Search for Franklin Region Explored Northwest Passage # of expeditions 40 First Discovery Gravestones of three crew members (1851) Important Finds Relics and notes found on King William's Island (1859) Other Significant Events Mutilated bodies showed evidence of cannibalism (1851) Did you know? McClintock's search party (1859) found a message in a tin box covered by a stone cairn on King William Island. The message explained that Franklin died of a heart attack on June 11, 1847. During his three Arctic expeditions (1848-54) in search of Franklin , the hearty John Rae walked over 23,000 miles The Franklin expedition took 8,000 tins of food which, unfortunately, were sealed with lead which is poisonous. The lead may have contaminated the food to the extent that the crew became ill, weak, and irrational.

The Search for
John Franklin

In 1847, when people in England still had heard nothing from Franklin and his crew, rescue parties were sent to the Arctic. Sir John Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Franklin wanted to know what had happened to her husband. For thirteen years Lady Jane encouraged people to search for her husband's expedion. She spent all her own fortune financing search parties.

The first expedition to seek out Franklin's fate was led by the Scottish explorer, surveyor, and surgeon John Rae (1813-1893). Rae made three voyages, in 1848-1849, 1851, and 1853-1854, and in the process, surveyed and mapped over 1,400 miles of uncharted Canadian coastline. He also showed that King William Land was an island. Local Inuit told of seeing about forty white men traveling in company southward over the ice, dragging a boat and sledges with them. In 1851 on Beechy Island just off the coast of Devon Island in Barrow Strait, corpses of some thirty persons and gravestones of three members of Franklin`s crew were uncovered. Some of the bodies were in tents; others were under a boat which had been turned over to form a shelter, and some lay scattered about in different directions evidently cannabalized as a means of sustaining life.

Rae did not get the full story until his return trip to Repulse Bay, by which time it was too late for sledging; the coastal areas were thawing, making for treacherous travel. Yet having heard of his offer of a reward for artifacts, the Repulse Bay Inuit offered a trove of items from the Franklin expedition, including the officers' silver plate, broken chronometers and astronomical instruments, and even one of Sir John Franklin's medals - a Guelphic Order of Hanover.

Franklin`s wife then enlisted the services of Captain Leopold McClintock, outfitting his vessel, the Fox, to continue the search. McClintock reached King William Island by the winter of 1859 where he found further signs of Franklin`s disaster. There he discovered a stone cairn and the last written report of the Franklin expedition. The note (a scrap of paper contained in a tin box) was written on 28 May 1847and it revealed that Sir John had died on June 11, 1847, in King William's Land of a heart attack. A second message was added to the margin a year later confirming that the crew's survivors had headed south and that Franklin had, in fact, found the Northwest Passage. Continuing the search, McClintock met a party of the local Inuits who told him of two ships being crushed in the ice and they gave him buttons, needles, knives made from a ship`s wooden and metal fittings and and pieces of silverware bearing the monograms of Franklin and some of his officers.

Though further expeditions were sent to the Arctic, few new discoveries were made; rather they simply confirmed earlier discoveries.