This documentary recounts a desperate tale of the doomed Franklin expedition and the equally desperate struggle to find out what went wrong. In 1845, Sir John Franklin, with two ships and 132 men, set out to find a route to Asia through the arctic – the fabled Northwest Passage. They never returned. Why the expedition failed became an enduring mystery. After 150 years, Franklin's records are still missing and the search for his ships and the graves of his men continues.
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Franklins Lost Expedition. Video hosted on Youtube. Franklin's lost expedition was a doomed British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin that departed England in 1845. A Royal Navy officer and experienced explorer, Franklin had served on three previous Arctic expeditions, the latter two as commanding officer. His fourth and last, undertaken when he was 59, was meant to traverse the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage. The entire expedition complement, Franklin and 128 men, died after their ships became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. Pressed by Franklin's wife and others, the Admiralty launched a search for the missing expedition in 1848. Prompted in part by Franklin's fame and the Admiralty's offer of a finder's reward, many subsequent expeditions joined the hunt, which at one point in 1850 involved eleven British and two American ships. Several of these ships converged off the east coast of Beechey Island, where the first relics of the expedition were found, including the graves of three crewmen. In 1854, explorer John Rae, while surveying near the Canadian Arctic coast southeast of King William Island, acquired relics of and stories about the Franklin party from the Inuit. A search led by Francis Leopold McClintock in 1859 discovered a note left on King William Island with details about the expedition's fate. Searches continued through much of the 19th century.
In 1981, a team of scientists led by Owen Beattie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, began a series of scientific studies of the graves, bodies, and other physical evidence left by Franklin crew members on Beechey Island and King William Island. They concluded that the crew members whose graves had been found on Beechey Island most likely died of pneumonia and perhaps tuberculosis and that lead poisoning from badly-soldered cans was also a likely factor. More recently it has been suggested that the primary source of this lead may not have been tinned food, which was in widespread use in the Royal Navy at the time, but the unique water system fitted to the expedition’s ships. Cut marks on human bones found on King William Island were seen as signs of cannibalism. The combined evidence of all studies suggested that cold, starvation, lead poisoning, and disease including scurvy killed everyone on Franklin's last expedition. After the loss of the Franklin party, the Victorian media, notwithstanding the expedition's failure and the reports of cannibalism, portrayed Franklin as a hero. Songs were written about him, and statues of him in his home town, in London, and in Tasmania credit him with discovery of the Northwest Passage. Franklin's lost expedition has been the subject of many artistic works, including songs, verse, short stories, and novels, as well as television documentaries.
This documentary recounts a desperate tale of the doomed Franklin expedition and the equally desperate struggle to find out what went wrong. In 1845, Sir John Franklin, with two ships and 132 men, set out to find a route to Asia through the arctic – the fabled Northwest Passage. They never returned. Why the expedition failed became an enduring mystery. After 150 years, Franklin's records are still missing and the search for his ships and the graves of his men continues. Since the 16th century, the British had been trying to conquer the Arctic. But the way was hard – the ice-encrusted islands of the world's second largest archipelago were largely uncharted, and it was uncertain if the Northwest Passage even existed. However, Franklin was determined to prove that it could be done. His ships sailed for Baffin Bay, where they were last seen moored to an iceberg. To this day, no one knows what happened next. What really finished the expedition were its maps, which were a mixture of accurately recorded detail, blank spaces and conjecture. Since popular opinion maintained that King William Island was in fact part of the mainland, Franklin concluded that the passage was closed off to the east. He therefore sailed west, where his ships became trapped in the ice. The men onboard had no recourse but to wait for the summer and pray that the ice thawed before it grew thick enough to burst through the hulls.
Three years after the expedition set out, the British admiralty mounted the largest search and rescue mission in history, spending £30 million to equip three teams to bring the men home, or at least find out what had happened to them. But the search parties were unsuccessful and, in a surprising turn, the first news came in 1854 from explorer John Rae. Rae reported having spoken to local Inuit people who told him they had found the remains of a party of white men who had died of starvation in their camp. These men had been driven to the last recourse: cannibalism. This prompted a national outcry in Britain as cannibalism was perceived as an act of uncivilised savagery that threw the expedition into disgrace. With national pride at stake, the Admiralty mounted one final expedition in 1857. Although they failed to find either the men or the ships, they did recover the only document ever found from the expedition. It revealed that, 10 months after the ships became trapped in the ice, Franklin and several of his officers had died. But the document, which was left in a cairn on King William Island, gave no explanation of the cause of so many deaths, and simply added that the 105 men who were left alive had decided to abandon the icebound ships and make the long trek south to mainland America. They never made it. Pulling heavy sledges stacked high with food, shelter and firewood across the frozen wastes was too much for the men, who were already overcome with fatigue, malnutrition and scurvy. Although some of them survived for as much as 200 miles, they were ultimately all doomed. The Admiralty in London were swift to play the blame game and pointed the finger at Stephan Goldner, the Hungarian immigrant who had supplied the expedition's canned food. But most modern scientists have exonerated him from accusations of both inexpertly preserving the food and lead poisoning.
The Victorians later turned on the Inuit, stating they were lying about British men resorting to so-called barbarism. The Admiralty overcame these shameful claims by simply ignoring them, erecting a statue to Franklin in praise of his successful conquest of the Northwest Passage and asserting his men had "forged the last link with their lives." But history remains unsatisfied with this blatant whitewash, and the quest for the true story continues to this day. It is driven, perhaps, that despite the Victorians' extensive search; a series of scientific expeditions in the 20th century; and new investigations in the 21st, the answer is still out there, buried under the ice.
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