticoat rule”. But in the six years they were there he and Jane managed to introduce the Tasmanians to the rudiments of Victorian civilisation, building a school and a museum, founding a learned society and urging the Colonial Office, in vain, to grant the island representative government.

When her husband and his expedition disappeared in 1845 it was Jane who badgered parliament and the admiralty into sending ships and men to the frozen wastes. She lobbied prime ministers and MPs and aroused international sympathy by appealing to Tsar Nicholas I and the American president. (Two American rescue missions dispatched in the 1850s were both disastrous; the second one lost its ship and had to be rescued by the Inuit.) It was Jane, too, who succeeded where the official search parties failed. She bought a steam yacht, the Fox, and chose a naval officer, Francis McClintock, to captain her. In May 1859, after an epic sledge journey, McClintock’s second-in-command found a large abandoned campsite and, in a tin container under a cairn, the only written record of the Franklin expedition.

Penned by one of the surviving officers on April 25, 1848, it revealed that Franklin’s two ships had been locked in the Arctic ice since September 12, 1846. Franklin had died on June 11, 1847, and eight other officers and 15 men had died by April 22, 1848, when the survivors, numbering 105, had taken the decision to abandon the ships and try to reach safety by marching south. It was, Lambert observes, hopeless, and the officers must have known it, for they would have had to march 1,000 miles to reach the nearest Hudson’s Bay Comp­any post. McClintock found, 60 miles to the south, a boat lashed to a sledge containing stores, guns and two human skeletons.

The fact that Franklin had died so early in the expedition meant that he was freed from the stigma of cannibalism, and Jane set about raising funds for the memorial in Waterloo Place, near Trafalgar Square, unveiled in 1866, which celebrates her husband as a heroic explorer. For Lambert the memorial is a “brazen lie”, and he blames it and Jane for obscuring Franklin’s true significance. He was really, he argues, a scientist, taking part in a significant scientific enterprise, the mapping of the earth’s magnetic field. Masterminded by an army officer, Edward Sabine, and backed by the admiralty, this held out hopes of providing the 19th-century equivalent of a satellite navigation system. Though the ostensible purpose of Franklin’s expedition was to discover the North West Passage, the sea route to the Pacific north of the American continent sought by mariners since the 16th century (which Jane’s monument falsely credited him with finding), its real purpose was to take magnetic measurements near the magnetic north pole as a contribution to Sabine’s great plan.

The achievement of Lambert’s biography is to put Franklin, for the first time, into this modern context of how to fund and co-ordinate big science. Some of his other viewpoints seem more doubtful. He takes exception to Franklin being called an explorer. Yet his own account shows that Franklin went to places where nobody had been before, and mapped unknown regions, which seems to be what explorers are meant to do. He also thinks it wrong that the

Waterloo Place monument does not mention cannibalism. But that would have struck an unusual note in a public memorial, and besides, Franklin was not implicated in cannibalism and had he lived his leadership might have prevented it. By turning Franklin into an Arctic hero who died a noble death, Lambert finally alleges, Jane and her monument spurred the Edwardian working class to patriotism and self-sacrifice, and so helped to send “several million Britons to the muddy hell of the western front”. How many deluded Edwardians contemplated Franklin’s example before enlisting he does not divulge. But the abundant material he gathers in his biography will convince most readers that Franklin did indeed set an example of nobility, heroism and self-sacrifice, and that he found in Jane a wife worthy of him.

Franklin by Andrew Lambert
Faber £20 pp440

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