An enduring mystery
“Of all the explorers who have ever gone missing, none has inspired so long, so persistent a search as has Sir John Franklin, whose final Arctic expedition was last seen off the coast of Greenland in the summer of 1845,” writes Russell A. Potter in Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search.
When Franklin’s ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror failed to return to Britain, their disappearance set in motion an enduring fascination with the fate of their crews as well as a series of organized searches that began in the following years.
In 1854, Arctic surveyor Dr. John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company returned to Britain with detailed Inuit testimony as well as relics that included pipes, watches, and even Franklin’s medal. He received the ten-thousand-pound award for “ascertaining the fate” of Franklin, but many rejected suggestions that the ships’ crews had resorted to cannibalism.
Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, sponsored several searches for the party, including one led by Francis Leopold McClintock, who returned in 1859 with records that confirmed John Franklin’s death on June 11, 1847, but indicated neither a cause of death nor a final resting place. Her efforts are credited with maintaining initial interest in the expedition’s fate, but since then many others have caught the Franklin search bug. cantly — clear evidence that the final survivors had indeed turned to cannibalism. And, although his death by suicide a few years after his first discoveries ended his own career as a searcher, he influenced a generation of amateur Franklin detectives who continued to visit King William Island for nearly a decade afterwards.
It was, by some accounts, a book given to him by his son that started Ranford’s Franklin obsession; no one seems to recall which book, but I like to imagine that it was McClintock’s Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas. Whatever it was, Ranford was soon devouring every book about Franklin he could get his hands on, and when researcher David Woodman’s account of the Inuit evidence was published in 1991, he read it with tremendous interest. He was particularly struck by the accounts of Franklin’s men as they struggled southward down the coast of King William Island. How could the remains of so many have gone missing? Where was In-nook-poo-zhee-jook’s second boat, the one filled with bones, or the skeletons reburied by Frederick Schwatka? And then there was the large tent full of bodies described in the Inuit testimony — had it been a sort of field hospital for those too ill to carry on? Surely some trace of such a place must still remain.
And so, in the summer of 1992, Ranford, along with his former photography