The Fate of the Franklin Expedition

Three years before John Rae found the Northwest Passage, the Royal Navy dispatched two of their own ships in search of the elusive northern trading route.

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror sailed north in an expedition led by Sir John Franklin. The Franklin Expedition vanished without trace.

The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition led to a massive search at huge expense, but the fate of the crew and the two ships remained a mystery for nine long years.

In 1854, John Rae encountered a group of Inuit that had a number of items belonging to the British navy. Rae questioned them closely, and learned that they had come upon a camp of dead Europeans some months earlier.

Examination of some of the items the Natives had carried away confirmed that these were members of the Franklin expedition. Nothing could prepare Rae for the shocking circumstances of the missing sailors' fate.

When John Rae returned to England, he published a formal report of his findings:

'From the mutilated state of many of the corpses, and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource - cannibalism - as a means of prolonging existence.'        

'The Arctic Expedition', The Times, London, Monday 23 October 1854

John Rae, a man who clearly should to have been celebrated as a hero received no formal recognition for his incredible accomplishments.

British society, led by Franklin’s widow, Lady Jane Franklin, the novelist Charles Dickens and key members of the Royal Navy, refused to accept Rae’s account of the fate of the Franklin expedition. They discounted his findings and attempted to destroy his reputation.

As far as Lady Jane Franklin and the British Establishment were concerned Rae was wrong to trust the word of the Inuit people. Native people were thought of as 'savages', and the reputation of the Royal Navy was at stake. 

Even today, a bronze statue to Sir John Franklin stands in London, crediting him instead of Dr John Rae with the discovery of the Northwest Passage.

In 1981 a team of scientists studied the human remains, finding cut marks that showed that the members of the Franklin Expedition had indeed turned to cannibalism to survive.

In a time when it would have been easy to simply back down, Dr John Rae stood up to the British Establishment and refused to alter his story. He stood by his word and the word of the Inuit people he had learned to trust and respect.

Dr John Rae died in London in July 1893, aged 80. His body was taken to Orkney and buried in the St Magnus Cathedral kirk yard in Kirkwall. A memorial to him can been seen inside the cathedral.

Photograph credits

The images used above are licensed under Creative Commons on Flickr by the National Maritime Museum.

The image of relics from the Franklin expedition is licensed through Wikimedia Commons.